Low Walls: Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute Arts Department
Invented outside the institutional domains that typically house the media arts, the RPI Arts Department was not yoked to traditions, canons, or formats. It circumnavigated debates that sometimes trap programs in whirlpools of unspoken antagonism among professionally oriented faculty, artists, and critical theorists. As part of a major technological university for engineers, the RPI program never pathologized new media. The rhizomelike structures and interactive/performative interfaces of new digital technologies provided models for collaborative work across traditional boundaries. Neil Rolnick muses that “when we started ten years ago, it was not clear if this would be successful. We decided we would be successful if we became a sort of new Black Mountain College, a place where people bring fresh ideas to art, technology, and the larger public.”
Yet, historically, academically hot programs tend to blossom and wilt as social relations and contexts change. How did RPI, a university traditionally known more for semi-conductor research than for Shakespearean scholarship or a vibrant media arts environment, do it? How did its Arts Department move out of the basement and into a future that includes a state-of-the-art, $50-million Electronic Media and Performing Arts Center designed by internationally renowned London architect Nicholas Grimshaw? The answer may reside in a combination of esprit and utility.
From curricular design to faculty hires to public programming, the Arts Department functions at an almost dizzying rate of innovation, energy, and change, blurring the borders between art, technology, and commerce. Competing university-based media departments look nostalgic by comparison: slow, too old-fashioned, too “old media,” even though many embrace professional training, job placement, and instrumentality within their production programs, where an uneasy, conflictual pas de deux between practice and theory often exists.
The Arts Department proffers “edge” mixed with moxie. In higher education, it is highly unusual for the practice of the arts to be so marketable to undergraduate and graduate students. Yet in the new economies of the digital world, the borders between art and commerce, profit and nonprofit, technological innovation and technological commodification are blurred and fluid. This shape-shifting environment is also congruent with the global information economy, in which the need to manage and communicate has amassed increasingly high value for horizontally structured, transnational corporations. It’s a brave new world where unbridled, creative thinking-out-of-the-box actually has market value.
With the mythologies (and often realities) currently circulating in higher education that suggest undergraduates only desire degree programs that are fast tracks to industry jobs, the Arts Department seems to work under the radar. It has created degrees that provide students with the technology and art-making skills to render them adroit navigators of the new economy. In many ways, the perspective of RPI’s arts programs is not all that unusual in higher education: its emphasis on technological skills (even if arts-practice based) conforms with a dominant trend in higher education over the last decade to gut the humanities and to focus on more instrumental education.
Nationwide, angry, pitched ideological debates about the relationship between critical studies and job placement wend their way through many communications and film schools. Yet the electronic media programs at RPI seem to have struck a balance. Graduates with degrees from the newly formed EMAC (Electronic Media and Communication) program have secured jobs with high-profile organizations: the American Museum of Natural History, Digital Domain, Discovery Channel, Forbes Magazine, IBM, Imagine Software. The M.F.A. program has one of the highest placement rates in the country, with alumni spread across colleges and universities across the United States. The Arts Department has comprehended the shift from the Fordist economy of bricks, mortar, and distinct national media boundaries to the post-Fordist, new-economy model of information production, where knowledge that is adaptable, flexible, and horizontal, rather than vertical, is prized.
The Arts Department at RPI operates more like a entrepreneurial Web-design company in the postindustrial economy than a slow-as-molasses, traditional academic department of the old economy. Although the faculty represent enormously different disciplines (electronic music, painting, media production, Internet art, critical studies), they share a commitment to change and innovation. The curriculum has grown at an unprecedented pace, responding to students, the marketplace, and changing public-media and arts-practice landscapes.
History
Associate Dean Larry Kagan, an RPI aeronautical engineering student in the 1960s who later joined the arts faculty, has lived through each evolutionary cycle of the arts program. Early on, art supplied electives to engineers: drawing, painting, music, art history—“a grab bag of odds and ends.” The establishment of the Arts Department in 1972 arose out of student demands during the antiwar movement for a liberalization of the harsh, technology-based environment connected to the military-industrial complex. “One of the early strands [of the program],” Kagan recalls, “meant not a standard arts curriculum of drawing, painting, and sculpture, but one that connected to the strengths of RPI—technology.” The arts faculty and curriculum worked with computer graphics, Fortran programming, mainframe computers, and Sun systems in the early 1970s, more than a decade before the rise of the personal computer.
By the late 1970s, some senior faculty retirements allowed the department room to expand into a new area–electronic music. Rolnick, a University of California at Berkeley Ph.D. in musical composition, was hired in 1981. He remembers this early period as a time when arts were almost exclusively framed as a service area: teaching drawing to architects and music appreciation to engineers so they would support symphony orchestras once they achieved corporate success.
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, most art programs were territorial rather than interdisciplinary. Kagan recounts that “everyone had a fence around their programs.” The arts faculty at RPI took their liabilities—no tradition of arts practices, a technological rather than liberal-arts environment, no budget—and transformed them into assets: they were forced to think with more open-ended approaches, which led to a more integrated, interdisciplinary view of arts practices.
In the mid-1980s, out of this organizational culture of nontraditional frameworks and no limits to the imagination, RPI developed iEAR (integrated Electronic Arts at Rensselaer) as a “steeple of excellence”—an initiative to move a few areas toward national and international recognition. The M.F.A. program at iEAR, launched in 1991, combines music, video, and computer graphics and animation. As one of the only M.F.A. programs in the country to integrate these three areas, it is a highly marketable distinction. Birthed through stealth, the program initially had no operating budget. The 25–30 student program was attractive precisely because it was not a traditional media arts program: it combined disciplines and gave students technological empowerment. Its sixty-credit-hour, two- to three-year curriculum stresses studio-based work, performance, and public presentation. If you say the name of the program—iEAR—out loud, you will understand the central philosophical undergirding of faculty, curriculum, and public programs: eye and ear.
The arts faculty did not stop with graduate students, however; they developed an aggressive public-programming initiative through the financial munificence of one of the trustees and matching grants from the New York State Council for the Arts to bring top-notch artists like computer-imaging pioneer Ed Emshwiller and electronic artists Woody and Steina Vasulka to the school for residencies. The residency program was designed to garner more national and international visibility.
Five years after the launch of the M.F.A. program, a joint undergraduate B.S. program was established that joined the Language, Literature, and Communications with the Electronic Arts program in the Arts Department: Electronic Arts, Media and Communication, or EMAC, was thus born. Faculty anticipated five students; instead, twenty-five arrived the first year and seventy-five the second. As Kagan explains it: “It seemed to catch the right surf—continuing interest in video games, computer games, and the Web was catching on; all of sudden, students were coming out of the woodwork.” Within four years, EMAC, , a more professionally oriented program that mixes arts and technology, boasted three hundred majors. Shift magazine’s 2000 “Digital Education Guide” ranked EMAC sixth out of fifty U.S. and Canadian programs. It is the cash cow of the Arts Department. A new B.S. in Electronic Arts will be offered this fall, and a dual program with the Department of Science and Technology Studies is in the works.
The Rensselaer Plan, a major strategic planning initiative designed to position RPI “to achieve prominence as a top-tier, world-class research university,” has identified two targeted areas for growth: information technology and biotechnology. Consequently, the electronic arts program has gained a new prominence at the university, compared to its position twenty years earlier, and is being transformed from a marginalized service area into a pivotal unit generating prestige and recognition.
Building on the department’s international reputation for excellence in electronic arts, a $50 million, 160,000-square-foot electronic media and performance arts center is in the works. Just this last spring, RPI generated a large buzz in higher education and in the national press when it received the largest nonrestricted gift ever granted to an American university: $360 million.
Anomaly
One of the strengths of the Arts Department and its iEAR, EMAC, and EAPS (Electronic
Arts Performance Series) programs resides in the fact that virtually no other
academic unit in the United States resembles it. As Associate Professor and
media artist Branda Miller puts it, “Our asset was our interdisciplinarity. At the core is a deep respect for each other’s differences and a commitment to collaboration. Our magic bullet is that we were truly interdisciplinary, before the rise of the Web.” It is an interdisciplinarity and diversity that has its downside as well: namely, the absence of a central core of shared knowledge in the curricula (areas that anchor the discipline of more traditional academic communications programs, such as history, theory, criticism, policy, economics, social science, industry studies). And although many faculty thread humanities issues into courses, critical studies seem tangential to hands-on production.
This technological orientation nonetheless provides the Arts Department with a unique marketing hook that appeals to students who grew up playing CD-ROM games, writing code, and making digital video on their iMACs. Neil Rolnick observes that the department “had the right idea at the right time, because there were no programs for students who play with computers all day yet still want a career.” Because the dot.com boom of the 1990s coincided with the development of its unique degree programs, the department’s mission to connect arts with technology coincided with economic high times in Internet commerce, convergence, and Web design.
RPI has tapped into the digital generation’s passions for new technologies and interdisciplinary work. Most faculty and administrators deploy the term “grounding across fields.” Dr. Fay Duchin, Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences at RPI, argues that “students have found a program that does two things simultaneously: they can acquire skills that will be useful and at the same time can follow their passion.”
The Arts Department is also an anomaly with respect to the context of typical academic homes for media and electronic arts programs: schools of communications, film schools, journalism schools, or art departments saturated in the liberal arts. These other media programs evolved out of long-standing educational structures that reflect the imprints of the commercial media world, the film studios, the art world, and academic disciplines. While these old formations of communications education possess some enduring assets that RPI may lack (say, highly developed critical-studies areas and more faculty who emphasize analytical critique, writing, and a larger worldview), Larry Kagan, a sculptor who is now serving as associate dean of undergraduate programs and curriculum initiatives for the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, prefers to emphasize the benefits: “we were starting from scratch, so there were no entrenched interests.”
RPI’s explicitly stated mission represents a 180-degree turn from the interests of the public media and liberal arts world: the university “educates the leaders of tomorrow for technologically based careers. We celebrate discovery, and the responsible application of technology, to create knowledge and global prosperity.” Its Web site proclaims, “Many of our professors have close ties with the top global corporations.” Founded in 1824 by Stephen Van Rensselaer, RPI , at 177 years, was the first degree-granting technological university in the English-speaking world. Its alumni invented the Apollo Project, e-mail, the first pocket calculator, TV, baking powder, microprocessors. U S News and World Report recently listed RPI as one of the top fifty universities in the United States, and ranked it seventeenth in engineering. Success magazine listed RPI as the sixth best school for entrepreneurship. Consequently, the humanities and social sciences have traditionally occupied a tertiary status, providing service courses to “round out” science- and math-oriented engineering students and “humanize” corporate middle managers.
RPI is historically connected, like most engineering schools, to the military (it has been allied to the Watervliet Arsenal) and to major corporations (the institute has major links, for example, to General Electric). It has a large ROTC contingent on campus and attracts a decidedly white, male student body. However, this traditionally white male institution boasts an extremely visible black woman president, Dr. Shirley Jackson. Installed as the eighteenth president of RPI in 1999, Jackson, the first African American woman to receive a doctorate from MIT, previously served as Chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, worked for AT&T Bell Laboratories, and taught at Rutgers University.
This context of corporate ties and engineering programs heavy in math and science, technological invention, and corporate links should not, however, be read with old Marxist eyeglasses that would see nothing but domination, control, censorship, and lack of imagination. On the contrary, this context sustains a fertile terrain where innovation and thinking imaginatively across disciplines form core organizational values. It is an overarching institutional context that nonetheless risks media arts education being stripped down to production and machine interfaces, so that graduates can slide into any sector that desires them.
But as faculty describe it, an arts department housed within a technological university operates with some distinct advantages over other art, media arts, and communications programs. The institution does not suffer from sticker shock when purchasing new equipment or software upgrades. (RPI has been ranked one of five most wired universities in the country.) The Arts Department at RPI in some ways shapes its interdisciplinary model on the convergences between sound, video, photography, film, and music that exist within the new media themselves: like engineers, the faculty in the department create new technological interfaces and interdisciplinary bridges. Invention, rather than tradition, is highly valued. As art historian Mary Anne Staniszewski analyzes it, RPI sustains “a framework that makes you see your work in a broader context of technology and finance. . . . It is a catalyst for creative thinking that goes against the grain of contemporary culture, questioning conventions.”
The institution explicitly understands that engineers need to marshal creative-thinking and visualizing skills in these highly charged new economies; math and science alone are not sufficient. In a speech delivered this past March at Smith College entitled “Engineering and the Liberal Arts,” President Jackson suggested that engineers in today’s economy need to collaborate, communicate, explain, and expand—modes of thinking identified with liberal arts as well as arts practices. Clearly, RPI’s media programs are congruent with the global economy, where thinking laterally across disciplines and industries is often more valuable than a specific skill.
Low Walls
The Cinderella-like academic and artistic success story that has transformed RPI’s Arts Department and its iEAR program from service area to powerhouse hinges on more than degree structures and new buildings. A major ingredient powering all this commitment to rapid change and innovation is an epistemology of electronic arts that insists on collaboration and exploration in an immersive, border-crossing, technological setting. At RPI, the borders between professional education and artistic practice are almost nonexistent—a rare situation in the context of most media arts and communications programs, which are often unsettled by a covert ideological war between professionalization and artistry.
Rather than maintaining binary oppositions between different media practices the program furthermore creates what many faculty call “low walls”: it is relatively easy to move between electronic music, computer art, video making, and painting. Larry Kagan explains that in the Arts Department, “digital information flows became the aesthetic trunk, and support, to what had traditionally been specific disciplines.” As many programs nationwide struggle to figure out how media arts and communications education become more interdisciplinary in structure to adapt to new media technologies, RPI’s Arts Department maintains a structural core that is based in integration, interdisciplinarity, and innovation. This spirit of “low walls,” collaboration, and integration permeates virtually all the department’s ventures: projects that involve faculty, staff, and students; artist residencies that freely mix technologies and performance; encouragement for students to explore a full range of digital and electronic technologies and softwares.
One of the greatest strengths of the iEAR, EMAC, and Electronic Arts programs resides not only in their embrace of new media technologies but in an aggressive commitment to curricular overhaul. While many schools modify courses and curricular structures in the press of digitalization, the Arts Department operates with a strategy that is almost the polar opposite: it invents anew, looking at the ways new technologies require new ways of thinking and new ways to structure knowledge and practice. Whereas many traditional media arts or communications schools might overhaul curricula once or twice a decade, RPI’s Arts Department seems to engage in a constant state of exhilarating—and productive—flux. According to Rolnick, this strategy is an absolute necessity, because “electronic arts no longer fits into neat categories.”
The department “attracts people who are ambitious but who don’t fit easily into a traditional film or video department. Our context gives people a lot of freedom,” Rolnick assesses. Faculty diversity propels the intellectual combustion: hardly any of its members come from the same background. While many departments recruit on disciplinary congruency and shared intellectual/artistic heritage, the Arts Department seems to hire faculty on the basis of a shared commitment to exploration and innovation in technology. Faculty, administrators, and alumni sketch an image of a think-tank environment that seems more like Xerox PARC; here, faculty, staff, and students work closely together—a far cry from the more conventional academic unit, where faculty are frequently isolated and fragmented.
“We are watching the convergence of IT tools for art practice, breaking down walls between sound, image, interactivity,” says Branda Miller. “We were there to remind people that at the core of all technological practice was human creativity and experience.” Although these battles between professional preparation and artistic exploration and critical studies run overtly and covertly through almost every media arts and communications program in the country, the Arts Department and its affiliated programs seem to have moved beyond these debates: degrees mix professional and artistic courses, different kinds of degrees are offered, students seem to glide gracefully between the commercial and artistic worlds, and jobs abound for technologically savvy graduates. From the vantage point of RPI’s iEAR program, the old battles between professionalism and artistry seem like virtual reality or ghosts from the Victorian era compared to the dynamic, new ways of thinking about technology and art interfaces that characterizes all levels of the program.
Artists
At many institutions, faculty are hired to cover existing curricular or course
needs. It appears that in the Arts Department hires are made not only to
create a mix of utterly different profiles but to amass a group of individuals
whose work has pushed the envelope between experimental arts practice and
technology. As Neil Rolnick muses, “we try to make an environment here where what is important is that faculty are actively working as artists; that they are not seen, nor do they see themselves, as primarily academics but as artists.” The range of faculty resembles an edgy new media festival more than a communications or media arts school—yet another example of how the department’s models resonate more with structures outside the hallowed halls of the ivied establishment than with traditional academic formations.
Larry Kagan is a renowned sculptor who works with shadows. Neil Rolnick, an internationally heralded electronic composer and musician with several CDs, recently launched a large collaborative project with New York University called “The Technophobe and the Madman,” which explores the performance possibilities of the Internet. Branda Miller, who has been making media art for two decades, recently produced the acclaimed CD-ROM and video
"Witness to the Future", a piercing expose of environmental racism inspired by Rachel Carson’s "Silent Spring." Igor Vamos has engaged in a variety of high-profile media-intervention projects, such as Barbie Liberation Organization. Mary Anne Staniszewski, the only critical theorist in the department, is the author of Believing is Seeing: The Power of Display (MIT) and The Lens of Culture: Art, Politics, Activism, Internet and Everyday Life (Penguin). Faculty searches during the 2000–2001 academic year brought electronic musician Pauline Oliveros, video artist Kathy High, installation artist Karen Thornton, and performance artist Nao Bustamante.
The alumni of the M.F.A. program in Electronic Arts represent some of the most high-profile, cutting figures in digital arts as well. Virtually every graduate recounts the attractiveness—and artistic utility—of a program that combines music, computers, and visual imaging with an emphasis on collaboration and performance.
Adriene Jenik graduated from RPI in 1996 and is currently an associate professor at the University of California–San Diego. Jenik produced her highly recognized CD-ROM "Mauve Desert," a landmark in digital narrative, as a graduate student. Kevin and Jennifer McCoy created a database narrative in a DVD that takes apart the live-action drama of “Starsky and Hutch,” and their Walker Art Center–funded Web project, Airworld, pulls content form corporate Web sites in real time through a Web search algorithm. Andrew Deutch, currently an assistant professor of sonic art at Alfred University, was featured in the “Bit Streams” show at the Whitney Museum: he records sound on a hard drive, then cuts it up, reassembles it, and processes it digitally. An assistant professor at the University of California–Irvine, alumna Julia Meltzer created a recent piece titled “Speculative Archive for Historical Clarification,” a collaborative project that analyzes the social and political implications of classified and declassified state documentation.
RPI M.F.A. graduates are leading the charge to create new, borderless communications curricula. Yet because not every university possesses the technological resources and “low walls” of RPI, these graduates, as they fashion new degree programs elsewhere, slam up against the realities of technological conversion within more traditional academic settings: limited infrastructural support, not enough faculty, insufficient conceptualization of interdisciplinarity, massive student interest that is difficult to accommodate.
Performance
Like a media transnational, the Arts Department program operates on synergies
and on cross-platforming between its academic curricula, degrees, and public
programming initiatives. The iEAR Studio program offers multimedia artists,
composers, and sound artists residencies with eighty hours of studio time
and the chance to work with both undergraduate and graduate students. The
jewel in the crown of the public programming initiative, however, is the
Electronic Arts Performance Series, known as EAPS.
The EAPS curatorial mission focuses on artists who carve out new, unexplored territories and involves large numbers of faculty and students in collaborative projects. This spirit of exploration and collaboration was evidenced, for example, in the residency of border artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena, a performance artist who has been recognized with a “genius” grant from the MacArthur Foundation. Branda Miller and then graduate students Phillip Djwa and Adriene Jenik worked with a team of students and Gomez-Pena to produce a live cable-access and satellite-feed show and performance titled “El Naftazteca.” The EAPS program has hosted some of the most important, envelope-pushing, code-reconfiguring international figures in electronic arts and music: DJ Spooky, Emergency Broadcast Network, Faith Wilding, Alex Rivera, Craig Baldwin, Laurie Anderson, Vuk Cosic, Muntadas, Krysztof Wodiczko, Steina Vasulka, Valie Export, Kristin Lucas, and John Hanhardt.
Contradictions
Underneath all the euphoria about new technologies, interdisciplinarity, and “low walls” at RPI, however, lurk some real contradictions. Not surprisingly, some alumni who wax eloquent about the unique advantages and opportunities of the EMAC and iEAR M.F.A. programs complain almost as much about its gaping holes: the interdisciplinarity can frequently mean it is easy to scatter; the broad range of applications and technologies to master often leaves students without any proficiency; some areas seem more developed and systematic than others.
The technological landscape of an institution like RPI, with its wide range of engineering degrees, can be deadening and mind numbing for emerging artists: theory, history and criticism courses in the arts and media are minimal in comparison to studio-based courses focusing on applications. In the Arts Department, only one faculty member teaches critical studies courses and writes about critical theory.
The contradictions of the focus are stark: on the one hand, the engineering context means no fears of technology and innovation; on the other hand, without a broad-based liberal-arts context in which critical thinking is highly valued, electronic arts may risk being reduced to a corporate subsidiary, where experimental forms are translated into just another way to achieve e-commerce success. Analyzing its degree offerings, one might ask if the programs’ hidden ideological function provides a seamless, value-free, instrumental corporate training , in which the “why” of things and their implications are marginalized by the “how” involved in mastering machines and software. Old-fashioned as they may seem in comparison, many traditional film and media schools acknowledge that more humanities-based intellectual areas are necessary, even though they often fuel epistemological conflict.
While degree programs in the Arts Department astutely surf the contradictions imbedded in the “new economies” and new technologies, this situation may represent a pact with the devil. Arts practice, the avant-garde, and software skills shorn of critical thinking (ethics, philosophy, history, politics, social relations, theory) can more easily adapt to the mandatory arsenal of corporate skills. Yet one might ask if moving between technologies, software, and interfaces is enough in higher education; or if students need also to move between social, political, economic, technological, ethical, and philosophical ideas as well—something that academia executes much more skillfully than the corporate sector. One might further ask whether the diminution of such a critical, humanities-based conceptual framework allows students to manipulate software but may truncate their critical awareness of the implications of the images and machines they produce.
Jennifer McCoy calls RPI “technophilic.” Students often prefer learning machines rather than ideas. Some alumni and faculty expressed concern that the underdevelopment of humanities at RPI reduced discussions to the effectiveness and efficiency of software operations rather than to the larger aesthetic, formal, social, or political implications of work. The frenzy of producing constantly, learning new programs weekly, performing, and putting oneself out into the art and media-art worlds does not, according to some, leave much time for reflection—or for reading about the major ideas and debates in these various fields.
Another contradiction in the programs arises from the very spirit of inventiveness they maintain. The constant reinvention of curricula and institutional culture incurs some liabilities: historical analysis, which undergirds the discipline of communications and media arts, can get short shrift when confronted with the velocity of change the larger transnational corporate environment demands. Speed is not necessarily good: sometimes slowing down for critical assessment and historical retrospection mean more significant, far-reaching, and deeper discussion of social, political, historical, moral, and ethical implications. A culture of change can also become a culture motored by values outside the academy (economic and market viability, for example) rather than values inside the academy—like the critical assessment of histories of media formations and their connection to new structures.
The largest complaint lodged against the program, however, was actually not about the curriculum, courses, or faculty, but about the palpable and often debilitating sexism that permeates RPI. Some graduates mentioned that the overwhelmingly male context of RPI created an aura of a place frozen in some pre-feminist era. Several women alumnae described a technofetishist environment so hostile to women that many beginning women graduate students ended up in tears and debilitated during their first semester. Often, complaints of harassing behavior and sexist comments were ignored. However, almost any art school, media arts program, or communications school might echo these comments.
In response to these criticisms, the department is developing a joint degree with the Science and Technology Studies program to bolster the critical studies end of the program. The graduate program is currently being reformulated with more credit hours. The Rensselaer Plan outlines the need to pay attention and develop diversity.
Conclusions
Despite the very real contradictions mentioned above, in the end, the Arts
Department at RPI remains one of the most forward thinking media arts programs
anywhere. Its “low walls” and innovative culture present the rest of communications and media arts education with a challenge to think carefully, and imaginatively, about how new technologies require paradigmatic shifts. Yet however new the programs and the technologies are, old political issues regarding the place of critical thinking, historical analysis, and a public sphere uncontaminated by the military or corporations still persist: every new technology, and every new program that teaches technological mastery, nonetheless calls up old baggage—militarism, sexism, racism, corporatism, anti-intellectualism.
The department’s focus on arts practice rather than the larger discipline of communications leads to a mixed result: students may be able to manipulate software but may not understand that new technology is both old (in the sense that it represents the continuation of old debates, old economic structures, old forms) and new, presenting puzzles about representation, meaning, and economic structure that require new epistemological equipment. Image-making technologies rise and fall, come and go. As someone who has taught for more than twenty years, I have lived through similar euphorias about 16mm, reel-to-reel tape, camcorders, LaserDisc, the Internet.
The lack of substantial history and theory in the program conforms to the end of liberal arts nationally, and it troubles me deeply, as both a historian and critical theorist, that this situation robs students of the very thing a university education should provide: the ability to step back from the flurry of change and corporatization to think critically. Most faculty I spoke with at RPI cling to this notion of critical thinking, but the larger institutional context seems rather inhospitable. One wonders whether the emphasis on arts practice might change the nature of RPI, or whether arts practice has been coopted in an uneasy yet productive alliance with some elements that many artists would prefer to critique.
Perhaps the notion of a “radical arts practice” no longer exists in the era of digital, transnational media. What we have now is a situation of endless contradiction that requires the imaginative furor of the faculty of iEAR. The programs feels alive, vital, energizing, and enticing in a way that few media arts programs and communications schools can muster in their curricular conservatism. I deeply admire how the department rethinks and rewires in light of technological change, not settling for the repetition of old truisms. Yet what impressed me the most about the Arts Department at RPI is that the faculty has figured out a way to grow flowers through the cracks of this ideological cement.
Patricia R. Zimmermann is Professor of Cinema and Photography in the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College. She is the author of Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film and States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies, as well as co-editor of Wide Angle Books for Temple University Press.
© 2001 National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture. All Rights Reserved.
