I am sending you as part of the message Oliver's review of the conference,
as I know enclosures from Macs to PC's cause difficulties.
All the best, Sue

Review of Digital Creativity 99. Middlesbrough, April 1999.
by Oliver Lowenstein, Fourth Door Research

With the backdrop of Middlesbrough as signifier of Post Industrial
decline,  and the spectre of unemployment clearly evident beyond the
campus car park gates, it seemed difficult to ignore the progressive
entanglement between Industry and Universities, and its consequences for
education. Both explicitly, and less tangibly, the academy-business
relationship weaved its way into the core of the undertow of the third
CADE conference.

This was the first conference since the British Labour Party came to power
with their high octane mantra of education, education, education. At CADE
97, in Derby, in the weeks before the election two years earlier, few
maybe anticipated that Labour would so effectively seize electoral
control. Less obviously, who in Derby's audience would have imagined that
two years on, a film-world mogul turned politician would be addressing
Derby's sequel, placing his hand on heart about being a 'true believer' in
the digital revolution, and extolling  the 'up for grabs' world of
opportunity that is distance-learning 'content provision'. Undoubtedly,
this call to digital arms by David Puttnam, the first day pm key-note
speaker concentrated the minds of the higher echelons of art college
professionals, on developing the financial futures of their
establishments' integration with new media.

CADE stands for 'Computers in Art and Design Education' and MIddlesbrough,
a one time ship-building centre on England's North East coast, was its
third conference in four years. Its project brief might be described as
the development of understanding of computerisation and new media in
higher education arts education. So far, it has done this by providing the
space and a focal point for concentrating together, a broad range of new
media type projects across the arts sector. Like many such set ups, it
runs the gamut between being a serious forum and a talk shop for the
practitioners in the field. Puttnam's message turned on definitions of
what education is, what learning is, and what each are for. Compared to
Derby and the launch conference at Brighton four years ago, this spotlight
on the nature of education was new. However attractively it was presented,
Puttnam's option was nakedly utilitarian in its apprehension of education.
Indeed, Puttnam, as befits a professional politician, was palpably
seductive in his vision of the future of the education 'business', as he
put it, providing for the vast new markets opening up in the remote
learning nooks of cyberspace, across the planet. He was also reassuringly
calming to an higher education arts sector which maybe feels, rather like
so many other elements in the lattices of the learning professions, that
their skills, needs and wants are completely ignored or misunderstood by
big Government, of whatever hue. By the end, you felt or you wanted to
feel that he understood;  that he was on the same side.

If in the afternoon we were all business-friendly, envisaging great leaps
forward by the learning society facilitated by the brilliant contributions
of new media education corporatism, in the morning we had dutifully
trooped into the hall to contemplate our selves as moral communities,
using these new technologies for radical ends, by implication, against the
requirements of big business, science and education. Carol Gigoliottis'
thought-provoking, if somewhat ineffectively communicated talk, discussed
new media education in a language completely relevant to anyone
considering pausing for a moment before signing up to the Globalist
version of 'edubusiness' futures. By the close of Puttnam's far more
skilled performance, the tension set up between these two key-note talks
seemed oddly paradoxical and also to my mind, worryingly irresolvable. I
couldn't figure out whether what I had heard and listened to was the same
education world, though one with accent egrave, the other acute. Or
whether Gigoliotti's challenge of placing technology in the service of the
future, as a metaphor to live by, and her quotation of a philosopher of
technology that 'making things and taking action can be one and the same'
placed her narrative beyond the frame Puttnam's pragmatic approach
permitted.
Out of the mainhall, across the concrete, and a quick walk to another
bright  Post-Modern education building, the prestige charisma of the
large-scale technology of the Hemispherium suggested how the host
University of Teesside played this question; first, introduce a brandable
piece of technology and next develop links with local industry as best you
could, so that maybe some sort of relief could be brought to the region's
decline. The conference too, was a pointer to University participation in
the reinvention of the Industrial character of the region. An irony then,
that Gigliotti was inviting us to set time aside on how to remake the
concepts of new media for potentially transformative uses.

Between and after the key-note speakers each morning, there were three
parallel sessions with around five twenty-minute speakers each. Unable to
be in more than one place at any one time, the sense I got of these was
much like many conferences; that these were talking-shops on research in
its early stages, or underway, or near conclusion. It may have been the
sessions I chose but there seemed to be a preponderance of themes which
are new to CADE, and a counter-weighting of regionality which was absent
at the previous two conferences. For instance, Textiles was not dominated
by London and MIdlands Universities, rather, contributions came from
Heriot- Watt, and other further flung institutes. Research into
distance-learning also seemed to be in evidence where it hadn't been
hitherto, with reports on the Clyde Virtual University (the first Virtual
University) and on research also originating from Glasgow, on remote
learning across the sparsely populated Highlands, Scotland. Interestingly,
both reported the need for the learning environments to be very carefully
thought through and integrated into the thinking of remote education.
Maybe this will have developed further by the time of the next CADE in
2001, which, helpfully for these themes, will be hosted by Glasgow.

Another fault line which ran across the conference was the sheer diversity
of themes and also how long these themes had been in existence. Whereas
the self-respecting conferee would probably assume an awareness of
Internet Avatars, this time round, the conference had attracted from far
and wide and such knowledge was inaccurately assumed. Nearing the end of a
terrifically techie PhD progress report on 'Social Avatars',  the woman in
front of me, who had flown in from the Shetland Islands off Northern
Scotland and was here because of the application of remote learning to
crafts, quietly confessed to not knowing what the chap was on about. She
hadn't heard of Avatars, and was baffled by descriptions of the visual
grammar to be employed by avatars in dialogue.
This may well be a problem for a conference which is trying to cover so
many bases. The ubiquitous application of digital media to so many fields
suggests that where there may have been, as at Brighton's first conference
in 95, a coherent community of interest, today the divergence means there
are incomprehensibly different languages. If this is indeed the case,
those within the many specialisms  talk specifically to their peer
colleagues, leaving others outside in the cold unless you're generalist
enough to cover a wide range of bases.

The apparent guiding narrative of the education dimension continued to
resurface amidst these parallel sessions. Richard Povall, of Oberlin in
Ohio, continued a possibly dissident note by asking the obvious: are
students arriving at the beginnings of their Art College experience no
longer prepared for single-discipline learning? Is in its place, a new
media canon emerging which is not only multi-disciplinary but
post-disciplinary, driven by the diversity of skills students bring with
them,  being haphazardly followed by colleges and departments? Dismissing
the efforts of most 'interdisciplinary' college courses as 'no such thing'
he resorted to his post-disciplinary theme and recruited Dartington as
was, as an alternative exemplar, suggesting that pedagogical practice,
where it pushed at the boundaries came up against entrenched conformity.
This was interesting territory given both the divergent options mapped out
by Gigliotti and Puttnam, and the momentum and evolution of convergence
afforded by technologies. It suggested a post-disciplinary educational
realm where courses might be in a constant state of flux, mutating out of
reach of the constraining arms of pedagogy. 
I wondered at the receptivity of those putting together art college
courses to Povall's message. Particularly since in Britain the profession
has, perhaps, lost its nerve in its relationship with its Governmental
sponsors. Over stretched, under funded;  the beguiling offerings of David
Puttnam would seem a realistic strategy to put the books in order, rather
than the journey into the unknown Povall and his ilk would have colleges
set out on.
However events (and technologies) may conspire against such safety-first
routines. If students are arriving with skills which demand a new
formatting of disciplines, the Povall option may be seen to make
increasing sense.

If this message went unnoticed by the conferees, the same cannot be said
of Roy Stringer's wake-up call on the second morning: Just what was needed
when the audience could have been lost to fatigue, as Stringer placed a
firework under the conference proceedings. By turns enthusiastic, brash
and intelligently informed, he conveyed excitement, in a non-academic
street- smart language which had the audience eating out of his hand.
Stringer, apparently a one-time computer whiz-kid, was the only speaker
who performed, and his accessibly wacky fusion of the American
hypertextualist Ted Nelson and the cybernetician Stafford Beer, was
intoxicatingly straightforward for an academic audience to get to grips
with. Waving his arms, he repeatedly stated that any number of scenarios
were going to happen; "guaranteed". His banter being so engagingly
convincing that his primary theme, non-linear navigation systems, seemed
immediately to rescue non-linear cyberspace from a perceived dark ages of
linear environments. The primary navigational tools were polyhedrons,
specifically Platonic Icoso and Dodecahedra. For those with irresolvable
symmetry aversion, he showed a non-platonic form; all odd shapes, which
worked just as well. These were non-hierarchical, or heterarchical systems
that enabled any navigator to connect from one element of the system
without fore grounding one to the parts to another. Stringer's
acknowledging of the influence of Beer's syntegrity design for the 'brain
of the firm' gave a sense to the audience of how this could be applied to
self- organising systems such as groups of people. Buoyed on by Stringer's
palpable enthusiasm, you could almost feel audience lighten as it grasped
a visual organising metaphor, rather than an analytical concept. 'It's so
much fun!' Stringer was repeating, about applying syntegrity to
non-hierarchical organisation decision making, and as the wave of
enthusiasm extended across the audience I was struck with the dawning
realisation that this brand of academics were up for 'fun'.

Stringer's non-linear Navihedrons added an extra third dimension to the
education proceedings. You could see the critical discourses of Gigoliotti
and the like, sitting on the floor in Icosohedron form alongside David
Puttnam and civil servant colleagues, resolving organisational problems
which might very well elude them otherwise. Such organisational innovation
might be new to both parties, yet both could probably see value in these
sorts of resolution strategies, Certainly at the session Stringer
facilitated in the afternoon where he put this into practice with those
who came along trying out the rudiments of these organisational
techniques; it seemed like those participating were engaging in something
new and exciting to them. 
Stringer's sessions were the high point for me and saved the conference at
a point when it could well have faltered. Smuggling in ideas which are as
unknown in art academe as elsewhere his work came across fuelled with a
kind of transgressive charm. 

On Friday, a thinned audience resumed for the last session. Pelle Ehn from
Malmo University's Digital Bauhaus had had to bow out, due to illness. In
place, and  received in an almost relaxed post-conference spirit, Donald
Davidson from New York's American Museum of Natural HIstory gave an
informal overview of the Planispherium being developed at his museum and
planned to open next March. HIgh on the 'wow' factor, this virtual
Planeterium will provide the visitor with a jaunt through a "tiny, tiny
local area" of our solar system. "About 100,000 stars", Davidson stated,
which seemed sizeable enough before he placed this six figure number in
context; the galaxy contains 500 billion stars. 

Davidson says he wants to extend these virtual universes into the micro
worlds of microbiology, as well as human culture. It can extend out into
the whole range, becoming reality domes for any number of imaginable
virtual explorations. A question from the audience asked whether Davidson
envisaged artists could use these. "For sure" was Davidson's response, and
over in the Hemispherium virtual artist Gregory Little's Avatar was ready
to roll, facilitating your journey deep into his digitally created inner
body. The Hemispherium explained Davidson's presence in Middlesborough,
whilst his Museum's use of similar technology,  for their state-of-the-art
Planispherium, showed a way ahead for twenty-first century-immersed public
learning facilities. Maybe this is a path Teesside's Innovation Centre are
already hard at work on. There was something somnolently relaxing about
this last key-note session, as if after the 'work' of the first two days,
the talk gave space for fantasy about the future. It seemed a far cry from
the reality of funding bids, budget cuts and the imminent horizon of
distant learning content provision.
It wasn't of course.

The three days had definitely, if incrementally, improved. If this report
only focuses on small elements of the conference, then 'education' seemed
wholly pertinent in a region which has had to face the local brunt of the
consequences of Globalisation. On the radio, on the Friday morning, the
news reported 500 jobs being created by the telephone company Cellnet in
North Yorkshire; surely Teesside. Across the ripped backsides of the city,
a new football arena has been recently built. It's called the 'Cellnet
Stadium', blatantly publicising the company which funded its construction.
Meanwhile, the Tees riverside lived up to imaginings of Post Industrial
decline. In the remaking of these sites, new media is playing a
paradoxical role, hand maiden to their destruction, and player in their
futures. It remains to be seen whether the education community can make
something else happen, bringing an enabling creativity alongside invention
and innovation to the many, as well as the bittersweet promise of digital
surfdom.







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