jonCates'

> TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
“Teaching without Philosophy” - jonCates (2009 revision)

Teaching without Philosophy means educating without reliance on meta-narratives, pursuits of absolute truth or universalist and essentialist assumptions regarding the dynamics of the classroom or the abilities of our students. (1) To teach "New Media" without Philosophy is to teach multiple alternative Media Art Histories while mobilizing critiques of the positivist conceptions and conditions of the "technological." I achieve these goals through playfulness, engaged pedagogy and valuing decentralized learning, resource sharing and self-reflexivity in the process of teaching.

I embrace enthusiasm and criticality while facilitating idiosyncratic artistic uses of technologies and fostering students' individual approaches. I am committed to the growth inducing complexities of a dynamic and decenteralized classroom, open to constant learning and insistent about both DIY (Do It Yourself) and the need for Free and Open Source community oriented approaches to learning. My emphasis on openness and shared resources is an informed position which respects the abilities and interests of my students. I keep my students' skills in the foreground and do not attempt to sidestep any instructional responsibilities when teaching technical, theoretical or historical concepts. I commit to high standards of proficiency and competency but actively critique "mastery". The fallacy of technological mastery is a dangerous myth in the field of Digital and New Media Art and I refuse to either assume ignorance or virtuosity on the part of my students.

I am particularly excited about opportunities for learning which foster transformative moments and microrevolutionary exchanges. (2) I actively pursue the "technological" as a social construct, a field of cultural performance. In the field of experimental Media Art, the performance of the "technological" is informed and inflected by adjacent and interconnected fields, but is also always already built out of particular human habits, needs and desires. To address these concerns, I practice an "engaged pedagogy," of which bell hooks has written. (3) Engaged pedagogy takes an embodied, situated and contextual approach to uprooting the destructive expectations of dominant cultures, to set up the conditions for teaching transgression through convivial tools (4) that enable students to "play to learn and learn to play" as Sherry Turkle has said. (5)

The digital toolsets and systems taught in the service of New Media Art are unstable, still in formation, being updated and upgraded as consumer technologies. These socioeconomic conditions rapidly transform any given digital system from having the latest cultural currency to being obsolete detritus. My challenge is therefore not to try to overcome obsolescence any more than seasickness, but to move with it, within and alongside these forces, engaging students creatively and playfully. I remain vigilant with my students as emerging critical thinkers and re-programmers of techno-cultures. In doing so, I refrain from teaching over-specialization or over-determined approaches to the various systems they use to hack, crack, critique, celebrate, and/or otherwise create their projects. In this process, I foster agility, criticality and playful experimentation as responses to the shifting technologies of New Media.

I critique the new-ness of New Media Art through discussions of utopian hopes and promises; lost inventions, faded glories and failed futurisms; revolutionary ruptures and remediations of previous models, as well as obsolete tecnhofetishes and scientific 16 innovation. Students learn to constantly recode and renegotiate New Media Art as a culture. I combine the teaching of technologies as socially constructed (and therefore capable of being changed, detourned or remixed) with ongoing open discussions of the concerns outlined in this text in order to inspire my students to consider themselves developers and reprogrammers of New Media Art culture.

1. This title is a remix of Social Criticism without Philosophy: An Encounter between Feminism and Postmodernism, an essay by Nancy Fraser and Linda J. Nicholson from 1988 in which the authors proposed postmodern approaches to Feminism.
2. I take the concept of the microrevolutionary from the work of Felix Guattari, particularly from his concept of "Molecular Revolutions".
3. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom by bell hooks (1994).
4. The phrase "convivial tools" in this context is a reference to Tools For Conviviality by Ivan Illich (1973).
5. "In video games, you soon realize that to learn to play you have to play to learn" - Life on the screen: identity in the age of the Internet by Sherry Turkle (1997)