My ID/UM manifesto

All art is media art.
There is no art that is not media art.

ID/UM is more engaged with newer media, than with older ones, but it is not all unthinkable that in an ID/UM class you would make drawings, or a piece of land art, or a physical performance. ID/UM allows all media when they are right for the work… (of course a work cannot be considered to exist separately of the media in which it is created, but you could try to image a work as made by other media than the one you know it in – actually my 3rd year of DOGtime always includes an re-mediation assignment. )
Look at it like this: if you made drawing or a piece of land-art or a a performance for an ID/UM class, they would be looked at differently than in a BK class. How so?

In ID/UM we (speaking for more than one but not necessarily for all ID/UM teachers) never look at an art object as though it produces any meanings on its own. Of course we look at an object’s form, aesthetics, and content: what’s in there? How does it look? How does it feel ? What does it refer to ? …but always in context. We look at how it engages with its physical, symbolic, possibly narrative context – how it is situated in its surrounding realities? And what it does it DO together with its situation?
We (at least, I am) are not absolutely against you making stuff for white cubes, (‘black box entering white cube’ ) but we tend to feel that the implicit art script that controls the possible relations in a white cube space actually runs counter to a lot of explicit desires, ambition and potential vitalities of artistic practice.
We are much more interested to see if you can develop scripts for artistic(cally informed) encounters in spaces of different kind: public, private, corporate, hybrid, what have you.

Lastly, and I think most typical for ID/UM, we look at the way you design with your work the relations with your audiences – we look at your content in context from the perspective of a member of the audience: we look at how your work makes makes or facilitates contact.

Take this member of your audience: how does his or her experience of your work develop over time? How does he/she encounter it? How does he she develop relations with it? Or with other people, through it? What are the qualities of those relations? Are they interestingly different? How does the relation end? What is left? For whom? In other words, an ID/UM work is always treated as a process.

These ways of treating artistic work – content in context, making contact, treating work as a process, are obviously informed by the developing nature of the current media ecology: by the internet and the web, by interactive media, mobile media – all phenomena that are articulated and performed through and hugely influenced by ongoing technological developments. ID/UM takes technology as a crucial element of culture and of the artistic playground. We’ll also teach you interactive technologies, but ID/UM is not just ABOUT the technologies, it’s about processes of content in context, and contact, in any media.

Do read on in the blogpost Relational Design