Smarthistory: a Kickstarter success story

Image via WikipediaI was really glad to see that people have stepped up and supported Smarthistory - this is a really amazing site that needs and deserves our support. Their Kickstarter page is here, but PLEASE contribute; this is an incredible project that can really promote art history and online education, and despite reaching their financial goals, we have to think about on-going support. These are just the kinds of courses that are on the chopping block right now in these hard economic times and we need to step up.

We don't know what is going to happen as we lose liberal arts education. This used to be one of the most important parts of learning: participating in a shared culture. When we lose the liberal arts, we lose our sense of history. Being able to access arts on the web means that students in schools across the world get to benefit from the curation of professional art historians. Yes, looking at pictures on the web is not the same as being there. But this is the next best thing. It is also something completely different. It is a guided view of art and art history scholarship that you could not get in a static textbook. Also, I have seen paintings here for the first time that I could not get to experience any other way. Please support this site!

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Of Concept Maps and Crucifixions

I visited the National Gallery earlier this year and I spent a lot of time looking at a few paintings of crucifixion or passion paintings. I was particularly interested in a few early renaissance paintings. These paintings come from a time when art served a teaching and learning function; they had a didactic purpose and not just decorative or expressive one. Paintings that fit this bill will have the crucified Christ at the center and in the landscape behind him, arranged radially, will be scenes that illustrate the life of Christ or the events of the Passion. One example that is in Wikimedia is Hans Memling's "Tafel mit Szenen der Passion Christi"

 
This is a painting of Jerusalem and at the center of the painting is the scourging of Christ. All of the scenes around it, in various parts of the city represent different events in the arrest, trial, and execution of Jesus. There are even two scenes representing the crucifixion; one with him dying on the cross and another on the next hill, of him being taken off the cross. There is even a resurrected Christ in the lower right corner about to harrow hell. This is all typical of Flemish painting especially.In the extreme lower right and left corners, I believe we have the devout patrons of this painting.

The point of all this is that the painting represents a central idea, The Passion of the Christ. It has a series of connected stories that are all related to that central idea - spatially and temporally. This painting represents a concept map of that narrative. Concept maps allow us to see connections to different ideas in new ways, but they also help us describe knowledge in a way so that we see how all of the pieces are connected. There are many examples of this throughout history and the world. Art is used to share ideas and their connections in the tangka paintings of Tibet and the Navaho sand paintings. Concept maps and "mind mapping" are not something new, they are an integral method of sharing knowledge and ideas.

The Art of Describing

Image via Wikipedia

There are often connections between my artistic life and my work in education that are surprising. I am reading a book called "The Art of Describing" by Svetlana Alpers. It is a book about Dutch art in the 17th century and it feels pretty far removed from my work in instructional design and distance education. It is not a new book but I am giving myself a crash course in art history and criticism to work out some ideas that are important to the current novel I am writing. Additionally, I am just interested in art in general. My current novel hinges on ideas of art, identity and authorship. In her book, Alpers talks about Dutch art as descriptive rather than being a narrative art like the Italians (she gives notable exceptions, of course) and in the second chapter, talks about how lenses and the camera obscura began to change how the Dutch defined art, seeing, and knowing. There are two important terms describing art for the 17th cent. Dutch - "naer het leven" (after life e.g. painting from a live subject) and "nyt den geest" (from the mind). Alpers writes "while naer het leven refers to everything visible in the world, nyt den geest refers to images of the world as they are stored mnemonically in the mind" (p.40). This is pretty exciting territory for me because there is an intersection here between this work I am doing for my art (fiction) and the work I am doing in instructional design, which involves visual pedagogy. The 17th century was an important turning point in science and art because the inventions of the lens and the camera obscura were changing how we understood optics and images. Kepler wrote about optics Alpers sums up Kepler's arguments when she writes "To understand our view of the sun, or moon, or world, we must understand the instrument with which we view it..." This is very radical. It implies that there is no concrete "actual" image out there - just a view of the world that is an interpretation by an instrument which could be a lens, a camera obscura, or the eye itself. I think this was a common view of all technology back then. It comes from a fundamental mistrust of the senses and an understanding that all tools for observation are really tools of interpretation and the tool you choose shapes that interpretation.

The lense we are looking through now is the series of connected databases, documents, images, texts and people that make up the internet. Understanding how the technology determines our interpretation of knowledge on the internet is critical. I believe that we are only going to be able to fully understand how we can do that by looking at how we processed technical innovations in the past.