Thanks to everyone who participated in the session! 
It was great to learn about your experiences through our thoughtful and lively discussion.
Please feel free to add more resources and activity ideas to the Google doc (link is below).
Best wishes,
La Tanya S. Autry
@artstuffmatters
PowerPoint: tinyurl.com/nvuhcy4
Google Doc: tinyurl.com/k6amfjq
My friends and I would like to have a safe space where we can address the broad context of online instructions at the City University of New York (CUNY) and how my/our own classroom intersects with this history. I intend to share perspectives on the teaching of art and art history online and various pedagogical approaches by introducing new online platforms. For example, how does the shift from face-to-face to hybrid formats inspire students to explore museums in other countries and provide them with new insights into their own cultures? Investigating an expanded continuum to many and varied important cultural moments on the landscape of time and space provides students and teachers with greater body of information about art and the making of art. This approach lends itself to challenging our definition about what art is. Since students today are emotionally connected to their mobile devices, bringing them to virtual space seems necessary to have them develop a relationship with an art object.
I’d like to propose an informal discussion having to do with a few of the projects I have been working on for the last couple of years surrounding the re-contextualization of cultural heritage artifacts. These are usually small experiments, but have grown to be “projects.”
1) Curatorial Poetry is a stream of decontextualized “descriptive” texts pulled from museum collection meta-data. These snippets of information, separated from their full object records and image representations, provide the possibility of a different entry point to the object.
2) Curatorial Poetry Derivatives — Encoded Catalog & Robot Readable Design Museum – These “iterations” continue the conversation around re-contextualizing information, with the hopes of creating a new understanding through the use of new audiences and entry-points into a knowledge-base.
3) Object Phone – Object Phone was an attempt to give our objects “voices.” The end result is a phone number that you can call or text to receive information about any object in our collection. It opens up the concept up an audio-tour, raises questions about accessibility and most importantly gives our objects their own voice!
4) Moment’s Notice – Moment’s Notice is an “experiment in correspondence.” This is a personal project of mine that I have just started. In a nutshell, people sign up, I send them a roll of 35mm film, they return it, I process it and scan it and make a permanent archive website. This project is about correspondence. It’s also about the dying art of analog photography. It’s about the avalanche of imagery posted to the internet every single second of our lives. It’s about slowing your brain down, and it’s about breathing. I’m curious about selection, and curation, and building a long lasting archive of images that communicate something cerebral–something that lives outside the current framework.
In the discussion, I would like to present these projects ( quickly ) and then discuss how and why I can to do them. I’d like to talk about how we as artists and sometimes employees are motivated to explore concepts like these, and how we can carve out time in our busy lives to make them come to life. I’d like to talk about how technology plays a role but is not necessarily the centerpiece of the conversation.
-micah
