Studies in Art Education: Call for Submissions

Digital and Postdigital Media Practices in Art Education

Submission Deadline: April 1, 2023

Publication Date: November 2023

Digital art encompasses numerous practices and is informed by varied philosophies, and like most art forms, it is continually in the process of being reinvented. From the Jacquard loom punch cards created by Ada Lovelace, which led to the development of the first computer coding (Kafai & Margolis, 2016), to early forms of interactive art that grew from large mainframe computers, digital art has continually evolved alongside—and perhaps occasionally in advance of—industrial culture. Public access to the internet in the early 1990s gave rise to hypertext poetry and net.art, and eventually, immersive networked digital environments were able to be supported by increasingly powerful desktop computers, allowing artists to engage in innumerable creative and critical practices. At the end of the 20th century, theories of postdigital artistic practices originated in electronic music (Cascone, 2000), and have since been applied to the production of contemporary digital visual art. In the early 21st century, developments in blockchain technologies have given rise to nonfungible token (NFT) art, and programs such as DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney have harnessed the computing power of artificial intelligence (AI) programming, destabilizing notions of artistic creativity and originality in the process.

In art educational practices, art educators have utilized digital media forms through various means and methods. Early computer graphic imaging (CGI) was embraced by art educators such as Freedman (1997), who saw the potential for these technologies in the spaces of preK–12 public schooling. The concept of hypertext, originally introduced in the field of experimental literature (Landow, 1989), was embraced by art educators interested in curriculum design that reflected decentralized forms of knowledge production and distribution (Taylor & Carpenter, 2002). Interactive media such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) have become part of educational strategies used in art museums (Løvlie et al., 2022) and community art spaces (Nekoui & Roig, 2022). And while there have been many who have argued for the relevance of digital media in art educational practice, there also have been those who have been skeptical of such practices.

This special issue of Studies in Art Education looks to extend and expand research and teaching being done at the intersections of digital media and art educational practices. Potential authors should consider submitting full research articles that deal with the relationship between art educational practices in various locations and geographic areas and a range of digital media. Possible topics might include:

• Exploration of utopian narratives connected to digital media specifically shown in claims that networked forms of interaction and representation would be free from racial and gender bias, and how art educational practices might respond to these claims.
• Historical reconsiderations of digital media research and theory in art education, particularly as notions of the postdigital allow for the reexamination of fixed binaries regarding media specificity and authorship.
• Do-it-yourself (DIY) approaches to learning through digital media related to informal art education related to the maker movement, circuit bending, glitch art, YouTube tutorials, etc.
• Specific studies of digital media forms as they are currently being presented in preK–12, community, or museum settings.
• Applications of digital media as research methodology in forms such as data visualization, and how these research methodologies might relate to or conflict with approaches exemplified by arts-based research.
• Speculative considerations of developing digital art forms such as NFT and AI-based art, and how these art forms might unsettle research methodologies and pedagogical strategies in future art educational practices.

How to submit:
All submissions for this special issue should follow the established submission guidelines for Studies in Art Education on Taylor & Francis’s website located at: https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/usae20 (Click on the link “Instructions for Authors.”)

Download the complete call for submissions here.

Word count:
Approximately 6,000 words. Include an abstract of 75–150 words.

Questions?
Please send specific questions to studies@ucf.edu

All manuscripts undergo a masked review by selected members of the Studies editorial board.

References

Cascone, K. (2000). The aesthetics of failure: “Post-digital” tendencies in contemporary computer music. Computer Music Journal, 24(4), 12–18.

Freedman, K. (1997). Visual art/virtual art: Teaching technology for meaning. Art Education, 50(4), 6–12. https://doi.org/10.2307/3193647

Kafai, Y., & Margolis, J. (2016, October 11). Celebrating Ada Lovelace. MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/celebrating-ada-lovelace

Landow, G. P. (1989). Hypertext in literary education, criticism, and scholarship. Computers and the Humanities, 23(3), 173–198. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30200162

Løvlie, A. S., Waern, A., Eklund, L., Spence, J., Rajkowska, P., & Benford, S. (2022). Hybrid museum experiences. In A. Waern & A. S. Løvlie (Eds.), Hybrid museum experiences: Theory and design (pp. 31–56). Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv2cxx8x6.5

Nekoui, Y., & Roig, E. (2022). Playgrounds in the digitally mediated city: An approach from augmented reality. Urbani Izziv, 33(2), 82–90. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27184921

Taylor, P. G., & Carpenter, B. S., II. (2002). Inventively linking: Teaching and learning with computer hypertext. Art Education, 55(4), 6–12. https://doi.org/10.2307/3193962