Hello Lorna,

Thank you for your thoughtful response and questions. This initial research focused more on collecting insights, data, and input from current Artist-Technologists in the field today - from college students to adults. We wanted to discuss the current field today, how they received their training, and what gaps they see between education and the workplace. All of this was part of an initial planning grant. The next grant will consist of developing educational training programs, which we are very excited to implement! 

Thanks for the question, Brooke.  And you are catching us at a perfect in-between point.  The 40 we interviewed were from a planning grant project.  Now we are trying to take the lessons learned from that (and inspiration from the video) and turn them into the activities you mention - so we are still thinking through details.  A big theme we are incorporating though revolves around students gaining access to some of the high tech tools at an earlier age.  For example, since we are focused primarily on music production, developing experiences that allow students to make music with tools supported by machine learning.  By minimizing some of the technical details they would need to create music, see where they take.  Even though the details aren't fully developed yet, the idea stems from a tension we saw in our data, depth in technology fluency versus "enough" to do what you want.  Some artists described that they continually sought to learn more and go deeper with their technology medium and that allowed them to create more/new things.  Others described themselves not as experts, but willing to learn just enough to bring their vision to fruition.  It's in that space we will design the experiences for students.  Thanks for the questions!

The arts teachers in our PD program (https://stemforall2022.videohall.com/presentations/2446) were excited to modify their existing lessons to include the technology we made available to them.  I'm sure the material constraints are different, but I suspect the K-12 art teachers would say that the content of many of their arts-standards-based lessons were pretty unchanged.  For example, what they wanted their students to know and do with respect to sculpture was accomplished with 3D modeling in tinkercad.com and 3D printing; the students painted with Apple pencils and the Procreate app on iPads; a music lesson in which students were supposed to invent a notation system (that would allow someone to easily play a song) was done with Makey Makey physical-digital instruments they made with cans, pie pans, silverware, paper clips, play-doh (anything conductive).  Our project goal was to make the teachers more comfortable with technology so they, in turn, could help ALL students feel confident with coding, circuitry, fabrication technology.  The ones who really dove in and implemented technology-based lessons do not think it caused the artistry to take a back seat.  And as this project points out so well, tech is also making it possible for contemporary artists and students to do things they couldn't do before, like kinetic, interactive sculptures.

Thanks for the initial question and response.  The examples Ann provided are fantastic.  Our team also had many rich discussions about the creative process and how technology might influence it.  Two thoughts I took from the interviews we conducted are that most of the artist technologists enjoyed creating, regardless of medium.  As long as they found their passion and saw value/fulfillment in what they were making, the digital-analog distinctions didn't matter.  The other, and this is more my conjecturing based on how I heard the artist unpack their challenges, is that the challenges became opportunities for expression.  Finding ways to work around and through the limitations pushed their creativity in ways that were new to them and pushed them to express themselves in new ways.  

Very interesting questions, Dan. As we thought about how to best support artists to learn about technology as part of the "full" proposal we recently submitted to NSF "Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier", we grappled with similar questions.  What we think is needed is a program that includes complementary components to address the diverse needs we identified in our interviews. 

Among the key "types of learning experiences" we are suggesting are: (a) awareness sessions/ presentations that show "what is possible" when technology is integrated with art (along the lines of the examples we included in the video, but going in depth about what it took to create those products and what an artist would need to know about technology to be able to do something similar) - as motivation and inspiration; (b) "scaffolded" opportunities to learn a specific technology of one's choice on one's own (the challenge here is to provide enough resources and structure for this to happen, tailored to the individual) - also as a way to develop confidence and strategies to learn other technologies even more independently in the future; and (c) experiences of crating art using technology (to allow for "tinkering"), best if part of a team (to provide opportunities for exchange of ideas, peer learning and reflection).  These are still hypotheses at this point, but what we learned from the experience of successful artist-technologists makes us believe that these types of non-traditional learning activities have great potential.      

The artists I've met who use tech would probably call themselves "tinkerers" and would probably feel at home in the Maker movement.  For example, in our PD program, we have an artist coming to train K-12 art teachers to program strips of LEDs with Arduinos to make light art.  This artist emphasizes that it's best to just dive in – borrow someone's code and tinker with it until it does what you want, and learn as you go.  She never studied computer science; you might call her a "just in time" learner.  The bravest art teachers who were comfortable learning alongside the students were our most enthusiastic implementers of tech in art class.

Hello Marcelo! I love your hypothesis. One thing that we discovered when talking to artists that learn technology, or technologist that love art is that the way they think, assess, and perceive the world is very different. When an artist looks at a piece of technology or starts utilizing it, their approach is very different than the person who might have created it. Regarding non-traditional uses of this technology, I think this appeared quite frequently. In particular, if an artist wants to accomplish X and a tool doesn't exist yet that does exactly that, they explore how far to push existing tools or, better yet, start thinking about creating a new tool that would help them with X. Hence, many artists become artists-technologist to solve problems! 

What a great thought.  Thanks, Eric.  I love the potential that you've been increasing curiosity towards STEM fields, too.  Your point made me think about another detail I'll share, the importance of teams and being able to communicate across disciplines/fields.  Many of our interviews discussed how challenging in the beginning, then rewarding and essential it was to be able to bridge the different ways traditional fields make sense of phenomenon.  Curiosity seems to be a great bridge and connector so I'm looking forward to digging deeper in that intersection.  Thanks for the food for thought.  

Great question, Kristana. We did submit videos in 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022 - and each time built on what we learned from the previous experiences.  I'd say the key lessons learned were: (1) start with the key message you want to convey (and be very clear and focused about it - less is more!); (2) think of the video as a 3-part "story", each with a clear message/ take-away; (3) write a script and find visuals that support your story/script - making sure it is less than 3 minutes!; (4) choose a consistent format (we preferred voice-over); (4) be careful about matching words on the screen with what you say (but only writing the key words on the screen).  These may be obvious points for film-makers, but they were important learnings for us!