Pioneers of Electronic Art Education
by Ebon Fisher, Director of the University of Iowa's Digital Worlds Program
Jeff Robbins

I can vividly recall the surge I felt as a kid in 1973 when I strapped on that first clunky Portapak and plunged into the burning sunshine of Winona Street. My mother's employer, Jeff Robbins, had introduced reel-to-reel video to my school system in Philadelphia, and on weekends my mother brought the sweet stuff home. Mr. Robbins didn't mind our weekend hacking in the least. He was committed to spreading the media wealth like the gleaming, theoryflinging hippie that he was. A lot of ketchup landed on that rig while my sisters and I simulated glorious death scenes in the living room and layered the Beatles' "Revolution" over shots of ourselves escaping from the house. The term "music video" hadn't been invented yet, although the Monkees, taking their cues from the Beatles and Motown, had seduced many a day-dreaming kid into the fantasy land of rock and motion pictures. Mr. Robbins intentions for the equipment were more socialist, of course, but no less weird. He wouid enlist students from numerous schools and jump-start multicultural experiments in "Gymkraftics" - a hybrid of gymnastics, video feedback, and dance. As a 13-year­old "insider" on this media scene, the world was an intoxicating reticulum of videotape and Silly Putty, binding play, school, and television. I am immensely grateful to Jeff and my mother, Anna, for these memories. Jeff's Center for Evolving Education, attached like a barnacle to the side of Germantown Friends School, introduced many children and educators alike to the democratic glories of homemade media.
Bruce Breland
My first taste of weekend video-hacking led me inexorably to art school at Carnegie-Mellon University in the late 1970s, where I met another great media educator, Bruce Breland. Bruce, like Jeff, had that frenetic media sparkle. He taught a wide-open course he called "Intermedia", where I first learned about the aura of Marshall McLuhan, photocopiers, the mail-art scene, and mysterious stories about "slo-scan" parties where Bruce and Pioneers of Electronic Education his overseas friends would conduct simultaneous parties linked by homemade fax transmissions. Participants in Pittsburgh, Paris, New York, San Francisco, and Dakar, Senegal, got an early taste of the global village to come. I wish I could say that the MUDs, MOOs, and CU-SeeMe confluences of the 90s network scene were informed by these experiments, but Bruce and his comrades in their Digital Art Exchange may have come too early to be appreciated and documented by the huge digital audiences of today. Every other week I receive e-mail from some group claiming to be the "first inter-city art opening" or the "first international house party" and so on. Bruce was one of the jolliest fellows I ever met and I'm sure the current explosion of digital exchange, completely oblivious of his early efforts, is all just a remarkable chuckle. Years after I graduated from Carnegie-Mellon, Bruce's underfunded media efforts have evolved into an entire Electronic and Time­Based Media department, standing side by side with the sculpture and painting programs. Simon Penny now conducts a creative robotics workshop there, although it is still outbudgeted by Hans Moravech's more utilitarian robotics laboratory in the School of Engineering.

Minor White
Bruce Breland's dictum, "If it looks like art, it isn't" lifted me into a quasi-anthro­pological quest for meaning outside of official art circles. After a foray into neuronal graffiti in 1981 and an encounter with Keith Haring (which, quite frankly, was not altogether edifying, due to his uncanny straightforwardness), I found myself consumed with an elegant new computer program, Pascal. A book I programmed in 1984 of randomly generated fields of zeros seduced enough eyeballs at MIT to land me there at the formation of the Media Lab. Muriel Cooper, director of the Visible Language Workshop, asked me to teach the Media Lab's first undergraduate course, a program of hands-on media instruction which Minor White had originally formulated for MIT in 1968. "Creative Seeing", as it was called, introduced handfuls of engineering students to the joys of visual experience and creation. Minor White is best known for instigating Aperture magazine, but I can't help seeing him as a reincarnation of Jeff Robbins. "Creative Seeing" was designed as a multisensory swirl of learning, a grown-up version of Jeff's "Gymkraftics". When Muriel handed White's course over to me, I knew instinctively what to do. However, delivering media experiences to Reagan-era students in the mid-1980s induced me to modify some of the more way-out exercises - not because I didn't believe in their value but because I wanted to reach the cluster of doubting students who might gain the most from the course. The way-out students would "get it" no matter what I threw at them. The others, stuck in the illusion of materialism, scared me.
Otto Piene
It was another program at MIT, however, for which I reserve most of my affection: the Center for Advanced Visual Studies. This was the small, fierce but overshadowed predecessor to Negroponte's more corporate Media Lab. I spent much of my time there.
The CAVS was led at the time by a great and fearsome pedagogue Otto Piene. I always imagined a tragic penumbra emanating from the man as he conducted his baronial sessions with the fellows and graduate students. In retrospect I can see that Otto ruled the CAVS with more warmth than I was capable of discerning as a young graduate student. But as the more entrepreneurial Media Lab exploded on the scene with its demo tapes of future possibility, I could see the perturbation increase in this Austrian­born inheritor of Bauhaus­flavored idealism. Otto insisted that the founder of the CAVS, Gyorgy Kepes, was a direct link to the Bauhaus, that great German experiment in interdisciplinary education. Kepes had been invited to teach at Moholy-Nagy's New Bauhaus, in Chicago, where Kepes developed his book, The Language of Vision. This in turn had brought him to MITs Department of Architecture and Planning, wherein he built his own interdisciplinary dream-boat, the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, in 1968.

Red Burns
In the late 80s I moved to Brooklyn, where rents were tolerable but media resources were scarce. We had Williamsburg's charming and enigmatic media hang-out, the Outpost, headed by Al Arthur and Ruth Kahn, and across the East River I found solace in Downtown Community Television, where I was able to meet some of New York's activist media community. Another Manhattan media center, which has become an important hub for digital artists, is Red Burns' Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. Ms. Burns' program predates MIT's Media Lab by a decade but, like the CAVS, has not quite warped the map of popular consciousness so severely. Stuck somewhere between the Bauhaus and "professional" America, ITP explored electronic culture in New York long before the city looked up from its hardcopy and museums and realized it was being swallowed by a digital storm (a rude awakening that this Brooklyn expatriate would place at 1995). Very much in ITP's favor is its assortment of strange digital bedfellows - from VR pioneer Jaron Lanier, to L.A.-bred "cyberslacker" Jaime Levy, to the "metagroovers" of interactive television, Nick West and Big Twin.
Hans Breder
Hans Breder didn't wait for New York's digital awakening. Back in the 60s he left a strong career in New York as a minimalist sculptor to follow his instincts in the direction of media. He started teaching "the media of drawing" at the University of Iowa in that remarkably pivotal year of 1966 and launched the department of Intermedia in the pivotal year of 1968. Performance, video, and other media thrived in his program, which boasts a large and devoted stream of graduate students. Hans' exuberant parties and international exchanges have been brought to my attention so many times that I must record them here as an extension of the man's mission - to expand and lubricate the clay of human existence both inside and outside the phosphor tube. I have had the benefit of starting my own "Digital Worlds" program at the University of Iowa with Hans Breder's experience and guidance.
Roy Ascott
One other innovator of electronic-arts education has managed to scratch my skull and leave more than a few rivulets of curiosity. In 1994 Roy Ascott rounded out a long career as an arts educator by initiating the Center for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts (CAIIA) at the University of Wales College in Newport, Wales. Like many of his generation, Roy brings a strong interdisciplinary curiosity to his work, which began to utilize global networks in 1980. He has recently collaborated with the Kuikuru Indians of Brazil, exploring relationships between shamanism and cyberspace. Ascott and his doctoral students have been weaving art, technology, and consciousness research into a new discipline they call "technoetics". CAIIA's annual conference, "Consciousness Reframed: Art and Consciousness in the Post­Biological Era", has been attracting a remarkable crowd of artists, biologists, architects, and technologists. A thorough index of pioneering media educators would reach far beyond this small Atlantic survey. Against many odds, however, and in the face of their own sense of alienation from the very linear history of mainstream cultural circles, these unique and passionate people have helped to formulate a radically new practice of culture. Without our current hindsight and without the comprehension and support of neighboring disciplines, they dared to formulate a dream of a bionic planet with a friendly soul.
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