The history of art in the age of digital media 
13 August 2012
6pm
Venue: Room 220, Arts 1 (Building 206)
Host: Professor Charlie Gere, Lancaster University
In this public lecture, Professor Charlie Gere reflects upon the experience of trying to teach the history of art in a digital culture. Taking his cue from the critical pedagogical ideas of Paulo Freire, Ivan Illich, and Jacques Rancière, Charlie Gere suggests that we must develop new forms of teaching that emphasize relationality, interdisciplinarity, participation, equality and sharing, against those emphases paradigmatic of a print regime, such as the subordination of the taught to the supposed mastery of the teacher, disciplinary autonomy and specialisation, and competition. This is partly a response to the sheer impossibility of mastering knowledge in the light of the overwhelming amount of information available through new technologies and networks. Thus, rather than the teacher being regarded as someone who fills the students with knowledge to overcome their ignorance, both teacher and student should be seen as co-participants in the process of discovery.
Charlie Gere is Professor of Media Theory and History at the Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University. He is the author of Digital Culture (Reaktion Books, 2002); Art, Time and Technology (Berg, 2006); Non-relational Aesthetics, with Michael Corris (Artwords, 2009), and co-editor of White Heat Cold Technology (MIT Press, 2009) and Art Practice in a Digital Culture (Ashgate, 2010). In 2007, Professor Gere co-curated Feedback, a major exhibition on art responsive to instructions, input or its environment, in Gijon, Northern Spain. He is co-curator of FutureEverybody, the 2012 FutureEverything exhibition, in Manchester. His new book, Community without Community in Digital Culture (Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), will be published later this year.
