Digital and Postdigital Media in Art Education

Digital media is having a moment. Artificial intelligence (AI) is currently unsettling many of those involved in traditional forms of artistic and cultural production by confusing some and captivating others. From state fairs (Escalante-De Mattei, 2022) to graphic novels (Andersen, 2022), to forms of Indigenous knowledge (Carlson & Richards, 2023), AI is certainly on the minds of many—including art educators.

AI image generators, such as Midjourney, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion, allow individuals to compose imagery that is varied, sometimes crude, and other times quite polished. The feature that is most captivating, however, seems to be the speed at which these images are composed.¹ The ability for individuals to make digital images quickly from a few text-based prompts that access the wealth of images found in networked databases raises a number of issues regarding copyright and creative self-expression. These are issues that art educators might address when using AI.

Or they might not. Contemporary spaces of art education are often resistant to change, whether it be cultural, social, or technological. If you were to walk into a community art center, museum education space, or art classroom today, you would probably see sketchbooks, easels, pottery wheels, and the like—and you might see a tablet or laptop computer. It’s also possible that you might hear a 3D printer whirring away in the back corner of the space, and it’s also possible that networked digital technologies are allowing for collaboration and communication to take place across the country or the globe. Maybe.

The main issue here is not the integration of digital media in the spaces of art education, although that is a concern that has been voiced by numerous scholars in the field. What seems to be the most pressing issue is how AI-generated art is impacting the field on a social level. AI art is changing the way images are made, distributed, consumed, and understood. In this manner, they are postdigital, which is a term that refers to the ubiquitous nature of digital media in addition to how these media impact and influence all media that came before (see Tavin et al., 2021).

Art educators currently have the opportunity to address the impact of AI-generated art as it relates to a digital visual culture. This can take place through the making of AI art that is generally accessible and user-friendly—especially for disabled artists (Hayes, 2018). It can also happen through a critical analysis of AI art. The U.S. Copyright Office recently ruled that Jason Allen, an artist who created AI-generated art that won an art contest at the Colorado State Fair in 2022, could not hold copyright (Knibbs, 2023). This ruling can introduce educators and students to concepts of originality and appropriation in a timely manner. Artists, such as Sarah Andersen (2022), are concerned by the ethical issues of AI-generated art, especially when these works draw from databases of digital images that have been collected without the consent of the artist.

To be clear, this special issue of Studies in Art Education is not dedicated specifically to AI, although there are two articles that deal with the topic. AI only represents the most recent cultural flashpoint where digital media represents a challenge to traditional cultural values while simultaneously offering opportunities for artmaking, investing, and product development. In addition to this theme, articles featured in this special issue address the possibilities for social media applications and explorations in museum spaces, as well as the potential for feminist glitch practices in art education. All of the authors in this issue are looking to the future of digital and postdigital media practices in the field while also acknowledging the practices of previous art educators who raised critical questions regarding such media forms.

In “Creative and Critical Entanglements With AI in Art Education,” Ye Sul Park provides readers with a useful overview of technological developments that led to the current AI applications, as well as a summary of related postdigital practices in new media art, and how this might inform future art educational approaches:

The postdigital conditions of contemporary society are reshaping the ways we define teaching and learning, how we structure art pedagogies, and what our students would expect to learn in our classrooms. To create meaningful learning experiences for students that reflect their shifted ways of developing identities and building social interactions through digital technologies, art educators and researchers need to develop technologically responsive pedagogies; it is important to know how to leverage emerging technologies in our research and pedagogies.

Park argues that these types of responsive pedagogies can be productively informed through the study of new media artists who speak to the complexities of AI. The artists who are discussed provide a useful snapshot of current digital media practices, but the challenge here is, of course, that digital media such as AI-based software are evolving quickly. The reasons for this growth are numerous; venture capitalists have seized upon the popularity and visibility of AI startups, with a quarter of all investments in U.S. startups going toward AI companies in 2023 (Gordon, 2023).

As art educators who are interested in leveraging this popularity explore and employ AI-based artmaking, the concepts of creativity and individuality that have been central to art education since at least the mid-20th century are thrown into question. Park uses the terms “computational creativity” and “metacreativity” to describe these shifts. It would certainly benefit art educators who have invested in the notion of creative self-expression to scrutinize this notion as creativity is augmented and the self is made machinic.

Maggie-Rose Condit-Summerson addresses similar themes of posthumanism and the postdigital in “‘How Do We Break What Is Broken?’: An Exploration of Glitch Feminism in Art/Education.” This research article focuses on the glitch as a dysfunctional element of technological media that can be leveraged to explore pedagogical possibilities that resist patriarchal and racist forms of dominance and normalizing frames of reference. As she writes, “Glitch feminism provides a particularly potent conceptual framework for exploring digital culture as a networked contemporary condition in which the divisions between life online and away from keyboard (AFK) have become slippery.”

Here, one can see how the social implications of digital and postdigital media use are emphasized. The glitch is, as Condit-Summerson describes, a function of postdigitality. The glitch shows the limitations of digital systems that are designed to work in a friction-free manner. This exposes the flaws in digital systems, which can allow art educators to critique utopian narratives of digital perfection and make meaningful pedagogical connections to previous predigital technological systems.

Condit-Summerson deftly draws a line from cyberfeminism to glitch feminism, scrutinizing the notion of technological progress and pointing toward practical and theoretical concerns that are relevant for art educators in a variety of settings. This piece provides a number of potent examples for art educators teaching at the university level and includes provocative forms of questioning and inquiry that are aimed at subverting oppressive forms of power and knowledge production through postdigital media.

Emma June Huebner presents equally potent forms of digital and postdigital inquiry in “Museum Education Through Social Media.” In this research article, Huebner argues for museum education that addresses compelling communicational aspects of social media, particularly in a post-COVID era. As she writes:

Young people have specific needs and desires when it comes to learning about art and museums via social media. Therefore, educators must leverage technologies and visual and popular practices in a meaningful way to reach them effectively via these platforms. The roles of many museum educators have been transformed by social media, and this study suggests that these changes are here to stay in postpandemic museum programming.

Huebner describes the tension that often results from the clash between social media as a marketing tool and social media as an educational platform in museums. Much of this tension can be seen in short-form videos such as those posted to TikTok or on Instagram as Reels. Respondents in this study indicate the challenges in blending educational and entertaining information in social media platforms.

Employing a research methodology drawn from Allard and Boucher (1998) and Meunier (2011), Huebner suggests a shift in research that previously focused on the museum as environment. Instead, she proposes that social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok be seen as a meaningful extension of the museum environment. Educators who work in museums have certainly felt the impact of social media in museum-based experiences, but this shift in the parameters of the research methodology is perhaps quite radical.

This study points to the ways that art educational research continues to change and adapt to digital and postdigital media. In “Midjourney Killed the Photoshop Star: Assembling the Emerging Field of Synthography,” Aaron D. Knochel also acknowledges the ways research methodologies might adapt along with that which is being studied. In this research article, Knochel presents what he terms as a synthographic research narrative, or an approach to research influenced by practices and theories of assemblage. As Knochel writes:

Creative practice and arts learning activates distributed agentic networks whereby hidden curricula proliferate and an ethics of participation is rendered. In addition, the assemblage methodology focused on the social ontology of technological actants, which could be renewed through refocusing on a range of mediating actants in arts spaces, offered a renewed critical approach to creative acts with media in education that moved beyond literacy discourses into materialities, posthuman agency, and digital visual culture.

Knochel analyzes the graphic imaging software Photoshop and the AI-based image generator Midjourney, identifying similarities and differences. What makes this a synthographic form of research is, as Knochel argues, that the networks of actants (see Latour, 2005) are being cut and reassembled, much in the same way images are decomposed and recomposed in both Photoshop and Midjourney.

This would seem to be an appropriate way to present research writing that relates to digital and postdigital media. The reflexive relationship between what is studied and how this study is described seems to be central to all forms of academic research. Knochel’s piece acts as a call for future research methodologies that are responsive to what is being studied—digital, postdigital, or otherwise.

It is my hope that readers of this special issue of Studies in Art Education respond to this call by scrutinizing the ways research might change and adapt with developing technologies and technosocial ontological forms. By attending to digital and postdigital media in the forms of AI art, social media interaction, and feminist explorations of the glitch, art educators would be better prepared to respond to those moments that lie beyond this moment.

Editor’s Note: This issue of Studies in Art Education is my last as senior editor. I want to thank a number of people who have made my 2 years with the journal a pleasure. First, I want to thank Amy Barnickel, who understands the inner workings of the journal better than anyone. Without her, this journal would not be what it is. Next, I want to thank Donal O’Donoghue, past senior editor, for his guidance and support throughout my tenure. His vision for the journal and editorial approach have been extremely influential. I also want to thank Kryssi Staikidis, who will be senior editor for Volumes 65 and 66. Kryssi and I have worked together in the past, most notably on the Journal of Social Theory in Art Education. I appreciate her attention to detail and dedication to academic rigor, combined with a sensitivity to the individuals involved in the process of researching, writing, reviewing, editing, and publishing. I am excited to see how these qualities will shape future issues. In addition, I have been lucky to work with an editorial board that is composed of individuals who give precious time and knowledge to the journal. Your service is much appreciated. And last but not least, I want to thank Jamie Klinger-Krebs for her focus and support as Publications Manager at NAEA. The look and feel of the issues of Studies that I have edited over the past 2 years is greatly due to her creative ideas and insights.

It has been my honor to serve as senior editor for the past 2 years. Thanks to everyone involved with Studies for the opportunity. Cheers!

Notes

1 I did not use the term “created” here, because this seems to be one of the contested aspects of AI-generated imagery.