Sabbatical Leave Report 2019 – 2020

Sabbatical Leave Report 2019 – 2020
James MacDevitt, M.A.
Associate Professor of Art History and Visual & Cultural Studies
Director, Cerritos College Art Gallery
Department of Art and Design
Fine Arts and Communications Division
Cerritos College

January 2021
Table of Contents

Title Page

i

Table of Contents

ii

Sabbatical Leave Application

iii

Statement of Purpose

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36 37 38 38

39 40 41

42 70 78 101 103

Objectives and Outcomes

OER Textbook: Disciplinary Entanglements

Getty PST Art x Science x LA Research Grant Application Conference Presentation: Just Futures

Academic Publication: Algorithmic Culture

Service and Practical Application Concluding Statement Appendix List (A-E)

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SABBATICAL LEAVE APPLICATION TO:

Dr. Rick Miranda, Jr., Vice President of Academic Affairs

FROM: DATE:

James MacDevitt, Associate Professor of Visual & Cultural Studies October 30, 2018
SUBJECT: Request for Sabbatical Leave for the 2019-20 School Year

I. REQUEST FOR SABBATICAL LEAVE.

I am requesting a 100% sabbatical leave for the 2019-2020 academic year. Employed as a fulltime faculty member at Cerritos College since August 2005, I have never requested sabbatical leave during the past thirteen years of service.

II. PURPOSE OF LEAVE

Scientific advancements and technological capabilities, most notably within the last few decades, have evolved at ever-accelerating rates. Artists, like everyone else, now live in a contemporary world completely restructured by recent phenomena such as satellite imagery, augmented reality, digital surveillance, mass extinctions, artificial intelligence, prosthetic limbs, climate change, big data, genetic modification, drone warfare, biometrics, computer viruses, and social media (and that’s by no means meant to be an all-inclusive list). Artists and humanities scholars alike have had to grapple with these new developments, many producing important interdisciplinary research publications and creative projects exploring their cultural significance. During this leave, I will review recent academic publications and visit notable academic institutions that explore the emerging intersections between art, science, and technology. This research will allow me to prepare an Open Educational Resource (OER) textbook for use in the recently established Art, Science, and Technology course (Art 113), part of the new Visual and Cultural Studies Program, as well as to curate future interdisciplinary exhibitions for the Cerritos College Art Gallery as a compliment to the existing science and technology-based curriculum at the college.

III.SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES

A. In order to better understand the issues surrounding the complex relationships between art, science, and technology, I will first conduct a self-directed study into recent and relevant academic research. a. I will review recent academic publications that confront the numerous intersections between art, science, and technology (see Appendix I for preliminary bibliography).

3b. I will visit institutions that research and exhibit artwork dealing with the intersections of art, science, and technology (see Appendix II for relevant institutions). c. I will attend talks, conferences, and symposiums examining the intersections of art, science, and technology (see Appendix III for relevant events).
B. Using the information gleaned from the primary sources I review, the institutional spaces I visit, and the academic conferences I attend, I will develop and produce a free OER textbook built around key thematic foci and then integrate this material into the existing Art, Science, and Technology course (Art 113). a. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of this course, finding a single comprehensive textbook is effectively impossible and the book that most

closely meets the curriculum, Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science,

and Technology by Stephen Wilson, is itself fifteen years old (which might as well be a hundred years old, considering how quickly this material has changed). Having an OER textbook would not only save students money on the purchase of their course reading, it would also allow for the regular and frequent updating of material in order to better evolve with the topic of study. As an OER textbook, it will also be available free on the Internet for any Cerritos faculty that might wish to integrate relevant modules into their existing courses. b. Thematic foci will include, but may not be limited to: The ‘Two Cultures’ of
Art and Science, Cabinets of Curiosity, the Scientist as Subject, Artistic Interventions in the Laboratory, Techniques of the Observer, Envisioning the Cosmos, The Machine Aesthetic, Experiments in Art and Technology, Video Art, Imagining the Future, Science Fictions, Speculative Design, Animal Studies, Ecological Art, the Anthropocene, Medical Imaging, the Cyborg and Post-Humanism, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Algorithmic Art, Data Visualization, Social Media, (Dis)Information, Surveillance Studies, Net Art, Video Games, Virtual and Augmented Reality, Digital Humanities, Software Studies, Media Archaeologies, and Media Infrastructures.
C. The bibliographic list of recent academic publications that I use as primary sources for my own research in developing this OER, along with any new resources I encounter during the research, will also serve as a booklist that I will submit to the Cerritos College Library for purchase and/or acquisition. a. This will ensure that the Cerritos College library contains the most current and important texts in these key areas of focus, which, because of its interdisciplinary nature, will benefit students from across the disciplinary spectrum. b. Visual and Cultural Studies majors who transfer to four-year universities are expected to conduct their own research in primary sources and to successfully integrate those sources into their research papers. All courses in the Visual and Cultural Studies program include an independent research project that relies heavily on students having access to current academic research in the topics they choose to investigate. Having the most up-to-date academic texts in the library for our students’ independent research projects will better prepare them for this challenge.

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D. As the Director/Curator of the Cerritos College Art Gallery, I have committed myself to presenting exhibitions that cut across disciplines and which are cutting-edge in terms of their thematic foci. I will build upon this record and the research I conduct during the sabbatical leave to produce multiple exhibitions at the gallery during the 2020-2021 annual exhibitionary cycle that will provide direct and immediate access to art projects that operate within these interdisciplinary areas.

IV.

PREPARATION

A. Curriculum Development a. Along with my colleagues in the Art History program, I oversaw the creation and approval of a new AA degree in Visual and Cultural Studies. Cerritos College is the first, and currently the only, community college to have this advanced interdisciplinary degree approved by the Chancellor’s

Office. Visual and Cultural Studies draws from a number of disciplines to explore the meanings, practices, and processes of looking and imaging across historical periods and diverse cultures. It is inclusive and broad ranging both in its methods and approaches and in its objects of inquiry, which include digital technologies, photography, film, painting, television, performance, sculpture, video games, exhibitionary display, sound, the built environment, and many other elements of popular culture. Numerous fouryear institutions have recently expanded their curriculum beyond traditional Art History programs by creating Visual and Cultural Studies departments, including UC Riverside’s undergraduate program in Media and Cultural Studies, UC Irvine’s doctoral program in Visual Studies, and USC’s Visual Studies Research Institute. Our students are well placed to successfully transfer to these programs because of the early adoption of this new curriculum here at Cerritos College.

b. As part of the new Visual and Cultural Studies degree, I wrote and passed through the curriculum approval process (locally and at the Chancellor’s

Office) a new interdisciplinary course in “Art, Science, and Technology” (Art 113). This course is an overview of the intersections between art, science, and technology, as well as their broader impact on, and interaction with, visual and material culture. Areas of focus include the social impact of scientific innovations, technology-driven art, and art/science collaborative projects, including discussions of code-based and algorithmic art, data visualization, robotic and interactive art, machine aesthetics, body modification and cyborg experiments, ecological and environmental art, conceptual Internet projects, culture jamming and hacktivist art, game art and virtual reality, surveillance art, and tele-presence and locative media.

Art 113 has so far only been taught once in the Spring 2018 semester and it will again be offered in Spring 2019. These initial offerings have been (and will be, in the case of Spring 2019) insightful, in particular in identifying the lacunas in the currently approved textbook. The experience I gained from developing and now teaching this course will be instrumental in ensuring the OER textbook will be ideally suited for this curriculum.

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B. Professional History a. My own professional and academic interests have long existed at this intersection of disciplines, in particular so-called new media and digital humanities. Before being hired as a full-time faculty member at Cerritos College, I worked as the Digital Media Associate at the UCR/California Museum of Photography where I digitally archived their world-class stereographic photography collection (The Keystone-Mast Collection). This included creating and maintaining the SQL database that stored the records and writing the code for the online retrieval tool that accessed that database. As part of this NEA-funded project, I also participated in the establishment of the Museums and the Online Archive of California (MOAC) Initiative, based out of UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library and the Berkeley Art Museum. Initially including only eight founding academic museums, the Online Archive of California has since blossomed into housing the digitized collections of over 200 archiving institutions across the state. b. In 2007, prior to the widespread adoption of online learning management software like Sakai and Canvas, I gave a presentation at the Online Learning Conference about the development of my own interactive online course management program that I created using open-source coding languages and applications, like PHP and MySQL. This site, which is still in use today and has been accessed by well over ten thousand students in the last decade, allows students with zero coding ability to create online curation projects supported by their own independent research. c. In 2017, I organized the large-scale FAR Bazaar, which transformed the old
Fine Arts building into temporary exhibition spaces for local art collectives and MFA programs, and which featured numerous multimedia installations, including a giant floating head, a virtual reality simulator, the ghostly hologram of Steve Jobs, and so much more. d. That same year, in no small part due to the prominence and success of the
FAR Bazaar event, I was named Cerritos College’s Most Outstanding Faculty Member. e. In 2018, LA Weekly named Cerritos College Art Gallery as one of the best college art galleries in Southern California, stating “Associate Professor of Art History James MacDevitt is the Director and Curator of the Cerritos College Art Gallery, so you know the exhibitions are legit.”
C. Publication History a. In 2007, I presented a paper at the annual Computers and the History of Art
(CHArt) Conference at Birkbeck College in London, England. The theme of the conference that year was Digital Archive Fever. An updated version of the paper that I presented there was then selected for publication as a chapter in the book Revisualizing Visual Culture, published in 2010 by King’s College and Ashgate Books. My chapter, “The User-Archivist and Collective (In)Voluntary Memory: Read/Writing the Networked Digital Archive” explored the seemingly innocuous recording of user activity in a museum’s online archives and how that meta/data could conceivably be

6activated by collecting institutions to counteract decades of colonial activity and structural racism present within the collection itself. b. In 2011, I was invited to write the keynote essay for an exhibition catalogue produced by Cal State Fullerton’s Begovitch Gallery for the exhibition

Meta/Data/Phile: The Collapse of Visual Information. My essay was titled

“The Ties that Un/Bind: On the Enigmatic Appeal of Meta/Data” and theoretically explored the Mobius-like exchange that occurs between data and metadata (data about data). c. In 2013, I wrote an essay for the publication We Come in Peace, a monograph by the artist Daino (Dan Torres) about his experimental art project in which he trained ants in his backyard to carry miniature protest signs. My essay analyzing and deconstructing this unusual artistic practice and the nature of cross-species interactions was titled “We Come in Piece(s): Alien(ated) Phenomenologies and Cultural Resistance in the Biopolitics of a Human-Insect Assemblage.”
D. Curatorial History a. Since taking over as the Director/Curator of the Cerritos College Art Gallery in 2009, I have curated well over thirty exhibitions and published associated catalogs (generally with a thoroughly-researched curatorial essay), including numerous thematically organized group exhibitions, many of which specifically deal with the intersection of art, science, and technology. In fact, the very first show I put together was titled “Over/Flow: Horror Vacui in the Age of Information Abundance.” Dealing with the tendency to feel overwhelmed by the availability of information, this show included a stereographic video headset, a screen simultaneously displaying multiple gameplay recordings of the same video game, and an interactive data visualization that allowed visitors to dance with their own shadow. b. In 2010, I curated the exhibition “Object-Orientation: Bodies and/as
Things,” which explored the post-humanist expansion of the body into a cyborgian extension, as well as the animist liveliness of everyday objects. c. In 2014, modeled after the famous 1970s-era Experiments in Art and
Technology project in New York and the Art+Tech program at LACMA, I founded an annual interdisciplinary Art+Tech Artist-in-Residence program at Cerritos College in which a professional artist is embedded in the facilities of one of the Technology division departments. The first year, the resident Jeff Cain worked on 3D printing with Engineering Design, resulting in the exhibition “Natural History.” The following year Beatriz Cortez worked on metal shaping with Autobody Repair, resulting in the exhibition “Your Life Work.” The next year, Stephanie Deumer used a CNC router with the Woodworking program, resulting in the exhibition “Features of the Same Face.” Most recently, Sonja Schenk was embedded in the Welding department, resulting in the exhibition “The Box.” The next resident, Kim Morris, is currently working with Cosmetology, to develop a project that uses appropriated hair to make Creole-inspired Mardi Gras masks that will interrogate the complex relationship between hair and racial identities.

7d. In 2015, I curated two linked exhibitions, one at Cerritos College and the other at South Bay Contemporary in San Pedro, CA. At Cerritos, the exhibition was titled “Abstracted Visions: Information Mapping from Mystic Diagrams to Data Visualizations” and included a painting of subatomic decay patterns, textiles representing meteorological data, a sculpture made from sonic recordings of the ocean floor, and a perfume bottle containing scents to best communicate with non-lingual alien life forms. At South Bay Contemporary, the exhibition was titled “Via Negativa: The Transcendence of the unReal” and included an obsidian rock surrounded by welded 3D nurb renderings, a broom that danced in a circle by itself, a table made of speakers pierced by needles quietly clacking together, and a video showing observatory equipment measuring dark matter. e. Opening in August 2018, the latest exhibition I created for the Cerritos
College Art Gallery to touch upon the intersection of art, science, and technology, titled “Geo-Ontological: Artists Contemplating Deep Time,” looked at artists exploring geological strata and rupture, as well as envisioning the futuristic state of the earth after the era of the Anthropocene.
E. Preliminary Travel a. In preparation for research on the cultural phenomenon of Cabinets of
Curiosity, which, as a precursor to museological archiving, historically represent the impulse to collect, organize, and display both cultural objects and natural specimens, I recently visited the eclectic Zymoglyphic Museum in Portland, Oregon and the fantastical Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine. b. During Summer 2018, I traveled to Boston to visit the campus of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and, in particular, visited the MIT Museum, which was hosting a 50-year retrospective exhibition highlighting the art-science collaborative research conducted by the fellows at the influential Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. Other relevant exhibitions at the Museum included the Kinetic sculptures of Arthur Ganson, the drawings of brain dissections by Santiago Ramon y Cajal, the experimental photographs of Gyorgy Kepes, and an exhibit highlighting landmarks in the history of robotics and artificial intelligence. c. During the same trip in Summer 2018, I visited the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, which is renowned for its experimental exhibitions and collections, including Julianne Swartz’s Tonal Walkway, Natalie Jeremijenko’s Tree Logic, James Turrell’s Light Space, Liz Glynn’s

Archaeology of Another Possible Future, Michael Oatman’s All Utopias

Fell, and Laurie Anderson’s virtual reality installation, the Chalkroom.
F. Academic Research a. As referenced above, my own personal academic interests have drawn me to interdisciplinary concerns and I have spent much of the last decade acquiring relevant publications from academic publishers that specialize in producing texts at the intersection of art, science, and technology, including the MIT Press, University of Minnesota Press, Duke University Press,

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Princeton University Press, and the University of Chicago Press. The prior bibliographic research I conducted and book acquisitions I have made serve as the backbone for the books listed in Appendix I, which I will read and review during my sabbatical leave, in order to develop the intended OER textbook. b. During Fall 2016, I curated a rare solo exhibition at the Cerritos College Art
Gallery of the work of painter Christina McPhee. In addition to being a respected artist, McPhee was a founding editor of the twenty-five year old internationally recognized Empyre listserv, one of the oldest Internet-based forums for engaging with academic issues at the intersections of art, science, and technology, now based out of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art at Cornell University. Through McPhee, I was introduced to the archive and have reviewed many of the historic dialogues in which academics from across the globe have engaged. I also wrote a chapter for McPhee’s recently

published retrospective monograph, Christina McPhee: A Commonplace

Book, published by Punctum Press, which also included essays by professors from UC Riverside, Leeds Metropolitan University, Columbia College Chicago, Central European University, Smith College, and the University of Oslo. My essay was titled “Pattern Discognition: Uncommon Conjunctions (and Conjugations) in the Recent Work of Christina McPhee.” c. In February 2018, I attended the 106^thAnnual College Art Association
Conference, a four-day conference bringing together art historians from across the country. While there, I participated in numerous scholarly sessions dealing with the intersection of art, science, and technology. Some examples include “Against Algorithms (Or the Arts of Resistance in the Age of Quantification),” “Site Specific, Collaborative, and Interactive Platforms within Locative Media,” “Aesthetics and Control: Artists Respond to the Surveillance Apparatus,” “Art/Data,” “The Call to the Virtual: Virtual Reality as Artform, Discourse, Intervention,” “Data Publics: Art in the Age of Platforms,” “Alternative Beginnings: Towards an-Other History of Immersive Arts and Technologies,” “Energy and Photography,” “Naturally Hypernatural: Debates about Nature in Contemporary Art and Theory in the Age of Metamodernism,” “Spaces and Places for Artistic Interdisciplinary Collaboration in Science, Engineering, Arts, Technology, and Design,” “Irrational Identities: Art, Science, and Selves,” “Climate Aesthetics in the Anthropocene,” “Cultural Literacy and Ecological Crisis,” “Digital Surrogates: The Reproduction and (re)Presentation of Art and Cultural Heritage,” “A Critical Conversation on Affect Theory, Neuroscience, and Art-Science Collaborations,” “Art on the Nature of Data about Nature,” “A System of Systems: Cybernetics and Play in Postwar Art,” “Evasive Articulations in the Age of ‘Fake News’: Thinking about the Relationship between Art and Truth,” “Experiments with Technology in Latin American Art: From the 1960s to the 1980s,” “From Avant-Garde to Afrofuturism: Return to Identity.” a. In July of 2017, I attended the symposium Free Radicals: Evolving