The Iear Studios Startup

Pioneers and Pathbreakers pioneers and pathbreakers The iEAR Studios Startup CurriculumandValuesin ElectronicArtsEducation N E i l R o l N i C k When the MFA in Integrated Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic development of the iEAR Studios. As I describe the devel- Institute (iEAR) enrolled its first class in 1991, it was, as far as the author opment of the curriculum and the values underlying the is aware, the first graduate program in the United States to focus on the program in this article, I must acknowledge that this effort electronic arts as a unified interdisciplinary field. This article recounts ABSTRACT the process used to design an academic curriculum to help students was the product of an extraordinary group of faculty, staff develop the skills and the breadth of artistic vision needed to pursue and students working together. While I was in a leadership careers as artists using electronic media. The article also describes the position through the 1990s, the curriculum and studios were climate and culture of the iEAR Studios in the 1990s and argues that the the result of consensus and a shared commitment to certain values embodied in the studio culture played a large part in fostering the educational and artistic values. creative and experimental use of electronic media and developing artists The academic programs in Rensselaer’s arts department whose work disregards traditional disciplinary boundaries. have changed in many ways in the intervening years. The department now offers undergraduate degrees and a PhD in The iEAR Studios at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in electronic arts. The faculty and focus have evolved. However, Troy, New York, and its associated MFA program were un- I think it is worthwhile to look at the initial iteration of the precedented when they debuted in 1991. To my knowledge, MFA program, in its first decade, for an understanding of Rensselaer’s Master of Fine Arts in Integrated Electronic Arts the curricular development and departmental culture and was the first graduate program in the United States to bring attitudes that helped make it a fruitful breeding ground for together art and music students—under the umbrella of elec- young artists. tronic media—to study and work together in what we called “electronic arts” (Fig. 1). Today, electronic arts is a broad field BackgRouNd with constantly evolving boundaries and definitions. How- I was hired by Rensselaer in January 1981 to begin an elec- ever, in 1991, we thought of it specifically as comprising three tronic or computer music program at the well-respected en- fields that we brought together in our studios and in our fac- gineering college. At the time, the Institute’s arts department ulty: computer music, video art and digital imaging. Under was primarily a service department, providing humanities the rubric of digital imaging, we also included digital anima- courses for the engineering majors who made up the largest tion and web programming, both of which were emerging part of the student body. The department offered courses in technologies at the time. music, painting, drawing, sculpture and art history. There Many of our MFA students of the 1990s have gone on to was no thought at that time of offering undergraduate major careers as significant contributors in the arts and in music. programs, much less graduate programs, in the arts. These alumni hold academic positions in the United States I had just finished my doctorate at the University of Cali- and elsewhere, and their works are represented in galleries, fornia, Berkeley, which had included studies of computer museums and performance venues worldwide. An annotated music at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music list of alumni of Rensselaer’s graduate programs in the arts and Acoustics (CCRMA) with John Chowning and Andy since 1991 is provided online as supplemental Appendix A. Moorer and nearly two years at the Institut de Recherche et Appendix B lists the faculty and staff who were key to the Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris, where I was able to work with Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio, Jean- Claude Risset and Vinko Globokar and with digital synthe- Neil Rolnick (composer), Email: [email protected]. sizer designer Pepino di Guinio. Rensselaer actually offered See www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/leon/52/1 for supplemental files associated with me the job for the fall of 1980, but I ended up spending what this issue. would have been my first fall semester as a consultant for the ©2019 ISAST doi:10.1162/LEON_a_01327 LEONARDO, Vol. 52, No. 1, pp. 81–86, 2019 81 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/leon_a_01327 by guest on 26 September 2021 of Toronto (where I saw my first computer mouse); and commercial startups like New England Digital. Something that I did not quite realize until much later was that I had not seen any institutions where computer music was combined with pioneers and pathbreakers visual arts in the digital realm. When I arrived at Rensselaer I was given $15,000 to build a studio and was told to have the engineering students in my classes help design and build it. I also got advice from composer Joel Chadabe, who was teaching at SUNY Albany at the time, that it would be wise to get something run- ning with my $15K and then look for money for upgrades on the working system from the school and from govern- ment grants. We did that. We used an old PDP8 computer that Chadabe was throwing out to house a digital-to-analog converter (DAC). We ran a line to feed the DAC from the school’s IBM360 mainframe computer, where we installed the FORTRAN-based MUSIC IVBF software. A few years later we raised more money, swapped the software synthesis setup for a Synclavier and some analog synths, and eventu- ally began to acquire MIDI gear. But the heady atmosphere of work with engineering students to buy and build working systems was very important to early progress on music technology at Rensselaer. The other key component of the situation was the natural proclivity among the students to think about music and video together. Before my arrival, the video artist Tom DeWitt had a studio associated with the student radio station. When I arrived, many of the students from the radio station gravi- tated to the computer music classes, and their interest was actually the original impetus for the idea of integrating video production equipment into the studio we were building. One student in particular, Dean Winkler, was heavily involved with both DeWitt’s studio and the new music studio; Wink- ler went on to establish Post Perfect, a major commercial recording and postproduction studio in New York City. In the early 1980s, he worked with John Sanborn on the videos for Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives (1983). The students’ interest in video led the arts department faculty to think about hiring a video artist when another faculty position opened up in 1983. We hired John Sturgeon, whose work at the time involved using video in performance and installation, in addition to his single channel video work. Working on a kind of island of experimental, technological art within the arts department of an engineering school, Stur- geon and I hung out together often and spent time playing Fig. 1. First recruitment poster for Rensselaer’s MFA in Electronic Arts program (1991). (© Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) with each other’s studios. I showed him around the music studio, and he allowed me to play in the video studio. The fundamental concept that grew out of this relationship was school, traveling around the United States and Canada to our understanding that the process of making time-based art make a survey of current computer music facilities to add to was remarkably constant, regardless of the medium. Issues of what I’d seen in Europe while at IRCAM. That trip brought structure over time, of narrative (or not) and of aesthetic ori- me to academic research centers that were just starting up entation and social relevance came up in similar ways. And in the wake of work at Bell Labs and CCRMA, including the ultimately, we felt we were both chasing electrons through Computer Audio Research Lab (CARL) at University of Cali- wires and various kinds of transducers to create our work. fornia, San Diego; computer music centers that evolved from By the mid-1980s Sturgeon and I had established courses analog studios at the Universities of Illinois and North Texas; in computer music and video art, and we were soon to add computer research centers like Bell Labs and the University a faculty line focused on digital imaging, initially filled by 82 Rolnick, The iEAR Studios Startup Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/leon_a_01327 by guest on 26 September 2021 Mark Resch. At about this time, we realized that we would added it all up, it became clear that students would need to be happier as professors if we had a student body who were spend six or eight years in our MFA program. And that was committed to what we were teaching rather than only engi- totally unrealistic. neers who took our courses as humanities electives. It was So we had to forget about designing a program that would obvious from the start that with three professors in diverse clone our own training and instead ask ourselves what kinds pioneers and pathbreakers fields it would be foolish to think of designing a four-year of background knowledge and skills would be necessary for undergraduate major curriculum that would encompass the someone going into a career in the arts that combined video, fundamentals of computer music, video and image process- digital imaging and computer music.

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