Jaume Plensa, “Alchemist” (2010) was commissioned by an anonymous MIT donor on the occasion of the Institute’s 150th anniversary and given to MIT in honor of all the alumni who have helped support the Institute over the years. (via flickr.com/soelin)
LOS ANGELES — Lots of srsbsns with the arts and technology in the news lately. What caught my eye was a new Center for Arts, Science and Technology at MIT and a new academic journal, the Journal for Digital Humanities.
Here’s what Design Observer had to say about the new Center:
A $1.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will provide awards to faculty, researchers and curators seeking to develop cross-disciplinary courses, new research, or exhibitions that span the arts, science and technology. Mellon funds also will supplement MIT’s existing Visiting Artists program.
Not that we need more biennials, but according to the news release, the program will also be hosting a “major, biennial international symposium on art, science and technology” that will kick off in the 2013–14 academic year. That same release also noted that nearly three-fourths of entering students join MIT “with advanced skills in the arts.”
This sounded cool enough, another feather in the cap of digital media artists seeking institutional validation, but then I came across news of a new Journal of Digital Humanities:
As [editor] Dan Cohen explained in a separate blog post, the journal operates under the model of catching the good — of finding substantive and valuable digital humanities work “in whatever format, and wherever, it exists.” Blogs, podcasts, Twitter conversations, slideshows, and so on, these are all venues in which significant and, though I hate to use such an ungainly word, impactful work is being done.
The expansive definition of what “the good” might be sounds exciting. Indeed, the Journal aims to pull from Editors Choice posts at Digital Humanities Now, a journal that, according to Cohen, relies on Twitter to catch what academics are talking about:
The first iteration of DH Now, which we launched two years ago, relied almost entirely on an automated process to find what digital humanities scholars were talking about and linking to (namely, on Twitter). About a year ago, in an attempt to make the signal-to-noise ratio a bit better, I took my slightly tongue-in-cheek “Editor-in-Chief” role more seriously, vetting each potential item for inclusion and adding better titles and “abstracts.”
