Crisis of the human and responsibilities of art/education
GAO Shiming (translated by WANG Chih-ming)
ABSTRACT In the 21st century, we are experiencing a new round of acceleration in the Anthropocene. On all fronts, art and education are facing new challenges and chances. On the one hand, the technological and media developments have compelled art, design, and knowledge production to change, whereas the internet, big data, and artificial intelligence have brought about a revolution in education and learning. As a consequence, the ideas of art education and the form of the university are also remodeled. On the other hand, the reverse side of this technological optimism is the proletarianization of sensibility resulted from digitalized, intelligent, and automated technologies, as the motivations for art are depleted and replaced by the conveniences provided by the big data and artificial intelligence. How to find the force to reverse this trend? And how to locate “another register of the dialectic” ‒ beyond that of the technologization of nature and the naturalization of technology, and of the technologicalization of humans and the humanization of technology ‒ has become the fundamental mandate of art and education in the 21st century.
KEYWORDS: Art/education; proletarianization of sensibility; humanization of technology; preservation and development of the human
Notes on contributor
Dr. Gao Shiming is the Vice President of China Academy of Art, and Deputy Dean of National Institute of Art/Education. He is the founding chair of CAA’s Curatorial Studies Department (which is the first curatorial program in China), founding director of the School of Inter-Media Art, and China Institute for Visual Studies. He is also one of the initiators of Inter-Asia School and Bandung School.
Notes on translator
Chih-ming Wang is associate research fellow at Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan. He is also the author of Transpacific Articulations: Student Migration and the Remaking of Asian America (University of Hawaii, 2013) and the co-editor (with Daniel PS Goh) of Precarious Belongings: Affect and Nationalism in Asia (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017).