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September 16, 2015 11:03 AM

Sara Hendren talks at the Eyeo Festival about how she, as an artist, came to work at an engineering college. Hendren teaches at Olin College in Needham, MA and runs the site Abler, a site about "art, adaptive technologies and prosthetics, the future of human bodies in the built environment, and related ideas." Hendren's talk name-checks the artist Claire Pentecost, who has elaborated idea of the artist as "public amateur": the learner who is motivated by love or by personal attachment, and in this case, who consents to learn in public so that the very conditions of knowledge production can be interrogated. [via Text Patterns]
posted by Cash4Lead (2 comments total)

While I don't want to critique Professor Hendren or Claire Pentecost personally, I feel deeply suspicious of the idea of artists-scholars "motivated by love or by personal attachment," i.e., scholars who do work entailing knowledge-production with a whole lot of extremely suspicious semantic fudging on issues like being paid to do that work.

Also, I'm a little dismayed to read Pentecost say this, which immediately follows the quoted text from the last link (emphasis mine):

Not the public intellectual, which is usually a position of mastery and critique, but the public amateur, a position of inquiry and experimentation. The amateur is the learner who is motivated by love or by personal attachment, and in this case, who consents to learn in public so that the very conditions of knowledge production can be interrogated. The public amateur takes the initiative to question something in the province of a discipline in which she is not conventionally qualified, acquires knowledge through unofficial means, and assumes the authority to offer interpretations of that knowledge, especially in regard to decisions that affect our lives.

I mean, frankly, I don't think that having more people who aren't "conventionally qualified" in certain disciplines assuming authority to speak on them is necessarily a good thing. Of course, it depends much on who those people are, what their unconventional qualifications are, and whose interests they represent. Still, it creates in my mind a rather high bar to pass, because there are already a lot of people, working effectively in the interest of a very few, who aren't conventionally qualified saying terrible, stupid things about decisions that affect our lives every day.
posted by clockzero at 11:46 AM on September 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

I attended this talk. Do watch it. It was one of the high points of an already-excellent conference.

Anyway. I hadn't thought so much about this aspect of Hendren's talk. For me, the interesting thing was the great creative work that can happen when someone with a fresh perspective comes to work in technology. As for the public amateur, I suspect we need more of these in engineering. Even though the tech is deeply important to people's personal, everyday lives, the inner workings of technology intimidate most folks.

who consents to learn in public so that the very conditions of knowledge production can be interrogated

This would be a very good thing for tech, I think.
posted by the_blizz at 1:02 PM on September 16, 2015 [1 favorite]