By: Caleigh Monk

AGENDA  The Rundown  What is the Art Assignment?  Who created the Art Assignment?  What are the elements of an Art Assignment video?  How does it relate to DH?  “Make a Thing”  The Thing Quarterly  The Assignment – “Make a Thing”  Go Time! & Share Time!  Discussion

The Rundown

What is the Art Assignment?  The Art Assignment exposes the audience to a different contemporary artist each week.  This artist give the audience and art assignment to complete and share on social media (#TheArtAssignment). “Harnessing the meme-loving, community- building power of the internet, The Art Assignment brings new audiences to contemporary art and contemporary artists to new audiences” (The Art Assignment, 2015)

Who Created the Art Assignment?

PBS Digital Studios ( )  Partners with vloggers and other digital creators to produce original and educational online programming.  CrashCourse, Brain Craft, and It’s Okay to be Smart are all produced by PBS Digital Studios  Check out their YouTube ChannelYouTube Channel

Sarah Urist Green (  Creator and Host of the Art Assignment  Former Curator of Art at the Indianapolis Museum of Art  MA in Modern Art History  “There are numerous examples in art history of artists giving themselves or others instructions as a form of art- making. I saw this overlap as a possible way of exposing the internet generations to contemporary art, and as a way of legitimizing and celebrating the enormous creative output that the internet and social media has made possible” (Urist Green in Robertson, 2013)

John Green (  Executive Producer and co-host  Award-winning author and creator of Vlogbrothers & CrashCourse  “The YouTube page resembles a classroom [...] you see young people using the tools and the sort of genres of the internet in order to create places for intellectual engagement” (Green, 2015)

Elements of an Art Assignment Video  The Introduction  Sarah introduces the artist and briefly explains what their preferred artistic medium and creative background  The Artist  The artist introduces themselves and discusses the motivation behind their work  Examples of their major works are displayed for the audience  The Assignment  The artist explains the assignment  Examples of the assignment are given

Elements of an Art Assignment Video (Cont’d)  Art History Discussion  Sarah and John discuss the history of art as it relates to the assignment  Completing the Assignment  The artist completes the assignment and shares their completed assignment with the audience  Details of how to share a completed assignment are provided

How Does it Relate to DH?

Making  Call-to-Action  Learning through production and experimentation  Move beyond the theoretical “The empowering rise of the do-it-yourself Maker Movement has found fertile ground in higher education, cultivating a vibrant community who believe in the effectiveness of learning through doing, sharing and mentoring, playing, exploring, and risk-taking” (Henseler, 2014)

Collaboration  Collaboration between the creators and the artist to produce the video  Collaboration between the creators/artists and the audience to complete the assignment  What is learned from the assignment partially relies on the collaboration of the community “The collaborative nature of digital humanities work often blurs the lines when it comes to defining individual’s responsibilities and contributions” (Colbe, 2012)

Interdisciplinary  Creative people and artists from a variety of professional and academic backgrounds  John Green provides perspective from a literature/educational orientation “Two further aspects of academic practice are important for work in digital humanities: openness and interdisciplinarity”(Scanlon, 2011)

The Assignment - Make a Thing

The Thing Quarterly  A quarterly publication created by John Herschend and Will Rogan  Each issue is object-based and conceived/created by a different “creative person” “This is about people interacting with [the artist’s] work” (Rogan, 2015)

The Art Assignment: Make a Thing

Examples

Share your Creation  Take a picture of your creation  Post the picture on Twitter (don’t forget to use our hashtag - #LIS9372)  Comment, favourite, and retweet!

Discussion

 How did this art assignment make you think about the digital context?  How does this relate to what we have learned or experienced in LIS9372? “With the internet it is hard for something special to rise to the surface and yet we all put so much energy towards this thing. We’re all constantly dumping our attention and energy into this place that reduces everything to one context” (Rogan, 2015)

Discussion  Do you think the Art Assignment is a useful tool for librarians? Why or why not?  How does the Art Assignment relate to DH?