Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

Art Casting

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So I’ve been going back and forth with Dave Gilbert of Art Mobs fame about ways the students at my school might tie into the MOMA podcast virtual tours that he’s doing with his group at Marymount Manhattan College. I have to thank him for the idea; he’s really enthusiastic about connecting the technology and his college students with ours on the 9-12 level, and the more I thought about it, the more excited I got. So I corralled the forward thinking art teacher here and gave her a pitch to weave some form of audiocasting into her curriculum next year, and to make some of it synch with what Dave is doing. Here are some of the possibilities:

  • Students could select pieces from the MOMA online show and do audio deconstructions or interpretations. One thing I liked about what Dave’s students did was that they were all over the map in terms of how they “interpreted” the art.
  • We’ve been running an online art show here that the teachers want to expand next year, and what better way than to have the artists post not only their work but a audio reflection to go with it. We’re thinking about how we could make these a daily “show” via a podcast. (Hey…if you have one of the 60 gig iPods, the ones that view images, could you look at the art while listening to the podcast???)
  • The people in charge don’t know it yet, but we’re going to do a virtual audio tour of the county art museum. And, perhaps we can include some interviews with the artists themselves.

    Dave and I agreed to keep thinking over the summer about ways to make this work together, and I have to say I am pretty psyched. Once again, the idea that students can produce real content that has potential value to a real audience just changes everything about the process. I love it, I love it, I love it…

    • Comments

    1. Jason Ediger says

      Yes, if you have iPod photo, you could view images while listening to the podcast. This could be added to the ID3 tag of the audio file as album art. This way, you don’t have to worry about downloading the art and the audio separately and then reassociating the two within the device.

      Only downside is the rights to distribute a reproduction of the artwork. That would be need to be worked out per piece.

      🙂

    2. Paul Allison says

      Nice thinking here! I will follow your progress. We’ve been trying to elbow our way into audioblogging at East Side Community High School, and this week it’s taking off…

      Check out our new audioblog RSS for our 9th graders: http://blogs.writingproject.org/eastside2008/newsItems/departments/audioblogs.xml

      Plus these two by seniors:
      http://blogs.writingproject.org/eastside2005/2005/05/20#a911
      http://blogs.writingproject.org/eastside2005/2005/05/20#a910

      As always thanks for the ideas!