This is probably way to vague to get much traction on the idea--but I'll give it a shot. What motivated me to think about it like this was the recent spat over Jon Bon Jovi's odd claim that Steve Jobs and iTunes killed the music business. This is like saying that the printing press killed writing. But in terms of user generated content, and some of the other features of web 2.0, such as free access, the Arts hold a rather special place. In so far as we are all 'artists' to some extent, in the sense that we all can be creative beings, we all generate content, espcially as children. There is no doubt that using technology has increased our ability to be creative in many new and exciting ways. Often the Arts are juxstaposed to STEM, or other more 'career' based disciplines like Journalism or Business. Yet if you loosen the idea of the arts to be inclusive and think of them as creativity it is universally applicable. This is definitly the way Richard Florida is thinking about creativity, as cross disciplinary or interdisciplinary. And so we now have "intermedia" where, for example the Minnisota Arts Organization "Intermedia Arts" emphasizes the multdisciplinary feature of the Fluxus movement and clearly identifies it with the creative economy of that state. The computer immersed new media form of hyperformalism is another great example of the synthetic influences of emerging and hard to define artistic forms, allowing viewer/participant interaction and altering of the experience of art.
Here are some snaps I took in Second Life of DCSpensley's ZeroG Dancers performance.
The silos of disciplines tend to distort and homogenize people and ideas. The arts are no less suseptible to this. User generated content and the internet's explosion of resources and opportunites brings me to wonder if there aren't opportunities in what we consider the "Arts" to be. If we re envision these silos and see the blending and emergence of new forms of media as offering us the chance to by pass the limited view of a juxstapostion of these disciplines-- suddenly the world looks different. What is technology? What is Dance? What is Film? What is Music? What is visual art or Painting? They are blending. The boundaries are getting fuzzy. Here is a young student of mine working in these new areas. Be patient with the video, its not fully revealing the effort, but it gives you the idea.
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/13406727
So the question is this: If we blend the disciplines--espeically the Arts, we open new possiblitlities to enhance all of the disciplines. The seeds of STEM are growing in the Arts--
