Despite decades of exploration, tinkering, and, at universities,
certainly, implementation at scale, we are experiencing shock as we are
plunged, around the globe, into distance learning.
I’ve been thinking, for many years, about the possibilities
here in digital space, beyond the more obvious but obviously significant
factors of convenience or accessibility, and outside of conversations about the
machinery of distance education, which, necessarily, has taken up so much space
for so long. Yet despite the ubiquity, now, of technology, we are so often
stalled by it still. Perhaps it is because, as Heidegger
argued, technology discloses
everything as measurable, orderable and calculable, available at our command
and our convenience, and here, where we are entirely encircled by technology,
it is more difficult to see differently; our eyes see through the lens
technology creates.
I have been
trying to find a way to disentangle the technology from distance education to express
what often seems inexpressible, its poetic possibility. I am currently
reading Peter de Bolla’s beautiful book – Art Matters.
He attempts to put in words what he calls the “mutism” of aesthetic experience
– when we are moved profoundly by a work of art – by close examination of three
pieces of art. He begins with Barnett Newmann’s Vir
Heroicus Sublimis, a massive painting which stands almost 8 feet tall
by 18 feet wide.
The sheer size of Newman’s picture, he argues, poses the
question of distance. How do I see it? Many, given this size and the absence of
a human figure, see it as cold. Empty. Inhuman. De Bolla sees it differently: “The
depicted human form is displaced from the picture plane, only to resurface on
the other side, as it were, in the space in front of the canvas.” This
displacement, he contends, makes the human more powerfully present. He argues
against the common idea that the very size of the painting makes us feel small,
insignificant. Instead, he says,
Vir Heroicus Sublimis demands that the viewer resist a particular form of looking…to enter a shared space in which the nakedness of presentation asks one to face up to being here, in the visibility of a communally constructed presence. Here in the hushed sublimity of a shared world.
And in distance education, in our vast shared digital
spaces, with the teacher displaced behind the glass, what new possibilities
might emerge if we resist our usual ways of looking?
