Eyebeam celebrates the return of Digital Day Camp
September 12, 2017, 00:00
A personal view of Eyebeam’s singular approach to artist-led learning by Associate Director for Education, Lauren Gardner.

A personal view of Eyebeam’s singular approach to artist-led learning by Associate Director for Education, Lauren Gardner.
Since opening our doors in 1998, Eyebeam has served emerging and mid-career practitioners critically engaged with the impact of technology on culture at large. From inception, Eyebeam’s programming included Digital Day Camp (DDC) as a platform to share artists’ research with a larger community, youth and teachers in particular. For the past few years, DDC has been on a break but we’re happy to announce its successful return and share with you what we’ve learned by re-launching it. Eyebeam aims to provide artists with the space, resources, and community to foster collaborative experiments with technology geared towards a more imaginative and just world, and this is core to our pedagogical framework. Over the past nineteen years, by incorporating our values into curriculum, Eyebeam has created healthy habits for students as well as artists, and educators. Open dialogue through public discourse and critical thinking is key to refining an artist’s vision and growth, the same is true for a student. Furthermore, coaching young audiences allows teaching artists to reflect on their own work. The artist/student relationships formed at Eyebeam has proven to be a beneficial and reinforcing activity which strengthens our community. This has only become more visible and meaningful as our students start to develop careers and practices of their own. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvlZ805-WS8[/embed] DDC is a multi-week, arts and technology intensive for approximately 15-20 students held at Eyebeam. Students work alongside artist-educators and staff, engaging in lectures and hands-on workshops focusing on art and technology, tools, careers in the field, and relevant social and artistic topics. DDC has provided free, out-of-school, STEAM based art & technology education to hundreds of youth in NYC public high schools. Students work under the guidance of teaching artists and practitioners from the Eyebeam community. The theme of the program changes each year adapting to both cultural trends and those in technology, this year's theme was POWER. Examples from previous years include: - DDC 2002 investigated architecture, public art, and memorials in contemporary society. The program addressed both the area destroyed by the September 11th attacks and its impact on the city's collective consciousness. - DDC 2006 focused on the relevance of and issues surrounding biotechnology projects created by artists and activists. What makes this after school program unique is Eyebeam’s ability to challenge youth to apply creative thinking strategies across a range of technological tools and topics with the goal to help them develop critical, empowering, and sustainable relationships with technology. It’s been a few years since we’ve run a DDC and we wanted to re-launch a program that focused on our strengths. First, we researched and evaluated the NYC afterschool landscape to see what gaps needed to be filled. We were interested in looking at two factors of afterschool experiences, the subject matter they teach and the type of learning environment they offer (pedagogical format). We determined that the sweet spot for us is right in the middle of this spectrum.
Regarding subject matter, we are inspired by the pedagogical concepts of humanistic learning, and active research. In short, these learning ideas view an educator's primary role as a facilitator where the teacher (or admin) will seek student’s feedback on how to better support their growth. So we talked to previous Eyebeam students and education facilitators to gather feedback on what they thought was special about our DDC program. From the conversations, three points kept resurfacing.
Article by Former Associate Director for Education, Lauren Gardner and edited by Leandro Huerto.
Since opening our doors in 1998, Eyebeam has served emerging and mid-career practitioners critically engaged with the impact of technology on culture at large. From inception, Eyebeam’s programming included Digital Day Camp (DDC) as a platform to share artists’ research with a larger community, youth and teachers in particular. For the past few years, DDC has been on a break but we’re happy to announce its successful return and share with you what we’ve learned by re-launching it. Eyebeam aims to provide artists with the space, resources, and community to foster collaborative experiments with technology geared towards a more imaginative and just world, and this is core to our pedagogical framework. Over the past nineteen years, by incorporating our values into curriculum, Eyebeam has created healthy habits for students as well as artists, and educators. Open dialogue through public discourse and critical thinking is key to refining an artist’s vision and growth, the same is true for a student. Furthermore, coaching young audiences allows teaching artists to reflect on their own work. The artist/student relationships formed at Eyebeam has proven to be a beneficial and reinforcing activity which strengthens our community. This has only become more visible and meaningful as our students start to develop careers and practices of their own. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvlZ805-WS8[/embed] DDC is a multi-week, arts and technology intensive for approximately 15-20 students held at Eyebeam. Students work alongside artist-educators and staff, engaging in lectures and hands-on workshops focusing on art and technology, tools, careers in the field, and relevant social and artistic topics. DDC has provided free, out-of-school, STEAM based art & technology education to hundreds of youth in NYC public high schools. Students work under the guidance of teaching artists and practitioners from the Eyebeam community. The theme of the program changes each year adapting to both cultural trends and those in technology, this year's theme was POWER. Examples from previous years include: - DDC 2002 investigated architecture, public art, and memorials in contemporary society. The program addressed both the area destroyed by the September 11th attacks and its impact on the city's collective consciousness. - DDC 2006 focused on the relevance of and issues surrounding biotechnology projects created by artists and activists. What makes this after school program unique is Eyebeam’s ability to challenge youth to apply creative thinking strategies across a range of technological tools and topics with the goal to help them develop critical, empowering, and sustainable relationships with technology. It’s been a few years since we’ve run a DDC and we wanted to re-launch a program that focused on our strengths. First, we researched and evaluated the NYC afterschool landscape to see what gaps needed to be filled. We were interested in looking at two factors of afterschool experiences, the subject matter they teach and the type of learning environment they offer (pedagogical format). We determined that the sweet spot for us is right in the middle of this spectrum.

- Curriculum should ‘feel’ like an Eyebeam experience, not a class
Article by Former Associate Director for Education, Lauren Gardner and edited by Leandro Huerto.