In the year 2015, School of Inter- Media Art (SIMA) of China Academy of Art (CAA) reformed into three departments and five institutes. These three departments, based on teaching, include New Art (Experimental Art Department), Inter Art (Media Scenography Department) as well as Post Art (Open Media Department) . The Institute of Network Society (INS) comes into being and is comprised of an international team, aiming at pushing forward the research and practice in the virtual reality, network ecology, digital humanities, sci-fi games as well as future media/art under “Internet + ” milieu.
The word “network” rather than “Internet” is being stress is that INS focuses more on the socio-cultural reformation triggered by information technology. INS employs a project-based learning, which combines international conferences, workshops with theory labs in a flexible way to participate in the teaching. In this way, a key issue of “Practices Today through Envisioning the Future” will form progressively base which will drive China on a research peak into network culture, contemporary art, social thoughts and global actions in the next ten years.
Grassrooting of space of flows
“Centre on Research and Teaching” will be established in order to help local artists, hackers, makers, cultural activists, laboratories, writing communities and scientific and technological companies in China connect to international trends. INS is able to establish “milieu of innovation”, making it possible for the virtual space to meet physical space, international networks to meet local identities, and finally get a synergistic effect.
Connect Space of flows
International professors and artists will be invited to host the “Theory Labs” in order to establish a network union of global information culture research. It can collaborate with foreign research centers and exchange programs so that students can develop their abilities of researching, curating, creating and finally become the main forces in the future. INS will held conferences yearly to better look into the contemporary digital culture as well as social changes.
Switch-on Art Education
rt education relies mainly on experience and personal somatosenses, which is why it can be easily switched-off from the networked society and be discontinuous of mediaization. Being the pioneer of online art education and with a target of all disciplines in CAA, we need to recreate the art education procedures, or more specifically, set up the frame of online courses, and put it on internationally famous MOOCS platforms so that courses can be reached all over the world. It can also help increasing the appeal of the program “Frontier of China Academy of Art” overseas since whoever is interested in Chinese traditional and contemporary art can learn from these curriculum in both Chinese and English.
Action of knowledge upon knowledge
We consider the core of the knowledge reproduction to be the process of creation and accumulation. Apart from the art works, exhibitions and publications around CAA, a wiki-like database included “Inter-Asia School” , “Multitude.asia” and open online publications will be accomplish to the Art Domain of China. This is the action of knowledge upon knowledge.