Professor Randall Packer Talks Opera and Multimedia

By Katie Burns-Yocum

Many people might not see the connection between a classical composer and the virtual computer world, but both play a huge role in the up and coming field of multimedia art.

One who can see this connection is former composer Randall Packer, the program coordinator and assistant professor of the multimedia art program at American University.

Packer is the author of Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality, one of the top texts internationally for teaching multimedia arts.

“Opera is the oldest, most advanced form of multimedia,” says Packer. “It combines all the arts: music, dance, and theater.” This is a connection no one else saw according to Packer.

“My thesis was never considered before I wrote this book,” said Packer. “Now there are lots of scholars and artists who have embraced this idea.”

Packer’s office in the Katzen Arts Center is organized chaos. It is filled with three Macintosh computers, a table and file cabinet covered with papers and books. It has a window looking out on the second-floor art studios.

Since the multimedia art specialization is interdisciplinary, Packer is the only professor in this area and his students take classes in other departments including the School of Communications and other courses in the art department.

A graduate of UC Berkley with a Ph.D. in music composition, he began as a composer before becoming interested in the technology available to artists.

After 20 years of combining his musical interests with other media in different ways, he discovered that he was working in an area called multimedia.

After moving from California to Washington, D.C., in 2000, Packer began to explore the role of artists in political and social arenas, leading to the formation of the U.S. Department of Art and Technology, a fake government agency which exists only in virtual reality.

The USDAT “supports the idealized definition of the artist as one whose reflections, ideas, aesthetic, sensibilities, and abilities can have significant and transformative impact on the world stage,” according to Packer’s website www.zakros.com.

This project produced published articles, videos and live performances, and media installations around the world. One project was the USDAT Visitor Center in the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in fall 2003.

For the past five years, Packer has worked at AU to redesign the multimedia arts program, a new addition to the art department, to better teach multimedia history and aesthetics with multimedia techniques.

He said he wanted the program to become an integral part of the department’s interdisciplinary approach to art.

“I’d like to see that interdisciplinary approach go even beyond the arts and incorporate technology, political science, communication, and international relations,” he said in an April 2007 article in The American Weekly.

Despite spending most of his time teaching, Packer finds time to make his own art, including new art instillations.

“It’s not always easy” he said. “I try to involve my own work in teaching, try out ideas. I try to share my scholarship and research with my students.”

His work is mainly concerned with how individuals and the world they live in is influenced and impacted by new media forms.

“We live in a world permeated with media,” said Packer. “My courses give a view on the world that is good for understanding the world we live in.”

Packer sent all of his undergraduate multimedia students to the inauguration of President Obama on Jan. 20 and had them use the social networking site Twitter to communicate with one another and document the event.

They shared the experience technologically by documenting their individual experiences through Twitter and pictures to be brought together and presented as a dialogue.

“This assignment embodied multimedia art in that an experience was shared and interpreted collaboratively using technology and expressed collectively as composition,” said multimedia student Samuel Lavine. “Through this technological forms of communication were utilized to compose art.”

Packer said gaining a” critical and aesthetic understanding of the medium” and his approach can be a challenge for his students.

According to Packer, the key when helping students who are having trouble in one of his multimedia classes is to “make sure that they don’t give up. That’s the obstacle. They have to keep working at it.”

Packer teaches a General Education course titled The Artist’s Perspective: Multimedia and many of the students in his class have little or no art background.

These students have “so much energy,” says Packer. “They are much more enthusiastic and open to technology. They are eager to learn.”

Packer said he wished that more of the university’s students would explore multimedia art courses, which combine culture, history, theory, and technology.

But Packer said he does not simply want his students to interact with media; he wants them to become a critical part of it. This is practiced in the classroom according to graduate student Carolina Puente.

“My favorite part of his class is learning about new media artist and responding to their work through critical analysis,” she said.

Packer also challenges his students through having them do “criticism for new media artists and documenting their exhibitions,” said Puente.

“Some things he would describe as art or performance seem a bit of a stretch on the words,” said one of Packer’s General Education students.

According to Packer, one of his favorite things about teaching is “getting students excited about something they haven’t done before.”

Packer said he wants his students to appreciate art through the knowledge of and use of technology. He wants them to understand the aesthetic and philosophical implications of art as well.

“I have been able to experiment with photography and poetry, film and music, all in the context of using a computer as an artistic tool,” said Lavine.

For Randall Packer multimedia art, creating it and teaching it is like “opening up whole new world that turns everyday kinds of experiences into something creative.”

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