Board of Directors Election
2010 Candidates
Conrad Gleber, La Salle University
Conrad Gleber, La Salle University
Statement: My vision for CAA’s future aligns with the goals of the organization’s new strategic plan. As a twenty-first-century organization, CAA faces the irony of opportunities and constraints brought about by the internet, especially social networking and Web 2.0 interaction. Consequently, the best future will lie in continuing to develop priorities based on relationships over goods and services.
CAA is well poised to provide the environment for members to self-organize and foster relationships that will broaden and strengthen the membership. It can reify this vision by continuing to expand opportunities for members, creating and contributing to initiatives that might normally be executed in a central office. While such an approach may seem to relinquish control, it instead creates allegiance and ownership through participation and sharing that can define membership as evolving relationships among the various fields of art study and practice. For instance, think beyond national and international boundaries: art is being studied and made with a global audience in mind, and CAA should represent a vanguard of that thinking.
Collaborative relationships should be formed with organizations at the same or higher level as CAA, and specially focused workshop conferences should be programmed and hosted in smaller cities. Affiliated organizations should be given time at the CAA conference, while CAA must have a presence at affiliate conferences, seeing those events as complementary, not competition. Additionally, CAA should develop self-generating data-collection websites that use participation to build a self-correcting image of interests, issues, cultural interaction, and the organization.
Biography: Conrad Gleber has had a long, distinguished career in art and new-media design. His sculpture, photography, and artist’s books have been exhibited in museums nationally and internationally, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and recently the Kunsthalle Museum in Düsseldorf, Germany.
He exhibits digital artwork, sound, and video installations. Two recent productions are exhibitions of outdoor site-specific video projections: one in Chicago’s south loop and the other as part of a digital-arts festival sponsored by the Delaware Valley Arts Alliance.
Gleber earned an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a PhD in educational research at Florida State University (FSU) in Tallahassee. He has taught digital studio courses and seminar classes on critical issues in art and design at FSU and was the past director of the European graphic and new-media design program at the FSU Study Centre in London. In 2006 Gleber accepted a position at La Salle University, where he is an associate professor in math and computer science and the director of the Digital Arts and Multimedia Design Program. His current research is supported by a National Science Foundation CPATH grant and is focused on the integration of digital arts into computer-science curricula.
