Jurgen Faust is the Dean of Integrated Media and Chair of T.I.M.E. (Technology and Integrated Media Environment) at Cleveland Institute of Art. An educator for twenty years, he's focused on integrating arts and science, and he's an independent artist who has exhibited works around the United States and Europe. He was the main founder of the Kunstseminar Metzingen, Freie Hochschule, Metzingen, and has led numerous lectures art, theory and digital installation art. His newest show, Hermeneutic Circle, is a media installation combining work that communicates the significance of all parts and how it connects to the whole, on view noon-10PM at Heights Arts Contemporary Community Gallery until October 3.
What are your passions and how does it manifest itself in your life?
I hope that I can contribute positive to the future, to our future in this world, for that reason I love to be a teacher at a college. I always feel that I can give the students something they are carrying with them later, I help them to find their way.
What has your best contribution to Cleveland been?
I can be proud the people say, that I was able to start a digital art and design program at the Cleveland Institute of Art which now educates the greatest talent. To quote one of the most famous web designers in US, Hillman Curtis, who recently saw the work of one of our students he said this is the greatest and best undergraduate work he ever saw. And for sure we also got the accreditation of our new graduate program in digital arts which we start in August 2005. One of the legs of this program is called the Professional Partnership Program, a very advanced co-op program, I got in place too.
Do you have favorite quotes or sayings you live by?
Goethe, the German writer said once, "If you have art and science, you have a religion, and if you miss one of the both, you are a believer."
What’s the best learning/experimenting you’ve done in the last 5 years?
I learned that a changing world needs a changing response, for instance the way you taught 15 or 20 years ago, doesn’t work anymore in the digital arena. You have to be a coach in this field.
Who’s on your list of most-admired & why?
Joseph Beuys, a German artist. Why, because if I look at his work and his life and then I read that he was able to put his life in service of a bigger idea: that his life was a social sculpture, something he invented. Life and art shouldn’t be separated, it should be one entity.
What’s the best advice you’ve been offered?
Have great ideas and do the necessary small steps.
What was a significant failure in your life and what did you learn from it?
Sometimes I had been impatient; these were the moments I did not only hurt myself I also influenced a necessary process in a bad way.
Where are you most likely to hang out in Cleveland?
Difficult to say, may be downtown, the Warehouse District, tango dancing at Belinda’s west side, and Nighttown.
How do you think Cool Cleveland can continue being successful?
Try writing more about art and how the business community needs to work with the creative class.
Interview by Tisha Nemeth (:divend:)