Dear all
Thank you for the great posts on Educational Turns, and Distributed
Social Systems so far.
It seems rather difficult and a challenge to lay-out and arrange or
‘control’ the lines of thought -- as Edgar proposed, there is perhaps a
need or claim to create or look for setting up systems that re-frame a
current debate, that shift parameters and by doing so unsettle the ways
we deal with power structures or models of dominance. ?
When suggesting and scripting the current theme of the month and its
potential agents, immediately, there was a certain discomfort, a doubt,
using terms such the representation of teaching/learning, educational
technology, or placing new media outside of curatorial contexts. These
terms in themselves are so contested, they are so much at stake in
today’s talking about art, talking on art. The urgency of addressing
particular issues foregrounds certain aspects, and neglects others, puts
others in the background, or to the side. But it might be precisely that
in this ‘overexposed’ site where those terms are so evident, certain
thoughts or themes persist as obligatory and important. In a way, these
dominant thoughts or themes (on the cultural surface) resist erasure by
being re-written, un-written and over-written. Thus, they can take new
paths and detours – and also bring new by-products, and potentially
oppositional, marginal thoughts.
The process I engage in here addresses an accumulation of knowledges,
and in relation to accumulating knowledge – through making work,
writing, performing, through a practice -, one can here perhaps refer to
what Irit Rogoff in her text Unbounded describes as a terrain, or
territory where “knowledge erupts”. She understands this eruption in
relation to “knowledges that daily refuse to remain in a contained
relation to their origins”. There is a proliferation involved where
knowledge can only emerge and remain in a transformative state.
There are a few, rather hastily notes/questions that I would like to
bring up that emerged in response to the proliferating posts.
_I was thinking about the issue of what is inherent to learning? Is
there not also a thinking about a future, or speculation? If our focus
is directed on to these forms of the educational, to what degree are we
also proposing to think ‘the future’.
“Imaginary schools”
_Artists working in/practising ‘the educational’. If the economy pushes
artists to work educationally (referring here to both, questions of
income, but also status of research) – in what way does it also shift
how we work as artists?
_If performing the educational and exhibition contexts, and focusing on
the potential of the momentary – Dorothee “...but allows also to react
in a temporary situation” – are passive states also desired, of value,
possible, and to a certain degree a form of agency?
_Is curating a performance? Or an acting out of a constellation, system?
_How to provoke? Is this a relevant question?
_Maintaining temporary projects? Maria mentioned Deptford.TV, and that
“Their short life might be because they die away, or because they become
institutionalised as a result of their grass roots success (which
entails death..).”
Ruth talked about the 3-week artschool and that it’s “momentum [is] hard
to sustain outside such temporal structures.”
Complex issues.
For now
Verina
www.crumbweb.org
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