Dear Miki and all


Thanks for your contribution to the educational turn related to Japan,
DIY movements, and alternative platforms (e.g. open source). I think it
is interesting to talk about that “education must be original”,
returning to the actual spaces of teaching/learning, and the focus on
speech and knowledges both ‘actors/agents’ (teacher and student, makers
and visitors) bring into the situation. 
It also might refer to the proposition of a non-linear relationship to
‘education’ (Edgar earlier on described ‘zones of emergence, the moments
of excessive knowledge production’ in relation to certain readings of a
crisis that takes place through and in educational settings; “That
something is produced here out of various component parts (an
institution, a set of desires, some space, some bodies, a crisis, some
threats etc), and that that may be more important than whether it was
intended, inevitable or simply happened. The occupations, protests and
all the other forms of performed dissent we will see much more off soon
may become (and are already in the process of becoming) a productive matrix.
And to account for them as productive may also allow to treat them
simply as the more visible articulation of one of the underlying
dynamics of the 'educational': that it does not entertain a linear
relationship to 'education', that it also and most often occurs against
the odds, that it happens and/ or takes place, whether there is a place
for it already or whether that space needs to be claimed.”
Performed dissent, or dissent as NOT performed but emerging, has to
necessarily occur in particular situations, new arrangements, or new
forms of ‘working together’. 
Definitely also important to again claim that art, making art, art work,
is at stake in emerging practices, in a more general sense. Which then
brings us back to ‘work’ and art as force in a particular way. -
Ranciere’s discussion on Art and Work in ‘The Politics of Aesthetics’:
“At the time of the Russian Revolution, art and production would be
identified because they came under one and the same principle concerning
the redistribution of the sensible, they came under one and the same
action that opens up a form of visibility at the same time as it
manufactures objects. The cult of art presupposes a revalorisation of
the abilities attached to the very idea of work. However, this idea is
less the discovery of the essence of human activity than a recomposition
of the landscape of the visible, a recomposition of the relationship
between doing, making, being, seeing, and saying. Whatever might be the
specific type of economic circuits they lie within, artistic practices
are not ‘exceptions’ to other practices. They represent and reconfigure
the distribution of these activities.”


A last reference before the next Theme of the Month, which connects to
Miki’s post specifically in relation to ‘collaborative knowledges’. Am
just back from NYC, taking part in “book sprint” at Eyebeam
http://www.eyebeam.org/events/collaborative-futures-2nd-edition-book-sprint.
Book sprint (2) was a three-day project to collaboratively write a book
– or rather to collaboratively write the second edition of
“Collaborative Futures” a book made in Berlin over 5 days. To me it was
quite a new situation having to work fast (am usually very slow, both in
terms of reading and writing) – or rather feeling obliged to work fast
within this environment. Different forms of ‘knowledge’ or whatever
occurs in/through scripting discussing and immediate feedback/editing.
Especially what is omitted from the ‘final version’; which in itself is
not a final version, but rather a stage of a process and ongoing
inquiry. There was the challenge of negotiating vocabularies (open
source versus other art/media workers), the rhythm of the text, of the
gaps. How to possibly follow/avoid conventions of writing/reading and
integrating what and how. Multiplicity writing, and still, the book is
so “limited” in terms of a reader/audience (we wrote about the Imaginary
Reader and Imaginary Author). I am not sure what I learned, what
learning processes can be drawn from it, maybe the project was about our
experience with time, after all. Revolutionary time, present, archiving,
“progress”, utopian dimensions, out-of-time, speed, print run ---- and
the DESIGN OF OUR TIME. 



All invited respondents of the Educational Turn a big Thanks for their
time and thoughts!!!!! 




Best
Verina



www.crumbweb.org