The second Leonardo Education and Art Forum: Transdisciplinary Visual Arts, Science & Technology Renewal Post-New Media Assimilation workshop.
Sponsored by the National Institute for Experimental Arts.

Presented in collaboration with Rewire the Fourth International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology.

LOCATION:
Liverpool School of Art & Design,
Liverpool John Moores University Art & Design Academy 
Duckinfield St, Off Brownlow Hill, Liverpool
DATE: 27th September
TIME:  2-5pm

WORKSHOP MODERATORS: 
Associate Professor Paul Thomas: College of Fine Art, University of New South Wales and Curtin University of Technology 
Nina Czeglady: Senior Fellow, KMDI, University of Toronto, Adjunct Associate Professor, Concordia University, Montreal, Senior Fellow, Hungarian University of Fine Arts, Budapest.

WORKSHOP ABSTRACT:
Transdisciplinarity is deemed ‘radical’, ‘provisional and opportunistic’ because it challenges traditional educational paradigms. It focuses critical and creative attention onto domain-specific problem areas of ‘chance’, ‘discontinuity’ and ‘materiality’ (Foucault, 1976) to transcend limits within established disciplinary knowledge practices. This enables (re)visioning of the role, activity and value of Art Schools in uniting the pedagogical and technological strengths of the humanities and sciences in a university context, utilising conceptual growth, experimental innovation, visual communication and flexible learning spaces to deliver a model of Transdisciplinarity. 
The second Leonardo Education and Art Forum workshop is a follow up to the post iSEA2011 Istanbul workshop which explores the transdisciplinary model from various international institutional perspectives. Similarly structured around three focus areas this workshop continues to seek to identify and share ways to address challenges encountered in interdisciplinary art/science practices and curricula with the aim of publishing a guide to effective models and best practices in  LEAF International.
WORKING GROUPS’ FOCUS AREAS: 
1. Transdisciplinary collaborations 
Working group leaders: Petra  Gemeinboeck  and Mike Phillips
2. Transdisciplinary practice in the studio 
Working group leaders: Ross Harley and Peter Ride
3. Transdisciplinary theory
Working group leaders: Darren Tofts and Wendy Coones
Dr. Petra Geminboeck and Prof. Mike Phillips, the leaders of group 1, will focus on transdisciplinary collaborations within the existing institutional framework. Dr. Geminboeck will explore how historically experimental arts practices seem to be particularly privileged for opening up and navigating via transdisciplinarity such a complex, slippery terrain. She will explore how we can develop and foster a horizontal, open transdisciplinary framework for research collaboration that perforates and transcends existing disciplinary boundaries. Prof. Mike Phillips will offer another angle on the fractious debate surrounding the ‘qualitative’ and ‘quantitative’ approaches to research, from the Earth Sciences perspective. Rather than considering the diverging approaches that can polarise even a single disciplinary community as a threat to the cultivating of interdisciplinary relationships, this friction is viewed as the necessary ingredient to creating the conditions to put the ‘Trans’ into disciplinarity Prof. Phillips’ presentation will explore the importance of developing an understanding of data as a creative ‘material’ and as a Rosetta Stone for unlocking transdisciplinary dialogues and collaborations. Here the ‘qualitative’ and ‘quantitative’ research methods are understood as a coherent whole.

Focus Group 2 led by Prof. Ross Harley and Peter Ride will focus on transdisciplinary studio practice. Prof. Harley’s presentation will briefly outline some of the successes and challenges encountered in the process of working across disciplinary, cultural, and institutional boundaries. This will be explored through the specific cross cultural project that took place for two weeks in September 2009. More than sixty art, design, and architecture students, practitioners and academics worked on a live design brief in an intensive two-week studio at Donghua University, Shanghai. e-SCAPE was a partnership between Professor Richard Goodwin’s Porosity Studio, and The Collabor8 Project (C8), in collaboration with Donghua University (Shanghai) and COFA (Sydney). Peter Ride will be looking at the changing boundaries of curatorial practice, which is becoming an increasingly an interdisciplinary activity. Using the term that is current in Visual Culture, what constitutes a ‘visual event’? Recent educational theories around fine arts practice-as-research suggest that we can see the construction of meaning in practice as a point of cognitive transference. Ride proposes that these models can be adapted and used to explain the ‘visual event’ when the audience, too often overlooked in the discussions of curatorial practice, meets the work and the entire construction of meaning as an example of cognitive transference.

Focus Group 3 will discuss transdisciplinary theory. The group leaders Darren Tofts and Wendy Coones will present productive possibilities opened by transdisciplinary research practices within the university. Tofts will be expanding on Edward Colless’s abstract by by focusing on the undisciplined and inviting us to think of the “transdisciplinary” disruption, not as a deregulation of academic discipline (as a cultural relativising of the arts and sciences meeting on equal ground), but as an irregularity within academic discipline; as an insurgency or “in-discipline” of academe. He suggests that we use the prefix “trans” to suggest drift and errancy, as disciplines cross each other with the eventful possibility of collision or collusion but without the eventuality of their consensus. Tofts refers to these crossing provocatively as an occultation, in that it induces an esoteric knowledge not manifestly conferrable, discernible or communicable. In this respect, the “transdisciplinary” induces an occulting of disciplinary research by an abnormality or unnaturalism, which is to say it offers a new manner of occult knowledge. Wendy Coones will be exploring the possibility of emergence of polycultural space where formal education curricula, digital and print dissemination points, common research tools, national / international collaborations and continually developing interaction structures meet. Taking into consideration the parameters of individual endeavours and their possible influence on one another, a larger image of the interconnectedness can be discussed.

Further information contact Marzena Topka [log in to unmask]