This year’s Art & Open Learning Fair builds upon Georg Hardenberg / Novalis / Joseph Beuys’ 1978 provocation: JEDER MENSCH EIN KÜNSTLER. The Fair is a process that has emerged from the open educational resource (OER) produced by Neil Mulholland, Emma Balkind, Jake Watts and Beth Dynowski. The OER is accessible here via this blog: blogs.ed.ac.uk/artandlearning/courseware-contemporary-art-open-learning/
Monday 23rd November 2020> The Mind’s Eye 🟡 Yellow Basho //// Runs from Monday 23rd November 2020 asynchronous
Wednesday 25th November 2020 Treasure Hunt🟣 Purple Basho //// 9:30am-12:30pm GMT for live activities
Wednesday 25th November 2020 How to Become an Artist 🟢 Green Basho //// 1:30pm-4:30pm GMT for live activities
Thursday 26th November 2020 MENU: Being an Artist🔴 Red Basho //// 1:30pm-4:30pm GMT for live activities
Boshears argues that, to be genuinely open, research should be focused less on research objects and more on the new ‘publics that result from the circulation of these objects’. (Boshears 2013: 617) Thinking about what sort of publics we might engage (or generate) through the production of open research objects is an ambitious challenge, one that our masters of contemporary art have risen to meet. They do so during a pandemic that has brought the arts to a virtual standstill.
Based in Edinburgh and across China, the School of Art’s postgraduates have imagined a variety of blended approaches to art and learning that are responsive to our volatile world. The pivots herein are not simply skeuomorphic translations from meatspace to massified, open online courseware, (i.e. MOOCs); they represent a wide range of blended and augmented sites; art-as-education-as-art equipped to work within the full range of Scotland’s four tier Covid-19 protection levels.
Rather than create virtual projects aimed at a faceless mass of placeless lurkers, paragogues have peer-produced participatory workshops for each other. Working together in four small basho (Red, Green, Purple, Yellow) they have created an intimate, reciprocal programme of artistic learning that is, nevertheless, scaleable.
The four projects produced by each basho blend curatorial tools, re-imagine event-places and devise artistic practices for multiple scenarios. The JEDER MENSCH EIN KÜNSTLER fair is a work in progress, a chance to playtest the range of practices offered by the members of each basho. Anyone is welcome to browse through and participate in any of the asynchronous projects and workshops.
Contemporary Art & Open Learning is a brand new 20 credit course running as part of the MA Contemporary Art Theory and MFA Contemporary Art Practice programmes in the School of Art, ECA, The University of Edinburgh.
The Course Organiser and designer is Prof Neil Mulholland. The teaching team includes Dr Jake Watts and Dr Emma Balkind. Dr Watts’ field of research expertise is the artistic workshop, Dr Balkind’s is commoning and the open paradigm.
Contemporary Art & Open Learning is a paragogics that draws on Shift/Work (Mulholland, Watts, Naomi Garriock and Dan Brown) and Neil’s research on Re-imagining the Art School via a number of open learning theories, tools and practices.
Courseware is distributed across a number of online platforms, some of which are closed access (MS Teams; Blackboard are for UoE students with a login) and many of which are completely open (e.g. WordPress, Notion, Twitter).
Neil will be attempting to post all of the OpenCourseware here on the course’s Art & Learning blog to create an Open Educational Resource (OER).
If you want to use the OpenCourseware personally or with your own students, please do so making sure to attribute the author(s) using the licence posted on each page (nominally a CC Share-Share-Alike licence).
If you do use it, please contact me (Neil Mulholland) to let me know a) what you do with it b) how you get on. I won’t be able to help (unless you are my student at ECA) but I’m interested to see how the OpenCourseware is used so that we can recalibrate our learning design and improve the OER from one year to the next.
The course begins on the 21st of September. You will find an Introduction to the Course here:
With
the peristaltic gurglings of this gastēr-investigative procedural – a
soooo welcomed addition to the ballooning corpus of slot-versatile bad
eggs The Confraternity of Neoflagellants (CoN) – [users] and
#influencers everywhere will be belly-joyed to hold hands with
neomedieval mutter-matter that literally sticks and branches, available
from punctum in both frictionless and grip-gettable boke-shaped formats.
A game-changer in Brownian temp-controlled phoneme capture, Pan-Pan’s writhing paginations are completely oxygen-soaked, overwriting the flavour profiles of 2013’s thN Lng folk 2go
with no-holds-barred argumentations on all voice-like and lung-adjacent
functions. Rumoured by experts to be dead to the World™, CoN has
clearly turned its ear canal arrays towards the jabbering OMFG feedback
signals from their scores of naive listeners, scrapping all lenticular
exegesis and content profiles to construct taped-together vernacular
dwellings housing ‘shrooming atmospheric awarenesses and pan-dimensional
cross-talkers, making this anticipatory sequel a serious competitor
across ambient markets, and a crowded kitchen in its own right.
The Confraternity of Neoflagellants was founded
in 2009 by Serjeant-At-Law Norman Hogg and joined by Keeper of the
Wardrobe Neil Mulholland. It is a secular and equal opportunities
confraternity bound by choreograph.
La Confrérie de Neoflagellants a été fondée en 2009 par le
Sergent-At-Law Hogg et rejoint par Gardien des Vêtements Mulholland. Il
s’agit d’une confrérie laïque et l’égalité des chances lié par
chorégraphe.
Including contributions by Polly Apfelbaum, Abel Auer, Fiona Banner, Kerstin Brätsch, Confraternity of Neoflagellants (Norman James Hogg and Neil Mulholland), David Raymond Conroy / Ghislaine Leung / Cally Spooner / Jesper List Thomsen, Matt Copson, Liu Ding, Gerasimos Floratos, Andy Holden, Anna K.E., Florian Meisenberg, Mike Nelson, Alicia Paz, Alexander James Pollard, Lindsay Seers, Andro Semeiko, Yuko Shiraishi, Amy Sillman, Mark Titchner, Tris Vonna-Michell, Yu-Chen Wang, and Vicky Wright.
Emotionarama presents a range of artists’ ideas that are described in an overtly emotional or demonstrative manner through short pieces of creative writing. Participants were invited to produce a text that defined their imaginative and mental processes whilst creating an artwork. For example, some have chosen to record a method of thinking behind the production of an existing piece, while others discuss a concept for an unmade artwork in a reflective manner, and/or its materiality, texture, colour, shape, size, and content.
Performances of the contributions within Emotionarama will take place within environments in which members of the audience will be free to lie down, relax and close their eyes to imagine through listening. Through this process, it is hoped that potential new collaborators will have an opportunity to engage with the book’s range of creative processes and subsequently realise their own ideas in multiple forms.
Friday 3 – Saturday 4 April, 12:00 – 18:00 Multi-media installation and book reading
Drop in to PEER on Friday and Saturday for the multi-media installation for Emotionarama including pre-recorded readings developed by Andro Semeiko in collaboration with actors Siân Phillips and Bill Bingham, writer and BBC Radio broadcaster Zinovy Zinik, and musician Capitol K. The audience will be able to listen to the entire content of the book during these six–hour sessions.
Shift/Work Speculations Cards (2017) designed by Jake Watts
Neil Mulholland ‘Shift/Work: Speculations’, in L. Campbell (ed.), Leap into Action, New York: Peter Lang. 12th December 2019. pages 21-26; 39-40; 59-60 ISBN 9781433166440
Shift/Work is a performative paragogics (Corneli 2011) that supports the active peer production of Open Education Resources (OER) for artists. Shift/Work arose from participatory action research (PAR) into art education’s hidden (anti-)curriculum as a means of intervening in the monadic culture of self-sufficiency performed by its atomising technologies of the self. An iterative practice continually re-performed like a musical score, Shift/Workers compose and play-test intersubjective workshops for one another prompted by a ‘gesture that interrupts’ (Biesta 2017, 36); a MacGuffin that playfully amplifies our different educational expectations in order to draw our collective attention to how learners are subjectivised as artists. Drawing on a paper presented at ISoTL17 in Calgary, this chapter delineates Speculations (Shift/Work 2017), a Shift/Workshop composed and performed in Scotland, India and Norway during 2017 and in Ottawa in 2019, the parameters of which were scaffolded by Dan Brown, Jake Watts and Neil Mulholland.
