Category Archives: Akadēmeia

Akadēmeia, Education, Paper, Shift/Work

CONTEMPORARY ART & OPEN LEARNING

20.4.21 11:20 BST

A Reflective Practice paper at #OERxDomains21 organised by the Association for Learning Technology @A_L_T in partnership with Reclaim Hosting’s Domains Conference, this special edition of the much loved event is the 12th annual conference for Open Education research, practice and policy.

This paper reflects upon the @eca_edinburgh paragogic OER Contemporary Art & Open Learning that started Sept 2020 https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/artandlearning

‘SCOOP’

Intentional art education today takes diverse organisational forms: traversing small artist-led initiatives, international biennials, art academies and artistic practices. Artistic learning is porous and ubiquitous: it is lifewide: discovered through a wide variety of formal and informal arts contexts. Art education is a distinctly ‘live’, embodied experience. Until the pandemic pivot, there had been few virtual communities of artistic learners. How might artists catalyse the post-Covid recovery of the artworld by engaging with emerging edutech practices such as the open paradigm (Winn 2015), paragogy (Corneli 2011, 2016) and para-academia (Wardrop 2014)?

To partly address these issues, I will reflect on a new course I taught in collaboration with my colleagues Jake Watts, Emma Balkind and Beth Dynowski at Edinburgh College of Art.

Contemporary Art & Open Learning was designed to enable colleagues and art students to open access to artistic learning by peer-producing, codifying and sharing their own learning practices. The OER practised a range of peer-based theories of learning and knowledge production to extend open access into the communal Third Places (Oldenburg 1999) frequently produced by artists. In particular, it promoted ‘paragogics’, learning principles that offer a flexible framework for peer learning.

Embracing the Open Paradigm’s vision of education as a human right might better equip formal art education organisations – such as art schools, workshops and galleries – to fulfil UNESCO’s right to participate in cultural life. However, we must also remember that cultural life is fermented formally and informally. Working together, OERs and people can catalyse the recovery by forming symbiotic colonies of artistic learning and, thus, new artworlds.

Contemporary Art & Open Learning

Corneli, J. and C. J. Danoff (2011). “Synergising Individual Organisational Learning.” Wikiversity.

Corneli, J., et al. (2016). The Peeragogy Handbook. http://peeragogy.org, PubDomEd and Pierce Press.

Knox, J. (2013). “Five Critiques of the Open Educational Resources Movement.” Knox , J 2013 , ‘ Five Critiques of the Open Educational Resources Movement ‘ vol. 18 , no. 8 , pp. 821

Oldenburg, R. (199) The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community. Boston: De Capo Press.

Wardrop, A. W., Deborah (eds). (2014). The Para-Academic Handbook: A Toolkit For Making-Learning-Creating-Acting. Bristol, England, HammerOn Press.

Winn, J. (2015). “Open Education and the Emancipation of Academic Labour.” Learning, Media and Technology 40(3): 385-404.

Akadēmeia, Education, Shift/Work

Week 1 | Marginalia on the Educational Turn | Build-a-basho

曜 Contemporary Art & Open Learning >

The Rules of the Game

Learning/Experiments

Collaborative Inquiry

What are the learning resources?

What are workshops?

What is a Crit?

OERs and Paywalls

Stand-up

#studywithme

Edutech Tools

Week 1 – Marginalia on the Educational Turn

Week 1 – Assignment-1-Build-A-Basho™️

Akadēmeia, Education, Shift/Work

Contemporary Art & Open Learning | An Open Educational Resource

Max Headroom’s Basho

キタ━━━(゜∀゜)━━━!!!!!

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:

https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/artandlearning/2020/08/27/the-rules-of-the-game-contemporary-art-open-learning-course-intro/

More posts will follow on the Art & Learning blog as the course commences…..

CC BY-SA

キタ━━━(゜∀゜)━━━!!!!! is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Akadēmeia, Art, Books, Education, Shift/Work, Theory, Writing

Shift/Work Speculations

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.

Akadēmeia, Confraternity of Neoflagellants, Criticism, Paper, Theory, Writing

in medias res : nonmodern art

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019)

Scheihing Edgardo Flickr: Meteorito El Chaco Meteorito_El_Chaco_100_2422 8 September 2011, 17:28:25 This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

As contemporary artistic practice has become ever more polymorphous and multispatial, large scale exhibitions have accommodated a wider array of emerging nonmodern epistemologies, materialities, and temporalities ‘in the middle’ (Latour, 1993, 47). As a critical means of considering contemporary art’s homologous non-modern, this paper refracts two influential global exhibitions of contemporary art – dOCUMENTA (13) and Il Palazzo Encyclopedia – through the lens of Medievalisms Studies. Medievalisms Studies’ challenge to the ‘simplified binarization of premodernacts and modern identities’ (Fradenburg, 1997, 213) invites deeper scrutiny of contemporary art’s knowledges, materialities, and chronopolitics. Developing the medievalist analogies of the compendium and the relic, I focus on specific exempla presented within the curatorial frameworks of two key biennale that offer a macro-cosmic discourse on contemporary art’s developing relations with knowledges, materials, and time. In unfolding anachronic materialist narratives, a nonmodern sensibility promised to liberate emerging art from the social constructivist paradigms that still dominate contemporary art. As a corollary of their nonmodern materialist epistemologies, the biennale that form my exempla also attempted to (dis)place the practices they curated through a polytemporality in which now-and-then and here-and-there areintertwined.

Link to article in postmedieval

Akadēmeia, Art, Books, Education, Events, Shift/Work, Talks, Theory, Writing

Re-imagining the Art School | Glasgow School of Art

 

Flourish: Johnny Rodger & Irene McAra McWilliams
Memory, Will and Understanding II

present:

Re-imagining the Art School

Professor Neil Mulholland
(The University of Edinburgh) www.neilmulholland.co.uk shift-work.org.uk

Thursday 24th January 2019 5.30-7pm
Bourdon Lecture Theatre
Glasgow School of Art
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/reimagining-the-art-school-prof-neil-mulholland-tickets-55017781666

Re-imagining the Art School assesses the organisational development of the humanist ‘idea of the art school’ from the post-rationalist perspectives of constructivist and connectivist educational learning theory. It examines how recent internal (‘porous’) and external (‘para’) reforms have transformed the production of subjectivity in art schooling and pioneers the application of theories and methods of para-academia and paragogy in art education. It is the first book to be published on the future of the art school to develop an open access paragogy for artistic learning and research.

Reimagining the Art School will be published in 2019 by Palgrave Macmillan

Location

Bourdon Lecture Theatre , Glasgow School of Art, Bourdon Building
Renfrew Street, Glasgow G3 6RQ
View Map

Akadēmeia, Art, Books, Catalogue, Criticism, Events, Exhibitions, Writing

The Unlearning Organisation: Cultural Devolution and Scotland’s Visual Arts 1967-2017 in Artists in the City: SPACE in ’68 and beyond

Artists in the City: SPACE in 1968 and Beyond
Edited by Anna Harding
Designed by Modern Activity
Published by SPACE (Art Services Grants Limited)
ISBN 978-1-9999278-0-6
Distributed by Cornerhouse Publications, HOME, 2 Tony Wilson Place, Manchester M15 4FN. Price £19.95

SPACE’s 50th Anniversary Archive Display
SPACE Mare Street, London
19 January – 17 March 2018

In celebration of SPACE’s 50th anniversary, a display in the project space presents previously unseen material from SPACE’s archive covering the years 1968-75 as well as photographs of early events and studio sites, capturing the founding years of SPACE and AIR, the Art Information Register which was the sister organization to SPACE. This material forms the basis of the book Artists in the City: SPACE in 1968 and beyond to be published in March.

The book launch event is set for Saturday 17 March, followed by a panel discussion with selected contributors at Whitechapel Art Gallery on Thursday 22 March.

Neil Mulholland – The Unlearning Organisation: Cultural Devolution and Scotland’s Visual Arts 1967-2017

Building on primary research in CCA/GSA’s Third Eye Centre archive and interviews with key stakeholders, this chapter elaborates the ways in which visual artists based in Scotland developed their own civic infrastructure in tandem with the devolution of state arts patronage from London to Edinburgh from 1967 onwards. It demonstrates how the Keynesian arms-length principal inherited by the Scottish Arts Council (SAC) generated a productive tension with nascent Artist Run Initiatives (ARIs) in Scotland. With limited state support, artists successfully developed and ran their own platforms while the Scottish Arts Council founded and led more generously funded (competing) national and civic arts organisations.

Realising Tom Nairn and Bob Tait’s vision of a Scottish International, Scotland’s nascent ARIs bypassed official Scottish and British arts bodies, finding a blueprint and network for their activities in ARIs such as SPACE (London) and PS1 (New York City).

As a means of mapping means of production and systems of distribution over the past half century, the chapter presents snapshots of organisational change at pivotal moments in the devolution of the arts in Scotland: 1971, 1979, 1992 and 1999.

These case studies provide a basis for critical analysis of the devolution of the visual arts since the reconvening of the Scottish Parliament. Following political devolution in 1999, Scotland’s Governments have revoked JM Keynes’ arm’s length Patron State model in favour of the New Labour experiment with Structuration and creative economics that is Creative Scotland. Throwing SAC on the arms-length-bodies bonfire that has raged across R-UK, a centrist ‘creative economy’ model has been accelerated by the SNP.

In some respects, post-devolution Scotland is less devolved than it was in 1994 and, also, less democratically accountable. The chapter proposes that the Scottish Government may best unlearn the existing Union State apparatus by adapting the distinctive model of collaborative advantage that artists have developed to successfully govern their activities over the past 50 years.