pedagogy notes

notes: pedagogy

included below are the notes i distributed in class for my lecture/talk related to my investigations and research on alternative pedagogical models and concepts. in each case i have a brief indication for the source for the material. if you need additional information or detail please let me know. these notes aren’t exhaustive or comprehensive, they are simply references (in slightly greater detail) to points i raise in my discussion.

From: Cybernetics and Art: Cultural Convergence in the 1960s

- Edward A. Shanken

1. Moving away from the notion of art as constituted in autonomous objects, Ascott redefined art as a cybernetic system comprised of a network of feedback loops. He conceived of art as but one member in a family of interconnected feedback loops in the cultural sphere, and he thought of culture as itself just one set of processes in a larger network of social relations. In this way, Ascott integrated cybernetics into aesthetics to theorize the relationship between art and society in terms of the interactive flow of information and behavior through a network of interconnected processes and systems.

2. Certainly Stiles is correct that the genealogy from gestural abstraction to happenings and to the performative elements of interactive art offers an important source of insight into the growing concern in the 1960s with the temporal dimension of art. Indeed, by Ascott’s own estimation, the work of the New York school, and Jackson Pollock’s web-like compositions in particular, greatly influenced his own thinking about art. While the abstract expressionist ethos of unbridled expression of the unconscious was too romantic for Ascott’s temperament, Pollock’s physical, corporeal involvement in and around his paintings established an important model for experimenting with the process by which art comes into being. The interconnecting skeins of Pollock’s dripped and poured paint came to suggest, for the younger artist, ways in which art functions metaphorically within connective networks of meaning. Moreover, Pollock’s decision to take the canvas off the easel and paint it on the ground altered the physical working relationship between artist and artwork from a vertical plane to a horizontal one, in which the artist looked down on the canvas from a bird’s eye view. In so doing, this method of working contributed to the reconceptualization of painting from a “window on the world” to a cosmological map of physical and metaphysical forces.

3. Ascott’s theories of art and cybernetics also directly informed his creation of a method for teaching art based on the same principles—a cybernetic pedagogy. In 1964, he described the continuum between his work in the studio and his work in the classroom, which he felt complemented each other: “In trying to clarify the relationship between art, science and behaviour, I have found myself able to become involved in a teaching situation without compromising my work. The two activities, creative and pedagogic, interact, each feeding back to the other. Both, I believe, are enriched.” It is no coincidence that he used the language of cybernetics to suggest how his art practice and pedagogy interacted, “each feeding back to the other,” as part of a mutually reinforcing system. As artist and critic Eddie Wolfram wrote in 1968, “I do not know of any other artist/teacher who projects such a high incident of integration between his teaching ideas and the art-hardware that he makes.”

In the classroom, cybernetics offered a clear model for reconceptualizing art and education—and their roles in a larger social system—by suggesting the organization of art education curricula in terms of a behavioral system of feedback and control. The course of study Ascott implemented at Ealing beginning in 1961 focused on these cybernetic principles. Students collaborated as elements of a system that regulated their artistic behavior as an integrated whole. For example, as Ascott himself explained, forming groups of six, each student would be “set the task of acquiring and acting out . . . a totally new personality, which is to be narrowly limited and largely the converse of what is considered to be their normal ‘selves.’” A student’s preconceptions about his or her personality, strengths and weaknesses as an artist, and about the nature of art itself, were not only thrown into question, but were actively transcended through the forced adoption of different behavioral characteristics and a rethinking of art-making and art as process and system. Because their individual behaviors had to be integrated into a coherent group process, each member would be “of necessity interdependent and highly conscious of each other’s capabilities and limitations” in order to accomplish together the “set goal of producing . . . an ordered entity.” In this way, students learned about the principles of cybernetics as applied to art through their own behavioral interactions as part of a cybernetic art system in which the controlled exchange of information organized the overall structure.

4. In conclusion, Ascott drew on cybernetics to theorize a model of how art could transform culture. He was particularly insistent that cybernetics was no simple prescription for a local remedy to the crisis of modern art, but represented the potential for reordering social values and reformulating what constituted knowledge and being. In 1968 he wrote:

As feedback between persons increases and communications become more rapid and precise, so the creative process no longer culminates in the art work, but extends beyond it deep into the life of each individual. Art is then determined not by the creativity of the artist alone, but by the creative behaviour that his work induces in the spectator, and in society at large. . . . The art of our time tends towards the development of a cybernetic vision, in which feedback, dialogue and involvement in some creative interplay at deep levels of experience are paramount. . . . The cybernetic spirit, more than the method or the applied science, creates a continuum of experience and knowledge which radically reshapes our philosophy, influences our behaviour and extends our thought.

Jacques Rancière

Frankfurt, August 2004

From: The Emancipated Spectator

1. The distance that the “ ignorant” has to cover is not the gap between his ignorance and the knowledge of the master. It is the way between what he already knows and what he still does not know but can learn by the same process. To help him to cover it, the “ignorant master” needs not be ignorant. He only has to dissociate his knowledge from his mastery. He does not teach his knowledge to the students. He commands them to venture forth in the forest, to tell what they see, what they think of what they have seen, to check it and so on. What he ignores is the gap between two intelligences. It is the linkage between the knowledge of the knowledgeable and the ignorance of the ignorant. Any distance is a casual one. Each intellectual act weaves a casual thread between an ignorance and a knowledge. No kind of social hierarchy can be predicated on that sense of distance.

2. The presupposition is that the process of learning is not only the effect of its cause –teaching - but that it is the transmission of the cause: what the student learns is the knowledge of the master. That identity of the cause and the effect is the principle of stultification. On the contrary, the principle of emancipation is the dissociation of the cause and the effect. The paradox of the ignorant master lies there. The student of the ignorant master learns what his master does not know, since his master commands it to look for and to tell everything that he finds out on the way and verifies that he is actually looking for it. The student learns something as an effect of his master’s mastery. But he does not learn his master’s knowledge.

3. There is no privileged medium as there is no privileged starting point. There are everywhere starting points and knot points from which we learn something new, if we dismiss firstly the presupposition of the distance, secondly the distribution of the roles, thirdly the borders between the territories. We have not to turn spectators into actors. We have to acknowledge that any spectator already is an actor of his own story and that the actor also is the spectator of the same kind of story. We have not to turn the ignorant into learned persons, or, according to a mere scheme of overturn, make the student or the ignorant the master of his masters.

4. …it is a matter of linking what one knows with what one does not know, of being at the same time performers who display their competences and visitors or spectators who are looking for what those competences may produce in a new context, among unknown people. Artists, just as researchers, build the stage where the manifestation and the effect of their competences become dubious as they frame the story of a new adventure in a new idiom. The effect of the idiom cannot be anticipated. It calls for spectators who are active as interpreters, who try to invent their own translation in order to appropriate the story for themselves and make their own story out of it. An emancipated community is in fact a community of storytellers and translators.

Irit Rogoff- Academy as Potentiality

1. So thinking ‘academy’ as ‘potentiality’ is to think the possibilities of not doing, not making, not bringing into being at the very centre of acts of thinking, making and doing. It means dismissing much of the instrumentalising that seems to go hand in hand with education, much of the managerialism that is associated with a notion of ‘training’ for this or that profession or market. Letting go of many of the understandings of ‘academy’ as a training ground whose only permitted outcomes are a set of concrete objects or practices. It allows for the inclusions of notions of both fallibility and actualization into a practice of teaching and learning (of which more later), which seems to me to be an interesting entry point into thinking creativity in relation to different moments of coming into being.

2. In thinking ‘academy’ through ‘potentiality’ , we exit the realm of generic potentiality – we are not interested in the production of skills and knowledge, we do not think about the liberation of someone’s deeply buried creative possibilities nor do we think romantic moments of self expression or moments of analytical and investigative exposure of the grim realities of our world. Instead ‘academy’ becomes the site of this duality, of an understanding of ‘I can’ as always, already yoked to an eternal ‘I cant’. If this duality is not paralysing, which I do not think it is, then it has possibilities for an understanding of what it is about ‘academy’ that can actually become a model for ‘being in the world’. Perhaps there is an excitement in shifting our perception of an educational and training ground which is not pure preparation, pure resolution. Instead it might encompass fallibility, understand it as a form of knowledge production rather that of its disappointment. At this moment the debates and events that have been raging around the around the EU constitution come to mind as an example of fallibility built into a process whose outcomes are guaranteed to remain unknown and incalculable for some time to come.

3. How this impacts on education in the arts is particularly thorny, because here process and investigation are everything and the possibility of establishing hard and fast ‘outcomes’ that testify to the successful completion of a training or an educational apprenticeship, are virtually impossible to arrive at. One shudders at the thought of increasingly ‘professional’ artists, curators, directors, critics etc’ whose schooling is aimed at producing prescribed museum quality final exhibitions, performances, exquisitely professionalized displays of cultural resistance, perfectly honed critically positioned texts which are publication worthy. One shudders not because this is dull, though it certainly is that, but because the idea of being able to foresee the expected outcome of an investigative process, is completely alien to the very notion of what ‘education’ is about.

4. I would argue that these factions produce a false set of conflicts and engagements. That the question in education in general and in art education in particular, the question that we have not yet begun to deal with, are not that of specifying what we need to know and how we need to know it, of who determines this and who benefits from it; instead it is a question regarding how we might know what we don’t yet know how to know. And it is here, in the aim of accessing this complex aspiration that we need to change our vocabulary – to swap knowledge transfer and knowledge assessment, professionalisation, quantifiable outcomes and marketability for another set of terms and another set of aspirations.
These aspirations might have to do with the lived contemporary realities we experience, with the sense of urgency they might instil in us, with how these lived realities might point us towards the critical tools that allow us to enter the fray and become actors within it. Within this volume, my colleagues at Goldsmiths, where we often speculate on the relation of needs and drives to knowledge, have put forward a whole set of concepts by which knowledge unfolds through it own urgencies. What I would like to pursue here is a set of alternate emergent terms that operate in the name of this ‘not-yet-known-knowledge’. Terms such as potentiality, actualisation, access and contemporaeinity, which for me are the building blocks and navigational vectors for a current pedagogy, a pedagogy at peace with its partiality, a pedagogy not preoccupied with succeeding but with trying.
The sceptics among you will shake your heads and decry my naiveté, will say how can she not acknowledge the demands of bureaucracy and of the market, of the new entrepreneurship in the arts and the all importance of branding and consumption through the academy. Without for a moment denying the overwhelming pressure of all these factors, I would nevertheless argue that we need to learn to live in parallel rather than in conflictual economies; moving sideways, finding the opportune moment, engaging in numerous non-legitimated processes, producing the new subjects that we need for ourselves, always starting from right here and right now and forever searching for what might be important rather than useful, to know.

From: Ambient Lightworks- Kevin Eden

Over the years (Brian) Eno has drawn inspiration from the works of a number of writers and thinkers, but two theorists were particularly important in the development of his ideas during the mid 1970's. The first, Stafford Beer, is the international authority on the cybernetics of management. The second, Morse Peckham, a Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. In Biology a species periodically throws up random mutations, but only those suited to dealing with the changing conditions of its local environment survive. Survival, in turn, reinforces the characteristic within the species as a whole; if the characteristic is more effective than the one it replaces it will eventually dominate. Like computers and the animal kingdom, humans also learn by mutation. But the behavioural innovation that new ways of doing things require are often resisted because they lead to unacceptable increases in the rate of error. To gain the full benefits of change, Eno thought, people would have to learn to accept and endure the temporary increases in error that arose from the process of mutation. In his 'Brain of the Firm: The Managerial Cybernetics of Organisation', Stafford Beer furthered the discussion on self-organising and mutating systems, whether they be ecological, biological or electronic. Beer uses the term 'heuristic'in his book; his definition specifies a method of behaving which will tend towards a goal which cannot be precisely specified because we know what it is, but not where it is. For example, an heuristic instruction to reach the top of a mountain would be 'keep going up', whereas an algorithmic instruction would be 'go up 200 yards, turn left at the rock, up another 400 yards, past the ravine...'. Heuristics prescribe general rules for reaching general goals. By arguing that for dealing with unthinkable systems, such as biological mutation, or computer-designed error it is normally impossible to give a full specification of a goal, so that moving in some general direction will leave you better off (by some definite criterion) than you were before. By thinking in terms of heuristics is at once a way of coping with proliferating variety. The one heuristic of Beer's that Eno still refers to when discussing all of his working methods is: 'Instead of trying to organise it in full detail, you organise it only somewhat; you then ride on the dynamics of the system in the direction you want to go.' By now Eno was convinced that contemporary art must have something to do with biological processes, and with the modification of behavioural patterns. Exactly where this link lay continued to perplex until, in 1970, he discovered 'Mans Rage For Chaos: Biology, Behaviour and the Arts' by Morse Peckham. Eno was to spend the next four years coming to terms with its contents. In his book Peckham attempts to establish a relationship between art forms that many scholars have classified as quite different phenomena: poetry, painting, architecture, and music. He does this by challenging the widespread assumption that the social and psychological function of the arts is to transform the chaos of human experience into a reassuring vision of order and unity. The opposite, he argues, is the case. Day to day human experience is not chaotic. Our perceptions are continually engaged in imposing order on the flux of information that reaches us through our senses. If this did not happen we would be powerless to act. In Peckham's view, what art really offers the perceiver is an escape from the orderliness of life. The arts, far from being characterised by order, exhibit a profound disorderliness: art creates expectations in its audience precisely in order to violate them. 'The distinguishing mark of the perceiver's transaction with the work of art is the discontinuity of experience, not continuity; disorder, not order; emotional disturbance, not emotional catharsis...'Peckham wrote. All of the arts, whatever their formal dissimilarities, expose the perceiver to this kind of disorientation. Two terms used by Peckham in the course of his discussion were especially important to Eno. The first of these is the concept of 'cognitive tension'. This is the feeling of deep unease that results when we realise that our mental models of how the world works - the assumptions by which we live - are not adequate to describe the world as it really is. Peckham argues that high degrees of cognitive tension can only be endured in conditions of 'psychic insulation'. By this he means settings which are sufficiently cut off from the rest of life to allow the individual to lower his defences and expose himself to disorientation. To Peckham - and to Eno - the arts provide their audience with a safe area where there is no physical risk, and little real psychic risk. In the insulated settings in which works of art are created and perceived, artists and their audiences can experiment with ideas, attitudes, and behaviour that might, in real life, have disastrous consequences. In a phrase of Peckham's that became Eno's credo during this period: 'Art is the exposure to the tensions and problems of a false world so that man may endure exposing himself to the tensions and problems of the real world.' The idea that art has a biological function, as an 'adaptational mechanism' necessary for our survival as a species, went a long way to resolving the uncertainty that Eno felt about the relevance of the arts. As Peckham puts it: 'Art is a rehearsal for the orientation that makes innovation possible.' Throughout the 70's and 80's Eno tried to put into practice, through his music, many of the lessons learnt either at art school, or through reading.