Tag: Education

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NAFAE Annual Conference 2025 Call for Papers

This year’s National Association of Fine Art Education conference – Culture Co-operative: Moments, Spaces, and Alternatives for Art and Cultures of Learning – will be hosted by the Feral Art School in Hull on Friday April 25th.

The themes of this conference follow on from those of the 2024 NAFAE Conference The Art of Resistance and the arguments of the recent book Cooperative Education, Politics, and Art: Creative, Critical, and Community Resistance to Corporate Higher Education.

The deadline for proposals is March 3rd and confirmation on the 17th. More details about the conference themes and the submission process can be found here.

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Drawing Analogies: Diagrams in Art, Theory and Practice

My new book Drawing Analogies: Diagrams in Art, Theory and Practice, co-authored with David Burrows, Dean Kenning and Mary Yacoob, is available as Open Access here. The print edition will be available to buy here from 6th Feb 2025.

Informed by Charles Sanders Peirce’s understanding of a diagram as an analogy of relations, Drawing Analogies draws on its authors’ creative use of diagrams as artists, educators and arts researchers, and on fields of inquiry that bring the arts into alignment with other disciplines, most notably anthropology, critical theory, pedagogy, philosophy, psychology, semiotics and the physical and life sciences.

By taking an artistic approach to diagrams and diagramming, by incorporating diagramming as a method of enquiry within chapters, and by exploring their interdisciplinary and multi-perspectival potentials, Drawing Analogies proposes giving new life to the art of diagramming and widening the arena of artistic practice and creative research.

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Re-Imagining Aesthetic Education for Creative Health

I will be presenting my paper ‘From the Education of the Senses to Creative Health: Re-Imagining Aesthetic Education for the 21st Century’ at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance’s annual conference ‘Igniting Creativity’ on the 8th of January in Leeds. Tickets for the event can be booked here and you can see the schedule here.

Here’s a summary of what I’ll be addressing in my talk:

‘Contemporary British culture is wrought with seemingly intractable economic conflicts and social inequities, particularly in the areas of education, health and the arts. Yet despite poor prospects of future financial rewards, young people still choose creative arts degrees all over the UK.

The values that bring young people into arts education – improving mental health, meaning, non-conformity, play, self-expression, social critique, social justice – have all been embedded in the arts since the beginning of 20th century, but they fall outside accountable metrics of the socio-economic good.

Paradoxically, as regional arts programs struggle to survive, the government’s Creative Health agenda is gaining national momentum. Is there a way for us to revitalise the 19th century ideal of art as an “education of the senses”, reconnect it to the broader project of improving individual and social wellbeing though increased sensory awareness and embodied cognition, and align it more closely with Creative Health?’

I will also be involved in workshops and discussions led by Friends of the Future, a newly established community interest company supporting, educating and offering connection to mental health professionals and community artists who are providing creative activities to individuals and communities in and around the Yorkshire region. We will be launching our website at the event.

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Generative AI and Arts Education: The Case of Fine Art

Here is the outline for the presentation I will be giving at the Homo ex MachinAI event in Athens next week.

In this presentation I will discuss my use of generative AI tools for teaching BA Fine Art and their implications for arts education more widely.

In his influential essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1935), the German art critic Walter Benjamin famously argued that the meaning and social function of art would be irrevocably transformed by photography’s erosion of the unique art object and its “aura”. Almost a century later, and despite major changes in the way art is made, discussed and experienced, contemporary fine art remains essentially a studio-based activity through which individuals versed in art history, theory and philosophy, create unique, singular artworks that are publicly experienced by humans using their full range of senses. 

Using examples from my teaching, I will argue that generative AI tools like Midjourney and ChatGPT will impact the practice and teaching of those arts more closely tied to business and screen-based media (advertising, animation, game arts, illustration, marketing, photography, etc.) more significantly than those that create unique artefacts and events based on the lived experience of individuals and groups, encountered by other humans in real space and time (dance, fine art, performance, theatre, etc.).

The peculiarly anachronistic, experiential and deeply humanistic character of fine art and fine art education, and a long history of highly-evolved philosophy and critical theory reflecting on its paradoxical nature, mean that: i) fine art is less likely to be impacted by generative AI than more commercially-orientated practices and ii) having already ridden out and survived several perceived existential threats posed by new technologies and the social environments they create, it is well-prepared for ‘the coming wave’.

Arts education and education more generally, however, are already being impacted and transformed by generative AI tools. How fine art education will fare in an environment of hybrid teaching methods, AI-enhanced personal learning tools and AI-assisted grading and feedback is another matter. 

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AI/Midjourney Presentation

Below is the documentation of a presentation I gave at the ‘Challenges and Opportunities of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Creative Educators’ event, the Art House, University of Worcester June 7th 2023, organised by my colleague Desdemona McCannon.

My talk has the rather formal title ‘Using Midjourney to Explore Relations Between Word and Image with Level 4 Fine Art Students’. Before I get to that, I take a detour through some of my PKD-related work.

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DIAGRAM AS THINKING MACHINE/ART AS METAPRACTICE

Below is an edited transcript of a talk I gave at the first DRUGG (Diagram Research, Use and Generation Group) gathering at University College London on July 14th and 15th 2012.

Fred Astaire and Hermes Pan, RKO Publicity Shot (1939)

Introduction

Diagrams play a fundamental role in the art of teaching, helping people do and understand things in ways that differ from and complement other teaching methods. Diagrams can be defined as visualisations of non-apparent systems, concepts, relationships, processes and ideas. They help students to recognise and understand parallels and structural correlations between things in the world; their constitutive natures; their internal structures; relationships; the systems of which they form a part; the processes they are involved with; their own physicality and subjectivity; the coming-into-being of all of these through time and space; and theoretical explanations for these becomings.

As visual and drawn objects with a pedagogical function, one might expect diagrams and diagramming to be established institutional objects and practices in art and design education. This is however rarely the case. Although diagrams and diagramming are often used in lectures, as tutorial aids and in student notebooks, they are seldom addressed in art education on their own terms. Having taught art theory and academic writing to art and design students for many years now, I have found them increasingly useful as teaching tools, particularly for helping students see and understand relationships between philosophical concepts, art theory, art making, thinking and writing.

Later I will try to construct a practical, systematic schematisation of diagrams. But for now I will simply include ‘diagrams’, ‘analogies’, ‘allegories’, ‘maps’, ‘plans’ ‘models’, ‘schema’, ‘pictograms’ and ‘technical illustrations’ in the category of things we might conveniently describe as diagrammatic. Generally they all combine, in an ostensibly unitary form, words, pictures, lines, figures, shapes, numerals, forms, axis, grids and tables. The diagrammatic in this sense is can be characterised by the following attributes: (1) graphic visualisation, (2) an economy of graphic means that minimise extraneous information (3) a high-level of representational and conceptual abstraction, (4) the representation of non-apparent systems and relations and (5) a generally didactic purpose. Later we will see that some of the key philosophers concerned with the diagrammatic depart significantly from this signifying, purposive and didactic schematisation.

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