Critical Digital Making in Art Education. Группа авторов
rather than capturing the complex aesthetic dynamics that digital technologies offer (Dunne, 2008). Conversely, the deconstruction of digital technology, its history of production, and the performative use of it can be a way of developing experimental methods in art, design, and education (Crutzen, 2006). There is a general need of experimentation, beyond the borders of digital technology as it is presented to us in everyday situations and as novelty. Simultaneously, there is a specific need for experimentation with creative and critical perspectives in the digitalization of education, especially in art education. In a European context, there are steering documents presented to support the development of digital education. For example, the EU publication from 2017 Digital Education Policies in Europe and Beyond: Key Design Principles for More Effective Policies presents eight core-guiding principles. Three of them are of interest to the development of material-digital art education. The principles of interest here are to follow a holistic approach targeting systemic change, embracing experimentation, risk-taking and failure, and building up teaching competence (Conrads ←35 | 36→et al., 2017). Within these core principals, we would like to put emphasis on the deconstruction and artistic experimentation of subjects, objects, selves, histories, and cultures. The aim is to experiment with ways of making, writing, and visualizing difference in a performed material-digital scenario as part of self and group representation. Our art-based research explores the potential of performed relations of the digital and the material through sound in a less electrified environment of the outdoors.
In this exploratory investigation, the primary reference to theory and methodology is the physicist and feminist theoretician Karen Barad’s (2007) agential realism and our deep reading of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of matter and meaning. The theory of agential realism questions a traditional world view where humans are positioned in and surrounded by an environment, and instead puts forth that “practices of knowing are specific material engagements that participate in (re)configuring the world” (Barad, 2007, p. 91). This theory has implications within knowledge production and the traditional division of research subject and research object (Barad, 2007; Snaza & Weaver, 2016; Lenz Taguchi, 2009).
MATERIAL-DIGITAL SOUND
Sound has great significance as a dynamic material involving art, people, material, and society. “Every sound exists in time and space, and since time and space are building blocks of human activity and struggle, sound is the venue where perception meets action. Sound is where the body politic encounters the material” (Ultra-Red, 2014, p. 23). Listening does not only engage the sense of hearing, but the entire body acts as a listener, and the body is also constantly making sounds. The materiality of sound has proven to be of value as it allows for the inclusion of the phenomenon of technology, environment, and the body as a whole.
Material-Digital sound is a relational sound that extends to the movement of air pressure and to the material world as friction and tactile feeling. Such everyday experiences of sound have become hidden in conventional product design and routine sound consumption. For example, the act of swiping the screen of a smartphone with your fingertip can result in us being connected, but the connection is based on just a few parts of the body—eyes, ears, and hands—and confined to digital technology design. This sensory reduction deprives us of making deep connections with materials, environments, and ourselves. We claim that when technology, as well as art, are presented as only systems of representation and form leaving the sensory experiences out, we are deprived of important connections between aesthetics and ethics (Jones & Arning, 2006).
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VAGUE EVENTS
The vague event simultaneous engages with space and time. It is open ended and open to change. The event includes both creation and exploration, and makes no division between the development of the subjects and the objects of the event (Barad, 2007; Lenz Taguchi, 2016; Springgay, 2016; Trinh T., 2011). The vague event aims at “simultaneously intervention and invention, responsibility and ethics” (Lenz Taguchi, 2016, p. 53). An event is understood as a disruption that brings other truths into the open, thereby changing traditional frameworks of knowledge (Atkinson, 2017, p. 5). While engaging in a vague event, we specifically look for that which creates meaning by focusing on phenomena rather than objects, while aiming to be fully aware of the transformational intervention that we are part of. “In/determinacy is the surprise, the interruption, by the stranger (within) re-turning unannounced” (Barad, 2014, p. 178). The production of the event is not clear at the outset, and the event needs to be open to whatever appears.
Vague events overlap material technology experiments and education through outdoor workshops and art performance. Our material technology experiments are examples of how material relations are addressed through the experimentation with plurality, sound technology, body, and location. The combination of the laws of physics and the structure of technology enables a fluid relation between human-machine-context, which is often regarded as immaterial entities in interaction (Berglin, 2008).
A vague event includes performance as a twice-behaved behavior and as something which is re-created (Roach, 1995; Schechner, 1985). We note and partly plan our own bodily performance in relation to the environment. The materials involved in a vague event engage in processes of creation and re-creations. This performative practice can lead to new patterns of thoughts and the creation of other experiences, forms, and representations as a “performing exploration” (Eriksson, 2009). A performative re-creation of events cannot be fully anticipated, nor can any performance be performed exactly the same way twice (Phelan, 1993). This means that a vague event can use, and re-use the same materials and set ups and still produce new results when re-created.
AGENTIAL REALISM AND INTRA-ACTION
An important concept of agential realism is intra-action, which differs from interaction (Barad, 2007). In interaction, the differences of the parties involved are set. But in intra-action the collaboration and interplay between phenomena are vaguely divided from each other, and have mutual transformational impact and agency (Lykke, 2009). In the process, intra-action has become the concept we use ←37 | 38→in conducting in-depth research on how it may be of use for the overlapping of technology, education, and art. In agential realism, “it is through specific intra-actions that phenomena comes to matter—in both senses of the word” (Barad, 2007, p. 140). The different