Resources for artistic practices

[SHIFT]. Exploring Relationships between Artists and Technology in Education explores the interplay between technology and education within the arts. In doing so, it reveals the often-unnoticed structures of domination that influence our interactions with digital and educational environments. This book challenges the perceived neutrality of technology and proposes a radical rethinking of our relationships with the tools we use to create and learn.

This is a call to action. [SHIFT] encourages artists, educators and technologists to forge paths toward a more inclusive and equitable future. By engaging with the arts as a dynamic framework, this book offers experimental strategies for dismantling oppression and reimagining how we live and learn in a technology-driven world.

Grounded in empirical research, Alternative Pedagogical Spaces: From Utopia to Institutionalization is a critical inquiry into the establishment, development, and transformation of alternative pedagogical and social spaces. Written by Anna Colin, a former director and co-founder of Open School East, an independent art school and community space founded in London in 2013, this essay-length book explores the instituting factors, organizational life cycles, and alignments and misalignments between values and practices that permeate such a project.

The essay delves into the qualities and prerequisites for what Colin calls “multi-public educational organizations.”  It also scrutinizes the hurdles associated with the effort to remain alternative, including processes of habituation, temptation or pressure to scale up, ethos-bending fundraising exercises, and long tenure, as well as the plain desire for stability and sustainability.

People and societies thrive on a versatile and imaginative awareness. Yet the critical debate on arts education is still too often about the qualities of artefacts and technical skills, and tends to neglect issues such as the critical function of the arts in society, artistic cognition and cognitive development, changing artistic and cultural practices, and research into arts participation.

Arts Education Beyond Art argues that education of the arts, both for children and adults, should focus on the qualities of the processes generated by the artistic artefacts, and on these artefacts as means to an end. Instead of teaching how to look at art, we should teach how to look at life – through art.

Grace Ndiritu delves into radical approaches to education, drawing from her self-directed research in alternative, nomadic, and spiritual communities. Her experiences – from Buddhist monasteries to permaculture communities – profoundly shaped her understanding of embodied learning and its relevance in times of social upheaval. ‘Being Together: A Manual for Living’ reflects on these themes, weaving voices from her social practices to explore collective action and shared destiny within the context of contemporary art education. This second edition, enriched with new essays, deepens the dialogue around these ideas. Published alongside her solo exhibition ‘The Compassionate Rebels, Tools for Everyday Living Part 1’ at Page Not Found, the book extends the exhibition’s exploration of transformative educational practices and communal living.

Would you like to start changing the world from your living room? What if your neighborhood made its own money? What would happen, if all animals, including humans, had equal rights in the park next door? Have you considered that you are flying through space right now? Sibylle Peters, director of Theatre of Research, a Hamburg-based theater dedicated to creating social experiments together with audiences of all ages, invites readers to reimagine the world—and act on it. Based on 20 years of performance-based research, and guided by children’s wishes and concerns, this book of at-home experiments shows you how to change reality through play.

Creativity in fashion spans multiple dimensions, forming a continuum that education must deeply explore. This book advocates a practice-based approach to examining the connections between individual creativity and collaborative dynamics, as well as between spontaneous creation and industrial processes. Emphasizing material and construction—the foundations of fashion—it highlights their role in enabling personal expression and collaboration within creative and industrial systems. Through workshop-based projects, the book demonstrates how material and construction foster creativity and teamwork. It brings together students, educators, industry experts, and companies to explore fashion’s possibilities. Conversations include insights from Walter Van Beirendonck, Lutz Huelle, Sara Sozzani Maino, and Colomba Leddi, among others.

In 1985, Griselda Pollock critically examined the gender politics of twentieth-century art education that, she argued, reinforced masculinist and individualist ideologies within capitalist conditions of artistic production. She linked the cult of authorship to the non recognition of women as artists, even in the face of the evidence of women’s considerable participation in modern art. She explored the impact of a critical post-modern and feminist artistic engagement with theories of meaning, subjectivity, and the image drawn from outside the “studio” model. She ultimately proposed “feminist interventions in art’s histories,” where expanded histories—including race, class, gender, and sexuality—challenge both the monographic-all-male model of the hero artist and the hegemony of formalist art theory.

Almost forty years later, in 2022, she revisited the impact of “1968” and its theoretical revolution. She historically situates the major geopolitical and ideological shifts since 1989 (The Fall of the Berlin Wall) and 2001 (9/11), and notably since 2007 the touch-screen phone (linking to the internet and social media). She identifies a troubling cultural tendency post-2010 that, with thanks to Derrida, she terms “insta-grammatology.” Finally, she calls for a critical analysis of how the “grammar” of social media reduces the spectrum of nuanced thinking and performs a political surveillance of ideas.