Pandemic experimentalism: decentering studio art education in an ongoing global emergency
Article Sidebar
Main Article Content
After eighteen months of online art education during the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors consider Form and Time, a required first-year studio art course at OCAD University in Toronto, as a case study within global practices of reconfiguration and experimentalism in art and design pedagogy during the crisis. Form and Time was scheduled to launch as a required first-year course on campus at OCADU in Fall 2020, but quarantine prompted the pivot to fully remote.
Critiques of the traditional art school’s situated format were launched before COVID-19 by anti-ableist, Indigenous and feminist scholars, addressing access barriers and stressing resilience in the face of crisis and oppression. The pandemic disrupted the centrality of in-person studios and critique methods in post-secondary art education; this accelerated and took unexpected turns during the online pedagogical experiments of the early pandemic. In this context, Form and Time foreshadows new modes of art school studio delivery, decentering and critically intersecting with studio precedents suddenly disrupted by remote learning during COVID-19.
Form and Time’s weekly asynchronous video lectures and online meetings probed themes of Space, Form and Time. Students posted weekly studio experiments on discussion boards, using materials close at hand. As with other art and design courses, everyday objects and materials provided a platform for discussing material conditions and encounters during the pandemic. Students depicted their unique surroundings using strategies of observation and walking. They accessed faculty-made online micro-workshops recorded by the various course instructors on home studio material techniques. These comprise a growing online archive shared by faculty teaching the multi-section course.
Looking forward, we anticipate further crises. Greater interplay between online, blended and hands-on art studio education will prioritize flexibility that can better adapt to life pressures and emergencies, opening access for a diverse range of learners in decentered locations.
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
(c) Judith Doyle, Simone Jones, Elizabeth Lopez, 2023
Copyright
For all articles published in Artnodes that are subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence, copyright is retained by the author(s). The complete text the license can be consulted at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. You may copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the work, provided you attribute it (authorship, journal name, publisher) in the manner specified by the author(s) or licensor(s).
Authors are responsible for obtaining the necessary licences for the images that are subject to copyright.
Assignment of intellectual property rights
The author non exclusively transfers the rights to use (reproduce, distribute, publicly broadcast or transform) and market the work, in full or part, to the journal’s editors in all present and future formats and modalities, in all languages, for the lifetime of the work and worldwide.
I hereby declare that I am the original author of the work. The editors shall thus not be held responsible for any obligation or legal action that may derive from the work submitted in terms of violation of third parties’ rights, whether intellectual property, trade secret or any other right.
Similar Articles
- Miguel Ángel Rego Robles, Stereoscopic vision in Wilfrid Sellars’ thought: ontological approaches through post-contemporary art , Artnodes: No. 32: (July 2023). NODE 32. Possibles III (Editors: Pau Alsina & Andrés Burbano)
- Norberto Fabian Diaz Duarte, Ana Teresa Arciniegas Martínez, NODOS: a research proposal to disseminate the transmedia and multiplatform projects carried out in Colombia between 2009 and 2020 , Artnodes: No. 28: (July 2021). NODE 28. In the limits of what is possible: art, science and technology (Guest Editors: Paloma Díaz, Andrea García)
- Pau Alsina, Ana Rodríguez, Vanina Yael Hofman, Becoming of Media Archaeology: paths, knowledge and methodologies , Artnodes: No. 21: (June 2018). NODE 21. Media Archaeology (Editors: Pau Alsina, Ana Rodríguez, Vanina Hofman)
- Ruth Pagès, The net.art arena and its reception: the process of appreciating the work of JODI , Artnodes: No. 4: (July 2005). NODE 4. Calculability (Editor: Pau Alsina)
- Augusto Zubiaga, Lourdes Cilleruelo, Games of emulation: Ideological framework for an electronic neural architecture of biological inspiration , Artnodes: No. 25: (January 2020). NODE 25. Dialogs Between Art and Fundamental Science (Guest Editors: M. Bello & A. Gracie)
- María Teresa Galarza-Neira, Artistic research in higher education: inclusion context and modalities , Artnodes: No. 31: (January 2023). NODE 31. Possibles II (Editors: Pau Alsina & Andrés Burbano)
- Slavko Kacunko, Immediation , Artnodes: No. 21: (June 2018). NODE 21. Media Archaeology (Editors: Pau Alsina, Ana Rodríguez, Vanina Hofman)
- Paula Fernández Valdés, Achieving cultural sustainability through the preservation of video art: open distribution platforms , Artnodes: No. 31: (January 2023). NODE 31. Possibles II (Editors: Pau Alsina & Andrés Burbano)
- Marc Kosciejew, Documenting and materialising art: conceptual approaches of documentation for the materialisation of art information , Artnodes: No. 19: (June 2017). NODE 19. Art and speculative futures (coord.: Ana Rodriguez Granell)
- Stanislav Milovidov, Content policy and access limitations on commercial neural networks as an incentive to artivism , Artnodes: No. 33: (January 2024). NODE 33. Media Artivism: On the Archaeology and History of Digital Culture for Social Change (Guest Editors: Carolina Fernández-Castrillo & Diego Mantoan)
<< < 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 > >>
You may also start an advanced similarity search for this article.