[spectre] LEAF@Rewire2011

[czegledy]

 From Paul Thomas:

Dear Friends

I am delighted to report that the Leonardo Education and Art Forum 
(LEAF) continues its successful international education 
event-initiative. LEAF will have completed a workshop at ISEA in 
Istanbul and  will migrate to Liverpool to build from the emerging 
ideas. We cordially invite you to join us at the Second 
Transdisciplinary Visual Arts, Science & Technology Renewal Post-New 
Media Assimilation workshop as part of Rewire the fourth 
International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and 
Technology .
Sincerely
Paul Thomas LEAF International Affiliate

The second Leonardo Education and Art Forum: Transdisciplinary Visual 
Arts, Science & Technology Renewal Post-New Media Assimilation 
workshop.
Sponsored by the National Institute for Experimental Arts.
Presented in collaboration with Rewire the Fourth International 
Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology.

LOCATION:
Liverpool School of Art & Design,
Liverpool John Moores University Art & Design Academy
Duckinfield St, Off Brownlow Hill, Liverpool
DATE: 27th September
TIME:  2-5pm

WORKSHOP MODERATORS:
Associate Professor Paul Thomas: College of Fine Art, University of 
New South Wales and Curtin University of Technology
Nina Czeglady: Senior Fellow, KMDI, University of Toronto, Adjunct 
Associate Professor, Concordia University, Montreal, Senior Fellow, 
Hungarian University of Fine Arts, Budapest.

WORKSHOP ABSTRACT:
Transdisciplinarity is deemed 'radical', 'provisional and 
opportunistic' because it challenges traditional educational 
paradigms. It focuses critical and creative attention onto 
domain-specific problem areas of 'chance', 'discontinuity' and 
'materiality' (Foucault, 1976) to transcend limits within established 
disciplinary knowledge practices. This enables (re)visioning of the 
role, activity and value of Art Schools in uniting the pedagogical 
and technological strengths of the humanities and sciences in a 
university context, utilising conceptual growth, experimental 
innovation, visual communication and flexible learning spaces to 
deliver a model of Transdisciplinarity.
The second Leonardo Education and Art Forum workshop is a follow up 
to the post iSEA2011 Istanbul workshop which explores the 
transdisciplinary model from various international institutional 
perspectives. Similarly structured around three focus areas this 
workshop continues to seek to identify and share ways to address 
challenges encountered in interdisciplinary art/science practices and 
curricula with the aim of publishing a guide to effective models and 
best practices in  LEAF International.
WORKING GROUPS' FOCUS AREAS:
1. Transdisciplinary collaborations
Working group leaders: Petra  Gemeinboeck  and Mike Phillips
2. Transdisciplinary practice in the studio
Working group leaders: Ross Harley and Peter Ride
3. Transdisciplinary theory
Working group leaders: Darren Tofts and Wendy Coones
Dr. Petra Geminboeck and Prof. Mike Phillips, the leaders of group 1, 
will focus on transdisciplinary collaborations within the existing 
institutional framework. Dr. Geminboeck will explore how historically 
experimental arts practices seem to be particularly privileged for 
opening up and navigating via transdisciplinarity such a complex, 
slippery terrain. She will explore how we can develop and foster a 
horizontal, open transdisciplinary framework for research 
collaboration that perforates and transcends existing disciplinary 
boundaries. Prof. Mike Phillips will offer another angle on the 
fractious debate surrounding the 'qualitative' and 'quantitative' 
approaches to research, from the Earth Sciences perspective. Rather 
than considering the diverging approaches that can polarise even a 
single disciplinary community as a threat to the cultivating of 
interdisciplinary relationships, this friction is viewed as the 
necessary ingredient to creating the conditions to put the 'Trans' 
into disciplinarity Prof. Phillips' presentation will explore the 
importance of developing an understanding of data as a creative 
'material' and as a Rosetta Stone for unlocking transdisciplinary 
dialogues and collaborations. Here the 'qualitative' and 
'quantitative' research methods are understood as a coherent whole.

Focus Group 2 led by Prof. Ross Harley and Peter Ride will focus on 
transdisciplinary studio practice. Prof. Harley's presentation will 
briefly outline some of the successes and challenges encountered in 
the process of working across disciplinary, cultural, and 
institutional boundaries. This will be explored through the specific 
cross cultural project that took place for two weeks in September 
2009. More than sixty art, design, and architecture students, 
practitioners and academics worked on a live design brief in an 
intensive two-week studio at Donghua University, Shanghai. e-SCAPE 
was a partnership between Professor Richard Goodwin's Porosity 
Studio, and The Collabor8 Project (C8), in collaboration with Donghua 
University (Shanghai) and COFA (Sydney). Peter Ride will be looking 
at the changing boundaries of curatorial practice, which is becoming 
an increasingly an interdisciplinary activity. Using the term that is 
current in Visual Culture, what constitutes a 'visual event'? Recent 
educational theories around fine arts practice-as-research suggest 
that we can see the construction of meaning in practice as a point of 
cognitive transference. Ride proposes that these models can be 
adapted and used to explain the 'visual event' when the audience, too 
often overlooked in the discussions of curatorial practice, meets the 
work and the entire construction of meaning as an example of 
cognitive transference.

Focus Group 3 will discuss transdisciplinary theory. The group 
leaders Darren Tofts and Wendy Coones will present productive 
possibilities opened by transdisciplinary research practices within 
the university. Tofts will be expanding on Edward Colless's abstract 
by by focusing on the undisciplined and inviting us to think of the 
"transdisciplinary" disruption, not as a deregulation of academic 
discipline (as a cultural relativising of the arts and sciences 
meeting on equal ground), but as an irregularity within academic 
discipline; as an insurgency or "in-discipline" of academe. He 
suggests that we use the prefix "trans" to suggest drift and errancy, 
as disciplines cross each other with the eventful possibility of 
collision or collusion but without the eventuality of their 
consensus. Tofts refers to these crossing provocatively as an 
occultation, in that it induces an esoteric knowledge not manifestly 
conferrable, discernible or communicable. In this respect, the 
"transdisciplinary" induces an occulting of disciplinary research by 
an abnormality or unnaturalism, which is to say it offers a new 
manner of occult knowledge. Wendy Coones will be exploring the 
possibility of emergence of polycultural space where formal education 
curricula, digital and print dissemination points, common research 
tools, national / international collaborations and continually 
developing interaction structures meet. Taking into consideration the 
parameters of individual endeavours and their possible influence on 
one another, a larger image of the interconnectedness can be 
discussed.

Further information contact Marzena Topka marzena.topka at westnet.com.au
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