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<div><font face="Optima" size="-1" color="#000000">From Paul
Thomas:</font></div>
<div><font face="Optima" size="-1" color="#000000"><br></font></div>
<div><font face="Optima" size="-1" color="#000000">Dear Friends<br>
<br>
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 .<br>
Sincerely<br>
Paul Thomas LEAF International Affiliate<br>
<br>
The second Leonardo Education and Art Forum: Transdisciplinary Visual
Arts, Science & Technology Renewal Post-New Media Assimilation
workshop.<br>
Sponsored by the National Institute for Experimental Arts.<br>
Presented in collaboration with Rewire the Fourth International
Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology.<br>
<br>
LOCATION:<br>
Liverpool School of Art & Design,<br>
Liverpool John Moores University Art & Design Academy<br>
Duckinfield St, Off Brownlow Hill, Liverpool<br>
DATE: 27th September<br>
TIME: 2-5pm<br>
<br>
WORKSHOP MODERATORS:<br>
Associate Professor Paul Thomas: College of Fine Art, University of
New South Wales and Curtin University of Technology<br>
Nina Czeglady: Senior Fellow, KMDI, University of Toronto, Adjunct
Associate Professor, Concordia University, Montreal, Senior Fellow,
Hungarian University of Fine Arts, Budapest.<br>
<br>
WORKSHOP ABSTRACT:<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
WORKING GROUPS' FOCUS AREAS:<br>
1. Transdisciplinary collaborations<br>
Working group leaders: Petra Gemeinboeck and Mike
Phillips<br>
2. Transdisciplinary practice in the studio<br>
Working group leaders: Ross Harley and Peter Ride<br>
3. Transdisciplinary theory<br>
Working group leaders: Darren Tofts and Wendy Coones<br>
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.</font></div>
<div><font face="Optima" size="-1" color="#000000"><br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
Further information contact Marzena Topka
marzena.topka@westnet.com.au</font></div>
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