Decolonising Computabilities: Counter perspectives in Art and Design Pedagogy in Creative Arts (an introduction)

Dr Nancy Mauro-Flude (RMIT University | Institute of Network Cultures)
2021 Conference

Contributing to artistic practice and media design studies, this paper discusses creative arts pedagogy at a significant moment of profound concentration and the impact of emergent technologies on much of contemporary culture. The provenance of such ubiquitous networks is language and code, a visceral integral part of our daily lives. By deploying minimal computing frameworks as a potent mode of critical inquiry, the ever-widening gap and misalignment of expectations around critical engagement in university can be analysed. These palpable practices respond to the bodies who inhabit and traverse these spaces. Reflecting on some of the propositions raised in the ACUADS 2021 New Networks Conference, the paper presents an examination of how corporealities assemble through computational poetics to build liveable and sustainable techno-lifeworlds. It advances the propositions of Investigative Aesthetics, as defined by Fuller & Weizman (2021). Examining pedagogical case studies and participant observational analysis demonstrates ways to restore diverse experiential learning spaces by nurturing sociability and kinship. The findings reveal that emerging technological systems are a bio-social-cultural construct. The paper considers how networked infrastructure has contributed to the destruction and creation of nascent ecologies to stimulate diverse pedagogical innovations related to artistic production and codesign practice as cultural spaces containing actants perceived as a new species that exists with/in us.

 

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About the author

Dr Nancy Mauro-Flude PhD Art (UTAS), MA Media Design (PZI), MA Performance Art (DasArts), BA Dance | Theatre Studies Hons 1:1 (USYD) is an artist and theorist specialising in the philosophy of techné. Her research contributes various creative public engagement strategies in visceral and emerging systems. She applies ethnography and experiential prototyping, feminist methodologies, artistic and somatic research modalities to explore STS (Science, Technology and Society) issues through a postcolonial lens.

 

Prior to joining the College of Design and Social Context, RMIT University, she spent the last decades as: Honorary Researcher Slade School of Fine Art; Visiting Assistant Professor at Trondheim Academy of Fine Art, Norwegian University of Technology, where she continues to cooperate as an affiliate; and Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS) directing the Curatorial and Cultural Leadership program in collaboration with NUS Museum and ArtScience Museum. Since 2005, Mauro-Flude has been an ongoing

Research Fellow at the Institute of Network Culture. She is represented as an artist by Bett Gallery.