Workshop

workshop

Anja Groten

In 2018 my colleague Shailoh Phillips and I organized a workshop on ‘how to give workshops’ at the annual Summer Academy of the Amsterdam-based workshop initiative Hackers & Designers (H&D). The practices of participants joining H&D’s activities are usually situated at the intersection of technology, design, and art. H&D’s workshops take place in a non-hierarchical manner, meaning that participants become workshop hosts and vice versa. The ways in which the workshop programme unfolds over the course of the Summer Academy is put up for discussion.

Our motivation for hosting a workshop on how to give a workshop was mostly to pay attention to the format of the workshop itself as it, so far, has remained mostly unquestioned as a format, even though it is a substantial ingredient of H&D’s activities. H&D is only one of many similar initiatives that resort to the workshop as a format for organizing events. As an ambiguous format, not tied to a specific context, the workshop crosses many boundaries—between art and activism, between different disciplines and institutions, between commercial and educational contexts. My attempt at a definition is: a gathering of a committed group of people who want to learn something together in a set time frame. Workshops that I have been part of usually follow a hands-on approach to learning that can be traced back to the Bauhaus. Here, the workshop was the artisan’s workplace, a place that bridged the divide between making and thinking, as well as between disciplinary divisions such as sculpting and painting. The workshop brought together art and technology in an attempt to provide solutions for the social problems posed by an industrialized, capitalist society.

Workshops like the ones organized at H&D are not bound to any particular space. In this regard they differ from the artisan workshop, which is the site of material production. The workshop does not exclude the possibility for material production or skill transfer and there is a strong incentive to share knowledge and learning experiences through making things. However, making something is not necessarily regarded as a goal. On the contrary, a workshop may become an opportunity to escape the pressure of producing something final or instantaneously useful.

Despite these differences, both the artisan workshop and what I would like to call the ‘ephemeral workshop’ (as described above) can be seen as social spaces within which material-based learning can take place.

Besides methods, techniques, tools, and protocols, workshops also bring about certain social dynamics that evolve from the particular composition of participants, as well as the context and conditions they find themselves in. Such ‘moods’ shift and slide and cause particular forms of production and knowledge to emerge, intervene or evaporate. Workshop participants and workshop hosts together shape and reshape the dynamic present.

In the 1960s and 1970s the workshop evolved as an extra-curricular self-organized activity that resisted principles of art & design schools such as disciplined and canon-based learning, hierarchies between teachers (instructors) over students (apprentices), as well as the commercialization of workshops to produce ‘marketable’ goods.

Since the 1990s the workshop format regained traction with a renewed interest in educational experimentation in the arts. Inspired by movements of the 1960s and 1970s such as the ‘Free International University’, ‘Antiuniversity’ or the ‘Non-School’, the so-called educational turn drew attention to collective research, paying attention to processes rather than objects or final outcomes.

Today, collaborative learning, critical pedagogy, and self-organization are still key principles for collective practices that do not abide by the stiff structures of educational and cultural institutions. Workshops organized today for instance by H&D, Varia, Trojan Horse, Anhoek School, or Parallel School continue the legacy of ad hoc self-organization, defiant dilettantism, horizontal and collective learning-by-doing.

However, in our day, the workshop has also become a popular genre that functions well within the framework of a service economy. Situated between work and leisure the workshop’s commercial potential is explored in the context of conferences, incubator programmes, and creative retreats. Taking place outside of the daily work routine, workshops ought to be fun while valorizing the participants’ CV. The workshop has been co-opted by innovation labs and creative agencies and turned into a product itself. For example, Next Nature, a speculative design studio, sells a workshop-in-a-box. Here, the workshop takes on the format of a card game and is described as a ‘2-hour dynamic crash course [that] helps you to better understand and discuss technology’. It might not be intended as such, but in my view this workshop-in-a-box could be read as a satire on workshops, as an ironic commentary on compulsive self-improvement, learning-by-doing and the pressure to participate in one workshop after the other. The implication of presenting a workshop as a product is that the workshop in and of itself is a highly productive format. What a product like the workshop-in-a-box lacks to address is the unpredictability of a workshop context. Workshop moods that are essential to any workshop experience cannot be predetermined thus, cannot be turned into generic instructions that fit on a card.

In my experiencing there is no such thing as a guarantee for ‘a perfect workshop’. Workshop chatter and workshop moods—either friendly and warm or grouchy and agitated—are core ingredients of a workshop situation, but hardly predictable. Still, I do believe that the workshop can be a meaningful tool.
The workshop brings about temporary learning environments, in which making processes but also modes of being together are put up for discussion. Workshop situations have challenged me in my lack of patience or my assumptions of what I regarded as productive or efficient. A workshop cannot be taken
for granted or defined as a given format or medium, and therefore cannot guarantee any outcome. The workshop comes with the potential for confrontation as much as it can lead to long-lasting collaborations and friendships. A workshop situation may produce disruptions and reciprocal challenging of assumptions engrained in disciplinary habits of how we are practicing. Specific moments of transformation are evoked by making things together, in the ‘here and now’.