Introduction-Figuring-Things

Figuring Things Out Together - An Introduction

Anja Groten

In her talk “The changing fate of the workshop and the emergence of live art” art historian Heike Roms (University of Exeter) outlined a history of artist initiatives that reformed art education through organizing educational events. Central to her talk was the workshop as a format within the context of emerging self-organized educational experiments in the 1960s and 1979s particularly in the UK. She specifically presented the relation between self-organized educational activities and performance art. She focussed her research on artists and educators who organized study-groups for teachers and students in their private homes, an evening class of sorts. Such evening classes became a kind of parallel institution, centered around exercises and public sharing of artistic processes.

Roms pointed out the difficulty in conducting research on such artistic-educational events, as they were never well documented. The emphasis of such practices was on the momentary collective experience, and not so much on what was being produced at the end. Therefore documentation is very rare and it is difficult to reconstruct what actually happened during such events. There might be some printed testimonies, such as announcements, flyers, posters and pamphlets that hint at the character and content of the respective activity. Sometimes she found some prompts, an outline or score. However, in what ways such prompts were perceived, enacted, and iterated on is difficult to reconstruct. Roms showed a few clumsy attempts of herself and colleagues reenacting what might have happened in such workshop situations.

"Figuring Things Out Together" is an exploration of the (im)possibilities of editing and designing a publication about and for of self-organised, collective learning.

You may find snippets of code documentation, instruction manuals and workshop plannings, readme's, some of which available online as well.

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The 'workshop script' is a pedagogical document, a format the Hackers & Designers collective has been experimenting with for several years, and which became a crucial tool that allowed us to continue hosting workshops throughout the disembodied experience of hosting workshops during the Covid pandemic.

This publication is an invitation to readers to circulate, reuse and iterate on the proposed pedagogies, exercises, narratives, skills and experiences entailed and to stimulate their continuation, and consider it a kind of graphic design genre as well – not that ought to resist aesthetic traps.   The workshop script is informed by formats such as instruction and install manuals, readme's, and how-to manuals, but also includes context-specific and narrative aspects. It is a document that is easily accessible, engaging, affords reproduction and distribution, iteration and continuation. Situated between documentation and call for action, workshop scripts became an important focal point for the development of this publication.   Leveraging the experience of different collective environments in hosting, facilitating, and participating in self-organised collective learning environments, this publication wants to foreground educational resources, exercises, methods and prompts, for learning through and with technology. The scripts were activated in different moments, of which traces can be found throughout this publication, on the web, wikis and H&D Git repositories.

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In exploring the thresholds of planning and scripting workshops and leaving space for interpretation and contingency, I came to wonder in what way certain aesthetics, visual and material gestures afford reproduction, iteration, and continuation of such workshops? I have looked at different books about art and design assignments, for instance a collection of '37 Assignments', an intriguing assembly of prompts for design and art students, which are printed and bound into a book. However, while these assignments were probably the starting point for many interesting student projects, certain design and editorial choices flatten the prompts in ways that they don't say much about their moments of activations, and don't invite to be interpreted differently or challenged. For instance, the binding of the book, use of the same typeface for each assignment, the decision to not attribute the assignments to their authors, are all choices that anonymize the assignments. The design distills the prompts from their moments of activation and reactivation. How to take care of a pedagogical document such as an assignment, make it legible and usable, but also show where it came from, leave open where it could go – while making sure that it could, in fact, go elsewhere and continue otherwise? If such a document can be designed, – a document that resists aesthetic traps (the book "37 Assignments" is in fact a beautiful object), fixities that avoid continuations, it would perhaps succeed in making legible the ways it was, is, and is going to be involved in future collective unfoldings.