Hyper-communication and the Gift of Connectedness?
Paul Jones, Glyndwr University, United Kingdom
Breakout Session 1: Wednesday 10 May 16:30 – 18:30

The digital age uproots us, it displaces us from our situatedness and disembodies us. The acceleration of information does not allow for deep understanding; in fact, it extracts and fragments. It repels the slowness required to absorb and shape our understanding beyond the surface. Jones proposes that we turn towards slowness and reconnect to things in the real world. We need to stop our compulsion to produce the new, we need to end our obsession with hyper-communication (Han, 2022) and situate ourselves in a shared, positive, and active stillness in the now and learn once again to connect to physical things — their presence, shape, weight, colour, taste, fragility, permanence, and history.

Hear together: Asynchronous situated learning and reflection via podcasts
Ollie Palmer, Situated Art and Design Research Group, Centre for Applied Research in Art, Design and Technology (Caradt), Netherlands + Situated Design MA, Master Institute for Visual Cultures, Avans University of Applied Science, Netherlands
Breakout Session 1: Wednesday 10 May 16:30 – 18:30

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin…
Digital audio is a potentially valuable yet underused medium in teaching and situated research. The podcast format creates a feeling of intimacy that is unparalleled by visual media, allowing listeners great flexibility in how and where to listen, as well as enabling their environment to become folded into the work they create (or connections they make) while listening. This presentation describes three podcasts used in teaching and research: two syllabi created for teaching on a Situated Design MA course, disseminated via podcast, and one set of research interviews. The aim of the podcast is to contextualise the field itself within which situated practice takes place, investigating the relationship, harmonies, and tensions between creative practice and teaching. This playful presentation will present the case for aurally intimate, podcast-based teaching and research, as well as methods for audio creation.

I'm Not a Robot: Facilitating Connection through AI
Phillip Kennedy, National College of Art and Design, Ireland
Breakout Session 2: Thursday 11 May 09:30 – 11:30

This workshop focuses on the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in education and explores how this technology can be used as a tool to expand the possibilities of teaching and learning. By leveraging the power of AI, educators can free themselves from the constraints of traditional teaching methods and gain a new perspective on how they can best support their students. Discover how AI can be used as a valuable tool in education, helping to free educators from the constraints of traditional teaching methods and empowering students to explore new ideas and concepts. By leveraging the power of AI, educators can create personalised learning experiences that can foster creativity, innovation, and success.

Exposing the Slow Image: Can a primitive early photographic process become the antidote to hyper tech?
Catherine Dineley, Staffordshire University, United Kingdom
Breakout Session 4: Thursday 11 May 15:00 – 17:00

Contemporary higher education is digital to the core. Learning environments are hyper-tech and immersive. How do we navigate this artificial horizon with our students to activate learning while reducing the cognitive load? As modern visual cultures become increasingly ‘simmersed’ in AI, students from disciplines as wide-ranging as architecture, ceramics, surface pattern design, and fine art respond in real-time to this low-tech, sustainable form of image making as if no time had passed. Outcomes are fervent, varied, and fresh. What sense of connection to material and process is it that can so gamely supplant algorithms with the alchemic? What transportive magic? How can heritage processes be used in teaching to positively disrupt our sense of situatedness?   
Cyanotype was one of the first non-silver technologies used to create photographic images. With lower toxicity than other photographic processes, interacting with natural elements, sunlight and water, it is more sustainable and ecologically sympathetic. I invite you to interact and share while we investigate this slow process.

Environmental Calamity, Sustainability and EcoArtt
Fae Brauer, University of East London, United Kingdom
Breakout Session 5: Thursday 12 May 10:00 – 11:30

Negotiating Ecological Intersectionality: Illuminating Environmental Calamity and Sustainability through EcoArt: As ecological crises accelerate, the interconnectedness of climate change with human societies and the need for environmental sustainability increasingly requires investigation and illumination, particularly through intersectional methodologies and their application to art. These intersectional methodologies may be defined as exposing, following K. Davis, “the interaction between gender, race and other categories of difference in individual lives, social practices, institutional arrangements, and cultural ideologies and the outcomes of these interactions in terms of power”. How diverse genders, sexualities and ethnicities relate differently to climate change, due to their specific situatedness in power structures, institutional practices, social categorisations and knowledge production, has been exposed through multileveled intersectional investigations and illuminated through EcoArt, including Ecophotography. EcoArtists have endeavoured to reveal how power structures, categorisations and unsustainable lifestyles have contributed to the emission of greenhouse gases, global warming and ecological crises while challenging and renegotiating them in order to explore how climate change may be combated and environmental sustainability pursued. By focusing upon the Ecophotography of the Canadian, Edward Burtynsky and Bangladeshean, Munem Wasif, plus the EcoArt of English, Michael Pinsky and Australian, Janet Laurence, this presentation shall explore their diverse engagements with ecological intersectionality. After focusing upon their exposures of the impact of diverse ecological disasters, particularly in relation to new planetary awareness of environmental risks and sustainability, this presentation shall then examine how these EcoArtists also explore ways in which relations between human subjects and the global environmental imaginary may be reconceived in time and space.

Tools for Surviving Eco-Anxiety through Arts
Sanja Bojanic, Academy of Applied Arts, University of Rijeka, Croatia
Breakout Session 5: Thursday 12 May 10:00 – 11:30

In an exercise of intellectual ‘response-ability’ (Haraway, 2016) and to be able to cultivate collective ways of doing and knowing before even entering the class at the art academy, ‘I’ disclose my situatedness as a political subject of knowledge. The first premise allowing me to address the phenomenon of eco-anxiety consists of presenting various aspects of the situation: ‘my situation’ and ‘the situation of each student’ attending the class. The position I occupy in the class determines its environment and is also determined by it. ‘Survival tools’ are built together and through various stages of our work in class. Response provided through arts and pedagogical mechanisms in an art school bring specific forms of the meaning of the ‘here and now’ momentum. Anchored in this momentum, we create conjunctures, oppositions, and combined aspects of our shared situatedness.