Zooming In and Out on Art Education, Research, and Teaching
Jana Eske + Miriam Schmidt-Wetzel, Zurich University of the Arts, Switzerland 
Break out Session 1: Thursday 24 November 14:30 - 16:00 (Helsinki Time)

This session reflects on pandemic ad hoc distancing and digitalisation, with the aim of learning how digitalisation alters forms of collaborative working in academic and school environments—the dimensions of learning, teaching, and researching in the field of art education. Demonstrating collected samples of working processes, experiments, presentations, and discussions, it aims to draw conclusions from international perspectives for the further development of arts education research.

Perceptions of digital learning among Hong Kong performing arts students
Michael Li + Wong K. Katrine, The Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts 
Break out Session 1: Thursday 24 November 14:30 - 16:00 (Helsinki Time)

The pandemic has accelerated many initiatives, including forcing everyone to teach digitally. As part of a study on students, this session investigates their learning habits, preferences, tools, spaces, and how they managed learning during the pandemic. The presenters hope to provoke discussions that consider the other side—understanding performing arts students from learners’ perspectives. What makes students comfortable? How have they adapted? What are their perceptions and strategies?

Debate: Online or offline/Mensch or machine? How we can benefit from the best of two worlds
Eva Maria Bäcker + Sunedria Nicholls-Gärtner, Internationale Filmschule Köln (ifs), Germany 
Break out Session 1: Thursday 24 November 14:30 - 16:00 (Helsinki Time)

In the light of polarising e-learning discussions, this session offers a space to debate, laugh, cry, and let out the frustrations of online teaching. It aims to encourage the community to continue exploring their own assumptions and preconceptions about what our classrooms are and need to be. The speakers will also introduce a collaborative research project aiming to contribute to an innovative, inclusive, and diverse higher education environment for film and media, both on- and offline.

Hybrid Infinities: Connecting online and offline audiences
Nadine Roestenburg, Fontys School of Fine and Performing Arts, Netherlands
Break out Session 2: Thursday 24 November 16:30 – 17:30 (Helsinki Time)

STRP and Fontys continue experimenting with events and artworks that arise from hybrid ways of thinking, beyond (often boring) livestreams. Focusing on artistic approaches that use digital technologies as artistic tools to connect audiences in different spaces in exciting ways, ‘Hybrid Infinities’ is an interdisciplinary research project creating meaningful, engaging, and immersive experiences between physical and online audiences using creative technologies.

medienhaus/—decentralised digital infrastructure focused on the needs of art institutions
medienhaus/, Berlin University of the Arts, Germany 
Break out Session 3: Friday 25 November 9:00 - 11:00 (Helsinki Time)

As a result of the pandemic, Berlin University of the Arts was faced with the challenge of digitalising its education. Since this institution was largely defined by work in physical space, there was no digital infrastructure in place. An “emergency digitalisation” had to be undertaken. A group of students, alumni, and employees asked themselves what tools could enable artistic practice in the digital space, and who defines and shapes this space for collaborative teaching and learning? They founded the medienhaus/ × udk/spaces project, which is now firmly anchored within the Berlin University of the Arts. The result is an explorative, free and open-source project focusing on the requirements of creative groups and institutions, enabling data-friendly, digital collaboration which attempts to understand digital space for what it is—a supplement to the physical space, not a replacement for it.

Critical Chatbots, Tarot, and Drawing as an Epistemological Repositioning to Defend against the Neoliberal Structures of Art Education
Dylan Yamada-Rice, Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom; Eleanor Dare, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom 
Break out Session 3: Friday 25 November 9:00 - 11:00 (Helsinki Time)

Using critical chatbots, tarot, and drawing as an epistemological repositioning to defend against the neoliberal structures of art education. As universities moved rapidly en masse at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, so apparently did the impetus to algorithmically monitor, and by implication model, the actions, intentions, and emotions of online students. Intelligence and emotion are both contested subjects, and while technologies that claim to detect them proliferate in the case of emotion, ‘despite the continuing proliferation of books, journals, conferences, and theories on the subject of “emotion”’, there is still no consensus on the meaning of this term. Presenters critique such practices by comparing AI to a critical chatbot (made by Dare) and psychometric testing (of Yamada-Rice) to a tarot reading (by Feather Tarot).