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Art and Archipelagic Education in Virtual Environments Glenn Loughran, TU Dublin
This presentation will introduce the concept of archipelagic thinking as a conceptual framework for thinking contemporary art and its educational entanglements in the Anthropocene. In particular, the presentation
will reflect on the colonial contexts that have shaped Island studies and its heuristic potential for decolonizing our educational present. The application of these theoretical frameworks will be explored
through the archipelagic MA Art and Environment (2020 – 21).
Group Discussion: What educational questions does VR provoke?
This discussion will aim to expand on the current discourses surrounding educational VR by exploring educational problems and questions that VR might prompt or address. The aim of the discussion will be
to highlight the educational innovations that might be enabled by VR technologies.
14.00 – 15.30 CEST
Afternoon session
Virtual Environments and Institutional Contexts John O Connor, TU Dublin
This presentation will reflect on the decolonisation of institutional governance through expanded models of education in virtual environments. Where teaching or making work in online virtual worlds or with
VR headsets presents an opportunity to reimagine the nature of engagement between teacher and student, it also presents a challenge to institutional frameworks and gives rise to issues of governance
and social responsibility. What are the institutional implications of working in virtual environments and what opportunities arise? In particular, what responsibilities arise for institutions and academics?
The presentation will reflect on these questions as they have arisen with undergraduate and postgraduate programmes.
16.00 – 17.00 CEST
Exhibition Launch: Sensing the Environment
MA AE students will present speculative proposals developed in Virtual Reality (Spatial io) in the second module of the MA Art
and Environment. This module uses archipelagic environments in virtual reality to teach, discuss, research, and produce artworks. This year students took on the challenge of engaging with Islands and
Island communities without having visited those communities physically (due to lockdown). Particular to this challenge was the aesthetic representation of island spaces, island sounds and islander voices
at a time of unprecedented social isolation. The MA Art and Environment is an archipelagic Master's programme developed in the archipelago of West Cork, Ireland, in collaboration with the UILLINN: West Cork and the Sherkin Island Development Society (SIDS).
10.00 – 12.00 CEST
Morning session
Creolising Technology - Imaginary Futures in Shared Virtual Spaces
Ralph Borland will present his pedagogical engagements with ethnomathematics, topology, vernacular art, the origins of computing and the movement between hand and machine making and perception. Through this
presentation Ralph will reflect his creative work with Virtual Reality over the past few years, from using it as tool for the design and production of physical artworks, to creating virtual online social
art spaces. Central to this presentation will be a reflection on the use of VR in his projects Dubship I - Black Starliner and Digi-Dub Club, and ideas around VR’s potential for remote creativity, collaboration
and socialisation.
Digi Dub Club: Workshop / Discussion
Ralph Borland will lead a wire art workshop with one of his African Robots and SPACECRAFT collaborators, demonstrating some of the principles of creating three-dimensional forms from linear material.
Linking back to the presentation, key points of discussion in the workshop will be vernacular art, topology, ethnomathematics, the origins of computing and the movement between hand and machine making
and perception.
14.00 – 15.30 CEST
Afternoon Session
Dynamic responses:
the experience of using VR in teaching urban design at the Harvard GSD Heinrich Wolff & Sarah Fayad, Harvard Innovation Task Force, Harvard University, Graduate School of Design
How can a South African architect present a course in urban design at Harvard University, focussed on rapidly changing the current impasse on land justice, including scenarios of facilitating land invasions and squatting, without evoking a pessimistic sense of urbanisation in Africa? Simple; combine a candid investigation into the socio-political forces shaping one of the most unequal societies on earth with the techno-marvel of VR.
This paper will share the strategies and experiences of a design studio at the Harvard GSD. VR was strategically significant as a teaching and learning tool for this studio. At a basic level it allowed collaborative discussion and design work between people isolated during the pandemic. VR facilitated a studio experience at a time when it was thought of as impossible to achieve. Similarly, it allowed the students to experience a distant place at a time when travelling was restricted. At a more profound level, the sensorial experience of VR achieved significant educational outcomes. By reestablishing studio culture and joint reviews, informal learning, which is so fundamental to the socialised learning environment of a studio, could take place again. The future potential of informal learning with people “outside” a physical studio opens a new space to engage with others in learning. VR allowed a pedestrian experience of urban spaces; we thereby replicated the point of view of the most vulnerable citizens in our society. The ability to design and discuss simultaneously, facilitated role playing games where students are placed in the shoes of various urban actors to develop empathy for squatters, administrators, designers, etc. Students had real fun in VR; a pleasurable engagement with a subject matter enhances the openness of students to learning and it stimulates them to work hard and to remember what they learnt.
Group Discussion: What educational questions does VR provoke?
This discussion will aim to expand on the current discourses surrounding educational VR by exploring educational problems and questions that VR might prompt or address. The aim of the discussion
will be to highlight the educational innovations that might be enabled by VR technologies.
16.00 – 17.00 CEST
Virtual Exhibition:Creolising the Curriculum Through Wire-Frame Sculpture
17.00 – 17.30 CEST
Official Closing
Noel Fitzpatrick, ECT Lab+ (European
Culture and Technology Lab)
