| art.description.project | BACKGROUND:
The future is an alien mess, a dystopian fantasy, performed in art, books, films, and in the constant online and television newsfeed. In a recurrent loop, the future materializes in the now, emerging through perpetual change, with the residue of the past and the potential of what might come.
In the book, Lilith’s Brood, Octavia E. Butler tells a story where humanity’s ability to survive requires change through a fusion with aliens. The inevitable change produces a paradox between betrayal and survival. Saving humanity requires betraying it, turning humans into more-than-humans: alien-humans. The transformation tarnishes the essence of purity and sameness; where change is losing and gaining simultaneously.
WHY:
In this time of political, climate, cultural, and environmental change, art is taking new forms as research and education. Different ways of doing, understanding, and valuing art are emerging as a response to the changing world. Similar to Butler’s notion of the more-than-human, a future of arts-based research is materializing through hybrid forms, methods, and perspectives. Changes are emerging as modes of creation and survival.
Art-based research and education have an active part in creating an ethical and sustainable future for all humans, non-humans and more-than-humans.
HOW:
This experimental panel will take inspiration from the work of Octavia E. Butler to further engage with the symposium as Boundary Event. By becoming the traitor, the alien, new art-based research and educational methods can make new futures. Together, we will formulate and materialize speculative and wild art-based methods, blurring the borders between fiction, reality, disciplines, lived experiences, and imagined futures. By approaching the panel-as-process, we will create hybrid methods through unexpected alliances and alien thought.
EXECUTION:
In preparation for the symposium and the session, a question was asked to a group of students at the school of arts at Arizona State University.
- What answers do you want from the experts within the field of arts-based research and education when it comes to question concerning sustainable, ethical and just futures?
The students questions and comments, and the answers and discussions from the participants in the session were then communicated through handmade notebooks.
The notebooks are now to be developed and communicated with and through other future participants. They are to be used as an arts-based dynamic and in process archive.
In the session, Fredric Gunve and Liz Warren (Storytelling Institute Director, South Mountain Community College, Phoenix, AZ, USA) used readings, storytelling and story making with, chaotic rearranging and de-furnishing the room to create different memories from futures to come.
CONCLUSION:
This arts-based process of working diffractively with groups is a way of doing arts based educational research with the aim of finding and creating futures. The group that took part was introduced to how arts-based storytelling and material re-formulation, de-furnishing can be used as ways to open for other ways of working together and together create memories from a future to be acted upon already today. | sv |
| art.description.supportedBy | Arizona State University, School of Art,
Arizona State University, Art Education Department,
Arizona State University, Institute for Humanities Research,
Arizona State University, Center for Philosophical Technologies,
Gallery at the Tempe Center for the Arts | sv |
