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THE PLANETARY COLLEGIUM: Towards the radical reconstruction of art education
by Roy Ascott, Special Project Guest EditorI want to propose the creation of a Planetary Collegium: non-hierarchical, non-linear, and intrinsically interactive; a gathering together, a connecting, an integrationcof people and ideas. Combining cognition and connectivity, what better creative learning organism could serve our unfolding telematic culture? But by definition such an organism cannot be planned and implemented top down. In fact it is already emerging, bottom-up from the infinity of interactions within the net. The Planetary Collegium is a paradigm of the 21st century "Interversity" [1].
The Planetary Collegium was first presented in a paper given at the 5th
International Symposium on Electronic Art in Helsinki. Leonardo has sought
to extend the discussion that it engendered by calling for papers which
would address in some depth the issues raised. This invitation calls upon
the experience and imagination of artists, theorists and teachers to
propose new approaches to education and to formulate conditions in which
creativity in art allied to science and technology might thrive.
The Planetary Collegium is conceived as being a process, a world-wide
network, a series of relationships, a set of complex systems, rather than
any kind of fixed institution or establishment of bricks and mortar. It
identifies the need for strategies to re-vivifying art education (which
seems to have entered a stalemate, a kind of cul-de-sac leading merely to
training and technological dexterity), and to increase the connectivity
between art and other fields of knowledge and practice. It places the
problem within a holistic context which embraces the rich diversity of
cultural formations across the globe while focusing on the specific needs
of our computer-based society.
The important questions here are:
- how might new technologies and the metaphors of science be employed in the education of the artist? And how might the insights of the artist contribute to the advancement of knowledge in science and to technological development?
- how can the accrued wisdom of distant or earlier cultures be allied to the search for meaning and values in a post-biological society?
- how might the Net, in the fullness of its evolution, serve the needs of interactive, non-linear learning, and engender creative thought and constructive action?
- how might new discourses be initiated which will bring critical,
aesthetic and moral perspectives to bear on emergent fields of practice?
While education will always be concerned with providing students with tools to create coherence world views of the present, often drawing on beneficial practices from the past, it now becomes important to help these students to reach into the future, not only in anticipating radical change but by giving enrichment to its realisation.
Reference
1. R. Ascott, "The Planetary Collegium: art and education in the post-biological era," Artlink (Sydney) 16, Nos. 2 & 3 (1996) pp.51-54.
Uploaded January 1998
Updated 26 April 2006
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