Michel van Dartel presents his paper at the ninth international conference on The Image in Hong Kong.
The conference
at the Hong Kong Baptist University is about artificial images and visual intelligence: seeing in the age of big-data.
During his presentation, Michel van Dartel will discuss the topic Art and Design Pedagogies after the Situated Turn.
“That humans are inseparable from the world around them will not surprise anyone, but this only makes it more remarkable that humans are frequently isolated from their surroundings in human-oriented research and development. The result is invariably that knowledge and products are produced that do not correspond to the reality in which they are used or applied. Fortunately, in many disciplines, so-called ‘situated’ approaches have emerged, which take as their central premise that humans can only be understood in relation to their environment. Although the notion of “situatedness” has had major impact on many disciplines that perform human-centered research and development, it has not gained much ground within the fields of art and design.
This paper will claim that a situated turn in art and design is immanent and discuss its consequences for the production and presentation of art and design. Finally, the paper will go more deeply into the consequences of the situated turn for art and design education and will conclude with six practical recommendations regarding art and design pedagogies after the situated turn. These recommendations include: The build-up of expertise on the dynamic relationships that humans hold with environmental, social and cultural factors; a focus on how humans are situated through technology; providing familiarity with the reality of practices in other disciplines; advocating creation on the basis of instructions for a process; offering experience with post-studio and post-venue practices; and teaching the appreciation of other human actors in the process of creation and presentation.”
The conference also launches a “Curated Series” within the Common Ground Research Network under the title Transformative Pedagogies in the Visual Domain. The series contains eight books, including the title Embodied and walking pedagogies engaging the visual domain: Research, creation and practice, to which Michel van Dartel contributed a chapter on art and design pedagogies.
‘People are the product of their relationships with their environment. It’s important to understand how technological developments influence these relationships.’
Michel van Dartel is Research Professor Situated Art and Design at the Avans Centre of Applied Research for Art, Design and Technology (CARADT) and was affiliated with V2_Lab for the Unstable Media between 2005-2024. He holds an MSc in cognitive psychology and a PhD in artificial intelligence.
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