Fabricating Vibe
Winter 2021
Agnes Etherington Art Centre / Special Topic Project Space
Introduction to the Fabricating Vibe Residency Platform
For my contribution as a mentor to the Dark Matter Playgroup, rather than conduct a single workshop, I would like to try to fabricate one progressively with you over a longer, slower duration. This longer-term ‘workshop-fabrication’ project will require that we construct customised habitats for our own learning, co-teaching, and artistic production – our own scene. This process will be both immaterial (we will devise a set of behaviours, values and priorities that will guide us in smaller teams) and materially grounded (we will physically occupy a real-world workshop-like environment at my studio at 239 ½ Brock Street and together determine its operational functions and priorities).
While I am attempting to initiate a flexible and malleable learning context, I am also experimenting with it through deliberate design strategies, specifically those that attempt to build ‘publicness’ into their very operations. Fabricating Vibe necessitates that we consistently attempt to codify and externalize our knowledges and practices for one another by employing a range of exhibition-like strategies, including didactic address, architectural scenography, spatial ambiences, etc. Through this approach, the Fabricating Vibe platform aims provide a space and time for the group to examine the ‘exhibitionary’ as not a result or container for ‘research’ or ‘presentation’ but as itself a tool, grammar, and mobilizer for group learning and the making of our scene.
This is a learning experiment driven by and rooted in concepts and methodologies of ‘paragogy’ (or peer-to-peer learning), and its structure represents a deeply modified, transposed, distorted, thickened, and folded version of an Open Educational Resource and course that took place at Edinburgh College of Art in Fall 2020 called ‘Contemporary Art + Open Learning.’
Pandemic-Pivoted Learning
As will be outlined in Module 01: Gravity Calibrations, the platforms for study that I am proposing and offering here will attempt to take on approaches that differ from the general response that many educational institutions have had to take towards COVID-19: hosting Zoom-based classes, seminars and lectures that attempt to reproduce online classroom-style knowledge exchanges or in-person programming.
Instead, and as a more informal educational entity, I would like to engage with the Dark Matter Playgroup to together design and ‘test-drive’ an experimental (and safe) set of pivoted learning tactics that may involve processes such as: choreographing dispersed navigations of outdoor spaces and cityscapes, hosting one-day ‘residencies’ in a shared notebook, co-existing in indoor studio environments through a rotational logistics (not gathering inside at the same time), and other not-yet-discovered modes of embodied learning.
It is my hope that these strategies will prioritise more joyful modes of exchange that will counter-act the fatigue and burnout that some of us (including myself!) may be feeling at this late point in the pandemic with Zoom-based learning, working, and socializing. Some key questions on this theme that I am keen to explore with each of you are:
- How can we safely pivot our organizational behaviours as a scene towards learning strategies that are materially anchored? Are we willing to sacrifice the convenience and familiarity of online discussions for slower and possibly more difficult forms of exchange?
- How can we attend to and prioritize the affective dimensions of artmaking, learning and thinking? How can we tune into the ‘vibe’ of our learning experiences and adjust / revise these vibes as necessary, as we move through the project? How might our vibe-adjustments transform what types of discussions, processes and creative outputs are possible within our group?
- In the absence of the possibility for safe spatial coexistence, how might we think of our coexistence today beyond sharing a screen-based environments? What role does the spatialization of our thinking have on its development, retention, and our capacity for collective enunciation?
Shared Studio Habitat
For the duration of my exhibition From the vibe out at the Agnes (running from February 20th – May 30th, 2021, although currently closed), I will be transforming my studio space in downtown Kingston into our learning commons, re-configured for this group project, and hosting and propelling its systems of study. In keeping with the strictest COVID-19 prevention measures, my initial proposal in Module 03 will be that we each use the space in a rotational or ‘orbital’ manner, with members of the playgroup running independent sessions in the studio space, creating a relay of sessional, responsive workshopping while never gathering indoors at the same time.
As will be explained in the video posted in Module 03, as a paragogically-driven peer-to-peer learning site, I would like for us to engage with this room as itself a habitat for our learning and thinking, gradually developing from it an original ‘space-making methodology’ through the mutual preparation, caring for and priming of the space for one other’s use. This will transform us all into both senders and receivers, teachers and learners, designers and users, architects and tenants.