The Digitally Engaged Learning (DEL) conference is an annual international conference exploring and evolving digitally engaged teaching and learning in art and design higher education. It aims at creating a critical and reflective space at the intersection of creative disciplines in higher education, teaching, learning and digital technologies. It has been running annually since 2005, supported by an international partnership of art and design institutions of higher education. In 2020, DEL will be hosted fully online by Parsons School of Design of New School University in New York City, USA.
This year’s theme is “Hybridity”. Creative disciplines, both as instigators and as critics, have been a driving force in developing practices of hybridization that seamlessly appropriate, remix, and synthesize new formations of found elements from a wide range of contexts. In return, (tertiary) education as a mediator of cultures is expected to reflect, frame, respond and utilise this continuous stream of ideas. DEL 2020 presents contributions that celebrate, question, and/or explore the multiplicity of hybridity in teaching and learning, and across (creative) disciplines along the three tracks of “Transcultural Practices”, “Decolonising Knowledges”, and “Digitised Collectives”, three topics that strongly correlate with initiatives of the Shared Campus group.
Shared Campus’s Tools Group has been closely involved in the planning of the DEL2020 and we are happy to present the following Shared Campus contributions:
“Introducing Shared Campus (and the main challenges of its development)”Presented by: Daniel Späti, Paul Haywood
Shared Campus is currently one of the most comprehensive and ambitious initiatives to embed transcultural awareness, cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary practice as a cornerstone of contemporary art education. The idea of Shared Campus is not only based on bringing different interests, competencies and resources of the partner universities together, but to jointly develop and run education programmes and research networks from the very beginning and by that, implement transcultural perspectives in all its activities in a sustainable way. But the primary goal of Shared Campus is not to harmonise, but first of all about the perception and understanding of differences, which is helpful to become aware and reflect ones’ own system and cultural imprint.
“(Un)learning: Decoloniality within Creative Practices and the Destabilization of Hierarchical Dimensions and Dialogue” Presented by: Evelyn Kwok, Momo Mee Ping Leung, Michael Leung, Rada Leu, Annemarie Bucher
This session shares creative practices in decoloniality in the context of the emerging transcultural and global cooperation platform Shared Campus. Embracing nuances, complicity and the limits of such a “borderless” platform, the (artist-)researchers acknowledge their own decolonial frameworks/positions, with the goal of ‘un-learning’ hierarchical ways of thinking and working to create anew. The returning question is, What is to be (un)learnt within the existing hierarchical, patriarchal and neoliberal system to allow a pluriversal praxis to thrive?
“Diagrammarians” Presented by: Nils Röller, Leila Peacock, Peter Benz
Using the umbrella term “diagram” the panel specifically focused on text-image hybrids to explore the production of truth – or lies – as a transdisciplinary practice across visual arts, literature and philosophy. Conventionally, diagrams facilitate understanding, but here they are suggested as means to uncover conspiracies and forge new ones, satirise knowledge, map visions, mark time and construct new poetic forms.
“KOKO” presented by: Peter Benz, Harald Kraemer, Nils Röller
Initially, KOKO was simply intended as an online publication platform for staff and students of the Shared Campus group to publish and disseminate their theoretical and practical research. Based on this premise however, KOKO in the meantime has developed into a much more comprehensive experiment exploring the opportunities and limitations of academic online publishing, the equitable validation of theory-led and practice-based research media/formats, issues of transparency, accessibility and participation in research, as well as the integration of active research with teaching and learning in the arts.