Site/Sight/Insight: Becoming a Socioecological Learner Through Collaborative Artmaking Practices

This chapter explores collaborative arts practices as critical and creative vehicles for assembling a figure of the socioecological learner. We focus on developing the sensorial and affective dimensions of learning through aesthetic engagements with place, drawing on Deleuzian concepts of the “larval subject”, “carte”, and “rhizome”. In doing so, we also forge connections with contemporary life sciences that reveal the permeability and plasticity of learning processes through dynamic interactions within developmental eco-systems. These conceptual and empirical resources inform our posthumanist methodological approach to collaborative arts practices, which we describe in terms of a c/a/r/tography. Through the collaborative production of “site/sight-specific” images and poetic texts, we seek to produce a generative and visually critical exposé, which locates the emergence of the socioecological learner within a “biosocial ecology of sensation”. This opens up a field of potentials for sensing, thinking, feeling, and learning through collective aesthetic engagements with more than human worlds

Moments of (aha!) walking and encounter: Fluid intersections with place

In contemporary art, research and art education, the concepts of walking and mapping in singular and collaborative encounters with place are established as a generative learning, creative and research event. In this iteration of walking and encounter, four arts academics sought to extend and engage the practice of itinerant drift, collaboratively and discretely, mapping manifestations and then responding with an artful riposte in relation to educational practice. Using the provocation of playfulness, the methodology was inspired by the concept of the dérive and stimulated by Dada, Surrealist and Fluxus legacies. This visual essay portrays the assemblage of walking and encounter at the Peninsula campus site at Monash University through visual poetics, which aims to arouse continuing dialogue around place, learning, encounter, chance and disruption