Technoparticipation

Abstract

Maggi Savin-Baden’s (2007) theories on the interplay between reflection and interruption consider moments of reflection as interruption as catalysts that provoke self-reflection and deep critical thinking. Such interruptions, disruptions and ‘disturbances’ (Vale 2017) have the power to produce new knowledge, new taxonomies and revised thinking. Aware of the increasing need for students to engage in self-reflection and critical thinking processes, reflection is not viewed, in respect to Savin-Baden’s ideas, as being a form of interruption but I consider interruptions to performance experiences as an immediate call for reflection (Savin-Baden 2007) and ultimately, interruption, in parallel with Fred Meller (2017) as a ‘critical thinking tool’. This short article will share and reflect upon aspects of Technoparticipation, the name given to a research project I first conceived in 2015 at Loughborough University that encourages digital criticality and creative learning potential via student engagement in digital technology where educational formats (tutorials, workshops, seminars, etc.) are viewed as ‘performative events’ (Nunes 2006: 130–1) to help students develop as autonomous self-reflective thinkers and doers in a constantly evolving digital age. The article will share a recent project I have recently set up with colleagues called Digital Pedagogies Open Studio at the University of the Arts London, which explores a set of questions we feel are pertinent right now given the heightened move to online/virtual forms of learning and teaching due to Covid-19. These questions include: 1) How do you disrupt the digital space pedagogically? and 2) How can you replicate chance happenings/an interruption online?

Critical Digital Pedagogy is a philosophy and social movement where the digital is the framework within which critical pedagogy is practiced. As an artist, educator and interdisciplinary practitioner with pedagogical interests in the role of technology for improving access, participation and collaboration within the arts, I employ technology to rapidly multiply the spaces and opportunities for collaboration and participation—to achieve what I define as technoparticipation—using the digital learning environment as a space to not only reflect upon artistic practice but also to produce it as well as prompt statements and responses to its limits. Technoparticipation is also the name given to a research project I first conceived in 2015 at Loughborough University thanks to the generous funding support of a Teaching Innovation Award (Campbell 2017) (Fig.1)¹. Tapping into the increasing importance of digital and virtual realities in students’ lives—while helping students to engage with multiple technologies to build digital literacy, thus ensuring that teaching and learning does not displace students’ unique life experiences—one of the project’s core aims is to disrupt the digital space pedagogically and explore: How does the interruptive specifically play out in terms of a digital pedagogy (Campbell 2020)?

Lee Campbell: Technoparticipation lecture, Nottingham Trent University (2015) © Lee Campbell

What’s at stake with disruption? Disruption goes back to the Situationists—un-working passivity, activating agency and subjectivity, ethics and desire by provocations. Disruptions and interruptions literally cut people loose from their bearings. Disruption forces one to find an orientation. Desire might be radicalized in the way that people who might have had a near-death experience refine their reason for being in the world. While Maggi Savin-Baden (2007) suggests that interruptions can provoke self-reflection and deep critical thinking, Michael Vale (2017) asserts that interruptions, disruptions and disturbances have the power to produce new knowledge, new taxonomies and revised thinking. The project recognizes that the process of learning is in itself a series of interruptions involving scales of interruption from those subtle to those not; silence as an interruption; being observed as an interruption and so forth.

Extending the ideas of Savin-Baden and Vale above, the latest iteration of the project is the online Digital Pedagogies Open Studio co-set up between myself, Richard Parry and Natasha Sabatini at the University of the Arts London, an online space accessible to both staff and students where personal approaches and personal narratives shed light on key questions/ pertinent themes relating to disruptions, interventions and liminalities.

The project was initially designed as an online discussion and resource space applying critical theory from the arts to cultural narratives of the Internet to provide a much-needed space to pause, stop and reflect critically around the online learning environment and potentially discover new ways of seeing (pedagogically) through the Internet as a very specific and nuanced kind of viewing platform. What has now surfaced as underpinning one of the core values of the online studio is the ambition to explore in practice (given the heightened move to online/ virtual forms of learning and teaching due to COVID-19 and acknowledging and embracing technological disruptions and interruptions), how technology can be used as the form and content to be creatively disruptive. I remember how students I spoke to at the time were over/ super-appreciative of speaking to tutors when the first COVID-related lockdown in England happened in March 2020. We now have the tools to carry on teaching but must be critical of those tools and get beyond issues of technology as providing accessibility. We must use our current conditions to really interrogate the idea that form is content that suggests that different (technological) forms give slightly different ways of understanding an experience.

The Digital Pedagogies Open Studio encourages digital criticality and creative learning potential via student engagement in digital technology where educational formats (tutorials, workshops, seminars and so on) are viewed as ‘performative events’ (Nunes 2006: 130–1) to help students develop as autonomous self-reflective thinkers and doers in a constantly evolving digital age. The Digital Pedagogy Open Studio replicates chance happenings and interruptions online and proposes that the dynamic connection between students in a co-creative environment can still function when flow is constantly interrupted by technological imperfections. Rather than airbrushing out glitches and technological disturbances, the online studio sees value in not just reflecting upon technological imperfections such as momentary on-screen visual freezing but actually deliberately engineering these ‘interruptions’ to happen within teaching. Thinking through how the body may be configured/compromised when we are speaking/communicating online, moments when technology freezes momentarily online during teaching sessions are embraced as they bring in the materiality of the digital. The online studio also recognizes the weirdness when parties are attempting to look at each other but are synchronized, producing a ‘technological uncanny’.

It could be said that online working may be most attractive to those whose artistic practice directly concerns the digital and technological forms of making. Therefore, one of the ambitions of the studio moving forward is to attract a wide cohort of practitioners, who are engaged in physical forms of making, to really encourage contestation, deliberation and debate about what happens when we experience, for example, a painting, a sculpture, the artist’s live physical fleshy body in performance art online. We are keen to use the studio as a locus for discussions concerning what happens when we experience those physical entities through the digital/ through virtual presence and how this may affect viewer engagement? Is it altered? Is it compromised? How can the digital positively disrupt our ways of thinking around presence, encounter and engagement?

Heckling is predicated upon interruption using your physical body and language. In previous examples of my practice (Campbell and Jordan 2018) I employed heckling in the physical space to explore participation and in doing so became increasingly aware that there is a spatial aspect to it when suddenly you are aware of the space around you: the heckler at the back, the performer at the front. However, what happens when heckling and interruption exists in a non-physical, that is, digital/virtual/online space? To explore these questions in future practice within the context of the Digital Pedagogies Open Studio, I hope to set up a series of performative happenings taking place online by using the practices of a heckler as a means to generate dialogue. Participants will take on the role of hecklers and discuss heckling and interruption briefly in the physical world before exploring and experiencing what it means to heckle and interrupt in the virtual through a series of absurd performative constructs. Hecklers ignore the official speaker and refuse to take turns; they use their body and its corporeality to assert opinion. This will be achieved by participating in a series of body-related activities that may be considered as incongruous and unacceptable while performed among ‘serious’ debate. These activities could include, for example, speaking with your mouth full, brushing your teeth, standing on your head, doing the conga, attempting a limbo and so on. By engaging in this activities, participants may be able to reflect upon the importance of the physical body to put one’s individual opinion across by using the body as an expressive tool within everyday social communication. This may allow all participants to interrogate in depth how the physical body operates in the presence of online-ness and reflect upon the consequences of how certain forms of online activity ‘remove’ the body entirely from view or partially obliterate and restrict it.

Finally, by acknowledging time-zone differences that may impact upon collaborative processes/co-creation and also how certain digital platforms are not available in certain geographic regions, there are so many unique opportunities for developing an approach to arts pedagogy that is responsive to what the digital may offer. Since virtual space disrupts our understanding of physical geography, of having to be physically present in a fixed location. We also want to encourage creative practitioners and arts educators alike, to join us as allies and supporters of our studio, to contribute, co-explore and (re) imagine our practices as fluid, open-ended and fully responsive to contingent and changing conditions of teaching, learning and creative practice-making in (increased) technological forms. By doing so we open up potentially new ways of thinking about the physicality, affect and presence within our respective practices.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to acknowledge the conversations that have taken place between myself, Natasha Sabatini and Richard Parry at University of the Arts London since May 2020 that have fed into the narrative content of this piece. I also wish to thank the peer reviewers for their comments in strengthening this piece.

Notes

1 For more information on Technoparticipation, see: https://bit.ly/3GvSDcw