A/Live: Synchronicity in Art and Online Teaching

This paper argues for the ongoing importance of synchronicity as a mode of engagement within the creative arts and applies this thinking to the delivery of art education online. Despite the fact synchronous teaching online can be challenging, it is vital that educators continue to model durational aspects of process-based artmaking in the classroom and encourage practice-based research methods that value ‘not knowing’ and experimentation over ‘finished products’.

I will show how my practice-based research addresses these ideas through strategies such as live webcams, live performances in galleries, and live radio playing within sculptural installations. These methods of practice continue my research interest in the way humans habitually perceive the world in abstract terms (Whitehead 1939), easily divorcing processes from final products (Ingold 2010) and considering the world around us to consist of stable and durable objects (Harman 2011). This perceptual habit is both physiological, psychological and cultural, and challenging this enduring mode of perception is as important to the task of de-colonising our curriculum, as it is to taking better care of our planet. In my paper I will use the work of post-human, ecological writers and thinkers including Tim Ingold and Graham Harman, along with perspectives from First Nations artist and academic Professor Liz Cameron and Professor Brian Martin, to show how artworks and creative practices do not necessarily produce objects for display, but are reciprocal processes occurring in real time, and that modelling this in the classroom is as important as the resulting artwork.