DIY | ”COUNTERFEIT EDUCATORS” | Infrastructure ---> exaptive pedagogies ----> noncompliant learning
Nicola Twilley and the Geoff Manaugh's "Landscapes of Quarantine" Project:
- independent
- multi-disciplinary design studio based in New York City
- eight Tuesday evening workshops in Fall 2009
- 14 participants gathered to discuss the spatial implications of quarantine
- unaffiliated
- free
"You don't need a campus or even a dedicated building (or room); you need a schedule, some colored markers, a stack of plastic cups, maybe a Google Groups account, and a willingness to participate in a structured conversation. In fact, Nicola Twilley of Edible Geography and I have been joking that we wanted to start a kind of counterfeit university—that is, a form of continuing education that models itself on, and masquerades as, the very academic studio system it is meant to supplement (but not replace)." --Geoff Manaugh, BLDG BLOG
Landscapes of Quarantine fall studio, image Geoff Manaugh
In Fall 2009, two bloggers, Nicola Twilley and Geoff Manaugh (known collaboratively as Future Plural), convened an on-site "counterfeit" studio, which conducted collective archival and field research. It was informed by unofficial consultants who gave talks and answered questions, and culminated in a month-long exhibition in a storefront for art and architecture.The focus of the project was the spatial implications of quarantine, and it ended up addressing: airport quarantine facilities, Level 5 biohazard wards, invasive species, agricultural regulations, swine-flu infected tourists confined to their hotel rooms, lawsuits over citizens' rights to resist involuntary quarantine, horror films, World Health Organization plans for controlling the spread of pandemics, lunar soil samples, and nuclear waste repositories.
Quarantine was explored as a question of infrastructural solutions to the epidemics caused by "outbreaks"--unwanted flows of people, pathogens, materials, and behaviors. As an ancient spatial practice, quarantine is characterized by infrastructural architectures and other forms of "underlying connective tissues" that are designed to reverse the usual functions of infrastructure. Instead of enhancing flows, they seek instead to achieve enforced immobility and sequestering for the common good.
Landscapes of Quarantine opening, image Elizabeth Ellsworth
Their (Geoff and Nicky's) assemblage of people, new media technologies, bricks and mortar exhibition space, DIY education, and counterfeit institution of higher education practices created a provocative infrastructure for releasing and amplifying noncompliant, contemporaneous learning experiences.
"Landscapes of Quarantine" is just one of a growing number of recent DIY/counterfeit education interventions created by artists and embraced by galleries and museums. A recent edition of ARTFORUM reports:
"a spate of artist collectives are reassessing how progressive pedagogical models can be employed as consciousness-raising tools. Joining related endeavors such as 16 Beaver, the Public School, e-flux’s Night School, and the Bruce High Quality Foundation University, artists William Powhida and Jennifer Dalton have created #class, a series of public workshops in a classroom setting that, in its eclectic sprawl, seeks to investigate the effects of the economic downturn on the field of art: on its production, reception, distribution, and consumption; on its educational institutions and its institutions of display.
The setup is simple: A room contains several worktables and chairs lined with four chalkboards. Dozens of programs and open-ended brainstorming sessions have been scheduled for the one-month duration of the exhibition, and the artists will be present on a daily basis to use the gallery as a studio space. The “curriculum” ranges from the intentionally hokey (motivational speakers promising to unleash “wild creativity”) to the near heretical (dealers guaranteeing to answer questions about the art market with complete transparency)."
Other interventions repurpose museum spaces, blogs, the seminar and conference formats, the plein air painting tradition, and the exhibition format itself for pedagogical intents that are noncompliant. These projects seek to make more of the social production of knowledge by making it more inventivist and more contemporaneous with forces shaping economic, social, cultural, urban, and eco realities of daily life.
screenshot from the New Museum's Night School
screenshot from Cabinet Magazine's website
screenshot from FOODPRINT NYC