When people take up knowledge as a thing already made and use it in ways that are unresponsive to the current moment and situation—it becomes:
Complex events and situations require ways of making sense of the world that are contemporaneous and responsive-by-design. In other words, they require learning that is non-compliant with received ways of thinking and past ways of doing.
This project is interested in expanding pedagogies for non-compliant, contemporaneous teaching and learning. It’s interested in the design of pedagogical practices for knowledge in-the-making—at the emergent edge of the contemporary moment:
Tony Smith’s nighttime drive with students in 1966 on the unfinished New Jersey turnpike sets the stage for “Infrastructure as Civic Pedagogy." What Smith thought he knew and understood about “art” was unexpectedly breached, overrun, out-stripped by his embodied experience of a piece of infrastructure.
"Artificial landscape without cultural precedent began to dawn on me,” Smith said of that experience.
Without cultural precedent. In need of a response from somewhere new, somewhere else. No words to describe it. No gestures to fall back on. A contemporaneous, non-habitual response to an infrastructural landscape without cultural precedent would require new aesthetic languages and practices. Smith joined others in inventing what became known as Land Art.
The project of Infrastructure as Civic Pedagogy sent us traveling, both actually and virtually, to contemporary infrastructural landscapes that are without cultural precedent. Our experiences of those landscapes provoked us to ask: what pedagogical gestures are up to thinking and teaching that which is without cultural precedent?
That question led us to:
• William Morrish: infrastructure as cultural system; making infrastructure visible
• Land Arts of the American West: field pedagogies that encounter historical and operative infrastructures
• Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI): inverted vitrines, making infrastructure sense-able
• National Tourist Routes in Norway: breaking the frame of the car window, making infrastructure sense-able
• DIY/”counterfeit” “educators”: internet and mobile media as speculative infrastructures for non-compliant learning
Each of these individuals and groups employ infrastructure with pedagogical intent. We explore their practices here in order to:
ASK:
• how is infrastructure being used to engage publics in a variety of "non-compliant" learning experiences?
MAP:
• how various groups are using infrastructure with pedagogical intent
SPECULATE AND EXTRAPOLATE:
• exaptations of infrastructure: uses of infrastructure for something other than its original, intended purpose
• expand how we understand and imagine infrastructure • use infrastructure to in-form pedagogical practices for non-compliant learning
This web exhibition offers images, examples, and stories of how individuals and groups are using infrastructure with the intent to summon non-compliant, contemporaneous learning.