Universidade Duke

ART of the MOOC: Public Art and Pedagogy

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Students of this course may try their hand at their own public art interventions, or simply focus on learning from the theory of public practice and its recent history. Designed by artist and Duke professor, Pedro Lasch, and co-taught by Creative Time artistic director, Nato Thompson, this course presents public culture and art in their radically reinenvented contemporary forms. The lectures link major developments of recent decades to wider topics like spatial politics, everyday social structures, and experimental education. Also included are guest presentations from key thinkers and practitioners, like: Tania Bruguera, Claire Doherty, Tom Finkelpearl, Hans Haacke, Shannon Jackson, Suzanne Lacy, Rick Lowe, and many more. As the ‘ART of the MOOC’ title implies, learners and participants are encouraged to treat the MOOC itself as a public art medium. This happens mostly through the course’s practical components, local project productions, global exchanges, and critical feedback. While no prior art making experience is required, projects also offer challenging options for advanced learners. For other course offerings or language versions in this series, just search 'ART of the MOOC' in the Coursera catalog.

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Experimental Pedagogy: Lectures, Guest Presentations, and Quiz

Many socially engaged artists are invested in the communication of ideas through education or educational projects. From Freire and Boal to Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro’s Womanhouse and the CalArts Feminist Art Program a brief review of experimental or radical pedagogy and its influence on art is hence the focus of this lesson. Using various technologies and social forms, some of these works set out to transform education from within. Others intentionally position themselves as self-organized platforms outside of institutions. Our focus will be on how the production of alternative communities of learning can challenge the hierarchies, professionalization, homogenization, and economy of current education systems. This week’s practical components will invite students to rethink their relationship to education as they chose between small-scale socialization and massive collaboration.

Experimental Pedagogy7:40

Prompt-Overview of Project and Peer Assessment4:42

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Pedro Lasch
Visual Artist and Associate Research Professor
Duke Art, Art History & Visual Studies
Nato Thompson
Chief Curator
Creative Time

Welcome back to the Art of the MOOC.

This part of our MOOC should be especially exciting,

because we're going to make art together.

So, let's start. Each week, remember,

you will have two options to choose from:

a social method option or a worldwide flash mob option.

Depending on the week,

you may choose one or the other.

You don't always have to feel like you're a social person,

you will do the flash mob,

or you're an introspective person,

therefore, you will do the other option.

Just pay attention to the materials and then lecture and then be intuitive about it,

but also remember to challenge yourself and the people around.

Generally speaking, our social methods are about using

social structures in our immediate surroundings as the very material of your art.

The flash mob, on the other hand,

tends to imply reaching out to others,

whether it's in your immediate city or town, but even online,

and then create these very fast provocative events.

For this module, as a social method option,

we're encouraging you to do what one may call an anti-lecture.

Each one of you will have to think about

an assignment that you experienced in your educational past.

An assignment that you felt was incredibly antisocial.

It may even be an assignment that you learned a lot from,

but one where you felt like you were forced into this position of antisocial existence.

Why would we want to focus on that?

There are many traditions within education.

Beginning with this idea,

the dictum of Know Thyself,

that are premised on the idea of introspection and individualist knowledge.

It should not come as a surprise than in a MOOC on social practice,

public art, that we would want to challenge

this notion of introspection and individualism.

We don't necessarily mean that this is a bad thing but for us to create social knowledge,

we need to also learn to turn educational ideas into a social form.

And so, we're asking you to go back to that moment in time,

that particular assignment you had in your past, and think,

how can I turn that into a social project,

into a social assignment?

Something that will require me to work with

other people to resolve that very same question,

to reach that knowledge.

Whether it was a math problem,

chemistry problem, some type of history question,

none of that really matters.

It should matter to you and to those who you invite to

participate in the social process.

Hello, everyone. For this week's project,

you will all be doing

a special collaboration with one of our guest presenter, Cesare Pietroiusti,

it's the only project that students will be doing and in

an entire MOOC that is proposed by our guest presenter.

And we're calling it a mass drawing experiment.

It's basically a flash mob,

but in the form of a drawing that then gets posted on the Coursera platform.

So Cesare, can you tell students how they can make this project?

Yes, it is very simple.

It's going to be very simple.

You only have to make a drawing on a 20-by-20 centimeter paper.

And you can use any technique and it can take as long as you want.

The only condition is that the drawing you're going to

make will be unfinished. Incomplete.

And once you won't be

finished with the drawing because the assignment is that you should not finish that,

but whenever you think it's in a good state of unfinishedness,

you will scan it or photograph it and post it on the Coursera platform.

And it's the evaluators in our peer evaluation process who will complete the drawing.

They will conclude it, they will finish it,

and it's at that point that we will post it

collectively to the Coursera platform and see what has happened,

because we're making the work together,

we're not only judging it to get it, right?

And this is something that this mass drawing's exercise will do.

So, have fun.

Good.