FAST45 is funded by the Erasmus + Knowledge Alliance programme of the European Union.

FAST45 aims to create and test new methodologies, envisage future scenarios, establish long-term international collaboration, and develop tools and initiatives that will empower arts institutions not only to anticipate an unknown future but to actively shape it.

FOOTNOTES 2045: Annotating the Futures of Arts Education summer school was organised by School of Commons, Zürich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and took place from 29 August to 1 September 2022, on the ZHdK campus. The Summer School was part of the FAST45 project (Futures Art School Trends 2045).

The 5-day event gathered academics, (art) professionals, students and curious people who jointly worked around seven focus topics surrounding higher arts educational futures:

DIS/CONTINUITIES_Digital Cultures of Education

ORGANOLOGY_Art and Society

CHAOS/MOSIS_Inter- and Transdisciplinarity

COMMONALITIES_Knowledge Commons

RE/PROGRAMMING_Institutional Structures and Strategies

SYMBIOSIS_Ecological and Social Sustainability

PLASTICITY_the Institutional vs. the Non-Institutional

Throughout Footnotes Summer School, FAST45 explored Live Action Role-Play (LARP) as a method for futures thinking with the support of LARP artists Carina Erdmann and Steph Holl-Trieu (0ct0p0s). Following the Live Action Role-Play method, all participants assumed fictional characters for the duration of the summer school and agreed on meeting in the (imagined) year of 2045. All lectures and panel discussions were moderated in live-action role-play character by interdisciplinary artist Monika G. Dorniak. While the basic future scenario of the Footnotes gathering in the year 2045 was set, to a certain extent, by a group of selected organisers and artists, a main element of the workshops and lectures was to develop more detailed future realities of arts education in 2045, together. This process was strongly supported by role-play, which helped to interpret, embody and shape future realities. It was strongly emphasised that for participation in the Summer School, no prior experience in Live Action Role-Play was required.

The full title of the 2022 Summer School was Footnotes: Annotating the futures of arts education. This title describes both a space and a movement that critically engages with the futures of art education in hybrid spaces and over longer durations of time. As such, communication, exchange and knowledge creation took place before, during and after the Summer School, via a dedicated Learning Platform.

In the context of the Summer School, Footnotes can be defined a place for trans-temporal exchange. It recalls various practices that have historically marginalised, be that as forms of resistance found in feminist practices of critical pedagogy, traditions of black radical thought, artistic gestures of the 19th century, or forms of intervention and conversation experienced between different readers as seen in medieval scriptures. This kind of analysis and annotation was mostly used to critically reflect upon and subvert the Learning Platform and the knowledge body that is enlisted there.

What is Live Action Role-Play (LARP)?

In Live Action Role-Playing (LARP) Games, players pursue goals within a fictional setting. This setting is landscaped through a real-world environment. The players interact with each other in character. LARP Games can be played in a multiplicity of settings (not solely performative art settings).

Through its evolution, Live Action Role-Playing has emerged as a new performative art form that collectively performs realities.

At Footnotes, FAST45 experimented with Live Action Role-Play as a method for futures thinking in art school and for art school futures.

Do you want to dive deeper into Live Action Role-Play? Jump to the LARP Glossary!

It is the year 2045. This year’s Footnotes gathering will be hosted by the School of Commons. This meeting was named after a function within the Learning Platform, a tool devised in 2021 to facilitate knowledge and resource exchange, host digital learning formats (seminars, lectures, etc.), coordinate the use of physical resources (workshops, seminar rooms, technical equipment, etc.) and publish and present theoretical and artistic practices.

Slowly over the last 24 years, the platform was deployed globally across numerous Art and Design Schools. In some places, academies and educational institutions decided to repurpose and cut back on their financing of physical classrooms, studios, and workshops and invest heavily in digital infrastructures such as data centers and connectivity services. The reasoning was that needs-based rentals of workspaces and equipment would be far more economical than the maintenance of often centuries-old buildings. Of course, this was not the case everywhere. Other schools decided to use the Learning Platform ‘lightly’, emphasising the need to meet and study in physical environments. Without a doubt, these different models emerged due to the changing and asymmetric educational policies adopted by regional, national and international governance bodies.

Yet over this same time period, another trend emerged, threading its way through faculties and institutions.

Footnotes, a standardised functionality hard-coded into the Learning Platform, grew into a buzzing place of transgenerational exchange. Initially thought to simply comment and annotate an institutionally canonised corpora of knowledge, over time different working groups formed. In activating the space of the margin, these groups revisited feminist theories of critical pedagogy, black radical tradition, decolonial methodologies, artistic gestures of subversion, and practices found in medieval scriptures, to understand this environment as one with a rich history of emancipatory struggle and resistance.

For more than twenty-two years, the Footnotes function of the Learning Platform has become its own platform for individuals and working groups to discuss and organise around issues surrounding arts education. Over time, many different conversations and threads emerged between the lines. These threads coalesced into working groups, in-person meetings, and larger gatherings of translocal exchange. In April 2045, one of these groups called the School of Commons put out a call for a gathering. It didn’t take long until seven engaged groups signed up. They call themselves: DIS/CONTINUITIES, ORGANOLOGY, CHAOS/MOSIS, COMMONALITIES, RE/PROGRAMMING, SYMBIOSIS, and PLASTICITY. Each group would explore its own unique theme within the Summer School programme.

In a long message thread, the groups decided that there would be 2 ½ days dedicated to workshops, while the last 1 ½ days would host a conference. The latter would be committed to synthesising the many discussions and thought-forms that emerged over the last decades and were processed during the preliminary workshop sessions.

During the workshops, the groups endeavoured to deepen their understanding of their own research and practices, situating them both within their local environments and wider global developments.

Carving out new pathways for arts education and zones to nurture common bodies of knowledge builds on the efforts of many generations. Therefore some of the working groups will be annotating video lectures from future archives of the past. Others have invited remote speakers to share experiences, provocations, and reflections from their own contexts and conditions.

Because not everyone will be able to attend, newfound insights will be shared through the Footnotes Channel, the shared knowledge base of Footnotes. In addition, those who are not able to attend will be remotely embodied by a real-life avatar, who will visit the different groups over the course of the workshops and transmit questions and comments.

All FOOTNOTES panel discussions and Q&A are moderated by interdisciplinary artist and time traveller Monika Dorniak.

DIS/CONTINUITIES: Clara Balaguer (remote) Baruch Gottlieb (on-site)

ORGANOLOGY: Edwin Ramirez, Criptonite (remote) Noor Abed & Lara Khaldi, School of Intrusions (on-site)

CHAOS/MOSIS: manuel arturo abreu (remote) Philip Bergmann and Thea Reifler, Shedhalle (on-site)

COMMONALITIES: Silvia Federici and Jack Hogan (remote) Brandy Butler (on-site)

RE/PROGRAMMING: Marta Malo de Molina (remote) Lina Dokuzović (on-site)

SYMBIOSIS: Ama Josephine B. Johnstone (remote) Klasse Klima, Johann Otten and Lena Schubert (on-site)

PLASTICITY: Omsk Social Club (remote) C&, Will Fredo Furtado (on-site)

Year: 2 0 4 5

August 29 09:00 – 09:30 Arrival 09:30 – 10:00 Welcome 10:00 – 12:00 Introduction to Footnotes 12:00 – 13:30 LUNCH BREAK 13:30 – 15:00 Group Building 15:00 – 15:20 BREAK 15:20 – 16:30 Video Input and Initial Inquiry 16:30 – 16:45 BREAK 16:45 – 17:30 ASK: Factor Questions 17:30 Apéro August 30 09:30 – 10:50 Creating Common Ground 10:50 – 11:10 BREAK 11:10 – 13:00 ANSWER: World 13:00 – 14:30 LUNCH BREAK 14:30 – 15:45 Issues and Implications 15:45 – 16:00 BREAK 16:00 – 17:30 Preparation Conference August 31 09:30 – 10:00 BODYWORK 10:00 – 11:00 Looking Back 11:00 – 11:15 BREAK 11:15 – 13:00 Conference Preparation 13:00 – 15:30 LUNCH BREAK 16:00 START

Conference: August 31 – September 1

August 31 15:30 – 16:00 Arrival Time and Drinks 16:00 – 16:10 Welcome Note 16:10 – 16:40 Footnotes: The Prologue 16:40 – 17:40 🫁 ORGANOLOGY: Art School & Society with School of Intrusions 17:40 – 18:10 BREAK 18:10 – 19:10 🔋 DIS/CONTINUITIES: Digital Cultures of Education with Baruch Gottlieb 19:10 – 19:40 Footnotes: Intermission 19:40 – 20:40 Apéro

September 1 9:00 – 10:00 ☕️ Welcome Coffee 10:00 – 10:30 Footnotes: Intermission, Intro 10:30 – 11:30 🧠 PLASTICITY: Institutional vs. Non-Institutional Education with Will Fredo Furtado, Contemporary And 11:30 – 12:30 🕸 CHAOS/MOSIS: Within and Beyond the Discipline with Thea Reifler & Philipp Bergman, Shedhalle 12:30 – 14:00 LUNCH BREAK 14:00 – 15:00 🕹 RE/PROGRAMMING: Institutional Structures and Strategies with Lina Dokuzović 15:00 – 16:00 🦠 SYMBIOSIS Ecological and Social Sustainability with Klasse Klima 16:00 – 16:45 BREAK 16:45 – 17:45 🌀 COMMONALITIES: Learning from the Commons with Brandy Butler 17:45 – 18:15 Footnotes: The Epilogue 18:15 – 19:00 Apéro 19:00 – 21:00 Dinner

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Dive deeper

01

👣 Legacy Russell 2021: AICA-USA Distinguished Lecture.

02

👣 Sadie Plant (1997), Zeroes and Ones. Digital Women and the new technoculture “Only when digital networks arranged themselves in threads and links did footnotes begin to walk all over what had once been the bodies of organized texts.”

03

👣 Florian Schneider (2010), Footnotes On Education.

04

👣 bell hooks (1994), Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom.

05

📄 Nana Adusei-Poku (2020), Catch me if you can.

06

📄 Sophia Kosmaoglou (2019), Syllabus of Radical Pedagogy Research & Reading Groups.

07

📄 Patricia Reed (2019), Orientation in a Big World: On the Necessity of Horizonless Perspectives.

08

📄 Sandro Mezzadra / Brett Neilson (2008), Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor.

09

📄 Hakim Bey (1991), T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone].

10

📄 Jo Freeman aka Joreen (first print in 1972), The Tyranny of Structurelessness.