deschooling.classroom(o^o)

ТКХ и Контрапункт

објавуваат

ОТВОРЕН ДЕН

РАСШКОЛУВАНО.ЗНАЕЊЕ (o^o)

[колективно самообразование во уметноста и културата]

1 јуни, cialis 40mg Културен центар Точка

search size-full, wp-image-158, frame” title=”open-day” src=”http://www.deschoolingclassroom.tkh-generator.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/open-day.jpg” alt=”open-day” width=”405″ height=”275″ />

[програма]

20:00

Вовед  во  проектот Расшколувано знаење

Сузана Милевска и Ана Вујановиќ

Расшколувано знаење е проект за колективно самообразование кој е насочен кон современата независна културна сцена во регионот. Неговата цел е да ги истражува и да ги промовира алтернативите на хиерархискиот образовен модел во уметноста и во културата. Од методолошка гледна точка, проектот ги напушта концептите на индивидуално авторство и на стручност, а се залага за отворени колективни образовни структури во кои самоорганизираните заедници спроведуваат продукција, размена и дистрибуција на знаењето според хоризонталните организациски принципи.

20:20

Презентација на ТкХ (Теорија која хода)

ТкХ е независна платформа за теорија и пракса од Белград, која се занимава со унапредување на современите изведувачки уметности и критичките дискурси во локалниот контекст, како и на нивна афирмација во странство. Активностите на ТкХ вклучуваат: објавување списание за теорија на изведувачките уметности, самообразовни програми, on-line платформа, уметнички и теориски настани, интердисциплинарни перформанси итн.

ТкХ исто така активно е вклучена во расправите поврзани со прашањата на културната политика. Соработува со неколку самоорганизирани иницијативи од Белград (Other Scene), од регионот (Clubture) и пошироко (PAF), во насока на подобрување на инфраструктурните и дискурзивни потенцијали на независната културна сцена.

20:45

Проекција на филmот „Укради го овој филм 2″ (STEAL THIS FILM 2)

„Ова навистина се чудни времиња. Додека толку многу внимание во доминантните медиуми се посветува на ‘борбите’ меѓу старите и новите начини на дистрибуција, меѓу пиратите и институциите задолжени за заштита на авторските права, изгледа дека најголемиот дел од  нас веќе и изгубиле нешто и добиле. Знаеме кои се победниците. Тогаш зошто уште да се зборува?

Ако Укради го овој филм 2 се покаже корисен при регрутацијата на нови луѓе во групата на оние што се подготвени да размислуваат ‘надвор од концептите на интелектуалната сопственост’, креативно да размислуваат за иднината на дистрибуцијата, продукцијата и креативноста, во тој случај сметаме дека навистина сме ја постигнале нашата цел”

21:30

Распуст – Post school party

Добра шанса за неформален разговор со можните учесници и сите оние кои се заинтересирани за проектот и неговиот почеток за време на Отворената недела што ќе се одржи во Белград од 13 до 16 јуни.

Забавата е проследена со атрактивните поттикнувачки закуски во организација на ХНУ.

Расшколувано знаење е партнерски проект на ТкХ (Теорија која хода) платформа за теорија и практика, од Белград (http://tkh-generator.net) и НВО Контрапункт (Културен центар Точка) од Скопје (http://kontrapunkt-mk.org), кој се реализира со финансиска поддршка од Швајцарската програма за култура за Западен Балкан (http://scp-ba.net).

DESCHOOLING CLASSROOM(o^o) project 2009/10
[Collective self-education in the arts and culture]

TkH and Kontrapunkt announce the call for participation at the one-year Deschooling Classroom project for collective self-education. The project is aimed to students, viagra 60mg cultural workers and emerging professionals in the fields of contemporary art and culture from Serbia and Macedonia.

Deschooling Classroom project addresses the contemporary independent cultural scenes in the region and aims to research and promote alternatives to the hierarchical models of education in the art and culture. Methodologically, diet the project moves away from the concepts of individual authorship and expertise and advocates open collective educational structures where self-organised communities facilitate horizontal production, cialis 40mg exchange and distribution of knowledge.

The project is organised by TkH (Walking Theory) platform for performing arts theory and practice from Belgrade (http://tkh-generator.net) in partnership with organization Kontrapunkt, from Skopje (http://kontrapunkt-mk.org), and financially supported by the Swiss Cultural Programme in the Western Balkans.

PROJECT STRUCTURE

The participants will go through the process of collective self-education and simultaneously will develop collaborative cultural initiatives in working groups.

The working groups will be created according to various themes and fields of interest of the selected applicants, such as: curating in visual and non-visual arts, interdisciplinary dramaturgy, free software and open source technology, words and images, etc. All the working groups have regional character and include 6-8 members from both Belgrade and Skopje.

The participants will create the contents and projects through the following activities:

* Open Week is a five-day event, consisting of workshops, lectures and presentations. The open week will be organised in Belgrade, in June 12-16, 2009, and it is departing points for each group. The Open Day will take place in Skopje on June 1, as a presentation of the project to the local audience and to the potential applicants interested in participating the project and its launch during the Open Week (Belgrade, 13-16 June).

* Summer School is intense one-week educational event. It is created by the participants of all groups, for themselves and also for the others interested in the topics, especially those from the region. The summer school will be organised in Ohrid in August 16-23, 2009.

* Incubator comprises of a six-month collaborative work of the working groups. Their curricula will be designed by the participants, and include a continual self-educational process of the groups in Belgrade and Skopje via video link, and programmes facilitated by invited guest lecturers.

* Timeshare Campus is an accommodation/work structure offered by the project to the groups in the period of March and April 2010 to facilitate collaboration during the time of preparing collective cultural initiatives. The collaborative works can be e.g. video, fanzine, installation, web site, etc. They will be publicly presented in the region after the project’s completion.

HOW TO APPLY

Both individuals and groups can apply.

Any discrimination on ethnic, gender, generational, sexual, religious, etc. basis is not accepted within this project.

Please send your application consisting of:

-          narrative biography (up to 500 words);
-          one example of your work (in any media);
-          one page motivation letter, with indicates field of interest; and
-          your contact (email and cell phone).
-          In case of a group application please indicate potential collaborators.

To:

Deschooling Classroom :: dsc@tkh-generator.net

Deadline: June 17, 2009.

The decisions will be announced by June 19, 2009.

For further information please visit: www.deschoolingclassroom.tkh-generator.net, or contact us at: dsc@tkh-generator.net

related concepts and terms: research, no rx art practice as research, experiment, de-institutionalization, deschooling, self-organization, methodology, open source

Current cultural-artistic initiatives and conditions of work at the independents scenes today require new formats of education, learning, knowledge production and sharing, that go beyond models established in official educational institutions. As the scenes grow, the formats become more articulated and organized, thus emphasizing the importance of the process of self-organized learning in collective instead of gained amount of knowledge as the result of this process. Besides, the articulation of the formats render their methodologies available for sharing, further applying and/or improving by others. It also prevents us from over-enthusiastic understanding them.

Among characteristic organized formats of work in collective self-education, one can find: workshop, laboratory, working group or workgroup, and reading group.

Workshop and laboratory, as we know them in contemporary art and culture, are similar formats, sometimes considered variants. Moreover their etymology is the same – both are about “work” or “labor”. However, they are not the same nor at practical neither on conceptual level.[1]

Workshop is the most often about skills or similar particular (piece of) knowledge. It is realized as organized passing on of certain technique, specific knowledge, skill, experience, or method. Workshop is led by a workshop leader (up to 3) who already has or knows that technique, skill etc, and includes several participants who are interested in it. In collective self-education, a group gathered around common interest or aim is the one who invites certain workshop leader according to its concrete need. Workshop is framed in time, and it usually lasts from one day to one week. Laboratory is meant as wider and less organized infrastructure for artificial providing optimal conditions for experiments, discussions, and creative processes of a group of collaborators. An educational laboratory shouldn’t be led; it rather gathers horizontally collaborators in a cultural-artistic process in order to put certain subjects in question, to test methods, or to try new solutions and ideas. Therefore, there is usually a moderator or facilitator – instead of leader – of the laboratory. Laboratory can be realized without predetermined duration, as an open process, but because of economic reasons it is actually a rare case and it usually appears as a problem-solving format.

Speaking conceptually, although work is starting point for both workshop and laboratory, it is treated differently. Work-shop (in previous periods connected with crafts) is about “selling and buying” knowledge that can be integrated in future work of the participants. On the other hand, laboratory (from lat. laborare > laboratorium “a place for labor or work”) is about improving the work through extending knowledge about it, inventing it, questioning it, or destabilizing its premises by putting it into an experimental situation.[2]

Working group in the addressed field is a community gathered around common educational aim: particular task, research project, problematics, topics… It is temporary format motivated just by the aim, and after it is completed working group disintegrates. Number of members, their roles, as well as duration and organization of a working group depend on the very members and type of the aim. In the situation of collective self-education this format implies a “post-pedagogical” shifting the roles of those who know and those who are taught, those who ask questions and those who give answers. In that way each member of the group can learn from the others and learn them, orient the work of the group and follow the stream proposed by someone else. Because of the complexity caused by multi-directional “togetherness” of educational process and one predetermined aim on the other hand, working group requires precise organizational structure and decision-making process. Otherwise it can easily transforms in standard hierarchical educational or research situation.[3]

Reading group is also a temporary educational community, but whose work is intellectually orientated and focused on studying certain literature. It is usually not motivated by a particular task or aim, but by common field of interest and will to research on it by reading, discussing and thinking in a collective situation (but without a request for togetherness). Typical form of work within reading group is “seminar”. It is practiced also in official high education, when a group of students self-organize themselves in order to read together certain book or author. This kind of work concentrated around written material implies Rancierean horizontal educational situation, where “the book” is material artifact that engages directly all present intelligences in equally valuable understanding and interpreting it.[4] From the process of work within a reading group who benefits the most are the individual participants, who can work separately from each other and whose collaboration within the group don’t necessarily requires solidarity or common vision of cultural or artistic practice. However, it can be a starting point for certain group work or action in future.

---

[1] See more about art practice as research, laboratory and experiment in contemporary art in Ana Vujanovic: entries “Reasearch, Laboratory/Experiment”, and “Open Work”, Performance Research: Lexicon, vol. 11/ no. 3, Routledge, London, 2007.

[2] See more about popularity of research and labs in contemporary performing arts in Mårten Spångberg: “Overwhelming, The Doing of Research” (manuscript), 2006.

[3] See more in Oxana Timofeeva, “From the ‘Inoperative Community’ to the ‘Workgroup’”, at http://magazines.documenta.de/frontend/article.php?IdLanguage=1&NrArticle=702, May 17, 2009 / “Od ‘neoperativne zajednice’ do ‘radne grupe’”, TkH, no. 13, Belgrade, 2007.

[4] More precisely it is the situation of professor Jacotot; see: Jacques Ranciere, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.

Many of today’s experts in the areas of  education, urologist economy and community development have come to the conclusion that educational institutions alone can not prepare pupils and students for what awaits them after they complete their formal education. The key proponents of the new educational tendencies are advocating the introduction of new approaches that would unite study related activities conducted within the institutions with experiences and knowledge already existing in the community where they live and work.

Students frequently complain that the classes they attend are irrelevant and are not substantially related to what is happening outside the classroom. Because of this situation, shop they are very often not motivated to study, nurse because they perceive the educational process as something imposed, rather than as an exciting opportunity to improve themselves and contribute for the benefit of others. During the last few decades there has been a growing consensus on the need to change the educational systems. However, this reform should not be focused only on what is to be the subject of study, but also on how and where the educational process is to be conducted. Setting aside the idea that the place of the educational process lies solely in educational institutions  creates an opportunity for the process  to be  “opened” to such concepts as self-education, education carried out as part of the work of NGO’s, civic sector activities, activism, etc.

These concepts use the term community-based knowledge as a broad framework for the processes which encompass “service learning” (a method under which students or participants learn and develop through active participation in thoughtfully organised service that is conducted in and meets the needs of the community), experimental learning, school-to-work learning, internships, life-long learning, etc. It is important in this context to point out that the emphasis has been  on the desire of those involved in the educational process to learn or acquire skills related to those community aspects for which they think will be the most beneficial to their professional advancement and development.

In this context, the term “community” refers to schools, as well as all other formal and informal institutions in the place where the person involved in the educational process lives. The concept of community has been extended to include all sources of education that can be found and used on the internet.

The community-base learning principles apply to the changing nature of society, the person learning, the learning process, as well as to the sources of learning. The basic principles can be defined as follows:

-         Education must be seen as a continuous process which starts from pre-school age,  is carried out through various formal educational institutions, for then to continue as a life-long educational process for adults;

-         Learning is something that the individual does for him or herself. That’s why the process requires complete involvement both of the learner and the professor/mentor;

-         The future needs of employers will be focused not only on highly educated individuals, but also on  individuals with a versatile knowledge set including critical thinking, team work, as well as the ability to apply  acquired knowledge;

-         The problems facing educational workers are broader than the opportunities available to schools to solve them. For this reason, the involvement of the general community and all agencies working in the area of knowledge and its application is of key importance.

One of the more interesting aspects of this process is the dialogical relation between various different areas. Thus, according to Poulsen, this is a “method of learning/teaching which brings together the experience of community service with academic knowledge, personal advancement and civic responsibility “. (Poulsen, 1994)

Until know, the educational systems have been focused primarily on teaching. However, this has been changing in recent years, with the focus being re-directed from teaching to learning, from externally determined “expert” curricula and methodologies, towards learner-centred knowledge, based on experience and linking of knowledge, skills and attitudes necessary to function in the dramatically changing world in which we live in.

According to Hamilton, the role of mentors in the community-based learning process has been problematic and critically perceived. The mentors provide advice and encouragement to the participants in the process, sharing their knowledge and experiences as part of a personal and long-term relation. (Hamilton 1990, p. 156). This is a reason more to pay special attention to the process itself. Along those lines, Berryman and Bailey point out that “passive, fragmentary and decontextualised trainings organised around the idea of providing true answers adds up to ineffective learning “. (Berryman and Bailey, 1992.)

Erica Sorohan sums up her experiences from this area in the following 5 key aspects:

-         We position learning within our own personal experience, which is why we learn best when we manage the learning process ourselves;

-         We learn most effectively when we learn in some context, which is why learning  should be directly related to work;

-         We learn from those around us, which is why we should be able to communicate and cooperate openly and freely with others;

-         We constantly generate knowledge, which is why we need to know how to encompass what we know and how to share it with others;

-         We learn unconsciously, which is why we need to learn how to recognise and question our implicit assumptions. (Erica Sorohan, 1993)

References:

Berryman, S., and Bailey, T. The Double Helix of Education and the Economy. New York: The Institute on Education and the Economy, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1992.

Hamilton, S. F. Apprenticeship for Adulthood: Preparing Youth for the Future. New York: The Free Press, 1990.

Poulsen, S. Learning is the Thing: Insights Emerging From a National Conference on Service-Learning, School Reform, and Higher Education. Roseville, MN: National Youth Leadership Council, 1994.

Sorohan, E. “We Do; Therefore, We Learn.” Training and Development 47/10 (October, 1993): 47-55.

related concepts and terms: research, dermatologist art practice as research, experiment, de-institutionalization, deschooling, self-organization, methodology, open source

Current cultural-artistic initiatives and conditions of work at the independents scenes today require new formats of education, learning, knowledge production and sharing, that go beyond models established in official educational institutions. As the scenes grow, the formats become more articulated and organized, thus emphasizing the importance of the process of self-organized learning in collective instead of gained amount of knowledge as the result of this process. Besides, the articulation of the formats render their methodologies available for sharing, further applying and/or improving by others. It also prevents us from over-enthusiastic understanding them.

Among characteristic organized formats of work in collective self-education, one can find: workshop, laboratory, working group or workgroup, and reading group.

Workshop and laboratory, as we know them in contemporary art and culture, are similar formats, sometimes considered variants. Moreover their etymology is the same – both are about “work” or “labor”. However, they are not the same nor at practical neither on conceptual level.[1]

Workshop is the most often about skills or similar particular (piece of) knowledge. It is realized as organized passing on of certain technique, specific knowledge, skill, experience, or method. Workshop is led by a workshop leader (up to 3) who already has or knows that technique, skill etc, and includes several participants who are interested in it. In collective self-education, a group gathered around common interest or aim is the one who invites certain workshop leader according to its concrete need. Workshop is framed in time, and it usually lasts from one day to one week. Laboratory is meant as wider and less organized infrastructure for artificial providing optimal conditions for experiments, discussions, and creative processes of a group of collaborators. An educational laboratory shouldn’t be led; it rather gathers horizontally collaborators in a cultural-artistic process in order to put certain subjects in question, to test methods, or to try new solutions and ideas. Therefore, there is usually a moderator or facilitator – instead of leader – of the laboratory. Laboratory can be realized without predetermined duration, as an open process, but because of economic reasons it is actually a rare case and it usually appears as a problem-solving format.

Speaking conceptually, although work is starting point for both workshop and laboratory, it is treated differently. Work-shop (in previous periods connected with crafts) is about “selling and buying” knowledge that can be integrated in future work of the participants. On the other hand, laboratory (from lat. laborare > laboratorium “a place for labor or work”) is about improving the work through extending knowledge about it, inventing it, questioning it, or destabilizing its premises by putting it into an experimental situation.[2]

Working group in the addressed field is a community gathered around common educational aim: particular task, research project, problematics, topics… It is temporary format motivated just by the aim, and after it is completed working group disintegrates. Number of members, their roles, as well as duration and organization of a working group depend on the very members and type of the aim. In the situation of collective self-education this format implies a “post-pedagogical” shifting the roles of those who know and those who are taught, those who ask questions and those who give answers. In that way each member of the group can learn from the others and learn them, orient the work of the group and follow the stream proposed by someone else. Because of the complexity caused by multi-directional “togetherness” of educational process and one predetermined aim on the other hand, working group requires precise organizational structure and decision-making process. Otherwise it can easily transforms in standard hierarchical educational or research situation.[3]

Reading group is also a temporary educational community, but whose work is intellectually orientated and focused on studying certain literature. It is usually not motivated by a particular task or aim, but by common field of interest and will to research on it by reading, discussing and thinking in a collective situation (but without a request for togetherness). Typical form of work within reading group is “seminar”. It is practiced also in official high education, when a group of students self-organize themselves in order to read together certain book or author. This kind of work concentrated around written material implies Rancierean horizontal educational situation, where “the book” is material artifact that engages directly all present intelligences in equally valuable understanding and interpreting it.[4] From the process of work within a reading group who benefits the most are the individual participants, who can work separately from each other and whose collaboration within the group don’t necessarily requires solidarity or common vision of cultural or artistic practice. However, it can be a starting point for certain group work or action in future.

---

[1] See more about art practice as research, laboratory and experiment in contemporary art in Ana Vujanovic: entries “Reasearch, Laboratory/Experiment”, and “Open Work”, Performance Research: Lexicon, vol. 11/ no. 3, Routledge, London, 2007.

[2] See more about popularity of research and labs in contemporary performing arts in Mårten Spångberg: “Overwhelming, The Doing of Research” (manuscript), 2006.

[3] See more in Oxana Timofeeva, “From the ‘Inoperative Community’ to the ‘Workgroup’”, at http://magazines.documenta.de/frontend/article.php?IdLanguage=1&NrArticle=702, May 17, 2009 / “Od ‘neoperativne zajednice’ do ‘radne grupe’”, TkH, no. 13, Belgrade, 2007.

[4] More precisely it is the situation of professor Jacotot; see: Jacques Ranciere, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.

related terms: deinstitutionalisation, disease self-education, search informal education, here homeschooling, life-long-learning, networked learning / learning webs, self-organisation, vernacular

The critical term deschooling is not at all about a kind of Pink Floydian “we don’t need no education”. It is not about being done with education all together and it does not entail any calling to riots against schooling. Before all it questions what kind of education should replace the institutionalised, monopolised, hierarchicised and commodified education as we know it for centuries. Although deschooling resonates a kind of poststructuralist and deconstructionist model of critical interpretation of the power regimes of knowledge based control society and education system of control (think Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze) we actually owe the term “deschooling” to Ivan Illich. He coined the term deschooling in 1971 in his “old-skool” book Deschooling Society. [i]

Ivan Illich was an Austrian philosopher, social critic, polymath and polyglot. As a priest (actually he resigned the Roman Catholic church later in his life) he travelled and lived in various places (Mexico, United States, Germany) where he committed to different human causes. He was a precursor of postcolonial critique of the church interpreting its emissaries and foreign missions as a form of industrial hegemony and, as such, an act of “war on subsistence.” More importantly, he has argued for the creation of convivial, rather than manipulative institutions, for universal and self-directed education and intentional social relations in fluid, informal arrangements. Although sometimes referring to already exhisting ideas of Everett Reimer and Basil Yeaxlee, his work is uniquely bold and reflects his critical stances on the corrupted institutions of contemporary Western culture and their effects based on the provenance and accepted practices of education, medicine, work, traffic, energy use, and economic development. He has clearly pointed out the frequent confusion of teaching with learning, grade pursuing with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.

One comes to several interconnected ideas within the call for deschooling. One of the most important and most advanced of all alternatives to the institutionalised education is the early concept of networked learning found in Illich’s work. Before even Internet was widely spread he wrote that the most radical alternative to school would be a network or service which gave each man the same opportunity to share his current concern with others motivated by the same concern. [ii]His description of the eventual networked learning system sounds extremely innovative and at moments even prophetic for the period:

The operation of a peer-matching network would be simple. The user would identify himself by name and address and describe the activity for which he sought a peer. A computer would send him back the names and addresses of all those who had inserted the same description. It is amazing that such a simple utility has never been used on a broad scale for publicly valued activity. [iii]

Neetworked learning is an important leap that helps us understand the relevance of Illich’s radical thinking regarding changes needed in education for the launch of more contemporary discussions on self-education. It is a process of developing and maintaining connections with people and information, and communicating in such a way so as to support one another’s learning. If the institutionalisation of education is considered to tend towards the institutionalisation of society, coversevely he held that the ideas for de-institutionalising education are the starting point for a de-institutionalised society.

Network learning (similarly to community based learning) was coined much later and is based on the principles of learning where individuals establish an online identity and formulate relationships with other people and information to communicate and develop knowledge. However, regardless to its technological difference it sounds exactly as Illich’s profecy:

The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring. [iv]

The concept of vernacular is related mostly to the way in which thought language neglects mother tongue but obviously for Illich the process of destabilization of the vernacular language was also the starting point for establishing control society through education.

Although very important in the late 60s and 70s, from the 80s Illich’s work has been often neglected for being too radical and controversial. Some of the other attributes applied to his personality read: reactionary, leftist, conservative, Marxist, anarchist, liberation theologist, prophet, guru, convivial guru, teacher, dreamer, thinker, philosopher, non-conformist, critic of institutions, intellectual sniper, even ‘libertarian.’ However his own complex and universal education and his amazing erudition make his texts continously surprising and relevant readings within different contexts, particularly in contemporary projects focusing on self-education such as Deschooling Classroom: http://www.deschoolingclassroom.tkh-generator.net/?cat=4 . [v]

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[i] Illich, Ivan, Deschooling Society, Harrow; 1st Harrow Edition, edition 1972, or Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd, 2000

[ii] Illich, Ivan, “Introduction” Deschooling Society, <http://ournature.org/~novembre/illich/1970_deschooling.html>, Accessed on 2009-05-15 .

[iii] Illich, Ivan, Deschooling Society, chapter six <http://ournature.org/~novembre/illich/1970_deschooling.html>, Accessed on 2009-05-15 .

[iv] Ibid., chapter six

[v] See more about Illich’s concept of deschooling and his other works in Smith, M. K. (1997, 2004, 2008), “Ivan Illich: deschooling, conviviality and the possibilities for informal education and lifelong learning”, The encyclopedia of informal education, http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-illic.htm, Accessed on 2009-05-17

In the context of contemporary society and particularly art and culture marked by transition from social function of politics to the function of economy, ed the question of organization is becoming a crucial point.

In the text DagegenDabei Nicolas Siepen defines self-organization as concept witch is giving a “specific meaning to a general term of collectiveness”.[1] This author is making a difference between leftist and rightist concepts of collectiveness. Self-organization comes from the leftist arsenal, stuff and is on opposite side in relation to the rightist terms and concepts marked by intolerance towards conflicts “within that might be visible on the outside.” In that sense self-organization presupposes flexible “we”, check different from static “we” which is in opposition to “the other”. This flexible “we”, according to Siepen, is in fact “we, the others”. One of key terms connected to self-organization, according to Iskra Gešoska, is solidarity. She understands this term as a path towards transparency of the Self, trough flexibility towards Otherness.[2]

Term self-organization is connected with theory of complex systems. It presents one of the most sophisticated and most complex systems. It generates from its own inside dynamic, without being guided or managed by an outside source. In that sense, self-organization doesn’t implicate, in any way, disorganization, or non-organization. Self-organized system is always generative, in the sense that it is not hierarchically structured and thus enables multiple flows of information. It is organized from bellow or bottom-up, and not top-down, like institutional models.

In practical/political sense self-organization can be understood as a way of resistance or a way of intervention into existing models of organization.

Self-organization in art is a model of organization witch opens a possibility for creation of alternative spaces inside of existing institutionally organized network.

In relation to s-o-s project this means: collaborators are building for themselves alternative educational model in non-hierarchical and rhizomatic way of collaboration, every one is involved in all segments of project: organization, decision-making process, research, etc.

This kind of model is in close relationship with the term (workers’) self-management.

According to: TkH, Journal for Performing Arts Theory, no 11: Self-organization issue, Belgrade, October 2006

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[1] Nicolas Siepen, »DagegenDabei / Thereby Against; Fight for Relevance, or the Relation between self-organisation, institutionalisation and Power (Berlin)«, TkH no. 11: Self-organization issue, Belgrade, 2006, p. 80

[2] Iskra Gešoska, “The Archaeology of Solidarity”, TkH no. 11, Belgrade, 2006,  p. 76

Self-management is a set of methods, pestilence skills, info and techniques by which individuals or groups can effectively direct their own activities toward the achievement of objectives and goals.

Workers’ self-management[1] (radničko samoupravljanje) is an organizational model of economics where workers have a decision-making power contrarily to the traditional authoritative concept of organization where there is division between those who make decisions (management board, hemorrhoids director, boss) and those who execute them (employees).

Workers’ self-management is a concept of the state structure that was in one form implemented in ex Yugoslavia (Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia and Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) after the Resolution of Informbiro[2], expelling CPY (Communist Party of Yugoslavia) from Cominform in June 1948 and breaking up with USSR. This model, as an answer and critique of the Soviet system was being in use in Yugoslavia between sixties and eighties.

Workers’ self-management in Yugoslavia was conceived as a mixture of Soviet Union’s centralized planned socialism and Western market economy. Although workers’ self-management was a demonstration of “direct” democracy and workers were in the position to decide about certain questions, a strict control of the ruling Communist party in the form of cadre administration was omnipresent. Therefore, this type of “direct” democracy was applied only on the lower level of organizing in the form of decision-making workers’ councils that had autonomy in the decisions related to the distribution of income, employment questions, etc. However, the Party committee was deciding on the higher level issues like the cadre question. All this made the concept of workers’ self- management hermetic, autocratic and thus not consistently applied and implemented.

Nevertheless, it could be interesting to rethink it and reflect about the potential of the workers’ self- management concept as an alternative organizational model that could be re-appropriated by new autonomous self-organizing cultural and artistic practices that are acting in the atmosphere of neo liberal capitalism or transition towards it.

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[1] See: Todor Kuljić, Yugoslavia’s Workers’ Self-Management, Transcription of a video by Oliver Ressler, http://www.republicart.net/disc/aeas/kuljic01_en.htm

[2] The word Informbiro is a Yugoslavian abbreviation for Information Bureau, from Communist Information Bureau or Cominform.

Art practice as research broadly present in contemporary Artworld, symptoms was initially introduced in visual arts in the 1960s, viagra order developed and spread through later history of art. The concept is established by art historian Giulio Carlo Argan in his essay: Art Practice as Research (1958).[1] As Argan suggested, treatment research in and by way of art entails “the ability attributed to art for addressing and solving certain problems or for addressing itself to the artist as the problem that should be solved”.

Argan’s concept implies that artwork as research – in difference to a normal artwork[2] – introduces into the art production and practice elements and competences of second-level discourses on art: art theory, aesthetics, history of art, sociology and other sciences of art. So, points of departure of non-research-based art as normal artistic activity are established values: paradigms, technics, and knowledge existing in the Artworld. In that sense, its aim is to produce art objects as skillful and valuable as possible. In opposite, the research-based art, as incidental artistic activity tends to reflect, re-think, problematize, and question the existing values or itself as a value. In that sense, its aim is not the production of valuable art objects but critical artistic practice, focused on certain problems of Artworld (research in art) or on certain social problems through art (research by way of art). In the field of today’s art the interweaving of theoretical discourse and art production is constitutive for more and more works. They don’t exist in the system of history, tradition, and actual paradigms of art as in their natural environment whose values are accepted and used for the production of artworks. Instead, the values are here seen as the problems of the art-researches.

The problem with this practice that we meet in the most recent time is that art-research is already assimilated in the Artworld as a normal artwork, a ‘piece’. Further, this very problem must become an urgent topic for ‘art practice as research’ that still aspires to be critical.

Notions closed to the art practice as research are laboratory and experiment. Their increasing usage in the field of art from the 1960s to nowadays is usually superficial and makes as much problems as it tries to resolve. The concepts of laboratory and experiment are in fact taken from natural sciences, where they indicate place and procedure that provides optimal conditions for solving certain problems, testing certain presumptions, and discovering certain rules of surrounding world that can hardly be found in their pure shapes. In accordance to this, their common employment in the field of art – lab as free environment for unlimited experiment with human creativity – is basically wrong, since modern art (and post-modern too) in opposite to natural sciences is not based on positivistic approach to its ‘object’: phenomena, subjects, or topics from the surrounding world. Moreover, art in western cultural tradition doesn’t tend to achieve objective insight and conclusions on the object, but quite contrary encourages subjective points of view on certain matters of fact. Hence numerous labs and experiments in contemporary art are artistic self-evidence of its own weakness – in the absurd comparison to the natural sciences, in which art puts itself. Looking through these lens, the concepts are introduces into the field to provide more relevant status of art and its production of knowledge in contemporary society. However because of that they often miss that art is already-yet a kind of social production of knowledge whose intellectual and affectational peculiarities and material specificities are what should be constantly reflected in art and by way of art, as ‘the proof of artistic particular relevance’ in society.

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[1] Giulio Carlo Argan (1982), »Umetnost kao istraživanje«, in Studije o modernoj umetnosti, Ješa Denegri (ed.), Belgrade: Nolit

[2] The term normal here refers to Thomas Khun’s theorization of development of science, through normal states of science and scientific revolutions, in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolution.

Production of knowledge is a complex process of creating and organizing information in society. It is a time and money consuming process and because of that production of new knowledge is usually done by persons who work for government agencies, hospital universities, sildenafil large non-profit organizations, impotent or large corporations.

Dominant model of knowledge production consists of:

1. Educational system, research institutions and research facilities, supported by the Government and private grants (knowledge governance)

2. High-level research personnel that are to carry out social science and humanities research projects (human resources development)

3. Access to locally available social science and humanities knowledge (local knowledge)

4. Access to globally available social science and humanities knowledge (global knowledge)

5. Gatekeepers that are to evaluate research output, e.g. in the form of peer reviews (authorization)

6. Publishing research results in local print media (local documents)

7. Publishing research results in internationally recognized print media (global documents)

We can make distinction between two regimes that allocate resources for the creation of new knowledge: one is the system of granting intellectual property rights, as exemplified by modern patent and copyright systems; the other is the “open science” regime, as often found in the realm of “pure” scientific research (references and quotations). Today we also encounter this kind of system, to a certain extent, in the production of free and open source software.

The first system assigns clear property rights to newly created knowledge that allow the exclusion of others from using that knowledge, as well as the trading and licensing it. As it is well-known such a system provides powerful incentives for the creation of knowledge, at the cost of creating temporary monopolies that will tend to restrict output and raise price.

The second system relies to some extent on the fact that individuals often invent or create for non-pecuniary reasons like curiosity. Dissemination of research results and knowledge is achieved at a relatively low cost, because assigning the “moral rights” to the first publisher of an addition to the body of knowledge gives creators an incentive to disseminate it rapidly and broadly. Therefore, in this system the use of others’ output is encouraged and relatively cheap, with the cost being appropriate citation and possibly some reciprocity in sharing knowledge.

That is why the system of open science is often used as a regime of contemporary knowledge production in many critical and independent educational projects in culture and art.

According to: Bronwyn H. Hall, “Incentives For Knowledge Production with Many Producers”, ESRC Centre for Business Research, University of Cambridge, Working Paper no. 292

University of California at Berkeley and NBER, Department of Economics

http://lib.northern.edu/infolit/tablesversion/lessons/lesson1/production.htm