What would an education beyond learning look like?
I began to wonder what would an education beyond learning look like.
James Thurman:The studio is something different. Freedom start opening up.
Peter B. Hyland:We started with the action, and actually, the theory came out of what we did. Hello. My name is Peter Hyland, and I am a co author of Movements and Protocols for a Post Digital Education, as well as director of the Onstead Institute for Education in the Visual Arts and Design at the University of North Texas.
Tyson E. Lewis:And I am doctor Tyson Lewis. I coauthored the book, Studio Drift with my colleague, Peter. And I am a professor of art education at UNT where I teach courses in critical theory, critical phenomenology, aesthetic philosophy, educational philosophy, and dialogue and inquiry into the arts.
James Thurman:And, hi, I'm, James Thurman, a friend and colleague of Tyson and Peter's at the University of North Texas in the College of Visual Arts and Design. I'm a studio artist and a faculty member in the metalsmithing and jewelry area, but I've worked with both, Peter and Tyson on a a variety of different projects, some of which mentioned in the book.
Peter B. Hyland:So I thought maybe we'd start out by, taking us back to where it all began. When Tyson and I first met when I came to the University of North Texas and, I was, you know, in this new role, which, did not really have anything defined in terms of programming that I was overseeing. And Tayson came to me with an intriguing idea that just sort of took us in this trajectory that we're still currently enjoying at the moment.
Tyson E. Lewis:Yeah. I I really like this question, Peter, because it allows us to emphasize that the book came out of a long process of experimentation with different forms of educational practice. Before I came to UNT, I had already become really interested in forms of education that did not necessarily abide by the logic of learning. By learning, I'm referring to discourses and practices of what my friend and colleague, Herit Biesta, calls learnification or the economization of education so that all of education becomes a calculus of inputs and outputs. In fact, when Peter and I refer to learning in the book, Studio's Drift, we push this claim even further and we we try to argue that learning has become a kind of metaphysics of late capitalism.
Tyson E. Lewis:And by that, we just simply mean that learning has become the lens through which we interpret everything that counts as education. So if one cannot calculate the inputs and outputs going into an educational relationship, then it simply does not count as educationally relevant and might even be miseducational. This means that from our perspective that the language of education has become impoverished basically, and that marginal or minor practices that fall outside of this economization model are no longer discussed. They're no longer seen as relevant. So I had already been thinking a lot about this, but I I began to wonder what would an education beyond learning look like?
Tyson E. Lewis:How could we actually enact it? How could we make it come to life? This is the project I brought to Peter when I first arrived at UNT. And this was really the underlying goal of the first symposium that we hosted called Education as Experimentation, and it took place in 02/2017 at the University of North Texas. And for this event, we asked scholars, designers, philosophers, artists, art educators, museum educators, we ask them all to write short protocols or rules of engagement that would explicitly try to interrupt, suspend, or render an operative the discourses, practices, or materials, or technologies of learning, of learnification.
Tyson E. Lewis:And we didn't know really what would happen at this conference. And afterwards, it was actually quite challenging to assess it because any form of assessing its success in a way would turn it into a learning event. We'd be asking questions like, well, what did people learn? And then that would fall into the trap of the economization of learning and and education. So how do we even talk about what happened?
Tyson E. Lewis:And the people at the event also didn't seem to really have a language for what happened. In fact, on the final day, somebody in the audience raised their hand and said, well, I don't know what actually happened here, but something happened. You know, and that really seemed to be pretty accurate. And so since that initial experiment, Peter and I have been wrestling with a way to frame the fundamental problems or questions that came out of that first event. And that sort of led us to the second iteration of the event, which we called Studio D.
Tyson E. Lewis:That happened the spring that COVID hit. So the spring semester of twenty twenty. It was really a version of the first event, but dealing specifically with the ed tech industry or the e learning industry or the online digital learning platforms. And so the question was, how could we hack into or tinker with or render an operative the learning logics or the metaphysics of learning embedded within learning technologies like Canvas or Blackboard or even everyday technologies and apps and even things like Facebook and and so on and so forth. So this was a, specifically technologically oriented version of the first event, and that is ultimately what led to the book's studious drift.
Tyson E. Lewis:That was sort of the springboard for our writing.
Peter B. Hyland:Yeah. And, you know, I remember when you first came into my office to pitch the idea for the first symposium. You seemed a little tenuous because I think that you didn't know how well the ideas were gonna go over. You know, I remember just thinking I was like, wow, this is a really, like, punk rock kind of thing to do. I find myself drawn to things that are irreverent or, disruptive because I think that they can many times clarify, you know, real issues that you wanna dig into.
Peter B. Hyland:I was very intrigued by this format that Tyson was putting forward. Part of the intriguing aspect of it was the fact that it was actionable. What's interesting about the trajectory of this project is that we didn't really start in theory and then wind up with actionable items. We started with the action and actually the theory came out of what we did. You know, in part, it's an attempt to, as Tyson was indicating, to make sense of what what occurred.
Peter B. Hyland:So we had these happenings. We had these interactions. We had these protocols, which we'll talk about in a little bit. All this stuff occurred, but we didn't really yet have a language in place to unpack it and delineate it for ourselves yet. And so the book really in part is the culmination of us thinking through what has happened to us in these instances of sort of, action research.
Tyson E. Lewis:Yeah. And so we really are trying to build up a set of concepts. And so some of those concepts that we've subsequently used to give a description of these happenings or or situations or things like a path of physics of study or emphasis on studioing or an idea of studious drift in the protocol, the concept of the protocol. So the book is really trying to figure out how all these concepts hang together and how they can inform a sort of pataphysical educational form of experimentation.
Peter B. Hyland:Well, maybe let's talk a little bit about what we mean when we say protocol.
Tyson E. Lewis:The most important thing I think about the protocol is that it's a particular kind of writing. And I think when we talk about educational forms of writing, we often think about lesson planning or curriculum building or writing a syllabus. And one of the things that informs all those modes of writing is that they themselves are plans. You're planning a course. You're starting at point a, and you're trying to get to point b.
Tyson E. Lewis:And in that sense, they embody a kind of implicit or explicit logic of learning where you want your students to acquire this set of skills or this knowledge base and to progress, and then you want to evaluate or assess their progress. And so the protocol was really an attempt to suspend or render an operative that form of writing and the learning logic embedded in those forms of writing and really to create a form of writing that isn't about planning and isn't about assessing, but is still educational, still has something educational about it. When we initially gave the charge to come up with protocols, we really only gave three basic instructions. And that was one, the protocols have a minimalistic aesthetic. So less is more.
Tyson E. Lewis:Don't make them overly complicated. Secondly, the protocols should be able to be enacted by the largest possible audience. They should be as inclusive and as public as possible. They should be a set of rules that should be able to be held in common, whether or not you're, for instance, in a university. And thirdly, they should be genuinely experimental.
Tyson E. Lewis:And this is the most important charge for protocol writing. And by experimental, we mean they should be an open procedure and they should balance sort of form and chance. So they should be a set of constraints that release possibilities, unforeseen potentialities. James and I have written protocols together, and I'm just wondering, James, if you could speak to your experience of working on these because I know speaking to other participants, they often found this to be extremely challenging to to write these things.
James Thurman:Yeah. And, I mean, I've obviously been thinking a lot about those early experiences of going to the that first gathering and calling on my background as a teacher and educator for years, and it was wonderful to sort of have that subverted and inverted and to not necessarily be in control of things, not necessarily know what the specific goals or outcomes would be. I still go back to kind of the state of mind that I had and through that process of starting to get comfortable being uncomfortable. It's something that I've taken from that and brought to my students because I found, particularly in studio art, the students are so focused on product. Like, they have to finish this piece, and they have to exhibit this piece to the public, or they have to get graded on it, or all of those kinds of structures that are so indoctrinated into the pattern of experiences that they have in these courses.
James Thurman:And so, obviously, my students weren't there and didn't have these experiences, but through my experiences, I'm able to carry that forward to them. It's gonna be interesting to kind of implement this coming fall where we've opened up this, new one on one interdisciplinary kind of research topic. And students that don't have any training in metalsmithing and jewelry are gonna be coming into the metalsmithing and jewelry area through my guidance just to make sure that they're working safely, just kind of experiment. And I've had initial meetings and planning that out. And the the students are both excited, and I think the ones that don't know me as well are maybe a little suspicious that it's like, well, I can just play and experiment.
James Thurman:I said, as long as you're pushing, as long as you're doing things, then you're succeeding. And we'll talk about what that whole process is. And so I'm kind of challenging those ideas specific within my field of being so product focused of I have to make this thing, and now I've made this thing, and now I can do all the stuff with it as far as the exhibiting and the grading and and all of those things. And trying to take even some aspects that are maybe more common and accepted in the performing arts of the idea of, like, practice. You just practice and you develop skills, but there's no end to that.
James Thurman:And really just trying to communicate the value of process and remind myself of that too, of of trying to carve out time for myself in the studio to play, to experiment, to not have that focus that has been, you know, I'm sort of subject to it as well as our students are as far as having deliverables and things that can be professionally evaluated for promotion and all that kind of things.
Tyson E. Lewis:Yeah. I think that what's really at stake there is rehabilitating the idea of the studio, a space that's fundamentally different from a classroom and opens up educational possibilities beyond the metaphysics of learning, opens up the possibility of what we call like the pataphysics of study. We want to emphasize the resources that the arts bring to the table in terms of the alternative space and times of education beyond learning. There's, like, basically three points we try to make about studios. One is that studios are space time machines for deactivating, deactivating power relationships potentially, or as Michel Foucault might say, they're experimental zones in which power is put into play in new ways.
Tyson E. Lewis:And secondly, they are adisciplinary. Studios historically existed before the division of knowledge into the disciplines, and we think that this is fertile ground for thinking the space and time for, like, interdisciplinary studies today or a disciplinary studies, studies that aren't bound by, you know, disciplinary divisions that we find in the academy. And then thirdly, studios are paradoxical locations. If you look at the literature on studios and you look at actual historical examples of studios, they sort of blur the difference between public and private, inside, outside nature, culture. There are places where things that come into the studio are sort of opened up for new potential uses, new strange experimentations that aren't necessarily meant to be sold on a market or exhibited or distributed in some way or even taught to others.
Tyson E. Lewis:Rather, they they open up new possibilities for what counts as knowledge or what counts as an artwork.
Peter B. Hyland:Coming to these realizations, think back to my experience. I've got a background both as a visual artist and as a writer. And when I was in college, my painting studio sort of was in this open area that was right where my writing studio was. It was all one thing. I remember sort of this feeling of, well, as we say in the book, drifting.
Peter B. Hyland:Moving between these media, moving between these thinkers, these ideas, and sort of knowing that space was singular in some way, but, you know, not really having the language to indicate how. One of the things I appreciate about the work that we've been doing is giving a vocabulary to that experience, you know, experience of, as sort of James was indicating earlier, awkwardness in a certain way, which we feel is a generative thing. Awkwardness reveals things and usually things that are pretty fundamental and, therefore uncomfortable, which is why we don't like being awkward because something is askew in a way and is disruptive in a way that is going to complicate our notion of self, complicate our notion of the world. You know, what I've appreciated about the work that we've undertaken is that it's sort of explicitly that's kind of like all we wanna do is get to that, as you were saying with, Foucault, generate these zones, these liminal spaces in which becomings of certain kinds can happen and have free rein and be let loose without any preconceived notions of what they're supposed to be doing.
Tyson E. Lewis:Yeah. And I think the protocol is a technology that enables us to do that. Like, sometimes to get outside of yourself, you have to use techniques. If you sort of write down a protocol or a set of rules for yourself, this can almost open the self up to possibilities that the self might otherwise find too awkward to engage with. But but the rules sort of give you an excuse to to test things out.
Tyson E. Lewis:The constraints do not limit the freedom of the studio, but actually are the fulcrum of the freedom that you find in a studio. They make moves possible. They sort of introduce weird uncanny swerves into one's practice, for instance. If we have in education safe spaces and brave spaces, I think Peter and I are trying to argue for awkward spaces as educationally generative and that the studio is a space that embraces awkwardness and generates it. Awkwardness, simply put, is living a life of risk taking where the norms are suspended, where you don't have the social rules guiding you.
Tyson E. Lewis:You don't have the safeguard of knowing what's expected. It's hard to get yourself into a space of being comfortable with uncomfortability, of engaging in unprofessional activities or unproductive activities or unpractical practices, right, or impractical practices. So that's sort of one of the struggles, I think, of the studio is how how to open those spaces up and then sustain them.
Peter B. Hyland:You know, we talk about it in the book as being an existential risk. Part of the things that are put at risk are your notion of your identity, your notion of authenticity. All of these things are meant to be taken apart in these zones that are created. It is a very sort of visceral thing. Your sort of mode of thinking is on the line.
Peter B. Hyland:So getting to that risk is, I think, a fundamental thing that we want to try to achieve, and the protocols are, in some ways, handrails to get us there.
Tyson E. Lewis:I think it's so interesting. And, James, I have to make this comment about where you are right now. I think it actually describes very well the space of a studio.
James Thurman:Well, sure. So just out of necessity having to to find a place that would be a good quieter place for recording. It's a, converted sunroom of my house, which functions both my wife and I are metalsmiths and jewelers and artists. And so this space functions as a combination home office, storage room, material and tool availability, craft supplies, shipping materials. So there's pieces that are finished that are maybe on their way out to the world.
James Thurman:There's photography space for documenting that before it happens. It really is a catchall, unnameable space. We are fortunate to have a a studio studio kind of behind our house, but this space is sort of one step removed from it, where it's it's a support space to the studio. So the studio has all the kind of more traditional tools and materials and all of those things. And then this space, we can't really even settle on a name for it.
James Thurman:It's kind of a wonderfully unnamable space because its function is constantly shifting based on our day to day needs. And it has that ambiguous, fluid purpose that best embodies kind of an ideal studio that even challenges sort of its own rules of what you might consider. Like, day to day, my wife and I don't consider this our studio, even though a great amount of creative activity happens within this space. This is just what we use for what we need it to be. And I think that that's kinda probably most in line with concepts of studio within the book.
Tyson E. Lewis:Yeah. I I just love this because it's it's like the studio of the studio. You know, it's sort of like the weird remnant space that's, it's so liminal that it's even misrecognized as a creative space at all. Sort of junk room, creative room. In the book, we talk a lot about, the alchemist studio.
Tyson E. Lewis:And historically, the depictions of the alchemist studio throughout art history were used in a sense as a warning to the audience. Like the audience would look at these images and they would be chaotic. But in a way, those spaces, the most discarded spaces, these minor spaces are the ones that Peter and I feel are full of the most studious potential.
James Thurman:It's something interesting I've noticed in the past when I worked a lot more with first year students, their kind of acclimation to this new form of classroom, where certainly the vast majority of them had art classes in k through 12 before starting college and and things like that. But as they became more personally invested in, I'm an art major now, and this is the room where I do all that creative stuff, I think they started having some of those feelings. And I still see that even as they specialize, like, even as they come into a declared major like metalsmithing and jewelry or something. They still have this push and pull where the studio slash classroom okay. It's both that classroom with all that kind of baggage and and traditional hierarchies of teacher and power and all those kind of things, but then it's also the majority of time that they're in that space is not in class.
James Thurman:They're coming in outside of class time, and they have their workbench that is assigned to them. So this becomes this very personal space. I think it's constantly morphing for them. And I'm hoping in that experience that as they move out into the world, they then create their own physical spaces that that have that malleability of function and creativity and exploration. But I see that even in their first year starting where there's this mix of, like, alright.
James Thurman:Well, this isn't my classroom that I've grew up with. Now this is this is something different. I don't have to sit in this particular chair if I don't want to. Like, these freedoms start opening up. And I'm hoping that, you know, despite all the other structures that we do have to deal with within the university, that they can start experiencing some of that questioning and fluidity of experience within those spaces.
James Thurman:And I know that happens maybe later in the evenings when faculty and staff aren't around as much, but they're still being productive and they're still making things and being creative and forming their own communities within that experience.
Peter B. Hyland:Yeah. I'm really interested in, you know, your observations, James, about students' conception of space these days. One of the things that we talk about in the book is our discovery during Studio D. Once we entered into the pandemic phase and people were submitting things, you know, students were working in these different spaces, out of necessity. So all of a sudden their bedroom and, you know, literally their bed becomes their studio or becomes their office.
Peter B. Hyland:We all felt this in one way or another, as we went remote. You know, and this sort of connects to, what we talk about as the post digital in the book. In some sense, the what we're doing right now, you know, we're recording audio, but we're also seeing each other via these screens. And so we're bringing the external into an interior, but the external that we're bringing in is somebody else's interior as well. So there's all of these weird fittings together that are happening.
Peter B. Hyland:And I'm wondering if, you know, do you think that the necessary relocating that the pandemic through our way, has that changed the way that students think about studio spaces at all? Do you see that coming out in any way?
James Thurman:Yes. In many different ways. And I've been thinking about this a lot as we've started to transition and return back to more typical kind of spaces that we're working in before. I teach both in person in the the studio classroom with metalsmithing and jewelry students and then also online. The online courses are more for all art majors about professional practices.
James Thurman:But I noticed that the students are more confident in their ability to basically problem solve. So they got through this. They got things done, and they were sort of forced to come up with ways of accomplishing these that were more independent than typically happens during their educational experience. I think when they graduate, they're sort of thrown out into the street, like, alright, you've had access to all these wonderful tools and spaces, and it's been great working with you, and you did some great stuff, and good luck out there. Bye.
James Thurman:And there's a shock that I think most of our art majors kind of go through of, like, I don't know what to do now. And I'm sort of more optimistic and hopeful about these students that have been through this where they did create their own spaces and their own ways of making when they were sort of banned from campus in that spring semester of twenty twenty. And then as they returned, we were able to keep in person instruction through the 2021 academic year, but much more limited, a lot more social distancing, less time that they had in the studio. And so, again, they had to figure out ways to keep making and keep being creative outside of what the physical structures of school was providing to them. They haven't been happy about that, but I think it's some of that awkwardness that we were talking about that I know will serve them so well.
James Thurman:And I really believe that much more of them as they go out into the world will continue on as creative practitioners, Whatever they resonate with and whatever they choose to sort of creatively explore, I really feel that they'll have more of that sort of stubbornness and determination to stick with it as opposed to that shock of, oh, well, I can't go to those studios on campus anymore, and so I don't know what to do. And it's just too hard, and so I'll go get a day job or, you know, something like that. I'm interested to see how, as they start becoming alumni, what will happen for them and and how that'll evolve.
Tyson E. Lewis:I think this actually, you were talking about challenges that COVID placed on students, and I think it's also interesting to think about it in terms of the challenges placed on teachers and professors and not only the challenges, but the sort of opportunities. And I think that the fallback position was we just want to use Canvas or Blackboard or some sort of online platform to recreate the learning conditions of the classroom. The really interesting question for me when I was teaching online was how do I interrupt this? How do I use Canvas, but suspend or render an operative or neutralize the implicit educational metaphysics inscribed in the algorithm? How can I turn it into a kind of studious space, a sort of post digital studious space?
Tyson E. Lewis:So with learning, students feel that there's a purpose. So there's a problem, they're gonna surmount it. They're gonna solve it. And so there's a clear purpose and they are willfully pursuing resolution. I think that that's the quintessential sort of phenomenological experience of learning is that sort of there's the problem, I have the skills to cope with it, and I did it.
Tyson E. Lewis:And I can look back and assess my progress. I can feel growth. I can feel my development through that process. And I think that things like Canvas are scaffolded to to to support that. I think on the flip side, there's just the Internet, which is, you know, no purpose.
Tyson E. Lewis:It's like a sense of lack of purpose. This is why we all watch cat videos for endless hours or, you know, it's just like endless streaming or what Peter and I call browsing. Right? The challenge was to avoid both of these for teachers, like not to simply replicate the learning model that's being fed to us through Canvas and not simply letting students browse endlessly the internet and having an overwhelming sense of nihilism that often accompanies that. So the sweet spot, I think, for turning the internet or post digital platforms into studios is a sense of purposiveness without a purpose.
Tyson E. Lewis:You don't know exactly where it's going. You don't even necessarily care, but there's an underlying sense of urgency or importance to it. Like you feel like it matters. So there's a proposiveness there. You feel like things matter, but you can't necessarily articulate why or what the outcome is gonna be or what's directing it.
Tyson E. Lewis:And that's for us neither the sort of summiting experience of learning, nor is it the browsing experience of the internet. It is instead, what we call drifting, which is a kind of proposiveness without necessarily being wedded to a specific purpose. And the challenge, I think, during COVID was how can this experience be translated into an online environment?
James Thurman:It's funny that you bring up subverting Canvas because something that, I guess, was kind of a backhanded compliment, but I see the value in peer feedback. I mean, it's a basic tool and everything else. And so I set it up so that the students could turn in all their assignments as part of a discussion thread, which is not kind of what Canvas wants you to do. So they're posting it publicly within the course, which is a different dynamic than just turning it into the teacher. And then the students are posting feedback, and there's some guidelines about don't be a troll and all these kind of things.
James Thurman:And so I found that that dynamic has greatly shifted what the students do in the course. You know, the course had to be reviewed to be approved for all that, you know, administrative stuff. And one of the people reviewing it was sort of impressed, but they said, you know, you're not supposed to use discussion boards this way. I said, yeah, I know. They're like, I've never seen anyone use it this way.
James Thurman:I said, well, it makes sense for what my goals are. They just didn't know what to do with it. And I was I was actually really happy about that because, like you're saying, the students get trained and it's I turn in the assignment here. And and there's just that subtle shift of where if they're posting it publicly that anyone in the class can look at their assignment, that's a different thing. The students respond in different ways about that.
James Thurman:And I've had private messages from the students of either wanting additional feedback before they post. Like, it was more important to them, like, posting it out to everybody than just turning in the assignment, which actually made me very happy. And I felt that that shift or subversion of the structures was working because it started getting the students to think a bit more about the impact of their work beyond these these very regimented kind of educational structures that they're indoctrinated into.
Peter B. Hyland:It sounds like in a way they made that discussion board space an exhibition space. It reminds me of part of what informs the book is, Alfred Gere's pad of physics, which means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. But one of the things that Gere, says is that it's the science of impossible solutions. It is concerned with laws governing exceptions. What's the other the other one, Tyson?
Tyson E. Lewis:It's interested not in generalities, but in particulars.
Peter B. Hyland:Yeah. So, you know, the the notion of impossible solutions, your, you know, students took this tool that was supposed to be used for, you know, a very specific purpose and they just said, no, that that's not that's not what this is. They made it into what they needed it to be. That seems to me very much in the spirit of a patty physical approach. Again, an irreverence for received forms, for received truths and received knowledge, not because you want to negate them, but because you want to open them to different understandings.
Peter B. Hyland:You want to open them to different ways of making things become in the broadest sense.
Tyson E. Lewis:Yeah. I think that's really well stated, Peter. The features of pataphysics, they're hard enough to understand on their own. But I think it's interesting interesting just to think through how are they educationally relevant, this emphasis on particulars, exceptions, and impossible solutions. And I think that all of these features of pataphysics move us in a place beyond the metaphysics of learning.
Tyson E. Lewis:So for instance, learning, you could think of as sort of standardization and generalization of predictable patterns. Sort of standardization and generalization of predictable patterns. And the students fall into these patterns. Like they were predicting that Canvas would be used in a very particular way in James's course, and they were thrown off when it wasn't used in the appropriate way. And so learning is all about, it's like a science of generalizability.
Tyson E. Lewis:And I think also the laws, the sort of metaphysical laws of learning reject exceptions. If you're exceptional, you drop out or you become invisible or you don't fall on the bell curve, the graded bell curve. Whereas, pataphysics is really interested in those extremes, in those things that fall outside of the graph of what's predictable, the anomalies, the swerves, the clinemen, as Jerry would say. Thirdly, this idea of impossible solutions is so interesting because education, we wanna say, is all about solving problems. We wanna say it's all about solutions, you know.
Tyson E. Lewis:But in a certain sense, it's, you know, Jerry's idea of impossible solutions pushes us to the very edge of our imaginations about what does a solution look like. You know, it pushes us beyond pragmatic real world solutions towards a horizon of new possibilities that might not look feasible within the given common sense of a situation. So you might have to find very unusual anomalous, quote, unquote, solutions to a situation. I think that pataphysics encourages us to take these up as educational charges and to experiment with them. And the experiment, I think this is also important to note, James, with your example.
Tyson E. Lewis:The experiment might be quite small. Sometimes very small things introduce that swerve, introduce that like, you set up a protocol there. It was a very particular protocol that created a certain kind of awkwardness that generated outcomes that people were not expecting. So you introduced a swerve into the learning technology of Canvas. And I think that it's important to pay homage to those small things sometimes that teachers can do to open up that pataphysical dimension within learning.
James Thurman:As educators, we're modeling some of the behavior. I think it becomes challenging as you progress in your career where you get settled in certain ways of doing things. And like I mentioned, something that I really enjoyed was that process of how can you become comfortable being uncomfortable. If I want that for my students, I feel that I have to be living that as well. I have to be pushing myself into that zone as well.
James Thurman:It can be very discerning for all parties involved. Students often want a very comfortable established power hierarchy, even though they they say they may not. But in times when I've abdicated that and said, alright, well, let let's sort this all out together, an initial response is like, well, you're not doing your job. That's your job. You tell us what to do.
James Thurman:Eventually, they'll develop that trust and understand the reasoning behind shifting those dynamics. You know, we keep coming back to sort of awkwardness or being uncomfortable. And I think that that's because, at least for me, a real lack of language, because I know that there's a lot of subtleties of states that I'm not, linguistically equipped to specifically describe. Okay. Well, I'm I'm working towards something, but I don't know what I'm working towards.
James Thurman:How do I know I'm making progress? I'm feeling I'm making progress, but is that an illusion? And even just that process of questioning is, I think, critical to the whole process.
Tyson E. Lewis:One thing that Peter and I do, because we have used the book now and as an opportunity to perform protocol ing with practicing teachers as part of professional development courses and so on. And, this is very interesting because really the protocol is unprofessionalizing professional development and undermining the very idea of development. This is our like small subversive act. But I think that part of it is genuinely conveying to them that this is a real experiment. This isn't a setup.
Tyson E. Lewis:We are not trying to humiliate you. We are as awkward as you are in this moment. We're gonna see what happens. And so there's a kind of adventure that takes place because the path we're all on is uncertain and experimental. There are some people that of course will react negatively to that.
Tyson E. Lewis:But I do think that if you are genuinely open about your own awkwardness and willing to go there with them, that there will be some kind of solidarity in the moment of the experiment of the happening.
James Thurman:You
Peter B. Hyland:know, as we talk about all of this, the notion of common sense or or reason, there are limits to those things. Uncommon sense, you know, irrationality. They have import as well, in ways that we don't normally, I think, stop to examine.
Tyson E. Lewis:Maybe what we need are educational situations in the way the situationists talk about them, sort of like educational dureeves. And the protocol is one way of unlocking the dureeves and inducing a kind of studious drift into whatever space you might be occupying. And you can occupy a classroom or you can occupy a street corner or you can occupy a storage closet and turn any of those into studios simply through very simple practices. Our students during the COVID crisis tried that out, and some of them did some really interesting things. I would encourage listeners to go to the Studio D website, which is hosted through the Onstead Institute for Research in Visual Arts and Design, at UNT.
Tyson E. Lewis:One of the protocols was to create self studies, which is a riff on selfies. James and I came up with this idea. And take unsexy photographs of your study spaces and then talk about what those study spaces reveal to you. And I think that this really was an interesting record of that moment in history.
James Thurman:And I love the idea of shifting studio to a verb. Like, there's something really critical and important about that. I think I mentioned earlier about certain things about practice that's a part more of the performing arts and not as public a part of the visual arts. By turning the studio into a verb, it gives an an activity or a a trajectory or a vector to it that is very different from the typical concept of it as a specific place. I feel this movement.
James Thurman:It's not as reliant upon, oh, well, I need this whole big setup with all these, you know, tools and materials in order. Now I can be creative. I'm in my studio now. If you're studioing, it sort of feels like something on the go. It can happen whenever your mind is really taking you there and creating that context for that activity.
James Thurman:That was something from the book that continues to resonate with me, and I try to keep that with me just as I go about my daily life. It's much more a mental space and context as opposed to a physical one.
Peter B. Hyland:And I think deeply entrenched in that is the notion that it's a democratic practice as well because it's not situated on material equipment that one needs to, like, have a studio. Like, in order to have a studio, you have to have an easel, and you have to have this and that and the other. What we're talking about is a calibration of the mind that allows you to enter into what I would say my one of my mentors in poetry, Tony Hoagland, used to call ghost logic, where he would describe within the functioning of a poem its ability to create a certain emotional effect in a in a reader or to conjure up a certain idea. And you don't really know how that is working really. It's happening.
Peter B. Hyland:But when you look at the poem to try to figure out, okay, well, why is this happening? It's not very clear, but yet it still makes sense. Turning to valuing those moments and valuing that way of thinking can be difficult. A lot of it is unknown to you. They're the parts of yourself that are not as clearly defined.
Peter B. Hyland:They're the undercurrents that inform your thinking throughout the day, but that you don't typically turn to. What we're trying to advocate for is a conjuring up of of that state.
Tyson E. Lewis:Yeah. I like the verb conjuring too. It's like democratic, but also esoteric because you can't necessarily explain to somebody what's happening. You know you are running into a studier or a real studious person or somebody studioing when you ask them, Hey, what's going on? What are you up to?
Tyson E. Lewis:And they're like, I don't know exactly how to describe it to you. Or I They're always in the middle, right? They're never at the beginning or the end of something. They're always sort of circulating, drifting around where they find sort of potentialities. There's something difficult to describe about it.
Tyson E. Lewis:It does have a kind of ghost logic. And then also studioing, I think, is somewhat opportunistic and fugitive. You can sort of steal studio time or steal studio spaces by occupying liminal spaces in your house or a closet on campus or wherever it is. You know? Harney and Moten have this concept of the undercommons, and I think that it shares a lot in common with the idea of the studio as a kind of fugitive study space that's shared in common with other studiers.
James Thurman:Something that's happened to me recently that I'm thinking has a connection back to the book. So I was working in a more typical traditional way in my studio on this piece, and it has a deadline and so on. I had some shifts in what I wanted to do for the piece, and I didn't physically know how to get it to work, which is not a place I expected to be after, you know, I've been a maker for decades. You know, twenty plus years, I've been in the studio making things, and I'm pretty good at making certain things. And I never expected this point in my development and career to still be challenging myself that way and still not have answers.
James Thurman:I thought it would be honestly kind of, like, less interesting. I sort of imagined, like, oh, you get later into your career, and you just kinda do the same thing, and you get known for that and whatever. And I am so happy that I went through that process. And I think my involvement with this book and Studio D and the the gathering and all those other aspects, I think, led to that. And I'm hoping that that repeats for me in my studio practice because sometimes these things feel disconnected and disparate.
James Thurman:Like, oh, okay. Let's go do this thing over here, and I'll go back to my studio and do my thing over there. It seeped in and without consciously making those connections or anything else. And I ultimately solved the problem, but I kept feeling like I was almost painting myself into a corner, and I had to, like, magically materialize a rope to climb up to get out of that spot. I ran into that a lot more when I was less skilled and less knowledgeable.
James Thurman:But in a way, this book and the related experiences and materials have helped me push that and to to honestly be more successful in that practice. Certainly wanna just take this moment to thank you guys for kind of dragging me into this and having these experiences, and I feel sort of more equipped to continue on with those experiences through this.
Tyson E. Lewis:That's great. Thank you, James. I look forward to having more studious adventures with both of you in the future. You know, hopefully, this book is just another occasion for more studioing.