Thirteenth International Conference on The Arts in Society

Abstract

Contingency in Arts Education is vital in terms of supporting both teachers and learners in the ever changing and often outputs driven tertiary sector. Contingency can be defined in this sense as something other than what is now. Contingency leaves a residue in all art making and also in art education which provoke new ways in which to engage within old questions. I have observed in both my own institution, and in visiting institutions abroad, an ideological shift that is informing how learners are viewed, their agency, and how this specifically affects the fascia that connects and defines the institution, ideas of research, teaching pedagogy and the institutividual. Johannes Bruder, Matthias Tarasiewicz and Dušan Barok, in conversations around sources and resources in arts education in 2015, presented the term “institutividual” as a way in which to identify this shift in learners’ agency. To address the term institutividual in relation to the structure, intention and outcomes of the architecture of the tertiary environment, Jeremy Till’s interpretation of contingency in Zygmunt Bauman’s writing around Le Courbusier’s project in Pessac will be reviewed, where a top down architecture of communal living was reinterpreted by residents post occupation in order to complete the proposal of the lived project. This paper aims to provoke the readers’ questioning of their “why,” in relation to practice, teaching and the new technological world which we as semi-analogue beings inhabit.