Information, Medium & Society: Eighteenth International Conference on Publishing Studies

Abstract

Visible Epistemologies is a project in which the creators make visible the epistemological frameworks of artistic and humanistic ways of knowing that undergird curricular, pedagogical, and assessment praxis. This presentation documents the installation in Pratt’s historic landmark library in which the embodied nature of cognition, aesthetics, and the architecture of knowledge production was highlighted and exemplified. Using a combination of projected images and text that could be altered and manipulated in real time, the audience became performers and editors of the multimedia project. This environmental intervention allowed for the expansion of the idea of research, calling on artistic practice as a critical element in the production of knowledge in the twenty-first century. In the current climate of a post-fact world, we see a critical need for an approach to making visible new modes of knowledge production. Attempting to meet Johanna Drucker’s 2014 challenge to, “imagine new intellectual forms of interpretation [and] to design the spaces and supports that structure interpretive acts,” we employed art-making methodologies as the starting point to rethink the relationship between artistic and humanistic traditions of knowledge production. From this foundational notion, we assume that artistic practice is a critical way of knowing, and that this in turn can serve to reimagine Liberal Arts pedagogical practice – one which may help mitigate passive approach to truth, fact, evidence, etc. that we see propounded in the news each day, and that affects the material realities of every facet of life on the planet.