SWISP Lab residence program: SGB Sci560 Mediators
What is a SWISP Lab residency?
SWISP are in residence as a living lab in studioFive at The University of Melbourne and we re-turn research created in SWISP Lab anarchival exhibitions into teacher education so that teachers (both in- and pre-service) learn ‘in’ a living, ever shifting curriculum. Ours is a ‘radically related’ (Bickel., et al, 2011) residency and one that sets up the encounter for teaching and learning within a speculative, co-creative and critical currere (Pinar, 2019). As a result, we have been speculating about what constitutes ‘being in-residence’ with teachers and young people (aged 14-28 years old), as well as artists, scientists, researchers, and interdisciplinary practitioners. We ask, if we can make different nows possible by critically reimagining futures, what other ‘re’ work is necessary to come to re-know, re-think, re-imagine, re-consider, and reckon with the place of learning.
SWISP Lab continually fluctuates in composition, size and location, depending on where, when, and who we are in-residence with. We work across formal, informal and non-formal learning spaces including the cultural sector to wonder with teachers and young people about our interdisciplinary, climate, learning and digital futures. Together we ‘practice-in-residence‘ through relational pedagogies (Hickey and Riddle, 2023) and responsive cultural and critical art education.
SWISP lab’s signature project HAK.io also invites artists-in-residence in SWISP Lab as part of our Learning with the Land: Digital dispositions for Hacking the Anthropocene or HAK.io project.
HAK.io re-imagines art educations (that is the multiplicitious forms of all art education in places and spaces) through the residency model as speculative encounters to challenge narratives about Land-technology-human relations in Anthropogenic times (where human activities have significantly impacted the environment). The hacking of ‘residency’ like our hacked art educations are re-imagined as a/r/t (artist-researcher-teacher) programs for a justice orientated currere; where publics form around a local cite (scholarly and artistic) and site (specific issue) that is prevalent in a given community: e.g., violence against women and children in Australia, neo-colonial politics of climate action in India, Gen AI and social media bans. SWISP Lab sees all these issues as collectively contributing to the Anthropocene, or as Professor Kathryn Yusoff calls it, a billion black Anthropocenes.
The Learning with the Land partnership brings together an international network of art educators to explore how artists and arts-based researchers are taking up the concept of reciprocity to critically engage with the land upon which they live, learn, teach, and create. This partnership focuses on how the arts might help challenge Western-Euro-centric understandings of land and provoke meaningful dialogue and action towards decolonizing education and research practices. This partnership responds to the urgent need for innovative models of learning, teaching, and scholarship that create and examine human-land relationships as collective expression grounded in movement of thought (theory) and body (practices) by drawing on a transnational coalition of scholars, students, artists, and writers in education. This partnership simultaneously sees this research as a response to the calls to action from the most recent United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report (UN IPCC) that urges the use of scientific, local, and Indigenous Knowledge for adaptation and mitigation to the ongoing climate crisis (UN, 2021). This partnership is of utmost importance because despite institutional policy commitments towards decolonization: “There is a real need for academics to move toward concrete conversations about the Land to significantly reshape settler consciousness” (Ray, Cormier & Desmoulins, 2019, p.81).
2022-2025 – SSHRC Partnership Development Grant: Learning with the Land Principal Investigator: Emeritus Professor Rita Irwin; with twenty-four Co-Investigators and Collaborators.
Our relational orientation of education aims at creating “hybrid spaces where academic, practitioner, and community-based knowledge respect and interact to develop new solutions to the complicated process of preparing teachers” (Kretchmar and Zeichner, 2016, p. 428). Each SWISP residency results in the co-design of a gameplay or educational technology that attunes to the geo-socio-historical and political forces and as such the kits we co-create enable movements between cites and sites that loop in and out of education.
In October in Bengaluru, SWISP Lab were recently in residence with the Sci560 Mediators at the Science Gallery. This Anthropogenic exhibition (see the anarchive here) explores Bengaluru as India’s (citing the gallery curatorial here) “most recognised military-industrial-academic complex today”.
It was in the United States in the 1960s that President Dwight B. Eisenhower located the concern and conundrum of the military-industrial complex. Senator William Fulbright expanded on this wicked problem to include “military-industrial-academic complex” and his concerns about the interrelations, ultimate reliance and potential stifling of future science and research in this entanglement. So this show is ethico-political and socio-cultural and drags these big and complex ideas into the contemporary Global South as we consider the world we live and learn in right now. Given this positioning, working with these Sci560 Mediators (part-time and full time) ‘in-residence’ was a privilege afforded by our ongoing research partnership to consider the local cite – works curated in Sci560 – as scholarly and artistic and the site-specific issues arising through – art/science in the city.
Invited by The Learning Team at Science Gallery Bengaluru; SWISP was in residence for 4 days in Bengaluru to trouble ways to reconfigure our relations to the earth and all its inhabitants (Harraway, 2016) while considering how we mediate the places and spaces that art and science meet in complex times. An element of hacking the Anthropocene or HAK.io is coming to terms with human-technology-Land or Land-technology-human relations that perpetuate harms rooted in colonisation and extractive onto-epistemologies; which are problematic and this show carefully curates – but needs considered mediation to enter into the nuances.
Using HAK.io to mediate the SWISP Lab residency we played four of fourteen HAK.io methods with part time and full time Sci560 Mediators to locate our bodies in these multiples of complexities.
HAK.io Method 5: The Hundreds
With the part time Mediators, this began with Tipping Point climate stories told in 100 words. As the name ‘tipping point’ climate story suggests, we learn about the interconnected complexities and pluriversality of living in Anthropogenic times through a range of personal experiences.
Many of these stories were about breathing, water, education, waste, food, plastic, weather patterns, temperatures and cultural stories. Some told of how their cultural stories are becoming irrelevant given how much the climate has changed and the connection to the Land has altered due to climate collapse.
We started here to identify the Mediators tipping points because, “the next two years are so essential in saving our planet” (Stiell, 2024).
As part of our research, we collect, and curate tipping point stories recognised during hackathons facilitated as part of SWISP hacks (See SWISP Lab blogs for further information). A SWISP hackathon is a facilitated imagined possibilities workshop that as E. G. Coleman (2013) refers is the place “where craft & craftiness converge” (p.93) and what Lodato and DiSalvo (2016) refer to as issue-orientated breaking points.
Our hacks centre on complexity and critical issues that we co-locate with participants as a tipping point in the Anthropocene. With the full time Mediators we began the residency with storying in the body through walking.
HAK.io Method 4: Walking
SWISP Lab’s creative climate change metho-pedagogies developed through a/r/tographic inquiry enable walking with the Land while mapping the embodied, site-specific inquiry of the Anthropocene (See Anthropocene Curriculum where this all began).
In Bengaluru in 2023, this involved the Science Gallery Carbon Mediators forming a walking protocol for recording data in a 20-minute walk (sounds, sights, smells, feelings, daydreams, prayers, intrusive thoughts, and…whatever else may be co-located in the research site) at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, Karnataka. (See https://doi.org/10.26188/25511662.v1 to see the Walking Method Documented Using a Video Protocol)
In 2024, the walking protocol for recording data in a 20-minute walk was focused on attuning to the gallery and exhibition Sci560. How might the Mediators become attuned to cites, sounds and sights in the far, middle and close distances as they walked and mapped their knowing, being and relating on paper held to the their torso while mark making with charcoal?
The materials were defined, but each walking protocol was refined by the Mediators as they mapped the site cartographically. Cartographies produce what Braidotti describes as a “theoretically based and politically informed reading of the present” (Braidotti, 2019).
This residency like our others have produced new practices for SWISP and openings for knowing and doing differently. For the Mediators we hope that it ignited a way of being with transmediation and multimodality, a concept championed by The New London Group (1996). As Peñan and James (2024) suggest, “sensory, semiotic, and signal transmediation provides a structured way of understanding an otherwise complex and often invisible but ubiquitous function of meaning-making in contemporary society”.
Do you want to know more about Sci560?
click here https://sci560.scigalleryblr.org/programmes
Next week SWISP is off to COP29! A residence in Baku to share the ‘Learning with the Land: Digital dispositions for Hacking the Anthropocene’ in an exhibition and side event. As we prepare for this residency we will be making sense and sense making with what we were taught, learned, experienced and created in Bengaluru. Stay tuned here for updates.