in no particular order

One of the interesting things about blogging is it gives the illusion of a linear progression of events. However neither my teaching practice nor my life work in this way. Today (as I juggle a grumpy Charlotte) I have been thinking about the senior electronic arts projects and all the fantastic places these 15 students have taken the initial brief. We began with Nicholas Negroponte's "seek" from 1972 exhibited in Jack Burnham's exhibition "Software" at the Jewish Museum. My PhD used Burnham's work as a key starting point to discuss systems and new way of thinkng through materiality , in terms of connections between objects rather than objects themselves. This tangent in systems aestehtics has been especially fruitful to work with as I intruduce students to the wider ecologies of electronic arts. this is an image of seek

:And next week I'll post some images of the final works in this project. In the digital culture seminars I run alongside the studio project we have discovered the work of Semiconductor:




So when I think about teaching as an improvisational practice (more on this later) I am thinking not just about this structural need to systematically follow through on tangents, but the very real classroom experience of ideas and processes unfolding before us. I think an initial brief in studio is really more like Jorge Luis Borges' "garden of forking paths". We will see where this leads us as our paths weave and flow over the next two weeks.
That for me is the encapsulation of teaching and learning.