The Art of DIY Education

Artists have always used emerging technologies as creative tools, never more so than in the current era of generative media. Whether they are experimenting with software, hardware, or wetware, digital artists depend on hybrid literacies developed both within and outside of academic settings. The case for a more DIY approach to education, one that interlaces arts, sciences, humanities and posthumanities has never felt so urgent. 

A number of years ago, the professor Craig Calhoun identified a shift away from education as a process of instructing an uneducated other to an exchange of knowledges and co-production of understandings. Many scholars working today support interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches that challenge established institutional norms. In this special conversation hosted by Alex Estorick, scholars from Goldsmiths at the University of London discuss how new approaches to art and media can help to reshape the academy.

‍Alex Estorick: What is the importance of interdisciplinarity to you?

‍Rachel Falconer: As a curator who has worked within industry and academia, with artists, with research practice, and, in my past life as a creative director, in the film, advertising, and gaming industries, there’s always been a superficial alignment of disciplines in order to tout one’s business as an interdisciplinary practitioner. In an academic situation, those kinds of rhythms are sometimes accentuated because of the politics of being in a department that, in and of itself, is interdisciplinary. At Goldsmiths, I don’t think that there is enough porousness between departments. 

But if we’re identifying a useful generative model, it would involve interrelationships between departments and interest groups, as well as room for disconnect, differences of opinion, and unease with disciplinarity.

‍Andrea Khôra: I’m a PhD researcher in the Art Department and also an Associate Lecturer here, kind of floating between things. My practice itself is quite interdisciplinary, working between the worlds of science, computing, digital media, and fine art. There’s a lot of [time spent] trying to figure out how to translate methodologies and how they can fit within various sectors.

‍AE: How does one map such a hybrid practice onto the departmental or disciplinary structure in which you find yourself?

‍AK: I think in the department it’s quite simple, actually, because it is so open and everyone is in their own niche project. But, as an overall institution, I don’t feel that there is much crossover. I think I met Rachel at a Goldsmiths event, and then we were able to collaborate on a few projects after that.

‍Daniel Rourke: I’m based in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies and also did a PhD at Goldsmiths in the Art department. I found myself here at a time when there was a new MFA called Art Writing. Before that, I had done an MA in Creative Writing, and, before that, a BA in Philosophy. 

In a sense, the points where disciplines apparently meet have often been points where I’ve found a home for myself, but not by intent necessarily. That happened when I joined my current department right at the moment when the pre-existing Cultural Studies department had been subsumed into Media and Communications. It was a baptism of fire to be entered into this strange performance of interdisciplinarity, playing out in a place which is bureaucratic at the level of egos and resources. A lot of that has really settled now. To watch a small, independent department have to manifest a new position for itself within a big department was fascinating because there are points at which you wish there was more permeability between things. To see those egos dissolve and people find a new place, building alliances and allegiances was a really exciting and important thing to watch happen. 

At a time in this country when the Conservative government’s alliance with STEM studies [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] was so all encompassing that the humanities have kind of crumbled in its wake, I think that the inclusion of “media” in the title of the Media and Communications department has acted as a buffer or shield because media can be associated with technology. 

I don’t know how one could be a media theorist in a singular sense. For me, interdisciplinarity is happening everywhere all the time, quietly, and it’s actually just the bureaucratization of the disciplines that causes things to be forced into categories.

My own interest as a researcher is in what I would loosely term posthumanism or the posthumanities, which is a project to save the humanities in their traditional sense. Rosi Braidotti, amongst others, is trying to term a whole set of points at which the traditional humanities are meeting with technological, ecological, feminist, and postcolonial studies and trying to create some kind of post-anthropocentric understanding of not just the human but what it is to study under that moniker. She is not interested in categories so much as the movements and flows between things as well as their hybridity. Politicians have been trying to shove the humanities underneath STEM subjects but critical posthumanism makes the claim that the human has always already been imbricated with technology and ecology.‍

Gerolamo Gnecchi: I arrived at Goldsmiths in 2019 to pursue an MA in Computational Arts. My experience was different from the environment I had encountered during my studies in architecture. I found a community of people who listened, shared ideas openly, and supported each other throughout the year. I guess this was likely the result of our diverse backgrounds, which gave me a glimpse of what interdisciplinarity might signify.

‍Irini Kalaitzidi: I arrived at Goldsmiths in a similar way to Gero because I also came here to study the MA in Computational Arts in 2019. My background is in dance and choreography, and I was going through a period when I wanted to flee the dance field. 

The computational arts context felt like an escape from the human-centered dance field. I thought that technology would allow me to reimagine dance and choreography beyond the human, so I came here to escape the humanness of my discipline.

In the Master’s context, I felt that there was interdisciplinarity with very different perspectives and voices brought to the table. Then I started working here as a teaching assistant and then as an Associate Lecturer and now as a Lecturer since 2022 in the same department. I don’t have a lot of experience of cross-departmental communication and collaboration. However, within the department, I have been given the opportunity to develop a module called “Hacking your Creative Practice” that is based on my practice as a choreographer. The idea is to explore the affinity between choreographic and computational thinking, so it is interdisciplinary in its essence, but it’s also quite niche at the same time. 

‍AE: I find it interesting that you use the word “niche” because it’s hard not to feel that we’re talking about niches at all times. 

‍IK: It’s even more specific in the context of computational arts because dance and embodiment could be seen as very easily related to computational media. But choreography is not a concept, discipline, or word that is brought into the discussion. So it’s not that accessible.

‍RF: Maybe that’s the problem of paying lip service to the idea of different disciplines colliding. 

‍Daniel Berio: One problem with implementing interdisciplinarity is communication with “languages” used in different fields.

I work with artists at the arts end of computational arts as well as computer scientists and often they will end up in conflict because one communicates in a way that is completely alien to the other. 

The other problem is time, because we’re all overworked, and so to water interdisciplinarity, as it were, takes time. A less intense work environment could lead to more developments on that side.

‍AE: You all wear formal hats but actually what you’re doing under your umbrellas is different. While the discipline or institution delimits your envelope of activity, what you do or with whom you interact is invariably disruptive.

‍Atau Tanaka: I like that fluid, contradictory, and even decoy form of identity, which might give you space in which to operate. My title is Professor of Media Computing, so some of my post ends up in the Department of Media, Communications, and Cultural Studies although I’m a professor in the Computing department; so even in the title, you’ve got smoke and mirrors. But I don’t do media studies and I’m not a computer scientist at all; I’m really a musician. My PhD is in computer music, so the title includes an artistic discipline, music, and a technical discipline, computing.

At the top level, it’s art and science, and there are methodological differences between Cartesian scientific method and artistic process; we can go back in history to C.P. Snow and “The Two Cultures”. But we can also consider the possibility of doing both in an integrated way, not least by having this conversation with younger academics who are working to break down traditional silos and barriers. Yes, we can be discontent, but it’s a whole lot better than it used to be. 

If you have computer music, you have an art and a science, each taking on methodologies of their surrounding disciplines. Computer science is about hardcore algorithms — in fact, what I do is human-computer interaction, and there’s a lot of design thinking in that. Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby are key reference points who came to see me perform back in the day. Body theory is a big part of it as well. 

I accumulated these disciplines, some of which were emerging fields, as I went along, but I didn’t know that I would adopt them when I was a PhD student. I’ve been able to contribute to them but always with a musician’s voice. 

I have this core identity to which I think I’m faithful, but all the while I’m wearing different costumes and hats and masks to get the message across depending on who I’m addressing, whether it’s as an independent artist, or when I was an unwilling young academic, or now as a senior academic sitting on Council, having to talk to financial senior management when they are deciding on reorganizations. The question of translating interdisciplinary interests while the humanities are in danger is a never-ending dance. Before I started at Goldsmiths in 2012, I was told “oh, things are always breaking there.” But that’s good. That’s the kind of space where you can operate. 

‍RF: I think we all find our freedom within dysfunction. 

‍AT: From my experience in other universities in Europe, Japan, and elsewhere in the UK, the siloization is reduced here at Goldsmiths, and we’re very good as colleagues at finding each other. I supervise PhDs across other departments, which can bear itself out administratively if one can only figure out the flow of money. Higher education is getting financialized, but my parents encouraged me to get into academia because they didn’t trust business or money-based disciplines; academia was supposed to be a safe space, which is no longer the case.

‍AE: Are you saying that hybridity or disciplinary porousness comes at a cost? 

‍AT: Yes, because if we are all going to be supervising PhDs across departments, then the second supervisor in the ancillary department needs to have that recognized in their workload. The bean counters are running the show.

Interdisciplinarity is natural for us as humans, but it’s unnatural for institutions. Having as broad an exposure early on will lend to a society that is more open and inclusive. But it takes rigor to map lexicons from different disciplines. 

‍DB: I did my PhD here, and I come from a mixed background; I worked as a programmer and did my Master’s in the art-science program in the Netherlands, which is similar to computational arts but we could take courses in very different branches of the university, from engineering to art. That gave students freedom. I feel very lucky that, thanks to Goldsmiths, my PhD ended up being very technical, closer to computer science, but on the topic of graffiti, which other universities probably would have rejected. 

‍AE: I want to address the limits of an interdisciplinary approach as well as the potential that it could be used as a cloak with which to streamline an institution. Right now, it feels as though there is a constant threat that some departments, especially in the humanities, could be subsumed within other departments at the cost of the livelihoods of lecturers and students’ futures.

‍AT: While in the US, the liberal arts provide broad disciplinary exposure, unfortunately, the design of a core curriculum here is a streamlining and money-saving enterprise. 

‍AE: But it seems to me that interdisciplinarity need not necessarily involve streamlining. Indeed, it might involve an agglomeration of discourses.

‍RF: It might also denote multiplicity or something with an unpredictable growth rate. However, I do think we’ve got to be careful with how we use terms like “fields” and “disciplines” even when we’re talking about interdisciplinarity, which is already a loaded term. 

Knowledge exchange projects aren’t necessarily income generating, but they need to have a particular kind of measurable societal output. 

‍AE: It sounds as though there is something that you want to do, which is not necessarily lucrative but that you always need to frame in a way that the institution understands. Perhaps what is really needed is something more like a DIY institution that is capable of reconciling the fact that the role of the scholar is in flux. 

‍DR: Coming from an artistic background and a teaching background, and then arriving in the university just before the pandemic, it feels like this university is only just settling back into some form of order where people are meeting in the corridors and having conversations, which is where this kind of work takes place. ‍

AT: We just want to be who we are, but we need jobs, which end up being in some department in some institution. 

The beauty of Goldsmiths is that you find people who are in the wrong department. 

‍AE: One stakeholder we haven’t really discussed is the student. How have you been shaped in your research or teaching by your interactions with students?

‍AT: The siloization of disciplines exists institutionally but, in my experience, students don’t see disciplinary boundaries as such. It’s up to the structures and programmes within institutions to support that naturally emerging interdisciplinarity.

‍AK: The majority of my time here has been spent teaching critical studies with first year bachelor’s students in the Art and Computing departments. But I found almost the opposite of what you just said; I found very strict delineations in students’ minds. The computing students generally wouldn’t even want to talk about feminism, saying: “this doesn’t apply to my work.” I feel that everything applies to your work. 

One of the best parts of being an artist is to steal methodologies from other disciplines and work with them, play with them, and translate them. 

‍AT: Maybe the student body is changing, which could be a function of the ideologies of government and the ways higher education is sold and offered.

‍DR: At this moment, what it means to be part of institutions like this university as well as others is going to be increasingly under duress. We’ve got JD Vance coming in in the US, who said that “universities are a means of enforcing conformity of thought, and they have become a barrier to social mobility and economic growth.” Then you have Kemi Badenoch, who is now leader of the Conservative Party, who has waged a war on universities for a while as an extension of conservative culture wars more generally. 

As we enter into a climate that is going to become more and more confrontational, we need to question what the role of the university is, not at the status of individual needs and wants in the neoliberal sense, but from the perspective that we are here to offer a way of asking certain kinds of questions that cuts across all disciplines. 

‍AE: Do you think that an interdisciplinary approach can serve as a form of resistance to the atomization of the individual as a corporate body?

‍DR: I think that we should be encouraging our students to see themselves in a more hybrid way and to be able to cross over into classrooms not because there’s something there that they think they want, but because there’s something there that might challenge them. The problem of bureaucracy is that it forces us to find points of connection and agreement. Actually, we want to bring different ways of looking together. That’s when it becomes interesting; not that I have a funding model based on discord. 

‍AK: It’s difficult, though, because we can’t necessarily put monetary value on critical thinking, which is what the government is wanting to do. 

‍DR: They want to quantify it.

‍GG: My thoughts are moving toward what it could mean to build a space that welcomes diverse ways of knowing, but it is becoming more and more difficult for such spaces to flourish. In a city like London, this can be experienced in different ways. 

Within academia, decreasing funding for the arts and humanities suggests that there will be less and less room for interdisciplinarity to exist. Beyond academia, this can also be observed in how community-based spaces that welcome diversity and are not profit-driven have been shut down or displaced in the past year. 

Examples include the Matchstick Piehouse, IKLECTIK and Mother House Studios. A lot of energy, resistance, and effort is needed for such spaces to survive, but I wonder why that is. Why should it be a struggle?

‍IK: There is some struggle around effectively integrating human movement and computational practices. Students, especially those of a younger generation entering this department, often adopt a disassociated approach that involves working with bodies and movement in a disembodied way. This is reflected in the stiffness of their own bodies as well as a broader stiffness around framing their practice and discipline.

‍AE: Is that part of the reality of working with digital technologies? 

‍IK: It is a prevailing way of working with these technologies. But I do wonder if there is more to it than that. What I am trying to do is unsettle that a little bit by bringing in some actual physical movement. I can see how this immediately shifts something in the way they relate to each other and in the interactions that we build. I feel as though the biggest skill that I have as an artist and educator at Goldsmiths is that I’m a good improviser, and the DIY framework of operation resonates a lot with the way I function here.