“The exercise was not just a pedagogical tactic but became a way of staging an encounter with the nature of education itself. The ‘exercise’ is distinctly and immediately recognisable as a space of learning - where knowledge is transferred and generated, where the sensation of learning is keenly felt. The explicit ‘makeup’ of the exercise as teaching mechanism in the form of rules, constraints, process, reflection, sharing, discussion, and outcome emphasise and reify the conditions and experiences of practice-based learning that are hard to define and articulate due to it’s ongoing and iterative nature. In the immediacy of the situation, the ‘exercise’ offers a finite structure through which to understand one’s practice, yet this structure also offers a way to identify and analyse the more ineffable qualities of learning in order to reclaim agency within them.â€
Against a bureaucratic backdrop of decade long strategic plans and ‘risk appetites’, the contemporary art school operates in a space of perpetual anticipation, of constant forecasting, and outcome driven learning. The temporal regime of the art school is always future oriented - progress is chronically bound to the onwards march of time. What possibilities might this temporal logic be restricting or precluding?