The four missions of the Professorship AeCT

The AeCT Professorship takes on 4 missions in the service of its vision:

1. Theory of Creativity

While creativity has often surfaced as a fundamental force in human endeavor, it has been presented as either a mystified process of individual genius or a mythicized force that can be broken into practical competences and components. Philosophical and aesthetic discourse on creativity has been more interested in delineating its shape and contours, and its capacity for divining truths. In the cultural industries discourse, creativity is given a teleological charge of achieving desired goals in precarious contexts. By investigating the concept of creativity we want to deepen the intellectual dialogue on creativity, by understanding and analyzing it, in its full range. Formulating the theory of creativity, based on the theories of Deleuze, Bollas and Spivak the AeCT professorship wants to present creativity in everyday life as a tactical force that helps explore the innate, implicit, affective, and speculative possibilities of our times. It proposes creativity as a strategic essentialism (Spivak),  by using practical tactics that often emerge out of challenging the exercises of power to create new and equitable forms of life. E.g : The Creative Theory of (Just-About) Everything with Valiz Publishers

2. Radical educational experiments based on the theory of creativity

The AeCT proposes that the strength of artistic research is in creating new futurisms by challenging the existing institutional structures for future resilience. Instead of wedding itself to the probability-driven logical thinking of historicization, art education offers possibility-based, non-conformist, alternative and fictive explorations of that which has not yet been. Through place-making, space-making, and life-making, the AeCT professorship proposes radical experiments for the future educational landscapes with multiple partners. Inspired by artist like Ai Wei Wei and Olafur Eliasson, AeCT  constructs creative labs on a local-regional-global scale to enable hybrid local experiments that can incubate new ideas that can inform governance, politics, and socio-cultural conditions of building smart and human habitats and habits. E.g. : Designing (No) Schools in the Age of Creativity. s,m,l, xl with Valiz Publishers.

3. Mapping  and measuring these art-based educational experiments

In order to find a conceptual, pedagogic, and critical space in education and learning, it is important to map art-related educational experiments that can extend the learning to other spaces. The professorship initiates a comprehensive mapping of art-based educational experiments, produces mixed methods to measure results, develops frameworks for analyzing this data through rigorous standards and contextual knowledge, and finding tactics to introduce these results into undergraduate and graduate learning. The professorship recognizes that the idea of creativity can only be sustained if we build creative frameworks and matrices that move the contemporary focus from STEM to STEAM (including the arts) based education, and to acknowledge, reward and support it in our learning and living. E.g. : Mastering and Meassuring Creativity (SIA Seedcapital 2018) in cooperation with Teacher College.

4. Curating a new educational turn with art education as the home to house

The accelerated nature of rupture and transition that marks the current informationally networked society radically challenges the historically formed concepts of schools and disciplines. Drawing both from the new models of tactical learning from new geographies and contexts, and from the increasing demand for education to take agile, flexible, student-driven, and individual led trajectories, the AeCT professorship proposes to curate a new educational turn with Art Education as the home to house it. It seeks to work with artists, scientists, entrepreneurs, and governors to mark the different educational turns of the present and future to produce new mode of knowledge circulation, consolidation, and creation. E.g.: Enschede Educational Biennale 2019 in cooperation with No School.