Jupiter Artland
Jupiter Artland is a park near Edinburgh where contemporary art is shown in an outside space that the visitors can walk through. The spaces are chosen by the invited artists and so the setting within the park also has a significance, not just the artwork itself. (Flint et al. 2018) In the article under discussion here, by Flint et al. (2018) the process of the creation of a virtual version of Jupiter Artland is described and the motivation for this move into the virtual world is explained.
The authors very clearly explain the three aims they had when they undertook the challenge of creating Jupiter Artland in a virtual setting. They wanted to build a copy of the extraordinary park in a virtual environment to investigate how children experience virtual and mixed reality. Secondly, they wanted to explore the option of a virtual Jupiter Artland as a substitute or introduction to the park. Lastly, they wanted to create a flexible virtual space to see if this could be used in art education for children. Through two separate studies done with several different classes of children, they seem to have achieved all these aims by the end of the project. By virtue of using Minecraft as the virtual space, all children were able to easily interact and play within the virtual world and most found it an enjoyable experience. (Flint et al. 2018)
This is a very interesting and ambitious project which has a lot of the characteristics of a critical posthumanist view as described by Sian Bayne in her article in which she criticises the use of the term “technologically enhanced learning” (2015) The critical posthumanist perspective sees technology not as a black box where it is contained and untouchable, but as an interaction between the human and the non – human. She also argues that technology is created in a relational way, influenced by social and political factors. (Bayne 2015) All these points are discernible in the Jupitar Artland project as described above. The creators of the visual Jupiter Artland had a clear vision of how the virtual could work as an introduction or even a replacement of the actual park (Flint et al. 2018), which can be described as an interaction between the human and the non – human. The virtual space was created in response to a social and political situation; the Educational Foundation wants to try and let as many children as possible interact with the park and the art inside it. The idea of the virtual park was created to try and make this ambition possible. (Flint et al. 2018) And lastly the way a class of children helped change the park after it was created. After their visit in the Minecraft park, some of the children made suggestions for improvements for the virtual space. This can be found in Bayne’s (2015) explanation of critical posthumanism as the technology and the human coming together; the technology is created and then improved again by humans, in this case to enhance the visitor experience for the park.
The creation of the virtual Jupiter Artland in Minecraft can certainly be used as an example of the use of technology in education through a critical posthumanist filter.
Sian Bayne (2015) What’s the matter with ‘technology-enhanced learning’? Learning, Media and Technology, 40:1, 5-20, DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2014.915851
Flint, T., Hall, L., Stewart, F. & Hagan, D. (2018). Virtualizing the real: a virtual reality contemporary sculpture park for children. Digital Creativity, 29, pp. 191-207
There is lots in this article that resonates with a posthumanist perspective especially in the non-realistic virtualisation of JA twhere the limitations of the technology gives space for and shapes the children’s imaginative responses to the artefacts. The article does also touch on some interesting issues of the temporal experiences, such as the growth of the trees, the pace of Minecraft and the effects of flying, using carts or rollercoasters to speed-up the experience. These virtual experiences then also go on to partly shape the children’s responses to the ‘actual’ Artland – such as to the Love Bomb and the Temple to Apollo.