“An unconference is a participant-oriented meeting where the attendees decide on the agenda, discussion topics, workshops, and, often, even the time and venues.”  (Budd et al. 2015: 2)

What

An unconference is a participant-led meeting where participants decide on the agenda, topics, workshops and often even the time and place, and it takes the form of something like Fool camp, Barcamp, ScienceOnline and so on. In Neil Mulland’s view, Barcamp is an informal and flexible programme, where firstly participants present their own Toolkit and secondly learners can choose their courses accordingly.

I have developed some understanding of Barcamp based on the FISh model. In the Focus phase, I learnt about the definition, format and some of the ways in which Barcamp is organised, in the Investigage I learnt about other types of unconference and ways of working, and finally in the Share phase I gathered and shared the results of my Barcamp research.

So

Based on the CAT openlearning course, our Basho naturally formed the basis for the formation of a Barcamp. We share similar motivations and communication bases, and are both participants and rule makers. By reading Dr. Bradfield Marsha’s article Utterance and authorship in dialogic art : or an account of a barcamp in response to the question, “what is dialogic art?”, she recounts summarises a new non-conference approach through this one-day barcamp, collating and documenting the discursive struggles of contributors to co-create dialogic art as a dialogue-based approach to contemporary art practice, a tendency that explores the various relations of authorship as authorship. These include the material and conceptual thresholds that organise creative agents and their cultural production: participation and collaboration, process and outcome, the author and the authored. This renewed discussion of identity and object has begun to inspire me to think that in the barcamp to which I belong.

How

A very big shackle is that in our previous art education (our Basho is made up of Chinese people), a system of knowledge, built from indoctrination and didacticism, has formed an empirical model of the concept of art. In other words, we were used to getting enough textual definitions before starting our practice by looking up information before the dialogue and discussion, which I think is contrary to the original intention of the establishment of Barcamp.

Including in previous theme classes, I found that my peers still preferred to follow the same learning patterns as in China and were unable to enter new learning contexts. Although this is not something that can be changed in the short term, I hope to work out a ground rule that is at least suitable for myself and my Basho to circumvent these problems.

Based on these issues, I have come up with my own suggestions (which can also be interpreted as rules that I think can be reformulated and added to my basho’s barcamp): the first point of consensus that can be established is to avoid the domestic teaching experience. The second point would be to avoid an academic dialogue environment, to avoid too many references to academic material and to focus only on emphasising fun. The consensus is to reconstruct the experience of the experiencer through play. The third point was to involve more people in the planning and communication, with our common theme being open rather than directly decided. He can be flexible and change according to our discussions, and we can change our own programme because of the suggestions and knowledge added by others.

Based on this basic premise, we wrote down our ideas and content on the miro, building something like a knowledge network and trying to build connections between each other and organise the main threads.

Reference

Utterance and authorship in dialogic art : or an account of a barcamp in response to the question, “what is dialogic art?” (Bradfield, Marsha, University (Bradfield, Marsha, University of the Arts London; 2013)

Ma contemporary art theory (no date) Ten Rules for your Basho’s Barcamp – MA Contemporary Art Theory. Available at: https:// blogs.ed.ac.uk/macat/openlearninghandbook/sprint4/tenrules/ (Accessed: November 20, 2022).

Sprint4 Barcamp / Lisirui Wang / Contemporary Art & Open Learning (2022-2023)[SEM1] by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0