Introduction to the celebratory publication

13.10.2023 0 Like 0 kommenttia

”Imagination is (…) a way of manufacturing our relationship with the limits of what we see, know, remember, and project about the world in which we live. “

Garcés 2022

This bilingual publication (Finnish/English) collects and extends traces of a seminar that took place October 23rd at the Theatre Academy (Teak) University of the Arts Helsinki. The seminar was held on the occasion of Teak´s 40th anniversary of higher art education in dance and choreography. Seminar focus was on worldmaking and contemporaneity in dance and choreography in higher art education.

The publication aims at opening the potential for dialogue and conversation about dance and choreography pedagogy in higher art education with a local and international body of readers. Hence the publication may be seen as an opportunity for conversation about dance and choreography training in higher art education beyond the day of the festivity of the 40th anniversary.

As editors, we decided to produce the visual heading for the publication through AI.

The banner of the publication is a selection of test images from a hundred visuals generated by online creative artificial intelligence in response to the event tag words, which have been reassembled and diversified in order to thwart biases. In other words, we sourced tag words and notions from the different contributions and through our dialogue as editors, combined them and put them into two image generating online platforms (Imagine Ai Art Generator and Wepik).  Tag words we used were e.g. anti-racist intersectional worldmaking, internationality criticality contemporeinity or many worlds think queer movement. 

The motivation to use Ai generated images is based on our discussions where we delved into means and tools that we recognize touching upon the artist-education and artistic practices in the last few years. We started that process by at first needing to work through the fact none of us is an artist expert in using this new technology to generate images in our respective research projects. We were looking for a location from where to allow ourselves to engage with the AI generated text-to-image generator. But also, we were from the start aware of the ethical concerns such as copyrights and security when operating within open source image production. And last but not least, since image generators are trained with a tones of data we ran into complicated questions of representation. When it came to the complexity of representation, we hooked into the AI generated image capture process, and discussing the generated images became a moment to  critically look at who and what is re-presented how why for whom: We started a conversation on worldmaking. 

We handle the bilingual nature of the publication in the following manner: if the author of the short essays wrote first in Finnish, we also placed first the Finnish version of the text, followed by its English translation. And vice versa. 

Through an open call we asked artists from the field, graduates or former teachers from either of the three programs, to respond to a prompt we gave: Let’s imagine you walk/move down a street. You turn your head and see a quick reflection of your practice or artistic work in a window you are passing by. How would you describe that fleeting reflection as a second of your practice or work? How does your current artistic work or artistic practice partake in world-making? 

Thank you everyone for your contribution! We left them untouched in respect to editing and publish them in the language you sent them to us.

Senior lecturer in contemporary dance and head of the BA Dance programme Sanna Myllylahti opens views for thinking about the theme of internationality from the perspective of the program/TeaK infused with personal account on her dance training in a multicultural context. Lecturer in dance Maria Saivosalmi invites the reader into the pedagogical situation of a class and ponders through that on the tools for performing in the studio setting. Lecturer in artistic research and dance performance Simo Kellokumpu’s opens the discussion about artistic research with the head of the Research Institute of the University of the Arts professor Leena Rouhiainen. Professor in choreography and head of MA Choreography Kirsi Monni’s text gives through various perspectives on history, university and the theme of the seminar day, an overview of the last ten years of dance and choreography education in higher art education.  Lecturer in choreography Jana Unmüßig’s writing contributes to the complexity of teaching choreography in MA Choreography studies with impulses coming from the field of expanded choreography.  In addition, there is a text from the administration and production team, whose work enables artistic production. Managers Jan-Peter Kaiku and Nina Numminen, producer Salli Berghäll and coordinator Rita Heino write about the supportive, often invisible labour, which is behind the artistic processes and productions at TeaK.  

Thank you everyone for your contribution!

Jana Unmüßig and Simo Kellokumpu