Critical Gounds #11 – Giulia Perugini – New Media Pedagogy and Other Short Stories

Arshake is delighted to publish the essay by Giulia Perugini, who was invited by Antonello Tolve to contribute to the 11th edition of the Critical Grounds series. “New Media Pedagogy and Other Short Stories” is the title and subject of this essay which explores pedagogy through new media. In the current framework, described with extreme care and detail, leaving aside any polemical discussion, Giulia Perugini pinpoints several historical experiments which have found an ideal territory in art, where theory and practice aimed at the encounter between pedagogy and new media can be successfully linked.

The text focuses in particular on some ‘illuminating realities’ which «in the last three decades have chosen to rethink pedagogy in qualitative terms, taking advantage of technology to achieve previously unthinkable formative goals, using artistic practices and creativity». CRAC – Centre for Contemporary Art Research, ALAgroup and H-FARM are considered «pole stars in the pedagogy and teaching of art in the new media age».

Alongside these new educational models, Giulia Perugini adds the experience of Wrmkos, developed in 1987 from the collaboration between Pasquale Campanella and several members of the Cooperativa Lotta contro l’Emarginazione (Cooperative Fight against Marginalisation), a centre that disseminates culture through associative processes and collective artistic actions following Franco Basaglia’s guidelines, his attitude and acceptance of those who suffer from mental illness.

The bibliography that concludes the essay builds a framework in which to situate these specific experiences, forming an incredibly rich and varied theoretical map, made accessible by dividing the topics: from questions concerning the evolution of the relationship between new media and educational practices to the relationship between art and teaching, including their social implications, as well as the latest trends in artistic practices and the art / new media contamination. We are particularly pleased that the analysis of the encounter between art and technology is focused in this case on education and that we are able to bring Giulia Perugini’s research and work to a wider audience. Perugini bears witness to a part of Italian history that, within a complex and somewhat uncertain frame – as it undoubtedly is – is still characterised by creativity and engagement with experimentation, represented in examples that reveal all the potential that the encounter between art, education and new media holds for new ways of thinking and acting, putting together a framework for future generations.

«Critical Grounds», the Arshake’s publishing project directed by Antonello Tolve, is born from the desire to network precious and of great cultural interest books in open source electronic format. It is, in fact, a shelf which, together with the re-release of untraceable or forgotten essays, spreads rumors of the international critical scene to offer a wide-ranging look at the culturological contemporary landscape. Alongside this program “Critical Grounds” also proposes artist books, new authors and new voices of fiction to share with its authors and its readers a wide choice of assumptions, guidelines, designs on the creative area of the near future.