Investigations within Future Academy: Clementine Deliss, February 2004. What concept can we imagine for the art college of the future given the huge variety of academic structures that exist today? Which art histories will be incorporated into what has been, until now, a predominantly European and American reference system, and how can one accentuate difference? In what ways can we develop critical architectural parameters for new art academies in Europe, America, Africa, and Asia? How does mobility feature here, and can we counteract the drive towards unification and standardisation inherent in both European ideologies and globalisation? What equilibrium is possible between the industry of architecture and more fluid models that characterise the roving realities of a shifting home base? Are we looking at academies as stations along geo-aesthetic axes of research and production? What physical environments do we anticipate for art and design education when new technology initiates new ergonomic needs and the studio can be condensed to a digitally equipped desk space? Do we need smaller studios and larger socialising areas; and if the creative hub of the college has become the computer room, what can the traditional studio setting provide and how fixed and located should it be? What will happen to the studio when wireless networks question the very concept of a building, and the technology we are incorporating today becomes more and more invisible, ubiquitous, and irrelevant? What can we learn from current experiments with distance learning and virtual colleges in the arts? How can we sustain the research potential of art colleges in relation to new art practices that are in a state of experimentation? If practice-led research is the motor of the art college, how can it remain a non-consumable yet primary feature of art education? Merchandising the experiment is a central dynamic of today's museum culture, so where do artists find the more open institutional environment today that can nurture new developments in their work? Can the art college provide this? Why do artists teach, and how can their own work be given freedom of movement within an international network of colleges? What will be understood as artistic competence in fifty years from now? How will it be taught and mediated? What ends will it be supposed to meet in terms of social change and civic responsibility? In what way can the global context encourage a more precise identification of audience beyond state structures and the immediate locality? What is the library of the future, what does it contain with regard to art practices as they may develop in the future? Edinburgh. Current problems: The problem of communication with the education system and the need to work on the architecture of the social structure. The art educational institution or college is sometimes an isolated area. It can be too self-contained without enough contact with outside society. If communication is difficult within our group at ECA (Japanese, Chinese, Swedish, Afrikaans, English, German…are all spoken but not all understood between us), can universal languages, images, body language, and art, communicate effectively? Language maps out the world. It makes people move around to study where they can speak a language or learn a new one. Edinburgh questions: Will education contribute to the loss of identity as the world becomes more globalised? How can the future academy reflect a merging and changing world of commerce, trade and culture? Why will people go to India - in the future? Why do we feel difference between cultures? Will identities in 50 years be the same? With the interlinking of races and children being born with roots from different continents will nationality still have an importance? What will the nation be? What is the geography of Future Academy. Will countries and cultures have open borders? How much will the merging of cultures relate to the home culture of one country? Will art practice be based in one place? How important is it to make works of art that are continuing? Who is the teacher of the future? Who is the student of the future? Will there be a need for art colleges? What is the art medium of the future? Will we still paint? What will art works be in the future and will they be exhibited and if so how? Vraagtekun=kuns? Translation? = Art (Afrikaans) Communication = Visual? How will fine art have the capacity to change social conditions, and life in the global economy? $? To whom are these questions addressed? Dakar: "Interrogations perpetuelles - Perpetual Questions" What are we looking for in terms of aesthetic practices in the future? Why are we looking for them? What is a raw material in the future? Where do we find these? How do we look for them? Why do we want to find them? The concept of generation and how it has transfered from a notion of time to one of human product? We need to look a the post-geometric organisation of dynamics. Looking at the economic systems that are related to how one organises knowledge. A suggestion to make a film that looks at businesses from the perspective of money and knowledge. Whatever the investigation, be it hawkers (baol-baol) or religious education, what comes back each time is the concept of the informal system. How can one create a revenue if the formal banking institutions are in crisis? Leads to the Tontine, rotating savings associations found all over Africa. Establishing a Tontine in Dakar, and now in Edinburgh. The Tontine provides for a personalisation of human relations. What is the Indian equivalent, and how do the Scottish Savings Banks work? Daara: Koranic school, memorisation. Memorisation as a potential class within the future academy? Analysing the coranic school from different perspectives. Proposition: Zero degree poverty in the future. The begger child and corporate advertising…how do artists engage with this? Penc communications as a method of teaching for the transmission of knowledge. Penc is a crossroads in the village and a system of communicating. It allocates roles to women, men, a village head, and to festivities. It has a mystical dimension too. Elements of the Penc: protection, connection, verbal discourse, banking, respecting values, closed circle, human warmth. Looking for aesthetic vectors and values in domestic industries: Fripperie: b-grade clothing sold in Colobane, Dakar as what could be regarded as an international stock exchange; analysing illegal taxi systems and their race against death, hawkers… The 'baol-baol', hawkers and their connections to the coranic school and the Talibe, a child who is enroled in a coranic school and has to beg. Is there a relation between the hawker and the swami in India? The concept of laver-repasser, or clean and press with regard to imports of objects and knowledge. The suitcase: metaphorical and real - what do you take with you as a gesture of trust and exchange. Currencies of exchange in the arts in the future? The student body, community and communality. What runs in common with whom and why? How does one expand Future Academy? Srishti School of Art, Design & Technology, Bangalore India: Can we break away from and destabilise the representation of architecture through its discourse in drawing and model-making? Can we create a document within architecture that can be used as a tool by a community and not just provide an academic framework? Who is excluded from future academies? Who is excluded from Future Academy? Who is a student? How will illiteracy affect access to communications? Is Future Academy about resistance, secrecy, filtering? How do we understand the notion of generation today and what will it mean in the future? How can we refine the philosophy of design and take it away from cosmetic interplay towards function and system change? Is criticality unplugged when you leave college? What will art and design do in the future with regard to the increase in toxins? What is the social responsibility of designers for the future? Is there such a thing as crisis design? Who do architects design for and can we move away from trophy architecture? Can you have ethics without a concept of the divine? Who is the peripheral academic? Should institutions cease to exist? What is an institution in the future? What is the life span of an institution in the future and why? (ie. self-destructing institutions based on shorter working spans) Question of what is the artist's studio of the future and how it overlaps with the notion of the art school. Does art have to be based on spatial considerations, e.g. studio, e.g. gallery? How do disciplinary fields actually intersect? How does FA support these connections? Does art pick up on global trends as much as music and fashion? What is the divide between professionals and amateurs in the future? Who and what are we quoting? What are the structures of citation that we are working from? What can we expect from the transformation of the vernacular into a debate on new media? What can design students do about the one day economy of the traditional production systems in India? If we adopt an urban vs. rural polarity are we likely to fall into others such as the individual vs. collective? How can we strengthen the platform and the relationship between practice and pedagogy, in particular within the field of architecture, thereby taking into account areas that do not fit within textual formats? No discipline is a discipline unless it is grassroots. What do we understand by an institution? The institution itself is at stake and we need to conceptualise the role of a pedagogic institution in the future? We need to look at different ways to define what knowledge is. What are non-legitimate sources of knowledge? What is the world view or basic method with which to construct a system of knowledge? If there exist many systems then what is the role of Future Academy in thinking this through? We need to look at multiple languages, linguistic and disciplinary rather than continue with existing polarities between modernity and tradition or arts and crafts, or architecture and engineering. What types of cross-overs are now possible? The success of Future Academy will lie in debating ownership and cultural norms. We need to look at past academic formations. Students question regarding Future Academy: are we highlighters or are we editors? Future Academy is not a monument but a series of invisible mobile structures. Movable work stations: Future Academy active pedagogical model, dissemination in an invisible manner. The potential of Future Academy is in addressing internationalism.