The art school as an ecosystem

Co-learning: Conversational, situated, and more-than-human pedagogies at Master’s level

Guus Vandeweerd, Anneleen Swillen

Digital technologies are often developed from human-centred perspectives, overlooking relations with more-than-human actors, such as plants and animals, as well as machines and artificial intelligence.¹ The book Ways of Being, by writer, artist, and technologist James Bridle, addresses this tension through “the interrelationships between technology and the world, its meaning and materiality, its impact and uses, beyond the everyday, deterministic fact of its own existence.”² Each class of the Master’s seminar “S (or: exploring more-than-human entanglements in a post-digital culture)” at PXL-MAD School of Arts, Hasselt, takes one chapter of Ways of Being as a starting point for critical and creative reflections on themes, questions, and case studies from the book, and relates these to the works and exhibitions of contemporary artists and designers.

Co-learning ecologies

Throughout the seminar, we experiment with co-learning methods. Our approach is inspired by Donna Haraway’s idea of “sympoiesis”, or “making-with”, in which knowledge forms through relations.³ By working across diverse media and formats – literature and case studies, group discussions, presentations, walking, writing, artistic experiments – we aim to practise ecological thinking: attending to how ideas form through relations among environments, bodies, and technologies. This reflects a central concern in Bridle’s work, with particular attention to complexity, interrelatedness, interdependence, and the (re)distribution of control and agency. Alongside this, Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500 (2023), created by researchers and artists Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, serves as a key reference, tracing the entangled histories of power, technology, and ecology.⁴ Exploring non-linear mapping, participants develop their own research documents, in digital or analogue form, to reflect on Bridle’s book and connect ideas from their own practice (see Figs 1 and 2).

Nomadic co-teaching and more-than-human thinking

Each class is preceded by the individual reading of a chapter from Bridle’s book. During the live sessions, we gather in different environments, impacting how participants engage with the text, and with each other. So far, we have hosted sessions in cities, in parks, on buses, at exhibitions, and during second-hand book sales (see Figs 3-5). We aim to explore “nomadic co-teaching”, in line with philosopher and feminist theorist Rosi Braidotti’s understanding of nomadic subjectivity: “a situated and embodied consciousness that is critically aware of the conditions of its own production”.⁵

For the chapter “Wood Wide Webs”, we organized a session in a park. Participants engaged with the text by drawing, recording sounds, collecting materials, and writing. Through these actions, the park entered the conversation, allowing the text to be read together with what, and who, was present. Sitting on a path made of cut trees while discussing underground mycelium networks raised questions about origin, extraction, and connection. “Is this wood from the same environment, or does it come from elsewhere?” one of the students asked. The conversation shifted towards how connected systems become fragmented through deforestation.

In a session reflecting on the chapter “Talking to Strangers”, guest lecturer, artist and researcher Alicia Monreal presented her research practice. Drawing on collective sourdough bread making and the more-than-human organisms that constitute human bodies, she proposed cannibalism as a metaphor for becoming. Rather than framing consumption as extraction, Monreal considers cannibalism to be an ongoing process of mutual transformation, in which bodies, ideas, and environments continuously participate in each other’s making.⁶ The transformation of text, then, cannot be separated from the change of context.⁷ Reading becomes a form of digestion, in which meaning emerges through the conditions of its consumption. In this regard the presence and influence of nonhuman entities can be seen as part of the relational field in which thinking takes place, understanding space as a co-producer of thought and a pedagogical condition (see Fig. 6).

Meaningful meandering

With artistic research at its core, the seminar focuses on how various kinds of knowledge emerge through relations between practices in which thinking and making are in a continuous dialogue. As part of the learning outcomes, students explore visual and conceptual languages that engage with social, cultural, and political questions; situate their work within broader historical and contemporary discussions; and question the role of the artist or designer within these contexts (see Fig. 7).

Reflecting on the seminar’s first iteration (academic year 2024-2025), several considerations shaped our organization for 2025-2026. For example, we began experimenting with “nomadic co-teaching” and encouraged students to bring connections from a broader range of contexts. These included items from popular culture alongside artists’ and designers’ work and exhibitions, in an attempt to question the implicit hierarchies that tend to govern what counts as an appropriate reference in academic contexts, while remaining open to the value that can emerge from unlikely connections (a key strength of artistic practice). As the classes are conversation-driven, an ongoing question, and exercise, concerns how closely to remain with the assigned material (the text or topic at hand) and how much to welcome digression. This resonates with a reflection by one of the students:

What stayed with me most was the freedom and safety the format created. The group discussions felt like a book club, an accessible way to share and debate ideas, where digressing was just as welcome as staying on topic. Ways of Being changed the way I looked at everything I thought I already knew. The freedom of the seminar allowed me to relate to knowledge differently, and it has had more influence on me as a maker than I realized at the time. I think people underestimate the power of a book club. What I valued most was the space – in an educational context, but also beyond it – to open things up, which influenced me as a person and as a thinker, and, through that, indirectly as a maker.

Some sessions felt genuinely alive with student-driven conversation, while others gravitated towards a more conventional classroom setting, with the teachers’ voices central and the students mainly listening. This led us to reflect on how participation can be further supported through the seminar’s structure, and how responsibility for the conversation might be shared more openly – for example, by inviting students to take turns leading a session. This also ties in with our attempt to create space for different kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing, encouraging students to share from their experience, trust their own voice, and recognize that even a seemingly small skill or idea can be valuable. In this way, we are pursuing a more horizontal model of knowledge-sharing, one without a fixed hierarchy, where expertise can take many forms, recognizing that we are all continuously learning, and that we can do so in many ways. This calls for truly, and respectfully, listening to one another, mindful that understanding is itself plural.

Overall, participants shared that they valued the connections formed with one another, the conversational format, the atmosphere of trust, the breadth of themes explored, and the insights gained into artistic research. These reflections affirm our commitment to continuing this course as an ongoing invitation to (re)read, (re)think, (re)make, and question together. Looking ahead, we hope to open the seminar to students from various departments and universities, fostering even broader cross-disciplinary collaborative exploration.

Acknowledgements

We would like to extend our gratitude to all participants in the seminar, both human and more-than-human, and to PXL-MAD for their invaluable support in making this experimental course possible. Thank you for the time, space, resources, and trust that allowed this work to unfold.

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Guus Vandeweerd (he/they)

is a designer and researcher focusing on nonhuman avatars and more-than-human design. He is a PhD researcher in the arts at PXL-MAD and Hasselt University. His work spans research-led teaching, writing, and speculative design.

Guus.vdweerd@gmail.com

Anneleen Swillen (she/her)

works as a researcher and lecturer at PXL-MAD and Hasselt University. Through research in the arts, education, curation, and writing, she explores futures adornment, more-than-human co-creation, and (e)merging bodies in a post-digital age.

Anneleen.Swillen@PXL.be

Footnotes