Studia of the Present: the recursive art of imagining the places of art today

The latin word studium, from which we get our studio, reflects a strange intertwining: of study and a place of study, of time and space, of inside and outside, now and later, contentment and desire, and so on. Studium appears to be already plural: Studia. It's not just that the strange conjunction of art and learning has gone through many forms, leading us to wonder what is next. It's that at any given moment a studium opens onto the diversity of the present. We could say that it is a form of recursive labor: it works on its own possibilities. As we collectively work through accelerating shifts in the nature of education, the arts, and labor today, studia both run the risk of becoming unrecognizable and unworkable to us, and offers us the potential for re-imagining their labors. The extent to which we can reflect on this is precisely the opportunity of a profession.

Chris Moffett, Ph.D., is a Research Scholar at the Digital Futures Institute, Teachers College, Columbia University, working across philosophy, education, art, and technology. He has taught both Art Education, and the Foundations of Art & Design, at the University of North Texas. Current projects include work on play-based early-childhood learning in Anji, China, non-traditional and new media in the art classroom, play and risk in the technical landscape, and a phenomenology of streaming. Dr. Moffett is a Founding Member of the artist collective ARE, exploring the intersection between movement, sensory exercises, and aesthetic practices. ARE has taught workshops for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, El Museo del Barrio, the Festival of Ideas for the New City and the Guggenheim Museum, the Noguchi Museum, DIA:Beacon, and collaborated with FormLab at the Inside Outside Museum in Beijing, amongst other projects.