PRAXIS / PROCESS

zero friction journaling and notes

we gather in a studio, talk, break up into 6 groups of 5 or 5 of 6 each table records

8 channel ? use motu or ATEM

look at this workflow ...

https://dgross.ca/blog/llm-assisted-journaling-workflow

we dont need to take notes to catch everything just 1 keyword / 2 minutes in caps on B4 newsprint in 4B pencil, inked over in 1 - 2mm black refillable permanent ink pens transferred to large brown or / then white paper sigilise your favourite word, each group makes a poster with words in 6-8mm round pen type and brushed ink fluo orange red purple pink spectrum, slightly different hue for each group

display on wall, discuss, photograph

add items from visioning / uchunodaijobu box.

photograph

setting intentions, grant morrison on sigils and logos, doesnt need to exist to work and other whorls on the hairy ball, fast, focussed one shot final work, no rehersals

cf. japanese calligraphy and swordsmanship

Lecture 1

hello

welcome

this here now

30 human bodies with states and memory and negative and positive evctors

positive groupings and clusters and patxhings

multiplied by 15 days together over as many weeks

creativity is collaboration

ono yoko: dream dreampt together

so declare, let it exist, just suppose ...

we are an elite multi-cultural, good enough by far collective of smart modern orientated, somewhat together scene, we will suypport each other and dive into the unknown together and build something

danger and the importance of working "beyond knowing what we are doing" trusting the body, the universe

get the stack aligned and clear of nonsense blockages and thet the universe dance

the work makes itself, we notice and get out of the way

it is so very very easy it is almost impossible to notice ...

we will run very much like Namaiki, we welcome any offers that come and make the very most of them, we always be knolling and exploring and building community and making space for "everyone is an artist" Beuys

we perform and demonstrate the role of artist in our comunity, we plug in the microphone so the local old ladies can share food and karaoke

we are the kindergarden, the old folks home, the pub, the madhouse, the factory (both Andy and Manchester's)

and we are Raw we go deep, all the way back, behind Andy to the appartment where Marianna Zazeela met Tony Conrad and Jack Smith, and the world changed again

we notice the radiant beauty of these moments and follow them to honour the ever flowing source, the muse, the flux. Ineffable, way beyond even poetic language. we observe it flow

from fertility goddess sculptural [ insert any useful art history, the art and creativity craft of building of villages and towns and cities etc. } Liverpool Manchester Industrial revolution, to London - Paris Expo's end of 19th Centuary, Gaudi and Barcelona, to Tangiers, Paris, NY, West Coast, dada, situationists, post moderns, etc etc. where on earth are we now

sloppy stealing of the commons built by the open surfers of the early web, often, as ever, greedily killing the geese that have been laying the golden eggs, the true alchemists, the shit composts to soil grows food, magic beans grow up to heaven and the geese lay golden eggs, till like the dodo, we eat the last one, another species dies at our feet.

so we flip it, no negative vectors, we align with a possible future

a planet wide forest a 1000 meters deep

and a topsoil as deep down into the earth

a very very thin shell on a molten rock in a deadly absolutely cold space warmed by our very own star

we are grateful for the experience

and cease all our suffering and whining and wailing, and get on with the job

made un necessarily difficult by the "situation"

we accept the "situation", all that, all this, we need not speak of it here

we are looking over the sea, we have fled from the war machine of Rome, we take no joy in killing as sport, we accept that some do and wish them well

we end up in Lisbon, looking out over the sea, dreaming of Atlantis, a paradise across the oceans

and we start to creatively build boats and space ships to head off to the future

and here we are today

that powerful long lineage vector at our backs pointing us where

how to describe, to map, to share these dreams,

words and all the rest of creativity

and now the machines can do the words and the maths better than us, we need to focus on what we do best

and share the work and the rewards fairly with everyone

art is the only alternative to ...

so we get excited, get oriented, organised and we make action

as a group, for this semester

we will all pass, if one of us is failing then I ask those that have more bandwidth to help us along, this is community, we do not have outcasts and undesirables, a life is a life

the strong should help carry the week, we are capable of enough abundance to sanctify life in this way and if our communities cannot support their afflicted then unnecessart and unfain burdon is being heaped upon us ... this is all we will say about the situation

we will build toys for the children in our communties to show them the best the non-local world has to offer, we will creatively and respectfully engage with our communities and be prepared to notice and recive gratefully the gifts the universe will provide

things dont need to be true or even exist to work, we honour the gods of the countries we pass through

from Dr John ... icloud shared album

From Michael ... icloud image reference

Do It Yourselves

Human Creativity Now

lecture course in creative practice — taught sessions with an applied project strand — working with materials, places, people, tools, and artificial minds

CORE PROPOSITION

AI makes competent production increasingly easy. The scarce human capacity is origination: noticing what matters, generating a live impulse, and retaining enough judgment to prevent powerful tools from making it ordinary.

now we have our final text copy from Dr John, which came as a word file and we have copied it into google drive and then into google sites to make a collaborative working document.

notice how have we compromised security in return for ease of collaboration.

look at otherways we could have done this

where is the live shared document ? who cam edit it ?

What are better ways of structuring this ?

What are we trying to achieve again ? private fast easy gathering of all the relevant text for a public document.

where is our original data that AIs can reference, where is, and what format is our AI database, wiki, RAG, markupdocument etc. etc.

then we do a final copy check with everyone: names, spellings, URLs and media links etc. then we look at html design in sites, what is our text structure, headings, titles etc.

STOP not sure i like our base document being a google sites shared file, what else do we have, within apple ecosystem we have a shared notes file, how about a github html file, how editable by non tech people ... obsidian ? miro ? ... no, this is just text. fast, easy, editable by anyone ( and revertable and undoable ) ... with basic formatting ... and cheap to covert to tokendps (pdf NG) ...

can we use the Read Me file ? if we set up the most basic server,or use our ISP or what does have serverwise

hmm, simple html ( with a lossless) html, markup, markdown conversion

https://openknowledgeformat.com

obsidian markdown

Word doc to docs ...

Copy paste from docs ...

DO IT YOURSELVES

Human Creativity in the Age of AI

A lecture course in creative practice — taught sessions with an applied project strand — working with materials, places, people, tools, and artificial minds

CORE PROPOSITION

Course premise

Creativity is not treated as a rare talent or a sequence of software skills. It is a practice developed through contact with materials, tools, places, other people, constraints, accidents, and systems that answer back.

Students begin with hands-on, largely analogue practice. They learn to notice, improvise, acquire or make tools, work frugally, use available materials, and contribute to a shared creative environment. Only after establishing something genuinely their own do they introduce digital media and generative AI.

AI systems enter as fellow artists: different collaborators with distinctive capacities, temperaments, maintenance demands, and costs. Students learn to cast, test, judge, alter, or dismiss them according to what they contribute to the work and to the creative activity of the group.

Guiding principle: All tools are valid; all tools have costs.

The classroom as a working space

The course is taught in an ordinary classroom or lecture theatre. Each session opens with a lecture and discussion; the practical work that follows uses only portable materials and the existing room. The wider campus is occasionally used as a site for observation or fieldwork, but the course requires no dedicated studio, specialist facility, or permanent change to any space.

The organising idea is straightforward: a class works best when its methods, materials, and shared records build on one another week to week, so that later sessions can draw on what earlier ones produced. A modest, well-chosen exercise usually teaches more than an elaborate technical set-up.

Course format and cohort organisation

The course is a standard 15-week lecture course for 30 students, delivered in a classroom or lecture theatre. Every session is anchored by a taught lecture; students then apply the ideas in structured practical work, mostly in six continuing groups of five. The room needs only portable materials and temporary displays—no permanent change to the space.

Where two periods are scheduled back-to-back, each pair runs as one extended session—lecture and discussion first, applied work second:

CLASS A — LECTURE & IDEAS

CLASS B — APPLIED WORK & REFLECTION

Lecture and discussion: provocation; artist, movement, or historical context; demonstration; and framing of the applied task.

Individual or group making; midpoint constraint; group comparison; selected whole-class critique; documentation and reflection.

Developmental spine

1 Tune

Place and setting

2 Make

Hands and materials

3 Resonate

Others and systems

4 Amplify

Digital and AI fellows

5 Encounter

Public and community

Learning outcomes

Act on a creative impulse before its outcome is known.
Connect creative practice with relevant artists, movements, histories, and ideas.
Learn, adapt, misuse, or make tools in response to an artistic need.
Work intelligently with material limits, cost, resistance, accident, and failure.
Notice how place, atmosphere, and other people affect creative activity.
Develop work independently and as part of a collaborative group.
Translate an idea among physical, spatial, performative, digital, and generative forms.
Select AI collaborators according to their distinctive contribution and costs.
Distinguish technological fluency from artistic value.
Build works and systems that generate resonance and further activity.
Exercise authorship through selection, rejection, editing, and transformation.
Present work through increasingly public encounters, from one viewer to community.

Fifteen-week curriculum

Week

Theme

Class activity and output

PHASE I — TUNE · Place and setting

What Is Creativity?

freedom to be, strategies for escape and being alive, total artists, eff, chris etc. you wont meet many in your life, and you wont often recognise them, maybe a few of you are

set up a system where i can revord myself mulling over these questions and annotate them

A: Creativity as practice rather than talent; divergent and convergent thinking; play, inhibition, and why AI makes origination more important.

B: Rapid low-stakes making; establish process books and six working groups.

eames, after 50 years video

always be knolling video

[ media database, list relevance to each section ]

samples of pocket papers and pen, pencil style

that disabled artist and his index cards and gilbert and georges elegant house studio

the chaos of bacons studio and calder

Place Changes Thought

A: Site-specific art, walking as method, and relationships among space, season, material, and attention. B: Campus observation and field collection; groups construct a shared atlas of overlooked signals.

Creative Environments

A: Studios, salons, laboratories, scenes, and temporary autonomous zones; examples from Frank’s practice. B: Groups propose and test a portable intervention that “tunes” the classroom.

PHASE II — MAKE · Hands and materials

Do It Yourselves

A: DIY, maker and vernacular traditions; learning skill through purpose. B: A constrained construction challenge: learn, adapt, borrow, misuse, or make the tool the group needs.

Materials Have Costs

A: Found material, readymades, Arte Povera, upcycling, and financial, environmental, attention, and maintenance costs. B: Create maximum expressive effect from minimal material expenditure.

Error as Method

A: Chance, indeterminacy, misuse, glitch, Dada, Fluxus, Cage, and the difference between randomness and judgment. B: Build a process that admits error; document what is accepted, repaired, or rejected.

PHASE III — RESONATE · Others and living systems

When Does It Become Art?

A: Object, framing, context, audience, Duchamp, and institutional theories of art. B: Present the same object in three contexts; make a work for one other person.

Distributed Authorship

A: Collaboration, collective practice, participation, assistants, audiences, and instruction-based work. B: One group writes instructions that another must interpret without clarification.

Systems That Answer Back

A: Feedback, emergence, cybernetics, generative systems, and artworks that respond rather than display. B: Build a classroom-compatible physical, social, or rule-based system that contributes to group activity.

PHASE IV — AMPLIFY · Digital and AI fellow artists

Crossing the Digital Threshold

A: Digitisation as translation; loss, compression, scale, replication, circulation, and the medium’s effect on the work. B: Translate an analogue fragment digitally and identify what was gained, lost, or normalised.

AI as Fellow Artist

A: Generative models as differently behaving collaborators; authorship, selection, interfaces, and costs. B: Six groups test contrasting AI collaborators against the same living fragment.

Amplification or Replacement?

A: Augmentation, automation, homogenisation, and the human as originator, editor, director, and judge. B: Produce human/material, AI-led, and authored-synthesis versions.

When the Electricity Goes Off

A: Infrastructure, dependence, preservation, obsolescence, and the question “Where exactly is the work?” B: Remove power or a key component and redesign the powered/unpowered relationship.

PHASE V — ENCOUNTER · Exhibition, salon, and community

Exhibition as a Medium

A: Gallery, salon, pop-up, performance, sequencing, framing, labels, hospitality, and documentation. B: Six groups design and test sections of a classroom or campus exhibition.

Public Encounter and Reflection

A: Install, rehearse, and refine through structured critique. B: Exhibition or salon; group presentation and individual reflection on impulse, tools, collaborators, costs, and authorship.

Signature experiments

The tool test: Students identify an artistic need, then learn, adapt, borrow, misuse, or build the tool required to answer it.
Casting the fellow artist: Students give the same living fragment to contrasting AI systems and compare artistic contribution, maintenance demand, financial/material cost, and normalising pressure.
The power-off test: A digital or AI-mediated work is experienced with its technological infrastructure removed. Students decide where the work resides and redesign the shift between powered and unpowered states.
Expanding encounters: A work moves through increasing levels of publicness: one viewer → in-class showing → pop-up exhibition → salon/community encounter.

Assessment

Assessment principle: Artistic value is not reduced to polish or technical complexity. Assessment follows attention, risk, specificity, resourcefulness, contribution to the shared system, and the relationship between the original impulse and its public form.

Component

Weight

What is assessed

Individual creative process book

25%

Selected weekly experiments, contextual understanding, decisions, failures, and concise reflection.

Two structured creative experiments

25%

Material/tool experiment and analogue–digital or power-off experiment. Demonstrated engagement with at least one generative-AI collaborator is required.

Group project and public exhibition

30%

Coherence, collective contribution, exhibition design, public encounter, and documentation.

Individual authorship reflection

20%

Clear account of impulse, tools, collaborators, AI, costs, transformations, and learning—including where AI was used and where it was deliberately refused.

Teaching architecture

The course operates as a recognisable lecture course: each week delivers taught content—artists, movements, histories, and ideas—and then connects it directly to a structured practical task. It stays responsive to the students and the materials at hand, but the teaching structure is conventional.

A taught lecture and visual case studies open every week, followed by applied work.
Thirty students organised into six continuing groups of five for the practical strand.
Portable material and tool kits; all practical work is classroom-compatible.
A shared class log recording tools, costs, failures, discoveries, and changes to working practice.
Individual process records alongside collective documentation.
Clear safety, equipment, access, and responsible-AI protocols.

Rotating group roles

Instigator: Keeps the original impulse and question visible.
Maker: Tests physical or digital execution.
Toolfinder: Identifies, learns, adapts, or makes what is required.
Editor: Removes generic or unnecessary elements.
Witness: Documents process, costs, failures, and decisions.

Further reading (the spine, by phase)

Phase I · Tune

Claude Lévi-Strauss — The Savage Mind (1962): the origin of “bricolage.”
Rebecca Solnit — Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2000).
Lucy R. Lippard — The Lure of the Local (1997) — or Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another (2002).
Hakim Bey — T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone (1991).

Phase II · Make

John Cage — Silence: Lectures and Writings (1961).
Germano Celant — Arte Povera (writings / exhibition catalogue, 1969).
Matthew B. Crawford — Shop Class as Soulcraft (2009): skill learned through purpose.
Jane Bennett — Vibrant Matter (2010): the agency of materials.

Phase III · Resonate

Roland Barthes — “The Death of the Author” (1967).
Sol LeWitt & Yoko Ono — “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” (1967) and Grapefruit (1964): the instruction as artwork.
Claire Bishop — Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012).
Jack Burnham & Norbert Wiener — “Systems Esthetics” (Artforum, 1968) and The Human Use of Human Beings (1950).

Phase IV · Amplify

Walter Benjamin — “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935).
Kate Crawford — Atlas of AI (2021): the material and human costs behind the tools.
Joanna Zylinska — AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams (2020, open access).
Hito Steyerl — “In Defense of the Poor Image” (e-flux, 2009).

Phase V · Encounter

Brian O’Doherty — Inside the White Cube (1976).
Hans Ulrich Obrist — Ways of Curating (2014).
Grant H. Kester — Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (2004).

Documentaries & viewing

look, then make; switch it on, then switch it off

Ways of Seeing — John Berger (BBC, 1972): the founding lesson in noticing.
The Way Things Go (Der Lauf der Dinge) — Fischli & Weiss (1987): chance, causality, and error as method.
Waste Land — Lucy Walker / Vik Muniz (2010): value made from found and discarded material.
Cybernetic Serendipity (ICA, 1968) — archival material, with Gordon Pask’s Colloquy of Mobiles: systems that answer back.
Sougwen Chung — drawing with robotic collaborators (artist talks / TED): AI as a fellow artist, live.
Anna Ridler — Myriad (Tulips) and Mosaic Virus (artist talks): making the dataset — and its cost — visible.
Memo Akten — Learning to See (2017, online): what a generative model projects onto the world.
Abstract: The Art of Design — Netflix (2017– ): accessible single-episode portraits of makers at work.

Links are deliberately omitted; all are findable by title through the library, the artists’ own sites, or the Institute’s subscriptions.

Course materials

The course runs on everyday equipment that the classroom and the students already have. Nothing specialist, expensive, or purpose-built is required.

In the classroom

A projector or large screen for lectures, case studies, and group comparison.
A whiteboard and markers for teaching, planning, and the shared class log.
Tables and chairs that can be rearranged for discussion, group work, and showing.

Students bring

Smartphones — the main tool for capturing images and sound, quick notes, and accessing web-based AI.
Laptops — for writing, editing, and running the AI and software tools in Phase IV (a shared or loaned device is provided for any student without one).

Basic consumables

Paper — plain sheets and a few large flip-chart sheets for sketching, notes, and displays.
Pens, pencils, and markers.
Tape, scissors, and glue for simple assembly and display.

Digital and AI tools

All accessed free or at low cost through a phone or laptop browser. The teaching point is contrast, so students compare more than one:

Text / multimodal models: e.g. Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini — compared directly in “Casting the fellow artist.”
Image and sound generators: a couple of free or trial web tools, so students feel the difference in cost, control, and “house style.”
Editing: free, browser-based or built-in apps on the phone or laptop — no paid software required.
Make costs explicit: keep a shared note of each tool’s price, data/consent terms, and footprint. This is course content, not admin.

Documentation

Phone photos and notes, gathered into a shared cloud folder (institutional Drive/Teams).
The class log kept on the whiteboard and in the shared folder; individual process books kept by each student.

Access and responsible use

Access: every core activity is achievable without any personal purchase; a device is provided for anyone who needs one, so no student is disadvantaged.
Responsible AI: consent and attribution for any personal or third-party material given to a model; a stated position on training data, appropriation, and authorship (developed with students in Weeks 8 and 11); AI use logged in the process book and authorship reflection.

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