In this paper, we aim to reflect on an experiment that we conducted with students as part of a (bachelor/undergraduate) course centered on the scientific nature of educational sciences, viz. on what it specifically means to interpret and research reality pedagogically. The experiment took place in one of the first weeks of the by now infamous 2020 corona lockdown, and figured as an online substitute for a series of parallel, live small-group seminars. Although the original angle of seminar—looking into the aesthetic aspects of pedagogy’s scientific endeavor—did not change, we refused to simply ‘copy-paste’ the set-up of the live practice onto a given online format. Instead, we chose to make optimal use of the ongoing events and their infrastructural implications, to integrate the seminar’s content and format into the altered educational experiences of the students. Key to this experiment thus became the double question: to what extent are our intuitions and cognitions about what is of concern during the corona crisis aesthetically informed by (political, technological, and other) ‘affective-perceptual’ styles, and in which ways are we ourselves, as pedagogues, capable of affecting those regimes to disclose other, new, imaginative ways of being, living and thinking together, both during and after the apparent break of the crisis? In what follows we will first sketch the background of the experiment—the general idea of the course and the seminar’s broader theoretical embedment. Then we move on to describe and explain the experiment’s design, in order to conclude with a discussion of its results, viz. of the more striking and ‘questionable’ experiences that arose in its course. Finally, we offer a brief reflection on what this experiment, with all its limitations, might tell us about pedagogy’s scientific aesthetics and how these may (not) inform new ways of doing science.

On the style of matters of study: a Latourian recalibration of pedagogy

The experiment we will discuss, took place as a seminar within a compulsory course for bachelor students of educational sciences. The course, officially named ‘Interpreting, researching, and theorizing in educational research (part 2)’, is a kind of cross-breeding between philosophy of education and philosophy of science. It develops a fundamental, self-reflective understanding of pedagogy as science, as opposed to pedagogy as an amalgam of different educational practices (teaching, adult education, community education etc.) and their respective didactics—these being considered as potential objects of pedagogical scrutinyFootnote 1. The main wager of the course is not just to offer an overview of different scientific approaches to pedagogy—which is what part 1 of this course strives to achieve—but to challenge the still prevalent methodological and epistemological distinction between the ‘interpretative’, qualitative social sciences on the one hand, and the positivist, quantitative hard sciences on the other hand (cf. Smeyers & Smith, 2014). Specifically, the course wants to reconsider the strongly ingrained divide between more philosophically oriented, conceptual, and humanist modes of pedagogical research, and the statistical methods typically espoused by psychologically, sociologically and neurologically oriented pedagogies, in order to progress beyond their dichotomies, and to conceive of pedagogy in more dynamic, relational, and ‘posthumanist’Footnote 2 terms.

Although we will not trace here the whole line of arguments which the course develops, its most crucial element, the philosophy of science of Bruno Latour, will also provide us with the necessary background for understanding the pedagogical concept of the seminar experiment under scrutiny in this paper. Latour’s analysis of modern science mainly involves two big, criticalFootnote 3 arguments. First, Latour observes that modern science has largely come to build on what British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead calls the “bifurcation of nature”: an event that pits the primary qualities of the objectively observable and quantifiable mechanics of nature against the secondary qualities of subjective human experience and socio-cultural signification, and that tends to dissimulate the aesthetic and technological artificiality co-shaping all scientific procedures (Latour, 2008). Secondly, Latour makes the case that this bifurcation, which is clearly at odds with the mixed nature of our more immediate daily experience, did not come about ‘by accident’, but has been the outcome of a particular political agenda. For Latour, the said bifurcation namely represents a supremely anti-democratic attempt to separate scientific experts, possessing the authoritative (and technical) access to supposedly objective, natural facts, from the common populace, who must constantly submit to these facts the mere ‘fancies’ of their own subjective experiences, values and narratives (Latour, 1993). If thus his analyses replicate some of the socio-constructivist criticisms of modern science, Latour—along with Ian Hacking for example—equally disavows social constructivism on account of its tendency to precisely keep the (politics of) bifurcation in place (cf. Hacking, 1999). While we indeed need not accept as the ascendance of primary over secondary qualities, of ‘bare facts’ over subjective values as absolute givens, neither should conceiving of these tensions as the contrivances of specific political-aesthetic regimes induce us to cynically forego all efforts to rethink science in non-hegemonic fashions.

In the end, what Latour tries to get at, is the idea that all science—whether ‘natural’ or ‘social’, ‘hard’ or ‘soft’—is inevitably artificially (aesthetically and technologically) constructed, but not for that reason any less real(istic) or true. Instead of resigning ourselves to some unbridgeable gap between human experience and natural reality, and criticizing all attempts to overcome this, we had better affirmatively rethink the artificial modalities—the “styles”—in which scientific projects are always already framed or “inscribed”Footnote 4,and do this more in relation to the concretely lived, local situations in which they are enmeshed. In other words: where a purely critical discourse will only land science—pedagogy included (Hodgson, Vlieghe, & Zamojski, 2018)—in new versions of the same modern bifurcation, we need to come up with more relational styles of scientific practice, in which socio-cultural concerns and positive data are genuinely co-implicative, viz. dynamically informing one another while retaining their own, irreducible agencies (Latour, 2004). Only then, Latour claims, will science—whether natural or social—be truly able to become the democratizing agency it so commonly purported to be. For only by allowing its discoveries and inventions, its “matters of fact”, to be re-immersed in the wider experiential and constructed networks (of human, socio-cultural, and natural, more-than-human actors) from which they were originally made to arise, may science again become a “matter of concern”, a practice shared by experts and citizens at largeFootnote 5.

The latter point again emphasizes how decisive the (positive and negative) complicity between science and politics is for grasping the far-reaching implications of Latour’s ideas. What is less acknowledged though, also in pedagogical readings of these ideas, is the importance Latour attaches to the aesthetic dynamics, the styles, that animate this complicity. Not only are his arguments suffused with examples from various arts, he also often speaks of scientific practices in terms of their poetic, architectural, or perspectival qualitiesFootnote 6. In neither case does Latour simply mean to equate science with art or a particular artistic discipline (cf. Latour, 2008; Latour & Weibel, 2002). Yet inasmuch as science is always creative and artificial, viz. dependent on political-aesthetic processes of deciding which style of practice is preferable in which case and for what reasons, concrete practices of art can (and must) keep providing us with new imaginative impulses for doing science differently, for recalibrating its stylistic spectrum and scope of experience. As such, the arts should never become mere ‘interpreters’ representing pre-existing scientific truths (rendering these more palatable); nor should science just resort to artistic media for conducting its research or communicating its results in more strategically interesting ways—either of these options, Latour insists, only brings about bad art and bad science. On the contrary, art and science—and politics—should affirm that they have always already been co-dependent, that they constantly (re)shape each other’s divergent styles, reasons, and cognitions, in relation to shared experiences of an inherently mixed reality. The moment this ‘original’ relationality is also again practically enacted—as in fact our daily practices unabatedly invite us to do—both art, science and politics can once more truly live up to the creative and democratic potentiality immanent to their respective fields of action (cf. Schildermans, 2019).

When now subsequently our course tries to add a pedagogical twist to this scientific-philosophical framework, it primarily does so by arguing that the political-aesthetic reciprocity between matters of fact and matters of concern still lacks an educational mediation that connects the former two poles through what Hans Schildermans has coined as matters of study. This notion expresses the phase in which an issue that has come to insist upon common sense with a certain pregnancy (a matter of concern), is materialized in such a way that, before transforming itself into a politically effective fact, it can gather a crowd of studiers who allow it to make them think, viz. to problematize anew the diverse values at stake in the issue (Schildermans, 2019). Put differently: matters and practices of study deliberately slow down the process of going from matters of concern to matters of fact. They create concrete, ‘extra-ordinary’, collective spaces and times for what Schildermans (after philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers) calls “hesitation”. Having little to do with Cartesian doubt or scepticism, this concerns a radically situated questioning of what (political, scientific, cultural) reasons, values and agencies are ‘given’ with an issue, and of the extent to which these afford and induce (locally) shared possibilities for the issue’s further development. Moreover, also in this process a strong aesthetic component is at work. Not only does Schildermans highlight the inevitable “artefactualization” of matters of study, procedures through which they are literally made into concrete, technically operable and sharable study materials (texts, maps, narratives, artworks); he also underscores their irreducible affective and sensorial dimensions. In fact, it would seem that it are these that render an issue capable of catching the studiers’ attention in the first place: of ‘luring’ them into the event of gathering, and approaching the matter of concern as some-thing to be studied (Schildermans, 2019).

What this paper aims to do, is to expand on the aesthetic dimensions of such ‘study practices’, by reflecting on how a very situated pedagogical experiment—situated by a course, by the corona crisis, by digitized educational conditions—has attempted to ‘artefactualize’ issues related to the pandemic onto specific places, times, and protocols that allow art to make us sense and think anew. By enrolling students in a more or less collective and protocolled curriculum of “artistic-scientific interventions”—a concept that will be further explained in the next section—this practice wanted to ‘put to the test’ both art’s potentiality for questioning certain concerns enmeshed in the students’ pedagogical experiences and cognitions (in casu regarding the corona crisis), and the students’ own susceptibility for this potentiality as a modality of doing science. As we will see, both in the next and in the third section, this ‘education of the senses’Footnote 7 proved to be a highly challenging experiment: generally lacking in many iconographical and/or iconological tools to transform their individual artistic research into common matters of study, most students found it extremely difficult to relate aesthetic affects to scientific knowledge; that is indeed: to reach beyond the bifurcation of lived meaning and science. At the same time, however, the experiment not only showed that even without such tools art can trigger uniquely forceful and transformative processes of scientific-pedagogical thinking—particularly in such confusing, mediatized and politicized situations as the pandemic—but also that to achieve this, it absolutely requires specifically educational practices, based upon transindividual spatiotemporal protocols that force students out of their most immediate experiences.

A pedagogical Decameron : experimenting with artistic-scientific interventions in corona lockdown

Originally, the live seminars which our experiment ended up replacing, would have revolved around an ‘artistic-scientific’ reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story Descent into the Maelstrom, such as proposed by the Latour-inspired scholar-artists Aurélien Gamboni and Sandrine Teixido in their serial project A Tale as a ToolFootnote 8. The idea was to have students prepare by reading Poe’s story and studying Gamboni and Teixido’s project, so that during the seminar we could collectively discuss (in smaller and larger groups) how in this case artistic media not only facilitate, but really intervene in and ‘restyle’ scientific discussions and their matters of concern—i.c. the increasingly problematic relation between natural environments and human modes of existence and cognitionFootnote 9. Although after our university had gone into lockdown, it would still have been possible to conduct these seminars via one of the available online learning platforms, we feared that the idea of “artistic-scientific interventions” would fade too much in a one-off digital event, thereby taking into account that students were only just getting used to these media as their primary learning environments. At the same time it seemed that the corona-related circumstances also urged a more situated online seminar format, which would from the start address these circumstances themselves as a matter of concern in need of artistic-scientific interventions. This would moreover allow students to engage with such interventions themselves, as matters of study, and thus to afford each other first-hand experiences of how artistic styles co-create and co-decide our most daily concerns—through mass media, through politics, and through science.

It was thus that we decided to develop a seminar format based on the Decameron, the narrative cycle authored by 14th century Italian humanist Boccaccio, in which ten young Florentines, locking themselves up to escape the Black Death, decide to spend their time according to a strict scheme of story-telling, whereby each day every member of the crew has to tell an edifying story about a theme chosen by the ‘king/queen’ of that dayFootnote 10. On the one hand, this reference provided the format with an interesting culture-historical link to the circumstances of the actual pedagogical situation (the pandemic and its radical consequences for educational life and thought). On the other hand, it inspired us to stretch out the experiment over a longer period of time, and to locate it within a designated, protocolled digital space—a secure but adaptable blog hosted by our university—as this might nurture the student narratives’ capacity to evolve, and to reciprocate one another more intensely in relation to the matters of study. As such, the concept of a pedagogical Decameron seemed particularly amenable to the many experiential differences between public, live seminars, and a digital network of individualized interfaces. Instead of just mimicking the former in a live chat or Skype session, the format called for interactions that would genuinely depend on the flexibility and simultaneity of the digital, so as to turn this into an intrinsic aspect of the matter of concern to be studied—the pandemic, our common lockdown, and its pedagogical significance.

Hence, divided into thirteen groups of ten (each named after one of the characters from Boccaccio’s story cycle), the students were asked to gather with their group for five days in a rowFootnote 11, each day discussing two artistic-scientific interventions, presented by two group members, and on the basis of a strict posting protocolFootnote 12. This protocol stated that the interventions had to be presented without any introduction or explanation, in order to keep the ensuing discussions as open as possible, unburdened by any ‘authoritative’ judgment of the intervention’s nominator. As for the reflections constituting the discussion, these had to consist of exactly 250 words, and needed to start out either directly from a remarkable stylistic feature of the intervention, or from a comment upon someone else’s reflection. Furthermore, it was stipulated that each day’s interventions would have to build upon (remarkable or underdeveloped) elements from the previous day’s interventions and/or reflections, in order to heighten the collective sense of aesthetic and speculative (dis)continuity within the matter of concern/study, and thereby add to the experiment’s construction of what Yves Citton has recently called an “ecology of attention” (Citton, 2017)Footnote 13. Finally, at the end of the experiment all students were expected to evaluate their own interventions shortly in light of the various processes of which these had taken part. By thus giving feedback, from the point of view of their own intervention, on the assignment’s design, the group discussions, and the dynamics of other group blogs (which were open to everyone), the students were asked to reflect upon the way in which the experiment had affected their pedagogical perceptions and cognitions vis-à-vis the corona crisis and its scientific and political implications. In all of this, we deliberately refrained from assigning a strongly interventional role to ourselves, as lecturers; still, at the end of each day we would run through all the group discussions, communicate some general observations and questions about the directions these appeared to take, and reflect on which other perspectives the experiment’s protocol might enable students to develop during the remainder of the experiment.

As regards the nature of the seminar’s “artistic-scientific interventions”—a notion borrowed both from Gamboni and Teixido, and from the broader field of critical performance arts (cf. Gielen, 2011)—the experiment asked participants to browse the web (or other accessible environments) for ‘artistic entities’ which they might stage as responses to the reigning crisis whose style somehow deviated from dominant political, scientific, and aesthetic discourses. Students were thus not required (nor forbidden, of course) to produce a work of art themselves, but to (re)install an existing work (which need not address the corona crisis directly) as an ‘intervention’, a matter of study capable of generating a reflective gathering. The primary challenge thereby was to look for, and to research, artistic expressions that did not simply represent information or feelings about the pandemic (in function of pre-existing discourses, or strictly personal wellbeing). By contrast, the interventions were expected to resist the functionalist logic of representation, by drawing attention to, or taking distance from, the various representationalist styles involved—the styles in which the pandemic (or particular aspects of it) are predominantly signifiedFootnote 14. While an a priori definition of the intended artistic entities was omitted, leaving room for all sorts of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art forms to be selected, the experiment’s outline explicitly stated that “the choice of an intervention [could] not be based primarily on either personal appreciation (‘what one likes’) or informative content linked to the corona crisis (‘what it represents’)”. Key to an intervention’s success, so it was hypothesized, would be its potentiality to open up new, not-yet-identified, perspectives on the crisis situation, as well as its pedagogical ability to show how various styles of representation can precisely make various responses to the pandemic matter in different ways.

Thus concurring with Jacques Rancière’s notion of aesthetics as revolutionary dissensus, the experiment moreover aimed for students to make each other more sensible—and ipso facto, according to Latour and Schildermans, more knowledgeable—vis-à-vis the ‘dissenting’ political, scientific, and pedagogical claims dramatized through different stylistic regimes (Rancière 2015; cf. Lewis, 2013). By relating to and expanding on each other’s experiences in the experiment’s transindividual, protocolled digital space-time, students were really given the opportunity to educate each other’s pedagogical ‘senses’ or ‘styles’, in the face of a concrete, existentially urgent, and highly politicized and mediatized issue. Accordingly, they were repeatedly dissuaded from aiming for individual learning success—there would be no direct evaluation of their results—but to consider their efforts from the perspective of a collective and relational process, in which success and failure could only become manifest as the unpredictable, and therefore truly experimental, outcome of a common artistic-scientific dynamic. Thus the idea was for every intervention to be able to become a real event—in the strong, philosophical sense: absolutely inappropriable, not belonging to any person, institution, or discourse in particular, yet at the same time immanently relating, complicating and individuating all of the experiences involved, beyond what is already given at any point (Jagodzinski, 2010; cf. Schildermans, 2019).

Filomena, Dioneo, and Neifile: an overview of their empirical developments

Before continuing these speculations, we first propose to make them more concrete by briefly reporting on the actual, practical developments within three of the (thirteen) Decameron groups that partook in the exercise. Although it would not do justice to the unicity of the other groups’ proceedings to simply generalize those of the three groups selected (Filomena, Dioneo, and Neifile), it would also be unfeasible, within the scope of this (type of) article, to offer a day-by-day qualitative overview of all of the experiment’s activities. Therefore we should stress that the proceedings of the Filomena, Dioneo, and Neifile groups are exemplary at best, and that, as should become apparent, they have been selected on account of the complex (internal and external) varieties and contrasts displayed by their combined series of events. Moreover, the proceedings which we bring forward here are solely based on their material, online traces, that is: the written posts of the students (including their interventions), and the comments of tutor Wiebe Koopal. No further follow-up (in terms of interviews or evaluations) has been included, although, looking retrospectively, this might still have enriched the scope of the exercise and this article.

Our presentation of the Filomena, Dioneo, and Neifile proceedings follows a fourfold rhythm: it comprises both the daily movements of the interactive interventions and reflections, and the ‘feedback movement’ of the students’ final reflections. Also it is alternately diachronic, tracing the chronological developments of each group and of the experiment in total, and synchronic, comparing the internal dynamics of the various groups under consideration. As it is impossible to go into all the interventions and reflections with equal depth, some will be foregrounded more than others, depending on the specific nature of their contribution to our overview’s rhythm.

The first day immediately laid bare two tendencies that would prove strongly determinant for the rest of the experiment’s overall dynamics: the difficulty which students experienced in conceiving of art as intervening in processes of scientific practice, and the wide qualitative variety of interventions and reflections to which the exercise accordingly lent itself. Whereas the Filomena group started out with on the one hand Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam (with the near-touch), and on the other hand a movie fragment from The Little Prince (about the novel’s passage on “seeing with the heart”), the Dioneo group witnessed interventions by a picture of a hamster hoarding, and a cartoon about the stigmatization of China in the wake of the pandemic’s outbreak. In the Neifile group finally, one intervention presented a digitally edited picture of a person whose head literally explodes with colors and ideas, and a second one showed Luke Jerram’s experimental and controversial crystal ‘pig flu sculpture’. Whereas all this made for an interesting mix of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, of more traditional and experimental artworks, and of more and less scientifically constructive interventions, some of the responsible students indicated (in their final reflections) that they had felt very uncomfortable, and even anxious, “to get the experiment going”, to make a real beginning. More particularly, and beyond anything having to do with their personal wellbeing in the crisisFootnote 15, students admitted to feeling rather uneasy—despite our ample preparatory instructionsFootnote 16—about the whole idea of artistic-scientific interventions at this point: “Did we have to look for a piece of art that says something about the corona crisis and what it does to society, or that conveys our personal experience of all of that?” And another student (who posted the cartoon with the pun on racism) remarked: “I did not get how such an ‘intervention’ could also be scientific: should it then refer to specific scientific facts related to corona? If so I could not see how real art might be very relevant to any discussion.” The fact moreover that the exercise’s protocol urged them to refrain from introducing their own interventions (with background information, motivation of the choice etc.), apparently still heightened the uncertainty: “I could only hope that the others would understand why I found this particular passage [of the Little Prince] so significant.” And elsewhere: “I chose this intervention [the Michelangelo painting] because I believed it would be sufficiently self-evident to be able to do without my explanation.” Clearly then, it was difficult for students to renounce the responsibility and authority of personally explaining their intervention’s significance, and instead, to await the potentially unexpected effects it might have on a shared platform.

As for the reflections, on first sight these were equally divergent in nature, in accordance with the variety of interventions, in the sense that—(in)directly—they addressed a wide range of corona-related topics. Most of the interventions, however, easily achieved a kind of reflective unanimity regarding their apparently ‘objective’ messages on these topics: the importance of social contact and physical touch (Michelangelo); the need of a less materialist attitude towards the world (The Little Prince); the detriment of problems like hoarding (hamster picture) and racist scapegoat mechanisms (cartoon); the inspirational effect of more creative reactions to the lockdown situation (Neifile picture). One discussion, regarding Luke Jerram’s sculpture (a macroscopic crystal version of the pig flu’s viral structure), clearly stood out for the ambiguity of its reflections. In contrast to the other discussions, where students mostly began their contributions with personalizing and/or matter-of-fact statements of how much they “recognized themselves” in the intervention, or how “stongly [it] reflects what goes on now”, Jerram’s sculpture’s had a slightly ‘disconcerting’ effect leading to more hesitant and questioning reflection. “I am not sure what to make of this. Can a virus that causes so much suffering, be something beautiful at the same time?” “This work approaches the virus differently, that is not combative, but ‘friendly’; perhaps it means, however strange it feels, that we should find a way of living together with the virus, as is the case for nature in general.”

Given the overall tendency of both interventions and reflections on this first day to stick to art as a mere means to represent either ‘objective’ information (as supplied by dominant discourses) or subjective opinion about a priori defined, corona-related topics, we decided to close the day with individual feedback for every intervention, in which we explicitly hinted at possibilities for evaluating art in non-representationalist ways. Along with this we urged students to be more severe in selecting their interventions and reflecting on those of others; first of all by always taking interventions serious as works or practices of art, viz. formal-material configurations reprocessing (a) reality and its meanings, instead of rushing towards unequivocal messages that no longer have any need for art to be understandable. The proceedings of the next day in the Filomena, Dioneo, and Neifile groups immediately showed a positive response to this call, as reflections paid much more attention to the aesthetic forms and materials at work in an intervention: contrasting colors and expressive technique in Edvard Munch’s Melancholy (Filomena); poetic devices employed by A. Kortweg in his poem Long Distance (Lange afstand, Filomena); photographic angle and abstract planes in a photograph of an empty Chinese highway (Neifile). And even when some interventions were still extremely unambiguous about their representationalist intentions (e.g. the ‘Wuhan Psalm’ picture [Dioneo]), or simply consisted of a Twitter slogan (Dioneo), students mostly exerted themselves to produce affirmative and creative analyses. “These words [of McCoy’s ‘Higher Self’ slogan] exhibit a remarkable resonance, that is very powerful, like a mantra, and which breaks through the endless flux of chatter and news regarding corona that we face every day.” Although we did not consider such indiscriminately positive efforts flaws by themselves, our comments at the end of the day (which were more general) did point out an important risk inherent to them, namely that of not accepting failure for some interventions, and—consequently—of again not opening up to what is absolutely different or new. Afterwards, in the final reflections, it seeped through that students were extremely loath to criticize other interventions, both for fear of “personally hurting” the interventionist’s feelings, and out of uncertainty about their own “qualifications” to do soFootnote 17.

The next three days saw a fairly similar distribution of more and less thought-provoking (resp. representationalist) interventions. What did stand out, was the increasing number of ‘high art’ interventions, which showed most clearly in the Filomena group—in which this had already been a constant from the start—where on consecutive days a disturbing Dalí painting (Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man), the painting Escaping Criticism by Pere Borrell, one of Lorenzo Quinn’s Venetian hand sculptures, and the song The Seed by indiepop singer AURORA were presented. But also in the other two groups surprisingly challenging interventions were proposed, not seldom as the result of very precise and informed research: a highly provocative installation by Berlinde De Bruyckere (Dioneo), an art photograph by Charlotte Abramow (Dioneo), the bronze Man Who Measures the Clouds by Jan Fabre (Neifile), and the expressionist painting Vertigo by Léon Spilliaert (Dioneo). Yet at the same time still other interventions were posted—up till the last day—which were considerably less inventive, such as another motivational quote (from an unknown blogger) (Neifile), a picture of someone looking at the Mona Lisa through virtual reality glasses (Dioneo), or a cartoon about the run on toilet paper (Neifile)Footnote 18.

As regards the reflections and discussions of these last days: if on average these definitely gained in complexity, especially in the case of a consecutive series of more ambiguous interventions, they equally attested to frequent ‘relapses’ into strictly representationalist, personalizing or objectifying, accounts (e.g. in response to an image of two shaking hands colored with national flags [Neifile], which everybody immediately read as a general plea for more international solidarity). In her final evaluation, one student from the Neifile group reflected on this inconsistency/variety as follows: “Towards the end, I was more easily disappointed when people had not made a real effort to look for an intervention that […] could spark something more than what we all see, hear and think every day, especially since by then both in our blog, and in those of the other groups, enough good examples were at hand. […] Then again, I guess this [contrast] also shows that even in such short time you really get a feeling for what matters and what does not.” In other words: insofar the experiment did not result in any obvious or general ‘triumph’ on the part of the interventionist concept of art we sought to propose, it most certainly did confront students, as a dynamic, transindividual collectivity, with the possible consequences of such a concept for their pedagogical experience of a public, scientific issue.

Beyond scientific anaestheticism and aesthetic representationalism

Let us begin a deeper discussion of these results with an evident, yet important ‘disclaimer’. Since the experiment took place in one of the first weeks after Belgium’s and our university’s lockdown, many of the students were stricken with confusion and/or anxiety—both personally and vis-à-vis their academic activities, which after all henceforth had to be conducted online, from within their private living spaces. Undoubtedly this situation may be seen to have affected their responses with a certain ‘personal conservatism’Footnote 19. However, from the outset it also belonged to the nature of the Decameron experiment to take such feelings into account; not so much for their intimately personal, psychological significanceFootnote 20, as for the embodied, aesthetic styles of shared matters of concern (corona, education, public life, solidarity etc.) which they could express (Latour 2008)Footnote 21. In that sense, the great difficulty of the experiment, as already remarked before, precisely consisted in a search for artistic expressions that did not only appeal to them on an individual emotional level (diagnosing their own existing mental condition), but that would allow for the whole group, as a gathering of studiers, to think withFootnote 22 the various circulating facts and affects, towards a new, transformatively common, sense (Schildermans, 2019). As such, the extreme affective acuteness of the pandemic’s effects on everyone’s personal lives, and the way digital screens served to keep these strictly separate even during shared educational practices, paradoxically meant both the experiment’s failure and success. On the one hand this always threatened to disqualify interventions and reflections as genuinely collective events, by reducing their aesthetic style to individual feelings and opinions (about supposedly objective states-of-affairs). On the other hand though, it also lent to the concerns incarnated by the corona crisis the kind of urgency that induced students to grow more eager about the experiment, and to look for more diverse, scientific ways of ‘artefactualizing’ the affects at stake, and integrating them in wider, transindividual matters of study.

This being said, we believe that the experiment has given rise to at least three pedagogical points that merit some more reflection: (1) the problem of aesthetic (in)experience and frameworks; (2) the dominance of a representationalist aesthetics; (3) the educational potentiality of a protocolled ‘ecology of aesthetic attention’. The first point regards the ways in which students looked for, assessed and compared the artistic materials that were presented throughout the exercise. Although we had not made it an explicit part of the protocols to record this, both the actual interventions and the final reflections revealed a lot about the students’ research methods and/or apparent lack thereof. In general, it might be observed that students felt quite ‘disoriented’ in their queries, either because of the sheer abundance of materials (not in the least due to the pandemic’s enormous digital exposure), and/or out of inexperience with sustained and methodical practices of reflexive aesthetic appreciation (cf. Lewis & Alirezabeigi, 2018). Surely differences remained between students who had just randomly picked interventions popping up after a basic “corona + art” query, and others who admitted having found their intervention as the Google-generated outcome of a pre-formulated thematic focus (e.g. the Michelangelo from the previous section, which had resulted from a search for art related to touch). Nevertheless, what many appeared to have in common was an enormous awkwardness about having to look for an artwork that they would not simply find beautiful for themselves, or expressive of their own state of being, but whose artistic beauty (forms, materials, dynamics) could be deemed scientifically transformative in a situated context.

Luckily though—and we are tempted to add: thanks to the internet’s vast ‘impersonal’ intelligence—this awkwardness did not prevent many exciting artworks to get presented and to intervene in the students’ gathered concerns. On top namely of those (few) students who chose particular artworks departing from keen artistic and/or art-historical ideas, reflections showed that many others, while first ‘aimlessly’ wandering through their digital labyrinths, eventually succeeded in narrowing down their attention, to end up with surprisingly impersonal choices which they could not have foreseen beforehand (cf. Masschelein, 2010). And at the same time, the fact that students could not personally introduce their interventions at times certainly also helped to open these up to discussions that, as the student responsible for the intervention would afterwards sometimes admit, reached far beyond her initial motivation for choosing it. The Decameron’s proceedings moreover reveal that experimental dynamics like these did not just come about by themselves, by accident, or by the force of the protocol. Looking at the groups’ various synchronic and diachronic processes, it quickly stands out that students continuously imitated one another in their artistic-scientific research, trying to emulate each other’s research criteria. And although naturally such imitation did not always result in creativity, it certainly exemplifies the Decameron’s ecology of practices and its educational potentiality for generating new artistic-scientific attention.

A similar awkwardness, as well as a partial and gradual transformation thereof, manifested itself in the students’ reflections. In the experiment’s first days students mostly still felt as if they had to decide between purely subjectivist appreciation (“I think the person who chose this intervention wanted to express […]”; “personally, it makes me feel/think of […]”), or strictly objectivist accounts, of either a more scientific, or a more aesthetic-formalist, nature (“this reveals the fact that […]”; “these colors/shapes stand for […]”). What made this supposed dilemma all the more glaring was the indiscriminate tolerance with which students evaluated each other’s interventions, with but sparse room for outspoken dissensus or hesitation. If the artistic-scientific value could not easily be framed objectively (for lack of obvious links to the pandemic), there was always the option of giving one’s reflection an affirmative spin in subjectivist terms, by referring to certain emotions indisputably affecting one’s personal corona experience. Thus, on the positive side, students hardly ever ‘gave up’ on an intervention, casting it aside as meaningless, superficial, or inaesthetic; and hence, almost any intervention—disregarding its (artistic or methodical) provenance—had an equal opportunity of instigating discussions, and with little telling of the depth these would attain. The downside to this however, was that qualitative stylistic differences—even extremely divergent ones (a staged art photograph vs. an incidental live video)—were often dimly perceived, particularly in groups where more straightforward and more challenging interventions alternated without any critical continuity or reciprocation.

Intimately connected to all of the former is a second crucial point of observation, regarding the students’ habit of conceiving of their artistic-scientific interventions in predominantly representationalist terms (cf. Vlieghe & Lewis, 2017). Both in the group discussions and final reflections, students attested to a staunch expectation that interventions should convey unambiguous, neutral knowledge about objective matters of fact, rather than expressively (re)shape, or (re)style a common scientific practice around a differential set of situated problems and perspectives. It was intriguing to see how for instance a painting like Dalí’s Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man (cf. previous section) triggered three discussions that up till the end remained almost perfectly parallel: one based on very matter-of-fact, representationalist views, scrupulously searching—behind Dalí’s hallucinatory aesthetics—for a depiction of recognizable scenes from the pandemic (e.g. social isolation, climate change); one that strictly kept to established aesthetic forms that could again be recognized in the painting (e.g. surrealist elements, color schemes); and one abounding in more ‘private’, psychologizing interpretations, with idiosyncratic associations of impressions, thoughts and feelings (“I fully identify with the person on the painting who wants to get out into the world, but who must stay inside, given the risk of doing greater damage.”Footnote 23). In other words: if an intervention’s aesthetic dynamics could not be explained away as a piece of sensuous finery, to illustrate or embellish a ‘hard’ scientific truth—the crypto-Platonic position—it almost had to be turned into the object of a personal phantasma with little scientific urgency (Latour, 2008).

At some moments the Decameron experiment thus especially seemed to validate the implications of what Latour calls “the politics of bifurcation” (Latour, 1993): an ever-widening rift between primary (‘natural’, quantifiable) and secondary (socio-cultural) qualities of experience; and a false dilemma between conservative reproduction (expert knowledge representing pre-ordered static substances) and critical destruction (debunking knowledge as the contingent expression of power relations). Still, it is our claim that eventually, beyond these pitfalls of scientific/critical ‘anaestheticism’ and aesthetic representationalism, the experiment also generated experiences of a different, more hopeful kind. As already came up earlier, some students explicitly witnessed to having experienced art’s capacity for doing something different from representation, for intervening in their study of the pandemic situation, and also, as a result, in both the more subjective and objective aspects of this insistent experience. But even when looking at broader patterns within our empirical material, it becomes apparent that in between all the varieties of ‘either-or’ approaches, most students did at timesFootnote 24 positively hesitate with regard to the strong ‘common sense’ distinctions they made, acknowledging how these may call for a more relational and differentiating orientation. To some extent, our injunction at the end of the first day to begin reflections with attending to an intervention’s remarkable formal-material features, gave an important impetus in this direction, albeit sometimes at the cost of eliciting radical and far-fetched formalism. Yet what most of all seems to have made a difference in this regard, were the experiment’s gradual build-up and repetitive spatiotemporal structure. It was only by subjecting themselves to a rhythmic series of interventions within a relatively closed and regulated (digital) environment, that most students started to gain a sense—however minimal—of being in turn subjectively part of the experiment’s (un)common scientific ‘outcomes’.Footnote 25

Aftermath: towards an ecological education of the senses ?

Following up on this, and by way of conclusion, we still need to dwell a bit longer on a third (and last) point: the potentiality and requirements of an educational ‘ecology of aesthetic attention’. What did the Decameron experiment amount to, also in the context of our course, and what is to be learned from experiments like these, with regard to pedagogy in general and to the relations between art, science, and education?

What should have seeped through by now, is that in the experiment on which our paper has expounded, failure and success were not always neatly distinguishable, and that attempts at a uniform evaluation of the results are doomed to meaninglessness. Certainly one would have a hard time finding individual students who experienced the experiment as a ‘game-changer’ in their education, e.g. by having acquired ‘better’ scientific or aesthetic knowledge. An alternative picture emerges however, once one takes in the broader context of the experiment’s narrative development: the transindividual, ecological agencies and relations staged by its protocols (digital platforms, interventions, reflections, groups, evaluations), as well as the gradual dynamization of these protocols at the hand of the ecologies they put into play. What this picture could reveal, is that studying and experimenting with the styles of matters of concern requires an approach that principally refrains from defining concerns or styles a priori—in terms of benchmarks applicable to pre-existing educational subjects (students vs. professors) and objects (learning targets, evaluation criteria)—while instead designing protocols for gathering, studying, and artefactualizing materials a posteriori (Schildermans, 2019). Insofar within our practice such protocols enacted an absolute, immanent normativity (everyone was expected to comply with them), they remained throughout contingent as determinants vis-à-vis the emergent matters of concern, in the sense that every materialized intervention always renewed the protocols’ experimental sense and focus. Being thus incapable of simply predicting what narratives and cognitions they would generate, and themselves obviously subject to the actions of all the other agencies involved, the repetitions and selections of the protocols nevertheless did enable all of the former to ‘sustain’ the various differences produced in a more continuous, shared and constructive manner.

Arguably only such a radically ecological and constructivist approach can truly account for an experimental education of the senses. In our case, which situated this approach in a highly digitalized, mediatized and politicized educational ‘climate’ (cf. Vansieleghem, 2019Footnote 26), this ultimately allowed, albeit hesitantly, for more reciprocal, dynamic, and scientifically creative aesthetics to come into being, and for matters of concern to intervene in a way—an educational, ‘studious’ way—that is more durable, variable and democratic than their immediate political and scientific efficacy would have us believe. Supplementing Latour in this regard, who generally envisions a political transformation of science, we feel that experiments like these witness more to the transformative potentiality of specifically educational interventions. Prior to actually deciding upon future political or scientific outcomes, these really explore, through practices of the senses, particular issues of concern to both science and politics, in their stylistic potentiality, viz. before any definite shape is given to their meaning.

As a final thought then, one could ask how experimental aesthetic-educational ecologies like the one set up in this lockdown Decameron, relate to more ‘traditional’ aesthetic environments. It stands to reason, all the more from a critical-educational perspective, that to safeguard the autonomy of education’s transformative agencies, one must keep them out of the service of other socio-cultural domains—including science, but also including any artistic or aesthetic establishment. Hence, it seems—in following Jagodzinski and Wallin’s more fundamental reflections on this relation (cf. Jagodzinski & Wallin, 2013)—that education and art can only nurture one another on the basis of a radically paradoxical reciprocity. Where art needs education to question its ‘senses’ (materials, media, tools, effects), through the creative and appreciative experiences of new generations, education simultaneously needs the art already at work in society to set this process of questioning in motion, by giving concrete shape to its capacities for conceiving of different educational and artistic practices. The conundrum here, obviously enough, is that education, in order to maintain its autonomy as an experimental sphere, cannot genuinely transform our aesthetic sensibilities without affirmative references to existing artistic agencies, viz. agencies that society has already (partly) allowed in its midst, more often than not through all kinds of ‘messy’, representationalist uses (political, commercial, religious, scientific) Footnote 27.

In the experiment discussed in this paper, one of the main thresholds was set by the awkwardness which many students experienced towards the whole idea of taking art seriously, that is: as an agency that can effectively intervene in the styles of scientific practices and discourses. What we often perceived in this awkwardness was not primarily a lack of established frameworks of artistic reference, but, more profoundly, a strong association of such frameworks with exclusively professional art criticism, artistic virtuosity, and formalist aesthetics. Remindful of what Latour terms the hegemony of experts, our students appeared extremely reserved about taking themselves serious as amateurs of art, that is as people without professional qualification who nevertheless desire to engage with art practices in public, scientific ways that can be both relevant and ‘careful’ (cf. Masschelein & Simons, 2013). Hence, if the experiment’s proceedings do hint at the insufficient integration of arts education within general and academic education—which in itself is not an original claim (e.g. Lewis, 2013)—they also affirmatively reveal the possibilities of aesthetic-educational ecologies for going beyond these insufficiencies. Where even before the start many students complained about feeling unqualified to participate in something as ‘esoteric’ as artistic-scientific research, all of them did eventually present an intervention to their group, as well as participate in the discussion of other interventions. Naturally, so our empirical report shows, not all interventions or reflections may be said to have had equal chances of instigating educationally and aesthetically significant discussions. Yet really interesting about the experiment’s ecological dynamic was that sometimes unlikely transformative discussions emerged out of seemingly careless interventions—and vice versa. Despite ‘given’, naturalized differences in artistic or art-historical expertise (which did seem frightfully wide at times), the experiment thus allowed for genuinely new artistic-scientific expertise (or amateurism) to come into being.

At the same time, one thing should not necessarily be affirmed at the cost of another: reconnecting to the point of established art practices, one could positively wonder whether in the end the relative success of experimental practices like ours does not remain dependent on the surplus availability of a minimal ecology of acquired aesthetic habits—all the more in a digital age where art tend to get ‘diluted’ to the point of indistinction from random sensibility. Hence, if our experiment was never meant to foster a plea for arts education from a classical Bildung perspective—set on the continuous ‘growth’ of culture through educational acculturation (cf. Mollenhauer, 1986)—then perhaps it still may serve to recast this perspective on a more practical and experimental mold. What it has tried to do, and ended up doing (within its limited situation), is to reinvent an aesthetic ecology as educational catalysts for scientific and political differentiation, in view of an “uncommon common sense” that enables resistance to what pretends being simply given to our senses (Snir, 2018).