Material and Digital A/r/tographic Explorations

This book considers the generative tension between the materiality and virtuality of walking methodologies in a/r/tography and arts-based educational research. It explores the materiality of practice—manifestations, manipulations, residues, and traces of both real and imagined experiences and events. Authors present artistic representations, renderings, artifacts, and documentations that allow for various forms of return and re-visitation of places/spaces and temporal moments. The book also investigates the digital and virtual, including video, images, media work, and emergent technologies that allow one to literally, metaphorically, affectively, and conceptually go somewhere that might be previously impossible to reach. Authors consider curricular and pedagogical implications of digital/virtual walking in relation to desire, agency, autonomy, freedom, and other issues around ethics. The book brings together entanglements of the corporeal and incorporeal, addressing the questions: How does the (im)materiality of bodies/characters-in-motion in a/r/tographic practices shape understandings of place, space, and the self-in-relation? How do issues and particularities come to matter through one’s entanglements with(in) the (in)corporeal? “The editors of Material and Digital A/r/tographic Explorations have carefully curated a collection that engages readers in the world of a/r/tography and walking, which provoke, challenge, and respond to each other. This collection fosters engagement and understanding for graduate researchers, professors, artists, and those new to a/r/tography and walking as a methodology. This book challenges us to embrace new ways of exploring and engaging with the material and digital in art education, making it a transformative and ethically-driven addition to the a/r/tographic corpus.” — Kathryn Coleman, Associate Professor, Art Education, The University of Melbourne “The editors of this thought-provoking and arresting collection have assembled a textured and authentically international suite of art educators as authors that explore a/r/tographic walking in relation. The book engages textual and digital materialities such as GPS collage, digital imagery, AI, and other virtual platforms together with conventional approaches of deeply affective and photographic recordings and documented forms, as mappings, trails, and schemas. Visually rich, this book explores the materiality of practice, of turning and returning, visiting and revisiting, mapping and moving—drawing the reader affectively and effectively to consider a/r/tography and walking as ways to open each other’s potentialities.” — Alexandra Lasczik, Professor of Arts & Education, Southern Cross University