THE PROJECT
Hydra Poesis is currently undertaking DIDACTIC TOOLS – a cross-disciplinary project involving a core group of five national and international artists investigating knowledge culture in contemporary society. The core artist group will be conducting a laboratory at CIA in late November 2014 and will be running a weekend workshop for other artists to be involved with the project and share the processes used by the core group towards interdisciplinary art marking.

Didactic Tools will intensely examine ideas around knowledge and transference of information. The team will deconstruct traditional teaching aids (whiteboards, overhead projectors, lecturns), formats of teaching (lectures, demonstrations, writing), and investigate the explosion of instructional culture (web tutorials, freeschools, TedX, open source communities).

Didactic Tools involves working together with the core group, peer artists and the wider community in responding to our moment in culture where participation is built on skill and knowledge exchange, and where data itself has become culturally significant.

This project looks at the difficult area where art meets knowledge. It will question if artworks can both demonstrate and evoke, or whether these concepts are in opposition. It will look at the inherent value in learning, and the value of the application of knowledge. The project will investigate knowledge structures and resources currently in use, our relationship to them and our methods for informing ourselves and our communities. Didactic Tools attempts to answer: What are the aesthetics of learning?

Following the November development phase, the Didactic Tools team will be working with community teaching groups to form a ‘citizen academy’ and form a network between artists, self-educators and specific teaching groups (e.g. DIY hackers, political activists). Following this the core group of artists will create a set of works for exhibition at Fremantle Art Centre in 2015 which will be paired with a weekend Symposium.

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THE WORKSHOP
The workshop will consist of the core group of artists giving and sharing their processes for creating artworks, participants will be asked to respond to the concept in discussion and by experimenting with original and shared work.

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CORE ARTIST GROUP
Jake Oorloff (Sri Lanka)
theatre maker and performer, counter-narratives, activist art
http://www.floatingspace.org/

Keg de Souza (NSW)
interdisciplinary artist, inflatable architecture, mapping, zines, social dialogue
http://www.kegdesouza.com/

Tarsh Bates (WA)
artist and scientist, biological art, evolutionary and interspecies aesthetics
http://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/research/postgraduate/bates

Sam Fox (WA)
director of Hydra Poesis, interdisciplinary art, hybrid theatre, dance
http://hydrapoesis.net/

Kynan Tan (WA)
digital media artist, visualisation, sonification, synesthesia
http://kynantan.com/