Marc Allen Herbst and Michelle Teran
Promiscuous Infrastructure: Practicing Care, pp.154-161
Journal of Aesthetics & Protest Press/ Willem de Kooning Research Center
2024
We feel the uncertainty of these times.
We wonder about ways of learning that are centered upon uncertainty, that do not hide from challenges we face. Institutions of higher learning have promised never-ending progress based on reason and science, but today we are unsure if this is real, or desirable. Rather than modeling education around a heroic narrative of individuals overcoming challenges, towards unquestioning progress, we think about how learning can be oriented towards learning together in difference. By facing it, we wonder how uncertainty can be embraced, or, at worst, how we can avoid panic around uncertainty.
For this reason, we created an experiment, “Learning and Dreaming Together through Uncertainty.” The experiment of “Learning and Dreaming…” was to host a collective overnight dreamin that asked its participants to focus on the emotional fragility of uncertainty and how experimental social and education practices could deal differently with this uncertainty.