Social Practice Lab

s. Early champions like Tom Finkelpearl, Anne Pasternak, or Nicholas Bourriaud now hold top positions in official institutions. While this is all cause for celebration, the mainstream embrace of these practices is rarely accompanied by a deeper understanding of their history, or an appreciation for the complexity of their methods. Universities are best equipped to provide a remedy by strengthening the impact and scope of social art with the rigorous structures so characteristic of the sciences and humanities at research institutions. Socially engaged art, on the other hand, may provide more traditional academic disciplines in those very institutions with fresh and unexpected approaches to interdisciplinary work and collaboration, a higher degree of public engagement, as well as deeper student involvement through a full range of knowledge production that intentionally balances intellectual, cognitive, and affective dimensions. Ultimately, the promotion of social art practice and its integration to the university is only the first step towards the more relevant goal of reevaluating the notion of ‘arts and sciences’ and also creating a more socially engaged humanities. Regardless of any existing connection to art, social practice may in fact be restored to its rightful place as a core mechanism of intellectual life, extending far outside the art gallery, the university classroom, or the research lab. By its very name, the Social Practice Lab thus resists and complements traditions that see individualist introspection as the main access to scientific and artistic discovery. We will attempt to know the world through each other and each other through the world, even as others still prefer to know themselves. The University as Cultural Producer: Supporting Projects and Public Interventions

SPL’s operations are centered on the creation of multi-year signature projects and public interventions, as well as smaller, student-led productions happening on a single year or single semester basis. SPL projects bring together guest collaborators, faculty, and students through research and production teams, curricular tracks, and ongoing opportunities that extend beyond the social and geographic boundaries of the university (age, income, neighborhood, region, country). For the same reason, most of our projects strategically and playfully link internal university units with regional, national, and international organizations. SPL programming of guest visits, talks, and discussions tend to be directed toward specific projects, focused on the workshop and production model. The lab thus complements the abundant discursive and theoretical offerings that already exist on campus with material processes that highlight the importance of practice, doing, and making. SPL projects are chosen and developed for their ability to ask challenging questions, create interdisciplinary collaborations with a concrete outcome or aesthetic experience, and foster exchanges across units and academic levels that may begin, develop, or end outside the classroom. As deskilling sets root in post-industrial modes of arts instruction and publishing stands questioned as the only legitimate output in the humanities, SPL wishes to promote a radical reskilling for scholars, artists, makers, and public intellectuals that find their home in the university. Rather than think of the humanities as being in crisis, SPL sees this time as a critical period for their reinvention, a process that may be inseparable from the activist impulse behind creating a more intelligent, creative, and just society. The Humanities Lab as a Social Art Medium

Under the direction of Pedro Lasch, a longtime proponent and practitioner of social art practice, the FHI Social Practice Lab operates in accordance with a few simple - and at times provocative, claims. These can be summarized by the following chain of equation: LAB = FORUM = HUB = SHOP = MEDIUM. Discussion, reading, and intellectual exchange are at the core of the Social Practice Lab and its projects. Beyond being a home to public intellectuals and their practice, SPL is also a space for a wide range of free and public expression, intimate and highly public. As a forum, we wish to make room for bold intellectual propositions, difficult social questions, courageous outbursts, subtle preoccupations, and other affective energies that should be nurtured by university life, yet are rarely found in a science lab, museum hall, theatrical stage, or university classroom. It would be no accident if this language makes some people think of student services, religious gatherings, Greek life, pop concerts, group therapy, telepathic sessions, fight clubs, or underground activities, real and imaginary. While such extra-curricular contexts deserve serious recognition and study, the SPL seeks to create analogous spaces that resonate more closely with the goals and mission of the university. Gathering and connecting people and institutions around shared concerns and desires is a key function of the SPL. The choice to decentralize our work so we can follow the needs of different projects and develop them within a scattered infrastructure creates an even more active need to serve as a central node to our collaborative communities. Each one of our signature projects (ranging from a MOOC with over 8,000 participants in 134 countries, to teams of less than a dozen graduate and undergraduate students) is in fact accompanied by the creation of its own hubs. Ranging from global social media platforms to physical spaces with particular functions and characteristics, this integrated and overlapping set of hubs seek to enrich communities that would otherwise remain isolated from each other, all the while deepening already existing relations through regular contact. A glimpse of the activities of the Social Practice Lab quickly shows that this is no conventional workshop or traditional art studio. At play is a careful and patient reskilling, retraining, and physical exploration, a site of interwoven material and immaterial labor. Even if specific academic hierarchies still struggle to accept it, artists and cultural producers have been involved in rigorous and relevant research as long as these professions have existed. The high stakes and necessity of calling it research are more recent, and the product of their research is surely different from that of more established and tenured university professions. As universities genuinely seek to embrace artists, makers, and other so-called ‘practitioners’ as legitimate researchers and peers (any practice, after all, can only be performed at its highest levels with a thorough understanding of its theory), the lab and its formal features lend themselves as a great vehicle for integrated collaboration between ‘professors’ and ‘the professions’: the shop as workshop and a site of trade. As we recognize the pressure that exists to legitimize any intellectual production through the language of the sciences and their research budgets, we should be cautious about our choices. This does not mean we have to be cynical about the many inspiring hybrids that may result from a strategic series of experiments that that are staged at the intersection of the science and humanities lab, the reinvented art studio, and the refashioned workshop of old and new trades. Methodical research, empirical investigation, and advanced theory are some of the most common terms associated with labs. SPL embraces all of them, but not without challenging assumed divisions and hierarchies between science, social science, and the humanities. We instead wish to treat such categorizations of knowledge as social and historical constructs that can be studied and understood, used if they are helpful, and transformed if they are not. If the lab can mutate from the world of ‘hard science’ to that of humanities research, why should we stop there and not have it become a space for collaborative artistic production and aesthetic inquiry, perhaps even a social art medium in its own right? Inversely, have scientific labs across the centuries not been filled with props and theatrics immediately recognizable as such by those who study the history and philosophy of science? None of these ideas are new, and innovation is easier said than done, but the current situation seems to offer a unique opportunity to rediscover that core social material shared by artists and scientists: the stuff of invention.