2019, Allen, Jamie, Boelen, Jan

A School of Schools: Design as Learning is an educational web of design strategies for learning and learning strategies for design. The answers needed to address the world’s constant sense of crisis are not being delivered by the tried-and-tested education models. With the age-old logic of material abundance and information scarcity inverted, new ideas and knowledge to address previously unimaginable complexities are needed. We need to liberate our minds from the preconceived outcomes with which we have been schooled. Not knowing is the first step to learning something new. The Lie Machine project forms part of A School of Schools: Design as Learning as project and publication, curated by Jan Boelen, co-founding artistic director of the research program Atelier Luma, with Nadine Botha and Vera Sacchetti. The exhibition features the work of multidisciplinary practitioners from around the world and is presented in a custom-made ensemble in Arles. Throughout the course of four weeks in Arles, the exhibition becomes a temporary laboratory and observation display of a 2030 horizon. It explores the learning environment as a context of empowerment, reflection, sharing and engagement, providing speculative responses to recent global preoccupations.

2018, Ricci, Donato, Artut, Selcuk, Young, Michael Edward, Kiesewetter, Rebekka, Verjat, Benoit, Patelli, Paolo, Allen, Jamie, Boelen, Jan

Teaching Lies is a public School of Schools, a workshop about illusory deceptions at work in the designed modern world. Its scope is to identify, expose, discuss and make public these modes, through the collaborative writing of a syllabus for a spurious studio-based class. the workshop is aimed at participative production and play, modulations and dissimulations of designed deceptions in pedagogy and beyond. Over multiple days, a workshop and exhibition elements develop around several thematics addressing different fabulative tropes, such as concealing (secret origins, hiding, shadowing, masks); camouflage (adversarial, being unmappable, decoys, hiding in plain sight); fabulation (fictionalization, re-narration, imaginaries); reduction (simplification, rules of thumb, common practice, ‘just enough’); misappropriation (metaphors, anecdotes, projection); misdirection (look over here! fakes, hoaxes, sleight-of-hand, puppets, apocrypha, data derives). For the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial, Donato Ricci, Selçuk Artut, Michael Edward Young, Rebekka Kiesewetter, Benoît Verjat, Paolo Patelli and Jamie Allen seek to analyze, explore and re-compose the rhetorical figures and material strategies behind communication, design, media, technology and art, as part of our pronounced post-factual condition; in a context where terms of art and artifice — like ‘fabulation’ — have become main means of doing art, design and by extension, communication, politics and life. A further instantiation of the project is exhibited as part of the 26th Biennial of Design in Ljubljana, Slovenia.