RESEARCH statement

Virtual Communities of Practice on Social Media and DIY as Art Education

Due to dwindling budgets, roughly 2 million students lacked access to arts education in 2019 in the United States (Morrison et al., 2022). What is more, efforts to defund the National Endowment for the Arts in recent years have endangered publicly available art programs (Wilbur, 2017). Yet there is another form of art education taking place within virtual communities of practice (CoPs) online. Since the advent of Web 2.0, social media sites have served as virtual places for mutual stakeholders to participate in joint enterprises of collective learning and knowledge production (Agarwal, 2011; Jones, 2015; Kilgore, 1999; Razmerita, 2014; Wahid et al., 2019). User engagement in this sense is characterized by creative ideation, content creation and curation, and enhanced critical thinking skills (Hall & Zarro, 2012; Knochel, 2013; Linder, 2014; Schmidt & Evans, 2018). Online communities convene around Do-It-Yourself (DIY) content on sites like Pinterest, TikTok, and YouTube, where users exchange information about material processes, swap tips and tricks, and share project ideas. In consumer societies, DIY practices promote the fixing, adjusting, and/or creating of cultural forms. As a result of participation, users can learn to exercise creative agency, falling in line with the historical legacy of DIY practices that have long promoted social empowerment. Examples include 2nd Wave Feminist Zines, anti-establishment DIY Punk music, and the crafting of quilts that contained symbols to help enslaved people navigate the Underground Railroad to freedom.

Occurring beyond traditional education contexts, intra-actions between members of DIY CoPs align with Richards’ (2010) notion of everyday creativity, wherein creativity is understood to be socially meaningful, non-random, relatively rare, and exhibit originality. Herein, there is a rejection of the Western Modernist fissure between low and high art—or the pursuit of craftwork versus the making of art-for-art’s sake. Rather, DIY promotes participation in low-stakes creative acts, and by studying technological affordances, my research assesses the impact of user interface and user experience (UI/UXI) design in fostering participation in creative making. Studying user engagement with social media sites in this way is valuable as they increase access to informal modes of art education outside of K12 and higher education settings. Additionally, my research examines how pre-service art education majors and in-service art teachers use social media to supplement their teaching through sustained engagement with DIY CoPs online. My research methods include content analysis, sentiment analysis, digital ethnography, data visualization, and art-based research.

Traditionally, art education has provided tools for developing and nurturing creative capabilities, yet it is no secret that access to art education within or outside of K-12 schooling is limited in the United States. To address these issues, my research examines informal forms of art education taking place in craft communities online. In particular, the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) movement, which provides access to nontraditional forms of art education, exemplifies opportunities to use social networking systems (SNS) to share information about creative practices. By studying everyday creativity occurring in DIY communities of identifying and non-identifying artists, my research aims to garner a glimpse into creative ventures beyond traditional academic art education settings.

Historically, DIY practices have long promoted social empowerment. Examples include the crafting of Underground Railroad Quilts designed to transmit messages to assist those seeking freedom, Zine culture connected the rise of third-wave feminism, and more recently, home improvement practices taken up by consumers to bypass professional services. SNSs serve as virtual places for mutual stakeholders to participate in joint-enterprises of creative making as information is swapped and knowledge is co-constructed. Largely, participation in these activities occurs on sites like Pinterest, YouTube, and TikTok. Activities on these sites promote re-engagement with creative matter manipulation and can empower users to attempt creative projects in real life (IRL). By studying technological affordances connected to user experience and user interface (UX/UI) design, I analyze the impact of SNSs on users’ creative endeavors. In this way, my research explores alternative forms of art education taking place within online social spaces of online community intra-action.

METHODS:

Working as an artist-scholar, I study topics using cutting-edge methods in scholarly research, and I am also able to process my findings in a highly exploratory manner through my studio practice. The integration of art and science affords opportunities to conduct rigorous academic research using modes of inquiry that are essential to arriving at a more holistic and scrupulous way of researching and manifesting artworks—one capable of provoking profound discussions in conversation with a broad range of creative endeavors. To perform my interdisciplinary research, I work across the fields of Art Education, Internet Research, and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to study collective learning and knowledge production taking place in online creative communities. At present, my research involves the use of mixed quantitative and qualitative methods, including descriptive statistics, sentiment analysis, narrative analysis, and digital ethnography. I employ quantitative methods to identify trends and make predictions about DIY projects, preferences, and practices on SNSs. In tandem, I use qualitative methods to triangulate findings and provide a deeper, multifaceted look at what is happening within these communities. I also engage in Art-Based Research (ABR) as a means of interpreting data using my studio practice as a form of examination that invites and acknowledges my positionality through expressive visualizations of research findings.

LIMITATIONS & FUTURE RESEARCH:

Modeling creative behaviors in real life (IRL) by studying participation on social networking sites has its limitations. It is important to note that user comments alone do not confirm whether users actually attempted DIY projects, and the sentiments expressed by user comments offer only a partial view of the creative activities taking place online and/or IRL. Also, as DIY practices are widely considered to be a means for reducing costs for consumers and dependence on experts or professionals, from an economic standpoint, future research could use machine learning to study underlying systems of power related to manufacturing and marketing specific designs and craft materials. Future research might also consider the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and apply post-humanist lenses to study non-traditional art education happening within online DIY communities.

ARTIST statement

BEGINNINGS & CULTURAL FORMS As entities, humans are exceptionally bioengineered for life on Earth and as such are inextricably dependent upon specific environmental conditions to which we are adapted. Humankind’s adeptness at matter manipulation has led to changes in our environs, which in turn has created equally impressive challenges for humans. As our world changes, vital instinctual mechanisms that evolved for a comparatively primitive existence have become increasingly at odds with newly configured realities. The world we are creating promotes interaction abstracted from immediate physical stimuli via internet technologies and social networking systems. Such instances of experiential disassociation alter the ability to perceive cause-and-effect relationships. As the capacity for foresight is severely lacking in our present physiological state, when compared to the pace of change occurring around us, we encounter a disadvantageous paradox. To this end, my work examines the dematerialization of contact with immediate, physical matter and its effect on social relations and the development of cultural forms. Specifically, I engage with trending DIY practices, gaining inspiration from everyday creativity taking place in creative content communities online. The interplay between virtuality and embodied experiences drives my work. Participating in DIY practices affords those living in consumer societies opportunities to re-engage with physical matter by experimenting with materials, repairing broken items, and developing project ideas. The DIY movement encourages creative practice in the Post-Industrial era, and my practice blurs the line between craftwork or applied arts and high Art.

ART ENCOUNTERS & ENTANGLEMENTS As an artist-scholar, I recognize that artistic practice, unconstrained by conventional rules of functionality, has the potential to provoke curiosity and prompt critical thinking. Experiences mediated by encounters with artworks induce critical aesthetic experiences (Medina, 2012), giving rise to new awarenesses by abutting immediate, unconscious, sensory mechanisms with conscious reflection that has the power to result in self and social empowerment. These occurrences prompt intra-actions and entangle entities with environs. Within the frameworks of New Materialism and Posthumanism, scholars like Barad describe these occurrences as “quantum entanglements”, wherein what may be considered inert matter exercises agency (Barad, 2012). In my work, messages emerge from the wall in the form of a decorative category called “inspirational décor”.

 HOW DOES IT WORK? Keeping in mind the tediousness of conscious intervention compared with the facility of instinctive mechanisms, my work explores the subversive use of designed objects, printed matter that work with our current capabilities in a period of information inflation and an increasingly complex social fabric. Taking the form of participatory installations and, my work investigates the absence of immediate feedback during social interactions via partial obscuration of participants bodies and limited means of communication despite close physical proximity. Combining image and text, my work also takes the form of artist’s books that prompt readers to explore what information is prioritized with information propagated within online homogenized platforms. At its core, my work deals with ways in which interactions stimulated by material artworks can give rise to new understandings in various social contexts. I use furniture and object design in this way to provide sites for intera-action, with the goal of provoking new forms of communication and ways of exchanging creative wisdom between individuals. Taking the form of participatory installations, my work uses relational aesthetics to investigate the absence of immediate biofeedback during social interactions despite participants’ close physical proximity.

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