“MIND-LAUNCH: Reflections / Projections on Education as Art” presented by Ascott

This paper looks primarily at the development, and the possible present and future relevance, of two specific projects, the Groundcourse of the early 1960s and the Planetary Collegium of the new millennium. There is a third project of the early 1970s, lurking in the wings, which, although more radical, and potentially efficacious than the first, lasted a mere 12 months, and so has been consigned by some to the dustbin of history. The link between all three initiatives has been the search for structures that elicit and support creativity, enable research, and develop innovation – of systems, cyberception, identity, language, and behaviour. The field is art, technology and consciousness (technoetics). The thread that links these initiatives is what I call ‘cybernetics of the third kind’, the art of connective, interdependent, associative, transformative syncretic systems. Education as art resists orthodoxy, denies academic predictability, opens up the territory of the unknown in all its fields of inquiry and practice.