2016 >>.

>...This video work is a counterimpulse to current fads in educational technologies. The work complicates and challenges the aesthetics of education apps. The audience interacts with a constructed appropriation of an iPad interface to encounter chaos rather than communication. This work aligns with the modernist tradition of art-making, whereby a self-reflexive analysis is mounted about the nature of the aesthetic medium itself (in this case, edu app design). The work is indicative of a distinctive turn in contemporary art in the age of information, whereby the artistic device of the readymade is transformed into critical momentum through acts of curatorship. The video work treats education apps (maths apps in particular) as found objects to be sampled. The “information readymade” becomes the ultimate readymade of archival aesthetics, displaying: “An archival logic of citation and juxtaposition… where data is reprocessed and sent on…to use and download, to revise not only found images and texts but also given forms of exhibition and distribution” (Foster, 2011, p.713).


This research aligns with Dr Kevin Larkin’s investigation into the paucity of research into the purported education benefits of mathematical education iPad apps. This project focuses on the elements of the aesthetic design of the apps selected by Kevin for review, however it utilises the apps as an aesthetic data set and challenges the viewer in relation to the aesthetic nature of the apps.

Hal Foster ... [et al.] (2011). Archival Aesthetics. In Art since 1900 : modernism, antimodernism, postmodernism. Imprint New York : Thames & Hudson

App Play: Kevin Larkin
Video works: Marta Kawka