Knowledge Exchange and Knowing: The Self, Art Practice and the Digital

This chapter is a series of thoughts and provocations on knowledge socialism that are explored through the lens of art practice and is the first to consider the term presented by P. Jandric and M. Peters in the field of art practice. It looks at recent shifts within neoliberal societies which have influenced knowledge exchange. This is examined across the arts in Higher Education (HE) institutions and practices of institutional critique. The significance of the chapter is the questioning of the centralisation of economic profitability in higher arts education achieved through its increasing mechanisation and digitisation and the possibilities offered by art practice, as a tool for revealing hidden systems of control and ownership in society which have created a digital age of distrust. Michael Peters notes, “rather than relying only on the market to serve as a catalyst for knowledge creation, knowledge socialism marshals public and private financial and administrative resources to advance knowledge for the public good.” (Peters, 2019, p. 5) Two methods of art practice are proposed, the first is ‘defamilarisation’, a method of art practice to make the present time strange in order to gain understanding of it. The second method is ‘hauntology’ – a method practiced through art which evokes an experience of contemporaneity by understanding it as a constant recombination of the past and present, and framed by this chapter, through digital knowledge exchange. The chapter’s key aim is to demonstrate the impacts of digital technology on the development of knowledge exchange and formations of the self. In turn, it looks at how art has explored this complex process through defamiliarization and hauntology’s unpicking of the self. The chapter is aimed at academics and policy makers across social science, the arts, digital and education to influence understanding of the term through the canon of art.