The Poiegg and the Mickeymaushaus: Pedagogy and Spatial Practice at the California Institute of the Arts
Janet Sarbanes
“The Poiegg and the Mickeymaushaus: Pedagogy and Spatial Practice at the California Institute of the Arts” is a viralnet.net essay by Janet Sarbanes that first appeared in Ken Erlich’s “Art, Architecture, Pedagogy: Experiments in Learning” back in 2007–8.
http://viralnet.net/homeandgarden/projects/ehrlich.html
This version includes marginalia by author Randall Packer. Packer’s Integrated Media class at CalArts, “OSS: Open Source Studio,” used this text as a means to interrogate the feasibility of online studio practices in the arts.
In many ways the Sarbanes text and Packer’s comments emphasize the importance of place in creative activity and they both question architecture and pedagogy when it comes to fostering contemporary arts education.
Sarbanes quotes Walter Gropius in the beginning of her essay:
The ultimate aim of all creative activity is a building! Architects, painters and sculptors must recognize anew and learn to grasp the composite character of a building both as an entity and in its separate parts. Only then will their work be imbued with the architectonic spirit which it has lost as “salon art”.
This essay is even more relevant today—as it begs these questions—Can an online educational space function anew as a creative studio with an architectonic spirit? Are we in need of a different spatial metaphor when designing alternative online educational models? Is education destined for online automation in the “composite character” of the commercialized Internet of 2015–16?