**Abstract**

Transdisciplinary art-science learning is linked to semiosis and the performative nature of learning. At the core of contemporary learning is sensemaking through images. We learn through how we perceive, remember, and imagine the world. An ethics-approved inquiry looked at the artmaking practices of gifted secondary school students between the ages of 15 and 17 years (n = 108) with a focus on their art-science performative learning. The study applies Deleuzoguattarian thinking and other post-structural perspectives on contemporary representational practices for learning and communication in art-science spaces. One of the research key findings is that artified visual pedagogies can both transverse and/or facilitate meaning-making across art-science spaces and brings forth the creation of science-linked identities. Educators must now engage with the idea that visual reasoning as performative action is now the connecting pedagogy in all epistemic fields.

**Keywords:** science-linked identities, visual borderlands, transdisciplinary learning, art-science, semiosis, artification, visual learning, science communication

#### **1. Introduction**

There is an emerging watershed moment that is set to challenge the relationship between dominant text-based instrumentalist imperatives of the last century and visual art and science education in transdisciplinary learning spaces. With the ideas of contemporary post-structural philosophers such as Deleuze and Guattari entering educational discourse, visual performative thinking and semiosis are forging a rethink about knowledge and communicative connections between disciplines [1]. As our artefactual world now centres on the image, what we come to know as experience and learning are being redefined by how we perceive, remember, and imagine the world as images and signs. Educators must now engage with the idea that visual reasoning, as performative action is now the connecting pedagogy in all epistemic fields with the capacities to visualise, transform, and communicate information.

The chapter argues that the concept of visual borderlands has the potential to unmake current constructs of both traditional art and science curriculum and their related pedagogies by exploring the liminal, embodied, and artified knowledge spaces emergent in their borderlands. This has significant resonance as neoliberal ideology, promotes certain student/teacher behaviours in the name of creativity [2], and has become intricately connected to making a scientific workforce and presenting a dogmatic image of thought about scientific knowledge [3]. This chapter seeks to loosen such ways of knowing in science education in the consideration of the role artification plays in contemporary science learning. I write this at a time when pedagogical rhetoric across secondary and higher education is shifting to a focus on the importance of transdisciplinary knowing yet remaining anchored in positivist text-based assessment and teacher-centred content. Ironically, policy and debate on pedagogical futures which speaks to student-centred inquiry and knowledge connections continue to have the side effect of the neglect of the arts generally, and specifically visual contemporary arts practice which accesses all signs and epistemological contributions as artified ways of knowing and being when inquiring and when communicating to audiences.

Current pedagogical challenges are heightened by everyday digital imaged technologies and their semiotic complexities. These imaged technologies provide agency and fluid learning opportunities for all youth. The next education frontier must look to the significance of the visual, its visual learning processes, and its semiotic contribution which grounds personal experience, aesthetic, affective, and performative learning. By drawing on the Deleuzoguattarian method as one of intuition, it is argued that visual boundary learning goes beyond the actual and our limited, or fixed forms of representing life, to recognising that we are always seeing [4] with affective and imaginative potential. Drawing on gifted secondary school visualisers enrolled in a commencing introductory first-year university fine art 2D course, it seeks to provoke accepted constructs of traditional visual art and its more contemporary contribution to learning. Within this course, students were asked to explore a scientific concept of choice and straddle subject borderlands. The inquiry examines the extent to which scientific and arts-based learning has the capacity to de-territorise knowledge. In so doing, it brings to the surface the concept of an artified pedagogical perspective. Artified learning is linked to adaption and aesthetics and, in the spirit of transdisciplinary learning, presents insights into new ways of seeing or imagining future pedagogical connections and possibilities.
