**2. The watershed moment: neo-liberal education and the fluid performative realities of being a digital visual learner and communicator**

There is a coalescing of current educational commentators critical of the current instrumentalist and positivist knowledge perspectives on pedagogical design which will have ripple effects on society into the future. Four key ideas are presented and will be foregrounded in this chapter: (i) scientific commentators who challenge the hegemonic dominance of the contemporary positivist idea of fixed scientific representations and teacher-centred pedagogies; (ii) the performative nature of learning which links percepts and affect, becoming and the multiple ways we make meaning; (iii) the digitisation of social media, dominated by the visual, its fluid processes, unstable meanings, and artful semiotic practices; and (iv) the concept of visual borderlands [1] at the heart of transdisciplinary learning where the learning is affectively driven, relational, and connected. A pedagogy offering imaging as a valued liminal space sees visual borderlands as being able to connect knowledge, identities and employ metaphor across epistemological boundaries for new understandings.

#### *Transdisciplinary Art-Science Identities and the Artification of Learning DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.101092*

In the first watershed moment, a rupture now exists between our understanding of the need for transdisciplinary knowledge diversity and associated learning assets and a perceived excessive focus on dis-imagination in quest of vocational and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education [5, 6]. Commentators like Yong Zhao [7, 8] speak to the unintended side effects of such economic education policy narrowing society's skills and talents/interests as non-STEM skills are undervalued. He argues against a focus that educates uselessness to one with a focus on creativity, resilience, and talent diversity. Zhao emphasises specifically the ways of knowing offered in the arts. Ways of knowing that refine interpersonal, intrapersonal ways of knowing, and their intrinsic, aesthetic, critical, and communicative skill sets are central to contemporary subject-objective reality. Lovat [9] further draws attention to the pedagogical challenges of dominant positivist/instrumentalist pedagogies and their learning limitations emphasising that knowledge is never generated in isolation but is dependent on how the learner effectively receives and understands the knowing. Indeed, there is resistance to the assumption that education is just about producing a scientific workforce. Commentators on art-science, creativity, process pedagogy, and learning continue to argue against the marginalisation of some students towards a consideration of the idea of 'science-linked identities' [10]. They argue for the removal of subject borders [11, 12]. Given the agency of digital culture, and the way young learners both effectively [13] and cognitively access visual reasoning visual representations are now considered a significant cognitive tool both effectively [13] and cognitively access visual reasoning is now considered a significant cognitive learning tool [14]. The siloed nature of the curriculum and the de-imagination of learning occurring in neoliberal education simply performs the task of using education to train workers for service sector jobs and to be cultural consumers with the rhetoric of being able to straddle the development of self-knowledge and citizenship.

The second current arises from a philosophical and research shift that acknowledges the performative nature of learning that links subjectivity and autopoiesis to machinic ecology [15, 16]. Deleuze and Guattari [17, 18] speak to subjectivities and the multiplicity of ways in which we continuously connect our past and present in future orientations. These ways of knowing are always shifting in a process of learning and becoming. They reference autopoiesis which presents sensemaking or meaning-making in nature as a living machine, continuously replaced in pursuit of a self-referentially organised ecology for adaption [19]. For Guattari [20] autopoiesis operates within a machinic ecology which is greater than our biological being. It is an ensemble of conditions or a machinic assemblage where all the components are relationally and transversely connected. A machinic ecology is defined by Guattari [20] in his book 'The Three Ecologies' which speaks to 'a machinism that has technological, social, semiotic and axiological avatars' (p. 34). Contemporary communication, education, and culture are also identified in this dynamic ecology and rest on a relational ontology [21–23] that has no clear boundaries. Furthermore, it has shifted the emphasis in which language and communicative action have typically played a central role towards a performative approach that holds that truths, realities, knowledges, relationships, literacies, agency, and identities as performed in and through material-discursive practices [24]. Milovanovic and Medic-Simic [25] extend these ideas drawing on self-organisation in complex systems physics in their study of neuroaesthetics and artmaking, stating that contemporary art practices, with their postmodern aesthetics, consolidate both art and science. Commentators on Deleuze and art research present contemporary art as a practice that dwells in the transcategorical and transdisciplinary, or liminal spaces between historical and contemporary representational practices [26].

Acceptance of the cognitive and affective work images as meaning-making tools do in both the arts and sciences is required if we are to extend our current limited ideas on transdisciplinary learning. Images are used for visual observation as perceptual and experiential knowledge bridges and include representations, both material and virtual. Both art and science carry multiple common semiotic structures, such as diagrammatical and metaphorical practices which Root-Bernstein et al. [27], sees extends the correlation of thinking skills across art and science.

Art and science have always been close. The images in show how visual representations, across art and science, are historically, relationally, and transversely connected and codependent on the sociocultural and technological skills of the day. Driven by new media and communication imperatives, the representations of knowledge are increasingly digitally enhanced and open to fluid interpretations and uses. Visual communicative competency as sociocultural learning is now an essential skill across all disciplines and significantly in science [28, 29]. Pauwels [30] commenced the discussion around the unstable or interpretive nature of visual scientific communication, the processes and methods by which they are produced, and how scientific images, through their repeated copying, have been normalised as fixed across learning and communication contexts. She draws attention to the inscription, transcription, invention, and fabrication of scientific images across algorithmic and non-algorithmic representation practices such as the use of the camera or X-ray and the role of scientific illustration ([29], p. 149). These ideas have more recently been extended beyond the science of communication to science communication where writers seek to address questions about ontology, such as what is real or true, and how scientific ways of knowing or epistemological points of view or lenses are used to initially capture reality, and then how they are used by social media or the wider society for the communication of ideas [31].

The third consideration informs the first two considerations and is driven by the benefits of artified digitisation. Communication and learning are increasingly propelled forward by the new image-based economy with new knowledge in the sciences and arts increasingly conscious of the flow of signs and images destabilising knowledge [32]. All images are now aesthetically curated and culturally situated within social media. Dominated by the visual and its semiotic complexity, we are all participants as actors, producers, and consumers of information [33]. Digital online photo-sharing and videoing acts now creatively and intuitively connect all experiences and representational knowledge from all discipline fields. These images effectively trigger and connect content and contexts to individual learners [34].

Science education has traditionally focused on conceptual or factual understandings when using visual representations and less on visual representations as epistemic objects for scientific identity [35]. There is a renewed focus on how visualisation contributes to knowledge formation in science from the learners' perspective. It is acknowledged that epistemic representations as boundary objects are incomplete and precipitate an unfolding [36, 37]. Increasingly science educators seek to disrupt the currently accepted normalisation of scientific images as fixed truths or facts. Pauwels [29] asks the science educator or the observer to question what is revealed, obscured, included, or excluded, in these representations. She also asks that we pay attention to how scientific illustrators now readily adapt their images, reframe them for an increasingly wider audience, that of producers or consumers as represented in **Figures 1** and **2**.

Science educator-researchers have begun to respond to the shifting demands of new digital communicative and multimodal semiotic realities of the classroom

*Transdisciplinary Art-Science Identities and the Artification of Learning DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.101092*

**Figure 1.**

*The materiality of things: Takes us beyond words (Grushka, 2019).*

**Figure 2.** *Depictions of the COVID-19 virus.*

learner. In doing so, they are identifying the limited visual literacy and visual communicative skills of their pre-service teachers [38]. Leßmöllmann and Gloning [39], arguing that there are indeed diverse communicative responses required when seeking to connect multiple relationships between scientific knowledge, audiences, and work. Scientific contemporary communication to the public can inform, influence, and even negotiate the science via new social media platforms. It is inevitable that the social and cultural realities of the world of work and the WWW will collide as the vast world of images and their performative and semiotic intersections cross all subject fields.

Transdisciplinary learning for knowledge production and as a communication enterprise is a process of semiosis. Semiosis is a sign or meaning-making process with a choice to select [40]. It is the continuous production, translation, and interpretation across all societies of everyday signs. Human communication thus engages in dynamic relations formed by the human mind and its cultural artefacts [41, 42]. Semiosis is presented as an assemblage or bricolage of different semiotic codes used to build communicative coherence in the contemporary learning culture. It is increasingly identified as affective as we invest in the world via our intentionality, habits, and prejudices [43].

Scientific representations have entered mainstream media with normalising social and cultural traction, such as the COVID-19 virus.

The media-driven scientific culture acknowledges that the algorithmic image of COVID-19 is aesthetically enhanced through artful acts. In **Figure 2**, the SARS-CoV2 image describes the antibodies and is enhanced as light blue. It also acknowledges it as an artist's impression [44]. These images have intentional affective traction as contemporary scientific image makers use artful intuiting representations, such as colour to help in the communication of concepts, abstractions, aesthetic insights, and design orientations that seek to immediately bring forth 'effects' from the audience. These 'effects' can be passive or active and are dependent on an individual's 'seeing' within their personal, social, and cultural context. This seeing is shaped in part by epistemic insights and multiple learning contexts [45]. Such a shift in thinking about the work of scientific images in learning and understanding their knowledge complexity, their performative nature, and interpretive possibilities, is currently a pedagogical challenge as re-imagining transdisciplinary pedagogies and its assessment continues to prove difficult [38].

The concept of artification, as adaption is an important concept when considering the rapid speed with which images are created, modified, and communicated. Artification, emerged from the work of Dissanayake [46] which was deeply grounded in evolutionary anthropology and psychology. It presents art as behaviour and its verb is to artify. It has been subsequently re-set or redefined in contemporary discourse as a sociocultural process located in time and space [47, 48]. The processes of artification, as defined by Shapiro, within a post-positivist paradigm, carries the attributes of meaning which may include displacement, renaming, the shifting of categories, organisational and institutional change, functional differentiation, redefining time, legal consolidation, patronage, aesthetic formalisation and intellectualisation ([48], p. 267). These processes are not the limit of possibilities and Saito [47] argues that artification must maintain a critical stance if it is to promote new ways of thinking and doing. Ways of thinking and doing that promote creativity, imagination, spontaneity, passion, and innovation towards a re-imagining of learning that can break away from the use of normalised images, goal-centred planning, and text-dominated assessment in curriculum.

The concept of visual borderlands is the fourth and final concept and is presented as a new way of thinking as experimenting about relational and connective concepts in transdisciplinary learning. This has been a key finding of the art-science research previously reported and extended in this chapter. The concept foregrounds the productive and performative role of imaged learning identified by the researchers. Visual borderlands in learning are the liminal spaces that are ever-present when students work with images to represent their knowledge. By their very nature, images dwell between the borderlines of art and science and carry a relational aesthetic. Visual borderlands are fluid spaces where the historical representation practices, all now virtually accessible, can hold past knowledge that can all co-exist with new imaging acts. To give meaning and form to emergent concepts, artists and scientists alike draw heavily on metaphor because metaphor can support this indeterminacy when confronting new ideas. It is in these visual borderlands that the generation and communication of ideas in transdisciplinary learning are shared between students and with teachers.

#### *Transdisciplinary Art-Science Identities and the Artification of Learning DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.101092*

Indeed, visual borderlands extend the earlier sociocultural claims by Mirzoeff [49] that vision and visuality would shape how we choose to see ourselves and others in the production of subjectivity. Visual borderlands and the skill of visuality, or critical visual literacy, have now spilled over to an educators' understanding of the way all young learners, 'capture' experiences, select images and concepts to be explored and communicated. These imaging acts are performative. In the processes of communicating their lives via mobile and digital devices they continuously engage in a process of image juxtaposition to explore 'the existence of the encompassed possible' ([50], p. 347). This student-centred learning is the core of visual art studio classrooms.

Visual borderlands identified in the research to date embed arts-based inquiry pedagogies with the affordances of a fusion of ideas and concepts from many knowledge areas, across the sciences, culture, and society. The skills developed in arts-based learning tolerate and are driven by the conceptual and visual communicative learning process. As identified, they operate at visual borderlands between arts and science, access other semiotic systems, and offer creative and personalised approaches to learning [51].
