what if? (un)learning through art
by Angela Serino
I recently came across the speech Geoffrey Hinton delivered as he received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.”1 Hinton’s research has been fundamental in shaping a new form of AI, one that, in his words, “excels at modelling human intuition rather than human reasoning.”2As I listened to these words, I found myself pausing to think about what we really mean when we speak of intuition. From the perspective of someone who uses technology, but is not a specialist, I started to ask what its role could be in a world with “digital beings more intelligent than ourselves,” beings that are, as Hinton warns, “no longer science fiction.”3
In a free association exercise, several images and processes came to mind. Intuition, for me, speaks of what is not necessarily verbal: bodily knowledge, other senses, the unconscious (as C.G. Jung would say), or what resists being measured or named. Even if it may rely on experience and knowledge, I believe intuition often operates in the dark, and from there it guides our decisions and actions. It’s that sudden snap in the mind—the “aha!” moment. A materiality of another kind. In this sense, it feels close to the artistic process: something that only becomes clear after it has been made, not before. In its absence, it would be mere execution.
I carried this reflection with me in the days I spent with the MEiA students in preparation for today. Even if we didn’t speak directly about generative AI and the future of AI-mediated education4 yet, many of our conversations around their educational work resonated with the questions such technologies bring up. Again and again, we encountered a tension between learning as a measurable, outcome-driven process, and learning as something more open-ended, embodied, and relational. With educational settings and learning situations outside the class significantly shaped by a language of improved efficiency, strategic decisions, and simplified management, we turn to art to cultivate conditions for alternatives to this linear thinking (what if? of the title).
We spoke of cultivating different sets of conditions: embodied attention, unproductive time, seamless and ‘useless’ actions. We explored the value of knowledge that emerges through doing, of deep interpersonal connections, and of reimagining evaluation systems that leave room for what cannot be easily measured. What kind of educational spaces and learning situations allow for meaningful pauses? For making room for what doesn’t fit the mold?
“The classroom is the most radical space of possibility,” bell hooks once wrote. For that possibility to remain alive—and to continue enabling forms of worldmaking, freedom, and transformation, even in a future shared with digital beings—what do we need to protect? What becomes essential to cultivate? Researching within a master’s programme, as well as pursuing a lifelong practice of reflection, articulation, and experimentation, is one possible answer to this. Research as an inquisitive, critical attitude, as well as a collective practice, is a process that situates one’s work—as an artist, an educator, a learner—in the world together with others, whether they are human, more-than-human, or in a close future, digital beings.
The students of this cohort and the works they’ve made embody this idea. They have committed to research in education for the last two years, and come today to share an incredibly varied set of lived experiences where artistic methods re-centre our humanity. Let’s celebrate together!
1
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2024 was awarded jointly to John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks”. Source: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/ (accessed on May 14, 2025).
2
You can find Hinton’s acceptance speech here: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/odUjxJy0YMo (accessed on May 14, 2025). For more information about Geoffrey Hinton’s research you can watch his Nobel Prize lecture “Boltzmann Machines” delivered on 8 December 2024 at the Aula Magna, Stockholm University. Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDE9DjpcSdI (accessed on June 1, 2025).
3
Ibidem
4
A future already practiced. In the UK, for instance, David Game College, a private school in London, is currently piloting a programme where students aged 15–17 prepare for their GCSEs (General Certificate of Secondary Education) exams in “teacherless” classrooms, using AI-powered adaptive learning platforms and guided by “learning coaches”. More here: https://www.davidgamecollege.com/courses/courses-overview/item/102/gcse-ai-adaptive-learning-programme (accessed on June 8, 2025).