The 38th InSEA World Congress will aim to promote international dialogue and exchange of experience and expertise in the field of art education and related disciplines.

 

The title of the congress offers a metaphor that can be figuratively applied to many ‘unexpected territories’, primarily to those we discover in art, in the ‘image’. The notion of image is not understood here only as one of the historical forms of representing the material and non-material world, or an expression of creativity and human imagination. Traditionally, the image has a material basis, but it is also a mental image – an unbounded concept, in short, an ‘unexpected territory’.

 

Through the image, we think and feel, through the image, we seek, find and express our identity, uniqueness, subjectivity – that is, our inner territory. Through the image we interpret and perceive not only ourselves, but also society, and the visible and spiritual world, too.

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Unusual territories, aesthetics and imagination can be also found in the art of new media or thanks to contemporary immersive technologies and generative tools of artificial intelligence – but we also enter unexpected and often dangerous territories through visual culture broadly understood, in which numerous disturbing principles can be traced, including deception and false reality, pressure on self-perception, addictive behaviour, imitation of models, the shaping of a certain type of behaviour – all with consequences that include a global increase in depressive and anxiety states. Social networks – of which the 'image' is an essential part – are abused and distort social debates, replacing a dialogue with confrontation.

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For a person anchored in the contemporary hypermodern, globalized reality, an unexpected territory can be territories with the visuality and sign systems of other cultures or even our own traditional culture, in which we often feel like strangers.

 

Modernity, the consequences of which we are now experiencing, has brought about the disembedding of tradition and normative value frameworks: we are able to overcome spatial limitations, we can even reside outside of physical space (e.g. in virtual reality), or we can connect with people in another time zone and another space at the same time, without being hindered by physical limitations. Disembedding mechanisms have given us freedom, but have also disrupted shared cultural and value systems and social relationships to the natural environment.

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The topics which are also offered for a professional debate, and anticipated by the subtitle of the congress ‘Permanence, Shifting Grounds, and Unexpected Territories in Art Education’ include: the disembedding of tradition and, on the other hand, its rediscovering, continuity and discontinuity, deconstruction of one's own cultural practices, reflection on paradigmatic changes brought about by modernity and digital technologies, new structures of knowledge and new methods of learning that find its expression in the field of digital humanities, digital platformisation and design practice, the permanent establishment of one's own value systems and identities through art production and art reception.