The starting point of this presentation is a general acceptance in media and literature that processes of digitization, have a profound influence on the daily functioning of higher education. At several places it has been argued that digitization changes education profoundly. Against this background the question is asked what this means or can mean for art-education. And more, how to speak and think about visual imag(in)ing in times where making images and thinking through images have become part of the fabric of daily life (via digital media)? Although images seem to be nearly everywhere, and especially in digital contexts, in digital education they remain to a large extent absent. Or maybe better formulated, they remain subordinated to learning processes. After all, isn’t digital education mostly a matter of fast learning and aren’t images not only important for making this process more effective and efficient? From this perspective, we ask the question can the actual digital condition and related to this, the omnipresence of screen images be understood as educational? What is necessary in order to make art academies in digital times? Additionally, giving the inherent reliance of art education with images and visual material, we ask the question whether insights can be gained in art academies?  In response to these questions and in line with socio-material studies, we argue that we need to conceive of the digital and screen images in terms of active devices. That is to say, as digital tools that not only make something possible, but that equally makes others do something. In order to come to such an understanding, we argue that we need to set up educational practices that make digital operations and their effect in terms of possibilities and impossibilities visual. While developing concrete screen experiments we come to a design for a MOOC in art (bMOOC) that makes visible and present the very potentiality of digital devices. In bMOOC images, then, do not appear as representations of another world, but perform and think vision.  Equally we  present a proposal for thinking digital screen education in terms of performative practices.

Decuypere, M. (2015) Academic Practice. Digitizing, relating, existing. Unpublished Phd dissertation, KU Leuven. Fenwick, T., & Landri, P. (2012). Materialities, textures and pedagogies: socio-material assemblages in education. Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 20, 1-7 Ingold, T. (2010) The textility of Making. Cambridge journal of economics. 34, 91-102 Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social. An introduction to actor network theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Law, J. (2009) Seeing like a survey, Cultural Sociology, 3, 239-256.