Agitation, Oscillation, Embodiment. The Spaces Between

Our creative and professional conventions, modalities and pedagogies are in flux. The rapid integration of Machine Learning technologies into, well, just about everything that is digitally tethered, is having a radical and destabilising effect. Uncertainty abounds; where, what and how we practice as educators are real and immediate questions. The old paradigm(s) that shaped our practices are being reframed. Ideas like superposition, existing in multiple ‘states’ simultaneously, and entanglement, are no longer abstract or remote scientific concepts. They describe our ways of being; we are physical with/through/in the digital, interdependent, knotty and distributed. In these fluid and dynamic spaces, political and legal rhetoric pushes us toward ideological polarisation, forcing us to pick a side, plant a flag. Outright rejection or brazen adoption become framed as the only viable options. In this fervour, are we losing the critical engagement that as educators we are so good at, do we risk making declarations without the literacies to substantiate them? How might we leverage values of interconnectedness and uncertainty in this multiplicity? Should we claim the cartography of new, complex and shifting Illustration topographies? What tolerances do we have to refuse coherence? How might we sit with this discomfort and is there  value in this space of ambiguity? Could we retool the vulnerability we are experiencing at this moment?

This year’s theme aims to capture the richness, scope and complexity of ideas that emerged at the gathering which took place in November 2025 at Kingston School of Art in London. The quality of the questions developed out of that conversation are inadequately represented above, however we have tried to acknowledge the need to create a discursive space that enfolds some of the specifics of our working practices while recognising that we are living through the most significant and rapid technological evolution in several lifetimes. The challenges presented by this radical turn are extensive and, at times, overwhelming but we might challenge ourselves to to recognise the value in our embodied practices, as educators and creatives. This could be a beginning, or touchpoint, that precedes a radical developmental stage for our discipline which ought not preclude individual or ethical agency but instead offer opportunity.