Pedagogy 2025
Abstract
In an era of content oversaturation and commodified attention, tertiary creative practice education faces a paradox; the same digital technologies that expand creative possibilities also contribute to creative paralysis and undermine sustained reflective engagement. This paper describes an Open Studio pedagogy that addresses the ‘attention economy’ as both subject matter and contextual challenge in contemporary art education. Drawing from the author’s experience as artist-educator, the paper identifies how attention-fragmentation impacts creative development and suggests strategic pedagogical interventions that help students confront this paralysis and find creative agency. The paper surveys tensions that creative students identify between digital and physical art-making, creative labour and value, and ever-present digital overwhelm. It draws on literature including post-digital art teaching (Kolb, Tavin, and Tervo, 2021), creative pedagogies (Orr and Shreeve, 2017), and broader contexts articulated by theorists including Berardi, Citton, and Fisher. Describing specific studio observations and exercises, the paper suggests how students can be supported to navigate digital potentialities and distractions while pursuing meaningful creative practice. Of particular focus is helping students understand and articulate their own creative habits and consumptive impulses in content-creation-culture. This work contributes to urgent conversations about the future of art education where attention deficits and digital technologies increasingly shape both student experience and institutional decision making. It documents practical pedagogical responses that acknowledge these challenges without surrendering to technological determinism. By reimagining the studio as a space for both digital exploration and reclaimed attention, the paper proposes a pedagogical model supporting students to create meaningful art in an era of disposable, monetised, and artificially generated content.
Daniel McKewen is an artist and academic whose creative research practice considers the impacts of screen culture on individual and collective imagination. Working with moving image, interactive and generative technologies, he critically examines how screen content and experiences intersect with ideology and aesthetics. McKewen is Senior Lecturer in the School of Creative Arts at Queensland University of Technology, where he teaches contemporary studio art practice.