Will metaversive technologies help writers to reclaim tacit knowledge?

Abstract

This article challenges the assumption that traditional genres of academic writing are as appropriate for practice-based students of art, drama or design as they were for book-centred disciplines, such as the humanities or sciences. It argues that scholarly writing diminished the importance of embodied and situated aspects of human ‘knowledge’ within mainstream university art school courses, such as visual and performative arts. In the traditional book-centred disciplines, scholarly writing was useful for encoding declarative knowledge (e.g. ‘knowing that’) but is less effective for the kinds of procedural knowledge (e.g. ‘knowing how’) that are vital in creative, studio-/practice-based learning. Now that academic writing is aided by technologies offering automatic spelling and grammar checks, global text search, cut-and-paste this has further widened the gaps between the knowledges pertaining to head, heart and hand. Soon, however, the combined benefits of 5G, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and ambisonic technologies look likely to make ‘immersive’ and ‘experiential’ technologies almost ubiquitous. Given the appropriate research and development, the ‘metaverse’ could encourage students to think in ways that are more presently situated, relational, embodied and multidimensional.