From our Academy to Yours: a request by Prof. Michael Stevenson from the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg to visit the KUKA College with his class.

To whom it may concern,

the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg, founded in 1662, is the oldest art school in Germany and in this singular role it has grappled long-term with the notions of innovation, invention and creativity. By its nature as a dedicated stand-alone educational institution in this field, it exemplifies a practice based learning environment. Core activities include, manual training, research, crafting and fabrication, skill enhancement, process optimization, and a flexibility of ones knowledge application.

Pavillion 27 – Prof. Michael Stevenson is a practical course in sculpture, we understand artistic production in two senses; as material and process and, beyond this, we glimpse the intangible properties of an artwork. This way of dealing with objects as both hardware and software leads us in turn to the building of intelligent art objects. As a class, we function as a think tank and have recently focused our attention on human-machine relations as well as the situated conditions of learning. Our classroom is in a sense like any other - a space where action is simulated - our hopes are those shared with other learning communities: that simulated action can have application beyond the class and create real-world effect. 

As a learning institution dedicated to the understanding of creativity we are interested in the KUKA College and its own highly specific learning environment. Your technology and its ability for near universal application simulates perhaps the traditional image of the artist with a blank canvas: an intelligent object ready to create. In viewing your website it can be seen that this universality, the reach of your technology across such a wide spectrum of applications, reflects in your classroom learning conditions for a manifold of potential work situations.

We would like to start a conversation - from our academy to yours - which we hope could develop as a collaboration. We respectfully ask therefore if it is possible in the first place to visit one of your classrooms; to see a demonstration of your technology and talk to one of your instructors about how universal knowledge is broken down in practice to construct a specific skill-base for situated action.