Flying Arts: brokering real and virtual pedagogies in regional Australia

Abstract

This paper describes and analyses the leading role that the Flying Arts organisation is playing in Australia in harnessing new technologies to contribute to communication between groups of visual artists with different backgrounds and cultural experience throughout and beyond regional Queensland. When Flying Arts secured Australian federal government funding to train regional artists in the use and potential of new technologies, it predicted that the courses, virtual residencies and discussion forums it developed online would market themselves via its historical 'real world' workshops and exhibitions. In fact, the reverse has happened. Online course participants and exhibitors are now engaging in complementary 'real world' activities. The mystique of the online facilitator has led to an uptake of 'real world' workshops by online participants, including schools and, more recently, to a trial unit devised with Bremer TAFE as the Registered Training Organisation, aimed at accrediting the nine Visual Arts Online modules currently on offer to artists. The paper will demonstrate not only Flying Arts’ ability to monitor and navigate change, but its inherent change to a hybrid organisation that acts as a broker between clients and providers (including government funding agencies and its host, the University of Southern Queensland).