The two year long Migrating Art Academies project is led by the European School of Visual Arts in Poitiers/Angouleme (EESI, FR) along with the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne (KHM, DE) and the Vilnius Academy of Arts (VDA, LT). The project is supported by European Commission Culture Program 2007.

The unprecedented technological and political changes of the last decade have created a rupture between traditional educational practices and a new polymorphic reality hybridized by the free flow of labor and information. In the age of Google Earth, blogs, Youtube, Myspace, Facebook, Wikipedia, and Second Life, virtual activities merge with the anthropologically and culturally evolved communication habits of real life. Objects are getting “smart.” Cars tell us how to drive from point A to point B (GPS); refrigerators know about all products stored inside them (RFID); telephone companies know where their customers are located (mobile phones, PDAs).

Literally the Migrating Art Academies is linked to Plato’s school of philosophy which was later called Aristotle’s Peripatetic School or simply the Academy. It is based on a process of thinking by walking. Replacement of the accustomed educational practice with experimental forms of work like doing-while-moving unleashes new forms of creativity and offers a different kind of study and research.

Practically the Migrating Art Academies project unfolds as a dual-layered and simultaneous structure — in physical space as an on-the-road reality of the mobile RV (recreational vehicle) units consisting of 5 students each and virtually in Second Life, an internet-based 3-D virtual world constructed by its residents.

The basic idea behind the project is to challenge the traditional and habitual artistic routines of the students in order to inspire their continued creative development. Students explore ambient environments while traveling across Europe to three different European Capitals of Culture — Linz, Vilnius, and Essen (Ruhrgebiet). Participating in classes within the Second Life environment, students get a chance to experience e-learning possibilities as well as visualizing their ideas , constructing their own personalized creative territories, or doing virtual performances.

The Migrating Art Academies project is an attempt to juxtapose the digital, non-haptic, anonymous, collective, and virtual on one hand with the unique, corporeal, and individual on the other. The project concentrates on social and interpersonal communication and encounters between differing cultural habits. “The breach between locations are the breaches between the individuals’, as the Maître à penser of this project, Vilém Flusser, once stated in his writings on migration and nomadism.

Migrating Art Academies provides a positive and pro-active model for a new structure of teaching and learning based upon notion of open and de-institutionalized flow of cultural experience and personal knowledge. The self-constructed virtual model in Second Life may be used as a prototype for a real school and migrated into the real life along with its students, professors, and infrastructure. The newly-synthesized school offers an accredited study program based on the re-unification of arts and sciences.