QUICKTIME RECORDINGS
Artist Statement: Jason Jones
August 2026
I have been concerned with ideas centred around 'pedagogy as medium' since becoming an Art Teacher in 2005. Translating these concerns into art has manifested into many forms, from video pieces that document performance to paintings that archive continuous professional development (CPD).
Recent work mimics a new teaching technique that I'm incorporating into actual lessons. At college, whilst delivering technical instruction, I'm recording the IMAC screen utilising the QUICKTIME screen record facility. Recording both the screen and audio, learners can access the recording, via their TEAMS channel within minutes of the session concluding.
The artworks I’m producing now inhabit the same structure, yet the content is deliberately a work of fiction. There is no educational awarding body, no tangible assessment and no internal moderation, at least none that have any consequence or that deliver any form of recognisable qualification.
Unlike Charles R Garoian's reshaping of the school curriculum as a series of performative agitations, identified in his book titled 'Pedagogy as Medium' (1999), my work is less confrontational, less antagonistic, less socially engaged and instead focuses on the subversion of modes of delivering, facilitating and operating with a classroom environment.
Reimagining functional educational delivery systems from which to re-perform and re-imagine as artwork is a current focus. Felix Guttari's statement 'how do you make a classroom operate like a work of art,' continues to impact the production and theoretical position of work. Where potential opportunities for new types of learning, thinking and production of art making as an event, linked to or evolved through pedagogy could emerge.
These art works are designed to simulate the original teaching format, whilst failing to provide a coherent curriculum structure. The video pieces intentionally communicate multiple forms of constructed visual stimulus, whilst adhering to an educational structure, where lesson objectives and independent study or blended learning tasks are delivered, as if being received by an imaginary cohort of learners. Using Adobe Portfolio, a basic web site is developed to present the visuals and instructional text from which the 'lesson' is delivered. From this website a simulated lesson is performed, where I appear via webcam, within the frame of the recorded session. Each page of the website, when activated by the highlighted mouse, introduces a new image that could be a motion graphic, hand drawn/painted art work or other type of image. The dialogue between the image and text (instructional guidance) is open to interpretation, and is intentionally produced not to illustrate or support either pieces of information. The tasks and accompanying visuals are deliberately created to exist within the same frame. The intention is not to provide clarity or meaning, but instead to invite new interpretations from the disparate elements. Where the historically objective task of delivering educational content through teaching becomes unstable, subjective, broken and fluid, as opposed to following the predicted knowledge formation structure. Teaching strategies are subverted, and as a result the expected outcomes become inverted, unrecognisable and available to deliver new, unexpected ideas, meaning and potentially knowledge.
The content intentionally fails to comply within the strict conditions and or traditions of pedagogy (designed to disseminate knowledge and promote learning through teaching). The artwork functions most successfully when slipping between the gaps of expected pedagogical frameworks and instead celebrates within this slippage, where the lesson being taught is a performed imposter, deliberately futile and happily delivering a curriculum of fiction. It is within this surprising and unexpected collision of perceived structure and subtle absurdity that new knowledge could emerge?
Artificial Intelligent (Ai) Version of the above statement:
QUICKTIME RECORDINGS
Artist Statement: Jason Jones
August 2026
August 2026
My practice has been concerned with the possibility of pedagogy as medium since becoming an Art Teacher in 2005. Rather than treating teaching solely as the context in which art education takes place, I have increasingly understood its structures, rituals, technologies and performances as material for artistic production. This has resulted in works ranging from video pieces documenting performance to paintings that archive continuous professional development (CPD). Across these works, pedagogy becomes something that can be appropriated, displaced, performed, fictionalised and reconstructed.
Recent work has emerged directly from a teaching technique I have begun incorporating into my actual lessons. While delivering technical instruction at college, I record the iMac screen using the QuickTime screen-recording facility. Capturing both screen activity and audio, these recordings can be made available to learners through their Teams channel shortly after the session has concluded. The recording extends the temporal and spatial boundaries of the classroom: instruction persists beyond the lesson, becoming an archive that can be revisited, repeated and re-entered.
The artworks I am currently producing adopt this same operational structure, while deliberately removing its institutional certainty. They simulate educational delivery, yet the lessons are works of fiction. There is no awarding body, no tangible assessment and no meaningful internal moderation. There are objectives, instructions, tasks and apparent learning opportunities, but these systems have been detached from their expected consequences. The apparatus of education remains visible, while its conventional purpose becomes increasingly unstable.
This position is informed by Charles R. Garoian's conception of pedagogy as medium. In his writing, pedagogy can become a performative and critical site through which established educational structures are interrogated, disrupted and reimagined. Garoian's work encourages an understanding of teaching not simply as the transmission of predetermined knowledge, but as an embodied and cultural practice capable of producing encounters, tensions and new forms of understanding. My work shares this interest in relocating pedagogy within artistic practice, although it operates through a quieter form of subversion. Rather than directly agitating against institutional structures, I inhabit and imitate them. The familiar language of lesson planning, technical demonstration, independent study and blended learning is retained, but gradually emptied of its expected pedagogical function.
The classroom, therefore, becomes both a source and a medium. Its systems of communication are treated as artistic materials. Screen recordings, mouse movements, instructional language, webcam performances, websites, learning objectives and digital images form an assemblage through which the work is produced.
This approach also resonates with Félix Guattari's question: how might a classroom operate like a work of art? For Guattari, subjectivity is not a fixed internal condition but something continually produced through encounters between individuals, objects, technologies, environments and social systems. The classroom can therefore be understood as an assemblage: a temporary constellation of bodies, screens, voices, institutional structures, images, technologies and ideas. My work appropriates this assemblage and redirects it. The educational event becomes an artistic event, while the artwork becomes a site in which alternative relations between instruction, image, language and interpretation can emerge.
The QuickTime recordings are designed to closely simulate the format of a conventional teaching session while refusing to provide a coherent curriculum. Multiple forms of visual stimulus are introduced within an apparently recognisable educational structure. Lesson objectives are stated. Independent study and blended-learning tasks are presented. Instruction is delivered as though it is being received by an imaginary cohort of learners.
Using Adobe Portfolio, I construct a basic website through which visual material and instructional text are organised. The website becomes a stage or interface from which the fictional lesson is performed. I appear intermittently via webcam within the frame of the recorded session, occupying the position of teacher, presenter and performer. As the highlighted mouse activates individual pages, new images appear: motion graphics, hand-drawn or painted works and other visual fragments.
Crucially, the relationship between these images and the accompanying instructional text is not designed to be illustrative. One does not explain the other. The visual and the verbal are deliberately placed together without the guarantee of correspondence. Their coexistence produces a gap.
It is within this gap that the work begins to move away from conventional pedagogy.
The apparent task of teaching is traditionally organised around clarity, progression and the anticipated formation of knowledge. Here, these expectations are disrupted. The lesson remains structurally recognisable, but its meaning becomes fragmented, subjective and fluid. Instruction appears to promise knowledge while repeatedly deferring its arrival. The viewer is positioned somewhere between learner, spectator and interpreter.
This instability is important. Rather than understanding failed communication as a deficiency, I am interested in its productive possibilities. The disconnection between task and image creates an encounter that cannot be entirely controlled by either teacher or artist. Meaning must be produced through the viewer's own movement between disparate elements. In this sense, the work moves towards a Guattarian production of subjectivity: knowledge is not simply delivered from one authoritative position to another but may emerge through unpredictable relations and encounters.
The fictional curriculum becomes a mechanism for generating what might be described as a minor or alternative pedagogy. Its purpose is not to communicate a predetermined body of knowledge efficiently. Instead, it creates conditions in which interpretation can proliferate. The lesson becomes an unstable assemblage in which absurdity, familiarity, instruction and visual disruption coexist.
The content intentionally fails to comply with the conventional expectations and traditions of pedagogy. Yet this failure is not simply destructive. The work functions most productively when slipping between the gaps of established pedagogical frameworks. Within this slippage, teaching becomes performance; instruction becomes material; the classroom becomes an artwork; and the artwork becomes a temporary educational space.
The lesson being taught is ultimately a performed imposter: deliberately futile, structurally convincing and happily engaged in delivering a curriculum of fiction.
It is within the collision between institutional structure and subtle absurdity that the possibility of something else might emerge. Not necessarily knowledge in its conventional, measurable form, but new relations, associations, interpretations and ways of thinking. In this sense, QUICKTIME RECORDINGS does not ask what knowledge a lesson should successfully deliver. Instead, it asks what might happen when the systems designed to organise knowledge are treated as artistic material and allowed to become unstable.
The resulting work occupies a space between pedagogy and performance, curriculum and fiction, teaching and art-making. It is in this uncertain territory that a classroom might begin to operate like a work of art—and where the artwork itself might become an event through which new forms of knowledge, subjectivity and possibility can be temporarily produced.
Spatial Book Anchor Paintings (SBA)
Paintings that Measure Reading, Time and Attention
In an era dominated by speed, distraction and infinite digital content, Bookmarks proposes a radically slower form of painting. This new body of work transforms the humble act of reading into an extended performative practice, where the completion of a painting is determined not by aesthetic decisions alone, but by the sustained commitment of reading a book.
Each canvas functions simultaneously as painting, document, archive and bookmark. Rather than depicting the contents of a book, the work records the physical progression through it. Every page completed is meticulously painted onto the canvas as a sequential number, gradually occupying its surface until no space remains. The title of the book and its publishing details occupy the upper edge of each work, anchoring the painting to a specific text while refusing any visual illustration of its narrative. The resulting image becomes an index of attention rather than representation.
The series positions painting as a temporal medium. Traditionally understood as the residue of looking, these works instead emerge from sustained acts of reading. Their production is inseparable from duration; each mark corresponds directly to lived time, concentration and intellectual engagement. Reading ceases to only be preparatory research for artistic production and instead also becomes the production.
Occupying a space between conceptual art, systems-based practice and process painting, Bookmarks extends traditions established by artists who have privileged procedure over image, documentation over representation and duration over spectacle. The paintings operate according to a self-imposed methodology in which every page number functions as both a unit of measurement and a painted mark. The work resists expressive gesture while simultaneously becoming deeply autobiographical, recording the artist's encounters with literature through an accumulation of repetitive acts.
Visually, the paintings oscillate between abstraction and information. Dense fields of hand-painted numerals produce rhythmic surfaces that can be read as minimalist compositions, yet every mark remains tied to an external event—the completion of another page. The works possess an aesthetic economy in which typography, spacing, repetition and accumulation replace conventional painterly illusion. From a distance they resemble geometric abstractions; upon closer inspection they reveal themselves as meticulous records of intellectual labour.
The project also interrogates the status of the book as object. Rather than acting as passive support for knowledge, each publication becomes the generator of an independent artwork. The painting functions as an external memory system—an artefact that silently witnesses every page turned. In this sense, the canvas performs the role traditionally assigned to the bookmark, extending a temporary object into a permanent monument of reading.
Theoretical questions surrounding indexicality, authorship and documentation underpin the series. These paintings are less concerned with illustrating literary meaning than with materialising the invisible activity of reading itself. They ask whether knowledge can be represented through evidence of attention rather than through images, and whether the accumulated traces of disciplined engagement possess an aesthetic value of their own.
Ultimately, Bookmarks proposes that contemporary painting can function as an instrument of measurement. It records not only pages read but hours lived, habits formed and ideas encountered. Every completed canvas represents a book, finished or not, yet equally embodies the time required to inhabit it. The works become portraits of endurance, meditations on learning and quiet celebrations of sustained concentration within an increasingly accelerated culture.