Collaborative STEAM Art Installations

Enfoque

In recent years, STEAM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics) has become an essential discipline in the field of education. The aim of this work is to describe a collection of collaborative art installations implemented across various educational levels (elementary, secondary, tertiary, and adult education) which serve to foster STEAM education.

What is STEAM education? The LOMLOE (Organic Spanish legislation that aims to reform the educational system, focusing on key competencies such as mathematics, science, technology, and engineering) introduces the fundamental competency STEM. This competency is geared towards teaching students practical problem-solving and critical thinking skills while encouraging creativity and innovation. STEAM education aims to provide students with a deep understanding of how the world around them operates, through a combination of science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics. Our objective, in the projects described here, is to advance STEAM education through the construction of cooperative art installations.

Our research group has designed and carried out a series of collaborative art installations that combine the STEM disciplines with fundamental concepts and practices of art. The installations are designed to encourage collaboration among a diverse array of participants (elementary and secondary school students, university students, and the staff associated with these educational centers). These installations have been created in easy access areas of the participating institutions (elementary and secondary schools, universities, and a community center).

The art installations were designed to employ a variety of mediums and techniques: acrylic painting on plaster walls, translucent vinyl on glass, painting on metal panels, and 3D spruce structures. Large groups of people participated in the installations (including an artwork with 117 students organized in groups). The physical dimensions of the installations range from 225 cm x 150 cm, up to 1830 cm x 238 cm, and 361 cm x 408 cm x 266 cm for the 3D structure.

The STEAM design of the art installations enables participants to explore ideas from different STEAM fields: in engineering, the concepts of discretization and bottom-up implementation; in technology, the mechanisms of formal languages; in science, the effect of vinyl on photon diffraction; and in mathematics, the emerging set of patterns and symmetries of the created figures.

The classic understanding of art, encompassing the three classic tenets (art as desire, art as beauty, and art as emotion), evolved in the 20^th century to incorporate the notion of art as understanding. Within this philosophy of art and understanding, art is seen as the environment for exploring and expressing ideas using visual forms instead of natural language. The collaborative art installations described here explore and express a wide range of fundamental STEAM ideas. Each artwork’s concept embodies one or more core elements of STEAM, manifested through its structure, subject matter, or implementation.

In this work, we will provide an in-depth look at four selected artworks from the group of thirteen installations created during the project. This examination will focus on the basic concepts of art and STEM present in each artwork, emphasizing the connections between these different fields. Also, this work discusses the educational structure that supports these collaborative pieces, outlining the teaching methods and learning goals achieved by combining art and STEM disciplines in this innovative project.

In conclusion, these collaborative art installations underscore the significance of STEAM education and its ties to artistic expression. These installations stimulate students to think inventively and apply STEAM principles to produce contemporary, conceptual artworks.