Mess and noise – Embodied site-specific learning in a digital age

In digital encounters, nowadays often used for connecting internationally, people convert into thin, grainy pixels, two dimensional flat screens that for the perceiver become white noise, humming shadows hovering via instable links, cutting sentences, smiles that disappear before taking note that they ever existed.

What happens when a person meets another physically, in a space where randomness, noise, and imperfection are allowed? Embodiment, place-based presence, and human messiness form the foundation for genuine encounters and global citizenship. This article explores the theme through an international mobility learning experience where digital connections fall short.

Connection is created by sensorial experiences only

At Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria, experts make art by mixing the digital with the organic and the living. The topics there cover a wide spectre from artificial intelligence and neuro-bionics to autonomous systems and robotics, genetic engineering and biotechnology as well as the wicked global changes of our time.

One piece of art particularly shouts at an unaware spectator. Future Ink asks: Where Is My Soul? And then finds various answers one being that of noise. The digital, Future Ink claims, procures to get rid of all the noise, to clear everything. Where is then the creativity, ‘the soul’, in a world cleared of random sounds and unexpected happenstances?

Going on a Erasmus + teacher exchange gave me a chance to experience these artworks provided by Future Ink – Ars Electronica Futurelab . The physical mobility also made me ponder about the reason for choosing an embodied experience over digital interaction. We are as humans, as learners, as teachers living beings in a multidimensional existence where our connection to different realities and others are created only by our noisy, messy sensorial experiences of the outside world, of other conscious beings’ presence around us.

Sensing makes sense

The digital world offers so many tools for connecting these days, that traveling with its unexpected disruptions sometimes seem like a slow, inefficient way to meet people.

Walking along the streets of the Linz old town, sitting around tables with new colleagues from the partner institution, and especially, seeing the smiling, hungry and curious eyes of the students. I know that it makes sense. Because I feel it.

Human connection requires happenstances that need bodily presence, air and porosity, chaos and intensity, small cavities for improvised interactions. To create a dialogue is site and soul specific. Only a living being can be present and connect to place and others.

Global learning is site-specific

Site-specific is a term that in the context of art refers to a production or work that ‘fully exploits the properties, qualities and meanings of a given site’ (Wohl 2014). This idea of a physical space, a given place having unique qualities could be applied to learning, as well.

There is a lot of talk about different learning environments, many of them virtual or digital, these days. Seeing them as a source of inspiration for learning, as places meant to give an authentic experience, is often replaced by standardised, neutral class-room settings, auditoriums and virtual meetings. Where ‘the space itself might become part of the performance text’ (Wohl 2014) in a site-specific theatre performance: a person might become part of the place in an intercultural learning experience, such as a mobility in a different city and country. This also contributes to embodied understanding of being a citizen of the world.

Mess makes the change

One integral objective of all international education is to make people aware of their own Global citizenship. It is a messy concept without clear boundaries, and being a global citizen is an embodied, site-specific endeavour. The Inner Development Goals (IDGs) are an attempt to make something abstract and unattainable into something everyone can get their hands on, live and do. It is a personal matter to be interconnected to others and strive for sustainable choices of body and site.

Where does the motivation for committing to combat for a sustainable future get its fuel? It arises from a desire to be good to those who are good to oneself. It appears when one senses the others living presence and understands that we are all just human beings, similar, diverse, but in the same boat, living within the same messy human existence. In the case of developing teachers, the dimension of education, fostering the conditions for future generations to flourish and societies to provide good life is central. Growing as and into a human is messy business both for teachers and students.

Make noise not war

Even the concepts of global competence, global citizenship education and education for global citizenship are messy and convert into noise pollution when not understood by heart (Unesco 2025). They are to be lived in unclear, and often enough contradictory, controversial situations. They are to be implemented to and with living creatures that are mostly imperfect compatriots of the globe, still in need for growth and transformation, always at the brink of choosing the most comfortable option.

Laughter and smiles by funny people being people, authentic, unique and undefinable beings, are exchanged on different cultures and educational aspects. The strings in between people, nations and generations become almost visible in the spaces electrified by life and, yes, – mess and noise, when people in international mobilities create a site for embodying their shared experience.

That is how futures are made: out of shared spaces filled with echoes and voices and the lively, living human beings interacting and growing together toward a global peaceful world.

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