DAI's MA in Art Praxis study trajectory offers our students 4 distinctive curriculum components. The students are required to take part in all 4 of them:

1. COOP study groups = described on this page

2. How To Do Things With Theory

3. Kitchen | AEROPONIC ACTS

4. WEAVER

COOP study groups ~ formal framework:

COOP study groups ~ formal framework

Six COOPs, are at the heart of the DAI's curriculum.

COOPs bring makers, researchers, writers, and curators together around well-defined, relevant questions and topics. All students are called to active participation in these year-long curated, collaborative, un-disciplined, art research trajectories which are presented to our student body during the introduction week.

Over the course of one academic year every DAI-student will join one out of the 6 COOPs that have been organized for that year. Thus, during the two years of study at DAI a student participates in two different year-long COOP study group trajectories.  

COOPs are guided by tutorial teams bringing knowledge, intuition and experience to DAI. The teams are convened in response to a commission from the part of DAI. Every academic year art organisations with a compelling curatorial and urgent political vision on study and non-extractive forms of research, are invited to bring together a tutorial team that acknowledges the hybrid nature of current praxis wherein roles can easily co-exist in one person or be swapped among the members of a collective or otherwise. 

COOPs gather for several days during each DAI Confluence to share research and to develop a group work. Ideally this work comes into being as an entirely collaborative endeavour, but it may also be the umbrella for more or less individually produced works, carefully brought together by the study group.

Gatherings can take the form of a seminar, group presentation, workshop, reading group, walk, site visit, boot camp, laboratory, screening, interview, exhibition, ritual, meditation, party, work-out, exercise or otherwise.

Each COOPs modus operandi is guided by an overarching question or proposition to which the tutors as well as the students can respond with aural, visual, tactile, performative, digital, cinematographic, choreographic, architectural, curatorial, textual, theatrical, theoretical, and practical contributions (embedded within the framework created by the tutorial team). Students can be asked to prepare and  lead specific sessions.

The tutorial teams offer support to every individual student to make meaningful connections between the student's praxis and the specific field of enquiry of the study group.

Students are asked to invest generous time, in-and outside DAI Confluences. Next to artistic, theoretical, and curatorial vision, practical skills and knowledges will be of crucial importance to produce both the Chronicles as well as the final work for the COOP Summit:

COOP SUMMIT: The collaborative outcome of each of the six research trajectories will be shared with the other groups as well as with the public during our COOP SUMMIT. Learn more about the annual COOP SUMMITs since 2018.

The COOP's Education Team Leader is Nikos Doulos. Students and tutors are kindly requested to direct all their questions in regard to the modus operandi of this curruculum component to him.  

DAI's partnership framework is developed by DAI's artistic director and head of program Gabriëlle Schleijpen.

*Earlier editions of the COOPs are all archived under CONTINUUM.