Swimming between the flags: The pictures of the floating world project

Abstract

This chapter recounts and reflects upon an educational initiative known as the Floating World project which created a suite of digitalised curriculum resources, drawing on a series of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japanese Ukiyo-e (literally Pictures of the Floating World) woodblock prints. The Floating World project was an innovation that sought to transform and perhaps transcend a number of traditions, such as schools' access to traditional art works, and/or the relationship between these art objects and their (passive) diverse viewers, through the design and deployment of a technologically mediated space. In doing so, the Floating World project opened up new ways for information to flow, enabling a dynamic relationship between viewer and (art) object. In describing and analyzing the processes and outcomes of this initiative, this chapter reflects, also, upon the challenges of moving beyond the boundaries that are so carefully enforced by dominant educational mindsets.