On Tuesday, during a strong presentation session, while listening to the last talk about dérive and virtual spaces as alternatives by Pritish, I found my mind returning to a learning theory I had studied many years ago. I could not immediately recall whether it was Vygotsky or Piaget, and this hesitation made me unsure about sharing the thought at the time. Afterwards, I searched…and yes! It was Piaget’s theory of assimilation and accommodation, the idea that learning happens either by fitting new information into existing schemas or by adjusting those schemas when new information does not fit.
Reflecting on this, I began to think about how virtual spaces function in a similar way. Even when people experience digital or alternative environments, their feelings and reactions are still shaped by accumulated past experiences and knowledge. Any first encounter within a virtual space is built upon pre-existing cognitive and emotional structures. So, virtual spaces act more as a mimic or extension of reality rather than a replacement. This process can apply not only to places, but also to human relationships, attachments, and the way knowledge itself is formed. For artists in particular, engaging with new media or environments becomes less about abandoning reality and more about negotiating between what is already known and what is newly encountered.
Artists can be understood through Piaget’s concepts of assimilation and accommodation, where creative practice becomes a continuous process of negotiating between existing internal frameworks and new experiences. In assimilation, artists adopt new media, theories, or environments while maintaining their established emotional language and conceptual concerns. The tools or platforms may change but the underlying schemas remain consistent.
On the other hand, accommodation occurs when new encounters challenge existing schemas and require deeper transformation. This is often where significant artistic shifts emerge, when identity or the understanding of presence itself is reconsidered. This change is not merely stylistic but structural and art education environments sometimes encourage this level of critical adjustment.
Virtual space also reveals how artistic perception is shaped by memory and embodiment. In digital environments, artists still rely on bodily memory, cultural conditioning and early play patterns, while also borrowing physical metaphors such as walking, entering, meeting, or distancing. Virtual space often mirrors or exaggerates reality rather than escaping it entirely, showing that cognition and imagination remain grounded in lived experience.
Play therefore persists as a fundamental mechanism within artistic practice. What begins as childhood experimentation evolves into adult creative inquiry, where testing rules, breaking structures, and negotiating imagination against reality become methods of continuous learning and re-formation.
Below is a short child observation, with an image and a video, which for me explains the theory mentioned above:
The child is my nephew, my brother’s son. In the first image he was two years old, in August 2024. We were at a farmhouse with cousins and aunties. I introduced him to drawing with charcoal that we found the day after a barbecue. We made a few marks on the ground together, and he didn’t stop playing with it, continuing to draw small circles and lines.
Last summer, in August 2025, in the second video, we returned to the same farmhouse with the same family gathering. The next day my nephew found small pieces of charcoal and began making circles again. When the charcoal finished, he picked up a small stone and continued drawing on the floor. This happened without my involvement or guidance, I was simply nearby watching him play outside. What amazed me, and what I could not resist recording, was the moment he began showing his cousins what to do and teaching them. They were all having fun, and I was quietly enjoying this very human moment at a child’s level.
This observation functions as a small case study of assimilation and accommodation in everyday life. The first encounter with charcoal represents assimilation, where the child integrates a new material into existing playful behaviours such as drawing circles and lines. The second encounter, one year later, demonstrates accommodation, when the charcoal is no longer available, the child searches for an alternative and selects a stone, adjusting both the tool and the physical effort required while maintaining the same intention to draw. The act of later teaching other children reinforces this learning socially, showing how knowledge becomes shared rather than individual.
In an artistic context, this example illustrates how creative practice is not only about materials but about cognitive continuity. The surface, gesture, and intention remain consistent while the medium changes. This mirrors how artists adapt to new technologies or environments without abandoning their internal motivations. The child’s behaviour reveals that creativity operates through repetition, substitution, and social exchange, suggesting that artistic development, much like childhood learning, is a cycle of experimentation rather than a linear progression… which this also can relate to the cyclicality that mentioned in Eleanor’s presentation.
Karema 