Multiple Recipients of a Single Creative Impulse
As proof that artists who are activists regarding environmental reform also tend to exhibit a fervent desire to reform social spaces as well. They apply the terms 'safe', 'true', 'clean', 'sustainable', and 'productive' to multiple contexts. Consider the Experiments in Extra-Institutional Education that Michael Mandiberg organized with several collaborators.
Last spring he organized a colloquium exploring experiments in educational stratagies and philosophies. The project gathered the prime-movers whose creativity is inspired by the objection to schools in which desks are lined up in rows, bells regulate the march of students through halls, and classroom content is dictated by remote authorities.
The popularity of the initial event has spawned this autumn's Experiments in Extra-Institutional Education seminar series. 
The new series features the current wave of non-traditional learning scenarios representing a wide range of pedagogical innovationsin various academic disciplines and in unconventional settings. Meetings are held monthly on Tuesday evenings.
The seminar will ask distinguished renegades in the educational field questions as foundational as, “Do the terms “student” and “teacher” have different meanings in anti-institutional education than in traditional pedagogical contexts?” and “How is knowledge identified and exchanged in collaborative contexts?”
The year long seminar is organized by Carla Herrera-Prats (SOMA Program, Mexico City), Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo (Parsons, The New School), Michael Mandiberg (CUNY), Jennifer Stoops (CUNY).The first seminar is Tuesday, October 15 at 6:30 pm.
Information is available here: http://centerforthehumanities.org/seminars/extra-institutional-education.
This only goes to prove the contribution of the artist, as innovative thinker, to all facets of contemporary life, particularly those that are function poorly.