Class of Interpretation (COI) is a unique program from the perspective of intellectual production and educational form, with an emphasis on the mediation of art and critical thinking manifest through constant interpenetration of the academic environment and museological practice. 
 
This five-year educational program invites some of the most renowned international thinkers to Prague. In its first year, the program starting in October 2018, offers around 10 public events in two semesters (2018/2019), led by artists, philosophers, theorists, historians, and scientists from all over the world as well as the Czech Republic, including the program leaders Boris Ondreička (Curator at TBA21 Vienna) and Václav Janoščík (Lecturer at AVU Prague). 
 
 
Methodologies
 
Unlike regular academic courses COI tends to focus on lectures by leading theorists, curators and artists from around the world and intensive concurrent seminar-based collaboration. 
 
The program offers ten semesters (2018–2023) of rigorous academic sessions consisting not only of open public lectures but more particularly semi-public seminars. For these semi-public seminars around 25 core students have been selected, but COI has the capacity to extend an invitation to another 25 guests from the general public. Additionally, COI has the ambition to host adjacent workshops and research study groups, fieldwork outings and performances, and publishing or curatorial activities. Selected students can attend COI for multiple consecutive or intermittent semesters throughout the five-year duration. 
 
Distinct from other learning programs embedded into or adjacent to public museums, as well as master’s degree programs in curatorial or museum studies, this program will use the TBA21 collection and its knowledge apparatuses (archives, library, histories) as a starting point and critical matrix. It proposes to form an enclave of embodied learning, which will further the deep exploration of the themes of art, ecology, philosophy, and politics with international and local experts.
 
In this course of action COI wants to create a new generation of exceptional professionals and thinkers in the area of art from the rapidly evolving Central European Region; in order to build a network of leading experts in their respective fields with an overlap into political life and ecology, and ultimately to support future agents of change in society.
 
 
Conceptual framework

Pluralist democracy is based on individual interpretations. Democracy is a domain of interpretational participation. These altered domains already suffer from infobesity. Congestion of these platforms produces the exhaust emissions of post-truth, alternative facts, fake-news, which are all the logical side effects or price for “freedom.” The clash of interpretations (ideas) implies a multilayered societal negotiation which might lead to a productive consensus (ideologies). From this edgy sociocultural and political perspective, one aspect of interpretation requires specific attention.

The operational area of COI is the intertwined environment of art, science, and public issues, following what Colombian mathematician and philosopher Fernando Zalamea describes as “The transits between reality and imagination, the Many and the One, the particular and the universal, the local and the global, (which) constitute the very core of mathematical and artistic creativity.” Interpretation is a method of a (the Many and The One) dialogical nexus: the One, the Many. Art is an authorial interface between recipients and subjects of reality and imagination under consideration. Understanding art means to embrace the triangularity between the author, the reality/imagination, and the recipient, who meet at the object(s) of arts together. Understanding arts leads to an understanding of the reality of the contemporary and its future possibilities. The collective interpretational discourse around the Many leads to the consensus of the One.
 
The COI’s goal is for its guests and students to immerse themselves in the problems of perception, cognition, understanding, and expression, in ways that go beyond the discursive and engage and harness the creativity of participants. The COI employs a knowledge, experience, and skill-oriented praxis. The COI is a backstage of a critical, ambidextrous, collective learning process.