Preparing for a module and using eStudio

As part of the preparation for the Collaborative module I'm looking at how students might access the introductory PowerPoint on line.

Click here

One option is using SlideShare, which you can check out using the click here link above. I'm still wrestling with the new eStudio technology and have not yet solved the issues surrounding embedding web-links. However the first step has been taken and I'm now familiarising myself with this type of file sharing.

I also had a meeting this morning with another tutor who will be sharing the delivery of the module. This was very interesting pedagogically as we began to unpick all the elements I had initially designed as studio workshop sessions. In particular if collaborative practice is to be embedded deeply into the module, it has to start with the staff team. We decided that my initial workshops were perhaps too ‘directed’ and that they didn’t allow for enough ‘learning’ and were not clear enough as to which aspects of collaborative practice we were trying to highlight. We have therefore decided to start again and to rewrite the workshops, each one giving the students more responsibility and also making them take on board particular roles; for instance artist and audience, artist and technician, artist instructor and instruction interpreter, artist as group orchestrator etc. The good thing is that we have time to get these workshops re-written as the module does not start until October.

One task we will still use though is the artist and curator session. Below is the current rough draft and will be finalised within the next couple of weeks.

Curation as a collaborative practice

The miniature gallery

Curators

Working in teams of 4 to 5 (Please keep to your designated  C, M, Y or K group for this workshop) you will curate the work of 4 or 5 other students who will also be operating as a curatorial team using your work.

You will develop a unifying concept for an exhibition that will be sited within the studio using a miniature gallery and will be designed to change an audience’s understanding or reception of the works displayed.

Curatorial decisions can be driven by aesthetics, logic, theme, interaction or any other unifying factor decided upon by the group.

Exhibitors

Exhibitors must relinquish any direct control over the artwork that they are providing for curation. All that is expected of you as an exhibitor is to learn from what the curatorial team have done with your work. You are allowed to ask questions as to why work has been presented in the way it has, but not allowed to criticise the curatorial team.

All students are required to donate at least one miniature piece of work to a curatorial team.

C & M You will install in the morning and the exhibition will open at 11.15am. Viewing, 11.15 to 11.35am. Group C will answer questions as to their curatorial decisions from 11. 40 to 11.50, group M will answer questions as to their curatorial decisions from 11.50 to 12.00 noon.

Y & K You will install in the afternoon and the exhibition will open at 3.15pm. Viewing, 3.15 to 3. 35pm. Group Y will answer questions as to their curatorial decisions from 3. 40 to 3.50, group K will answer questions as to their curatorial decisions from 3.50 to 4.00pm.

Preparation and research suggestions:

You need to have made a basic miniature gallery. This can be as simple as a cardboard box or carefully made in the machine shop. Make a careful decision as to the colour of the walls/floors. You will need a good camera/mobile phone capable of taking images of small objects and keeping them in focus.

Fixings and fittings are vital to exhibition curation. If this was a ‘real-size’ exhibition you would need to consult with Richard Baker, who has plinths and certain tools and equipment that would be needed, however you cannot drill into the floors as they include under-floor heating elements and any changes you might make to the wall surfaces would have to be easily and quickly removed, so that the next group of curators/users of the space were not inconvenienced. Therefore by using a miniature gallery you don’t have to worry about those issues, however, you don’t want work falling off the walls of your miniature gallery, so do think carefully about how to attach work to walls or how to present floor based or video work.

Take some time out during the week beforehand to develop a group curatorial stance.

Look at how, why and most importantly what contemporary curators have been doing.

This is a very basic guide: http://fineart.about.com/od/Curator/ss/Curating-A-Show-In-10-Easy-Steps-A-Step-By-Step-Guide-For-Art-Curators.htm

Cu`ra´tion

n.

1.

Cure; healing.  Check out independent curators

The mini art gallery

Stage one:

All individuals to make a gallery space out of a cardboard box. This to be able to be opened out so that photographs can be taken.  See below.

Stage two

All individuals to make a series of miniature artworks based on what they have been doing in the studio.

Stage three

Miniature work done the previous week to be displayed in bays. Curatorial teams organised (teams can’t select work displayed in their own bay, so we will simply move round so that teams curate other bays) to select from the work and organise mini exhibitions in mini galleries that will be documented.

Nb Each team should have 4 or 5 mini galleries to work with. If you want to you can link them together so that it appears as if this is a major exhibition and you would then curate each ‘room’. Alternatively you can decide that one, or two mini galleries are to be used and the others kept for something else. This will depend on  approaches to the work presented.

Nb C, M, Y, K groups will be decided upon at some point during the introductory sessions.

Another workshop we are thinking about uses mobile phones as an icebreaker.

The mobile phone concert as ice breaker

Two groups are formed from all students available.

The first step is to divide each group up by cell phone brand.

Once divided into phone brands each group has to find a common ring tone that the majority of phones have. The Nokia group perhaps the “Nokia Tune”, Motorola “Hello Moto”, etc. but this is to be agreed by each group. Those without common ring tones can partner up with someone else without a common ring tone.

Groups to work towards constructing order out of chaos. The goal is to be able to construct and send a finished ‘symphony’ to the other group.

The aim is not to create a cacophony of phones going off at once, so you need to have different sections play at different times, like a symphony. Instead of the “string section”, you might have the “Samsung section”.

At some point you will need to get back together to pair off with the other group and trade phone numbers, group A will be the first ‘instrument’ and B will be the caller, roles will then be reversed.

The callers will at some point need to elect a ‘conductor’, so that all callers are clear as to when they send their sound ‘message’, as well as a recorder, (someone who will record the symphony and post it onto a social media platform).

After the ‘instrument’ group is in place and ready, one student rings the ‘caller’ conductor to let him/her know and then the conductor counts off the sender group, or selected sub-groups to ring at counted off intervals, until the symphony is played.

Everyone then as individuals writes up the process and records their thoughts.

Each collaborative workshop session will have to be active, maintain interest throughout, deliver a clear outcome, be designed to get over a particular issue surrounding collaborative practice and work as an realistic introduction to documenting practice. The two staff delivering need to be clear about what is being delivered as we are in two separate studios. 

Probably the biggest issue is that of numbers. I have posted in relation to the collaborative module a couple of times before (you could use labels to collect them together) and each time the numbers to deal with increase. The first post records 50, the second 80 and this year we have 96 students enrolling. I won't be in post next year as this is my last year of phased retirement, but I would presume there will be a planned enrolment of 100. This continuing increase in numbers means that each year some areas of collaborative practice have to be dropped and others refined so that larger groups can be engaged. In particular I find myself having to do more work as an orchestrator and organiser. I am delivering less content and spending more time spinning plates. The larger the group the more chance some students will become disengaged because they don't really understand the use of the sessions, don't understand the instructions, so feel 'stupid' or embarrassed or simply can't hear or see the instructions for the day. (We set the stools out in the studio so that new first years could sit and listen to welcoming talks, the stools filled half the studio when laid out and some students you could predict were going to end up behind a pillar or other obstacle that will obscure their view.) One big issue of course will be what I call the murmuration, that noise made by large groups of people when they communicate internally. Janet Cardiff made great use of that in her '40 Part Motet', a beautiful piece responding to a Thomas Tallis composition. She had separately recorded the 40 individuals who would sing this and assigned to each individual a separate speaker, which was erected as part of a circle of speakers when the piece was staged. As you entered centre of the room it was staged in you were struck by the collective 'murmuration' of individuals but as you walked around the edges of the room each speaker revealed the sounds of the lone human. I must use this example to help open out the collaborative idea with the students and at the same time use it to explain how communication processes are also broken down with attritional 'noise'. 

Anamorphic Colour Illusions

One of the most fascinating first term studio builds for Foundation was one influenced by the work of artists such as Georges Rousse and Felice Varini. We had for a couple of years been looking at colour in space and in order to do this in one session we had students making small boxes within which they would insert different tints and tones of primary or secondary colours, and adjust their spatial positions so that they created the illusion that they sat in the same plane.  At some point (this must have been around 1994/5) someone decided that it would be better to have students working towards an architectural scale in groups to solve this problem. In order to introduce more precision and control it was further decided that they could create large scale anamorphic illusions in a similar fashion to Varini or Rousse’s work.

Working in teams students would initially be asked to share their collections of colour. I have mentioned before that students were often split into groups to collect primary and secondary colours. A large scale illusion of a simple geometric shape would be decided on, a square, circle, triangle etc. and then this would be plotted out over whatever structures were around, often these structures would be left over from the last project. So these might be anything from giant cardboard tools to 3D forms made from the synthesis of two different materials and their structural possibilities. (Another project that I will at some point look at). It was important that these forms could be seen as ‘intact’ geometric wholes from one unique point of view and that they could be constructed over a complex space that would usually include at least two walls, some floor and over several inventions. It’s easier to explain by looking at one of Varini’s pieces.

This is how the final installation looks, seen from a unique fixed point of view.

However if you are anywhere but at the unique viewpoint you can see the forms for what they really are, as in the images below and also walk amongst them.

The students’ would often make far more complicated pieces that the one above, their colours being made of paper, textiles, objects and whatever else they had managed to collect and the forms riding over a far wider range of surfaces. However the final result was similar. There was also an attempt to deal with atmospheric perspective, sharper more intense colours being kept for parts of the images furthest away from the viewer and less saturated colours placed in areas closer to the viewer. Hopefully if it was going to work correctly these differences in colour saturation would optically even themselves out as the eye adjusted its atmospheric spatial colour read.

The best of these images were totally convincing and of course photographed really well; eventually staff and students would then walk into the middle of the constructions to break the illusion. The photographs of course needed to be taken in such a way that these convincing illusions were surprisingly broken. Part of the yellow base of a triangle perhaps revealed to be a yellow bath-duck sitting on the floor, its left hand point a yellow duster pinned to a wall fifteen feet further back. The patches of colour could spread out quite some way into the studio spaces and they were far more broken up than the images of Varini’s above.

These constructions could take a full five days, but it was worth it because of the amount of learning involved. First of all, point of view was vital, and this was a great way for students to get their head around how important this was. The project was often their first ever site specific installation. They would usually use a camera set on a tripod for this, taking it in turns to check that everything worked correctly. The next issue was teamwork; someone always had to be directing others, it was impossible to do this on your own. The next issue was that an audience was vital to the ‘realisation’ of the piece, people needed to walk into the environment and experience it. For those who would eventually work with installations, be these design or fine art based, it was a powerful lesson, not least of course being how important it was to work with ambition on an architectural scale.  Precision was of course vital and any piece of colour out of key would pop forward or backwards and destroy the illusion, and because of the team working mentality we had a much better quality control system, each student checking on the work of others, so that the project maintained high levels of integrity. Finally the importance of documentation was raised. The work only made sense to others who had not experienced it photographically; the camera and its one eye, being part of the message of the work.





Fine Art Year One Collaborative Module

Tuesday was again working with Fine Art year one and getting students ready for collaborative practice. We now have the groups finalised so have to make it clear as to what they need to do. Part of this is delivering a short presentation on the use of gantt charts and how to develop and use project management skills. Students actually seem to be interested in this, the chart I started with them is now posted onto the ‘EStudio’ site. See below.

We also showed examples of last year’s collaborative module, this all being possible because video inductions and introductions to how to use video editing software are done in parallel with the project. Click below to see an example from last year:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZZZzUAf8O4

Video has become one of those tools that have become almost mandatory for student artists to understand. It is used to make practice, as well as to document practice and because we are surrounded by a media soaked world, without an understanding of how the language is constructed, you are in risk of being cut loose from your culture.  Every group will have to make and screen a video as part of the module and they only have two weeks within which to get this done. This will force group interaction and they will quickly learn to have to manage group dynamics, which is another area we have to introduce.  Tuckman’s "forming, storming, norming, and performing" being another 1960s concept they are being introduced to.

These are half day sessions and we are working with groups of approximately 25. The First year has 50 students on it this year, (planned for 85 next year due to changes in funding and other issues), on Tuesdays the group is split in half to enable more theoretical issues to be introduced within a question and answer framework. While one half of the group is getting gantt charts and group psychology, the other half is getting a more detailed look at the history of collaborative practice.

Collaboration day one

Monday and it’s snowing heavily. I have to deliver a lecture on Collaborative Practice as it’s a briefing day for the new module. I concentrate on how every artist is and always has been linked to other people. I used this diagram below as a key image, each line drawn figure being directly connected to each other and relative sizes can be changed easily according to focus.

The main historical reference I use though is Colab and 1980s post-punk practice, students seem to find the 1980s very like the present climate and I can make lots of references to both art and politics.

The afternoon is mainly spent trying to get the students into groups of 6, the following day will be working with these groups to establish what it is they can achieve in the time allocated for the module. The snow kept up and college closed early, so we all had to be out by 4.00pm.