Putting
together slides for lectures is always a challenge. In the old days of slide
projectors you never had text, everything was spoken and students made notes.
Because I’m ‘old school ‘ as the jargon goes, I still try and keep text to a
minimum, but the arrival of EStudio is forcing a rethink. I’ve never really been a fan of PowerPoint,
but it is given to us as standard with the Microsoft Office suite. In some ways
the fact that you have some control over backgrounds, fonts etc makes it worse.
Not enough to ‘design’ but too much to ignore. I always start with puzzling
over how much the technology is shaping the content. That said, in the end I
have to get on with it, as I am expected to have a slide show supported contextual
studies lecture every week, as well as presentations designed to help introduce practical modules.
The
introduction of EStudio (which is a replacement of what was Moodle) has been undertaken
as a standardisation exercise right across the college. In reality it doesn’t
seem to look or operate anyway differently to the previous Moodle system that I
was using when teaching on the Digital Film Games and Animation course two years ago.
What it
means is that all course content can be loaded up to an intranet and accessed
by students on line. This has been standard practice for years in most institutions,
but has previously been done on an ad hoc basis at the art college.
The
problem for me is that most of the EStudio content is so boring. Briefs and
timetables, module descriptors and codes of practice etc. If I was a student I
would want lots of ‘how to’ videos, filmed in the same environment that I was
working in, so that I could see where materials were stored, watch best
practice in mold making for sculpture, check on settings for welding, how to
make good canvas stretchers etc etc., as
it is I couldn’t see anything that I would have considered useful when I was a
student. Paperwork didn’t interest me then and from what I can see, current
students are not interested in paperwork either, except for when it comes
bearing a mark. Then they are suddenly really interested in why so and so has 2
marks more or less than them.
However my
lectures will go up once they are prepared. This means that they go up without
me. I’m not able to do my rambling preambles around the point. Not able to make
noises, clap, jump up and down and do all that stuff you do to make sure people
don’t fall asleep. Above all the fact that some points are very subtle and that
I have to feel my way round them, engaging the audience in a story that perhaps
has no single ending, means that the PowerPoint will in some ways feel like a
disused theatre set. You can wander around it but will have no real
understanding of the play that was acted in front of it.
My first
lecture this year will be used to kick off the first year practical programme.
Slide
one:
With each
slide in PowerPoint comes a notes area, something I haven’t really used before,
but as students will access this on line, it seems a good idea to put an
explanation in. I will put these in red, it will be easier to sort out from my rambling text:
Note: You
will initially be focused on drawing – but you will also have workshop
inductions as part of this initial module. So how to start? Here are some
thoughts to help you – drawing is fundamental to many art practices, but you
will also have to think about how you can use the various facilities and
materials available to you.
Why
do we start like this?
All
of you will come to this Fine Art programme with existing ways of working and
ideas as to how you might want to develop your practice. So on the one hand we
would like to acknowledge this and give you a chance to present to others what
you have been doing, however on the other hand your experience of different
working processes will be very different and you may not have had a chance to
explore other ways of working, or to think about how different materials and
workshops might change or open out new and more challenging areas of practice.
This
relates to what the students will be doing on day one. They have all been asked
to do something for a ‘holiday’ project and to bring this in. This piece of work will be used as partly an ‘ice breaker’ as it allows students to introduce
themselves and their existing practice to each other, and it will also be
something that can be transformed into other things using the various
approaches and processes introduced during these first few weeks. (I’m
personally never sure about holiday projects, I would rather just ask people to
bring in a piece of art they had made that they believed in) Not that this matters too much, as students
will need to let go of their existing ideas about these artworks they bring in,
because the processes introduced will transform whatever the starting point is
into something completely different. (Well hopefully they will, but I have run
this project before and a few people have been known to stubbornly keep their
initial concept going right to the end).
Slide two
I have decided to use a chair as a substitute for whatever
it is the students will bring in. It makes the point that anything can be
transformed and more importantly that everything can have meaning. There are no
notes as the slide is all text.
Slide three
Note: Scale will be an important issue. Try and push this to extremes
when exploring the potential of your initial starting point.
This
doesn’t really tell the story I will verbally tell, but it will have to do. I
like to get students to look underneath their chairs, get down on the floor and
do stuff that means that they get their head into where they might find new or
unusual viewpoints from which to see the everyday. Scale change is just one issue.
Slide four
This slide
of Lucas Samaras chairs is the key slide. Students should be able to get the
idea that they will be doing lots of drawings of something and using these to
inform what they might make. They should also be timetabled to do several
inductions into workshops while this project is going on. Their images will
then be further processed in a classic 2D to 3D dialogue. Medium specificity
will also be an important issue for them to think through.
Note: An
initial exploration of possibilities using drawing, then taking the idea
through different materials.
Again this note is very sparse. I would elaborate
considerably in the talk, however part of me feels that without the banter of
students asking questions I cant really explain beyond this in the note section.
Slide five:
This slide brings up the fact that students will be expected
to play. I particularly like Wurm’s ‘One
minute’ sculptures, they open out the performative possibilities and are very
cheap.
Note: The
importance of play. Pure un-directional play can be very rewarding. But there
is often a logic to this, even if it looks as if the logic is slightly odd or 'not as we know it Jim'. Take one aspect at a time and push the implications. What
happens if I extend this aspect, or repeat this, or bring these things
together, or make it out of unexpected materials etc.
Canhavato’s chair is made from decommissioned
weapons collected since the end of their civil war in 1992. The throne is a
product of the Transforming Arms into Tools project - whereby weapons
previously used by combatants on both sides are voluntarily exchanged for
agricultural, domestic and construction tools. Think about how the materials you make these transformations in bring with them new sets of meanings associated with their own provenance.
I’m not going to put the entire PowerPoint up, I’m just
trying to give an idea of what is being done, however these are the last two
slides.
Slide 16
Slide 17
Once the talk is over students will work all week drawing
and being taken out group at a time to begin workshop inductions. There will be
three to four staff working across 80 students for most of this time. I shall
just be there for the initial two sessions. The following week I will be giving a introductory contextual studies talk, 'What is art?'
No comments:
Post a Comment