For the first time, the Teachers' Academy was held in conjunction with the ELIA NEU NOW LIVE Festival, an annual event featuring high quality, exciting work of art graduates from all over Europe. The combination of these two dynamic events has resulted in a participatory experience covering the range of arts education pedagogy from process to production, getting together teachers, students and artists from all over Europe and beyond.
The digital version of the Teachers' Academy programme is now available for viewing and download!
For more information, please contact ELIA Conference Manager Barbara Revelli at barbara.revelli [at] elia-artschools.org
For the previous ELIA Teachers' Academy and papers from that conference, click here.
Online registration will be open till 3 July 2012.
The registration brochure for the 2012 edition of the Teachers' Academy is also available to download.
Participation is free for the selected speakers and workshop presenters. For other participants, the following fees apply:
ELIA members early bird fee: 250 euro
ELIA members: 350 euro
Non members: 1300 euro
The fee covers participation in all presentations and workshops, 2 lunches, opening dinner reception and closing dinner and party and entrance to all NEU NOW events.
For additional information or questions, please contact ELIA Conference Manager, Barbara Revelli at barbara.revelli@elia-artschools.org
Location: ESMAE –Politécnico do Porto
14.30–17.00 Registrations
17.00-18.00 Informative Presentation on the Teachers’Academy and NEU NOW Festival Programme
Location: Serralves Museum, Porto
18.30–23.00 Opening, Performance and Dinner Reception
From 22.00 Maus – Event Hub (live music and more)
Location: ESMAE –Politécnico do Porto
09.30-10.00 Registrations and Coffee
10.00-11.00 Keynote Speech - João Brites
(Artistic Director and Founder of Teatro O Bando)
11.00-13.00 Three Parallel Sessions (3 presentations each)
13.00-14.30 Lunch Break
14.30-16.30 Two Parallel Workshops
Various Locations
17.00-22.30 NEU NOW Festival Programme
From 22.00 Maus – Event Hub
Location: Faculdade de Belas Artes
09.30-10.00 Coffee
10.00-11.00 Keynote Speech - Giep Hagoort
(Professor of Art and Economics at The Utrecht School of Arts and Utrecht University)
11.00-13.00 Three Parallel Sessions (3 presentations each)
13.00-14.30 Lunch Break
14.30-16.30 Two Parallel Workshops
Various Locations
17.00 – 20.00 NEU NOW Festival Programme
20.30-22.30 Closing Dinner Teachers’ Academy at the Faculdade de Belas Artes
From 22.00 Maus – Event Hub
Samuel Guimaraes and Ines Vicente
(ESMAE, Porto)
Exchanging Materials: Collaborative Teaching Practice
Claes Peter Hellwig, Sara Erlingsdotter
(Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts)
Pär Gustafsson
(Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Stockholm)
How can an artistic experience meet an experience of a landscape and create a participant audience rather than an observing audience?
Franziska Nyffenegger
(Zurich University of the Arts)
Writing as Social Interaction
Matt Hawthorn
(Nottingham Trent University School of Art & Design)
Pervasive Performance & Pedagogy
Click image for detailed view.
The 2012 Teachers' Academy coincides with the NEU NOW LIVE Festival in Porto. Delegates of the Teachers' Academy get free acess to all NEU NOW LIVE Festival shows. Pre-registrations can be made via the Teachers' Academy online registration form.
This festival is an innovative international platform for talented graduating artists - coming out of Higher Arts Education Institutions and Universities across Europe and beyond – to present themselves to a wider international audience within a professional arts context.
The full program is now available on the NEU NOW Festival website.
Please click on linked events for detailed view.
18.30-19.15 Opening Speeches (Serralves)
20.00-22.00 Food and Drinks
22.30-23.00 ESMAE Exhibition (ESMAE)
23.00-24.00 Jazz (ESMAE)
00.30 Synth Party (Plano B)
10.00-20.00 Exhibition: Volume and Muschelrauschen
13.30-20.00 Gallery Opening (Galeria do Palácio)
17.00-18.00 Gallery: Introduction to the Works
(Galeria do Palácio)
18.15-19.30 Performance: Untitled (Galeria do Palácio)
19.00-20.30 Concert: carry [you carrying me]
Concert: Duo: Xenia Zemskaja & Talvi Hunt
After Talk
(Casa da Música)
19.00-20.30 Performance:
Kommandopiece aka Space Invaders
After talk
(Mosteiro São Bento da Vitória)
21.30-22.30 Performance: Games without Frontiers
After Talk
(Teatro Carlos Alberto)
22.00-23.30 Cinema Programme
After Talk
(Passos Manuel)
10.00-20.00 Exhibition:Volume and Muschelrauschen
(Casa da Música)
10.00-11.00 Teachers' Academy Keynote Speech
with NEU NOW Artists
(Faculdade de Belas Artes)
11.00-13.30 Entrepreneurship Symposium
(Faculdade de Belas Artes)
13.30-20.00 Gallery Open
(Galeria do Palácio)
17.30-18.45 Performance: Untitled
(Galeria do Palácio)
19.00-20.00 Concert: Body With Drawing
After Talk
19.00-20.30 Performance:
Kommandopiece aka Space Invaders
(Mosteiro São Bento da Vitória)
20.30 Closing Party TA & Barbeque
00.30 Drum'n Bass Party
(Maus Hábitos)
10.00-20.00 Exhibition: Volume and Muschelrauschen
(Casa da Música)
10.00-12.30 Gallery Open
(Galeria do Palácio)
13.30-20.00 Gallery Open
(Galeria do Palácio)
14.00-16.00 Artists' Talk
(Galeria do Palácio)
17.00-18.00 Cinema Programme
(Passos Manuel)
19.00-20.00 Concert: carry [you carrying me]
Concert: Duo: Xenia Zemskaja & Talvi Hunt
(Casa da Música)
19.00-20.15 Performance: Schijnbeweging/Feinting
After Talk
(Mosteiro São Bento da Vitória)
21.30-22.30 Performance:
SPRING and HOPE = BAHAR and OMID
(Teatro Carlos Alberto)
22.00-23.00 Cinema Programme (Passos Manuel)
10.00-17.00 Exhibition: Volume and Muschelrauschen
(Casa da Música)
14.00-18.00 Gallery Open
(Galeria do Palácio)
15.00-16.15 Performance: Schijnbeweging/Feinting
(Mosteiro São Bento da Vitória)
17.00-18.00 Performance:
SPRING and HOPE = BAHAR and OMID
After Talk
(Teatro Carlos Alberto)
20.30 Closing Party (Maus Hábitos)
Location: ESMAE –Politécnico do Porto
14.30–17.00 Registrations
17.00-18.00 Informative Presentation on the Teachers’Academy and NEU NOW Festival Programme
Location: Serralves Museum, Porto
18.30–23.00 Opening, Performance and Dinner Reception
From 22.00 Maus – Event Hub (live music and more)
Location: ESMAE –Politécnico do Porto
09.30-10.00 Registrations and Coffee
10.00-11.00 Keynote Speech - João Brites
(Artistic Director and Founder of Teatro O Bando)
Established in 1974, Teatro O Bando focuses on the integration of street theatre and activities for children in schools and cultural associations in decentralization processes. Brites also serves as professor of the School of Theatre and Cinema in Lisbon, has experience as a set designer and has published several articles on the theatrical creative process and on acting.
11.00-13.00 Three Parallel Sessions (3 presentations each)
Click on title for full details.
Session Art in Context |
Session Interactivity and Pedagogy |
Session Interdisciplinarity |
14.30-16.30 Two Parallel Workshops
Click on title for full details.
| Workshop |
|
14.30 to 16.30 |
|
Samuel Guimaraes and Ines Vicente (ESMAE, Porto) Exchanging Materials: Collaborative Teaching Practice |
| Workshop |
Location: Faculdade de Belas Artes
09.30-10.00 Coffee
10.00-11.00 Keynote Speech - Giep Hagoort
(Professor of Art and Economics at The Utrecht School of Arts and Utrecht University) His research is focused on cultural entrepreneurship and Creative Small and Medium Enterprises. Hagoort is author of several publications including: Art Management: Entrepreneurial Style and co-author of The Entrepreneurial Dimension of the Cultural and Creative Industries, a study commissioned by the EU.
11.00-13.00 Three Parallel Sessions (3 presentations each)
Click on title for full details.
| Session Performance, Reflection and Writing |
Session Performing Arts |
Session Cultural Initiatives and Skills |
13.00-14.30 Lunch Break
14.30-16.30 Two Parallel Workshops
Click on title for full details.
| Workshop |
|
14.30 to 16.30 |
|
Franziska Nyffenegger (Zurich University of the Arts) Writing as Social Interaction |
| Workshop |
|
14.30 to 16.30 |
|
Matt Hawthorn (Nottingham Trent University School of Art & Design) Pervasive Performance & Pedagogy |
Mag. Dr. Bernhard Gritsch, born in 1963, is associate professor of music education and currently dean of studies at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz (KUG). He majored in Music Education/French (secondary school teacher accreditation), earned his doctorate (Dr. phil.) in 1996 after submitting a thesis on computer-assisted classroom teaching in music and his habilitation in 2004. He taught at several universities including e.g. those in Salzburg, Vienna, Oslo, Bolzano, Osnabrück and Luzern and has been lecturer at many national and international conferences and symposia on music education. He has published musical text books for classroom teaching in Austria and Germany as well as specific teaching material within the framework of an academic book series at KUG. His research interests include teacher education according to the Bologna Process, multimedia design of teaching material and research on classroom teaching.
Until recently and very often, the traditional procedure of final artistic examinations in degree programmes for music teachers (secondary school teacher accreditation) at music universities or academies obliges the students to present an instrumental or vocal artistic programme. Due to recent challenges in the professional world of musicians and music teachers, which demand an increasing level of competence in project-oriented work, the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz (KUG), Austria (Institute of Music Education - IMPG) modified the system of artistic diploma examination by implementing an interdisciplinary project as final diploma examination. The relevant curriculum defines the prerequisites for this interdisciplinary artistic project following the classical and general criteria of project organisation: planning, realising and reflecting. The students have to present a project of 20-30 minutes as well as a reflection about it in front of an examination board, both in public. So far 93 students (2012) have completed their degree programme in accordance with these new regulations.
In 2009 the Institute of Music Education was granted the „Inventio 2008“ (category: cutting-edge music educators training, universities and institutions in a related field) for this concept of music educators training by the German Music Council and the Foundation 100 years Yamaha.
In 2010 an evaluation, based upon a standardised questionnaire and carried out by two scientists of the Karl-Franzens-University Graz (Institute of Psychology), proved the positive effects of this new form of final diploma examination on the overall professional qualification and especially on the up-to-date key skills of music teachers in secondary schools.
The Institute of Music Education generated an interactive data base where all the projects are stored for documentation purposes. Each project data set entry consists of a short video clip, an abstract, a short description of the project and a flyer (published for the live-auditorium): see www.impg.at
The paper to be presented within the framework of the Teachers´ Academy will focus on a systematic implementation report (general idea, representative examples, preparatory measures within the degree programme [e. g. establishing of compulsory project weeks – 4 times – in the curriculum], a critical review of the ongoing developments in the assessment procedure and quality assurance and a general view on the evaluation study mentioned above). Additional information will be provided if requested by the audience, just as well as prolific discussions are to be encouraged.
Worked as artistic director and dramaturg/dramatic writer during the last 25 years. Professor of Creative Process at SADA (fomer Dramatiska Institutet) in Stockholm since 2004.
Sara Erlingsdotter is a Swedish theatre and opera director. She is also artistic director at Himlabacken where, since 1990, she has created high-profile productions and genre-crossing development projects.Through her career she has directed on stages in Sweden and other countries, but also extensively worked with theatre outdoors in different landscape settings.
Starting in 2007 she developed a project on theatre and landscape with both exploring performances and research activities in collaboration with the Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts, The Swedish University of Agriculture Science and Malmö Academy of Music. This also includes master classes where she has been lecturing.
Pär Gustafsson is a landscape architect and professor of Landscape Architecture at The Swedish University of Agriculture Science at Alnarp.
He has worked with practical design and planning in many countries and over a wide range of areas such as cityplanning, planning of gardens, parks, and even outdoortheatres.
He has taught both architects and landscapearchitects and he has always tried to overbridge differencies with his often experimental teaching methods.
Pär Gustafsson has together with Sara Erlingsdotter done International the Designcours: Design – Site and Concept with a focus on landscape and stageart.
The course is a MA in devising for stage artists and landscape architects who wants to expand and create meetingplaces and activities where the audience will meet stage art blended with the landscape as equal partners.
The idea is to investigate the process of creating a sitespecific work and develop the collaboration between different methods and languages. The question is; How can an artistic experience meet an experience of a landscape and create a participant audience rather than just an observing audience.
We work with the relationship of space and audience and how this leads to the meaning of the landscape not as backdrop to a performance but as startingpoint of the action.
Background
“Meeting Place - Music Theatre Landscape” is an artistic development project where the theatre group Himlabacken since 2006 collaborates with Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts and SLU Alnarp (Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Alnarp) and Malmö Academy of Music.
The focus of the project is how music and theatre experiences can meet landscape and how they can enrich each other creating new forms of experiences, and how to make the audience participate as creators of these.
The project also investigates how to develop cultural projects in a rural landscape and how this can be of artistic value and become an important tool in getting back meaning to areas that are to become abandoned by people and commercial activities. This creates a milieu where performance becomes part of the overall experience of the landscape and the landscape becomes part of the narrative.
Interdisciplinary master course
The project has developed an interdisciplinary course at master's level as part of the collaboration between Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Alnarp, Himlabacken and Malmö Academy of Music. The course lets landscape architects and artists from different disciplines of stage art meet and work together. The main idea is the meeting of artist/craftsmen from both worlds and the development of their ability to work in complicated site specific projects were they can use ideas and crafts from each discipline. The artistic students come from a wide range of experiences (they can be directors, lighting designers, actors, writers, choreographers and performance artists) and the interchange between them have shown to be very interesting.
Dafne Maes studied contemporary dance at The Royal Conservatoire Artesis University College in Antwerp and Cultural (Ped)agogic Sciences at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. For her master thesis she did research about ‘Dance education/mediation in secondary schools.’
During and after her studies she was a dancer in several contemporary dance projects of Ann Van den Broek (WArd/waRD), Filip Van Huffel (Retina Dance Company), Paul Wenninger (Kabinett ad Co), Randi De Vlieghe and Goele Van Dyck (Nat Gras). For Ultima Vez/Wim Vandekeybus and Rosas/Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker she is organizing introductions, discussions, (dance) workshops and choreographic projects for/with students and teachers.
Since 2010 she conducts scientific research towards the competences and creative methodologies of dance education/mediaton at the Royal Conservatoire Artesis University College Antwerp in association with several partners: Department of Culture; Department of Education; The Vrije Universiteit Brussel; Retina Dance Company; Flemish Theatre institute; CANON Cultuurcel; Wisper and De Veerman.
The first part is a lecture about the temporary results of my scientific research.
Contemporary dance performances cannot be experienced in a unique way. The public is challenged to give their own interpretation of this post modern, contemporary approximation of dance. The understanding and the sensation of dance is not evident, but a learning process with dynamics and crises whether or not with (educational) guidance. The necessity of guidance has a deeper reason, independent from the content of some dance performances. Due to globalization and individualization with explicit consequences, we are facing great challenges. Besides technical and social-economical competences, cultural-artistic competences gain more and more importance. The starting point for my research is dance education (guidance) as mediation, so that young people develop insight on the hybrid dance world (education in the arts) as much as developing stronger (cultural) competences to develop themselves in a changing society (education through the arts).
But who is responsible for dance mediation? Several dancers, dance teachers, teachers of regular education, cultural and art education associates… get in contact with dance mediation but often have insufficient competences to get started with it on a qualitative level and in different contexts. Therefore I have made a “basic competences profile for a dance mediator” that will guide him/her to conduct qualitative dance mediation. I’ll represent this profile together with the main question ‘Where is the balance for a dance mediator between artistic and pedagogical/didactic competences?
Moreover I will speak about international learning methodologies for dance mediation. There is an (international) tendency of traditional transmission of knowledge and techniques(instructivism) instead of stimulating creativity and self expression through constructing active knowledge linked to unique and personal knowledge (constructivism). The latter is the only methodology focusing on the individual, which is very interesting for the future viewpoint of competences and the necessity for the active public who gives a personal interpretation of contemporary art and dance.
The ‘new’ competences as well as the qualitative methodologies for dance mediation will have an enormous impact on the interaction between students and lecturer which I will discuss.
The second part is more practical, a think tank with possibility for discussion. This will focus on the second part of my research (2012) where I will develop dance educative tools/projects (websites, books, etc) that can be used by dance mediators in different contexts (education and culture). We will discuss about the objectives, content and form of different dance educational instruments useful in different contexts. This part is also an experiment to fine-tune the competences profile and methodologies, where theory meets practice.
Daniela Moosmann (1961) took bachelor degrees in New Dance and in Creative Writing. In 2005 she took a Masters in Theatre Dramaturgy at the Utrecht University. She writes for theatre and teaches dramaturgy, playwriting, and theatre making processes at the faculty of theatre of the Utrecht Schhol of Arts and elsewhere. In 2007 she published The playwright as Theatremaker (‘De toneelschrijver als theatermaker’), a research on writing processes of famous Dutch, Flamish and German postdramatic playwrights.
Mart-Jan Zegers ((1960) took Masters in German literature and in Theatre Studies. He is a renowned dramaturg at several main Dutch theatrecompanies. At the Utrecht School of the Arts he teaches semiotics, theatre history and dramaturgy. In 2008 he published Theatre Making; pragmatic theories (‘Theater maken; pragmatische theorieën’), in which he suggests a new way of combining theory and practice in thinking and talking about theatre.
In postdramatic theatre the position of the text in performance has changed dramatically the last 10 years. Along with that the writing process of playwrights is developing constantly. In higher Art-Education there is a longing for a new pedagogy for playwrights that fits those radical changes.
Informed by the latest theories on postdramatic theatre and theatremaking working strategies, the module ‘staging open dramaturgy’ consists of a lot of new, provocative and innovative methods. It shows step by step how a writer can develop his writing skills by literally playing with presentation and representation on the stage, with the vanishing notion of character, and with the typical postdramatic concepts of fragmentation and multiplicity. The module can be characterized and is built as practice-based research.
Dorian Maarse (MA) combines her experience as an artist with her knowledge of Organisational Behaviour in training professionals and students in topics such as teamwork, (intercultural) communication, leadership, conflict management and negotiating as senior lecturer at the Utrecht School of the Arts (Netherlands).
She also conducted workshops and management development projects in other countries (such as Ukraine, Estonia, South-Africa, Ghana) and has her own company for team coaching (Maarse & Mensen).
Maarse wrote several articles on leadership and teamwork in the creative industry and a book ('More than an interesting project, how to improve Project based Learning', 2011) on Project based learning in Art Education.
The image of the professional artist working alone in the solitude of his studio does no longer match the reality of all alumni of art schools. Many of them work in teams, often with other professionals from different disciplines, with various needs and mindsets.
Also in other ways our alumni will meet new demands and challenges. The future for which institutes of art education prepare their students is rapidly changing given the enormous speed of developments such as digitization and globalization.
Therefore students need not only to develop an artistic signature, but they also have to learn to co-operate effectively in different creative and multidisciplinary teams, and to develop an attitude of life long learning to constantly acquire new knowledge to meet the requirements of future clients.
A pedagogy of project based education with commissioners from creative industries helps students to prepare for this. Project-based education is based on social-learning psychology. In small (multidisciplinary) project teams, students work within an agreed time frame on an assignment, that is representative of the profession. They need to identify and acquire the required knowledge and set and monitor quality standards.
The teacher supervises and coaches the team in their team work, the learning process and in their project management, . As creative processes often clash with strict schedules this is an extra challenge in creative teams.
At the HKU we have years of experience with this didactic form, in which we had to find solutions for many questions, such as:
The search for answers to these questions has resulted in the publishing of a book (2011): 'More than an interesting project, how to improve Project Based Learning'. In this book experiences within the Utrecht School of the Arts are put in a theoretical framework.
Since september 2008 Franziska Nyffenegger (b. 1966 Bern, lives in Zurich) has been a lecturer and researcher at Zurich University of the Arts / ZHdK and
Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts / HSLU D&K. Her professional experience is in public relation and marketing for the creative industry as well as undertaking independent work as freelance translator, interpreter, texter and editor. Nyffenegger's academic formation is in cultural anthropology and communication sciences (lic.phil. I). She has advanced vocational training in university didactics; recently started a PhD research in cultural anthropology at University of Basel.
Teaching areas: creative and academic writing in design, design ethnography, design and
society, design and cultural studies
Research areas: material culture, writing didactics
In a designers’ or artists’ professional life, working with words plays a crucial role: meetings and talks, phone calls and e-mails, briefings and proposals, offers and contracts are daily assignments. Nevertheless, design and art education traditionally neglect the training of verbal skills, even more in german speaking countries.
Students seldom use verbal language as a tool for idea generation and often fail when asked to communicate
their concepts in written texts. In addition, they do not perceive writing as a social act and neglect collaborative writing methods. They perceive writing as opposed to creative visual thinking, as a hassle to avoid whenever possible, and not as the powerful tool for idea
generation it actually can be.
To encourage students’ use of verbal language, Zurich University of the Arts offers a series of writing workshops on a cross-disciplinary level. These workshops attain two goals: first, to evidence the value of writing in creative processes, and second, to reveal
the role of social interaction in writing. Didactics are based on constructivist principles emphasizing exercise, exchange and experience. Staff includes lecturers with background in text editing, play writing, acting and visual communication.
This presentation briefly outlines the institutional background – Zurich University of the Arts offers a broad range of BA programmes in art education, design, film, art & media, dance, theatre and music. It then introduces the concept of cross-disciplinary writing workshops (“writing across the disciplines / WAC”). The main part discusses both analogue and digital tools to enhance writing in the creative process in and by social interaction. Special attention will be drawn to collaborative writing with “lines”, a tool developed by The Café Society (http://lines.thecafesociety.org), a design research group on new writing formats.
Program leader of the Street Arts degree. M.Sc in Social and Political Theory, MBA and MA in Performance Writing. 26 years professional practice as a performer/ director in 35 countries British Council
Senior lecturer Street Arts, Visual Development and Contemporary Performance, University of Winchester. Publications include The Orishas: The Influence of the Yoruba Cultural Diaspora’ in Harvey and Thompson (Ed.) Indigenous Diasporas and Dislocations Ashgate (2005) The Physical Journal: The living body that writes and rewrites itself: in Susan Broadhurst and Josephine Machon (Ed) Sensualities/Textualities and Technologies Writings of the Body in 21st Century Performance Palgrave Macmillan (2009). His main interests are to propagate twenty first century issues concerning the interaction between body, identity, audience and technology.
Lecturer/research practitioner BA (Hons) Performance and Fine Art Dartington College. 25 years professional practice. Artistic director Fuse Performance. Producer and director of performance events, creating projects locally/regionally/ internationally offering training for emergent, professional artists and companies making new work.
The teaching of the Street Arts degree is based around the pedagogical method of practice as research and engages the student through assessments that include public performances at differing levels of complexity over the three years of the program.
At the centre of the program is the practical exploration of performance in public space and the development of styles of interactive and engaging performances in a variety of found spaces.
The students learn trans cultural practices though specific modules but also though exchanges in Spain, France and Turkey in which students attend workshops and create performances with students and emergent practitioners in creation centres and festivals in these countries. The subject is inherently trans cultural and this is a recognized feature through the degree program both in the core literature and in the study of companies.
The program is also taught across a wide variety of disciplines that centrally involve the interface of performing and visual arts. Within these art forms are a range of disciplines that range from dance, puppetry, circus arts, site specific performance, celebratory arts and carnival, spatial studies, clown and comedy, design and making technologies.
The program emphasizes the importance for the students to evolve their own singular or/and group practice .This includes modules in the study of street arts business practice and creative production. The students work from the basis of developing their ideas of performances in public spaces, the production of those spaces to deliver those performances and the creation of business models that promote and develop creatively those productions within festivals, self generated events, community and commercial practices. There is also a pathway through the program that allows students to follow an academic pathway to become researchers in this new and innovative art form.
The degree has invited a large amount of interest internationally and the tutors are key members of an international team that organize a number of seminars in different countries on formal and informal methods of education in Street Arts(Street Arts Winter Academy (2011) Slovenia; Winchester (2012) These are attended by key practitioners and academics from across Europe. The output of these conferences are published as consultative guides for policy makers at national and international levels of governance and share latest ideas and practices with international colleagues.
Katji Lindberg has a background as an artist, but is also trained as philosopher. She is also a former art critic and publishes currently on topics related to artistic knowledge production, epistemology, French philosophy as well as contemporary art. She is holding a PhD position at Konstfack and Bodö, Norway*, and has been teaching creative and academic writing for several years.
* The name of the project is: A Potential Space, a Hypothetical Time, an Inner Logic: on Artistic Practice in an Epistemological Perspective.
Anna Sagström, born in Sweden in 1985, lives and works in Berlin. Graduated from Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm with an MFA in textile art in 2011. Works in the borderland between textile art and contemporary sculpture and installation art, using a variety of media. Recent presentations includes the group show 'Beautiful Potential' at Mother's Tankstation in Dublin and Come Undone, a solo show at Minibar Artist Space in Stockholm.
Since 2005 Inger Bergström has the position as a professor at Konstfack, University of Art, Crafts and Design, in Stockholm where she is running the master group Textile in the Expanded Field. The master group is emphasizing on textile as an area of knowledge where the conceptual as well as the purely material expression can be used in a design or a fine art context.
Synergia
Synergy comes from the Greek word synergia, a derivate of the verb synergos, meaning “working together”. The well-known expression synergy effect, meets the logical paradox that the sum is more than the whole of its parts.
This presentation is an outline of how we (two teachers and one student) –through our different perspectives - met the challenge to use writing as a reflective method in artistic practice on MA level.
The synergy is reflected on two levels: first the level of collaboration, where the pedagogical setting in a more “remote”, but all the less, fruitful way, provided the possibilities for new ways of expression. A challenge within higher education directed towards artistic practice, is to overcome the discontinuity of the plastic-aesthetic level and the textual. In the ideal state these different levels or competences blend, but this is not always the case.
On the second level, the synergy shows in terms of a pleasing outcome. In this particular case; an intertextual essay with a certain capacity of capturing the fleeting practice. On the individual level this student´s essay embraces “figural and linguistic intertextuality”. Thus: it uses the discontinuity between image and text, instead of favoring one or the other.
With inspiration from the concept of intertextuality and a slight dissatisfaction with standardized academic writing (from the teacher´s side), the challenge of asymmetry was provoked. The actual student´s essay took its outset directly from a series of artistic works and the text intertwines the images and pieces of text like a chorus. Instead of a linear, hierarchical structure, it copies the interwoven character of the textile piece and the result is both complex and effective in terms of communication.
A Lecturer on two programmes BA (Hons) Interior Design and Furniture and BA Visual Merchandising and Display. After 25 years in industry working in the UK and Ireland, I am now a full time lecturer in DIT. 1st year tutor for the BA (Hons) Interior Design and Furniture and 2nd year tutor for the BA Visual Merchandising and Display.
This research paper investigates the perceptions of first year third level design students regarding their creative thinking and the use of creative strategies, while studying a first year design based curriculum in an Institute of Technology in Dublin. The research was conducted in a three-phase, sequential project.
The first phase, questioned twenty seven students in total from both the B.A. (Hons) Interior Design and Furniture degree and the B.A. Visual Merchandising and Display degree, by issuing anonymous questionnaires to gather data on their methods of incubating design ideas, if they experienced any levels of anxiety when doing so, and their satisfaction levels in their design and creative abilities. Literature was reviewed to discover the attributes of those we perceive as creative and if those attributes can be nurtured. Further literature was researched on whether or not creativity can be measured and what are the barriers to creativity.
Finally the literature review addressed what might be the correct creative environment for students. The purpose of the investigation of the literature and the questionnaire data gathering was to create a format for the second phase of the project, a one day creativity workshop that addressed issues on creativity raised by the literature and the student cohort. A Creativity Games Day workshop was designed and conducted with a volunteer group of ten. It was hoped the workshop would enhance student’s belief in their creative abilities and introduce creative thinking strategies. The third phase of the project involved collecting further data by issuing a second questionnaire at the end of the workshop. A comparison of the data from both questionnaires is discussed to ascertain whether or not the participant’s perception of their creativity levels had changed. This small pilot study, while acknowledging the limitations placed on the results due to the narrow experience and small sample size of the research, does suggest that creativity can be nurtured in a student cohort.
In addition, due to the data collected the workshop was carried out during the first year student induction week during September 2011, with sixty students from both the previously mentioned degree programmes taking part. Data collected was again very positive and during informal discussions among lecturing staff, it has been noted the cohorts involved bonded together as a class very quickly, are more proactive in class discussion and take more risks in their design development.
After positions in universities in Germany and the UK, Kerstin Mey, PhD, MA, PGDip, is currently Director of Research and Enterprise at the University for the Creative Arts, UK. There she also holds a Professorship in Fine Art. She is a peer reviewer for UK Research Councils, international funding bodies and publishers. Her own research is concerned with the situatedness of contemporary cultural practices, the relationship between art and documentation, and the relationship between art and science. Publications include the authored book Art and Obscenity (2006); and the edited volumes: with Smite and Smits, Art as Research; On-Site/In-Sight, special issue Journal of Visual Art Practice, Vols. 4.1/2 (2005); Art in the Making. Aesthetics Historicity and Practice (2004). She was Director of ISEA 2009, the International Symposium on Electronic Art, held on the island of Ireland.
The proposed presentation is concerned with showcasing a skills development package for Postgraduate students in the area of design. The skills development package responds to capacity and skills gaps in design led research particularly with regard to data, primary research resources, methodological and ethical issues, cross-disciplinary collaboration, entrepreneurship, and interaction with businesses and industry and the cultural sector, as well as leadership capabilities for the creative economy.
The initiative was developed and will be delivered by the University for the Creative in collaboration with Norwich University College of the Arts. The workshops harness existing relationships to British Design Innovation and are provided in collaboration with experts from creative businesses and industry organisations. The skills development package includes six one-day workshops with the following content:
WS1: Research design (NUCA)
WS2: Experiential learning, embodied knowledge and the politics of research (UCA)
WS3: The role of design in society, particularly in relation to STEM: ‘translating cultures’ (UCA, to be held in London)
WS4: Re-Search and Re-Sourcing (NUCA, to be held in London)
WS5: Educating entrepreneurs and leaders for the creative economy (UCA)
WS6: Communicating, disseminating and sharing/exchanging research effectively (NUCA)
The presentation invites a debate about the generic and subject specific needs of Masters student in the area of design in the digital age.
Mantautas Krukauskas has a master degree in piano and composition and is currently teaching electronic and computer music, music technology and sound art disciplines at the Department of Composition of Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre. His compositions, including chamber music, audiovisual works, music for theatre productions have been performed in Lithuania, Austria, Germany, USA, and other countries. Mantautas Krukauskas has been involved in various organizational activities, including project coordination, event organizing, as well as international research and educational programmes etc. His interests comprise interdisciplinarity, music and media technologies, and a synergy of different aesthetic and cultural approaches.
Sound art, interdisciplinary involvement and community spaces: from SACS to IICS
This presentation will explore and demonstrate findings of ERASMUS intensive project “Sound Art in City Spaces” (SACS), which was taking place in Verona (2009), Porto (2010) and Vilnius (2011), as well as its extension – follow-up IP “Interdisciplinary Involvement in Community Spaces” (IICS), which with extended group of partners will be realised in years 2012-2014.
Since 2009, each year students and teachers from European partner institutions of SACS/IICS meet in one city and engage in an innovative creative experience. Project selects different students who show a capacity to engage in a collaborative artistic international project. Each student is assigned to one of 4-6 interdisciplinary working groups; each group contains one student from each school. The project works across artistic boundaries: visual arts, performing arts, new technologies. During 10 days, with moderation of teachers, students create their interdisciplinary project/performance in public/community space. Each project considers the following aspects: sound / visuals / movement / society / technology / documentation. Prior to the active period, the work is done over distance with the help of online tools.
The main aims of SACS/IICS projects are:
This presentation focuses on the results, methodological findings and outcomes of project collected over last 4 years. It will also involved practical elements demonstrating the working methods of the project, with dividing audience into groups and performing specific tasks.
I am Senior Lecturer in Narrative & Interactive Arts, teaching on the BA Theatre Design programme in 3 areas:
1. Critical Practices in which students build research (including practice-based research) abilities, through structured dialogues both live and on-line. This is a 3 year strand within the BA programme, and has also received a UK Higher Education Academy grant to develop an online platform for collaborative research across disciplines & institutions.
2. Pervasive Performance, a series of projects exploring the integration of new media in performance design for everyday spaces.
3. Company Based Learning - instigating & mentoring Yr3 students forming professionally attuned companies to develop curatorial and performance companies which can also function post graduation.
The proposal draws on all 3 of these strands of my teaching practice
My practice as an artist explores the relationship between people and environments. Some of this work can be seen as www.vimeo.com/channels/matthawthorn
This project focuses on the integration of studio performance teaching and the narrative structures of everyday life. Crucial to the project is the translation of performance knowledge into new professional contexts. The techniques learned by students in a performance context can be deployed in art & non-art professional contexts
This builds on the context of games and structured interactions with space, place and people. Conceptual sources for this include the ideas of Host/Ghost Architectures (Brith Gof) & Theatre Archaeology outlined by Pearson, McLucas & Shanks, outlining the way that narratives of place build up in metaphorical layers through performance and everyday practice. The project also cites the work of UK performance company Blast Theory, and a history of rule based performance stretching back to work of Howell and Templeton (Theatre of Mistakes).
The students work through a series of live interactive short task based projects each analogizing structures of narrative in literature, media, imagination etc., and the spatial, social and political structures of everyday life. These build up into a more complex structures facilitating audience participation into the narrative.
The project began as a third year elective, where groups of students develop independent projects, mentored by Academics.
Two particular outcomes are of note:
2007 - Left Luggage Theatre, a media puppetry performance in a disused building. On the basis of this performance they received a Puppet Centre Trust Residency, and attended the European Biennale of Young Artists in Skopje, and received a substantial Arts Council of England Grant to develop site specific projects in Newcastle.
2009 - Phone Box Theatre, an interactive street / building based performance, where an audience goes searching for a missing girl, and gradually gets drawn into a constructed world. Subsequently presented at the Test Festival of Multimedia Art in Zagreb, and the 2009 NEU NOW online festival.
In 2010-11, a second year project was developed to build preparatory methods prior to the third year. In 2011-12, a range of projects address the context of everyday life performance in museums, city spaces, a games festival and education contexts.
The project is also being developed as a means of teaching the professional knowledges in Architecture, especially looking at the ways of interrogating physical and social structures, and simulating design potential through live performance.
Michiel Schuijer is research reader at the Conservatory of Amsterdam. A graduate of Utrecht University and the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, he focuses his own research at the juncture of music theory and historical musicology. His book Analyzing Atonal Music: Pitch-Class Set Theory and Its Contexts was published in 2008 by University of Rochester Press.
Walter van de Leur is professor of jazz and improvised music at the University of Amsterdam and research coordinator at the Conservatory of Amsterdam. His research focuses on Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, and on the recepetion and representation of jazz. His book "Something to Live For: The Music of Billy Strayhorn" was published in 2002 by Oxford UP in New York; he has various chapters and articles forthcoming with a.o. Cambridge UP and Princeton.
Janneke van der Wijk is director of the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, which is the biggest and most diverse conservatory in the Netherlands. Before this she was director of Music Center the Netherlands, which is the Dutch national Resource and Promotion Center for the professional music world. She studied Musicology and Pedagogy at the University of Amsterdam and wrote a master’s thesis about the origin and development of the conservatories in the Netherlands and the professionalization of Dutch Musical life.
“It’s the Faculty, Stupid!" Footholds for Research Training at Conservatories
The integration of research training in a conservatory curriculum, as imposed by the Bologna process, has proven to be quite a challenge; not because research is fundamentally alien to musical practices, but because it is at times controversial among faculty. This is understandable, because in the customary binary system of higher education (consisting of professional education and university education) research is a discipline typically taught at universities. And the primary task of that discipline is to build and certify a shared body of knowledge. Musicians find it hard to unite this with the artistic values inherent in music education, such as skill and craftsmanship, authenticity and imagination, and perceptiveness and taste. However, an environment in which these values are instilled on a daily basis holds a great potential for a research practice to evolve.
In this paper, we will relate how, at the Conservatory of Amsterdam, we began to exploit this potential by involving all of our faculty in the supervision and/or evaluation of research projects carried out by Master students. For such an approach to be successful, it is important that research be presented not as an separate academic discipline per se, but as an activity naturally interwoven with music performance and composition. What the training brings to this activity, is the ability of musicians to assume a discursive position within the music scene and beyond, by proposing ideas, reporting progress, and presenting outcomes under the critical eye of an informed and experienced audience. This approach has created a broad commitment to research at our school, and it has got faculty members interested in giving more profile to their own research endeavors. We will present the main research lines that are currently being developed at the Conservatory of Amsterdam, and show how they connect the work of students and teachers.
With extensive experience of working across a range of educational contexts Jo Addison and Natasha Kidd have a history of collaborating to design and facilitate educational projects. Both Senior Lecturers in Fine Art, they have taught at some of the UK’s leading schools of art and design including: The Royal College, Chelsea School of Art & Design, Central St Martins, Kingston University, Bath School of Art & Design and Norwich University College of the Arts. They have co-designed educational resources, workshops and study days for Whitechapel Art Gallery, South London Gallery, Camden Arts Centre and Tate. Spring 2012 will see the launch of ‘e’, the interactive resource they have designed to accompany the Alghiero Boetti retrospective at Tate.
Since the 1960’s artists have been inventing or adopting rules, systems and strategies as a way of generating artworks. Often removing the execution of the artwork from the hand of the artist himself artists such as Sol Lewitt, Alghiero Boetti, Vito Acconci, Douglas Huebler, John Baldessari and Fluxus have not only challenged the status of the art object but questioned the role of the artist as author. In 2009, following this framework Natasha Kidd, Jo Addison and Alex Schady, 3 lecturers in Fine Art from 3 UK Higher Education institutions devised the project No Working Title.
No Working Title set out to provoke a dialogue between students and staff across 3 HE institutions, establish a collaborative relationship between the students and staff from these institutions and an international gallery curator. Through this relationship an authorial approach to practice is exchanged for an anti-authorial counterpart. Labour and skills are both relinquished and acquired and there is an opportunity to investigate what the points of interchange offer to all involved
No Working Title was originally launched as a collaboration between Bath School of Art & Design, Norwich University College of the Arts, Winchester School of Art and Tate Modern, London. The project, now in its fourth Year, has expanded to include Chelsea School of Art & Design and Camden Arts Centre.
In order to promote cross-institutional exchange, each student or member of staff is paired with another from a different college. Each person devises a set of instructions, with their own practice at the centre of the process. This enables their partner to generate an artwork. The instructions take many forms and are communicated by various means, including email, text, post and social networking. At this stage they do not meet face-to-face. Communication is limited to the issuing of instructions only.
On receiving their instructions, each person carefully follows the specifics of their partner’s request to make the work. All works are packaged for transport to a central venue where partners and works meet for the first time. A critique / debate surrounding this ‘pop-up’ exhibition is chaired by an international curator.
For students and staff alike, it is a challenging process. It questions important issues of provenance, control, labour, duty and ego. It encourages dialogue about art in which ideas are primary and are communicated and interpreted through verbal and non-verbal language. It questions the artist’s role as author and suggests that rather than de-skilling the artist/student through the negation of the act of production, the process re-skills the artist/student with more astute conceptual rigor and an evolved visual and verbal language.
Paul Cosgrove is Head of Sculpture and Environmental Art at the Glasgow School of Art.. He has taught and exhibited widely, nationally and internationally; and most recently was Lead Artist CENCIA (Center for Collaborative and International Arts), Atlanta, USA, working on a collaborative public art project with George Beasley Emeritus Professor of Sculpture Georgia State University. His recent work investigates Sculpture’s relations to the virtual, through both practice led and pedagogical research. Published writings, which look at studio practice and teaching, include Creativity and risk-taking: a view from the studio, co-authored with Justin Carter and Fiona Dean, in Ball, P (ed). Assessing creativity in design, UK: HEA Engineering subject centre and Making the virtual real: the VLE as a context for production in fine art learning and teaching studio practice, in Designs on e-learning 2nd International conference on teaching and learning with technology, London, UK.
SEA Islands: Partnership for collaboration
Acknowledging the excellence of what we do, alongside a need to (radically) re-think locations and nature of delivery, has become a recurring and always contentious question. Perhaps felt even more so in terms of Fine Art, where alongside cost - questions of purpose, relevance, need and impact seem to be constant negotiations. The social and political changes around us have effect on the kind of student who comes in, their experience and expectations, the kinds of contexts they might move into and the continued but distinctive role and support that courses might offer to this diverse cultural ecology.
The Department of Sculpture and Environmental Art (SEA), has always been concerned with interaction between ideas and practice, and reach and relations outwith the institution and into the wider community. As such, SEA has developed working partnerships with a range of city agencies and a commitment to the local is particularly evident in our programmes, such as in our Public art projects and ‘live’ placements, which seek new ways of mediating ideas, knowledge exchange and dissemination.
This presentation will use rich visual documentation to share and exchange ideas around interaction through a new learning and teaching development: SEA Islands, which tries to extend the notion of how we might traverse and move the terrain of the studio from within the institution to adjoining and distant locations and explore how and why we might interact with others on the ‘island’ to realize new possibilities in terms of learning. Through 2 examples of course developments, one involving UG student placements and off-site works negotiated within the spaces and audiences of a large urban public Park; and another placing PG students in a new cross disciplinary centre for the creative industries, the motivations, ideas and practices in how UG and PG potential is being taken in new directions through synergies and collaborations will be shared. The presentation aims to encourage discussion around key questions such as: How courses respond to the needs of a new generation of student? How do we work with others to enable greater fluidity between experiences – school FE, cultural organizations, students, professionals, and across diverse disciplines? Who are our potential partners? Why and how will we collaborate with them? What potential can be achieved through working in collaboration with others to create other sites and ways of learning, teaching and researching?
Peter McDermott is a freelance theatre director and lecturer in drama at the Conservatory of Music and Drama, Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland. His teaching comprises Meisner acting technique; student-led devising; Irish, British and American theatre and drama; and the study of performance in historical contexts. Recent directing projects have included Brecht/Weill’s The Threepenny Opera and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His research has focused on the diversification of drama training at college level in Ireland and the EU. Peter has taught acting and drama at Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin and Columbia College Chicago. He has also presented on drama education in University College London, the Warsaw Theatre Academy and the China-Europe Performing Arts Symposium, Beijing.
Many graduates of drama programmes start out in the precarious industry by creating their own work. This imperative, both necessary for career survival and rewarding creatively, contains many artistic pitfalls, as devised work that is deeply meaningful to the actors can fail to communicate that meaning to a public audience; or a neglect of structure and directorial elements can mean that a work with tremendous potential falls flat. This presentation will outline the devising, staging and promoting of a student-led production that combined Jerzy Grotowski’s principles of acting and Anne Bogart’s strategies of composition. The production was part of a module in contemporary theatre on the three-year B.A. in Drama (Performance) at the Dublin Institute of Technology Conservatory of Music and Drama.
The first part of the presentation describes how the actors, using Grotowski’s plastiques exercises individually in the space, unearthed deeply personal issues through impulsive physical movement and vocalisation. Because of the very personal nature of these exercises, it is important that they are not recorded so the presentation will outline some salient examples.
In small groups of three and four, the actors then – following Bogart’s emphasis on structure – drew on all of their the personal material to agree on a question that their performance piece would pursue and a pre-existing work of art that they would draw on for thematic material, text and/or structure. By setting themselves Bogart’s devising tasks – storyboards, improvisations, short performances that had to include pre-determined theatrical and textual elements – the actors transformed the personal material into creative material towards effective performance. This is a crucial transition point in any devising process and the presentation, which includes some video-recorded material of the small-group devising tasks, will focus on specific challenges confronted and breakthroughs made by each group in negotiating this transition.
The latter part of the presentation will discuss the actors’ collaboration with a professional designer, the student-tutor relationship in directorial problem-solving and the students promoting, publicising and documenting the production. Included in the presentation will be a student-created promotional slide show of video clips from the production and the findings of a recent survey of the actors, who graduated a year ago, which focused on the influence of the process and production on their approach to work in the industry.
Ruth Mateus-Berr is Professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She is artist, scientist, multisensual design researcher. She graduated in 1991 from the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and received in 2002 a doctorate for her research on the design of the carnival at the times of the National Socialism (Univ. Prof. Manfred Wagner, Univ. Prof. Karl Vocelka), she was appointed with the authority to teach (venia docendi) in 2011. In 1996 she graduated in multimedia art therapy (ÖAGG). Her art/designwork deals with interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary questions and is situated at the interface of science, art & design. Her works are presented at exhibitions in Austria and abroad (China, USA, Italy ...)
She has conducted workshops and presented lectures at different universities (University of Coimbra, Pt., University of Goiás, Brazil; Sint Lucas University Gent, Belgium, Rutgers University/DIMACS, NJ. USA; Estonian Academy of Arts, Estonia; University of Applied Arts, Austria).
The applied Design Thinking Lab Vienna is a Laboratory situated at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. The Lab approaches inter/transdisciplinary topics with interdisciplinary teams from different universities and was founded in autumn 2009 by the author. Applying tools of Design Thinking strategies, the participants develop their own specific art/design work, inspired by the peers and empowered with creativity. The participants derive from the fields of arts, design, fashion, architecture, performance, mathematic and education. At least every three months experts from various disciplines (mathematicians, fashion designers etc. regarding to each topic) are invited to join the group, reflect on their work and discuss it. Aim of this Lab is to facilitate innovative solutions for complex problems through interdisciplinary collaboration.
Since 2010 the Applied Design Thinking Lab Vienna concentrates on mathematics and fashion. In Western Europe, the making of patterns in garments mainly comes from one tradition. As far as we know, no one has yet thought about an approach based on platonic solids or reformulated the traditional S, M, L, and XL sizes with a new mathematical interpretation, Body-Index-Cloth. Rotational forms of conic sections enables for example to find forms for a hyperbolic ball gown. The Lab covers a broad range of problem domains from pattern making to fashion for buildings with inflatable membranes. Recent experiments reveal new perspectives for fashion and, additionally, bring up educationally fruitful methods for working with mathematical topics using a creative base. Interim results are presented through performative lectures at international conferences. (Bridges 2011-Coimbra.PT. Wiskunst 2011 Sint Lucas, Gent. BR, Bridges 2010-Pécs.HU, pechakucha Vienna 2011. Künstlerhaus-Vienna Design Week). “We believe that there is room for innovation in every aspect of education, and that it can be taught,” Stanford's website reads (Crandall 2011).
According to Kristensen (2004, 89-96), many design problems arise because there is little integration between the environment, people and technology. He recommends that physical, virtual space and a visual working methodology need to be interconnected in order to enhance a collaborative participation and performance for dispersed teams. The Design Thinking Lab is such a space and develops innovative and performative transfer of design (and involved disciplines) knowledge. Art and design based research is biased scientifically and applied practically at once. Developed innovative tools may be transferred in the fields of educational subjects (schools and universities), interdisciplinary applied in technologies or unto the fields of the creative industries.
Art educator since 1996; Contemporary art and culture teacher in the theatre department of ESMAE since 2002 on BA and MA courses ; Head of education department of Museu do Douro Foundation since 2006; Former Head of education department of contemporary art Museu of Serralves Foundation, Porto (1999-2002) and as invited teacher at European Studies Institute of Macau, China (1999, 2000). As an art educator works for theatre companies, festivals, etc.
PHD student in Art Education Faculty of Fine Art, University of Porto; MA Art History at Humanities Faculty (FLUP) of Porto University (1998); Further Education and BA: art history at FLUP (1992) theatre, movement and video workshops by different practitioners.
Theatre Director since 1996 in cultural institutions, independent structures and community work; Theatre teacher in the theatre department of ESMAE since 1996 on BA and MA courses; Voice Teacher and voice coach for artists and business in private enterprise; PHD student in Art Education Faculty of Fine Art, University of Porto; MA Voice Studies Central School of Speech and Drama (London, 2005); Further Education and BA: Theatre Studies, ESMAE (Porto, 2001 e 1996).
Exchanging Materials
The Materials to be Exchanged are part of a body of work that results from a collaborative teaching practice installed in the intersection of performing and visuals arts, having the human body as axel of the work to be showed and develop by a group.
This workshop is based in a range of experiences done in the fields of higher art education, community work, performing arts and the present PhD research in Art Education. This ongoing work is a partnership between Ines Vicente and Samuel Guimaraes.
As art workers and art educators we share materials that construct a ‘hybrid’ body of work and experience.
The changing materials between the different art forms and approaches, and theoretical issues are melted in our teaching and creative practices.
How in a collaborative workshop can we share the possibilities and findings of ‘dissonant’ practices?
This interaction and boundaries’ search will foster situations at the workshop that break the 'fourth wall' of artistic creativity and re-enacting or re-doing relational experiences from different artists or performances that disrupts the "ego imperialism" of artistic authorship and disciplines closures.
Two major questions will be raised to be worked by and with the group by means of kinesthetic experiments:
E.g. of Materials that might be Exchanged:
Proposed discussion starting point
As a possible reflection leit motiv we suggest the thought by Nora Sternfeld:
Thus the point here, once again, is to connect the question “Who is speaking?” with that of authorized authorship—“Who has the power to define?”—and to ask how the powerful distinction between the production and reproduction of knowledge can be radically broken down.
Steve Dutton is an artist who works on both collaborative and individual projects. He is Professor in Contemporary Art Practice at the University of Lincoln in the U.K
Individual and collaborative projects have been exhibited throughout the UK and internationally, most recently The Institute of Beasts at Kuando Museum of Fine Art in Taipei and The Stag and Hound at PSL in Leeds UK for which Dutton and Swindells were nominated for the prestigious Northern Art Prize. His most recent commission is an Arts Council Funded project for Bend in the River in the East Midlands of the UK.
He has published in the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice (2009) and the Journal of Visual Arts Practice (2007) along with many contributions to various magazines and publications. He also has curated a number of exhibitions and is currently working on a new project with Dr.Brian Curtin of Bangkok University.
I aim to discuss a recent rise in the number of artists and artists groups who are setting themselves up as some form of variation of an educational model, i.e. as an Institute, a Faculty, a Museum, a Department or even a University. I will suggest how this may impact upon the ongoing debates about the art school, its survival (or indeed demise) and its challenges.
Projects such as my own Institute of Beasts (Dutton and Swindells) , suggest a slight
subversion. In effect, where artist-teachers may have rubbed up against the institution from within and encouraged students to do the same, in the age of extreme institutionalization and hyper-instrumentalisation this playful/ironic approach may no longer be possible. Instead the artist- student- teachers are taking the ‘mantle’ of the institution and occupying its linguistical and rhetorical frameworks instead of its architecture, and by doing so, are attempting to unraveling and explore what might be meant by an institution in the first place.
This may have profound possibilities within the ‘walls’ and traditions of the art school where, the power of the institution becomes not only something ‘lessened’ but also something existing ‘in quotes’, thus empowering both staff and students to occupy and produce the ‘institution’ on their own terms. By creating and inhabiting these equivalents, in effect by inhabiting institutional terminology, change may take place from within. Students and staff no longer attend the institution, but attend to it by inhabiting it.
The art educational institutions may have no alternative but to ‘listen’ to art/practice or dismiss it from the curriculum entirely.
I will outline of what could be described as an attempt at a form of reverse interpellation and possible neutralisation of the neo-liberal educational project by using other examples of artists’ projects, such as Inga Zimprich’s Faculty of Invisibility, Wysings Art Centre’s The Department of Wrong Answers, Anton Vidolke’s Night School or The University of Incidental Knowledge and in which the nomenclature of the educational/research institution of knowledge production is often inhabited by production of different and less quantifiable sort.
Uwe Derksen is the Assistant Director at the University for the Creative Arts. Over the last 20 years has developed a range of enterprise and innovation schemes working with students, employers and academia. In the last ten years most of these have focused in the are of the creative art and the creative and cultural industries, including creative leadership, entrepreneurship and inspirational events. He has researched audience engagements and developed a range of projects around this theme. Most recently he developed together with a fellow artist, the sculptor Anthony Heywood, a public art and community engagement project in Dover, by creating a ‘peace table’ made from reclaimed timbers. Uwe’s background is in the social sciences, sociology in particular but has worked in and with the arts for well over ten years. He is currently undertaking part-time studies for his PhD in culture-led regeneration at the University of Kent.
Damian Chapman is a designer & educator in the creative industries who builds innovation for creative driven projects through Graphic Arts and Design, Innovation and Brand Management. Damian is MA Course Leader for a portfolio of professional and entrepreneurial MA courses at University for the Creative Arts and runs Chapmanstudio an online design agency. With a key focus on connecting people through design and narrative. Collaborative by nature and a senior manager he enables sustainable people leadership and the creative use of resources to mentor and produce design projects.
The Creative Challenge (www.creatovechallenge.info) has developed into an exciting and inspiring industry led and educational programme for Undergraduate and Postgraduate students. Now in its seventh year, it invites and tests the applicability of students’ creative ideas and inquiry against real world demands and set in the context of the triple bottom line agenda (profit, people, planet).
There is evidence of need for such provision. Creative Futures Creative Graduates research (2010) that ‘just under one half of all graduates had worked on a freelance basis (45 percent) and around one quarter had started a business during their early careers’.
There is some debate as to how much of the entrepreneurship agenda should be fully embedded into the art and design curriculum and how. There is some evidence that enterprise type units can play an important role in providing the necessary ‘translation’ between academic, business and student. Carey (Enterprise curriculum for creative industries students, 2006) found that recent graduates in the arts described the need for translators: individuals with an understanding of business and art, to be involved with their enterprise education. And research by the Higher Education Academy Art Design Media Subject Centre and the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (2007) found that that only 10% of entrepreneurship learning is delivered by specialists and recommended that entrepreneurship needs to be more explicit in the arts curriculum.
In 2009 onwards Uwe Derksen, building on his experience of having developed the Creative Challenge programme, began to investigate the enterprise experience of creative arts students seeking to encourage academic debate of entrepreneurship education which goes beyond financial business skills to establish itself as credible by adding intellectual value to arts education (see for example Beckmann et al. Advancing the authentic: intellectual entrepreneurship and the role of the business school in fine arts entrepreneurship curriculum design, 2009).
Benefits of the programme have been invaluable to the students experience as part of their professional development alongside their academic education and a much-enhanced position in the job market. Academics have benefited by providing their students with better industry insight and good networking opportunities. Industry has taken advantage of tapping into emerging creative talent, participating in a highly energised entrepreneurship programme with lots of networking opportunities.
A key message has crystallized, capturing the philosophy, thrust and ambition of the Creative Challenge:
Sustaining innovation and creative enterprise: the art of doing, connecting and
engaging; encouraging students to think critically informed and constructive, yet
independently. It is a framework that sets the pace for the future individually,
collectively and collaboratively.
The presentation will explore he underpinning issues and philosophy and invite the delegates to critically explore the issues from the point of view of their own experiences with the aim to learn from these and possibly result in further ELIA wide collaboration around this important topic.
A durational work examining issues of desire articulated through explorations of the r ela tionship between domination and submission, Clari ssa Sacchelli's UNTITLED invites its audience members inside a walled space. There they are free towalk around the performers – who are clad all in white, barely moving – and are called upon to immobilise them using strips of red tape. Ev oking a beautiful quietude belied by the dark undertones of its material, Sacchelli's piece communicates a compl ex, unspoken, impossible desire for emptiness and effacement while challenging the conventional relationship between performer and spectator.
Jarkko Partanen's Kommandopiece aka Space Invaders is a dance/movement work that investigates the forms of authority and the uses of power in our everyday surroundings. Serious, yet often on the brink of absurdity, the work plays out scenes of security and insecurity under the watchful eye of security cameras – which, depending on your point of view, either secure or monitor both the audience and the performers.
The Kommandos take over and seize spaces for themselves and the audience, and examining the actions and the behaviour of authority in society has brought Partanen's piece out of theatres and into the streets and public spaces. The audience is welcomed to witness the Kommandos at work, but each scene will define the role of the viewer as bystander or victim...
Volume is a sound installation which uses its exhibition space as an acoustic object. 24 electronic motors are mounted on different surfaces that are part of the exhibition room – plaster walls, plastic light switches, wooden floorboards, glass windowpanes – with each motor equipped with a small metal spike. When a motor is activated, the spike flicks down and knocks the surface on which it's mounted to produce a specific sound. All the motors are connected to a small main control – an Arduino board and some electronics – which runs a score composed of a series of varying random algorithms. The sounds produced are diverse in temporal and spatial coordination, with each having its own unique origin. The score itself is adapted for every room where the installation is shown.
For wind / attach, the artist Leo Hofmann has built a set of modified headphones that are driven not only by sound but also by air. Each earcup is connected to two leads – the audio cable, and a small tube through which air flows – so that a recorded voice can be combined with short pulses of air to create the startling sensation that someone is whispering in your ear.Such intimate, naturalistic effects are just one use for the wind / attach system, however, and Hofmann has concentrated on simplifying the system so that the airflow can be operated in software such as PureData with a single fader, or automated with an audio sequencer. His intention is to release the system as open source technology to see what abstract, conceptual combinations of sound and air other artists might be able to achieve...
A work situated between film, painting and photography, Jonas Englert's STIGMA depicts eighteen faces, all placed an identical distance from the camera, shown in black and white. Originally filmed at 100 frames per second for 72 seconds, the projection is slowed to just four frames per second, so that not much more than a minute of footage is stretched to a half hour and the smallest movements are precisely revealed.
Darek Fortas' Coal Story is the result of an extensive photographic engagement with the two largest coal mining companies in the European Union, located in Silesia, the most industrialised part of Poland. The project combines contemporary photography and archival research dating back to the 1960s when Poland experienced significant economic and industrial expansion. In the early 1980s coal mines were a major site of struggle and resistance against the communist regime, and workers' protests resulted in the creation of Solidarity – a workers and citizens movement under the leadership of Lech Wałęsa. The coalminers' actions eventually led to the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War.
Posing important questions that are associated with Solidarity's values, the movement's legacy, and its influence on contemporary Polish society, Coal Story highlights the social and political capacity of the miners and evokes the history and aftermath of the legendary Solidarity movement.
In 2010, when Loic Dieulle conceived the piece A4#1, an egg-laying hen in France lived out its life in a cage with floorspace equivalent to an A4 sheet of paper. Confronting this fact in the work A4#1, Dieulle arranges sheets of paper on the exhibition floor, printed with hens' footprints and arranged in a battery farm grid. Suspended above the sheets, just 54cm from the ground, fluorescent lights cast cold, fluctuating illumination on the dimensions of the artwork, bringing drama and intensity to the piece and strengthening its message that complex socio-political atrocities often lie hidden beneath the surface of daily life.
Laura Rytkönen's Family Act is an experimental animation that plays on concepts of time, space, perception and community. The puppets of the animation are a family-like community, occupying a space with only two features – a table and a sofa. They try to connect with each other, but their interactions often devolve into displays of power.
Shot over three days in an open gallery, Family Act uses the gallery's visitors as its backdrop – a frantic, moving background that exposes the artificial, constructed nature of time in animation.
In 2008 the visual artist Maria Brinch lived in Burma/Myanmar for six months. While photographing in Yangon City she saw that the women in her neighbourhood hung out the washing on their way to work and collected it, dry, on their way back home. Watching these daily routines, Brinch began to see the city in the context of its textiles, noticing garments everywhere: mosquito nets, curtains, bed sheets hung up to dry. They were placed randomly and temporarily on fences, balconies, trees and car wrecks; folded over anything and everything they seemed to Brinch to create an aesthetic promise of solidarity, a hope of something solid and visual – substantial – in a city suffering under oppression and poverty.
In the presented works, Brinch folds pieces of woven textiles into sculptures, images or outdoor installations. The colour, size and weight speak of water, sun and dust, and the simple fold is both practical and poetic. Drawn to the aspect of folded material as the meeting point of two layers, Brinch's work explores the act of folding as a practice of embracing or wrapping.
Playing with ideas of religious iconography, belief and cultural heterogeneity, Ashley Peevor's work reflects on the status of a monument or statue as a public exhibition of a private object by creating a new religious icon. Taking as its base the form of a small child – a symbol of the personal and the intimate – the icon is positioned on a plinth and hung from the ceiling of the exhibition space, subverting the customary placement and presentation of monumental architecture at the same time as it draws on the power of the religious monument to transform space.
In Johan Rijpma's film artwork Tape Generations, we see rolls of clear tape come to life. Affixed to a ceiling in symmetrical patterns, the rolls are at first orderly; soon, however, the designs begin to break apart, degenerating as the adhesive strength of the tape fails and the rolls are drawn down unpredictably by time and gravity. The chaotic shapes and movements that emerge seem to carry something familiar – some hint of recognisable life.
Named after a French hunting term that describes the action of moving or retreating into a bush – like an animal hunting or hiding – Marion Chérot's collection Buissonnade is made up of 30 photographs that study the round and irregular shape of bush vegetation. Each of the pieces is 40cm x 60cm, and the whole collection is composed in a structure almost five metres long and three wide – an arranged cartography that, though ordered differently from the real landscape it depicts, documents Chérot's experiments with land, body and camera.
Borko Vukosav's collection "P" (Personality / Possession) presents a series of photographs as diptychs. In each pair, the first image is a black and white studio portrait of a person standing naked, always shot with the exact same lighting, while the second photograph shows, in colour, the subject's living space, focusing on the bed as the most intimate and personal site.
The two images form a dialogue between two conflicting ideas: personality and possession. A causal link is formed between the person and the space depicted – the person forming the space and the space forming the person, personality determining possessions and possessions determining personality. Is there a real connection between the person and their intimate/personal space, and if so to what degree?
Jason Dunne's installation Potemkin Village consists of a large number of cut-out paper figures, ranging in dimension from miniature to more than life-sized. Recognisably human yet repetitive and uncanny, they are arranged to control the movement of the gallery's visitors, drawing them through a narrow entrance and into an arena where they are forced to confront these mysterious and alienating figures.
Can art save the world? If the bluefin tuna, now a critically endangered species, disappears from our oceans, then it could potentially unbalance the global ecosystem and begin a chain reaction with severe implications for the human race...
Michael Dilissen and Diederik Jeangout's How to save the Bluefin Tuna harnesses the power of design to incite us to save our common environment, at the same time casting a critical eye on the effectiveness of other bluefin campaigns. Seeking to distinguish itself from those ecological organisations that operate as businesses, investing in banal advertisements in order to raise money from membership fees to reinvest into more banal advertisements, Dilissen and Jeangout's project mobilises its audience with actions like Chopstick Guerilla, a DIY campaign to turn chopsticks into tiny placards ('Save the bluefin tuna!', 'Stop eating a nearly extinct species!') and smuggle them into sushi restaurants.
Inspired by the annual Czech folklore festival and celebration The Ride of Kings, an event on the UNESCO world heritage list, Chrobokova Lenka's collection of designs works with three motifs drawn from the event – the wrinkled sleeve, and the embroidered images of the horse and the rose on a silk organza.
Updating the folkloric garments to a contemporary style that Lenka considers a sort of 'modern pomp', the designs take a minimalist approach, combining black viscose knitwear, the black organza and white silk taffeta in a structure of sharp lines and geometric shapes.
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Lamps play an important dual role in the design of interior spaces, providing effective lighting to a given space at the same time as they carry aesthetic value.
Satisfying both the functional and aesthetic needs of the lamp, Jernej Orhini's wooden designs have been created using a new system of modular construction where the individual elements can be swapped out and in without the need for glue, screws or nails. Here the prototypes are for different lights and shades, but Orhini's innovative, modular system could be adapted for a range of products with only a few small changes.
Working with naturally occurring organic waste materials that would otherwise be discarded, the project Sustainable Packaging recycles fallen leaves, pine needles and cut grass to create biodegradable packaging for plant bulbs and seeds. The packaging is light-weight and can be produced in any size, with bulbs held in egg-shaped containers (which can be planted as well, breaking down into mulch), and seeds contained in hollow sticks – nature's own packaging.
The design of the packaging is inspired by a minimalist graphic approach and by the materials themselves, with hand-drawn labels illustrating leaves, grass, needles and sticks. The simplicity of these drawings, the clean, spacious graphic style, and the careful use of colour contrast with the glossy photographs more usually seen in garden centres and return the buyer's attention to the packaging itself.
A caustic monologue depicted as a short typographic animation, Hugo Edgar Mesquita's Is there a Crisis!? adopts the perspective of a nihilistic character to explore the current financial crisis as just one of many financial crises – seeing the bust as one of the most important (re)current events of our capitalist society.
Drawing on the cold, analytical qualities of typographic design, Mesquita draws his character's argument toward Nikolai Kondratiev's theory of long-term 'waves' – business cycles that move from boom to depression over a period of 50 or 60 years – to suggest that it is our ignorance of the cyclical nature of the economic system that has lead to our current circumstances, but also, perhaps, that the 'crisis' is less severe than we might think...
BOON is a journal primarily aimed at students of the creative arts. Aiming to raise the bar for the standard of student publications, it offers readers information that's engaging, relevant and never patronising, basing each issue around a central concept that also inspires the publication's design.
The central concept behind the first issue of BOON is that of searching, and particularly the idea of the continuous search in relation to the Internet – a place where our experience is defined by 'the search', and one where we can build idiosyncratic narratives as we navigate through what we read.
The articles in BOON's first edition have been taken from a number of web and print sources to suggest the idea that, for all the Internet has democratised information, there is still a sense of exclusivity to the content of some print publications.
Future detention policy in Norway intends to provide rehabilitation for inmates. Currently detention is foremost a punishment, but can also be an opportunity for inmates to develop the skills and values necessary to seek employment and become law-abiding citizens once they're released. All Norwegian inmates have mandatory work duties during detention, but these tasks – which may vary from scrubbing floors to making candles, bathtubs, or toys – have remained unchanged since the 1960s.
If the duties of detained prisoners are intended to play a role in developing their skills and learning capacity, how can design benefit these inmates? Can the production of furniture in prisons stimulate dignity, perspective and pride among inmates? For the project Bak murene i Vik (Behind Bars in Vik) the artist Morten Skjærpe Knarrum designed furniture intended for production in prisons after holding a workshop with six inmates from Vik prison in Sogn. Using traditional techniques from cabinet-making, Knarrum's dining-room furniture designs are meant for an outside market. By reconnecting mandatory duties with real application, real use, his project aims to teach a profession and useful skills to inmates, improving their self-confidence and future prospects.
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