new spaces beyond art education

today i have spent some time reading articles posted up on ADM website http://www.adm.heacademy.ac.uk/networks one which was of interest to me was Fiona woods piece on Slivers of critical space: Some thoughts on the role of the contemporary art educational institution here she discusses how the Knowledge Economy is profoundly shaping concepts and  practices not only within the field of art education, but in the area of cultural practice itself.
http://www.adm.heacademy.ac.uk/networks/networks-summer-2011/features/slivers-of-critical-space-some-thoughts-on-the-role-of-the-contemporary-art-educational-institution
Interestingly is this..
In 2009 in rural north-west Ireland, a multidisciplinary group of individuals founded ‘Ireland’s newest university’, the Home University of Roscommon and Leitrim (HURL). Committed to the ‘exchange of soft knowledge’ (2009), the model of education proposed by HURL identifies every private or public space as a potential place of dynamic knowledge exchange, seeking to facilitate its transfer from person to person, without entering into a process of commodification. HURL engages with issues, sites and groups of people that are ‘local’, but it does this using forms of assembly that are both real and virtual, operating trans-locally across multiple platforms, inside and outside the space of art. By acting in common with others, HURL finds ways of generating and sharing ideas and productions across time and space, involving fluid sets of actors, incorporating lived and sensed experiences and placing an equal value on abstract knowledge and know-how.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qY0RdXvNBkA&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

HURLS comic...

Good and bad times for making and thinking  

http://www.adm.heacademy.ac.uk/networks/networks-summer-2011/features/good-and-bad-times-for-making-and-thinking

I also read David Gauntlett who discusses Making is Connecting (his book!) http://www.makingisconnecting.org/ that we could be seeing the start of a shift from a ‘sit-back-and-be-told culture’ to a ‘making-and-doing culture’: people rejecting traditional teaching and television, and making their own learning and entertainment instead. This connects with the ideas of 1970s philosopher Ivan Illich, who argued that people need tools to create, to express themselves, to make their mark, and to shape the environments in which they live. Illich argued that we need ‘convivial tools’, which we can use to do what we want, rather than ‘industrial tools’, which are one-size-fits-all solutions which expect us to fit in with what they want. In this context, I tend to think of television as an ‘industrial tool’ – a take-it-or-leave-it delivery system for readymade content – whereas Web 2.0 platforms, at their best, can be closer to Illich’s ‘convivial tools’, enabling people to contribute to their own spread of media material, and to ‘make their mark’ on that landscape rather than merely being able to look at it.


Illich, I. (1973) Tools for Conviviality, London, Calder & Boyars.
 

product or process?

read steve wheelers blog (august 2011) on product or process..relates well to my research in terms of thinking again about what Im doing in terms of going forward. (I haven't considered since writing paper for the bridging module in July)...which i have to say was hard work for lots of reasons..refering to the previous blog 'writers block'. I really need to start working on finding another avenue. reflecting back on the paper there was alot of closed doors; however I also believe there are open ones too! I need to go back and unpick what I have found to date, perhaps there is something I have missed, that missing part??? where are you... 

"We are now living in an age where the recipe is more important than the cake". - Charles Leadbetter
http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2011/07/product-or-process.html

creative block!

...as alway Steve Wheeler is a great inspiration..heres what I have been reading up on today...

Ingenuity, creativity and time by Steve Wheeler

Creativity is such an elusive thing. For some, waiting for inspiration is a familiar past-time. It's more than just staring at a blank page, or waiting for that tune to arrive out of thin air. If the muse has deserted you, it can be quite a time of anguish, particularly if your living depends upon being creative. In his book Where good ideas come from Steven Johnson supports this argument, seeing recurring patterns that foster creativity and innovation. He recognises what he calls the 'slow hunch' which he describes as a long period of evolution of an idea, before it matures to become accessible and useful. Creativity is almost never instant. It takes time. But it sometimes takes on this guise, when apparently from nowhere, a musician or poet can conjure up a haunting melody or a killer line. No, creativity takes practice, and this is why, when we see creativity in the classroom, it is almost always the product of a long period of immersion in study, and an intimate familiarity with the subject. Musicians and poets take time to master their crafts, and then the tunes and words visit them. Give your learners time to practice their art, their thinking, their craft, and you will be providing them with the tools to become creative in their own right.....above link Elizabeth Gilbert talks about a new way of looking at creativity

file:///C:/Users/donohoe02/Desktop/what-makes-good-blogpost.html

extract:

So how do you start off writing a blog post, and avoid the writer's block syndrome? More importantly, how do you write something that is worthwhile writing? My advice is to just start writing. Write about something you know about, have an opinion on, or feel passionately about. You can also be controversial. Draw on evidence that supports your viewpoint, but also find those who argue against and include those too, for some balance. Use language that is accessible and easy to understand. But don't compromise on your own writing voice, which is often the one tool you can wield with devastating effect in any writing genre. Most importantly, try to engage your reader. Address them personally. That's something that makes you want to keep reading, isn't it?

final note is TED Technology, Entertainment, Design http://www.ted.com/pages/about
a non-profit organisation that is devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading...great!

London..

Michael Vogt H34 Robert  

c-type print

122 cm x 152 cm 
on dibond, tray framed

Tuesday 26th visited RA Summer exhibition...ummmm ok I guess, nothing really jumped except the work of photographer/fine artist michael vogt...interesting image..what he says about this series of work.."heterotopian relationships unsettle because they make things appear out of place. the juxtaposition of the unusual creates a challenge to all settled representations. it brings forward the out-of-place and offers it up as a basis for alternative perspectives and orderings. these "collages" of incongruent spaces often stand in opposition to each other, revealing little fragments of forgotten lives, found objects and strange unsettling novel things".

Wednesday 27th..visited in the morning Nan Goldin 'firetrap' at Sprovieri gallery 23 Heddon street..

http://i1.exhibit-e.com/sprovieri/Nan_Goldin_press_release_with_image_final.pdf 

EXTRACT Slideshows are Goldin’s preferred medium to work in. Fireleap is her latest slideshow, displaying images of children from 1978 until today, most of which have never been shown. Children, primarily for their state of freedom and natural innocence, fascinate Goldin. They make their own rules, living in a free zone utterly their own, like beings from another planet. A series of landscape photographs will also be on view. Goldin, who has traveled extensively, incorporates these photographs in her work as another aspect of personal experience. These photographs are not displayed solely for their aesthetic value, but are primarily a metaphor for larger emotional states. She has been taking them since 1979 but never shared them. “They have been my secret work metaphors for loneliness... (I was) trying to break the glass between the
outside world and me. I had lived in a dark space for 15 years so the landscape was unfamiliar to me, a fascination with an unknown world outside”.
In addition, three recent grid works are exhibited, marking a new approach in Goldin’s work. Concentrating on atmosphere over narrative, these grids reflect on wide-ranging states of being. There is a departure from themes of crisis, trauma, and loss that are prevalent in previous work while elements such as chance, regeneration and humor are present instead. Shape Shifting 1, 2010 portrays rebirth and transformation. A series of double exposures in Double-ex version 2, 2011 show the collision of separate events that took place at di!erent points in time, consequently creating a new reality out of accident. They serve as homage to analog photography in this digital age. In Empty Rooms, Berlin/Hamburg 1983-1996, 2010 uninhabited rooms are presented as a series of portraits. The photographs were taken in old whorehouses, pensions or gay
bars. They are like the people's faces that Goldin wants to remember, places she became intimate with.

1:30 Attended Interface 2011 at UCL...unfortunalty did not stay completely wrong venue and felt out of my depth...so that was that...ended up watching a film instead-miserable!!

Thursday 28th 11am headed to Peckham Rye to visit sculpture exhibition showing on level 7-10 on a disused multi-storey car park...brilliant concept!

a bit about it...Founded in 2007, Bold Tendencies has welcomed over 45,000 visitors in 2010 (30,000 in 2009).15 large-scale new works by international artists have been commissioned for 2011 by a specially appointed Curatorial Council and will be exhibited for three months.

Bold Tendencies is free to visit and has welcomed audiences from local residents to international tourists. Press feedback has been universally positive, and leading figures from the art world have offered their praise.

The popular Frank’s Cafe & Campari Bar designed by Practice Architecture (Paloma Gormley & Lettice Drake) occupies a temporary building alongside the sculptures on the roof. For 2011 we have commissioned two new structures for the space. 2011 will see the launch of two free audience programmes - a wide-ranging Events Calendar and Education for children and young people.

Bold Tendencies is part of the Cultural Learning Alliance. Bold Tendencies 5 is part of the 2011 ‘Year of Sculpture’, initiated by the Henry Moore Foundation.

and in the afternoon...Has The Film Already Started?is a new suite of collection galleries which highlights ways in which ideas of performance have come to occupy a defining place in art of the last 30 years. These major works explore different approaches to the use of narrative, tableaux and found objects.

For the first time at Tate Britain, a performance work, Marc Camille Chaimowicz’s Partial Eclipse... 1980–2006 will be integrated within the displays. The performance will take place each Saturday afternoon at 3pm. Corin Sworn’s installation Endless Renovation 2010 is also shown within these displays as part of the Art Now series of projects by emerging artists. showed work also by cosy fanni tutti..who I saw at a symposium at Tate Modern..really interesting...heres abit about her work...

Material recently acquired by Tate Archive has also been selected to explore Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti’s provocative activity in the 1970s, including the infamousProstitution exhibition at the ICA in 1976. Their work under the name COUM Transmissions has been powerfully influential and illustrates the complex relationship between physical performance and its documentation, representation and legacy.



7:30pm...attended Les Miserables starring Alfie Boe and Matt Lucas...beautiful, I wanted to cry after, felt quite overwhelmed...

 

Friday 29th walked down to Tate Modern (another warm day) saw the work of...  

American artist Taryn Simon. A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters was produced over a four-year period (2008-11), during which Simon travelled around the world researching and recording bloodlines and their related stories. In each of the eighteen ‘chapters’ that make up the work, the external forces of territory, power, circumstance or religion collide with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. The subjects documented by Simon include feuding families in Brazil, victims of genocide in Bosnia, the body double of Saddam Hussein’s son Uday, and the living dead in India. Her collection is at once cohesive and arbitrary, mapping the relationships among chance, blood, and other components of fate.

until next time left London at 5pm..

development of paper

...the paper its nearly complete having worked 24/7 on it during the past week...just having trouble with the end, always seems to serve a problem? anyway I plan to complete tomorrow with conclusion and a few other checks and then i can get started on the PP..tired out I must say..5000 words!!
However whats good is I have found by the writing the paper it has present me with something that is more confirmed now, I guess it has helped me to confirm my ideas and realise some news along the way. I found a paper by chance yesterday..Reflections on interactions in virtual worlds and their implication for learning art and design by Dr Julia Gaimster (London College of Fashion) 2008.

I am still following steve wheelers blog...its great and serves particulary well for my research
http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/
file:///G:/mebner/web-20-technology-future-interfaces-for-technology-enhanced-learning

Ive order a book called Second Lives: a journey through virtual worlds by Tim Guest

Yesterday I found a by chance a website called scribd..lots of books, papers etc which can be downloaded and put on your own virtual shelf

research ongoing

looked at some useful documentation today...findings made through MeCCSA event at Bournmouth 4th, 5th July 2011

THINK TANK; Where to Get a Good Idea: Steal It Outside Your Group

By Michael ErardPublished: May 22, 2004

Got a good idea? Now think for a moment where you got it. A sudden spark of inspiration? A memory? A dream?

Most likely, says Ronald S. Burt, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, it came from someone else who hadn't realized how to use it.

''The usual image of creativity is that it's some sort of genetic gift, some heroic act,'' Mr. Burt said. ''But creativity is an import-export game. It's not a creation game.''

Mr. Burt has spent most of his career studying how creative, competitive people relate to the rest of the world, and how ideas move from place to place. Often the value of a good idea, he has found, is not in its origin but in its delivery. His observation will undoubtedly resonate with overlooked novelists, garage inventors and forgotten geniuses who pride themselves on their new ideas but aren't successful in getting them noticed. ''Tracing the origin of an idea is an interesting academic exercise, but it's largely irrelevant,'' Mr. Burt said. ''The trick is, can you get an idea which is mundane and well known in one place to another place where people would get value out of it.''

Mr. Burt, whose latest findings will appear in the American Journal of Sociology this fall, studied managers in the supply chain of Raytheon, the large electronics company and military contractor based in Waltham, Mass., where he worked until last year. Mr. Burt asked managers to write down their best ideas about how to improve business operations and then had two executives at the company rate their quality. It turned out that the highest-ranked ideas came from managers who had contacts outside their immediate work group. The reason, Mr. Burt said, is that their contacts span what he calls ''structural holes,'' the gaps between discrete groups of people.

''People who live in the intersection of social worlds,'' Mr. Burt writes, ''are at higher risk of having good ideas.''

People with cohesive social networks, whether offices, cliques or industries, tend to think and act the same, he explains. In the long run, this homogeneity deadens creativity. As Mr. Burt's research has repeatedly shown, people who reach outside their social network not only are often the first to learn about new and useful information, but they are also able to see how different kinds of groups solve similar problems. 

thank you to Peter Fraser for sending me these finds...
http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/  really good..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4sOOSy2gIU&feature=player_embedded  good video on collaboration

I also spent much of yesterday evening looking back over 'Showstudio.com' at Somerset House  and 'telling tales' exhibition held at the V&A . I felt i needed to go over some old ground...why I was particularly influenced by research subject in the first place 

links:

The Telling Tales exhibition at the V&A 14 July-18 October 2009 showcases 

Alexander mcqueen 2002 Bridegroom stripped bare.

Online with Stuart and Fiona at 1pm today (hr) discussed Bournmouth and my research in terms of focus, I am going through what I call a 'fuzzy' stage currently, meaning Im not sure where to position myself...I need to make clear what it is I want to write about, problem is Im not sure where to start..?? and time is running out...considering this question I came across this...The ebb and flow of concentrated focus and total disengagement has been a subject of particular interest to the composer, musician, and producer Brian Eno (U2, Talking Heads, Roxy Music). Drawing on interviews from throughout Eno’s career, Eric Tamm’s book, Brian Eno: His Music and The Vertical Sound of Color, delves deeply into Eno’s “creative process.” Eno himself calls it:
...a practice of some kind ... It quite frequently happens that you’re just treading water for quite a long time. Nothing really dramatic seems to be happening. … And then suddenly everything seems to lock together in a different way. It’s like a crystallization point where you can’t detect any single element having changed. There’s a proverb that says that the fruit takes a long time to ripen, but it falls suddenly ... And that seems to be the process.

Stuart suggested I work on my IPA so that I have something to work on in out next meeting arranged for wednesday 13th September 2011.  I have also been sent a 'Doctoral supervision minutes' form to complete and return to Stuart..

Lastly...I found the term 'Flaneur'..this is a great metaphor for the participant/observer as part of the 2-way communication process
The term flâneur (English pronunciation: /flä-ˈnər/) comes from the French masculine noun flâneur—which has the basic meanings of "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", "loafer"—which itself comes from the French verb flâner, which means "to stroll". Charles Baudelaire developed a derived meaning of flâneur—that of "a person who walks the city in order to experience it". Because of the term's usage and theorization by Baudelaire and numerous thinkers in economic, cultural, literary and historical fields, the idea of the flâneur has accumulated significant meaning as a referent for understanding urban phenomena and modernity..."gentleman stroller of city streets",^[2] he saw the flâneur as having a key role in understanding, participating in and portraying the city

  

MeCCSA Conference Bournemouth

Sunday 3rd July 2011. left Harrogate for Bournemouth (MeCCSA Conference)
Monday 4th July...arrived at buisness conference centre at 9am...all day spent listening to papers, I was suprised at how broad they are from film to food..some interesting but alot dull. However was interesting to see how people put the 20 minute presentations together.  

Tuesday 5th...my turn! I did not deliever a paper as such, but talked about my idea to an audience, feedback came back as 'work in progress' Peter Fraser has offered to send me some documents which he feels will be relevant..