Yeah

I have decamped. I’m writing this from Sydney on the way to Hamburg.  Just heard I have been accepted to Hamburg art school for the summer semester as a guest student . Yeah!!

Aussie censors?

There is a group of folk in the Australian Government who think censorship is a good idea. Others have set up a website to keep their fellow citizens informed about the issue.

Argillite seekers

Jewellery students climbing over the argillite outcrop at Colac Bay, west of Invercargill.

Our sexualised world

I was astonished to hear from a staff member that they found my video confronting. They are so used to semi-clad female forms dancing in time to techno music that they found the images in my video discomforting, singing mouths which panned back to show that the mouths belonged to small children.

Today I read in Sydney Morning Herald that the Bill Henson photos had lead to a push to disallow artist’s privilege for imagery with children which is pornographic. The problem, as writer David Marr points out, is with the “widespread notion that has been growing over the past decade that just about any image of a child naked or scantily or precociously dressed is pornographic.” If, like my lecturer, you associate techno music with scantily clad females, you could argue that my film of children in pyjamas is pornographic.

I dont go to American movies as I find them trite but also because they sexualise everything. Ironic really.

Stained glass not stadium

I asked the Stop the Stadium group if they minded me using their charter in my stained glass window. They didn’t mind at all; in fact they liked the window so much they put a copy on their website.

Perhaps this “worst financial crisis since the depression” will result in the plans for the stadium being dropped. Every cloud has a silver lining.

Stained glass window – changed image no 2.

This image is as Dunedin as Dunedin can be. It is the stained glass window in the Dunedin Railway Station (apparently the most photographed building in New Zealand) and one of the heritage objects in the city I like best. It is a heritage gem.

Dunedin is full of heritage gems but I doubt that the people who designed the proposed new rugby stadium were interested in integrating it into the character of the city as it looks like an overgrown oyster. A lot of people, even supporters of the stadium, are against council plans to provide tens of millions of dollars of rate-payers money for a new stadium. That includes me. I think the reputation of ‘ the House of Pain’ should be built on, not squandered and I would prefer to see Carisbrook Stadium spruced up.

For this project I photoshopped anti-stadium images into the Railway Station window. The opponents of council funding for the stadium have set up a group – Stop the Stadium and I used the charter from the ‘Stop the Stadium’ group (taken from the homepage of their website) and put it in (or behind actually) the train smoke. It is also inserted around the window in each of the edge panes.

Photos I took at the protest rally on 2 August 2008 are inserted into the center of the train and in the bottom panel.

I see the new image as a reminder to the council that heritage matters.

Adrenalentil’s progeny

The techno-musician Adrenalentil was active in the 1990′s. I have used one of Adrenalentil’s tracks ‘The Softest Thing’ in my mash up. The track is not changed – I just added videos of the musician’s children. I think it will be an interesting experience for the musician to see the music combined with images of children who were undreamt of at the time the track was made. If I wanted to get all philosophical about it I could wax lyrical about the bendability of time.

eArt course

I must say that I have found the digital art course rewarding. All the lectures have been useful and todays workshop on projecting art run by Rodney has made me realise that I too could incorporate video into my work. I thought I might add that comment to my blog as I have no quibble with the actual course content or teachers, only with the system (which needs fixing).

I enjoy the unmarked components of the course (Illustrator, digital projection). Staff and students relax and we learn just as much (or more) but in a much more collaborative atmosphere.

Marks impede learning

We got our ‘interim’ marks for this last unit the other day. There is increasingly disgruntled muttering among the students and I have the feeling that many more students are now agreeing with the premise I argued last year, that giving marks impedes rather than encourages learning.

Each time we get marks people compare them and each semester there are new anomalies that just don’t make sense. Everyone knows about them …  they are unfair. Sometimes they are grossly unfair.

Last semester in eArt, it seemed that if you could demonstrate that if you had learned the technical procedures required then you got full marks. Essentially it seemed to be a pass/fail mark. I thought that eminently sensible. Some students who had done eArt as a major only turned up for the last presentation and could demonstrate without attending any of the sessions that they were conversant with the techniques. I have no problem at all with that – if you already know stuff, why come and be bored by the lectures?

This term we have been given interim marks. Suddenly we are being marked on things like ‘conceptual development’. Why is this I wonder?  I suspect few of us bothered to explain our ideas for our movies as the emphasis was very much on learning the techniques and since there was very little help from staff at the workshops, most of our time was taken in experimenting with the software. We did have a concept in our group, rather a good one I thought, but since no one pointed out that explaining the concept was important, I doubt that any of us did.

I just looked on the wiki blog and I see that there is a note about being marked on ‘technical and conceptual’ development. The blog changes constantly and I am almost skeptical enough to think the ‘conceptual development’ part it might have been put up recently when it became obvious that lack of tuition meant that we could not be marked on the audio part. I attended all lectures and workshops and I don’t remember anyone telling us that noting our conceptual concepts was important for marks.

I am getting increasingly cranky about this inappropriate marking system impacting on our creativity and I am intending to argue for us all to be given a pass/fail mark for eArt. A pass/fail system would encourage the second to last ‘learning outcome’ noted for this class, which is to be able to work co-operatively. I think this outcome is much more likely when the emphasis is not on marks.

I would encourage staff at the Otago Art School to explore the system used by the School of Art Institute of Chicago. You can see it on their school Wiki . The quote below in italics is quote from their Wiki.

Grading System

SAIC does not utilize a standard grading system. All academics are marked as credit no credit meaning C or above is pass, and below a C is fail.[1] It is a practice intended by the school to encourage exploration and growth without worry for failure at the bias of a professor. Most students are drawn to this unconventional structure since art cannot always be graded like traditional academics. This grading system is dependent upon a student’s personal ambition and requires more effort from the student as there are no marks for the student to use as academic measures or comparisons to peers.

Could someone please explain to me why we don’t have such a system? I think a lot of the students who currently do minimal work would be inspired to do much better if given such a chance.

My illustrator face

It was good to have the opportunity to fiddle with another piece of software. They get easier to use the more often we fiddle. Learn one and the rest are easier, just like other languages actually.