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Looking out Exercise

As part of each module, you’ll be asked to explore and discover creative projects, methods and approaches to find resources and examples. You’ll ‘look outwards’ by browsing resources online - research labs pages, blogs, news feeds, artists’ sites, etc. The goal is to broaden your understanding of the field and deepen your knowledge of prior work that’s relevant to the field and to the course. You’ll be expected to select a couple of works and report on your findings with a critical perspective.

Learning Objective

As part of the exercise, students will:

• build familiarity with projects that are relevant to the course and to tech-arts perspectives;
• identify and critically review precedent projects that relate to the course;
• helped co-create a set of exemplars to draw on as part of their own explorations;
• increase their ability to describe the domains of techology-arts and arts-based multimedia.

Instructions

Report on creative works and/or approaches that are relevant to the topic of the module, and reflect exciting examples of tech-arts. They should be works that you haven’t seen before, are relevant to the course and you find particularly interesting.

The emphasis here is on discovery. Writing about a project of which you’re already aware defeats the point of the assignment, which is to deepen your familiarity with the field.

Each ‘looking out’ will be themed. The discoveries you make should be relevant and related to the topic and ideas of the module.

Explore artists’ sites, blogs, aggregators, news sites, as well as conferences, journals and scientific papers to find exciting examples of arts-based production and/or collaboration. This could equally be a historical example which informed the kinds of scenarios we encounter today, a seminal or well regarded project which has had significant impact or influence, a cutting edge research project, a speculative proposal for a future installation or artwork, an interdisciplinary collaboration that bridges several areas, etc. There’s no constraints on the sources or places you can look- the library, academic papers, code sharing sites are all fair game. But the resources section offers a lot of good starting points. Each module will also have a set of resources that will help point you in the right direction for that exercise.

Submitting your work:

You’ll submit your discoveries on Slack. Each discovery should be submitted separately.

To submit your work:

• Open Slack and navigate to the #lookingout channel
• In the text box (bottom), click the + on the left hand side. Choose the option to ‘Create a new post’
• In the post editor, the title should match the name of the project
  • Include a hashtag for the lookingout exercise at the end e.g. #lookingout3 for module 3 and #lookingout2 for module 2.
  • The hashtag will be used to identify the module the post belongs to for grading purposes
  • You should have a title like this: “An example project #lookingout1”
• Add some text about your discovery. This should start with: a) link(s) to the project website b) a list of original creators/artists, c) relevant images or embed videos (see below).
• When you have added your post, click the Share button on the top right.

Important: the hashtag will be used to automatically check you have made the required posts for each module. If you forget to include it you won’t get a grade for the post.

In each post, embed a video and/or images of the project, and write a short critical reflection on the project (about 200 words) in which you:

1. Briefly describe the project (a couple of sentences) and who made it.
2. Describe why you selected the project (what is interesting, inspirational, innovative, etc. about it)
3. Unpack the example in terms of the how it was made (execution, tools, technologies) and why it was made (context, intent, concept)
4. Describe why you believe it’s an important or exciting example of artistic production / creative work.
5. If appropriate: Critique the project - what are its shortcomings; how could it be made better; what did they get right; and what didn’t they get right and why; are there concerns raised by the analysis or representation, etc.
6. Draw relationships to other work: What inspired or informed it? How does it compare to other work? Why is it influential and what has it influenced?

Remember: Create a separate post for each example. Title your post(s) consistently, with the title “My Discovery Title #lookingout3”, etc.

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Credit to Golan Levin for the exercise and it’s format