Due Date: December 15th (see full timeline)
Submit to Gallery Pool: Rework
“Ever tried, ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better”
- Samuel Beckett
This isn’t just a final assignment. This is your chance to fail better.
In some respects, the whole course has been an experiment in failure. You’ve been thrown the deep end from day one. You’ve been operating in an unknown and unfamiliar world - that of artmaking and critical practice. This hasn’t been a course of recipes (or templates) that you follow to learn; it’s been a series of challenges, provocations and big ideas.
Your projects are designed for your failure. You’re not an artist. That’s not your world. You don’t know these ideas and you haven’t had time to iterate or really invest in exploring deep questions, ideas or even refining your outcomes. How can you be a critical producer of media if you haven’t had the time to attend to the the details or spend time with your ideas?
Exactly; but up until now the goal hasn’t been to get you to produce better media. It’s to get you to think about the ways in which you can create media and the questions, ideas and provocations that surround its production. The goal has to been your understanding of the world of media art to give you a context to work in and a knowledge of the bigger ideas. The goal has been to re-sensitize you to the media you encounter everyday, to help you see how you can create better and more informed media, and to ask you to think about and work with media in new ways. You’ve been introduced properties, histories, philosophies, language, technologies and varieties of media art. You’ve been introduced to the forms we encounter today like data visualisation, social media and interactive performance.
In the final module, you’re going to do give you the time to really attend to the details and become a critical producer of media. Only so much much of this can be taught. We’ve prepared you for this by introducing you to a new field, to critical texts, to new ways of working and thinking about media, and the practice and works of a range of artists in the field. But, each individual is responsible for making their individual discovery of what it means to be a critical media producer.
Unarguably finding an authentic voice and direction in creative practices is hard. Process and rigorous investigation is the key. You’ll be asked to spend time with your ideas, experiment with possibilities, measure and calculate, rinse and repeat, refine and recycle… Most importantly, you’re going to be asked to dwell on the questions dangled at the start of the semester: “Why does it exist”, “What existed before”, “What influenced it?”, “How was it made?” “can it be made?”
You have to make these discoveries for yourself. To be a critical producer of media, you’re going to have to embark on rigorous investigation, you’re going to have to take risks and forge new directions, you may even have to make and break your own rules. More importantly, you’re going to have to deal with uncertainty.
This is what you’re going to be challenged to do in this final assignment:
Seek out unusual questions, assumptions, rules and challenge them in unexpected ways.
Embrace uncertainty and follow your questions into unexpected places.
Avoid conventions and the things you would normally make
Don’t ask ‘why’, ask why not
Make mistakes. Make beautiful mistakes.
Fail hard.
Play. Experiment. Wonder. Delight. Suprise
“Creativity arises out of the tension between the rules and imagination”
Over the past 12 weeks you’ve been equipped with all of the tools and habits of mind to make artful media. You’ve exploring the effects and cultures of media; analyzing media; producing intentional effects; creating provocative responses; understanding process, style and context in artmaking; decoding experience; forming critical response; listening to your inner critic; and researching phenomena that can inform your media making; collaborating across skillsets to produce integrated media; working with modern media forms; moving beyond the screen; and the theory and practice of working with digital multimedia.
Build on the experiences of:
Module 1 by understanding what you produce is situated in a history and context of other works in the same medium and this gives you a wealth of resources to inspire and draw on in your artmaking.
Module 2 by analyzing and considering the media around you, the assumptions and conventions it holds and the ways in which it creates mass and individual effects;
Module 3 by considering the spatial and experiential aspects of what you are creating through media as well as the value of making something beautiful and interesting: an integrated piece of critical media.
Module 4 by building on the modern mediums we’ve encountered and thinking about how media can move beyond the screen and be performed and interactive;
As part of this exercise you will be asked to:
Develop your skills in identifying, researching critiquing and reflecting on relevant prior works that relate to personal projects
Prepare an integrated proposal for a media installation which bridge arts (critical thinking, provocation, etc.) and technical considerations (tools, analysis, interactivity, etc.).
Develop your skills in ideating, prototyping and composing a media experience.
Develop a media prototype which successfully matches intent with desired effect.
Goal and Prompt: Choose a prior work from this semester and advance it to the stage where it is installation ready. You should cater for all reasonable considerations to produce a high quality, robust and polished piece. Both aesthetics, intent and context should be balanced and the work should be understood by a general audience. The final piece must also be established relative to prior work in the domain.
Collaboration:
Constraints:
Opportunities:
The manner in which you approach the installation, the theme, form or medium and how it communicates this idea is entirely up to you.
You are welcome to build on your own projects or anyone else’s ideas from any point in the semester (but you must negotiate that if you choose this option). You can remix, extend, build on, etc anything encountered; but the work for the project must represent a significant advancement over the previous idea i.e. there’s got to be a lot of rework visible in the new outcome!
The installation doesn’t have to be interactive, but it should be engaging/interesting!
Begin by looking at options and identifying questions and ideas that interest you. Preparation and planning lead to positive results. You won’t be ready to address possibilities without knowing your objective and being conscious of what it is you’re asking. Be analytical. Make sketches. Brainstorm. Research. Test options. Explore effects, impacts, assumptions, etc.
Goal versus endpoint. Answer what is the goal of your exploration and what it is that you’re trying to test early one. Remember that this project in and of itself is this is only a first step - you won’t get all the way there. Dangle your desired goal out of reach and simply move toward it in the time available.
Rigorously investigate: Follow questions, research ideas, go deep with your thinking and enumerate the possibilities. Find answers and generate more questions.
Use everything you know: To invite discovery, bridge multiple areas of interest and fields of study. What are the things you know from your own disciplines training that can be brought to bear (algorithms, methods, ideas, concepts)?
Record everything - keep a sketchbook or notebook for this project. Keeping records is the perfect aid for creative discovery.
The following are required deliverables for this assignment
Final installation: You must prepare a media installation that expresses the ideas above within the constraints and parameters as outlined above.
Curatorial statement: You must provide a short statement that explains the work to anyone; much as any work of art in a gallery is accompanied by a placeholder, your work must be accompanied by a statement which explains its intent to a viewer. This should be no more than 300 words in length.
Process: Your process should be excellently documented. You should provide a clear account of how you developed the idea, integrated feedback and iterated on the installation.
| Due Date | Deliverable | Details |
|---|---|---|
| Monday, Nov 28, 9pm | Proposal | Create a proposal for your project (200 words + illustrations). Develop the core concept behind your media installation (a clear idea which drives it.) Describe which previous project it relates to. You should also include sketches or images as needed. |
| Tuesday, Nov 29 (in class) | Presentation | Present your proposal in class. All students; 1-2 minute per person. |
| Tuesday, Nov 29, 9pm | Digital Crit | Give feedback to 2 projects online on proposals by Tuesday night |
| Thursday, Dec 1 | Cases | Research 3-5 precedents that relate to and inform your project. Post to Slack and present in class. |
| Tuesday, Dec 6 | Prototype | Develop prototype/first cut implementation for presentation in class. |
| Thursday, Dec 8 | Needs | Complete the tech rider and indicate any technical needs for the final showcase |
| Thursday, Dec 8 | Dry Run | Perform a dry run setup of the installation during class time. |
| Thursday, Dec 15, 1-4pm | Showcase | Integrate feedback, refine and prepare a final polished version of the installation. Present it during the final showcase |
| Friday, Dec 16, noon | Documentation | Final Documentation Due |
| Friday, Dec 15, midnight | Reflection | Reflection Paper Due |
This looking out doesn’t have a specific brief. Instead, you’re asked to research a series of works that can help inform the development of your project.
Brief: Research 5 works that are related to your project and can help inform it’s development or direction.
Each person will rigorously review 3-5 works for in-class presentation. These should be incorporated into the context/background section of the project documentation.
With your research try to surface examples of installations and artworks that might:
To start the ball rolling, browse relevant art sites (MOMA, Tate, ArtNet etc.), explore media-art blogs and feeds (Creative Applications, Creators Project, Processing Exhibition, OpenFrameworks Gallery etc.) and review informative books and texts (A Touch of Code, Form + Code, Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art, etc.). There’s no constraints on the sources or places you can look but these are good starting points. Don’t forget to check out the 4th Floor of Hunt Library. There are tonnes of excellent books on older works that you won’t find on the internet… And if all else fails, you can always google it…
Include a write up of the following:
Curatorial Statement: You must provide a short statement that explains the work to anyone; much as any work of art in a gallery is accompanied by a placeholder, your work must be accompanied by a statement which explains its intent to a viewer.
Product - What did you create, how, etc.? What tools and technologies were involved? Include appropriate content and illustration
Intention. Why did you make what you made? Write about the big ideas behind your project. What are your goals and motivations?
Context - Situate your outcome relative to other work. Include 5-10 media installations, ideas or critical frameworks that informed your outcome. Connections to the readings and course materials must be made.
Process - Describe how you arrived out the outcome. Show iterations and refinements. Document design decisions and challenges encountered.
Collaboration: Describe the process of collaboration. Note what contributions were made by each person. How did the collaboration work? What roles did each of the team members have?
Reflection - What does your inner critic say about this work? What did you learn? What would you do differently?
Attribution - Reference any sources or materials used in the documentation or composition.
Each of these sections should be no more than 200 words max. and well illustrated (images, videos, etc.)
For the project description: it must be tweetable - summarise your outcome in no more than 140 characters