FAMILIARISE YOURSELF WITH FOUR DOCUMENTS:
- Unit 1: Curiosity and Place – Assessment Brief (about 15 mins)
- MA Intercultural Practices: Guidance for Writing a Practice-based Research Proposal (about 15 mins)
- MA Intercultural Practices: Blogging Guidance (about 15 mins)
- MA Intercultural Practices: Peer-to-peer Entrance Interview Guidance (about 15 mins)
Assessment Brief:
In UNIT 1 we will explore our place and context through active searching and sharing.
What can you can discover is the cultural contexts within your geographical and personal heritage?
REFLECT AND TRACE.
In this blog I will document
-workshops
-fieldwork
-interviews
-discussions
-critiques
-curation
-reading
-practical art work
-self reflection through art
-research
Learning Outcome 1:
Demonstrate an advanced understanding of, or sensitivity for, the
relationship between context, complexity, and connectivity. (AC: Enquiry) (UNESCO ESD:
Systems Thinking Competency).
Assessed through 7-10 minute presentation of your Practice Based Proposal. (ONLY FORM OF ASSESMENT).
DEADLINE: MONDAY 4 DECEMBER.
Writing a Research Based Proposal:
When writing your proposal, ask yourself the following questions and use the various boxes to organise your thinking:
- What ideas/interests are most relevant to me and how do these reflect my values?
- How does this project build on and/or depart from my previous work (creative or other)?
- Is my project feasible in the scope of my part-time MA? Consider, e.g. what the project aims to achieve. No artist can fully engage with huge issues such as ‘truth’, ‘society’ or ‘culture’. Be selective, close some doors. Declare your commitments as an aim that is supported by several objectives.
- What is my field? What do I already know in this context and how will I deepen this knowledge and understanding through my research and/as cultural production? (e.g. primary research – visits to archives, libraries, galleries, museum collections, experimenting with new techniques, etc.)
- What does this project need to come to fruition? What is required of me as a person/practitioner to support this becoming?
IN THIS 1000-1200 WORD ESSAY NCLUDE:
- Your name and the working title of your project
- Summarise your research question and rationale (50-100 words): What do you want to discover and why?
- What steps do you need to take to achieve your aim and objectives?
- What practice-based/led and other methods will you use and why?
- Influences/context(s): Which artists/designers/curators/performers/musicians/theorists/ philosophers/economists/geographers and so on who are key to your enquiry? (Your list should feature at least ten cultural producers. You may only reference two or three in proposal while featuring others in your bibliography.)
- Identify what your project might need in terms of resources, materials and support. (Use bullet points to respond to this question).
- Provide a bibliography of sources that are relevant to your research. (Begin with an indicative ten sources – a combination of artworks, articles, books, papers, projects, websites, etc. [use Harvard referencing – see Cite Them Right (linked below)]. This list is something you will add to, continually.)
Peer to Peer Entrance Interview
Revisit in week 8
MAIP Practice Brief INTERVIEWING 2023.docx (sharepoint.com)
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WHAT IS FORAGING??
A branch of behavioral ecology.
Searching and discovery that is specific to a time and place.
In the Footnotes of Library Angels: A Study Room Guide on Live Art & activism
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Library Angel = The phenomenon of accidentally finding the content/ information/ text /material that you needed to read/ see.
Aesthetics has its root in the word = Αισθήσεις. (our senses).
Your experience with the world around you and your perception, through your body and your senses.
ART IS JUST PAYING ATTENTION AND FEELING?
The writer refused to take a flight to a conference he was hired to speak in because of the carbon emissions that the plane would emit.
Wouldn’t the flight still complete that journey with or without him on the plane? His absence changed nothing – Melissini
The writer’s close friend took his own life. Writer remarks that ” Despair never creates a revolution”.
Writer is sad that due to light pollution we wont be able to see the night full of stars at all soon ( in 2020). He remarks and questions the effect of corporate greed on our environment and the earth, and how the city will look when climate change hits hard.
“how can we really feel this all encompassing violence, this
assault on our lives, our environment, our rights, our hearts, our minds? How can we
comprehend with our gut this insane attack on all that is living by a system that
prioritises things, abstractions, money?”
Many of us pretend that it is not happening, we distract ourselves to get through the day,
we do everything we can to forget. Thou shalt pretend that nothing is wrong28, is the
creed of the market that is god.
In 1994 I began to immerse myself in the direct action29 movements, taking my
imagination away from what critic Suzi Gablik calls “the jails of the art world”30 and
placing my body in the way of road building machinery and occasionally in the jails of
her majesty’s police force. In those days those that spoke about the collapse of
civilization and of capitalisms collective suicide were mostly the radical ecologist, the
virulent anti-capitalists, the Earth First! protesters and a few obsessive reclusive
scientists. Many would call them extremists disconnected from society, simplistic neo luddites, and their Cassandra like cries were ignored and ridiculed. Mainstream media
rarely broadcast such millenarian fears and politicians and corporate leaders stubbornly
refuted them. But something has changed over the last few years.
“The odds are no better than 50/50
that our present civilisation will survive”; when the Pentagon publishes reports
describing European cities sinking beneath rising seas caused by abrupt climate change
and a future where “warfare would define human life” as “desperate, all-out wars over
food, water and energy supplies”31 erupt everywhere;– Royal Society Professor at Cambridge University and Astronomer Royal,
Martin Rees
A psychological study of holocaust survivors revealed that many of them refused to face
the seriousness of the holocaust even while it was happening around them. One survivor
recounted how his orchestra didn’t miss a single beat in the Mozart piece they were
playing as they pretended not to notice the smoke from the synagogue being burnt down
next door.
Meanwhile in the depths of the academy recent research in “neuro-economics” – which
works out ways that neuroscience can understand economic performance – has shown
that “people with certain brain lesions, which limited their capacity for emotion, felt less
fear, took more risks, and made bigger profits than rivals in a laboratory-based gambling
game”34. According to the logic of the market and terror35, success comes to those who
have damaged their capacity to feel.
This is such an important point! – Melissini’s note
As artists and activists we are somewhat awake to atrocity, somewhat attuned to feeling,
it’s often the fuel of our actions, the catalysts to our creativity and yet we also know that
to feel too much is as paralyzing as feeling nothing at all.
What is
the appropriate response to the suicidal insanity of our culture? What is our Response
– ability?
Answering it is the hardest thing – sometimes if I listen to my gut, my response is to wish
I had the nerve to sneak out at night and burn down London’s financial district,
sometimes I dream of planting a beautiful community garden39 that provides food for my
neighbourhood, sometimes I think the most important thing is to help build social
movements and plan actions that make revolution irresistible, sometimes I think I
should do as little as possible, just live in the moment mindfully40, try to be a good dad,
live lightly and refuse to produce more stuff on this planet crowded with to many things
and distracted by so much busyness.
I genuinely feel that artists DO feel stronger throughout all stages of our life. we care deeply. I didn’t specifically start to care and wake up to social issues at a time in my life. I always cared. even when i was too young and probably would have benefited from not caring. I am not saying i wasn’t a carefree child but I wasn’t immersed much in teenage life. i didn’t care much about what i should’ve cared about. i think as artists we are placed on this earth for this exact reason. to care deeply for things that don’t revolve around our own experience only. sometimes in my head i get frustrated with people who aren’t constantly craving to discuss and think about the environment, animals, people, classism WHATEVER. all of that. but i think its about UNDERSTANDING that we aren’t all born with the same priorities. and that’s why we don’t all have the urge to create. Creating IS about feeling. and creating IS about caring, and exploring the world around you thru your own lens. – Melissini’s note
I don’t want to
make more images that tell the world about the atrocities of war; I don’t want to do a
durational performance that points out the destruction of the biosphere; I don’t want to
make art about issues, but in them, with them. I want an art that is immediate41, that is
embedded in the issues themselves. An art that directly intervenes and attempts to
transform the problem not illustrate it. I don’t want to represent things but to change
them.
“Art loves to be incognito,”
wrote the painter Dubuffet “its best moments are when it forgets what it is called.”
But it wasn’t enough just for the art to be incognito, the
label artists should go as well, and so I eventually dissolved50 into social movements and
applied creativity directly to acts of resistance – collective events, unsigned and unattributed to artists. An action would be planned like any performance piece, crowd
movements choreographed like dance, protest strategies would be scrutinised with the
detail of design, propaganda would be as beautiful and enlightening as possible.
Elegance, detail and crafting were essential.
The writer began to realise that making the problematic stereotypes of “political activism” INCGNITO too would help him out. Like instead of a protest, a free party.
Instead of a boring march, bringing out radical publications that look like daily newspapers. Taking part in a riot that looked more like a carnival.
In the end the author is blessed by the Library angels and manages to find a book titled:
Charles Fourier: The visionary and his world.
book
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MY NOTES FOR THE TEAMS MEETING 11/10/2023
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