Victorian College of the Arts - Research Publications
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ItemNo Preview AvailableCalling Percy—a model for developing value-rich parallel pedagogical and studio research projects that result in significant cultural outcomes(Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools (ACUADS), 2017-12-01)The exhibition “Calling Percy: Encountering Grainger through engineering and sculptural practice” was held at the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne in October 2016, as part of “Cultural Collisions: Grainger/Griffins” curated by Jonathan Mills—the university’s contribution to that year’s Melbourne Festival. The exhibition included eight artworks: six by second-year undergraduate students enrolled in the Sculpture & Spatial Practice discipline for the Bachelor of Fine Arts (Visual Art) at the university’s Faculty of the Victorian College of the Arts and Melbourne Conservatorium of Music; one made collaboratively by two fifth-year students studying Mechanical Engineering at the university’s main campus in Parkville; and a new work that I created for the show as a research outcome. Each artwork responded to musician and composer Percy Grainger’s Free Music machines, combining sonic and sculptural elements, and many with mechanical components. I taught the project over the 2016 academic year, applying a parallel pedagogical–research approach integrated into the second-year S&SP curriculum, and that also provided a fifth-year ‘capstone’ opportunity for the Mechanical Engineering students. This paper outlines the pedagogical–research structure that facilitated this project, resulting in pedagogical and professional outcomes for eight students from two faculties, a research outcome, and a significant public exhibition that was included in two major festivals. It also outlines the evident value of such a project for both the students and the lead researcher. In doing so, this paper offers “Calling Percy” as a model for a pedagogical–research approach that may be relevant and useful to others developing teaching and learning projects with public exhibition outcomes.
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ItemWhat is ‘Value’ When Aesthetics Meets Ethics Inside and Outside of The Academy(Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools (ACUADS), 2017)As a ‘new’ research discipline, the creative arts challenges ethics understandings with emergent research practices. In this paper we focus on a current learning and teaching project that attends to ethical know-how in creative practice research in order to address the gaps between institutional research know-how and the practices of creative practitioners in the world. Graduate creative practice researchers working in the university are required to observe the University’s Code of Conduct for Research and adhere to the guidelines provided by the National Statement, however practicing artists working in the community are not similarly constrained. Once creative practice PhD graduates leave the university, they are no longer required to gain ethics clearance for their work but use their own developed sense of ethics to make “judgment calls.” Ethical know-how is situated, contextual, and a mainstay of all professional practices in action. The aim of this paper is to examine the notion of value as it is perceived by academics, practitioners and PAR researchers in and beyond the university as this relates ethical know-how. Through an examination of a survey of PAR supervisors and RHD candidates this paper will discuss issues specific to the creative practice disciplines. This analysis enables us to raise issues specific to the creative arts disciplines and will help us prepare our graduate researchers to become ethical and innovative practitioners in the real world.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableSOUND, SHADOW AND LIGHT: generating the experience of a natural environment(Generative Design Lab, Politecnico di Milano University, Italy Generative Art Lab, Domus Argenia, 2016)Sound, Shadow and Light is a generative program that seeks to replicate the visual and aural experience of a natural environment in a designed space that responds to the inhabitants of that space. In a natural environment there are opposing senses of intimacy and expanse, bounded only by the horizon. While each natural environment may have different or unique elements in it, Sound, Shadow and Light explores the hypothesis that just a few of these elements may create a sense, or experience, of being in a natural environment. It will do this by defining and then distilling the prototypical elements of an environment to form an essence, a small set of events that may be influenced by the inhabitant to create a mental and emotional experience of being in a natural environment. Sound, Shadow and Light bases its approach on the assumption that the natural environment is mostly static with predictable sounds, and that this causes the inhabitant to ignore most of the events in the environment. For this reason, it focuses on replicating the moving elements of an environment. By creating subtle and unexpected changes and introducing occasional unexpected events it is designed to create an experience of a natural environment with reduced overt interruption to the actual environment. The process for doing this is based on the concept of the garden as a place of simultaneous rest and subtle activity, in which expected events may occur at unexpected times; rhythmically repeated events occur separated by long periods, thus forming a sense of long structure; and occasional unexpected events that have no precedent. An interactive program is used to generate natural and synthetic images and sound; it takes pre- existing images and sounds, arranges them in groups for playback, subverts these groupings, and introduce synthetic versions of the sounds and images. This process is being developed to create virtual outdoor environments for people unable to venture into natural environments, as a demonstrator of responsive virtual environments, and as a platform for art-oriented projects.
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ItemiDARE Creative arts research approaches to ethics: new ways to address situated practices in action(Quality in Postgraduate Research (QPR), 2016-11-04)