The group
The MA cohort got together on line today and we each presented a little of our work to each other. Some shared themes became apparent very quickly. How art can transform one thing into another and how emotion is inextricably linked to any piece.
There were eight of us: Rhiannon located in Oxford; Pascale in Bahrain, Sarah in Austria, Blanca and Virginia both in London, Yvonne in Toronto and Aurelie in London with Jonathan leading. The information on locations is a bit misleading though as many of the participants are living in different places than where their formative years were spent and so it is a cosmopolitan group.
It’s members are also diverse in their artistic approaches with music, sound, movement, drawing, painting, sculpture and photography. I reflected on this a bit because my first impressions are that the participants appear not techie coders or digital animators, but artists in the traditional sense. I realise I had not thought about this much up until now.
Symposium
The symposium involved us each giving short presentations regarding where we are in our work, showing some of it, and answering any questions. This seemed a good way to get everyone talking and Skype’s messenger service is interesting and useful as you can see multiples posts being written with little pencils running across lines.
One of the strengths of this approach rather than a video conference is that there is a written record of the symposium and so you can come back to it and pick up things you missed as at was taking place. (Just as I am doing now).
One thing that interested me was how one presentation made use of Prezi presentation software (link). I’d not seen this before and it was certainly more efficient than showing a simple PDF as things like timing and emphasis could be controlled by the author.
Content
Some of the things I took away from this first symposium were about transformation – scale, time and aging on artefacts or treating things to particular processes such as freezing them all have an effect on altering the original thing, and at some point the original thing becomes wholly unrecognisable as it becomes something else.
Of course, we discussed lots more than that but these are the things I have taken away from the meeting.
anomiepete 
Have never heard of Prezi before. Are you going to try it?
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Maybe, Catherine, but just now I’m focussed on keeping my head above water with the course and everything else that’s going on.
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