Unit 2 Assessment evidence
Unit 2 of the MA Digital Arts course has been a productive eight months for me. My project has shifted and developed based on my research over this period. This weblog represents my reflections on my research and accomplishments to date. I have met the course learning outcomes as well as my personal project objectives. Posting to this weblog, has helped me develop and refine my critical skills along with focusing and directing my research. I have felt the pleasure and satisfaction that accompanies research and the pursuit of knowledge.
In April my research and interests had begun to clarify based on the shift towards locative media, mesh networks, GPS mapping and tracking that began back in December 2007 in Unit 1. The first posts back in April that propose an actual project was the tracking my routes entry where I first note thinking about how to map and track by embedding GPS Sensors into a bicycle. I note that my main challenge was to find someone with the technical expertise to advise me on how to translate the GPS data into interactive maps.
In May I traveled to Banff to participate in the artistic residency: Making Artistic Inquiry Visible. This gave me an extended period for focused research and it was a very productive six weeks. I began to focus on three things: how we locate ourselves and how we define ourselves within communities and how we collaborate within a group. I also participated in Jonathan Kearney’s “Developing the use of blogs as a reflective tool” research project and uploaded my reflections onto a new blog.
In June I followed my interests and continued my research into lossy compression, jpeg artifacts, image fidelity, encryption and continued my reflections on contextualizing the field of digital arts. I returned to Vancouver in July and looking back I seemed to be listening to a lot of music. I took my holidays in August.
In September it became clear to me that the field of locative media was developing so fast on so many commercial fronts that my artistic ideas were being eclipsed by commercial applications. I then began to clarify my ideas for a project and focus on my prototype: nonsite.
October continued to be productive. Andy gave me a great reference to Iain Sinclair and I researched the LPA and the SI as part of my research into walking, geotagging and psychogeography in relation to locative media and virtual communities. I also began to get a clearer sense of the potential for a larger project, built around memory, autoethnography, my own history and being an online MA Digital Arts student at a college within a university that I have never actually visited. I am very interested in this aspect of my reality.
I also completed my PGPD research paper.
In November I participated in the Interim Show. I finished my discussion paper: On Kawara: I AM STILL ALIVE on On Kawara, the Situationists and walking. This paper contextualizes an aspect of my nonsite.com project.
I have enjoyed being involved in group debate with my colleagues, both in the weekly chat sessions. I have also followed and participated in the development of the MA_DA course wiki. I continue to follow the progress of my colleagues in my course and I continue to read their blogs. Some of their research is quite different from mine and as much as I admire what they are doing, I find it is hard to stay connected with some of them. I haven’t paid enough attention to the other Camberwell students’ work which is something I need to catch up on now.
The challenge for me now is to continue focus and develop my nonsite project in relation to the construction of imagined communities. I sense I’m onto a subject that is relevant, current and topical and being discussed in a variety of places and ways and are interesting in an art context. What I need to do now is focus on working towards framing and completing this project over the next six months.
