Unit 1 Assessment evidence

Working on this Digital Arts course has been an amazing learning experience for me. Maintaining this weblog over the past number of months is something that I have really enjoyed. Over many years I have kept notebooks and notes of my ideas for artworks and art projects, but I have never written my ideas down in such a consistent manner.

This course has given me a structure to systematically follow my research and make constructive progress towards realizing a project. 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.

I have enjoyed being involved in group debate with my colleagues, both in the weekly chat sessions and by responding to their blog postings. I have also tried to follow and participate in the development of the MA_DA course wiki. This weblog represents my actual accomplishments to date.

I started in September with a plan to research and make an artwork based on my original application to this course. My plan then, was to focus on observable, interactive, real-time coloured light event environments and generative colour phenomena. In the first months of the course, I was thinking a great deal about research and how research is assessed and trying to make sense of Digital Arts as a field of research, as reflected in the first course Digital Arts Forum text Digital Arts is too big. I was also getting a better understanding of “web 2.0″ concepts, making tag clouds and looking at mind mapping diagrams.

By November around the time of the Forum my research and interests had begun to shift. The first post that indicates the shift was the entopic graphomania entry where I first note thinking about how to represent visual information and I discovered voronoi diagrams, one of many instances where mathematicians use drawing to represent their ideas. I was struck by these diagrams as they related to my interests in randomness, chance and aleatoric processes for determining placement and form.

I went to San Francisco to see Olafur Eliasson’s Take Your Time exhibition at the SFMOMA. In my week 13, December 10th post outlining the next month’s research, I have realized that there are two threads that I am pursuing. After seeing the Eliasson exhibition, I understood that many of the ideas related to coloured light environments had already been very successfully addressed by other artists and I recognized that my ideas were shifting literally and metaphorically.

My December 20th post: Where are you? is the first clear indication of the shift. Here I write about using mobile phones to generate art. That is the start of a really exciting ride- I began to see how my ideas related to the research going on in the fields of communications, sociology and geography.

Since the start of January, when I posted my revised project proposal, every week has been productive and illuminating. My research has been so full and progressing so fast that I haven’t taken the time to be as reflective as I could be. I didn’t spend as much time on my the project presentation of my ideas as I might have. I relied on a posting a Powerpoint presentation which was fine, but not that interactive.

February has been full. I have written posts about mesh networks, GPS drawing, Near Field Communications, Social RFID and mapping, live dynamic displays, geotracing and locative media, and geospatial drawing. I have found artists and researchers in North America and Europe thinking about similar ideas and possibilities. I have found conferences in mobile, locative and mapping technologies happening from as far away as Barcelona, Turkey and San Diego.

I have been following the progress of my colleagues in my course and in particular the sailing research that Jules Jans is doing relates specifically to some of my ideas. It has been great to see his project progress over the past few months. While I have read about the ideas of my course colleagues, 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 focus – I sense I’m onto a subject that is relevant, current and topical and being discussed in a variety of places and ways. What I need to do is understand what is possible, what interests me, what in manageable within the scope of this course and what would make these ideas interesting in an art context.