Allan Davies’s article on Learning Outcomes (LOs) gave me some interesting points of reflection.

Even as a student, I have often found LOs quite difficult to understand and felt they were more of a box ticking exercise rather than a tool useful to students to understand what they would learn and teachers to verify that the content taught was actually learnt. It seemed that the wording was too generic and too abstract to be helpful and offer the insight needed to fully understand students’ progress.

Interestingly this is exactly what the article was about. It looked at this very challenge of finding the right balance between LOs being too specific and therefore limiting students’ initiative and too broad and as such unclear. Especially in the creative arts sector, Davies (2012) argues that: “the over-specification of outcomes for the purpose of measurement can be counter-productive in art and design and other creative disciplines. The more specific the learning outcome is the more specific the ‘quarry’ will be and the greater the constraint on whether the most appropriate quarry is caught or not.”

To my surprise the article suggested that especially in the creative arts sector, lack of clarity in LOs “does not mean students are unclear about what they have to do” (Davies, 2012). This is to do with the fact that students have other more informal channels of communication that help them navigate the course requirements and the related LOs. Although I appreciate that formally written LOs may go against a more informal creative mind, such as that of creative art students, my question still stands: why should we write LOs if they are not helpful? Davies (2012) states himself that: “[LOs] might be seen as necessary for administrative purposes but they are not sufficient in helping students develop an idea of what they will be learning and how they will go about it”. I feel it is important to find a good balance, so that students can have a comprehensive handbook that gives them some structure to follow the course and guides them toward a successful completion of it.

This idea of a balance between formal and informal or to a certain extent creative and rigid seems to tie in with the other challenge that I have been experiencing at CSM whilst supporting performance students. Students have complained that they are not taught technical skills: they feel they will be not employable once they graduate.

Our experience until very recently (things seem to be finally changing somewhat) is that indeed students may have the conceptual understanding of the piece of work they’d like to bring to life, but no skills to do it and no understanding of those skills to practically interpret and translate their ideas into a fully-fledged piece of work. In other words they cannot communicate to the technicians what they want and so the technicians end up creating their own version of the students’ work for them.

The argument from the academic staff had been that students are not training to become technicians and if they are taught skills these would limit their creativity as the skills would dictate how their ideas can develop. So how do we support students’ employability without limiting their creativity and imagination?

Although I completely appreciate that technical skills should not be taught as methods, i.e. they should be presented as a pallet of tools students can use to create their work as opposed to the only way of presenting it; I also feel that, now more than ever, skills especially those that go hand in hand with technology are part of the creative process as opposed to a means to an end.

Until quite recently, we have often found that artists who use technology tend to develop an artistic concept, but then rely heavily on technicians to bring it to life. Even artists who create visual content, such as still photography or moving images, tend to be happy to see such content projected on a basic screen at one end of a room, in a generic two-dimensional display. This seems to somehow suffocate the concept itself and certainly limit the impact that the content could have on the audience. Should the surface we project these images on not be part of the concept too? Does projecting on a 2D screen not make a statement as opposed to projecting on a 3D sculpture or on a different part of the exhibition room? Similarly, when artists produce sound content, should this be output at one end of the room or should it be surrounding the audience creating an environment of its own to express the artistic concept more fully? And how should all these elements integrate with each other to convey the full artistic vision? Surely the picture is not just visual.

These are a few of the questions that came to mind when thinking about the impact of technology in art and the role of the technician in its realization: technology is no longer simply the vehicle to express the artistic concept, but it is part of the concept itself. Just like a painter would choose oil as opposed to water colour, a videographer may choose projection mapping as opposed to a TV screen or a sound artist may choose to dot the space with loudspeakers as opposed to playing through a boombox. No approach is wrong, but it’s important it is considered and that a decision in keeping with the concept is made, since any approach is a statement not a coincidence.

There are of course artists that do embrace this and now more than ever there is a strong rise in ‘immersive experience’ work. These are perhaps by artists that have focused on technology throughout their careers more that those that include some elements of technology in their more analogue art pieces.

A poignant example of full integration of elements is the work of Brian Eno who tends to create a 360 experience for his audiences and incorporates visual (colour, light, still and moving images) and aural (music, soundscapes, sonic environments) presentation elements to stimulate emotional and physical reactions.

An example is ‘Bloom: Open Space’ (2018). Described as “mixed reality”, the installation, which took place in Amsterdam’s Transformatorhuis, from February 21st – 25th 2018, takes further the app developed by Brian Eno and long-time collaborator musician and software designer Peter Chilvers ten years ago. ‘Bloom’ – part instrument, part composition, part artwork – allows anyone to create elaborate patterns and melodies by tapping the screen (or the air in the VR world of the exhibition), creating an infinite selection of compositions and accompanying visualisations. It uses the gesture controls from Microsoft “HoloLens” virtual-reality headsets as the interface for participants to create colourful “blooms” on the projected walls of the space. The blooms created by each user are seen and heard by everyone in the installation, turning the app into a shared experience.

A couple of more recent examples are:

Shilpa Gupta’s ‘Sun at night’ installation at the Barbican Curve, from 7th Oct 2021 to 7th Feb 2022. This piece, taken from the project For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit (2017–18), is the climax of the exhibition, and it presents, in a dim lit room, 100 microphones hung from the ceiling, which are actually loudspeakers (hidden in the mics) that output voices chanting, whispering, singing and reading fragments of verse written by poets incarcerated for their beliefs, their identity or their work, from the 8th century to today. The excerpts also appear on single pages, pierced by metal spikes which sit beneath the microphones.The multilingual words echo around the room both suggesting solidarity for the censored artists and highlighting the intensity of the widespread abuse around the world. 

Another example is the Lux Exhibiton at 180 The Strand, from 7th Jan to 20th Feb 2022, an immersive site-specific audio-visual exhibition by 12 audio visual artists, where creative decisions were made to literally bend technology to their expectations. We see curved OLED screens, transparent screens showing content as well revealing adjacent rooms with yet more content reflecting the environment shown on the screen itself, projection on all surfaces amplified by the use of mirrors and more.

These artists clearly have a close relationship with technology and/or collaborate with artists that do. However, for those artists that incorporate technology in their work, the role of the technician is still vital and here is where we wonder how that is changing, evolving. In the past technicians, especially those in-house to a venue receiving the exhibition, were considered inferior to artists, more like executors rather than creators, but it has become more apparent that this is absolutely not the case. The technician is at least an artist and more. The technician has to understand the artist, interpret their concept and together find a technical language to express the artists’ concept without leaving anything to chance: the technician is like a translator who needs to understand the culture as well as the language they are translating and have a complete mastery of their own language, in this case technology, at the same time. There’s those that believe translation is an impossible job, a lost battle, is this the case for technology and technicians?

So the remaining questions is, how do we teach this in art school? How do we help students acquire a palette of technical skills without imposing on their creativity? How do we teach technology as an artistic material vs a scientific means to an end?

All that said, we cannot expect artists to know all that there is to know about technology since that is an infinite realm. Therefore, we still need to embrace the need for technicians, for specialists that can interpret the more technically specific aspect of an artistic concept. We should encourage students to learn about technology and also encourage them to team up with technicians who can help them with the more challenging aspects of their work. It seems that in this case the role of the technician is getting closer to that of a collaborator more than an executor.

Bibiliography/References

Davies, A. (2012) Learning Outcomes and Assessment Criteria in Art and Design. What’s the recurring problem? In: Networks, University of Brighton Faculty of Arts. At: http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/projects/networks/issue-18-july-2012/learning-outcomes-and-assessment-criteria-in-art-and-design.-whats-the-recurring-problem (Accessed on 20.01.22)

Eno, B. Shilvers, P. (2018) Brian Eno’s AR experience lets you play synth in mid-air In: Wired magazine. At: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/brian-eno-amsterdam-bloom-open-space-installation-reflection (Accessed on 10.01.22)

Gupta, S. (2022) Sun at Night Installation At: https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2021/event/shilpa-gupta-sun-at-night (Visited on 28.11.22)

Lux (2022) Exhibition At: https://lux.seetickets.com/timeslot/lux (Visited on 15.01.22)