methodology

EMDWT 9/5/08

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Friday the 9th of May walking up the hill all sorts of things happening I think that I have just finished the slide show for assignment 3 eventually but i might add a few sounds I am thinking maybe sounds that I make like ........ (thinking of Simon' Allen's 6th form party trick) all sorts of different sounds and thinking about sounds in relation to things that happen on the the screen but this morning I thought some more about the talk that we had yesterday from Paul bout making bids and about the relation of that to assignment 5 and thinking about the bids I have made writing them up and writing stuff up for the Adobe conference and the animation conference which I think will be the bulk of assignment 5 and he was talking about the process of how you go about making bids and I was thinking about really just how important getting your name known is and the route that I took from just doing the digital without thinking about it to being sort of discovered by Huw from Hewlett Packard who was a friend of mine is a friend of mine and how badgering me badgering adobe didn't get anywhere until Huw intervened and then I got on to talking on the Adobe stand at Bett and the HP connection all that also got me on at Bett and because of the bett show i then became an Adobe education leader and also that got me on to the Apple cart as it where but the most interesting set of connections was last summer I think when I went to the Adobe conference in San Francisco and there I talk to Merlin John the IT journalist and I talked to him I already knew him from the Apple connection I guess I had already introduced myself to him so he wrote an article bout what I was doing in San Francisco sitting in the part the central square and because of that article I was actually asked to speak at Bett this January in my own right and I think probably because of that I got the article written (partly) about me in the Guardian newspaper and because of that article there was interest from the states from Adobe doing a case study so they all sort of linked one to another to another to another and it is not necessarily in the least bit remarkable what I do but it is remarkable how the connections being in the right place at the right time and doing something that is interesting and over the last ten years or so digital has taken off in the most extraordinary way and I have always been at the sort of forefront of it and although I am not a programmer and I am not that good at it myself necessarily staying at that leading edge is pretty difficult as well but I do have a particular niche and my particular niche at the moment is being an art teacher who is into digital in the classroom that is sort of actually quite a limited area that makes what I am doing quite particular and it is quite funny in a way for me to be slightly miffed that when I go to give this talk in San Francisco this summer there will be two people sort of talking sort of in a similar area and thinking will they be better than me jealousy creeping in right thinking again about assignment five and the bibliography in particular and serendipity again there is a thread currently on the Adobe chat whatever about all the blogs that people are keeping up with someone posted 300 blogs that she 500 I think that she keeps up with God knows how she does that two or there will do but definitely the bibliography in a sense is not just the news groups that I keep up with the Apple and the Adobe news group the Becta and the Bett b news group but the blogs other people are looking at and the blogs that I am looking at as well as the books in my cupboard that I have to look through so there is my bibliography but also the fact that I have been looking watching a lot of films and animations as well as reading books this is all part of my research part of what I am doing the websites is more difficult because surfing the web you cant sort of well it would be very difficult and rather stupid do keep a trail of all the things that I have been looking at but it is also a bit difficult to forget to remember to keep the main ones but I suppose a few like the Apple the thing from Steve Jobs that I read a couple of days ago Assignment 5 here we go

Early Morning Dog Walk 14th April 2008

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Transcription:

back to the question of what my research actually is or what my practice is more if my practice is as an art teacher specialising in digital looking at drag and drop and looking at website design then who are the practitioners are those my Apple and Adobe colleagues I can't really pick anyone out in particular who would be a role model for that an awful lot of the research that I do is serendipitous done on word of mouth finding things people sending me interesting things over the internet stumble upon that sort of stuff so there is no particular practitioner especially as it is sort of cutting edge and I don't really know who I could look at but i am going back to the practitioners who inform this practice which is why I have been looking at the collage artists rather than digital and maybe the dada as well to an extent and particularly film - looking at film. So that is what is happening there. And if the practice is my own practice that is something totally different and I am really in relation to this MA there is a little bit of a mixture of the two because I am wanting to be producing my own art work through it as well with my teaching has always been my artwork always been my creativity working through other working through my students so in terms of research I could put one or two artists in there who are actually working on web design now Hamilton I suppose would be one I can't think, Caplin I have already added to my list so if the criteria to do with new media it makes it makes it interesting how these artists relate to new media, the artists that I have chosen, where the root is, there is an awful lot more research in there that I need to be doing looking at these artists and how they relate, how the fit the criteria but new media is what I am doing that's my practice in relation to this MA so maybe I should add some graphic designers in there I have got Werkmann but there should perhaps be some others more traditional graphic designers in relation to the screen and what I was saying to Tim yesterday about what i am doing the screen is a two dimensional surface and to begin with computers were very flat just text on a screen and to begin with the graphics the operating systems were very very flat and they have gradually become more three dimensional or to represent the three dimensions through the metaphor of desktop and that sort of stuff so the metaphors are three dimensional if you like or real metaphorical real but so that's one dimension when you look into the screen but there is the other dimension that is the dimension of time if you are looking at media like film that operates over a time line and you have the possibility of combining the depth if you like the representation of the real with the representation of time that is not real time in that you can jump to any point in it so it is almost like it is a representation of time with a computer that you can include as well as looking at things in real time if you are using a computer to do things in real time like watching a film or watching telly it is not a different medium but if you are using it to create that or generate that time line like in a game and jump from one place to another put things together then it becomes a representation in a very similar way I think my thinking is a bit muddled around this I shall need some more clarity on it but certainly looking at the way it has evolved from a typewriter to a multi media machine and through lots of metaphorical stuff that goes on the screen the representation that is a place that I am particularly interested in researching which I guess is why I continue to look a the likes of Brenda Laurel and continuing my research from last term, it would be crazy to stop really because that is what it is that I am doing

Early Morning Dog Walk 9th April 2008


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10th April walking the dog.

Thinking - in the journal website thing - that I need to be getting some more stuff about actual research methods. And that could be part of the main website as apposed to the blog, which would be very much this. I could put the reviews somewhere else as well and not have them as part of the blog. It would be just the thoughts, the day to day stuff. I have been looking at animation, pixilation in particular, Angry Kid and the Naked Aussie, and more or less finished the Aardman animation book. Run out of time for one or two of the other books that I got out as they have to go back to the library today, and the Basquat movie which I could watch this morning or take out for another week. Not really got much thinking going on this morning so I won't carry on.... that will be it for today.

Early Morning Dog Walk 4th April 2008


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Walking up the hill again, early morning dog walk thoughts, lots of thinking this morning, firstly that playing around with drag and drop technology as in the website - Rapid Weaver, that's really quite a bit of my research, that is what it is that I am doing, trying to work on things that Kids can use very easily for blogs and and for creating their websites and galleries and so on, so that is my area of research, or an area of research. Another thought that sort of related to Duchamp was readymades, and my own artwork that is very much readymades, and clearing out the garage which is what I have just been doing looking at all the bits and pieces that I have collected for making readymades, that there is a sort of quirky humour to them that definitely taps in to the Wallace and Gromit feel, the cartoon feel as well as the readymade feel. That is sort of where I feel my art is which does all relate sort of to the animation and the fun and the spoons and the words and the language of it so that is really a part of my research as well and I was thinking of my collection my museum because that is a bit of artwork that I have done consistently for years and years and years and years my museum is just a collection of objects that I find when i am out walking a bit like the, walking like I am now and the way the thoughts pop into my head like the randomness of walking and clearing my head so that thoughts can pop in then now and again I find little treasures on the ground that other people have dropped, the detritus, but they become intimately precious in that I have picked them up and collected them which is in some ways, well it is not the same as Duchamp, it is very different, it certainly has a feel of the outsiders which is very definitely an area that interests me and influenced me when I was younger, maybe I should do a little more research on them. And then i plan to go and have a look at the Cranach exhibition at the Royal Academy tomorrow and possibly the Chinese Army as well and how that relates to Gormley who is another artist I really like and have been to see recently I love his steam room and I was particularly keen on his wire sculptures as well, that was on at the Haywood. So going back to my museum I could then maybe relate that back to the web would be in creating a web gallery, a web museum, that I tried doing a year or so ago but this would be more like the Steve Caplin website where you would open the draws you would actually sort of get the draw opening and inside would be the object, or maybe you would click on it like the flash gallery, you click on it and the object is there then you click on it and get the next one click on it and get the next one, and i could do that with the flash page turning thing initially, take all the photographs and turn it into a web gallery of the objects or I could try and do it like you are looking into a box with specimens and they are all catalogued and categorised, all my land-rovers and little people and al that sort of thing. Lots of close up photography, Mind you it would get the box dusted at the same time. Right, enough of this for now, lets switch off.

Early Morning Dog Walk (1) 3th April 2008

Walking back up the hill this morning, in the sunshine, which makes all the difference - pehaps my artwork needs sunshine. Having spent four days clearing out my workshop/studio, installing a wood burning stove and sorting out my collection of stuff.

Experimenting with dog walk thoughts again - this time using a skype in phone - line - phoning into this from my iPhone and recording my thoughts on the answer machine. Although the quality is not good enough to transcribe directly it seems to work OK - although I guess for quick searching etc. I shall need to do some amount of transcription - but this acts as a revision of the walk thoughts. I have looked at using the transcription pack with iListen, but the quality of the recording is not good enough. I could just make a summary of the recording, or I could do a typed transcription - I shall experiment with each. The other slight problem is getting the answer machine recording into this blog - it needs re-recording and then translating into a compressed mp3 so that it will play on this blog. Is it worth while?


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The main question to my mind is whether what I am researching in Research Methods is the methods of research themselves or whether I am researching in relation to the school work that I do which is my primary motivation for doing the MA in interactive media or whether the research is towards the artwork that I do in my own practice and whether I am looking at artists that interest me from that point of view and how that then relates back to what I am doing in school because obviously as an art teacher everything that I do and am as an artist feeds back into what I do as an art teacher and what I am enthusiastic about and then that presumably relates back to looking at methodology and who and how I look at. So up until now I have been looking over the Easter holiday at Aardman in particular, reading a book about Aardman and animation, not that I want to be a animator though I must admit that I did have a thought maybe after this MA I should do an MA in animation but that is for the future perhaps. I am definitely thinking that I should be looking at animation although that is not really quite where my own work is. I don't myself want to be an animator, what I work with is very definitely inanimate, more like painting although they are characters, a spoon becomes a person, a fork is definitely anthropomorphic. lots of what I do has that anthropomorphic character. That I am substituting objects for people. So maybe that should be one of the criteria, anthropomorphism, symbolism perhaps, you can't deny that a spoon and a moon are symbolic. And then the playing with words which maybe taps into Ginsberg and poets, maybe there should be a poet on my list somewhere, maybe not Ginsberg, children's books, Lily the Pink, who was the chap that did that? To bring in slightly more of an eclectic mix. There you go enough of that.