Hi Andreas, Beryl et al
Its a great subject for conversation and one close to my heart as I'm in
the last stages of my PhD which is, essentially, examining how curatorial
practice can generate outcomes that can be seen as pure research as well
as being creative outputs.
Andreas, I suggest that your friends/associates look at a recently
published book edited by Ernest Edmonds & Linda Candy 'Interacting: Art,
Research and the Creative Practitioner' (Libri Publishing 2011). Primarily
it looks at the place of practice based research but most of the
contributors are people who have either been engaged in computer science
related research or PhD projects at the Creativity and Cognition Studios
at the University of Technology, Sydney. I found this publication was
notable because it blows away a lot of the unnecessary verbiage around
practice-based research (I think Linda Candy is brilliant at cutting to
the essentials) and it is the only one the I have come across that
focusses on media technology. While there is now a lot written on practice
based PhDs in the fine arts most of them emphasise fine art studio
practice and they left me with too many unanswered questions and
annoyances because the situations that they refer to were not those that I
experience with technology based projects.
As a sidebar there is also a chapter by Lizzie Muller on conducting her
PhD research as a media arts curator, which I think should be essential
reading for anyone involved in CRUMB type activities.
I also want to second what Simon has said. In the UK, in my area, we
rarely run PhD programmes with a taught component and instead the PhD
process is almost exclusively dependent upon the student-supervisor
relationship. This has a good side in that it means PhD students can
develop highly individual projects but I think it can often mean that they
work without a sense of being in a cohort which can be dangerously
isolating. My North American PhD students get quite confused about the
lack of a 'programme' (but thrilled when they realise a PhD in the UK is
only a three year process and much cheaper for them!). For that reason I
think that identifying departments that have a synergy with the PhD
research being planned - which is what Saul Albert so coherently describes
he did - is an important way to proceed. In my university, students donıt
have a formal relationship with a department, only with their supervisors,
but the department structure allows them to access expertise and call on
'advisors' to supplement the supervisory team.
I would advise your friends to decide exactly what experience they want to
get out of doing a PhD and choose their country and system accordingly to
get what suits them best. Are they open to working/studying anywhere in
Europe or internationally?
I's also just add a response to your comment:
>but i fantasise about a PhD project that is akin to a technical
>invention, the thesis looking
>more like a patent application than a philological monograph (the latter
>format can be impossible for artists who have the technical and
>conceptual but not the writing skills).
I am with you on this, and aside from the issues around patents having a
different form and purpose I think its a sound point. There is absolutely
no reason why the practical work of a project shouldn't be a 'technical
invention'. The written component of a PhD needs to be able to argue why
this the project has been significant and original work. It doesnıt matter
if its a media arts project, a design for a bicycle, or study of
Shakespeare's sonnets. It needs to show that the student has a rigorous
grasp of the context in which theyıve been working, and therefore how this
contributes to and extends current practice (professional or academic - or
both). And why the problem that lies at the heart of the study (the
research question) has been approached in the best possible way to produce
the best results (the research methodology). So this doesnıt require
cultural theory. It doesnıt require an epistomological or philosophical
investigation. It requires that the case to be argued is presented in a
way that is appropriate to the discourse that surrounds the sort of work
that is being made.
I've read way too many inept theoretical justifications of research
projects (some of these being my own). I think universities have a lot to
answer for in that, while teaching some great intellectual skills, they
can also narrow their students' abilities to explore ideas. They can
constrain the way that students develop the ability to communicate their
intellectual processes. Its a game in which it is easy to become
complicit. Like Beryl I'm a huge enthusiast of research projects that try
to do things differently and encourage other approaches.
There is a caveat though, as far as the PhD is concerned, which is that
the examiners have to recognise this as well.
Best
Peter
***************************
Peter Ride
Course Leader of MA Museums, Galleries and Contemporary Culture
& Principal Research Fellow
Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies
University of Westminster
32-38 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW
office: 020 79115000 X 2377
mobile: 07979 590449
InteractingArt, Research and the Creative Practitioner
On 20/08/2012 21:40, "Beryl Graham" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>Thanks Saul and other contributors,
>
>Yes, an interesting issue - what with Sunderland having done
>art-practice-led PhDs since 1992, it's amazing the variety within that
>term - our regulations really only differentiate between those PhDs
>including creative practice and those that don't by the MAXIMUM word
>count - up to 40,000 words for those that do, up to 80,000 for those that
>don't. There is no minimum stipulated - it's all about what you need to
>do to communicate your research clearly, and that always depends on the
>research. I've seen all kinds of problems with this communication, from
>the over-verbose, the diagram-blind, the Deleuzian rapture, to those who
>struggle with visual literacy or taking images seriously at all, but
>we've always found solutions.
>
>Concerning cross-disciplinary research (and hence cross-disciplinary
>methods and theses), this does indeed cause anxiety, but we have often
>have supervisors on the team who are from the School of Computing, as was
>the case with Dominic Smith, whose research concerned exploring parallels
>between Open Source and participative art production methods and values
>(see CRUMB completion bios
>http://www.crumbweb.org/getBiosContacts.php?id=4 ).
>
>The fact that we have both art historians and software engineers on the
>same team seems to work well is the parties know each other well and feel
>secure in their own fields - think it is when those with less experience
>in 'new' areas feel threatened that problems start to arise. For example,
>I think social scientists and design-practice researchers can sometimes
>feel as though they have fought hard for their own 'new' research
>methods, and are firmly sticking there rather than risking weird new art
>ideas. Yes, some art historians have certainly been less supportive of
>art-practice PhDs than say engineers who might be more familiar with
>practical research methods, but art methods are still different from
>design methods, and so I think we still need both sides, or yes, what we
>might end up with is just 'research and development' with patents at the
>end.
>
>I think it's all about reading and experiencing lots and lots of
>different discipline's PhDs as student, supervisor, examiner or what have
>you - Ken Friedman told me this years ago, which rather irritated me at
>the time, but dammit, he was right! Once you've tried to extract
>knowledge from someone else's PhD, you become quite critical of whether
>other people have managed to communicate how they spent their valuable
>studentships ...
>
>Another interesting differentiation for CRUMB is the difference between
>art-practice and curatorial-practice research - a fair amount of
>precedence in the former, and not much in the latter, although CRUMB is
>plodding along with this! Views welcome on this...
>
>Yours,
>
>Beryl
>
>
>
>On 20 Aug 2012, at 18:42, Saul Albert wrote:
>
>> Dear Andreas, list,
>>
>> On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 06:17:11PM +0200, Andreas Broeckmann wrote:
>>> do people have experiences with such "engineering PhDs for artists"?
>>> and can you name schools that are open to such research, possibly in
>>> cooperation with a partner art school?
>>
>> Good question!
>>
>> Two years ago I came to a similar decision to do a PhD because I wanted
>> to spend an extended period of time reading and writing, and the project
>> churn didn't really allow for that space, so I started looking for
>> practice-based PhD programmes with critical/media art leanings.
>>
>> Many of the options available in the UK were situated within traditional
>> art schools, with a few media-art savvy stalwarts holding the fort.
>> Given that I actually wanted to get some work done, the idea of joining
>> an embattled few in an unsympathetic institution didn't really appeal.
>>
>> The alternative was to apply to a more design-oriented programme like
>> Design Interactions at the Royal College
>> http://www.rca.ac.uk/Default.aspx?ContentID=514648&GroupID=161712 or
>> Culture Lab in Newcastle (http://www.ncl.ac.uk/culturelab/), or to adopt
>> a curatorial focus and apply for one of the studentships with Beryl
>> Graham and Sarah Cook in Newcastle: http://www.crumbweb.org/.
>>
>> After an interesting but eventually unsuccessful funding bid to put
>> together a custom research programme with an attached PhD position at
>> Goldsmiths with Matt Fuller and Olga Goriunova at the Centre for
>> Cultural Studies (http://www.gold.ac.uk/cultural-studies/), I found the
>> Media and Arts Technology programme at Queen Mary Univeristy:
>> http://www.mat.qmul.ac.uk/ almost by accident.
>>
>> The programme was set up in the wake of audio-engineering PhDs such as
>> Dan Stowell's (http://www.mcld.co.uk/) during which the institution
>> noticed that artistically inclined/curious engineers could stifle the
>> yawns of the general public and tempt UK funders who sought to invest in
>> a mix of 'creative industries' and high-tech, perceived to be the UK's
>> primary exports aside from corrupt banking.
>>
>> After going to meet the course directors, I was pleased to find out that
>> they didn't seem to have heard about New/Media Art in the German sense.
>> They had envisaged people coming to create *Technology* for the Media
>> and Art industries, and were surprised and a little bemused when all
>> these strange people who self-identified as Media Artists applied with
>> unwieldy CVs, proposing to create all kinds of media art oddities..
>>
>> Thankfully, they were very open-minded (though not uncritical) about of
>> a sizeable influx of us misfits into what I affectionately think of as a
>> traditional 'corduroy trousers' type of engineering/computer science
>> institution, where researchers tend to work on recalcitrant, unglamorous
>> and genuinely innovative research, rather than the proliferation of ipad
>> fluff I see in more design-centric programmes.
>>
>> The major growing pains of joining a straight CS/EE programme have been
>> learning new research methods and ways of thinking about and describing
>> my research that are intelligible to people who self-identify as
>> Scientists with a capital S. Perhaps because Computer Science has a bit
>> of a chip on its shoulder about not being a proper science
>> (http://saulalbert.net/blog/2012/02/neuro-informatics-and-art/), there
>> is a tendency to adopt a somewhat hard-line Popperian stance about what
>> counts as a valid research question.
>>
>> Having said that, two years on I've found the constraints of having to
>> start from scratch in developing a context and theoretical grounding for
>> my work very empowering. Now I'm beginning to feel more comfortable with
>> the new literature, intellectual authorities and epistemological
>> battle-grounds I'm negotiating in an engineering/CS context, I find
>> myself agreeing with Sarah Cook that the methodologies and approaches
>> most readily available to art history and cultural studies aren't
>> completely sufficient for analysing networked/media art, and that
>> engineering/CS techniques have a lot to offer in this context.
>>
>> In any case, I'm looking forward to hearing about other people's
>> experiences.
>>
>> X
>>
>> Saul.
>>
>> --
>> mob: +44(0)7941255210 / @saul
>> sip: +44(0)2071007915 / skype:saulalbert
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Beryl Graham, Professor of New Media Art
>Research Student Manager, Art and Design
>MA Curating Course Leader
>
>Faculty of Arts, Design, and Media, University of Sunderland
>Ashburne House, Ryhope Road
>Sunderland SR2 7EE
>Tel: +44 191 515 2896 Fax: +44 191 515 2132
>
>CRUMB web resource for new media art curators http://www.crumbweb.org
>Recent books:
>* Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media (2010) from MIT Press
>http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12071
>* A Brief History of Curating New Media Art, and A Brief History of
>Working with New Media Art (2010) from The Green Box
>http://www.thegreenbox.net
>* Euphoria & Dystopia: The Banff New Media Institute Dialogues (2011)
>from Banff Centre Press and Riverside Architectural
>Presshttp://www.banffcentre.ca/press/39/euphoria-and-dystopia.mvc
>
The University of Westminster is a charity and a company limited by guarantee. Registration number: 977818 England. Registered Office: 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW.
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