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
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