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