Peer Power in print

The artesnet project will officially end on 30 September. The findings of three years of collaborative work have been gathered in artesnetEurope: Peer Power! The Future of Higher Arts Education in Europe. After months of hard work, the book is now running off the presses. Joke, our designer, put these pictures on her blog today to give us some foretaste:

(click on the image to see more)

Artesnet in Porto (2)

Peer Power! The future of Higher Arts Education in Europe
ESMAE, Porto, 7-8 May 2010

www.artesnet.eu

Day 3  Saturday 8 May

The second day of the meeting started bright and early with an introduction to the Portuguese experience by Alberto Amaral as an expert in Quality Assurance. Though specifically Portuguese I think the experience would be recognized in many places around – a massive and largely uncoordinated expansion of HE followed by frantic attempts to put in place some measure of quality control.

Artesnet in Porto

Peer Power! The future of Higher Arts Education in Europe
ESMAE, Porto, 7-8 May 2010

www.artesnet.eu

In an ideal world this would have been posted ‘live’ as it happened … sometimes hotel broadband is not what it should be, even when you have to pay for it!!

Pictures from the TA

ELIA Teachers’ Academy, Sofia, Bulgaria, 1-4 July 2009

We got pictures from the Teachers’ Academy at last. In fact, we got 2GB worth of pictures – so we had to downsize a bit and make a selection. For some odd reason, I couldn’t make a gallery on WordPress, so they’re online at http://www.elia-artschools.org/meetings/TA.

If you’d like to have one in larger version, or know if you’re on a photo we didn’t put online, please drop a line.

EUFRAD at the Glasgow School of Art (2)

Live blogging from the European Forum for Research Degrees in Art and Design, Glasgow, 4-6 September

What’s the litmus test for what’s good artistic research? According to Johan Haarberg, coordinator of the Norwegian Stipendiatsprogrammet, it’s when teachers will tell their colleagues to go and see it. The Norwegian programme, he adds with a slight tone of irony in his voice, does not include a course on methodology. After all the headings ‘methodology’ that we’ve seen passing by over the last one and a half days, that’s a relief. When artists are supposed to add a header ‘methodology’ as a disclaimer to their work, and the content of that disclaimer is French thinkers in English translation, one senses that something has gone terribly wrong, particularly in the UK.

EUFRAD is a very friendly meeting of people that want to learn from each other and have a shared interest in art that’s difficult, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t grave controversies. One of them in particular is about entry level. We’re not too eager to have fresh MA graduates, people from Leuven and Bergen state. We want experienced artists that know what they’re doing when they embark upon a three/four-year project. That’s fine, the objection comes, but then we’re not talking about PhD level anymore. If the requirement for admission is international standing, then you’re hiring senior researchers. And also, who’s going to do the quality assurance? Should the supervisors be on a higher level than their pupils?

EUFRAD at the Glasgow School of Art

Live blogging from the European Forum for Research Degrees in Art and Design, Glasgow, 4-6 September

Every one in the art world now knows what artistic research is – or maybe no one knows, for why else would there be all these conferences about artistic research? As Klaus Jung said today, opening the EUFRAD conference at the Glasgow School of Art, we’re all guinea pigs. Actually, he meant something different by that: EUFRAD is not a conference meant to define artistic research, but to create an open discussion between people doing artistic research around Europe, with a full spectrum of disciplines and approaches.

EUFRAD stands for European Forum for Research Degrees in Arts and Design, and it’s one of the initiatives that artesnet is developing to keep track of what’s going on in higher arts education. Another, closely related, is the overview of artistic research programmes that will appear on the artesnet site later this year and gradually develop from there. But so far, we’re still in the informal stage.

Texting, dancing, interacting, expanding the image

Live blogging from the Teachers’ Academy, Sofia, 1-4 July

There’s nothing like Loyke Lomine’s body language. When I came to his presentation on sms learning I was just out of a workshop on Qiang dance. The Qiang are an ethnical minority in China whose dances, Zhang Ping tells us, bear the character of a mountain people’s body language. The Qiang cultural heritage suffered badly from last year’s earthquake, and Zhang and his wife are very active preserving it. Here, while we see it on video, his wife reproduces Qiang dance on stage. We should get a professional dancer to reproduce Loykie’s presentation too I guess.

“That was boring. Tell it again.”

Live blogging from the Teachers’ Academy in Sofia, 1-4 July

The 4th ELIA Teachers’ Academy started today in Sofia, and from this blog, we’ll be covering the event. It’s been eleven years since the conference Strangers and Brothers, when we were just beginning to think of Eastern Europe as Europe, and a lot has changed. Then we were talking about defining a new collective future. Now we’re living that future, and ELIA and NATFA – the National Academy of Theatre and Film Arts in Sofia – are running the artesnet network together. The discussion is now about wikis and texting as tools for teaching, there are African and Chinese perspectives, and discussions about artistic research and the creative industries are never far away. But the NATFA building and the lecture hall are still unmistakebly communist.