National Experimental Arts Forum 2015

 

in Collaboration with Leonardo Education Arts Forum and National Institute for Experimental Arts.

Experimental Arts Curriculum

COURSE SUMMARY

Experimental Arts will provide an evocative space to explore art that is based on the unpredictable. The students do the experiments themselves, creating hypotheses that experiment with art processes and emerging technologies. Experimentation is about play with purpose.

 

The experimental is free to define new criteria and does not have to create a work that is trying to carry a message or be representational. Experimentation makes strange with technology, culture, and forms of life, grabbing these modalities and extending them into unexpected situations. In this course, students will push beyond skills they bring and are comfortable with to immerse themselves in experimental processes.

COURSE AIMS

This course will:

  1. facilitate understanding of the value of unpredictability and failures in art
  2. empower students to comprehend or decolonize the use of different meta languages to cross and engage in transdisciplinary practice
  3. enable a confident approach through experimental understandings of collaborative and individual roles

COURSE LEARNING OUTCOMES

At the conclusion of this course, students should be able to:

 

  • archive experiments
  • reveal evidence of experimentalism
  • develop experimental methodologies that sustain their practice
  • produce contextual reflections on culture, ideas and history

TEACHING STRATEGIES AND APPROACH TO LEARNING

This course is taught in an intensive mode and is designed to challenge student preconceptions as to the nature of their discipline and the ways in which experimental practice is undertaken. The focus of teaching is on guided group and individual experimental practice where the outcomes are less important than the exploratory research.

Experimental art is often achieved independently of what is explained, reviewed, or talked about in class. Often these solutions are based on lectures and demonstrations. Experimental outcomes are the result of “problem finding” rather than “problem solving.”

  • The best creative solutions extend the given assignment into another area or level of exploration.
  • Good creative solutions combine other people’s discoveries in the solution that does not present a new problem.
  • Ordinary creative solutions dilute ideas into a simple component of what is required, and do not explore problem finding.
  • Poor creative results are obvious attempts to exploit the easy solution to an assignment already discovered by the student.

EXPECTATIONS OF STUDENTS IN THIS COURSE

 

Assessment will be based on:

 

  • Evidence of problem finding. (Innovative progress)
  • Evidence of experimental exploration. (Conceptual progress)
  • The ability to work independently. (Independent progress)
  • Presentation of exploratory research. (Skillful progress)

 

Edited by Lindsay Kelley and Paul Thomas.