Assignment 2: Design a practice-based research symposium

"Good teachers perceive the world in alternative terms, and they push their students to test out these new, potentially enriching perspectives. Sometimes they do so in ways that are, to say the least, peculiar."
Mark Edmunson, Geek Lessons

Design and direct a symposium on the theme of practice-based research.
When: 13.00-16.00 Tuesday 14 October.
Where: site of your choosing.

The aim is to create an educationally rich and appropriate experience, one that allows us (your audience and participants) to investigate, explore and discuss (by any means you deem relevant) the concept of practice-based research in the arts, craft and design. This means you are responsible for the event's form and content alike.

Suggested methodology:
First identify and discuss the parameters, rules and conventions of a 'conventional' conference/symposium. Take nothing for granted: consider every aspect that affects the pedagogical situation: site, architecture, interior, furniture, purpose of artefacts/materials, communications technologies, language(s), roles of speaker(s) and audience, presentation techniques, degrees of interactivity, conventions of clothing, movement, physicality, light, scenography etc.
Which of these work well? Which should be retained, modified, rejected, or replaced?

Then design an event, lasting up to three hours (duration is also one of your parameters), in a way that will best help us explore and understand (if these are desirable goals in your formulation) the issues, challenges and complexities (if any) of practice-based research in the arts, craft and design. It's your show! Divide the group into smaller units to spread the work. Be explorative, experimental – don't be afraid to fail in parts of the overall conception, but be prepared to justify your decisions, aims and methods. You are, after all, designing a utopian encounter.

Reading: article in Frieze on artist Olafur Eliasson’s forthcoming professorship at Berlin’s Universität der Künste as an experiment in art education + "The Art Market" by Ronald Jones (both available via links below).

(Brief first presented in Vita Havet Wednesday 8 October 2008)