ACUADS 2006 Conference

 
I focus on a pivotal aspect of my studio-based investigation of duality, and the good/evil binary. In an illustrated presentation, referencing both my own work and other cultural and historical precedents, I explore how the game of 'Snakes and Ladders', set in the altered Garden of Eden, is increasingly coming to function not only as pictorial and metaphoric device but also as visual and philosophical structure.

After briefly outlining the game's history from its Hindu origins as a game of morality, played by children to teach them the rights and wrongs of life, to its emphatic adoption by the British Rajah into Victorian England and its many colonies including Australia, I examine other 'snakes and ladders' images, found in art, popular cartoons and advertising. This includes an image by Adelaide printmaker, Barbara Hanrahan, in 1978, which I explain differs significantly from other usages in both content and form. I then elaborate issues of collage, framing and grids, which structure my own work.

I hope this paper sheds light on the symbiotic process of correlations and cross-fertilisations peculiar to creative-based research.

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Design and creative technologies, creative and cultural industries, and artistic practices, are all characterised by the significance of material considerations in the emergent processes of experimentation, development, application and production. Research in these areas is usually practice-based or practice-led and the rapidly growing level of practice-led postgraduate research courses world-wide has led to an exciting new wave of contemporary academic interest in appropriate research approaches for this type of work.

This paper deals with current methodological imperatives in the fields of design and creative practice. This is an evolving field of academic investigation, dependent on a shared understanding and critique of the range and significance of practice-based approaches and methods that are currently being differentiated in the creative disciplines. The recently established AUT University 'Material Thinking' initiative is a challenge to all researchers in art and design disciplines to examine their conceptual approaches toward research and scholarship, including ways of learning, levels of engagement, integration and discovery. A focus on material thinking may open research horizons beyond the notion of practice as a derivative of theory, and contribute to good practices at postgraduate level, enhanced collaborative opportunities, and ultimately to a robust research discipline.

For this development to take place, we need to take a bold, professional position in relation to the identification, naming and articulation of the generative and working practices that underpin the work and the methodological approaches that are developed in the studio. Attention must be directed to careful comparisons and assessment of these approaches and to the discovery of relationships between these approaches and the various philosophical and conceptual underpinnings of practice-led projects.

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A curriculum ideology that is often held in the arts, is that art is not driven by commercial demands or direction and, therefore, our curriculum need not address partnerships and linkage to industry in respect to real work experiences. In the Centre for New Media Arts (CNMA), Australian National University (ANU), you could argue that we exist as a hybrid of art, having evolved from the Schools of Music and Art, into a Centre for the Arts and Technology, fifteen years ago.

We now find ourselves at the pinnacle of convergence, the blurring of specialist interest boundaries and practice with 'new' academic subjects emerging with titles such as Cinemedia, Anthropology and New Media, Digital Humanities, New Media Percussion, Design Arts, Shakespeare and New Media, etc. This spectacular growth now provides CNMA with a perfect opportunity to examine our pedagogy and explore our common beliefs, values and ideologies in New Media Arts.

At undergraduate teaching we face students of diverse focus, variable knowledge, learning capabilities and commitments, and who each have individual direction and career aspirations. The students are in themselves coping with the balance of specialist subjects and array of exciting electives to study. Any principles and values attached to the curriculum ideology of a pure arts focus in CNMA is now challenged as our education environment evolves and students are socially and economic alert to future directions and fashionable trends. As Toohey (1999) comments:
      The concept of tertiary education as preparation for employment has become so dominant
      that the idea that graduates might question the ways in which work is organised and distributed
      in society seems unpatriotic. We see the effect of these beliefs in the higher education curriculum,
      as degree programs in humanities and fine arts are redesigned in order to offer students
      preparation for a career in government service or arts administration.

This paper is concerned with two themes:
 1)  how we provide our students with real world experiences and opportunities in the context of
      preserving popular beliefs and values in research led education, and
 2)  a reflection of new media arts curriculum explaining the Centre of New Media Arts, ANU, nurturing
      profile, steering students through an interdisciplinary matrix of knowledge and creative production.
 

• Toohey S (1999) Designing Courses for Higher Education (Buckingham: Open University Press) ch.3 p. 45.

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A studio-based doctoral research project is a peculiar two-pronged process of making and writing, aimed towards an outcome of both artwork and dissertation. How to work in synergy towards a successful thesis, is the focus of this paper, which explores processes in depth and poses questions, such as:
How to develop an initial idea in multiple directions, and through two distinct modes of expression, without losing the plot into chaos?
What is the matter with Reflective Practice as the model for a creative methodology?
How to construct and apply an inventive methodology that embraces studio practice, theories and writing? How to achieve synergy where studio-based research and reflective dissertation work together, rather than either component becoming reduced to an explication of the other?
How is artwork able to function as articulate communication, how can it be manoeuvred to 'speak' without shouting, but also avoid being dense and hermetic?

This paper may come up with occasional answers, but more often suggests potentialities, while validating questioning as an important aspect of a creative and successful methodology. Considering the whole thesis as collage of interconnected fragments, I propose that a methodology can be constructed by drawing on philosophical and cultural theories, to bring together complexities through interweaving experience, theory and practice: an expressive process, while situated within a critical context.

 
Anne Bennett, whose career spans more than 20 years, has curated six exhibitions, taught at NMIT, University of Tasmania, Chisholm Institute, CAE and guest lectured at Monash University (Peninsular and Gippsland campuses). She has exhibited nationally and internationally; holding six solo exhibitions including at: Pinocotheca and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne; Plimsoll Galleries, Hobart, and participated in over thirty group exhibitions at regional galleries throughout Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, and universities in Korea and China. She holds a BA from RMIT, MFA from the University of Tasmania and is currently undertaking PhD research at Monash University in the Faculty of Art & Design.

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Nancy de Freitas is an associate professor in the School of Art & Design, AUT University, Auckland, New Zealand. Her current research deals with practice-based methodologies for artists and designers. De Freitas did her undergraduate work and first degree in Communication Design at the Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto. Her postgraduate studies were at the University of Auckland where she obtained a Masters degree in Fine Art. Since that time she has been active as both a professional artist and academic. As a professional artist, she has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions, including major installations at regional public galleries in New Zealand with support from University research grants and private sector funding. As a university academic, she has been involved in assessment and curriculum-based research and in the development of innovative collaborative teaching strategies for art and design.

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Eleanor is Head of the Centre for New Media Arts at the Australian National University. Under her direction the Centre has experienced major expansion and incorporated her unique vision of new media and a cross-disciplinary approach. During this time, she has also undertaken roles including: Convenor Postgraduate Studies CNMA (ANU); Deputy Chair Megalo Print Workshop; ACAT Consultant National Museum of Australia – Skylounge; Advisor ACT Board of Senior Secondary Studies; Government Arts Advisor ACT – New Media; Printmaker in Residence at Megalo Print Workshop; Researcher at Edith Cowan University, and Producer of CNMA events at the National Museum of Australia. Prior to her appointment as Head of the Centre for New Media Arts, Eleanor was Head of Design at Hull School of Art & Design, University of Lincoln UK.

Eleanor is a prolific artist, having received numerous awards, grants, and commissions in her career. She is a regular contributor to numerous professional associations, having published since 1985 and presented papers at conferences in the UK, Taiwan and Australia.

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Dr. Irmina van Niele was born in Amsterdam 1949. She worked in Paris prior to arriving in Australia in 1973. She has a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Hons) and a PhD from the University of South Australia. Selected recent exhibitions include Transient Traces, Liverpool Street Gallery, Adelaide (2005), Far from Solid, Liverpool Street Gallery, Adelaide (2004) and Words for Wandering, State Library of South Australia (2003–2006). She is currently part time lecturing in textiles and tutoring in art history and theory at the South Australian School of Art, University of South Australia.