Assignment 1 (group work): Choose 1-1 artwork by yourself that you consider the most relevant from the perspective of your research. Elaborate together an artwork of a different composite format that is able to carry both of the concepts of your previously chosen work.
Assignment 2 (group work): Create the documentation for the concept of the collective work developed in the morning sessions. Discussions.
Methodology/description/concept:
The subject has been introduced by a short lecture showing some examples of contemporary artworks using specific formats (Jonas Staal, Femke Herregraven, Tania Bruguera) and by watching collectively The Act of Killing by Joshua Oppenheimer.
It is a recurring phenomenon that research based artworks encompass materials of diverse media, such as texts, audio, visual, still or moving images, diagrams, and so on. Further on they often mix and shift in between the various attitudes as well, such as: documentarist, fictionalizing, performative, activist, etc. Since these artworks besides other aspects try to convey data and information, as landmark components of any research, the artworks are being enriched (occasionally complicated) with a large variety of simultaneously used media. We might call this methodology a “multimedial argumentation”, that driven by a strong communicative intention primarily serves the legitimization of the researcher’s position, secondary the inclusion of various research sources and findings.
The various combinations of different media and different attitudes often generate projects with a complexity well beyond the structure of one single autonomous artwork that might include public campaigns, interventions, actions, real life collaborations, social design processes, etc – that being articulated ultimately in art installations.
These various combinations defined by the individual artistic strategies are what we call formats.
The intention of the assignment was to encourage the participants to reflect on their own artistic methodologies, to elevate their perspective beyond the media usage towards a specific artistic strategy by imagining and designing various possible formats for a given concept.
