Tag: Discussion

Hangout—12 December 2019

Today’s hangout was well-attended, with nine people participating for the full discussion and a tenth arriving for the last moments of the meeting. There were two major points of discussion:

  1. AF was concerned about the possibility of self-plagiarism after a discussion with his tutor. Is there a chance that returning to themes or motifs may amount to an inappropriate use of one’s own work?

    The consensus was that self-plagiarism was only a real danger if one submitted the same, or substantially the same, work for more than one assignment or course. In fact, tutor CS mentioned that it might be possible to go too far the other way by doing something completely different for every assignment and never really developing a body of work.

    I am not overly worried about this, but I must admit that I have approached many of my assignments for OCA as a chance to try something new. My aim hasn’t been to aim for coherence but to use at least the Level 1 courses as experiments to see what I do and don’t like. If I don’t experiment now I may wind up producing much the same type of images that I have for years. We’ll see where this goes as I get ready to take on Level 2 early in the new year.
  2. ES raised the topic of cliches and tropes, and what the different terms meant for our work. The other terms that she raised (such as “synecdoche”) were familiar to me from my studies in rhetoric and have been popping up in some of the theoretical readings we have been asked to read. The rhetorical terms are useful as shorthand but I wonder if we sometimes run into difficulty as we transpose them from the written/spoken word to a visual language. It seems to me that theory and technical language are only useful insofar as they allow us to understand, but they should never be allowed to get in the way of effective communication. They should follow the process of making art, rather than controlling it.

I volunteered to host the next hangout session on January 12, 2020 and have set things up on the OCA website to allow people to sign-up and identify their topics for discussion.

Hangout—2 December 2019

Eight of us participated in this Forum Live discussion (CW, AK, AF, JC, KA, SS, NM and me) and it was good to see some new faces.

The first item of discussion was SS’ wish to find a way to better photograph his pencil drawings from a sketchbook. He wanted to be sure to capture not only the correct nuances of shading and line depth/blackness, but also something of the texture and tone of the paper itself. This led to a number of suggestions (and a bit of a tutorial) about how to use a histogram to adjust curves and black/white/gray points to achieve desired results in an image.

AF presented some WIP for a project tentatively titled “I am still here.” The work comprised a series of photographs that were taken on a neighbourhood walk, almost a return to EYV’s Square Mile assignment. Participants viewed the images and made suggestions about sequencing and how it might be important to provide the viewer with some context for understanding them, given that the individual photographs depicted fairly mundane settings. Although some pictures have interesting compositional elements, it won’t necessarily be clear to others what the photographer had in mind. AF himself wasn’t entirely clear on how to pull the images together, although the resonances with his childhood were apparent (he has lived in the same neighbourhood all his life). CS thought the work had potential and suggested including an artist’s statement, with pairs of images playing off one another.

There followed a question and response from KA, who wondered whether using film would be acceptable for her next course (first at L2?). The answer was a clear ‘yes.’

The group decided that it would be good to meet once more before Christmas and then again a month later. The next dates are December 15 and (tentatively) January 12. 

All going well, I will try to have most / all of my CAN A4 essay ready for the Dec 15 discussion.