Assignment 3: Collaborative Studio Project

Assignment Objectives

With this assignment, you have the potential to pull together several aspects of the course content and to reconsider the implications of interdisciplinarity across and between the fine, performing, and new media arts in a studio-based, workshop context.

Ideally, your response to the assignment should reflect the fact that at this point in the course we are considering that third category of interdisciplinary endeavour which we have named BETWEEN AND BEYOND BOUNDARIES. However, the fact that you are working in groups will also point to the second category we have been considering, COLLABORATION: FROM MULTI- TO INTERDISCIPLINARY PRODUCTION.

Preparation

Working in a group comprised of four or five students in the your tutorial, I ask you to design an interdisciplinary work which offers a position or idea on a given subject relevant to your own lives and concerns.  For example, your group might feel strongly about and, therefore, want to comment on:

  • A political event or circumstance (the recent war in Iraq, for example).
  • A social concern (homelessness or rising tuition fees).
  • Issues of identity (race, class, gender, and/or sexual orientation).
  • An aesthetic problem (the nature of beauty).

These are just a few among an infinite range of possible subjects.  It is up to your group to agree on a subject of common interest.  

Once you have decided on the subject you wish to address and your position, you must determine the best way to present it through the orchestration of a number of artistic disciplines.  You might want to consider the possibility of working toward an interdisciplinary object, performance, or installation.  Alternatively, you might want to conceptualize a project which cannot be realized within the confines of the course and, therefore, present the project as a mock-up or display of possibilities.  Hopefully, the form of your project will bring your subject alive but you should also use it to comment on the nature of collaborative artistic practice within an interdisciplinary world.

As your groups brainstorm about the form of your project:

  • Consider exchanging thoughts and information based on the research you undertook for Assignment 2, keeping in mind that the artistic forms you explored in this context belong to the category we’re calling BETWEEN AND BEYOND BOUNDARIES. Do they offer inspiration or suggest particular ways of working for this assignment?
  • Continue to visit the FACS 1900B website to review the material we have covered in lecture and tutorial in the categories of COLLABORATION and BETWEEN AND BEYOND BOUNDARIES. The material posted on the website may also trigger ideas.

Proposal

Please prepare a one-page proposal outlining your group’s intentions for this project (including subject and basic concept) to be submitted in tutorial  08/02/07.  This should be typed and prefaced by a title page on which you list the title of your project (yes, you have to name it!), the names and student numbers of all group members, and all the other information I’ve asked for on the title page for every assignment this year.

Documentary Text

In tutorial on 08/03/07 your group must submit a detailed text of approximately 1000 words outlining the nature of the project, the rationale behind the decisions your group made as you designed it, and the potential success of your project, both in terms of form and content.  Among other things, the preparation of this text, will help you to clarify some of the advantages and disadvantages of interdisciplinary collaboration.

Presentation

All presentations are scheduled for 22/03/07 between 2:30 and 5:30 pm (FACS 1900B).  These will be mounted in various spaces in Accolade West and the Centre for Fine Arts (CFA) and graded by your tutor at that time.  Please plan to be on site for the entire period.

On presentation day, I ask you to submit to your tutor a typed list of the contributions of each group member to the project.

Grading

Each group will receive a single grade based on:

  • The quality of the concept.
  • The degree to which it is developed, both in the written document and in your presentation materials.
  • Your creativity in integrating the arts and/or working between and beyond boundaries to illuminate the issues you are tackling in the work.