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Hacking the City: International research lab and exhibition

Posted by Simon McIntyre - May 13th, 2011
COFA's undergraduate students can participate in this international research project

RARE EARTH 创设纪-稀土 is a game-changing research LAB and integrated exhibition project under development by Ian McArthur, Brad Miller and Prof. Richard Goodwin at the College of Fine Art (UNSW) in Sydney in collaboration with Donghua University (Shanghai) and Tsinghua University (Beijing).

 

Join the RARE EARTH 创设纪-稀土 wiki to get the latest project updates ->

 It is scheduled to happen in September this year 2011 in Shanghai. In a globalised, interconnected yet schizophrenic world, opportunities for creatives from east and west to collaboratively engage in dialogue and practice that experientially deconstructs cultural difference particularly within art and design education contexts is quite rare, and although online spaces in principle allow and encourage us to inhabit digital space together, there are complex challenges to effective communication that can limit understanding. The College of Fine Art (COFA) at The University of New South Wales has constantly pushed boundaries between creative disciplines and cultures in its engagement with China. In particular Porosity Studio and The Collabor8 Project (C8) have provided art, design and architecture students from COFA, Donghua University, CAFA, Tsinghua, important opportunities to occupy and explore this seemingly elusive common ground in the city and online.

RARE EARTH 创设纪-稀土 simultaneously, engages and celebrates this vital creative reflexivity by dynamically engaging with the research of Brad Miller and his networked Interactive Media Platform //augment_me// to combine new and retrospective content, generated by undergraduate and postgraduate art and design students during our LAB. The project constructs itself as a series of lectures and intensive ongoing studio/workshops facilitating content development for a dynamic immersive environment drawing on a live database (Flickr) comprised of collaborative interdisciplinary outputs of artists, designers, architects, teachers and learners engaging in an exploration of the city as a plastic entity. RARE EARTH 创设纪-稀土 is a laboratory where student will explore and test their concepts at the scale of the city and within the interstitial digital space of the network. Through this process RARE EARTH 创设纪-稀土 participants become more equipped to deconstruct the common misperceptions that hold humans apart. By showing students themselves in otherness they not only share their realities they also realise the fundamental commonalities all humans experience. The outcomes transform perceptions of difference into cultural literacy preparing them to make constructive interventions as creative practitioners in an interconnected world.

 

Student places available

There are a total of 20 places available for 3rd and 4th year COFA and FBE students students at Rare Earth.
This program will offer a number of subsided places to assist with airfares and accommodation during the project. 3rd and 4th year COFA and FBE students will be able to enrol in the project as an elective using the following Porosity Studio codes:

Porosity Studio:Undergraduate Code SDES4754 Postgraduate Code SDES9754

 

For further details

Ian McArthur ian.mcarthur@unsw.edu.au
Feiying Ren feiying.ren@unsw.edu.au

 

 

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Shaping cross-cultural online collaboration for education

Posted by Simon McIntyre - March 11th, 2011

Visualisation for the upcoming Rare Earth project in Shanghai.

What happens when students in Sydney are immersed in a multidisciplinary collaborative process with their Chinese counterparts to address urban issues in downtown Shanghai?

 

This was the key question posed in response to the theme 'Old and Young' at the 2010 Better City Better Life Cumulus Conference in Shanghai. COFA Online Undergraduate Coordinator Ian McArthur presented at the conference, held in conjunction with the Shanghai World Expo at a number of venues around the city. 

Ian’s research platform, The Collabor8 Project (C8) is an ongoing series of case studies challenging art and design students in China and Australia to collaborate. In the most recent of the collaborative projects sixty art, design, and architecture students, practitioners and academics from The College of Fine Arts (COFA) and Donghua University (DHU) were challenged to interact online in a process culminating in an intensive two-week studio at DHU.

The paper ‘Creating culturally adaptive pedagogy’ presented case studies from 2009’s PorosityC8 e-SCAPE Studio highlighting profound transformations made real through blended cross-cultural studio collaboration. In it Ian argues that globalised economic and urban territories linked by network technologies and reconfigured geopolitical relationships impel art and design educationalists to develop innovative pedagogies relevant to the emergent needs of students, the world community, and as yet unforeseen industries.

The cross-cultural multidisciplinary collaboration (CCMC) within C8 is founded on approaches to learning that emphasise pedagogy over use of technology for its own sake. This ethos has inspired all C8 related projects to date. Using integrated, adaptive processes, the teaching and learning model presented provokes students to share cultural identity and methods of practice to find the common ground shared by young and old cultures as exemplified by Australia and China.

This research has led Ian to work on developing a new C8 related project called ‘Rare Earth’. Watch this space for updates!

 

 

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UNIKEN magazine interviews McIntyre and Watson

Posted by Simon McIntyre - May 17th, 2010
UNIKEN catches up with Karin Watson and Simon McIntyre from COFA Online during an interview with Dr Gay McDonald. Photo by Patrick Cummins.

COFA Online's Simon McIntyre and Karin Watson were recently interviewed by the magazine UNIKEN while conducting an interview with Dr Gay McDonald for the Learning to Teach Online project.

 

Click here to read the interview ->

 

UNSW's magazine, UNIKEN caught up with Simon and Karin to discuss the ALTC funded Learning to Teach Online (LTTO) project during one of their video interviews - this time with academic Dr Gay McDonald, Senior Lecturer in the School of Art History and Art Education, College of Fine Arts.

Gay was being interviewed about her experiences of using blended learning (a face-to-face teaching scenario supported by some online elements) for the first time in her teaching. This interview is one in a growing series that COFA Online is undertaking as part of the LTTO project. It will join many other insights gathered from academics across different disciplines and institutions as part of the free online professional development resource. You can read about the aims and structure of the LTTO project here.

The first episodes of the project are due to be released in June, so check back soon!

 

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