Impact7, Day 3

The first session was by Johanna Drucker speaking on 
"The Work Event: Art in the distributed field and systems of production"
Artists engage imaginative and opportunistically with available modes of production. 
In the current environment, a work might take many forms:
a gallery piece, a print-on-demand artifact, a limited-edition version, 
a performance, a YouTube video, and a blog documenting the project and event. 
These temporal and distributed modes may question what constitutes an artwork.

Later in the morning I attended a group discussing the use of letterpress.
Jacqueline Naismith (NZ) gave examples from Massey University's Communication students
who used letterpress to play with typographic design.
Two other speakers also gave examples,
and someone recommended a website called Letterpress Down Under.
(So if you are interested in letterpress then go check it out.)


In the afternoon session I attended a discussion about 'pedagogy' (teaching)
which raises a few interesting issues about how print is taught in education,
Steve Lovett (NZ) spoke about print & interdisciplinary teaching,
and a PhD student talked on 'critique' in art education.

'Print', once framed as a discipline, 
is increasingly absorbed into multidisciplinary open studio art programmes. 
This change is intended to model aspects of contemporary multidisciplinary art practice.
We might ask what is the place for a discipline specific art practice 
in our teaching institutions and ultimately in contemporary art? 
How are we equipping students to become savvy, skillful and imaginative printmakers? 

In the context of the open studio delivery model and multidisciplinary art practices, 
the question can be focused on the tension between 
developing a breadth of interdisciplinary knowledge 
or a depth of discipline specific knowledge.

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