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I repeat a few things from the previous post here but I thought it was worth getting this outline of the project into one document. Any comments or suggestions are most welcome.

 

Serial Space Interviews

Project Overview

The recent demise of the visual arts degree at the University of Western Sydney has brought to the fore the need to document the history of the program. This process is already well underway thanks to the work of ex-lecturer Terry Hayes who has documented many aspects of his twenty plus years of teaching at UWS. From the 15^th to the 28^th of February I will be working at Serial Space (33 Wellington St, Chippendale) to expand on Terry’s archive by conducting interviews with ex-UWS students, staff members and members of the broader art community who have a close interest in the teaching and art practice that took place at UWS over the years.

 

Extracts from these interviews will be made available online along with elements of Terry Hayes’ archive. The idea is to build an online repository that combines personal reflection with various forms of documentation to help to develop a clearer picture of the art and teaching that emerged from UWS, as well as giving us a better sense of what has been lost with the closure of the program.

 

As well as producing this online archive my aim is also to produce broadcast quality video recordings of the interviews so that they may later form part of a documentary that would trace the development and ultimate demise of the visual arts at UWS.

 

Legal

 

Given the fact that these interviews will be publicly released it is, strictly speaking, a legal requirement for interviewees to sign a document in which they agree to release their contribution. While I’ll be asking people to sign a standard release form, my plan is to then make the interviews, (and any resulting documentary), available through an “attribution and share-alike” creative commons license (for more information on this license visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/au/ ). This will mean that your contributions to the archive will be freely available, under the creative commons framework, to anyone who wishes to continue to build on the interviews and archive.

 

Focus of the Interviews

The following is a breakdown of some of the questions that interest me in conducting these interviews. These lists are by no means complete but I did want to give you a general idea about where I’m heading with some of my questions.

Ex-students

 

            -Your memories of one of the projects in Terry’s archive (see below)

            -Formative moments in your arts education

            -Memorable works produced by your fellow students while at UWS

            -The context surrounding the creation of your grad show works

            -Your favorite works produced by other students the year you graduated

            -How your grad show work is reflected in your current art-making

            -The influence your education has had on your post-art-school experience

 

As part of his archive Terry has created a record of all the projects that he developed during his time at UWS. These projects are generally non-medium-specific conceptual starting points for the creative process and, with only a few exceptions, were never repeated. Almost all students who did first year foundation studies at UWS will have made work for at least one of these projects. So prior to the interview I will be asking you what year you did foundation studies so that I can send you a copy of the project that you responded to. These projects will then be posted online along with edited excerpts from your memories and reflections on the process of making art in response to that particular project.

 

Ex-staff members

 

            -The ideas that guided your approach to teaching at UWS

-How those ideas might have been influenced by formative experiences in your own arts education

-How you own ideas about teaching related to the broader structure of the visual arts program at UWS

-Your approach to developing projects and course material

-Particularly memorable projects

-The most satisfying aspects of teaching at UWS

-Your take on the events that led to the closure of the program (if this is something that you want to discuss)

 

Gallery Directors, Curators, Arts Professionals

 

            -Your relationship to the visual arts program at UWS

            -What motivated your interest in the program

-What you saw as being the strengths of the program

-Memorable works from any UWS grad shows that you may have attended

-Your thoughts on the closure of the program

 

Structure of the Online Archive

 

At this stage the most likely form for the archive is a wiki. I’m envisioning two main sections; Projects and Grad Shows.  Both sections will allow ex-students to upload text, audio, video and images of the works they produced for particular projects or grad shows. The interviews I’m planning here will also feed into and enrich both sections of the archive. The projects section will involve building on Terry’s archive by providing a space for ex-students and staff members to add projects and share their experiences and documentation. The projects section will also go beyond those who attended UWS by being open to contributions from anyone who is interested in responding to particular projects. The grad shows section will allow ex-students to upload documentation of the works they produced during their graduating year. Ex-students might also post links to works that they have produced since they graduated that in some expand on the works they produced for their grad show. 

 

Not all content on the wiki will be editable. In fact once content has been placed in the correct section of the archive we should be able to lock it off. This will hopefully reduce the administrative burden of having to deal with vandals and spammers and also help to encourage people to post with the knowledge that their contributions won’t be destroyed.

 

It makes sense to me that my participation in the OSAS to grow from the form it took when this was just a blog. with that in mind i thought it might be worth initiating a bit of a discussion about how we might use the great word press (i.e. blog) feature of being able to classify posts. i say its a great feature because for me an OSAS is as much about presenting and organizing information into highly usable form as it is about generating the information. I’ve taken the liberty of creating a category for this type of post, (i.e. posts that discuss the structure of the OSAS site) but it would be good if other interested parties could suggest what some of the other categories might be.

With regards to this its also worth raising the question of wiki or blog. if the OSAS is successful then you would assume that the bulk of the information will be accumulated in the wiki, in this case the blog might function in parallel to the wiki with discussions about its development as well as the more traditional web log function of connecting to resources located on other parts of the internet. Having said that there is also the capacity to make pages in word press. this system allows you to assign the page a parent page opening up the possibility of having four or five page links on the main page of the blog which might then contain a number of sub-pages. of coarse we could choose to ignor this feature for the moment and concentrate on the blog and wiki (posting on the wiki has the advantage that you start to encourage the OSAS to become a more dynamic and egalitarian space).
ok so this is kind of boring organizational stuff, but i think its worth being clear about the structural possibilities and having some sort of plan as to how the different structures might be used. its this sort of organizational stuff that will help the OSAS become a useable and user-friendly resource. i see the initial posting and categorizing as creating patterns of use so any input on structural elements would be most timely at this early stage.
moving beyond structural concerns one of my interests in a OSAS is to link its content to the processes of library/book based research that forms part of academic study. this interest doesn’t necessarily involve OSAS “students” producing essays or replicating the modes of study used by universities. i think there is an opportunity to consider how this sort of material might function in other contexts, and in turn how those contexts might inform the development of that academic material, (a kind of open circuit between a university based education and the OSAS).

one of the difficulties with the wiki is that as a clean space with no pages it requires a bit of creativity and thought in terms of the best way to realize you vision. i am in the process of embracing these difficulties because i think they are indicative of genuine creative opportunities.