tutorials and first presentations

Quite useful at college today, though I have a lovely headache from staying up too late loading things into Flickr.

I'd a tutorial with Amanda wood and Iain Biggs to discuss my future progress in the modular structure, since I'm in a sort of "square peg" situation. I think I'm going to have plenty to do without worrying too much about all the other optional lectures I'll be missing: something for a loose end, perhaps, though I imagine that it would repay me to keep an eye on particular things that I'd find useful.

The assignments that I'm to do basically take me through a research
program of defining tropes and concerns in my artwork. It'll give me
some critical tools to work more reflexively to my research subject.
Although it looks like it'll be very useful in terms of me analysing my
own practice, I'm less sanguine about some aspects: I feel like it
needs my input to take it beyond a masters level and into PhD
territory, and that I should beware of trusting the syllabus too much.
I'll need to put my own input into things to a great extent: but the
feel for things will, I realise, take some time.

A number of student presentations today, people showing and telling
about their practice. Some interesting sidelights on issues concerning
me.

Iain said a thing about each of us having multiple selves engaged
with different things and that part of the problem, and fun, of
building a sustainable practice was to get these different selves
communicating with each other respectfully. I'd say that I enjoy some
success in this: the interesting parts of my job at the library have
their input into my work, and the different ways I work all have some
place in my working environment.

One of the other students had made a series of film studies of
spaces he was going to use for a film he wanted to make: these in
themselves were studies, but had beauty of their own. What happens
quite a bit with me is that my working studies go directly into my work
more or less unmediated. Well, only some times, and there is some
mediation, through medium and adjustment. But often i won't rework:
I'll re-place things sometimes. What I wondered was that, in the course
of doing a piece of visual research, and with the ease of feedback that
digital media and video give 9for example)- whether one could go with a
particular project in mind, and be swayed by the beauty of the study
itself. Sometimes I think that the immediacy of digital media do drag
us away from original intent, but they also give us new ideas more
quickly sometimes. Is it bad that they can drag us away from our focus?