Module notices

Please keep an eye on this section on a weekly basis. It will tell you immediate information, such as if there is a module cancellation, change of room, together with other module notices.

What is this module about?

By developing diverse creative strategies, and fostering an imaginative and experimental approach in the student’s practice, this module aims to develop an investigative process in creating experimental work in digital media at an advanced level. You will be encouraged to adopt a flexible method in realising a series of inventive and challenging visual and/or aural ideas. These investigations will form a final work (or a series) that is experimental, challenging and original in its nature. Working outside your area of safe convention, you will interrogate accepted conventions and practice within the digital domain and feed the evaluation into your future work.

What is the value of this module to my practice?

Digital arts practitioners work in the quintessential post-modern medium. Their work is fragmentary, eclectic, transient, reproducible, multi-authorial and democratic: the accusation often made against them is that they rely on technology to produce an easily achieved and aesthetically impressive solution to a rigid brief. Your exploration in this module will refute this assertion.

This module interrogates your preconceptions of your identity as a practitioner and encourages you to experiment freely with ideas realised in the digital domain, unconstrained by an adherence to concepts of linear narrative, subjugation to external text and a rigid, commercially-orientated brief.

Learning outcomes for this module

On successful completion of this module, you should be able to:

1)  generate experimental ideas that deviate from the safe confines of your conventional practice and select the most effective, original and inventive conceptual development to realise these ideas; 

2)  research and critically analyse a range of existing experimental work and reflect on how such work might influence your own approach and individual process; 

3)  make judgments about why a work can be considered experimental and demonstrate how this experience can function to develop inventive strategies in your practice;

4)  use appropriate digital and conventional techniques and materials inventively and selectively;

5)  produce experimental work that demonstrates your ability to adopt a courageous course in unexplored territor; 

6)  work responsibly with appropriate time management techniques whilst maintaining a free and investigative approach to experimental ideas development.

Indicative module content

You will discuss and examine, through lectures, workshops and self-directed projects, issues such as experiment, lateral thinking, unexpected uses of media and apply these approaches to your own work.

You will also explore, creatively and experimentally, approaches and processes that will identify you as a distinctly individual practitioner.

Learning and teaching activities

These will be:

• Lectures that explore issues of experimental practice, creative strategies and approaches, and which show how innovations in practice become accepted norms within the wider digital domain.

• Project work, in which the student experiments with ideas and investigates methods of realisation.

• Critical analysis seminars, in which students will give presentations in groups on significant examples of experimental work and how these relate to their practice and approach.

• Group criticism, in which students present their work and receive constructive criticism from their peers, under tutorial guidance. (This will be formative.)

The assignment and hand in

The assignment is an essay, or critical evaluation, of the ideas inherent in your practical work (40%) and a practical project (or series of projects) that manifest and demonstrate your journey of experimentation (60%).

Hand in

This is in the week beginning Monday 13th May

Do not hand your assignment CD/DVD to the module tutor on the day of submission. Instead, place your disk in a plastic sleeve with the cover sheet with the bar code (download this from SOLE). Seal it and submit it to the drop in point at Bredon. In this way, you will have proof of hand in. Note that assignments that miss the submission deadline can only score the minimum pass mark. After five days, late submissions will score an automatic fail! You will then have to re-take the entire module.

What characterises the assignment?

You will produce a piece of work in the digital domain that challenges your preconceptions of a conventional solution to a brief. This process should take you on an unexpected route away from the safe, formal prescriptions of your practice to date. 

This work that signifies your exploration should depart from a conventional, linear narrative and should discard preconceptions of form, function, design and aesthetic. As experimental media, the work should upset, challenge and interrogate previously held convictions within your practice. By so doing, it should open up new possibilities in your conventional areas of practice.

Reading list

There are no key texts. Your chosen topic will determine your essential reading, whether by publications or websites; you may discuss this with your module tutor. The following publications are recommended.

Arden, P. (2006) Whatever You Think, Think The Opposite: London, Penguin

Doble, R. (2010) Experimental Digital Photography, Lark Books

Eno, B. Nyman, M. (1999) Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Music in the Twentieth Century), Cambridge University Press

Faber, L. and Walters, H. (2004) Animation Unlimited: Innovative Short Films Since 1940, London: Laurence King Publishing Ltd.

Hess, John and Zimmerman, Patricia (1999) 'Transnational Digital Imaginaries' by John Hess and Patricia R. Zimmermann, in WIDE ANGLE, No. 1 Vol. 21 (January 1999), pp. 149-167.

Holmes, T. (2002) Electronic and Experimental Music (Media and Popularculture), Routledge

Kaupelis, R. (1992) Experimental Drawing Techniques: Watson-Guptill Publications Inc.,U.S.; New edition

Le Grice, M. (2002) Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age (BFI Film Classics), London: BFI Publishing

Leslie, E. (2002) Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde: London: Verso

O’Pray, R.(2003) Avant-Garde Film: Forms, Themes and Passions, London: Wallflower Press

Peuvion, J.P., van Trigt, E., de Saram, R., and Pousseur, H. (2008) Electronic Experimental and Microtonal 1953-1999, Sub Rosa (CD)

Reekie, D. (2007) Subversion: The Definitive History of Underground Cinema: Wallflower Press

Shaw, J. and Weibel, P. (eds.) (2003) Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film. MIT Press

Tala, S. (2009) Installations and Experimental Printmaking, A & C Black Publishers Ltd