university « Pete Hindle

August 26, 2010

Revenge of the (Academic MBA) Nerds

I was saving this bunch of links to write a piece about academia, but I’m in the middle of packing up my Newcastle flat and moving house – made more exciting than I’d like by things such as surprise house guests and exploding car engines. This means I can’t quite get my writing head into gear, so I’m going to linkdump these articles here and let people make up their own minds as to how the UK’s universities are dealing with these issues.

The Big Lie about the ‘Life of The Mind’ – Article in a US Universities website about the effectiveness of postgraduate humanities education in the job market, and employment as a humanities graduate within universities.
Wanted: Really Smart Suckers – In the US university system, there seems to be a tradition of employing graduate students as teachers of undergraduates. I’ve not come across this as much in the UK, but this might be because of the institutions and subjects that I’ve studied at/of. This article inspects the way that the postgraduate community is used.
The Last Professors – blogpost from a left-wing perspective about the end of the American usage of ‘professor’, as inspired by the book by Frank Donoghue.
Waiting 20 Years for Tenure – A personal account of one individuals life as a travelling lecturer. I know a number of people in a similar position, except I doubt that most of my friends expected to become “house” staff.
Review of the Last Professors book – Another look at the Frank Donoghue book

From my time in academia, I’d say that there is a real focus on money-earning activities in the UK, and this is corroborated by what happened to the Middlesex Philosophy department, which closed down recently. Perhaps my view is different from the norm, as I’ve mostly been in Fine Art departments (a subject matter that is perennially squeezed by it’s budget and the material requirements of it’s students), but I’d say that in the overwhelmingly capitalistic society of today, academia’s notions of knowledge and learning were bound to be a casualty.

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May 2, 2010

State

Wednesday was a bad day for me. I’d been carrying around a broken tooth, and leapt out of bed to make an emergency dental appointment. I then fixed breakfast and was just starting to gingerly chew my toast when I got a call from the benefits agency who told me that I wouldn’t be getting any money from them.

It took them a while to explain this to me, and when they were done my toast was cold. I hate cold toast.

The problem is that I made the mistake of getting ill when I was studying at university. I’m still ill, in fact – still in recovery from something that took me within a few hours of dying, six months ago.

I’ve put off making this post because I’m angry about it, and I don’t think I’m going to stop being angry about it. Because I was a student I don’t deserve help? I expect that attitude from bigoted chavs, not the government of the country I live in.

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January 9, 2010

MMX – The Start of the Post-Digital Decade

2010 and after are going to be about post-digital, by which I mean what comes after we’ve finished staring at our screens. We’re going to see an explosion in the amount of physical objects that would have been impossible without using digital process in the workflow, and objects that won’t work without a connection of some kind to the internet.

Spimes and RFID are only part of what I’m talking about here. Short-run publications, bespoke objects, and even distributed craft networks are also part of this new post-digital boom. There are going to be a lot of interesting tools for artists and designers to explore in the next decade, as we move away from computers being the site of the art (on websites) to being tools that enable interesting things to happen.

With this in mind, I’ve got three predicition for what the post-digital will be about:

It’s about fitting the digital into your workflow
It’s not venerating the things that are on our screens
It’s real-world hard work, and engaging with both hands

With this in mind, I looked back at my last decade and I thought about how my use of computers changed over that time. Do you remember using computers in 2000? I had to wrack my brains a bit, but here’s a personal timeline of digital use:

2000 – Started Foundation course. Used Kai’s Power Tools for the first time, made first video, got first real email address (by which I mean not a hotmail account)

2001 – First year of university. My first computer that was mine- a G3 desktop, zipdisks.

2002 - New computer – G4 eMac with OSX! Lots of browsing at uni, then taking software updates home on disks. Became expert on TWAIN, scanning, photoshop, and waiting for photoshop scanning to finish.

2003 – First external hard drive. Also brought Wacom tablet, midi keyboard (both mostly useless). Made videos, learnt non-linear editing software, wrote dissertation, stared out of the window a lot.

2004 - First broadband connection. Brought Max/MSP, downloaded Processing (alpha!), went on PD course. Still confused by all three ‘easy’ languages. Got Gmail account and my first laptop – a G4 powerbook.

2005 – Overused first broadband connection. Made some digital installations, brought Teleo card, got into electronics, nearly blew Teleo card up. Brought first iPod and Arduino.

2006 - Social networking via Flickr. Went on Arduino course in Barcelona with Massimo and David, gave up on Max/MSP and PD as patcher languages suck time, fun, and light from life.

2007 - Joined Twitter and Facebook. Facebook annoying from start. Finally buy proper domain name and start running my own website. Run the Glowbikes project, using SpokePOV’s as part of an art installation.

2008 – Powerbook dies, replaced with MacBook. Attended geek conferences, wrote and taught two courses for wordpress, made serious effort to learn Processing (which is then forgotten) and brought iPhone.

2009 – Discovered international roaming charges. Erk. eBay’d and sold things on Amazon, wrote thematic blog posts, and interviewed serious hacker-types.

2010 - Now.

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February 6, 2009

On Mavernship, part 3: Personal Bitterness and Creative Employment

I was shopping with Brian in Morrisons when I noticed how bitter I had become. I turned to him and said “I hate cake”. It’s offical: I’m suffering from some form of bitterness that has subsumed my soul. This state is not unusual for me though; however, I think I’m going to have to say that this current wave of bile flooding my system is in no way helped by the problems I’m trying to consider in this article. But, like a scabby knee, I keep coming back to pick at it.

I know how you feel, kitten.

Back in Hans Abbing states that it is the the partner that supports the artist, the economic benefit that these people bring to their households is still significant.

And, as writer Jacques Monin points out in this article,
the British as a nation are too dependent on a notion of wealth and earning as indications of success and happiness. This is a common theme that can be found in the writings of many commentors at the moment, from Alain de Botton to that “barefoot doctor” guy. Balancing this out in popular culture is the glut of property porn on television, preaching the notion of happiness being linked to a nice detached “family home” in which a nuclear family can be raised. Like the idea of painting as a cutting edge art, this is obviously a fallacy – it’s just as easy to be an unhappy family in a detached house, no matter what its value is.

I’ve been titling these pieces with the word ‘mavernship’ because it’s really about the issue of cultural influence that I need to discuss. As the organiser, communicator, and adminstrator of NewcastleGraft, I’ve gained a small amount of internet fame. This is entirely for my ability to be communcicative about art in the Newcastle area, and up till now, I’ve been doing that in a generalised way, supporting any activities within the area that could be put under the general banner of ‘art’. This, of course, included a vast number of activities that helped artists support the raft, as that raft-like conglomeration of businesses supported them in turn.

The only reason I’ve been able to become recongnised for my communication skills is the fact that I have some small facility with computers and other new technologies. Only last year I spent some time explaining the idea of Facebook to a local gallery, something which could be a valuable skill as a “social media facilitator” (listen to that podcast when done here). Sadly, over the past five years I’ve seen very little engagment with these technologies from institutions involved in the raft. Some, yes, but nowhere near the amount that I thought we would see by this point.

So enraged am I by the lack of good practice in this area that I cannot even begin to list the horrible manglings of internet ettiquette that I’ve seen practiced by galleries and artists. From my current vantage point as a postgraduate student within Newcastle univesity, I am seeing an even more comprehensive thrashing of good practice. Don’t. Get. Me. Started. That bitterness I spoke of at the top of this post rages when it sees the things done by those folk.

And so, I have to ask the question – how should artists be using the communication platforms that are available now to remove themselves from traditional employment? How can the internet be used to support creative practice, beyond the traditional, slow-reacting forms of support espoused by the Arts Council and other leaders? That will have to be the subject for part four.

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January 9, 2009

On Mavernship (part two: The Men from the High Castles)

Part two of some, which seem to be slightly rambly. Oh well. Better out than in.

Before I get going here, let’s just take a minute out to think about the image creators of the world. I’m not talking about painters, or any other type of specific mileau, but rather just the general act of creating images in itself, from your imagination. That’s what most people consider to be art.

That act of creation – whether by putting pen to paper, or by Cory Doctow’s pixel-stained peasants – is so important to the artistic industries. It’s the baseline idea of what art should be for so many people, that the idea of being an artist is tied to the stereotype of the painter in his garret. Even some artists fall into this ontological trap: I want to be an artist, therefore I shall be a painter, because that means that I will be making images.

For me, painting is a dead form, as much in need of protection as coppicing or any other medieval technology superseded by better, modern technology. Whilst painting could hang on well into the twentieth century, it’s last great gasp came just before the widespread introduction of television into households. It didn’t matter what Clement Greenberg wrote then, because compared to “I Love Lucy” or “Mr. Ed” all paintings are remote and detached.

A painting can still be beautiful, of course, but there are many other ways to make a beautiful image. Contemporary art galleries have created the term giclee, to describe a technique of printing computer images on canvas. This term is completely made up, engineered to lull the purchaser of these images that it’s okay to buy what amounts to a fancy print-out, because it’s art in the capitalised Fine Art sense.

And it’s that idea of a Fine Art, made by Fine Artists like Painters, that really confuses things. Personally – and bear in mind that this entire series of short writings is all from my personal perspective – every time I meet somebody who describes themselves as a painter, I worry. Usually that person is carrying around the sort of mental baggage that allows them to think that they are important, that the act of image creation via paint is somehow more worthy, and that their work is somehow worth more than their contemporaries.

In the digital world, this is not so. This has been proven for around the last five years, cohesively, determinably, repeatedly. All information can be copied, and even if it doesn’t want to be free (as the early hackers claimed), it must be moved. Visual information is a rich source of inspiration for us all – something we can’t help, owing to our hunting processes built into us.

Anybody who places themself apart from this new paradigm of information flow, or (mistakenly) sets themself above it, will find that events will happily take place without them. For a while, they’ll be able to sit back and reap the rewards of their pre-internet behaviour, but even as they do their impenetrable castle’s are going to start being undermined.

Suddenly I feel like this writing has turned into political polemic about the new age of an internet of things. I’m not heading in that direction though; this was just a detour, setting some groundwork before we can talk about the aforementioned raft that supports artistic economy and endeavour.

This was slightly delayed and altered by my supercold – this past few days have seen me become a pink-and-green snot making machine. Eurgh. Next up, I really will get to the ideas I talked about in the first part.

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January 5, 2009

On Mavernship (part one: rafts and curves)

Part one of some, in which you can read me espousing in a generalised year-end type way.

The other day, a very clever man explained to me about careers and learning curves. He was saying that every two years we complete another learning curve, take a look around at the career we’ve been having, and say to ourselves “has that worked? Do I really want to keep doing that for another two years, or longer?”

I’ve had a similar conversation with a few different artists recently, except that there seems to be one essential difference between the art world and the world of regular work, which is that people who work in the “straight” world (please excuse the crass generalisation) don’t really see themselves as having a choice about what they do. Whereas people who work within creative fields such as art often find themselves drawn there and stuck there by internal pressures.

It’s this pressure to make that I find interesting. Although make isn’t really the entire description: it’s also dance, sing, perform, paint, sculpt, install… any selection of words that you want to use to talk about creative work. The fact that we don’t have one single word that can sum up the creative span says a lot about our attitudes as a culture to anything outside the narrow band of work-in-an-office-sense-of-the-word work. Because these creative fields are work.

And, while it’s well known that these creative fields are not the most well remunerated, it’s still something that people want to make a living doing. Hans Abbing, the dutch economist who studied the artistic population of Holland, noted that when art stopped being the primary concern of the creative types, they often got more interesting jobs in related areas. This would be the raft of gallery, museum, and university-level jobs that enable cultural creativity to continue in the local area.

As pure conjecture, I would say that it’s impossible to rely on that raft to keep the creative economy going in any one area. For instance, the remit of universities and galleries is actually very different to what artists need. These large institutions need a constant foot-fall of visitors that they can show to funding bodies in order to qualify their existence. Artists need a way of producing work and being supported while producing work. Sometimes these two needs overlap like a venn diagram, but there will always be an overabundance of creativity that cannot be supported.

Continuing with my conjecturable musing, 2009 promises to be the start of penny-pinching times for a lot of organisations. Contrary to most people who are (like me) spouting unasked for opinion in a textual form, I can see some great upsides to this, such as finally encouraging people to take a two-year look around themselves and ask if they truly are happy at the end of their learning curve. I also think it’s a great time for people to ask if they are getting what they want from floating along with the raft.

The next section will have some thoughts on what is around apart from clinging to the raft, and will also get round to the question of mavernship in cultural circles.

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February 14, 2008

Bulletpoints

Sheesh! You’d think that just having a website was enough. But no, I have to provide interesting content for my loyal readers. Well, if that’s the case, I’m going to do it with Bulletpoints, because they’re cool.

I’m thinking of re-organising the site a bit more than it is already. I was hoping to make some more writing out of my fascination with bicycles, but honestly, it’s just not happening.
Actually, I’ve been off my bike for a while. My health has been a little shakey after what happened around the turn of the year, but I’m starting to feel a lot better, and I’m looking forward to doing some big rides this year.
I’m also getting a studio, which means that I’ll be doing some more creative stuff. In turn, this means I’ll have to talk about my retirement – ha ha, new content!
I know Topsy hates it when I just post words up, so here’s some pictures I took recently.
I meant to give them their own blogpost, but let’s just keep things moving, shall we?
I just attended some talks by Hans Abbing, which were totally fascinating. Not only that, but Hans himself was a really nice guy, and I enjoyed getting the chance to hang out with him for a short while. His work on the economy of the arts is something that really inspired me, and still does, and meeting him has encouraged me to do a few small projects of my own.
Although my previous writing on universities suggests a pretty dire history, I’ve found out that I might have a chance at attending a new course starting up this year. This solves my confusion about what to do after September if it comes through, but that’s still an ‘if’.

Is that the time? – I’m trying out a new early-rising scheme, so I better jump in bed. This makes a change from most of my life, so it’s a bit weird and I’m still adjusting. Which is why you are not watching a short video about my recent helicopter experiences, or another podcast – just think what you’ve got to look forward to!

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January 15, 2008

Sunderland Uni: Hey, remember that time…

… when my university housing caught fire? At the fusebox? In the fireman’s strike?

… when you hired that technician to run the video editing suite, who’d never used FCP or macs?

… when all the lecturers took three days a week off, for what seemed like a month, right before the degree show?

… when everybody passed the Fine Art course, no matter how hard they worked?

… when you told people they couldn’t drill into the walls of the sculpture studios, because they were full of asbestos?

… when I found out that butter on toast was 16p extra in the canteen?

… when you swelled the students attending Fine Art by over a hundred, but didn’t give any extra space to the course?

… when you got that budget for extra computers, but didn’t let students use them for two years?

Ahh, memories. I could reminisce for hours minutes.

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January 15, 2008

RCA Interview

I’m going to take a break from my review-writing and talk about some history. About three years ago (2005), around this time of year (January), I had an interview for the UK’s highest educational establishment, the Royal College of Arts.

Back then, I was really interested in making interactive art pieces. In some ways, I still am, but I wanted to go to the RCA’s Interaction Design department to fiddle with computers for two years and make cool stuff, because it was the only place in the UK that had anything like the level of techno-knowledge that I needed. If you are reading this from a bloggers point of view, you might think that last sentence sounded big-headed; however, I’d just finished studying at a university famous for it’s coverage of New Media art, where several important faculty members didn’t know how to email people.

And that’s not unusual either. The ivory towers of art academia are usually full of people who retired from using technology somepoint between betamax and steam boats. So I was really hoping to get into the RCA’s Interaction Design department, as I knew that they understood Processing, Max/MSP, and other, similar programs that were emerging around that time.

What I remember about the day is waiting outside the office for my interview, and hearing the sounds of the one workroom they had as it was full of students. And, to a man, those students seemed to be alpha-male types. The workroom of the course is very cramped, and the thought of spending two years in London, stuck in a room with braying alpha males did not appeal to me.

(Above: one of the four workbenches at the RCA’s Interaction Design room. Note the use of eMac’s, Apple’s loudest computer, which are pretty unpleasant to spend any time around.)

I didn’t do well in the interview. For one thing, I had an enormous ulcer on my tongue, which hurt when I talked. I’ve never had an ulcer like it since, but I still remember that bastard thing. Also, I wasn’t a designer. I was an artist, and they really wanted designers. Thirdly, I wasn’t somebody who wanted to do bio-art, which was where they have since re-focused the course.

I didn’t get on the course, and I was a whole lot busy with other things for that two years. It was only while doing some research last night that I remembered about that interview, as I saw a raft of familar names and what they were up to now. I guess if I’d passed that course, I could have been involved with some of the new interaction design programs coming up from London, like the people at tinker.it, or thishappened.org.

I wanted to do that course at a specific time in my life, and I think I would have been disappointed if I had got in. Instead of being thrown up against the crushing reality of living in London during an economic boom, I got to experience some really great stuff in Newcastle. And some other stuff that wasn’t so great, but was important to me.

Addendum: this blog post gets a lot of hits at the start of every year… I guess that RCA Design Interactions course is pretty popular! If you’re searching for help with the interview, or getting on the course, remember: I didn’t get on. But that doesn’t mean that I did nothing for two years – I did a whole bunch of stuff, I just didn’t get a degree from the RCA.

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