Unfortunately, I failed to change the student’s minds as planned for the last intervention, but when this model exposes to them, it has the potential changes. And in the last tutorial with Minka, she suggested calling back to the participants to see some potential changes.
I sent messages to the workshop group to ask participants whether they have some thoughts after the last workshop, no matter the career model that I showed them or their own career model.
Yuchen (art practitioner) said that she is thinking about the balance between the critical path and the commercial path, which I mentioned in the multiple identities ability. Apart from that, she also thinking about her own communication ability. Since she always works with interdisciplinary workers, she thinks she needs to strengthen her communication ability with them, and think about how to translate interdisciplinary jargon into visual language.
I think she start to think about her own career model based on her personal experience. That is the thing I want to see, and I believe there are more potencial change.
Yuchen’s reply
Yuchen’s reply
Yuchen’s reply
Here is the answers from Muzi and Sirui:
Muzi (art practitioner) said that she is thinking about the sence of value. She also mentioned some abilities in my career model becomes to must-have ability. life will push you to grow up and develop it. But she is greatful that I conducted this workshop, since she is too busy to think and talk like this for a long time.
But her reply reminds me again that my career model is not the only and perfect answer. What I want to change is not let all the fine art student follow my career moodel. My model is just a reference, and I am trying to give the light in the dark, since this model was missing from my previous education. The real change is let them thinking about their own model, rather than only focus on studio skills. As what Muzi said, the ability in my model is the must-have ability for her, so how about her own model? Is there are other special abilities for her?I think that’s the potential change, and it needs time.
While Sirui (student) still have no thoughts. She only care about the recent exam. I think the difference is really depends on the status. Students do not know the cruelty of the society. But I still believe it has potencial change after she graduate and experiences some setbacks in the future.
Conclusion: In this intervention, I found and verified the difference/gap between art practitioners and students. People have better interpersonal skills, cooperation skills, and independent thinking skills after work. In addition, because of the specificity of students’ identities (innocence, ego mentality, not having experienced the cruelty of society), it isn’t easy to make them realize the importance of other abilities in the development model. It’s hard to change them (this is also where this intervention failed.) But this failure made me think about this model’s place, before graduation, after graduation or after work.I failed in changing the student participants, but this model gave two other (art practitioners) more thought about their ability development, which I did not expect.In addition, the sample size of this workshop is relatively small, which cannot fully explain the problem. This needs to be further studied by enlarging the sample size. At the same time, I found a new ability that I could consider adding to my model: endurance/tolerance.
Career model iteration – version 5
Introduction: I designed a series of multiple task based on my career model. Each question has one correct choice which represents one ability. I plan to ask participants these questions and ask them to answer them and explain why. Also observe how they answer the questions to find out the differences between them. And try to make student participants aware of the differences between themselves and art practitioners and think about those differences.
Audience: I invited two art practitioners who has fine art background and one fine art background student who study in Italy right now.
My goal: 1) to verify the difference between art practitioners and students. 2) to change student’s thought about develop other abilities in a all around way. 3) to discover other abilities that I didn’t notice before and develop my career model.
Muzi
Yuchen
Sirui
Host-Sidi
Record:
Participant’s answers:
1.Organization ability
Please give your answer after carefully considering the logic and possible consequences.Imagine you are painting at home and the following things happen at the same time. In what order would you tackle them?
1)The doorbell rings.
2)Two cats next to you suddenly fight, and it is hard to separate.
3)The phone rings.
4)The bathtub is about to overflow.
5)You’ve spilled your paint and it’s about to spill on the floor.
correct answer: 2-5-4-1-3
Sirui: 5-1-4-3-2, I am not a organized people.
Yuchen: : 5-3-1-2-4, I think I am more organized at work than in life.
Muzi: 5-4-1-2-5, I’m an impulsive person.
2. Interpersonal skills/communication ability
Suppose you commission a gallery/institution to sell your work and they tell you that five copies were sold last week, you will…..
A. Feel happy and keep working on it.
B. Ask the gallery for a list of buyers.
C. Ask the gallery for a list of buyers, and try to contact them when appropriate.
correct answer: C
Sirui: A
Yuchen: C
Muzi: C
3. Cooperative ability
Suppose you need to select a project. One is to complete a painting project independently, the other is to work as a team. These two projects require the same amount of time and energy for you. Which one would you prefer?
A. Independent project, reason…
B. Team project, reason…
Correct answer:B
Sirui: A, I don’t like to socialize. I just want to do my thing.
Yuchen: A, I don’t want to spend time and energy communicating with others, and I want to minimize unnecessary misunderstandings.
Muzi: A/B, I can’t decide. On the one hand, I don’t like to communicate with others. On the other hand, I think team work can expand my network and help me in my future work.
4. Independent thinking
You are drawing a painting to be marked at the end of the term. Your teacher, whom you like and admire very much, gives you some suggestions, but you are not sure whether the teacher’s suggestions are right. What will you do?
A. Continue to work on your original idea
B.Try to revise it as the teacher suggested
C.Seek other people’s suggestions and revise them after comprehensive consideration
Correct answer: C
Sirui: B, If I have no idea, I will certainly listen to the teacher, after all, I don’t want to fail.
Yuchen: B, If the revision is not too complicated, I will follow the teacher’s advice.
Muzi: C, When I was a student, I chose A, but now I choose C.
5. A Commitment to Curiosity
Imagine that your friend has created a new piece of work to share with you, this is the style that you don’t like. How would you respond?
A.Give a false compliment.
B. Directly express that you don’t like the work.
C. Although I don’t like this style, I still try to see the advantages of others and give affirmation.
Correct answer: C
Sirui: A, As long as it is my good friend, no matter how he draws, I will praise him.
Yuchen: C, I think there must be something I can learn, like composition, color, whatever.
Muzi: A, I’m going to go for A.
Q：What do you think has changed the most between your student years and now?
Muzi: I think my tolerance has gotten better. I used to be more intuitive and impulsive. But now I’m more patient.
Yuchen: I work in a game company, and I think I’ve also improved my tolerance, as well as my ability to cooperate and communicate
Q：I have just interpreted my model, and you can also see the difference between you and the other two participants in the process of the workshop. Would you consider developing more of your other abilities now?
Sirui: I’m not going to develop anything else right now. I think I’m still focus on myself.
Q: For example, you and the other two participants gave different answers to the second question about the gallery helping you sell your paintings. Will you still choose A without contacting the buyers?
Sirui: Yes, I was afraid of offending the gallery, and there was no point contacting the buyer. The gallery is in charge of selling, they are more professional,I think it’s enough that I just paint.
This series of questions is designed around my current career model (As shown above). I want to discuss the test below in the workshop to find out 1)if the participants have the capabilities that lie beneath the problem. 2)what’s the difference between the student group and the art practitioners group. 3) Change students’ minds.
1.Organization ability
Please give your answer after carefully considering the logic and possible consequences.Imagine you are painting at home and the following things happen at the same time. In what order would you tackle them?
1)The doorbell rings.
2)Two cats next to you suddenly fight, and it is hard to separate.
3)The phone rings.
4)The bathtub is about to overflow.
5)You’ve spilled your paint and it’s about to spill on the floor.
correct answer: 2-5-4-1-3
2. Interpersonal skills/communication ability
Suppose you commission a gallery/institution to sell your work and they tell you that five copies were sold last week, you will…..
A. Feel happy and keep working on it.
B. Ask the gallery for a list of buyers.
C. Ask the gallery for a list of buyers, and try to contact them when appropriate.
correct answer: C
3. Cooperative ability
Suppose you need to select a project. One is to complete a painting project independently, the other is to work as a team. These two projects require the same amount of time and energy for you. Which one would you prefer?
A. Independent project, reason…
B. Team project, reason…
Correct answer:B
4. Independent thinking
You are drawing a painting to be marked at the end of the term. Your teacher, whom you like and admire very much, gives you some suggestions, but you are not sure whether the teacher’s suggestions are right. What will you do?
A. Continue to work on your original idea
B.Try to revise it as the teacher suggested
C.Seek other people’s suggestions and revise them after comprehensive consideration
Correct answer: C
5. A Commitment to Curiosity
Imagine that your friend has created a new piece of work to share with you, this is the style that you don’t like. How would you respond?
A.Give a false compliment.
B. Directly express that you don’t like the work.
C. Although I don’t like this style, I still try to see the advantages of others and give affirmation.
At first, I am trying to design a board game that combines and connect all of these abilities, and then invite art student and art practitioners to play it together. Then I can observe the difference between the two groups and let the art student group realize the gap between themselves and the other group. I tried to find some board games, but I didn’t find a suitable one, and it’s hard to design a board game that meets my requirements and expectations. So I think maybe testing each ability one by one is also a good choice. and I would like to start with ‘organization ability’.
I am thinking about in what situation, people could realize that they lack some ability. I think there are two ways. One is comparing with others, and the other is being pointed out by others.
So, for me, I have two ways to design my intervention.
1) inviting mature art practitioners and art students to do/play sth together.
2)using a quiz/test to test art students and point out their shortcomings.
Since I didn’t find a suitable art practitioner now, and I can not make sure the art practitioner has the ability that the art student has not. So I wanna start my next intervention from the second way.
Then I design a quiz which is about organization ability, after they finished, I will show them the right answer and tell them that the more similar to the right answer the more organized people they are. My goal is to test 1) whether fine art students lack organization ability 2) whether I can make them realize it and change their minds about becoming more organized people.
The right answer should be 2-5-4-1-3, and the more similar to the right answer the more organised they are.
Reasons:
1) Two cats next to you are engaged in a fierce fight that is hard to stop. It is very dangerous for your artworks when you are painting, and the cat next to you is fighting because they might destroy your paintings. So the first thing is to divide them. 2) Your paint has tipped over. Usually, the paint is right next to you, so simply bending down to pick it up can prevent worse things from happening in a second. It also prevents fighting cats from stepping paint elsewhere. 3）The bathtub is about to overflow. Here I said ‘about‘, which means you still have time to turn it off. So it’s not too late to pick up a cat, pick up a paint can, and run to turn it off. 4) The doorbell is ringing. You can tell the person at the door to wait for two minutes when you deal with the previous things. And you don’t know what the guy at the door wants from you. If he takes a long time, by the time you get back, the cat may have destroyed your work, trampled paint all over the place, and the bathroom is also flooded. 5)The mobile phone is ringing. You can call back later, so the priority is the lowest.
Uncomfortable zone: I didn’t find people I was already familiar with this time, and I sent it to 6 fine art students. I also try to contact some Fine art students in UAL that I don’t know through the WeChat group of the university student Union. There are only six people so far, but at least compared to previous ones, This time I tried to find a target audience I didn’t know.
Their answers of question one:
A: 2-5-4-3-1
B: 1-5-4-2-3
C: 2-5-1-3-4
D: 3-5-4-2-1
E: 3-5-2-1-4
F: 2-5-1-3-4
Their answers to question two:
The more similar it is to ‘5-2-4-1-3’, the more organized you are. If your answer is far from this one, you need to work on your organizational skills! Do you think you are an organized person? What do you think of this statement?
A: I don’t think I am an organized person, but I will try my best to keep things under control.
B: I don’t think the order can explain the ability of organization.
C: I am more organized. Everyone’s understanding of organization is different. I sorted things according to their urgency. Everyone has different views on these things.
D: Maybe
E:/
F: It depends on the situation. Sometimes when doing travel strategy, I will be more organized, but in daily life, it seems that it is not good.
Analyze and reflection:
All these participant didn’t answer the right answers that I design. I think their some problems in my test. I need told them this test is about organization ability at the beginning, and remind them that before they make chose they should consider the potential outcomes and the logical order.
I think maybe I should try test this through online workshop. Since some participants just fill this randomly rather than tell me their true thoughts. And the online workshop allows me to better observe the participants and judge whether the answers they give are not completely true.
At the end of this test, I should have told them the reasons of right answers, which will be more convincing.
I would say that this is a failed intervention. My goal is using this test as a intervention to 1) verify my assumption-they lack of organization ability. 2)help them realize it and try to develop it.
I received 26 pieces of feedback on this intervention.
Compare to the previous exploration, this intervention is a relatively useful way to strengthen the audience’s connection and resonance when viewing the exhibition. The data shows that 50% of people think the background sound can help them get more into the paintings. And most people can understand what the artists tried to express correctly.
From the angle of helping the audience better understand artworks, it is a relatively effective way. Now, I am thinking about the next step. How can I push my project deeper and further?
A friend of mine who was studying in Newcastle recently had a staged pop-up show. After I communicated with him, he agreed with me to experiment with some sound. I think this is a good opportunity to experiment in a real place, and the audience is visiting the painting in a real space and hearing the sound at the same time.
His paintings are also relatively abstract paintings. The paintings I used in intervention 2 are his works as well.
After intervention 4, I thought that sound and painting are different media for expressing emotions. If they are used as different media to express the same emotion, even if there is no direct correspondence between the content they express (for example, the sound in my intervention 2 is mainly description The content of the painting), can it better convey the information?
So the first thing I need to do is understand what the artist wants to convey in this series of artworks. He said:” The name of my series of works is ‘This Is What We Have Gone Through’. Before the pandemic improved, I came to a strange city alone as an international student. I have experienced a long time with myself, and I often feel very lonely. In this series of works, I ,as a recorder, use an artistic perspective to record the pandemic that I have experienced. What I saw, what I thought, and what I felt. The epidemic has changed the trajectory of many people’s lives, and I hope my works can also bring some thoughts to the audience.”
Based on the interview with him and his paintings, I try to create the sound of ‘Lonely, wrapped and alienated’.
1. Please use 3 keywords to describe how you feel after seeing this painting.
A：Hot; Planet; Confused
B：Retro; Psychedelic; Serious
C：Mysterious; Chaotic; Unbalanced
D：Moon; Universe; Touch
E：Space; Remote; Hot
2. Please describe the degree to which you feel connected to this painting from 1 to 5?
3. Please use 3 keywords to describe how you feel after watching the video?
A: Industrial pollution; Steam siren; Noise
B: Serious; Sci-fi; Future
C: Scary; Profound; Supernatural
D: Sad; Countdown; Destination
E: No feelings
4. Please describe the degree to which you feel connected to this painting from 1 to 5?
5. How do you feel about music?
A: Busy port.
B: Serious; it feels like a prelude to a major event.
C: I think it’s mysterious and detached from reality.
D: Sad.
E: Feel like mining.
Comparing the two scoring charts, three people felt that the connection became stronger, and one even felt that the addition of music made him feel less connection.
Comparing the two keywords, I found that after adding music, the audience’s understanding did not change much. Some words are the same (orange part); some words are guided by sound, such as the sound of siren and countdown ( The blue part); some people even think that adding sound will make it feel-less.
There are many researches on the relationship of sound and color, and their theories will be influenced by the author’s own background, cultural environment, time and other factors. Therefore, to a certain extent, what music represents and what color is a subjective personal point of view, and it is not universal.
Sound and images are different media that can give different sensory stimuli. For the next step, I want to test if I use these two media to express the same emotion, even if there is no corresponding relationship between the two, will it enhance the transmission of information?
Nomura, J., 1998. Commodity color theory – the study of utility development by color. Chikura Shobo.
For this intervention, The painting I chose comes from my friend. He is an art student who is studying surreal painting recently.
Step 1: Choose the instrument’s sound, note and scale.
1. What instrument’s sound should I choose?
I extracted the four main colors in this work (Vermillion, Dark blue, Yellow and black.) and referred to Kandinsky’s color theory. The Tuba represents vermilion, the cello represents dark blue and the trumpet represents yellow.
2. Which note in C major should I choose? (do,re,mi,fa,so,la,si)
I referred to Newton’s Musical Color Wheel. Vermilion- E (re), Blue- A (so), Yellow-F (mi).
3. Which scale sound should I choose?
Nomura (1985) “Commodity Color Theory” explains the scale and color listening: “From all the scales, the high scale tends to be bright and smooth, and the children’s scale is normalized to light and dark colors, and the strongest tone is Will be close to this color, the weakest tone color is newly blurred, and is close to the target; the scale of the flat semitone will remind people of the warm color system, the scale of the sharp semitone is the color system; the gentle music music singer blue association, fast Rhythmic music has a red association; high notes represent bright colors, while low notes are dull.”
This is about ideasthesia. From the perspective of lightness, dark colors are bass and bright colors are treble. Because this painting has a deeper feeling overall, I will use a lower tone.
After intervention 3, I redesign my research question:
How can I increase the audience’s participation and interaction when visiting the exhibition so that the audience can have more understanding and connection with the artwork?
I no longer regard buying and selling as my sole purpose, but turn to the multi-experience and better understanding when they visit the exhibition in the gallery.
Thinking from this perspective, inviting the audience to create music and sounds during the visit is not very easy to achieve. So I reviewed Kandinsky’s theory of music and colour again.
I plan to test whether the audiences can better understand the artwork by adding music corresponding to the colour of the artwork?
There are 2 reasons： 1. In Intervention 3, I found that the music and the painting are connected to some extent through the instruments chosen by the audience. (wood instrument)
2. Not everyone has synesthesia, but the conclusion shows that music and pictures are connected to a certain degree. So, can Kandinsky’s theory apply to more people?
Now, I need to solve three problems:
1. What instrument’s sound should I use? 2. What tone should I use? (C、D、E、F、G、A、B) 3. Which octave sound should I use?
