Monday 5 August 2013

Recollect Revisited

This week was the AUT Art & Design Postgraduate Symposium, and a lot has happened in the lead up to it. On Wednesday I was fortunate enough to receive the Art & Design Discipline Postgraduate Research Award (Digital Design).

Accepting the award from my supervisor Greg Bennett. © Zak Waipara.

Thursday, I presented my current Masters transmedia research project to a public filled auditorium. This meant spending the three weeks prior trying to organise my material into a presentable form in order to communicate the gist of it clearly. It was a useful exercise, it brought some ideas to the fore (like genealogy as a metaphorical linking theme) – which I will now use to bolster up the actual written research component that will accompany my transmedia project. It provided some much needed impetus to the project in general and helped me organise the various elements in a way that lets me see how much is still required to complete the various transmedia sections.

Graduation was held on the previous Friday and I graduated (albeit in absentia), and my Honours document arrived by courier today. In order to graduate, the prospective graduand must lodge their work (with corrections with the AUT library). I had only a few minor corrections to make to the text copy, and some timing issues to fix on the actual short film/animations. Those of us Art & Design students who had used moving image as a medium had our work screened together as one continuous looping reel, the exhibition being held last year in St Pauls St Gallery at AUT.


The Recollect DVD © Copyright 2013 Zak Waipara


I used the intervening time, between its screening and submission to the library, to tweak some of the motion graphics, improve parts of the art, finish off some sections that were rushed to meet the deadline etc. This took longer than expected, because the motion graphics all had so many ‘moving parts’ and in fixing some areas, other errors popped up. As a result, I ended up having to submit the DVD twice! That meant I missed the cut off date to apply to graduate in person (hence the ‘in absentia’ part). 

So this post marks the official completion and submission/acceptance of my Honours thesis (part exegesis and part practical project). It will now be held, as a digital copy, in the AUT’s library. Parts of this blog have been created from the exegesis document, with some sections almost verbatim and others summaries or re-wordings, while of course other entries are wholly original – having only a tangential connection. 

This blog was set up to talk about using academia (postgraduate research and classroom experience) to help produce creative work. An academic lens is a perfectly appropriate way to describe this process, because in addition to providing parameters, deadlines and measurable outcomes it also forces you to focus in on what you are really doing and the why of it. It gives you a chance to describe your work thoroughly, in a way that might not be asked of you in an industry based project. In the academic environment, even if only working part-time, it is hard to maintain credible industry experience, even more so if engaged in a full-time teaching position. In addition the rapid changes in technology, techniques and design trends in the digital arena can make any prior experience less relevant to practical training/tuition due to its currency or lack of it. Research with a creative practical component offers some potential to achieve a much sought after balance between being a lecturer and a practitioner.