With the one-week task from our first unit 5 session in mind, Elsa and I walked to the reception area intending to ask the receptionist about problems they’ve encountered. Instead, we found a student sitting in the area looking a bit troubled. We approach her and explained our task. She told us she was sitting out here from a lecture because she was having tech issues with Moodle, the university site that stores everything we need on our course. I took a picture of her sitting there, in the busy reception, head down in the frustrating problem of not being able to access the invisible content. We thanked her and left.
Right after, Elsa and I discussed how we can split up this task. We discussed how to visualize the problem, and I suggested photoshopping the problem to make it visible, having error codes swarming around her like flies. Elsa didn’t know how to use photoshop and I knew only basics, so I figured I will try to do this. She suggested she could add some color after to highlight the ‘problem’ experienced. Making plans to fit our schedules, I proceeded to experiment with the idea.
I’ve always admired the magic of Photoshop, amazed at some of the photo manipulation and collages I’ve seen in the past, but I know it is not a skill you can just learn in one day. Knowing how to use Photoshop takes a lot of buildup of experience - you wouldn’t know what to learn jumping into it, but as you encounter things you want to achieve, those are the things that will force you to watch tutorials, and achieve each little thing bit by bit. I only knew the basics of photoshop since I was quite passionate about making gifs last year - which, surprisingly, forced me to learn other small tricks in the program. Unfortunately it is very easy for me to forget skills such as this, so I am a little rusty in memory. I am glad this task enabled me to challenge myself again, even though it was a relatively simple edit, it still pushed me to use technology which I am always challenged by. Digital art is another thing - I’ve made stickers on the app LINE before, and that was quite difficult for a beginner. But for a more ‘realistic’ drawing you would need to use the brushes and build layers upon layers like a real painting. My frustration is that I don’t even know how to do that in real life, much less digitally! I hope with more experimentation with real paint I could dabble in the digital one day as well.
l didn’t 100% like how it turned out, as I always have trouble finding out a balance in graphic edits, but after Elsa highlighted it with oil pastel it looked much better. The tutors quite liked it and agreed that Moodle can be a source of problems. There has been a lot of confusion on where to find information even though it is all there. It is also not the most aesthetic of websites - especially coming from UAL. Anyway, it was really fascinating and useful hearing the other problems uncovered from the session by other groups. I didn’t know there could be so many underlying problems in the university.
This session started off with both the tutors talking about how they collaborate within their practice, we then moved on to presenting the 1 week work we did last week. It was really interesting seeing the various problems being highlighted throughout the university, including login/moodle issues, cafeteria space, lady at the art shop, not enough people using the library, and not having a technician to help with the 3D printer.
After splitting into groups, I decided to go in the 3D printer space issue since I did not even know this existed in our university and I think this is an issue. Having the equipment but not being able to utilise it to its fullest. During our group discussion however, Katie and Karolina voiced out their frustration of unit 5 - the collaboration unit taking up the same weighting/percentage of grading to our own studio practice(unit 6). Katie was saying instead of inorganic tasks like this, (seeking out the negative issues directly, one that not everyone in the group feels as strongly about) she would rather learn about more operational and practical things such as how to apply for funding/ how to approach others for collaboration etc. It was a fair point and personally I do feel a lack in knowledge in that area too. It is frankly quite daunting to know you’re out there on your own being expected to collaborate without having the knowledge on how to build bridges and who to contact etc. Karolina was saying how it could have been an optional thing since it’s unfair for everyone to be forced to be ‘comfortable’ to collaborate. There was a lot of other good arguments as well. On the other hand Kerry felt really positive about this unit as it pushed her out of her comfort zone. I am feeling kind of in between the two extremes. We discussed further with the tutors, and how to approach the 3D printer problem. The general idea right now is to make our own ‘technician’ perhaps even using the equipment in the space. We decide to hunt for materials, thinking of the skip beside the costume design area where mannequin parts sometimes appear. For monday we decide to meet and sketch out an idea of what this technician could look like.
