OER1058 Demonstration

Process Arts: a new collaborative online studio community exploring Process in Arts Practice

Chris Follows, University of the Arts London

Conference Theme: Open educational communities

Intended audience: Students, teachers and artists

Abstract: How can professional and educational studio art practices be documented and shared online? What are the advantages and disadvantages of showing the art studio process and viewing the processes of others? It is common practice for students, teachers and artists to document their practice through exploring and questioning the making process, for example in sketchbooks or through samples and experimentation. Those that do, have few options for presenting this documentation to others. How do students, teachers and artists approach, view and use such forms of documentation? Process Arts is a new collaborative online resource showing user driven video, image and text documentation of the many hidden traditional and contemporary creative processes practiced in educational and professional art studios daily. The website provides a dynamic user driven online studio community that focuses on making at all levels in art and design, stimulating discussion, interest and collaboration, whilst also sharing, informing and engaging with the wider online community. The two key aspects of developing Process Arts are:

1. Environment: Creating a simple, user-friendly and accessible media driven site with good multi media functionality.
2. Content: Exploring different methods of documenting and communicating arts practice online and assessing how much support, advice and guidance is required to facilitate and encourage the development of skills and ideas.

Although Process Arts is an open resource, and widely accessible, presently, only staff and students at UAL will be able to upload content directly. Process Arts is due to go live in January 2010. Early feedback has been extremely positive. Students viewing the site have been eager to engage, and several students have commented ‘they wish they had a website like this, years ago’. Staff have commented on how much they like the idea of students and staff uploading content together, and believe ‘its the right time for a project like this’ and ‘Process Arts can be the conduit for creative exchange, encouraging communication while supporting learning across all disciplines and media.’ External visitors viewing content via our YouTube channel have commented on how useful, helpful and inspiring the content is. The presentation will discuss and demonstrate how Process Arts has been designed with these issues in mind.

Keywords: Collaborative, Process, documenting, sharing, Arts, Art studio, Art practice, making

References/URL: Process Arts is due to launch in January 2010 and be widely accessible in time for the conference.