Week 2 CCAD Art in the Making

Art in the Making - Week 2

Venue: Art Trail

Host: David Upton

For the first installment of Art in the Making students and staff met at one ofthe venues in use for ArtTrail 2011, a disused furniture shop on Perry Street. The venue housed three groups of work by local and international artists with a strong emphasis on lens based media. David Upton, a recent graduate from the Crawford College who recieved an ArtTrail graduate award this year and one of the artists exhibiting in the show, led a discussion on the rise in video art and its current ubquity in contemporary art.

The group discussed issues relating to video as a medium such as the problems of working in a medium where the newest technological developments become outdated and appear old fashioned in a matter of years and tackeling viewers familiarity with the production standards and budgets of film and television. The group debated whether or not video is a democratic medium though its origins lie in the counter culture of the 60s has it sold out? As a medium associated the conceptual movement and non-objecthood can it be seen as anti-capitalist? Methods of presentation were also discussed from the cinematic projection to the everything goes video installation, opinion was divided on the presentation of accompanying sound with video headphones definetly not being a preferred method.