Course description
Content
The 21st Century has seen digital technology rapidly expand into mainstream culture, with the internet offering a truly global audience. Art now exists outside the gallery and the critical debate has made the same transition. Creative thinkers and practitioners have always found inspiration in their surroundings and technology has supplied a whole new set of tools for the creative individual. Our environment has changed beyond recognition as public, private, commercial and artistic data floats around us in a digital state. It is this challenge of understanding and interpreting 'the digital’ in our contemporary environment that is the focus of the course.
Course Highlights
Creative staff, with professional practices of their own, will help you develop your ideas and technical skills, while the University’s IT Research and Development Unit offers advice on technology and its implications for projects. This all adds to a vibrant and dynamic atmosphere.
MA Digital Arts Staff
The course team is made up of staff from both Camberwell and ITRDU (Information Technology Research and Development Unit). Course Leader, Andrew Stiff, has been teaching at Camberwell on various digital courses for the last five years. His work with multi-media arts cooperative, D-Fuse, has involved working on web, interactive and video projects. Recently he has exhibited in Rome and Seoul. The team also includes David Rowsell (Senior Researcher), whose professional activity in the field includes a partnership in Aend Corporation, web design, video post-production and multimedia company works.
The critic and curator Paul Tebbs, whose writing regularly appears in Sourse, Afterimage and Art Review leads the Postgraduate Professional Development unit.
In 2003, the quality of postgraduate learning at Camberwell was officially recognised by the Quality Assurance Agency, the higher education standards authority. The spirit of challenge engendered by the college's postgraduate community and its capacity to incorporate both traditional and new technologies won special praise. The QAA found our teaching to be current, responsive to students' needs and informed by staff research and professional practice.
Structure
The MA does not focus on technology but presents it as a tool to facilitate ideas, placing emphasis upon its creative use. You will be required to research, then contextualise and develop your project proposal into a final piece of work. Staff with backgrounds in many aspects of the digital medium will advise and help develop your projects, encouraging confidence in your own digital skills and ideas. Further experimentation with the communicative aspects of the digital is offered by collaborative presentations with students from the online version of this course. The students who apply are varied: artists, architects and graphic designers all bring different ideas to the course. We aim to help realise your ideas and to develop a context for your work. Studies are complemented by lectures, seminars and workshops designed to help you develop wider contextual understanding, research skills and awareness of professional issues. MA Digital Arts is part of the postgraduate community at Camberwell and there area number of ways in which the MA courses interact, most notably through research skills and career development. There is also a shared lecture programme, which draws upon the richness of research within the College and the University.
Your MA at Camberwell includes the chance to improve your research and career development skills. You'll have access to workshops in IT skills, individual and group tutorials for discussions on professional issues, and tutor-led seminars. This unit is an integral part of all MA courses at Camberwell, providing a critical perspective on research and practice. It introduces the students to key principles of research and equips them with the skills necessary to pursue their professional development.
Career Prospects
You will be prepared for a wide range of destinations in the creative industries. In past years some students have gone on to become practicing artists and freelance designers, while others have gained positions in teaching and research. A moving image collective, Photon Shepherds, met on this course and two other students have come back to study for a PhD, feeding back their expertise into the course.
Entry Requirements
-A good honours degree in a related subject
-Portfolio and/or slides of supporting work
-International students must show proof of IELTS level 6.5 or above in English on enrolment
-Project proposal
Project Proposal
Application for MA courses is by proposal. You’ll need to include with your application form a short proposal outlining your project, the research question it will address, its context, your methodology and the resources you would like to draw upon. Your project will need to be sustained to completion by a combination of independent study and tutorial advice. Studies are complemented by lectures, seminars and workshops designed to help you develop wider contextual understanding, research skills and awareness of professional issues.
The Project Proposal should outline:
-Research Question - What are you proposing to discover or explore?
-Context - What work, both theoretical and practical, relates to your project?
-Methodology - What methods will you employ to research your project?
-Resources - What equipment, facilities and expertise will you require to carry out your research?
