LIFE BEYOND A BOX

What creature is your question?

Issued Wednesday 1 December 2010
Presentation: Tuesday 11 January 2011

Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel?
Polonius: By the mass, and t’is like a camel, indeed.
Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.
Polonius: It is backed like a weasel.
Hamlet: Or like a whale?
Polonius: Very like a whale.
Shakespeare, Hamlet Act III Sc II

Introduction
Year Two of the course requires you to take a very high degree of independent initiative in re-evaluating, developing, and managing your major research project, including, essentially, the production of artefacts and their testing by external review, and a number of further re-iteration and re-testing processes.

Towards the end of Year One, you were asked to turn your question into an artefact-critique: a representation of a life form and its necessary support systems. This new project, which will consolidate and progress that experience, takes you through into the Second Year by asking you to build on your analytical and dimensionalisation skills to produce a further artefact that represents your research question in its independent form.

Brief
In response to your reflection and analysis following feedback on the earlier project, your project should be showing signs of flourishing independently in preparation for rigorous external review. You are now asked to create a new artefact that gives dimension to your ambitions and expectations for the evolution and growth of your project. The fragility and dependence of the earlier “life-form” will be giving way to an independent organism that is capable of blossoming, putting down roots, flying, hunting, foraging, grazing, swimming, digging, or whatever it needs to do to thrive and evolve.

As before, your production process should be focused on your ability to communicate rather than your ability to create entrancing objects, and remember that it is legitimate to find someone to help you to manufacture your artefacts.


Presentation
Your artefact is to be presented to your Year 2 Tutor and Tutor Group in the studio on Tuesday 11 January 2011. You are advised to avoid dependence on the functioning of technological elements.

Your representation of your project as an artefact should address at least the following questions:

• What kind of life-form has your project emerged as now?
• What elements of the box it needed to survive when in its previous incarnation has it retained, and how are these now dimensionalised?
• What new elements does it now need in its environment to sustain and develop it?
• Why have you produced your response in this particular way?
• How will you monitor and direct the development of the life-form you have created?
• How, and why, might your life-form fall prey to others in the food chain or to disasters?
• When next re-incarnated, or fully evolved, what might your life-form be?

After the presentation, you should also hand your tutor a hard copy of a revised What Why How If project proposal.


Criteria
The project presentation is not a summative assessment point, but it will be evaluated as part of ongoing formative assessment by your tutor. This will be evaluated against the following criteria:

• Your ability to give dimension to complex ideas through an artefact
• Your ability to critique your personal ambitions for the outcome of your project
• The clarity and relevance of your artefact presentation and its success in capturing your question
• Your ability to focus on essential points
• The level of risk-taking your artefact presentation displays
• Your ability to produce an artefact that does not use an aesthetic appeal as a substitute for content and communication.
• Your ability to evolve your project in response to feedback and other sources of relevant knowledge such as desk research, exhibitions, and other encounters.