To find out more details about the transfer to The Open University see A New Chapter for OCA.
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The recent study day to the British Art Show during its Edinburgh leg seems now to me to have been all about information and the way it is shared. I met with a sterling group of engaged and interesting students. Meeting students and finding out more about why and how they study is vital for me a tutor as well as being a highly entertaining and enjoyable way to spend a day.
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I have just finished speaking to a student as part of a telephone tutorial. He is at that mid point in a project and the conversation was about taking the next steps forward. There were a few points that he made in his discussion that made me confident that he had achieved clarity and a sense of direction on the project that he was working on. “It is how I see it” was his comment to me. This was a definite statement, not a proposition, not a question. “It is how I see it” – here was a moment of realisation at the point he is it currently at.
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Sebastian Schipper is a German director with a lot of nerve, if not verve. Barred from entry to this year’s Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film because there was too much English in it – I shall return to this later, his genre-busting one-shot movie Victoria, demands of the student of Film Culture some serious reflection.
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Part 3 of Context and Narrative is all about putting yourself in the picture and exploring your personal identity through your work. Recently there have been a number of collaborative student projects featured on WeAreOCA and OCA student Blas Gonzalez, excited by this part of the course, felt there was potential to do something with his fellow students. Find out how you can take part…
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Here are some thoughts on how the Photography Matters symposium came to be. I think the doubts and fears, and above all the questions I have, and have had, around the medium may be familiar to many of you. Photography Matters is intended to be read two ways; matters pertaining to photography, and as a statement affirming that photography matters to us all.
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I have been to several exhibitions over the last few weeks and have been aware how important earlier artists have been to the ones that follow them. The phrase “anxiety of influence” was coined by the American literary critic, Harold Bloom in his eponymous book about poets, published in 1973. And writers have been worrying about it ever since. Visual artists seem less worried.
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I decided to use this blog post to offer a sneak preview of some of the things I will be talking about in my paper for the ‘Photography Matters’ conference in Doncaster in May. I will be discussing how consumer culture affects identity in advanced capitalist societies, referring to the inclusion of ‘selfies’ in advertisements.
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The nearest faraway place has been a bounding collaborative experience for 35 OCA students spanning almost three years. Students worked together to create the handmade book which is more or less 9.60 meters long and about 2.5 cm thick. Read about the project and see the results…
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Join OCA tutor Wendy McMurdo on the 14 May in Edinburgh. The Scottish Endarkenment explores a wide range of disturbing and provocative topics, from ever-escalating international conflict, social inequality and unrest, gender identity and sexual prejudice – all fired by the dialectical struggles within the Scottish psyche between good and evil, self and the Other.
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In choosing to make a painting you are choosing to use paint. That maybe a tautology but I just want to start with it as I want to emphasise the significance of that material. That choice, the significance of that material, immediately becomes part of your subject matter.
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