Student work: Archive as Creative Presentation 

As the culmination of the first Creative Arts degree unit: 1.1 Experience Creative Arts, students produce a practical response to creative archive methods. The work they make is submitted as the main part of their Creative Presentation at assessment. Our students produce a diverse range of responses and are combining media and forms in some exceptional ways.

This blog post introduces the production of a creative archive by ECA student Tim Harbridge. Tim’s Box Concert archive demonstrates an excellent and engaging use of combined methods across film, audio, physical objects, and installation. 

Tim’s archive documents, reflects on, and develops out of his initial response to the covid pandemic restrictions which prevented singers, songwriters, musicians, actors, poets and storytellers from performing in public between March 2020 and June 2021. During that time Tim created a wooden box stage for performers to come and record a 30 minute set which could then be broadcast to audiences.

Using this event to spark the production of an archive, Tim edited the original video, adding interviews with the original performers alongside relevant objects. These elements were all carefully curated and assembled to present to a live audience which had been missing from the original concerts. The multifaceted aspects of this engaging archive are presented as a web-page here:

https://timharbridge.wordpress.com/

Tim says of his experience of creating the archive::

“Having the opportunity to revisit the 2021 Box Concerts through the lens of the OCA’s Experience Creative Arts teaching format enabled me to re-engage with the original project from an entirely new angle and perspective. The analytical tools and reflection and research techniques I’ve encountered in Unit 1 enabled me to reconsider and reposition the project in the contexts of time and place and with the benefits of objective hindsight and creative practice”