UMBC - FHSH June 2005
Project Overview:
In June of 2005, a select team of artist/researchers from the Department of Visual Arts and its IMDA Graduate Program traveled to Germany to participate in a Collaborative Art Project with the faculty and students of our Undergraduate Foreign Exchange Program partner the Fachhochschule Schwäbisch Hall (University of Applied Sciences, Schwäbisch Hall, Germany). The project was designed to replicate professional-level international collaboration often found in art events or “symposium” and similar in intent and mode to the exhibition context in which international professional artists are currently working.
This process afforded an internal opportunity for IMDA graduate students and Visual Arts faculty to collaborate on a professional level as artists and externally to interact likewise with their counterparts in Germany. Project concepts, media and forms were first proposed free form, in think-tank fashion between the schools via email, designing open-ended concepts that allowed for considerable flexibility for appropriate changes upon arrival. Once together in Schwäbisch Hall, the two school’s groups fused their ideas in light of the practical constraints of time and place into five project ideas and working groups.
This pedagogical design was to model, at “nuts & bolts” level, how international collaboration works in the “art world”, while providing a "real world" creative experience for our graduate students. The goal then was - to produce collaborative projects that afforded ample opportunity to experience planning with foreign artists. This would be followed by appropriate negotiations and amendments prompted by face-to-face meetings with our collaborators, the technical and social differences of our cultures, the unforeseen obstacles, all within a rather short time-line and with limited resources – and of course, to aspire to quality creative results.
Those finished collaborative artworks: performances, installations, web works culminated in an exhibition entitled, “Segue / Überlappen”, at FHSH’s Grüner Baum and which were also shown in conjunction with “Showcase” the 2005 Schwäbisch Hall Film Festival.