Research Paper 3 – Thoughts, Background and Final Version That’s it – no more! Yesterday and today became the ‘final straw’ with my research paper! Why? Because yesterday my ‘dying’ on its ‘last legs’ MacBook Pro decided that it was going to literally lose all of my research papers and drafts. I know it’s somewhat unbelievable but this actually happened! Months of hard work seemed to have disappeared in front of my eyes. The files were no longer there! I tried opening programs that I had used to construct the last version of my paper, but it was always the same message ‘File cannot be found’. I even convinced my self that there was some evil hacker trying to sabotage my work, that’s how upset I was. At one point I even thought I must be having a nightmare and that I would wake up soon. As I had been editing the document in Adobe’s PDF editing program I thought to myself, ‘Ha’ there will be a copy stored in Adobe’s creative cloud. So, feeling somewhat smug, I looked at my recent documents there, only to discover that on opening my research paper it gave an error message saying ‘bad […]
Summary of the Dean Kenning Lectures Term One Below are short summaries of the Dean Kenning Lectures that began this term Oct 2022. I will document these on a termly basis and include relevant slides. The Art and Politics of Statues 18/10/22 – This was the first lecture at the start of the term. I think that the key takeaway here was that sometimes it isn’t always appropriate to ‘hijack’ someone else’s cause because it could be seen as self serving self promotion. The case in point was the Marc Quinn ‘A Surge of Power’ (Jen Reid) erected 15th July 2020. Anti-racism protesters in England pulled down a statue of a 17th-century slave trader while demonstrating in solidarity with the US Black Lives Matter movement. Quinn surreptitiously erected the statue early on the morning of 15th July 2020. Although this would seem like an act of solidarity on his part as a white male, it raises questions about the true motivation behind it. Was Quinn simply trying to use a political situation in order to further his own career? Would it have been better to have community art erected instead of art from a white male already making a […]
A Little Confession – Before I begin to document our zoom session from this week I have a little confession to make. I heard someone say that this was zoom session six. I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure that this week’s session was zoom session seven. The reason I’m so sure is because each week I take the time to draw myself a little zentangle. I counted up my zentangles and I have seven. Therefore I think this week is week seven, but of course I may be wrong. As we were discussing ‘active listening’ I thought that now was probably a really good time to ‘fess’ up to my little ongoing drawing activity. I thoroughly enjoy our zoom sessions, I feel it’s a time for me to learn as opposed to teaching, which as a lecturer is a nice concept. When I’m listening I enjoy drawing. Since I seem to be mainly locked in a digital world at the moment, it brings just a small dose of the physical into my weekly meeting. I also find it very relaxing and for some strange reason it seems to help me concentrate more. I set myself a few […]
