| WRITING A PROJECT PROPOSAL |
| Under the heading 'application' at the top of the MaHKU-website you will find application forms and explanation of the application procedure. On page five of the MA Fine Art application form you are asked to formulated you project proposal, stating the main subject area you wish to research ad how you propose researching it. To give you an impression of what a project proposal may look like, we give you two examples written by actual MA Fine Art students. PROJECT PROPOSAL MA FINE ART #1 I am interested in art as a metaphoric social observation. I would like to explore and expose the habitual acts of routine and repetition most people settle into on a day-to-day basis. Essentially I want to visually study how we (people) interact and react to media each other and ultimately how this dictates the way we define ourselves. I am interested in visually deconstructing the average person's life. I want to explore these ideas through a variety of mediums and formats including photography, video and installation (which would include elements of assemblage and re-representation of found objects). I received my BFA in Photography, and though I enjoy it as a medium I do not believe in the strength of photography as documentation and artistically as small part of a greater visual whole. I am also interested in ideas of space and the way we view art and define art in a gallery setting. In my work I want to explore opportunities for viewing and composing art outside the traditional gallery or museum environment. I would like to do this by creating site-specific projects that allow me to incorporate the viewer as an active participant. I believe this participation can be direct or indirect and can take a variety of unconventional forms, such as found or collected objects that reveal common social threads through personal habits; or through literal mediums including interviews and visual media analysis. I wish to explore and acknowledge our often universal habits and desire for social consistency and/or conformity through the juxtaposition of information acquired from everyday people, television, magazines and newspapers. I am interested in the effects of the media on the average person and how that in turn dictates the way they affect their surroundings, so I would like, whenever possible, to incorporate media specific mediums such as film and photography to parallel and question the effects of movies, television and magazines in our day to day living. At present my work is limited by my resources. This does not allow me to focus my energies directly into these observations, however I attempt with each body of work to further express these concerns visually into an aesthetic visual language. From my research I believe that your environment would allow me to work toward these goals. PROJECT PROPOSAL MA FINE ART #2 I was born in ...., one of the world's biggest cities, which implies Third world contradictions. I belong to a middle class, religious background, at all times marked by an internal Diaspora, and this fact made it difficult for me to feel really rooted, and to grow fond to some traditions or moral practices but those ordered by cultural industries. For that reason, I grew up under the spell of TV; and I believe the 'visual' (as an experience) has been a crucial part of my education. In a time in which 'Visual culture' is a token, and images are so important, I think it is essential to explore this symbolic production. My main interest is centered on those products of the Visual industries from photography to film, video and multimedia as they intertwine with the visual production of what is still considered 'High Culture'. I am interested in the analysis of these visual products from the perspective of gender, race, religion, class and other practices at work in the global economy, as part of Cultural Studies. I want to investigate in deep informational hybrid technologies to disclose how it determines cultural paradigms in postindustrial societies, and in some territories within the global economy, that still differs in a way or the other from modernity. During the MA Fine Art program, I would like to explore, from my personal and cultural practice, those 'democratic technical media' and thus, their inner narratives, their means to construct new meanings and senses, incorporating their own technical limitations or attributes. I am particularly interested in media such as photography, film, video, on-line animation or virtual comic and computerized devices in general terms, both analogous and digital devices designed from the production of images. I am also interested in the inner technical process of those media, how those intersect with culture, its displacements and developments; and possible pretexts for its interpretation and cultural diagnosis. I am interested in researching the attributes and non-attributes of the so-called ' semiotic-machines (Arlindo Machado) and their related technical images. In that sense, I would make a distinction between 'linear narratives' matching the "correct' uses of images as defined by the manual and the program of the devices, and non-linear ones, break into the 'holes' of the technique itself, but not define in its programming. Such 'technical drifting' opens the way to random, 'erroneous'. unprecedented situations. I believe this could be a way to re-politicize the usual administration of those techniques, creating noises in the core of the device's programming, not only as a form, but as a moral fact. Regarding the theoretical aspects, I am interested in the analysis of the echoes generated by the technique itself in particular in the field of visual culture and the production of images from the perspective of cultural studies (gender, race, class etc.). In this sense, I believe that 'hybrid technologies' open the way to an approach toward 'public space' as a 'new agora' in which global and multicultural issues affecting our society could be discussed. |
