INTRODUCING SPECULECTURES

Paul O’Kane Associate Lecturer Contextual Studies 09/10

For this year’ Level One and Level two Contextual studies programme I will give a series of what I call ‘Speculectures’. These are brief presentations speculating on what might be a fundamental principle of artist’s or sculptor’s practice and considerations. A rapid rate of technological and social change mean that we need to become ever more spontaneous in our thinking, learning and teaching and this means utilising all the facilities at our disposal to renew existing models of what it means to be an artist, student, lecturer etc. As such these sessions are also experiments in teaching and learning.

The aim is to create a studio-like, creative, and constructive atmosphere and a working group that organically accumulates its own body of knowledge rather than dutifully absorbing an established creed. In this respect, the aim of the series as a whole also remains speculative -at best a group adventure in ideas and images.

Each ‘Speculecture’ will be followed by group discussion via which we will generate further content and questions to follow-up in the library, the studio, or the wider city, reading, Googling, visiting, making, discussing and feeding back in to the following CS session. I will accompany each ‘Speculecture’ series with an online Blog and complement it with any necessary texts, suggested readings, shows, movies, museum, music etc. using photocopied handouts, Blackboard and the Blogs where students will be able to respond to my own reflections with their own comments.

Again, spontaneity and invention is desirable in this respect and therefore the traditional idea of a ‘reading list’ is replaced by diverse materials and reference evolving directly out of our discussions so that individual students or small groups feel more motivated to seek-out and understand information specific to their interests and share the outcome with the wider group.