MA Art and Design Online Gallery

This year’s students have been faced with unprecedented and unforeseen obstacles and challenges. The situation placed exceptional demands on thinking about, engaging with and producing art and design. Methods and ambitions, both creative and academic, have been frustrated, requiring flexibility, pragmatism, reflection and adaptability. With honesty, rigour and energy, the group encouraged individual approaches through dialogues that would establish the groundwork for independent and sustainable futures to thrive in an uncertain cultural space. Working through the demands of these conditions, students have asked questions of the societal conventions specific to the production and consumption of art. For artists and designers today, any adjustments to the concept of production and the presupposition of its values will demand, in the changes to practice, how to collectively make an 'exhibition' productive without exhibiting. Material such as artworks must take, into account, their conceptual, propositional or immaterial reformulation if presented virtually on the internet.

Most self-evidently it is to the internet we increasingly turn our attention and our will to publish or announce ourselves as social beings. The domestic application of online publishing arguably now represents the most readily available distribution for extensive expression of both individuals and groups.

The difficulty is to re-imagine life entirely without media, since technology has always been at the core of human consciousness. The question will always remain open if we are able to stand the ground to shape concrete artistic possibilities precisely through technology itself. To ask, who will decide to make these adjustments?