Trailblazing new art course in Cork aims to push boundaries

THE cutting edge worlds of art and technology will come together this September in a trailblazing new course being offered at Cork College of Further Education and Training’s (FET) Douglas Street Campus.

The new full-time course in Immersive Art and Installation is one of the only such courses of its kind currently available anywhere in the world.

It aims to give students of all ages a grounding in the rapidly expanding field of immersive art, where multimedia audio and visual elements combine with more traditional art practice such as painting or sculpture to create unique art installations.

The course is the brainchild of Cork FET lecturer David Bickley, who has exhibited several immersive art installations himself.

He is currently artist in residence at Uillinn (West Cork Arts Centre), in collaboration with Aisling Roche, working on an installation project with ceramics and projections, and recently made an installation for IMMA in Dublin.

As founder of the award-winning Cork electronic band Hyper[borea], and the first television producer based in RTÉ’s Cork studios, he has a long track record of working in multimedia in Cork, and has been lecturing in various audio visual courses at Cork FET for several years.

“In the early noughties, about 2004, I did a film for RTÉ about teaching children the arts curriculum and that took me around lots of galleries around Ireland,” said David. “And I saw quite a lot of video art and that made me think that I should actually be aiming my films more towards galleries.

I had never really thought about it before, but then the recession hit in 2008 and I had lots of time, and I thought, you know what? I’ll make these art films.

"So I started making installation-based stuff, and one of my first major installations was in the Uillinn when it was the West Cork Arts Centre.

“I started doing what they call multi-channel installations, where you have a number of different screens and a number of different sound channels in a dark room and lighting effects, and the whole thing is moving separately.

“I very quickly realised that if you had - and I knew this from my audio work - more than three loops running out of synch with each other, they then became generative. So they start to create their own reality,” he added.

“When you go outside and you look at nature, you notice how all the trees are moving differently and it has a real immersive nature. So you are trying to create that illusion of loops and lengths running out of time with each other.

So that’s the basis of it, a very simple way of looking at it, a sort of generative immersive art.

David says that when he was teaching multi-media in Kinsale, the idea for the course began to form.

“I ended up with very few students one year, but they were very switched on and I thought, you know, let’s experiment a bit with the teaching here, so I created a theme and we took the theme of the sea and everything we did worked towards that.

“So we didn’t really have to know what module we were doing, whether it was sound, web design or whatever, because you were basically all doing the same thing and working towards one aim, which was the show at the end which had all the stuff in it, a bit of music, a bit of sound, bit of film, bit of digital design,” he said.

At around the same time, David bought an augmented reality projector, a high tech device with a built in scanner that allows the user to scan objects and then map surfaces onto them.

“The basic idea behind projected augmented reality is that you make things seem more than they are,” he said.

“So, say you had a vase and you had some flowers in it in a dark room, you could just project water onto that vase, but the projection would also be on the table and on the flowers.

“If you masked out the vase with a computer so it’s only projecting on the vase, then it looks a bit more real, but then its completely flat, you’ve got a flat image. But if you then warp the image so it maps to the vase, you then continue a new reality, and that’s what it’s all about.”

David added: “People are very interested in it and I want to make it open to older people too.

We obviously want school leavers who are interested in that end of it, but also artists who have gone on and done a degree in fine art, artists to come in and be immersed in this whole process and make stuff.

The Immersive Art and Installation course is a full-time QQI Multimedia Production Level 5 course at the FET Douglas Street Campus.

It is ideally suited to both new students, wishing to embark on a career in immersive media art, as well as established artists, wishing to expand the remit of their work to embrace modern technologies and practices.

Mallow native Gary Moynihan, who is now based in Melbourne, Australia, and head of creative experiences at Grande Experiences, is a big supporter of the course.

Gary, who designed the hugely popular Van Gough immersive experience, said: “With its emphasis on, and learning in, immersive multimedia, it is totally unique, not only in Ireland but probably globally.”

For more information, visit www.douglasstreetcampus.ie.