Get Well Soon Postcard Workshop

On the bus, on the way to work last Wednesday, I received a text from a colleague to say that he was not coming in due to sickness, and asking if I could cover his session. He said he was introducing the film students to Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and the concept of the Aura, with a view to contextualising their film project, shooting on Super16mm film stock the following week.

Now it's never the nicest feeling having only 20 minutes to prepare a session about a topic that I felt, at best, very rusty about! But I found some resources that I'd used previously and decided to adapt them and go for it. Turns out it was a really fun morning!

1. Students began with a section of TWOAAMR text that I had previously workshopped 3 years ago (see blog post here). This part of the text discusses the way that 'traditional' art and photography/filmmaking differ. (Section XI of the essay).

The students surprised me in their discussion of the text. They are a second year group of film students, and really took to the discussion. They were perfectly confident to offer opinion, even at the risk of "making a mistake", and they really tried to get through the dense text, listening to each other and supporting their colleagues to contribute.

We started with thinking about what the text was about, and decided that the most interesting part was Benjamin's discussion of the artist as magician, and the filmmaker as surgeon. Students did not agree that the traditional artist magics up scenes in a different way than a filmmaker  - they argued that filmmakers have as much creativity in creating an illusion as the painter does. It was an interesting start to deciphering the rest of the text.

2. We then moved onto the part of the essay that particularly introduces the notion of the Aura, sections I-III of the essay. This was a dense text to work with and a few students began to disengage. I deliberately gave them a copy each, printed on A4 white paper to see how they would handle being faced with masses of text. It was daunting for some - and we discussed the challenges of this in a very open and honest way.

This deliberate pushing of them to their limits, allows them a safety net - the shared understanding that this text is difficult for everyone! It was written in 1936, it is not written in their language, and it is talking about 'art' that is different from their experience of art. 

However, once they were brave enough to acknowledge the difficulties of the text, and to start to discuss it, they began to make major breakthroughs in their understanding of it. 

Students said the work was:

Serious, Heavy, Authoritative, confusing, repetitive, verbose, made no sense, and was political (and therefore potentially dangerous and useful for propaganda). They also said it was opinionated and narcissistic!

However, they made incredibly interesting comments about the concepts being raised, and began to acknowledge the differences between an 'original' work and a reproduction, and how this relates to working with analogue and digital technologies.

In order to cement the learning that was beginning to happen, I decided to risk it and allow the students to engage in some prit-stick activity! Instead of making booklets as previously with this text, I told the students they had to choose one particular line, or small section, from the text, and use it as the basis for a postcard design.

In order to do this they needed to cut up the text, an act that feels subversive in itself, but is enjoyable, especially if you have struggled to get through it mere words on white page.  

The basic 'rules' of the task were as follows:

1. Choose a line of the text that resonates, and relates to the concept of the aura.

2. Using the film magazines provided, find imagery to support your text.

3. Students were given a blank postcard, and asked to create a collage on the front, using the imagery and words they had selected.

4 On the reverse, they had to write an explanation of the piece of text they had chosen, and address their postcard, as a get well card, for the tutor who was off sick.

5. The tutor's office address was added to the address bar.

There were some great results from this task, and the students were all fully involved in selecting and discussing their choice of both text and imagery.

The postcards were pinned up on a "washing line" across the room, and we had a chance to discuss the meaning of the Benjamin text a little further. Students on the whole fully engaged with the morning's activity, and the discussion centred around authenticity, and the degradation of the original, compared to the digital copy of a copy of a copy of binary code....

What i especially enjoyed about this project was that they had started with the same materials, yet each made something completely original, authentic and analogue! 

Benjamin would have claimed he was "confronted with [each postcard's] uniqueness, that is, its aura" 

A great morning with the second year students, and a lovely treat for my poorly colleague on his return I hope! The afternoon session afforded the students the chance to get into 6 groups of 5/6 people, and work on an idea for their 16mm projects. The idea needs to be based around the concept of the aura. Let's see how that goes when they pitch it this week!...