FAQ

=**Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)**=



For two weeks in September 2011 more than forty art, design, and architecture students, practitioners and academics will work on a live design brief in an intensive collaborative two-week studio between The College of Fine Art (COFA) and Donghua University, Shanghai. For two weeks in September 2011 art, design, and architecture students, practitioners and academics will work on an intensive live studio/LAB in downtown Shanghai. RARE EARTH 创设纪-稀土 is a collaboration between Brad Miller, Professor Richard Goodwin (Porosity Studio), Ian McArthur (The Collabor8 Project) and Donghua University (DHU).
 * What is Rare Earth 创设纪-稀土**

Conceptually augment_me explores situated-ness and the vernacular through a video installation. Artists have for centuries have been interested in place and the everyday, the fleeting moments of transition while still enveloped in a specific place. This installation seeks to engage in a participatory set of embodied relations with its audience and the content which is over 2000 images and 20 hrs of video and sound. To formalise this content, which are personal images of things that have passed. I have initially developed a platform or a mechanism to model the potential ways of presenting these fragments in a coherent and reflexive way.
 * What is augment_me?**

These horizontal strips of "moments" are left or right in a smooth movement, as a continuous and seamless sequence across 4 synchronised projected hi resolution colour screens by the movement tracking software watching the viewing space below. The sound content is non objective or atmosphere, worked into the space at very low levels and using multiple output channels. The sound are actually fragments of the video's audio tracks. The moment are ghosts caught as the incidental.


 * What is Porosity Studio?**

The Porosity Studio was established by Professor Richard Goodwin in 1996 and has operated successfully since this time. It provides a potential component of a student’s major study in final years from a range of disciplines: Fine Art, Design, Media Studies, Architecture, Urban Design and Engineering. Multi-disciplinary practice is explored and students are able to test their individual practices at the scale of architecture and the city. The studio builds on the practice and research of Goodwin who is both artist and architect. The relationship between the city and public space remain key concerns for the studio – hence the name Porosity which speaks to the need for architecture to be Porous in relation to public space. The studios have been held in Beijing at The Central Academy of Fine Art and Tsinghua University, Rotterdam at The Willem De Kooning Institute, Den Haag at Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten, and Milan at the Milan Politecnico. In 2007, the British Council selected the Porosity studio as exemplary in its field and is now sponsoring students from around the world to participate in a series of 3 Porosity studios within the United Kingdom. To date these have included Edinburgh at the Edinburgh University, and Cardiff at Cardiff University and Glamorgan University. Since 2009 Porosity Studio has collaborated with DHU.

Collabor8 (C8) is an online initiative formed by Ian McArthur to establish a basis for online collaboration between art and design students and practitioners at universities in Australia and Shanghai. Through research the intent of C8 has expanded to encompass multidisciplinary collaborative online practice with particular focus in the area of cross-cultural (east/west) communications. In this year's project it is intended that students will work together in collaborations that span urban, cultural and virtual territories. C8 typically consists of online lectures, briefs, discussion forums and galleries allowing design students to conceptualise individually and in groups, discuss and compare their ideas and display design concepts and solutions. The students collaborate in cross-cultural teams with the objective of finding new ways of working together online. Through respect of each other’s cultural background and meeting the challenges of working in different geographic locations to create solutions to a brief C8 emulates in an intensive mode real world practices in the global creative industries. The online components of Rare Earth 创设纪-稀土 are decidedly open source utilising open media platforms (such as this wiki) and social media.
 * What is Collabor8?**