March 9, 2009: Alan Peacock, External Examiner
An External Examiner Alan Peacock, Course Leader in Interactive Media and Screen Culture at the University of Hertfordshire, in Hatfield north of London was present for 30 minutes of an online tutorial in March. He teaches in a similar course in digital arts. His role as far as I can understand is to assess the Camberwell MA Digital Arts to see if it meets the MA standards. It is a peer review. He wrote that: “perhaps it is useful that digital arts is less than clearly defined… do you know the phrase ‘incanabula’? It means ‘in swaddling clothes’ it was used for about the first 50 years after Gutenberg of printed books - metaphorically ‘emerging into its own form’ - like digital arts… and the plurality of the digital - its very width means it is difficult to identify the ‘masterpieces’ or even to know them?”
Interesting thought, which I guess is proposed to make us feel like we are at the start of something new. Tutor Jonathan Kearney said something similar last year.
This seems to be part of the myth around digital arts that the tutors believe- we know digital arts is going to be big, but it is just forming and still being defined so don’t expect any clarity about what it is anytime soon. Which I guess is another way around saying that they are not sure how to assess the quality of the research we do.