September 30, 2014

8.15 am. I arrived at Lecture Theatre 312 to conduct a sound check for the first Art/Sound lecture; this meant ensuring that anything that should make a noise did, and loudly. There was no need to test the acoustics of the room; they are always lousy. The painted walls and the apse formation at the rear of theatre reflect and magnify sound like a vast reverberation chamber. It’s relatively simple to improve the optical facilities of an auditorium: just upgrade the projector to a 3,000 ANSI lumens model. But to make a space acoustically dead requires the application of bass baffles and foam lagging over every surface. Nevertheless, the equipment held up during the course of the presentation, as the School took its first step in teaching the art history of sound:

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10.00 pm. Having dismantled and re-boxed ‘the gear’, I returned to the on-going departmental saga of the Central Printing Services. No one, other than the secretaries, can successfully send files to the printer/photocopier in the office. Having had their desktop printers confiscated following a managerial directive from above (on the pretext of economising (Diary, August 26, 2014)), academic staff, now, have no back up provision and must send all their printing requests through the already overstretched secretaries. I mean …

10.15 pm. I conducted an introductory seminar with painters studying the MA Portfolio, followed by the first Vocational Practice workshop and hour later. This is the largest cohort I’ve ever had to teach on this module. This year, for the first time, the art historians have joined ranks with the art practitioners:

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They’re a fine bunch, and well able to defend themselves against my designedly sardonic and interrogatory style of seminar leadership. Today, we looked at the elements of HE teaching and the nature of one-to-one tutorials, about which they and I had very decided opinions.

2.15 pm. Post lunch, and after a further wrangle with the printer/photocopier (which — adding insult to injury — now refused to recognise my password), two colleagues and I walked the postgraduate sector of the School and allocated studio and study spaces to the new MA intake. They are a tidy fit. The second and final version of the Erratum Musical video was delivered, scrutinized, and judged fit for publication:

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For the remainder of the afternoon, I caught up on course admin.

6.10 pm. Practise session 1. 9.40 pm. Practise session 2. During the evening and ‘The night watch’, I made adjustments to the second Art/Sound PowerPoint, uploaded material to Blackboard, and searched for information on Oscar Fischinger.

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