Intermedia is the only undergraduate degree programme in the UK that focuses explicitly upon the conjoining of media specifics prevalent within contemporary art and investigates the areas of artistic practice that lie between media.
The programme encourages students to consider contemporary artistic practice in its broadest sense and validates many approaches to working and existing as an artist. It provides an appropriate learning and teaching environment to enable this and encourages students to find the right form to carry individual ideas, the appropriate platform to disseminate their work and appropriate audiences to present to.
How you will be taught
Students can work broadly across a number of different and overlapping areas that may include sound, object making, installation, performance, video, zines and publications. There is a huge diversity of approach to making art both within the student cohort and within the staff teaching on the programme. Recent graduates have worked with music, song, movement, gesture, scriptwriting, talking, poetry and walking.
The programme is taught through a mixture of one-to-one tutorials, group tutorials, seminars with visiting artists, technical workshops, and intensive studio critiques. All these elements are designed to allow a critical and experimental approach to art-making.
In Stage 2 of the programme, methods and approaches are introduced through a series of projects that focus upon an archeology of making. Initially students look towards what may constitute an artwork, they then go on to consider different media approaches relevant to Intermedia (sound, video, light, performance, collaboration, for example). The emphasis then shifts towards more cogently introducing context and the idea of the ‘Mise-en-scene’. There are seminars which address the White Cube as a Gesture, immersive environments and Black Cube, ambient art, and social practices.
Across the School of Art, in Stages 3 and 4, students work with a greater independence and outside of a project structure. In these stages of study specialist workshops, external projects and Project Space critiques are the fulcrum of Intermedia programme study. Students are progressively asked to position themselves within contemporary art practice and are actively encouraged to think of this as an expanded practice: one which can challenge preconceptions of what Art is.
Recent visitors to Intermedia have included: Stephen Sutcliffe, Sue Tompkins, Rachel Maclean, David Sherry, Tessa Lynch, Hanna Tuulikki, Alec Finlay, Jenny Hogarth, Laura Aldridge, Lee Patterson, Sian Robinson Davies, Tom Nolan, Andrew Gannon, Aurélien Froment, Isla Leaver-Yap, Neil Bromwich, and the Rhubaba Choir.
