Project Update - Plans discussed at the meeting on 21.03.2013

Thanks to all who came to the meeting

First inter-disciplinary meeting
This meeting was the first opportunity for Fine Art and Interior and Spatial Design students at Chelsea to come together at this the beginning of the project.

Project Teams
The setting up of five interdisciplinary teams comprising students from both courses was agreed, numbers in each team of around six or seven students. Each Chelsea team will work with one of five teams in Shanghai researching the city square sites.

Project Aims and Objectives
The outcomes of this project will include a body of research instigated by each team to support the development of proposals for work to be considered for realization in these two sites and to be presented in May 2013 for debate, discussion and selection. Proposals selected from the Shanghai teams will be realized in the Parade Ground in July 2013, whilst the selected Chelsea proposal will be installed in September 2013. We aim to publish a book that contains the research material, the proposals and that documents the outcomes "in situ".

Concept and Methods
What distinguishes this project concept is that Chelsea students will be coming up with proposals for the Shanghai People's Square context and the SIVA students will making proposals for the Parade Ground at Millbank.

Project Tools, Skype etc
During this meeting it was possible to discuss some detail concerning this first phase of the project. We concentrated on thinking about the way the project will be based on web-based dialogue and shared research using skype tools, the exchange of image and video files, texts etc, to enable our partners in Shanghai to develop ideas for their future interventions on or around the Parade Ground at Millbank, based on a context of research material instigated by their research aims and objectives but collected and presented by the teams at Chelsea. Likewise, our Shanghai partners will enable Chelsea students to build up a research context for Chelsea proposals for the People's Square area adjacent to MOCA.

A beginning
The plan now is to begin to connect groups/teams, sorting out who is in the Chelsea teams and to get a list of skype names/accounts, so that dialogue can begin. Marshall McLuhan says in From Cliche to Archetype, 'when dialogue begins, propaganda ends', and sometimes this can happen. Connected to this notion is this link to www.chinasmack.com that Joey Phinn has provided us with.

Practicalities
A very good suggestion that we should follow through on is to set up a facebook group to help speed communication between us all. Also we need a blog that our partners in Shanghai can access too.

Next Meetings
We have a meeting time planned for 10am in ALG15a on Monday 18 March for anyone who was not able to come to the meeting on Thursday. If you are away, NO PROBLEM. The ISD students are on a study trip to Berlin, which is why we had the original Monday morning meeting time changed,

Meeting On Friday 22 March 9.30am ALG15a
This meeting was arranged as a follow up meeting to last Thursday for as many of the group who can attend. I will try and set up a livestream link so anyone with computer access can see how the meeting goes. Our partners in Shanghai are keen to join us for this meeting, and so they can welcome us to the project personally and virtually, face to face.