Project outline
- Attend a virtual briefing for teachers
- Attend a virtual meet the artist session with Tromarama for teachers and students
- Work with your students to create one or more collaborative artworks inspired by your local environment
- Document the development of your work in a short video
- Upload your work and seek feedback via FlipGrid
- Share your final video to be uploaded and shared via StreamYard
Key dates
- Thu 11 February, 4-5pm AEDT/ 12 -1pm Jakarta, Virtual teacher briefing
- Tue 16 February, 1:30-3pm AEDT/ 9:30-11am Jakarta, Meet Tromarama virtual student and teacher event
- Wed 24 March 2021, Deadline for project submission
- Wed 31 March 2021, Virtual final project streaming
Recommended weekly plan
Week 1: 8 February
Introduction to the program
Key date: 11 February 2021, 4-5pm AEDT/ 12 -1pm Jakarta, Virtual teacher briefing
Week 2: 15 February
Exploring the Triennial artworks
Key date: 16 February 2021, 1:30-3pm AEDT/ 9:30-11am Jakarta, Meet Tromarama (Virtual student and teacher event)
Week 3: 22 February
Research an environmental issue in your area
Share and upload your ideas, progress and artwork developments to FlipGrid.
Opportunity for feedback from fellow teachers and staff facilitating the project.
Week 4: 1 March
Brainstorming and Refining
Share and upload your ideas, progress and artwork developments to FlipGrid.
Week 5 & 6: 8 March
Creating and Documenting
Share and upload your ideas, progress and artwork developments to FlipGrid.
Week 7: 22 March
Putting it all together; editing and production of film
Key date: 24 March 2021, Deadline for project submission
Week 8: 29 March
Final Project Celebration
Key date: 31 March 2021, Virtual final project streaming
See what participating BRIDGE schools did in response to the project
Teacher support material
Week 1: Introduction to the program
In the virtual briefing for teachers, you will get acquainted with the AEF team and NGV educators and get a more detailed overview of the program structure as well as have the chance to ask questions and discuss initial ideas. We will provide an overview of some of the key works in the Triennial, including Solaris by Tromarama, introduce some practical strategies for looking at the works, and consider ways in which these works might inspire a collaborative project in your school.
Week 2: Exploring the Triennial artworks
Artists often use their work to celebrate and communicate something special and unique about the world around them. Many of the artists featured in the Triennial use their work as a way to raise awareness or to explore issues around human interaction with the natural world.
Start by selecting one or two artists that interest you. You may wish to work in a small group to discuss and find out more. Visit the exhibition or look at the works online and use the resources provided to guide a class or small group discussion about the work(s). Some additional guiding questions might help you to focus your discussion.
- Read more about these artists and their Triennial projects on the Triennial homepage
- For suggested activities and videos for students please visit the Learn Triennial resource page.
- You can also watch videos on the NGV Channel Triennial playlist.
Tromarama
Tromarama is an Indonesian-based artist collective founded by Febie Babyrose, Herbert Hans and Ruddy Hatumena. Their practice fuses video, installation and computer programming and explores the interrelationship between the virtual and the physical world.
Solaris, 2020, is a mural-sized LED curtain that screens an ecosystem populated with jellyfish. Created with computer software used in video game platforms, the screening presents a digital simulation of a unique marine environment located off the coast of Indonesia’s Kalimantan Island. Living without the threat of predators, the jellyfish living in this 11,000-year-old body of salt and rainwater have evolved differently. Their existence provides scientific communities with a living laboratory for studying the potential effects of climate change on marine systems. Elements in Solaris respond to changes in real-time weather data from the body of water – wind speed moves the camera across the terrain, temperature readings affect the size and number of jellyfish, and cloud cover and UV readings alter the colouring of the environment
Additional Triennial artists
Some more Triennial artists you may wish to look at are listed below.
Glenda Nicholls
Porky Hefer
Carnovsky
Cecile Bendixen
Pirjo Haikola
Guiding questions
- Make a note of your responses as you may wish to include them in your final video.
- What environmental phenomenon or issue is being explored by the artist?
- How do the materials or medium chosen by the artist/designer contribute to the meaning of the work?
- What message is the artist/designer attempting to communicate with their audience? Is the aim of the work to raise awareness, consider an alternative future, change our behaviour, or something else?
- What ideas could we use from this work to inspire our own artworks?
Week 3: Research an environmental issue in your area
What is extraordinary about your local environment? Environment includes the geographical features, social connectedness and community identity of an area.
As a class, research the local environment so that you can identify and describe natural features (for example, hills, rivers, native vegetation), managed features (for example, farms, parks, gardens, plantation forests) and constructed features (for example, roads, buildings) of the local place. Discover an aspect of beauty or extraordinary as an inspiration for the class art project.
Alternatively, identify and investigate an environmental issue faced by the local community, and reflect on the learning, address this issue in the class art project by proposing individual and collective action in response to the issue. Guide students to consider the environmental, economic and social aspects of the issue.
Identifying an issue
Below are a list of inquiry questions, some taken from the Australian Curriculum for geography, that may help students identify a magnificent aspect or environmental issue of the local environment.
- What has changed in the local environment in recent years?
- How do people’s reliance on places and environments influence their perception of them?
- What effect does the uneven distribution of resources and services have on the lives of people?
- What approaches can be used to improve the availability of resources and access to services?
- How do environmental and human processes affect the characteristics of places and environments?
- How do the interconnections between places, people and environments affect the lives of people?
- What are the consequences of changes to places and environments and how can these changes be managed?
- Discussing the different types of places where people can feel included or excluded, safe or threatened, and evaluating how this affects perceptions about liveability of places.
- What’s the daily and seasonal weather of the local area like? Investigate and describe the local weather with rainfall, temperature, sunshine and wind, and compare how different cultural groups, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples/ First nation people, describe them.
Classroom activity: Class mental map of the local community
A mental map is a person’s point-of-view or perception of their area of interaction. One person’s mental map can be very different to another person’s, even if the map is of the same geographical location.2 Use online navigation services such as Google Maps or Google Earth and print out maps of the local area for each of the students. Have students mark out locations that are significant to them, such as their school, their homes, the local park, and the local market to make their own mental maps. Display all the mental maps and give students opportunities to view their peers’ works. Then, as a class, discuss the similarities and differences of everyone’s mental maps. Are there any sites that many students find significant? Put together a list of significant locations for the class, and create a class mental map together.
Classroom activity: The local water system
Use a map of the local area and ask students to find and mark a river or creek. With the students, walk along its path like an explorer and document the plants, wildlife and human interventions, such as built structures or pollution. Alternatively, use virtual services such as Google Streetview or Google Earth to “walk” along the river path with students in the classroom. Ask students to analyze their documentation and use the data to identify one extraordinary thing and one potential issue about the local water system. Have students make a work of art based on their findings.
Week 4: Brainstorming and Refining
Brainstorming
Now that you have identified the local environmental condition that will form the basis of your artwork and have explored some ways to potentially produce it, it’s time to start planning. A great way to do this is by conducting a brainstorm together in which you can begin to identify and define the fundamental components of your project. The key considerations to make at this stage of your planning are about what you want to communicate through your artwork, how you might go about creating it, what materials might be involved, who will be involved and how you will measure the success of your finished artwork.
As a class or group, discuss and answer the following questions under each key consideration listed below. You can produce a mind map, list your ideas in a table, type them up, use post-it notes or simply write your responses down. Remember, at this stage it’s best to record all the possibilities and answers that come to mind. In the next step, you’ll begin to review and refine your ideas, so don’t be too concerned about keeping your answers concise for now.
Key considerations
Aims and objectives
- What are the key ideas you wish to communicate through your artwork?
- What do you want audiences to think and feel when they look at it?
- What adjectives could you use to describe the intended mood of your artwork?
Materials and media
- What kind of artwork will you make?
- Will there be one artwork to which everyone contributes, or will it be comprised of many individual pieces?
- Could it be 2-dimensional, 3-dimensional or digital?
- What materials would be the most appropriate for communicating aims and objectives?
- What materials do you have access to immediately and what do you need to source?
Who will be involved?
- How many people will contribute to the project?
- How will those involved come together to work on the artwork?
- Will there be groups or teams responsible for different stages or parts of the project?
- How will you do it?
- Where will the artwork be made?
- How often will those involved meet to work on it?
- How will you ensure everyone is on track?
Evaluation
- What factors will help you determine whether your project was successful?
- How can those involved in producing the artwork inform your evaluation?
- Who else can you involve in this process?
- How will you collect the information you need to evaluate the success of your artwork?
Refining ideas
It’s now time to look at all of the ideas you listed and identify which are the best for informing and shaping your artwork. But, what does “best” mean in this context? The best ideas generated in your brainstorm lie somewhere between two main concepts:
- Which ideas are the most practical?
- Which ideas will help you best communicate your intended messages through a well-executed, finished artwork?
Defining constraints
To help you identify the stronger and weaker ideas in your brainstorm, it’s a good idea to define your project’s constraints, as this will help you identify what is practical. These are usually associated with time, costs (your budget), the availability of resources such as materials and the extent to which everyone can be involved, including the teacher facilitating the project. You can define your constraints be answering these questions:
- How much time do we have to complete the project? This includes making your artwork and documenting your process in your submitted video.
- How often will we meet to work on the project?
- How soon will we need to start?
- Do we need to seek special permission from anyone to commence the project?
- What resources (materials, people) do we need to begin?
- How much money can we spend on the project?
- How much space will we need to produce our artwork?
After answering these questions, you’ll begin to see which ideas in your brainstorm might not be practical or possible to carry out. You can begin to refine your plans by eliminating these ideas and keeping those that are practical.
Communicating your message
Now, as a class or group, you can begin to discuss which ideas will help you best communicate your intended messages through a well-executed, finished artwork. One way of narrowing down the list is to ask yourselves some questions about your plans.
Which of your ideas will:
- Allow everyone involved to contribute?
- Enable your group to work together effectively?
- Let you express your intentions clearly through your artwork?
- Allow your group to document your process with style and ease?
- Leave you feeling proud of your achievements?
Finalising your plan
Once you have honed in on a clear idea for the production and documentation of your artwork, you can begin to:
- Create a production timeline or schedule
- Identify key steps in the art making process
- Decide what you will document in your process video (remember, this is your submission!)
- Come up with milestones or deadlines to keep you on track
- Assign individuals or small groups certain responsibilities
- Gather your materials
- Create and document!
Week 5 & 6: Creating and Documenting
As you create your artwork, don’t forget to document the stages of the process by filming and photographing various stages. Your final product may be shared by the school community or you may wish to organise a classroom visit with other classes in your school.
Your documentation should be a short film of approximately 3 minutes in length and should include the following:
- A description of your environmental phenomenon or chosen issue
- Explanation for your choice of medium and materials
- Intended effect on your audience
- An explanation of the process of making your artwork
- An evaluation – what was challenging or rewarding?
- Learnings – what did you learn during the making of the project?
Week 7: Putting it all together
Email your final video to bridge@asialink.unimelb.edu.au by 24 March 2021.
You might find it easiest to share a link to an upload portal such as Google Drive or Sharepoint, as the video file will likely be too big for an email attachment.
Filming your video
- Keep your final video 3 – 5 minutes in length.
- Always shoot in landscape mode by holding your phone, iPad or camera sideways. This will avoid the black borders in your video clip.
- Try not to use the zoom function as it can alter the image quality.
- Make sure there is plenty of light where you are filming, natural light is best.
- Use a tripod to get steady shots.
- Experiment with the inbuilt functions such as time-lapse and slow-motion.
- If you are recording sounds, use a microphone or overlay the voice over at a later time in a quiet space.
- Like a movie, you can add text titles to introduce your film or to make subtitles. You can also overlay audio to narrate the images.
- Depending on the device you use, save your movie as either an MP4, MOV, or WEBM.
Online safety and copyright
Please ensure you support students to engage with digital technology in a safe and responsible way in line with the guidance on the education.vic.gov.au website.
We ask that you:
- Never post more than three pieces of information that together could identify a student (consider that the student’s school is one such piece of information that is most likely already identified)
- Never use full names or email addresses online
- Never label a photo, or its file name with a student’s full name
- When filming or taking photos, consider using images that obscure student faces or that are taken from behind
- Gain informed consent before posting images of students online or allowing students to post images of others.
Week 8: Final Project Celebration
The submitted videos will be edited and pieced together to form a short documentary of the project, which will be streamed live via a YouTube premiere on 31 March 2021 (Time tbc).
Notes
- View a complete list of Bridge partner schools in Victoria https://www.asiaeducation.edu.au/programmes/school-partnerships/partner-schools/vic
- Read more about mental map https://www.thoughtco.com/mental-map-definition-1434793