Our session this morning with David Cross was amazing. I knew Jonathan was really looking forward to it and now I completely understand why. David is amazing! It would be impossible to understand the full complexities of his work, even though we had 3 hours with him. It felt like 1 hour!
He told us his story and how he works and his rationale and some stories using examples of students work starting back in 2012 and bringing us right up to the meeting he had scheduled for this afternoon, even giving us a copy of the leaflet that he'd prepared which I don't think anyone else had seen yet.
He uses his position within the university to question where critical thinking should stop, titling his session 'The Undiscussed University'.
Coming from a position of wanting to do less harm ecologically, he seemed to have started out by making the connection that the university was indirectly funding fossil fuels production through it's choice of bank (then RBS). He used the idea of the Artists Placement Group to use his practice within his job as being on a placement in an arts university reader role. He uses the notion of not knowing as a staring point, this is different from scientific enquiry where a specific question is researched and explored, with arts enquiry the not knowing is the starting point.
He showed us lots of amazing examples of bearing witness to events, responding to events, investigating basic ideas, following the supply chain and interrogating everything from different points of view.
We had a fantastic discussion with lots of different points of view really delving into the bank choice that UAL has made in Lloyds being better on the eco front but awful for funding arms. There were points of view from people who had obviously been in some high up management positions suggesting why the decisions might have been made and why it might be hard to alter it. There seemed to be a general consensus that the students should know and they would almost do the work for David as they'd be outraged if they knew (which we all seemed to feel!). I suggested that the change seems to be inevitable (eventually) as David seems to be one of those rare people that is miles ahead of his time and eventually we'll all catch up with him. To me the idea that we won't all eventually know what these banks are funding and the brand alignment that will follow from that would seems to suggest that UAL will have to switch, hopefully David can get them there a few years earlier than might otherwise happen. Of course the alternative is that Lloyds will stop funding such atrocities as the online world means that we are all becoming slightly more aware of who's doing what ... one can only hope!
I've done absolutely no justice to the amazing session in this recap, but I feel like I'm still processing it... Hopefully I'll add to this in time.
The afternoon session was all about valuing our work which was fascinating. I took lots of notes and am looking forward to getting the slides. It was really interesting to think about the different ways we can attach value to our work.