Jean Michel Soler, Plastic Arts Teacher
College A. Cabasse, Roquebrune sur Argens, Var, France
ARTISTIC PRACTICAL COURSE. 
AIMS :
Bringing face to face technological reality with contemporary
artistic experience through computer use. Allowing pupils to control
the tool to produce, make a work of art in a more opened educational
surrounding promoting individual process and autonomy.
PROJECT SPECIFICATIONS :
The A. Cabasse school is equipped with computer devices and has a
media spreading frame which we could use to satisfy children's
interest and fascination for this particular field while keeping the
usual orient of an Artistic work course aiming to encourage personal
process.
Individual process must absolutely go through three
levels over the year.
1/Appropriation of technics and softwares : those can not be explored
within the confined and overcrowded surrounding of a standard
plastic art course.
The appropriation will be suited to a personal project defined
together with the teacher at the beginning of the year. The project
will not be confined to development of technical capabilities, but
must be associated to a research work based on one or several basic
points of plastic art : as shape, color, material, space, as well as
body, medium, and time. Technological part will not be anything but
an element or the place of the research. A particular awareness will
be devoted to the development of research on "stage space",
modelling and virtual productions, in which knowledges on lights,
space, colors, material and texture which are taking a new meaning
thanks to data processing.
2/Thought on content : Contrasting or comparing on the idea of
representation in the classical system which take the object or the
real as the starting point and numeric simulation in which nothing
"is" before the picture except the software or the symbols it makes.
-Break between analogic of techniques ( photography, movie, video)
and numeric techniques.
-Relations that the artist has with technological surroundings in
the sense of putting the piece of art at a distance, that is to say
virtual work can not be touched.
-Duplicating and artistic value.
-Relation with time : time to make the work, time in the work if it
is an animation , time a piece of art lives and survives, within the
prospect of a technological development and the Meaning of art.
Assessment of children's work will be made more on the consciousness
of those problematics during the work than on the pictures obtained
or produced.
To back up researches the catalogue of the third Biennial of
contemporary art of Lyon 1996 and the book of A. MOLES "Art and
Computer" will be a basic source of information (Art copies, Artist
writings, theoretic talks, criticals of commissary, artist's
dictionary : Vostell, Paik, Kowalski, Anderson, Schwarz, Viola,
several among all, problematisation of the knowledges and definition
of the vocabulary) is a bridge towards the world of present art.
3/Researching of the means of distribution and exhibition : on
different mediums as CD-ROM of specialized magazines, floppy disks,
printing, by internal network channels in the school (working room
to video room for example) or internet by asking the hospitality of
the WEB's Pages of the Plastic Art Directory by the Provider of the
educational district of Nice : AZURNET.