UWS | Skillset Media Academy

@UWSInteractive Festival, 5th-9th March 2012

Posted February 24th, 2012 in Events, Portfolio by admin

The UWS Skillset Media Academy is pleased announce its involvement in the UWS Interactive Festival between the 5th-9th of March, 2012.

More about the Community Production and Media Activism Festival is available at http://www.uwsinteractive.net

“The UWS Interactive 2012 festival (5th-9th March 2012) is made up of lots of different individuals – from different organisations, institutions and backgrounds- working to put together a community-led media festival that encourages people to take part in and showcase what they are passionate about across the South West of Scotland. It is hosted across all five locations that the University of the West of Scotland (Dumfries and Galloway, Hamilton, Ayr, Paisley and Glasg0w) and will be ran entirely on contributions and suggestions of those who wish to get involved.

This site will form the basis of a schedule that we know already exists and will happen, throughout the lead up to the event, we will be encouraging you to suggest ideas, contribute to sessions, provide space to allow you to do the things you love to do, learn new skills and things about the work and meet new people. It is entirely citizen-generated, where participation is all that is needed to take part.

Some of the current partners that are involved in the festival or events during the festival (so far) are as follows:

#media2012, the first national citizen media network for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games

Creative Futures Research Centre and the School of Creative and Cultural Industries, University of the West of Scotland.

UWS Skillset Media Academy, University of the West of Scotland.

Citizen’s Eye Community New Agency, the UK’s first NewsNet beacon for Citizen Journalism in the United Kingdom.

Somewhereto_ , a nationwide project to help young people (16-25) find the space they need to do the things they love within sport, culture and the arts. A Legacy Trust UK project, supported by Channel 4.

DogWoof Films, the leading UK film distributor for social issue films and documentaries. There will be a mini DocFilm UWS Festival across the 4 days screening some DogWoof classics.

The Media Trust, who work with media organisations and charities to enhance their communications and enable communities to find their voice and make it heard.

Citizen’s Relay, Creative Scotland funded project to cover the alternative stories from the Olympic torch relay. The project will be launched during the festival.

TeachMeet, regular meetups for those who teach and enjoy meeting others to share tips, techniques and strategies for learning and technology.

We will be encouraging others to get involved in whatever way that they possibly can – it can be as simple as running a workshop, mentoring, leaflet sharing, skill-swapping or simply just turning up and getting involved and learning things.

The project will be ongoingly curated by Jennifer M Jones, who runs the site and always up for getting as many people as humanly possible involved. The site will change, evolve and morph over the next few months and be shared online via the @UWSInteractive twitterfeed.”

#citizenrelay interns – help us track the torch relay across Scotland in May 2012

Posted February 24th, 2012 in Events, London2012, Opportunities, Portfolio by admin

Do you want be involved in reporting the Olympic Games and lead a team of citizen reporters as they cover the Olympic Torch Relay in Scotland from 8-14th June 2012? The UWS Skillset Media Academy is pleased to announce new opportunities for students or recent graduates to join us and become a member of the #CitizenRelay project tracking the Torch Relay as it travels from Stranraer to Shetland. If you’ve had experience of managing multi-media content and working across multi-platforms then you could be our ideal candidate.

The #CitizenRelay project tracks the Torch Relay on its journey along the length and breadth of Scotland and part of the wider #media2012 citizen media project. You can be one of only eight #CitizenRelay Interns working in one of four geographical areas (Glasgow and the West; Inverness and the North West; Dundee and the North East; and, Edinburgh and the East).

You will be involved in:

• Helping to recruit CitizenRelay Reporters in your area
• Training them in the basic skills of blogging, podcasting, interviewing and uploading content to the web
• Developing story ideas in your local area
• Travelling on the #CitizenRelay roadtrip for two days on your leg of the journey.

You will learn:

How to create, edit and upload content to a specially designed #CitizenRelay website
• How to work in a team, lead your CitizenReporters and work in a fast- paced mobile environment
• How to identify story ideas in your local area relating to the Olympic Torch Relay

The #CitizenRelay project is funded by Creative Scotland, so most of the expenses you will incur will be covered, including travelling to the training day, costs incurred in meeting with CitizenRelay Reporters and the two days spend on the Torch Relay roadtrip itself.

For more details, visit the #citizenrelay website – http://www.citizenrelay.net or contact david@citizenrelay.net

This opportunity is available in: All Scotland. The deadline is Friday 09 March 2012 at 17:00.

Short Creative and Cultural Courses for Business

Posted January 12th, 2012 in Courses, Events, Portfolio, Research by admin

The UWS Skillset Media Academy brings together all of our provisions in support of the creative media sector. The Academy operates between our campuses and a creative enterprise cluster in Glasgow, working with the CCA: Centre of Contemporary Arts, the Scottish Centre for Enabling Technologies, and Film City Glasgow. Through our presence in Glasgow’s Digital Media Quarter we are co-located with some of the largest media employers.

Wherever your ambitions lie, with a wide range of full and part time programmes, we offer the essential practical and academic skills necessary for a career in the creative industries.

Tailored courses can include:

- Cultural Leadership (can be studied as an MA module)

- Social Media 1 (beginner)

- Social Media 2 (advanced)

- Developing a Social Media Strategy for your Business

- Blogging for Business

- Writing for the Web

- Creating content for the web (film, podcasts, creative copy etc)

- Develop your business’s online brand

- Digital Photography

- Digital Film Making

- Film Editing

For more information or to book a free consulation about your business needs, contact the UWS Skillset Media Academy.

Music without Sound, Wednesday 11th May (CCA, Glasgow)

Posted April 21st, 2011 in Events by admin

University of the West of Scotland (UWS) is presenting a unique event, which is aimed at anyone who has a passion for music and wants to develop a music-related business or creative activity, at the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) in Glasgow on Wednesday 11 May 2011, 10am-6pm.

Featuring key and emerging figures from across the creative Industries, ‘Music Without Sound’ will combine unique panel and performance events.

The event’s focus is music across all of the creative industries rather than simply ‘the music industry’. At the heart of the event is the creation of an environment that encourages everyone to ‘think again’.

The event will include a panel debate, comprising novelist Christopher Brookmyre, poet Sandy Hutchison and architects Ice Cream Architecture, on music’s influence on creative practice across other art forms from architecture to film, to sculpture.

Other panels on the day will include music’s relationship to hair, fashion and sex; entrepreneurship, technology and death; and therapy, rehabilitation and education. All panels will simultaneously contain an element of creative performance.

This event will provide participants with a taste of the types of topics covered in the University’s popular MA Music: Innovation and Entrepreneurship course – the first course of its kind in the UK.

The postgraduate degree, which was developed in response to the changes in the music industry in recent years and was launched last September, will produce highly-focused individuals immersed in the realities and practicalities of the emerging 21st century music business models.

Many traditional modes of thought in the music sector are quickly becoming obsolete, with larger, institutional processes now being superseded by more technologically democratic ways of conducting business. The rise of the ‘new artist model’ which places emphasis upon commercial autonomy by artists and managers within the music sector has also created the need for the development of a new music business skillset. As a result of these changes there are far greater entrepreneurial opportunities in the music sector and this course aims to produce employers rather than employees.

MA Music: Innovation & Entrepreneurship Programme Leader, Alan McCusker-Thompson of the School of Creative & Cultural Industries is co-ordinating the Music Without Sound event.

He said: ‘ The function of higher education has evolved from simply educating individuals to enable them to pursue traditional professional careers to the development of entrepreneurial capacities that enable students to create their own careers’.

“Developing the capacity to ‘think different’ is at the very heart of our Music Entrepreneurship course, which equips individuals with the skills to pursue any number of careers within the creative industries and beyond.”

As part of the event 100 members of the Scottish musical and creative community are being asked to create unique miniatures which will form a Lilliputian art exhibition exhibited at the CCA.

The canvases will be displayed anonymously and sold at a flat rate, with all proceeds going to Sense Scotland.

Sense Scotland has been working for over 20 years with children and adults who have communication support needs because of deafblindness, sensory impairment, learning and physical disabilities. One of their key areas of expertise is communication. Working closely with people, often on a one-to-one basis, they aim to find out what their aspirations are and how they want to live their lives.

For further information on the University’s Postgraduate MA Music: Innovation & Entrepreneurship email alan.mccusker-thompson@uws.ac.uk or call 01292 886 473

For further information on the Music Without Sound event visit www.musicwithoutsound.co.uk or Call the CCA Box Office on 0141 352 4900 to reserve a place.

UWS MA & Honours Students make and release an album in 24 hours

Posted October 28th, 2010 in Events, Portfolio, Songwriting by admin

Students from the new MA Music: Innovation & Entrepreneurship met yesterday with 4th Year BA Commercial Music students in an exciting new collaboration. They met at UWS Campus Ayr at 10am and worked through the day, writing, recording and mixing six new songs in response to a single page of the Herald Newspaper.

The work was released at 8pm on the Bandcamp platform under the name “The 24 Hours”. Please visit here to listen or download:http://the24hours.bandcamp.com/

There are wonderful pieces of new music here, quite an achievement for our students in the ridiculously short timescale. There will also be videos and photos from the event going up soon on our Facebook page “The 24-hour record.”

At the same time our friend (and PHD student) Chris Dooks was at home making his own new work in the same time frame. You can hear his Elephant EP here: http://www.archive.org/details/Elephant-E.P

MashingUp: Art + Labour

Posted October 20th, 2010 in Events, Glasgow, Portfolio, Research by Graham Jeffery

9th November 2010, CCA Glasgow, 12.30 – 5.00pm

Art+Labour is a public conversation exploring the conditions and experiences of creative labour in the cultural industries – working conditions, pay, working hours; freedom and autonomy, pleasure and obligation; insecurity and uncertainty; social reproduction, networking and isolation – and artists’ organising within it – unions, artists’ associations, or self-organised studio/exhibition spaces. What diverse forms of employment do artists undertake? Who are their employees? How secure and how flexible are these forms of employment? What are the conditions of employment and how are these changing? What can we say of artists’ autonomy in relation to contemporary labour practices? How do cultural workers effectively organise around labour issues? What would it mean for artists to withdraw their labour in defence of conditions in one’s primary or secondary employment?

With successive governments’ emphasis on arts’ social function, how does communality express itself in competitive Creative Industries? What is industrial about the Creative Industries; where do ‘Cultural’ producers sit within the policy frame of the ‘Creative’ Industries? How do we as cultural producers recognise our own positions and dependency on/within/alongside the public sector? With the entrepreneurial restructuring of the arts in Scotland and in the face of selective public sector cuts throughout the UK, how constructive are artists’ isolated appeals for a state of exception? What is so unique about artists in the social factory? These are some of the questions to be addressed during this public conversation.

The discussion is open to anyone – cultural workers, artists, students, interns, precarious and self-organised labour affiliated to academia – concerned with issues of art, labour and economics. The event will begin with a series of short position statements from invited speakers followed by discussion among panelists and audience.

Panelists include:

Angela McRobbie Professor of Communications, Dept. of Media & Communications, Goldsmiths

Scottish Artists Union The representative voice for artists in Scotland

Graham Jeffery Reader: Music and Performance, rhe School of Creative and Cultural Industries, UWS

Katarzyna Kosmala Reader, Centre for Contemporary European Studies, UWS

Gesa Helms Researcher and artist

Brett Bloom Member of Chicago-based art collective Temporary Services who recently produced ‘Art Work : A national conversation about art, labour, and economics’

Owen Logan Researcher, School of Divinity, History and Philosophy, University of Aberdeen

Facilitated by Gordon Asher Effective Learning Tutor, UWS Centre for Academic & Professional Development

Event is free but ticketed, tickets available from CCA Box Office: CCA, 350 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow G2 3JD tel : +44 (0)141 352 4900 http://www.cca-glasgow.com

“MASHING UP” : Art+Labour is organised by Leigh French, co-editor of Variant, and Sophie Hope, member of Making A Living, in co-operation with Graham Jeffery of the School of Creative and Cultural Industries, University of the West of Scotland, and supported by CCA, Glasgow.

“MASHING-UP…” A Public Lecture Series presented by UWS and CCA This ongoing lecture series stimulates critical, transdisciplinary research communities to discuss advanced knowledge and to build networks of excellence among producer communities. ‘Mashing up’ [definition] “a mashup is a web page or application that combines data or functionality from two or more external sources to create a new service. The term mashup implies easy, fast integration…to produce results that were not the original reason for producing the raw source data” (Wikipedia, 2009). The lecture series exhibits the values of new media culture to explore synergies between institutions, ideas and disciplines. This aspiration originates with the UWS and CCA partnership, which extends to the specific areas of inquiry that we pursue. It advances the core mission of each organization to initiate applied, international research opportunities through experimental, local dialogue to foster collaborative, bottom-up, sustainable practices of development. #mashingup We want attendees to blog, photograph, film, tweet and do all they can to share the content of these talks to democratize access to knowledge.

Scottish Production Archive: Paddy Higson

Posted September 23rd, 2010 in Uncategorized by Graham Jeffery

University of the West of Scotland: Scottish Production Archive.

Glasgow Film Theatre: 16.00 Sunday 10th October.

From the early films of Bill Forsyth through to her own work as Producer on key films like “Silent Scream” Paddy Higson has a fair claim to being the mother of the Scottish film industry.

A phenomenal encourager of talent, she also established Black Cat studios in the Parkhead area of Glasgow and produced top TV drama in Scotland for decades. A UWS:SPA Celebration of a true pioneer.

Paddy will be interviewed by Scottish film industry veteran David Bruce.

To book tickets please visit the GFT website.

Blueprint for #london2012: #Media2012

Posted September 20th, 2010 in Events, Journalism, London2012, Portfolio, Research by Graham Jeffery

A proposal for the London 2012 Games, to assemble the social media people of the world and to create an open media environment, where culture, sport and local stories can be told across international zones. The proposal aspires to create an Underground Media Zone, which will link the United Kingdom in physical and virtual space. For more details, please read on….

The first public launch of the proposal will take place on October 4 at the Abandon Normal Devices festival of digital culture in Manchester, an ‘inspired by 2012′ event, based in the Northwest of England. To book your place, please click here

This event is co-sponsored by the AND festival, the London 2012 Creative Programmers network and the University of the West of Scotland. It forms part of the research and development activity for the WE PLAY 2012 EXPO in the North West, supported by funding from Legacy Trust UK.

The symposium will bring citizen journalists, artists, cultural producers and media from the Olympic Games of Beijing, Vancouver, London, Sochi and Rio. Discussions will focus on opportunities, strategy and vision, to create a publicly owned new media legacy for the Games and encourage UK independent media networks to discuss prospects within the context of an increasingly Digital Britain.

Sessions will consider the national and regional cultural legacies leading up to London 2012 and consider the intersections of art, science and the media. Speakers include London 2012 Creative Programmers, social media experts Kris Krug, Alexander Zolotarev from Russia, and Josi Paz from Brazil, and London 2012 Cultural Olympiad Director Ruth Mackenzie and an open unconference for delegates to make their pitch about what they would like to see reported during Games time and how they will contribute.

The day will close with the UK premiere of ‘With Glowing Hearts’, a feature film about the social media scene around the Vancouver 2010 Games.

If you like the plan, please tweet: Follow @andymiah Media Blueprint for London 2012 http://bit.ly/media2012 #media2012

Welcome/Welcome Back

Posted September 14th, 2010 in Uncategorized by Graham Jeffery

Welcome, and/or welcome back for the new academic year! We’re very excited to be beginning this year as a Skillset Media Academy. Induction and Enrolment information is available, by campus, here. We encourage you also to join the University’s Facebook group, follow our Twitter feed, keep a close eye on our blogs, and tune in to UCA Radio and our YouTube channel. Explore this site for more ways of keeping in touch and getting involved.

Ayr Alternative Arts Day, September 25th 2010

Posted September 14th, 2010 in Ayr, Creative Writing, Events, Performance, Portfolio by Graham Jeffery

We are working with our friends at Ayrtime and South Ayrshire Council to support Ayr Alternative Arts Day on Saturday 25th September. It features a number of UWS connections: curated by doctoral researcher Chris Dooks, part of the day includes performances by Boy Angel Productions, a company set up by UWS graduates Lindalouise Martin and Dougie Grieg. UWS Reader in Music and Performance Graham Jeffery will also be performing From the River to the Sea, an audio piece put together with sounds from the walk from the campus to the harbour in Ayr.

The day also includes readings from acclaimed authors Eleanor Thom, author of The Tin-Kin, Jason Donald, author of Choke Chain and
Karen Campbell, author of The Twilight Time, After The Fire and Shadowplay. And artist Alex Norris will present his work on The Art of the Diary. Full information on the Ayrtime website .