Involvement of students in the making process

Each in our own way, we are trying to involve our students as much as possible in the design, production and mounting of our exhibitions.

Here is how we envision students taking part: - Some students with graphic design skills could participate in the making of a visual identity. - During the exhibitions and associated events, students could present the work they've done during and following the workshops and express their feedbacks and learnings. - In ESADSE, Damien Baïs will lead a course where students will code some graphic programs that will be a part of the exhibition and related to the collaborative videogame, he and David-Olivier Lartigaud (ESADSE teacher) are starting to make. - In each school, some students will be involved in setting-up the exhibitions and present it to the public.

Students will be invited to participate on a voluntary basis, except when it is the subject of specific courses. It's very important to us that they don't feel instrumentalized, that those who take part actually have the will to do so. Some of the students who participated in the workshops have already expressed their willingness to be involved in the exhibitions.

Programming of bugs by ESADSE's students

For the exhibitions, and following the workshop on collaborative games, the ESADSE team decided to specifically design and program a three-dimensional cooperative game in which the players will face each other (so they don't see the other player's screen) and have to talk out loud in order to meet on the map. When they succeed, events will be triggered in the scenography.

Indeed, students will be programming those events as part of ESADSE's Digital Creation program, more specifically in Damien Baïs' programming course. These programs will generate graphic effects on the interviews we have mentioned earlier, temporarily disrupting the videos broadcasted on screens in the room when players meet in the game. We call it bugs.

What is the most interesting is that students actually will be hacking their own videos, as a way to reclaim their form, which has been entirely designed by the teaching teams. In order to do so, they will design computer programs which will be connected to the game. The exhibition then becomes an exciting pretext for them to do some technical exercises. It's also an opportunity to include in the project some students who haven't taken part in the workshops.

Apart from those "filters" and even though the game will mostly be made by Damien Baïs and David-Olivier Lartigaud (Esadse teachers), it will also be opened for students to participate if some of them are interested in.

Setting-up the exhibitions with students

When we build an exhibition with students, it is interesting to involve them from the beginning to the end, particularly in the technical installation of the elements that make it up.

Involving students in setting up the exhibition is an opportunity to pass on technical know-how -- applied to a particular object -- that they can use later in their curriculum. This may involve spatial skills, craft skills (drilling, fitting a peg, choosing the right peg, and so on), setting up technical devices, etc.

In the case of this series of exhibitions in particular, the installation of the system linking a central computer hosting the game, screens showing the videos and micro-computers enabling coordinated actions between the game and the videos, is an interesting experiment because it can be somehow reproduced for other purposes.

In summary, the mounting of an exhibition is always interesting in terms of sharing knowledge between students and with the support of the teachers and technical teams involved. It is also a -- generally cheerful -- moment of collaboration when the "hierarchy" between students, staff and teachers is less visible, everyone working side by side towards the same goal.