Saturday 25th

Wrapping up and consolidating? Well yes and no. There was still new stuff happening at Summer School. There were intensive periods of making in the morning and afternoon. Participants made GIFs and zines.

Barby and Teresa enlisted the help of two young artists – Eva Cookney and Anni Movsisyan. Both of them are part of the “Sorry you feel uncomfortable” collective. They presented their work at the beginning of the day and explained how they used zines and GIFs in their work.

The GIF is a means of producing a very simple message through a single animated image. GIFs very often become viral and if they are very, very popular, can reach the status of memes.

A zine on the other hand is a cheap and small scale publication, typically under 1000 copies. It allows people to communicate their ideas, positions, opinions, and experiences to a wider group than their immediate peers and family. Zines often have a handmade an/or ‘punk’ aesthetic.

Both GIFs and zines have clear applications in schools and colleges inside and outside of art rooms.

Participants engaged in a flurry of collage construction and GIF making. Each participant made a collage which had some movable parts. The group used three images, but there could many more than this. We were limited by time. The collage was photographed three times, with the moving parts in different positions, and then these three images were transferred to gif maker software.

The entire group of GIFs were then exhibited and some were loaded onto a tumblr site.

The afternoon saw another intense period of cutting, pasting and sticking, with participants constructing a small zine as a reflection on their Summer School experience. Two copies were made of each of the zines – one for the participants to take home, and one to contribute to the Summer School archive.

A closing reflection allowed the artists, participants and Schools and Teachers team to consider what they had learnt over the five days. One participant noted, to widespread nodding, that the Summer School had reminded them of what they used to do as an art student; they were more in touch with their ‘artist self’. Another noted, again to nods of agreement, that it would be odd coming back to Tate as a visitor, after having had it as a ‘home’ for the week. And one said that she had already begun writing new lesson plans!