Site/Place/Industry

I felt that last week’s presentation for our group practice on site/place/industry as being pretty useless in helping us learn anything new, comprehend its relevance to our individual courses/projects and generally found myself to be bored, uninterested and ended up blanking most of everything that was mentioned. This was due to Ronnie’s presentation skills (or lack thereof). On his discussion of ‘site’ he proceeded to talk about one single location that seemed to be only relevant to those photography students. He kept discussing architecture and quite frankly this felt completely irrelevant to my particular practice in costume. Similarly, his way of presenting did not help with the lack of relevance, considering he spent a majority of time reading huge paragraphs and pages from text books without stating its significant relevance to anything. By the end I felt bored, uninterested and unfulfilled. Quite simply it felt like I had wasted that part of the day.  Similarly, whatever the second gentleman spoke about in regards to place I had completely blanked it because I felt it was again, completely irrelevant to my practice – it was not pointed out or stated at any point how whatever he spoke about would be relevant to what on earth I’m doing. Again, the final gentleman who spoke about Asian fashion as art – it is technically about clothes, so I perked up thinking finally something was going to be relevant to my project. But it instantly seemed I was mistaken as it seemed again, pointless and irrelevant to my practice.  The topic was vaguely interesting, but I felt as though it was not helping anyone consider the topic of site/place/industry, it didn’t fit with the topic of ‘industry’ even though that apparently was what he was discussing. In fact it felt like something completely different, but as to what it was, no one was quite sure.

Quite frankly the entire day felt like a waste of time. Nothing seemed relevant to anything, it was boring and the professors’ presentation skills lacked any actual skill. In my year one undergraduate degree we were taught the ‘dos and don’ts’ of presenting to a class, and quite simply all of those presenting – especially Ronnie – did everything you shouldn’t. They read out of books, they copied huge chunks of text onto the powerpoint board, showed pictures without defining their relevance to anything. I get increasingly frustrated at these sessions because they seem completely pointless.