In their first year, PhD students Robin Gordon, Aelim Kim, Tamryn McDermott, and Noor Murteza hosted trace layer play, an immersive research incubator, made possible through a partnership with Urban Arts Space's Hybrid Arts Lab, a multi-venue learning lab that experiments with how art is imagined, made, viewed and understood. Building and sustaining a graduate research community in art education during the global pandemic promotes interactive dialogue, debate and public engagement. Forging links between established arts and design practices and research, trace layer play was designed to identify, visualize and chart research trajectories as an experimental and collaborative process. Through mapping, inductive and deductive reasoning, and material-led thinking processes, these researchers continue to use art to articulate their research trajectories as they are situated within a larger research community. As an ongoing process, researchers engage their thinking process using visualization strategies with a goal of developing ideas for their dissertation topics in quickly changing and unpredictable times. The title, trace layer play, illuminates the active process of delineating, overlapping and connecting ideas.
trace: leaving a trace, tracing to reveal a history, and locating pattern
layer: stacking and overlapping materials, excavating, and accumulation
play: unfixed parts continuously change through interaction, seeking out the potential for generating new connections and forms
Hopkins Hall Gallery was transformed into a laboratory for developing socially dynamic and public-engaged research. Viewer and visitor remote and analog input were layered into the installation. Individual research maps became material experiences in this immersive, collaborative and corporeal space. You can view more of the work from this exhibition on their Instagram site: @trace_layer_play.
In spring 2022, trace layer play collective will expand to include students from across all AAEP MA and PhD programs. Finding strength in numbers and rejuvenation of spirit in a communal enterprise, Gordon, Kim, McDermott and Murteza sent out a call to fellow MA and PhD students to join them. Now conceived as an art collective, trace layer play plans to a hold a second iteration of its research laboratory in the spring semester of 2022, Feb. 21 - 25, 2022.
