Beyond Photoshop

Usually ICT in art lessons means Photoshop or one of the other image editing packages. The big advance in recent years has been the move from 'bitmaps' to layers, transparency and effects. It has involved the development of ICT as an essentialy collaging medium rather than a medium for directly generating art imagery. The ubiquity of digital camera's, or mobile phones, as they are often called, has dramatically changed the way first hand images are researched and recorded. the advent of Flickr points to ways in which collaborative work can be done between groups who have no social or geographical connections.
Next steps may be to explore the way that images can be used in the environment. It may be that the widespread availability of digital projectors in schools will enable students' digital art to take on new forms embracing sculpture and installations used in contemporary art but seldom in classrooms. For instance, images and animations can be projected onto other surfaces and images - thus doing in the real world what Photoshop has been doing in the virtual environment for some time. However, it is instant and does not require many hours spent wrestling with software.
Work in the last month with both primary and secondary teachers has involved experimenting with ways of using digital projections to create sculptures and installations. The latter involving sound as well as animation. This provides a new and powerful aesthetic vocabulary as the digital projections bring images into the real world which are big (projecting onto walls enables the use of scale in ways impossible previously) and subtle as the quality of the image gently modifies the objects or spaces it is projected onto. Installations by teachers and pupils have been exhibited and transformed the old victorian vaulted brick wine cellars at Waddesdon manor providing an environment of animation, sound, light and colour which was genuinely innovative and powerfully expressive.