Video transcript
Kia ora and welcome.
This webcast is intended to provide guidance and advice on the authenticity requirements for internally assessed Visual Arts standards.
This webcast covers:
- using appropriated material
- understanding Copyright and Intellectual Property,
- tracking and acknowledging other sources, and
- utilising sourced imagery and digital processes.
Appropriation is a long-accepted strategy in Visual Arts for satire, parody, and social commentary.
Guidance for students when re-contexualising material in line with their creative intention is necessary.
Cultural appropriation involves iconography, taonga, and artifacts with deep associated meaning or tikanga. In some visual arts contexts, cultural appropriation is valid and meaningful.
Guidance from kaiako is advised to avoid cultural misappropriation or tokenism.
Misuse of copyrighted images has increased with internet accessibility. Visual Arts students need basic knowledge of laws that protect the Intellectual Property of creatives, including the commercial restrictions around publishing trademarks beyond the classroom.
Schools should endeavour to protect students’ Intellectual Property, especially when publishing their work digitally. Educational permissions information is available at Copyright Licensing New Zealand.
Sources for all materials should be clearly attributed to ensure authenticity using simple documentation practices, including:
- labels that indicate student-generated, original imagery
- artists’ names or titles of artworks
- any URLs for imagery sourced online.
Deliberately copying elements of an artist’s work can be useful to show knowledge of conventions. In these examples, annotations acknowledge the use of artists’ compositional conventions, appropriated text, and explain how artists’ motifs and stylistic devices have influenced student work.
Inadvertent plagiarism can result from omitting attributions.
Kaiako can pre-empt this by outlining good research practices at the start of activities, including tracking templates to record URLs, and encouraging the labelling of artworks and use of quotation marks.
Acknowledging verbal information from experts is also important.
Student generated source imagery is best practice where possible.
Self-generated photographs and drawings allow students to fully control and modify their source imagery.
Collaging from found images is common practice to enable inaccessible subject matter to be utilised.
Using stock photos is an accepted practice in some visual arts fields, such as Graphic Design, where progressive modifications allow the student’s design capability to be assessed, not the stock image itself.
Visual arts study differs from the commercial sector where copyright, royalties, and caveats apply to stock images.
Open-source imagery should be used where possible, and clearly attributed.
Metadata and reverse image searches that have been useful for authentication may no longer suffice.
Current best practices include:
- explicit instruction about how generative AI and digital techniques may be used
- regular checkpoints throughout the creative process, and
- thorough documentation for authenticity purposes.
Fully documenting digital techniques and AI generated imagery is strongly recommended, such as snapshots of digital processes, cataloguing component parts, and annotating work pre- and post-digital manipulation.
For more guidance and examples of authenticity practices, see the links on the NZQA website. There are also helpful resources on the Copyright Licensing New Zealand site as well as the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand.
Authenticity (4:17 mins)
Helpful guidance and advice on maintaining the authenticity requirements for internal Visual Arts standards.
For more information related to authenticity in Visual Arts assessment, please refer to:
Video transcript
Kia ora, and welcome.
This webcast will explore a variety of appropriate research modes for the Visual Arts inquiry standard, 91912. Visual Arts inquiry, also known as practice based research, involves using a variety of exploration and response modes to gather, record, process, and reflect upon imagery and information about a topic.
The purpose of the practice based research is to accumulate the visual material and knowledge of the topic to support the personal artmaking that occurs in later standards.
Drawing media that's used for a variety of specific recording purposes (for example quick sketches) can capture the essential structure of objects, while more detailed observation records the specifics of form, tone, and pattern.
Purposeful selection of media can include pen or pencil for structure and textual elements, ink or monochrome for tonal values, and paint for colour properties.
Scrapbooking involves a range of resource material and information from a variety of sources.
Personal material includes student generated and family photographs, internet images, labels, tickets, etc.
Social or historical pages may include found objects, documents, maps, illustrations, and diagrams related to a time, place, or event.
High quality images support future art making, and brief annotations about the significance of imagery provide evidence of the personal reflection needed for higher levels of achievement.
Annotations serve a variety of purposes. At the level of Achieved, annotations typically involve labels, names, and descriptions.
At Merit, annotations include summaries of histories and/or narratives, and explanations of the key features of objects.
Excellence annotations often include reflection about personal relationships of objects and imagery, and/or connections between selected contexts. However, the focus should be on visual evidence rather than extended written responses.
Photography for research investigations differs from photography for art making purposes in terms of its exploratory intention. This means the primary goal is to document the visual qualities of objects, including form, detail, structure, and texture, using a range of viewpoints.
Photography can also record ephemeral qualities, such as light, contrast, atmosphere, motion blur, or other transient effects. Digital processing can be used to explore symbolic relationships between objects.
Most pages we’ll see for moderation include a blend of modal responses to the subject being explored. Richer pages typically include personal photography, drawing studies, and annotations summarising key information and personal responses.
Reflective responses, needed for Merit and Excellence, can be visual or written. For example, an identity collage can explore a connection with or relationship between cultures, but are not intended to be finished artworks.
Annotations, or summary statements explaining the selection and juxtaposition of imagery and visual responses, help to clarify the research purpose of the evidence.
Further support for this and other internal achievement standards in Visual Arts can be found on the subject page and the Assessor Support catalogue, available on the NZQA website.
Practice-based inquiry - standard 91912 (3:28 mins)
Video transcript
Kia ora and welcome.
This webcast will explore the requirements for Achievement Standard 91913.
The Explanatory Notes unpack the nature of resolved work outcomes for this standard.
These include: the scope of approaches related to a specific set of design properties and production practices, the substance of outcomes which need to have both sustained development and significant production values, the requirement for a specific communicative intention (such as a thematic idea or narrative proposition), and the requirement for technical finish aligned with the credit weighting and curriculum level of the standard.
Design conventions include the visual properties and principles related to a specific art making practice. For example, Zine projects need to be informed by pagination principles such as page inversion, double page spreads, and the location of cover and back pages.
As well as typography, layout, and illustrative properties, other contexts such as portrait painting or sculptural installation employ their own unique set of related visual principles and ways of working.
Production conventions are the technical principles and properties related to the fabrication of the resolved artwork – or the manner in which the artwork is created.
This supporting evidence shows understanding of the procedures for gathering and preparing flax for a harakeke project, including both cultural protocols and technical procedures.
‘Sustained’ can mean the investigative depth and critical decision making in the supporting evidence. This may include: research into the visual and technical conventions of the established practice, a study of selected artists and artworks, technical trials, conceptual options, and reflective thinking about the strengths and weakness of each option.
Sustained investigations typically take between four and five weeks. ‘Significant’ refers to the scale, conceptual depth, design complexity, and production processes of the outcome.
While scale is a regular feature of significant artworks, it is not always a requirement. For example, this ceramic outcome is smaller in scale than the dress installation and shaped painting, yet it is significant in terms of its conceptual intention and fabrication complexity.
Significant outcomes typically need between four and six weeks to produce. Resolved artworks for 91913 need to have a clearly defined communicative intention. This can be thematic, such a Zine based on a specific Whakataukī, or a more personal identity-based topic such as the ceramic artwork on the right.
An accompanying artist statement which explains the concept, narrative, or symbolism of the artwork can support assessment in terms of showing the specific communicative intention.
For Achieved, outcomes need to be fully complete with skills appropriate to New Zealand Curriculum level 6.
For Merit, artworks need to show control of both design principles and production techniques.
Control relates to the consistent management of visual elements and the level of competence with production materials and techniques.
For Excellence, artworks need to show fluency with both design principles and production techniques. Fluency means critical consideration of visual elements and consistent facility with production materials and techniques.
For more explanation and examples of what is required for this standard, see the exemplars on the NZQA website. There are also annotated samples of student evidence in the Assessor Practice Tool for 91913. These show the type of evidence required at each level of achievement.