Abstract:

The Madrid Regional Government, through the Madri+d Knowledge Foundation, promotes each year a Science Week. In November of 2015, under the slogan "Knows, Experience, See'', the regional government opened its fifteenth edition. On that occasion the initiative was also included in the activities of International Year of Light and Light‐Related Technologies proclaimed by the United Nations. The proposal we are making here was part of the activities undertaken by the Complutense University in the 15th Science Week of the Community of Madrid.

The course / workshop, entitled “Light-Art. Creation of glass lighting devices blown and shaped with torch” was an initiative of the Faculty of Fine Arts, the Glass Center and the Ultrafast Lasers Center. The Art-Based Research action was focused on the theoretical conceptualization, the empirical practices and the academic methods of a set of self-chosen artistic problem formulations.

The aim of the present work is to provide information relating to the dynamics generated in the configuration and development of a type of artistic projects related to forms of artistic thought, communication and procedure, linking science and art. The activity seeks to bring together a series of elements of theoretical knowledge –light, colour, form and glass- which allow us to get inside the complex world of artistic endeavour considered as the product of a systemic and creative processual way of thinking.

The teaching methodology followed in the subject acknowledges the convergence of five methodologies simultaneously: Skills-Based Learning (design of activities which allow students to acquire generic skills, related to the profession, and specific skills, related to the subject); Problem-Based Learning (learning through carefully constructed projects which pose specific challenges for the students to solve); the Case Method (analysis and study of works carried out by qualified professionals); Learning by Symbolic Description (course lectures or theory seminars); and Cooperative Learning (learning through group work). Each of these methodologies will play an important role in the detailed planning of the work in each of the proposed activities.

It is a way of working that originates in the formulation of a process and indicating how to develop it. The knowledge starts directly or indirectly from an author’s own rules and methods, with a personal code, and its mission is not to achieve the objectivity of the result, but to express a particular vision of the world, express its own interiority or satisfy a pure pleasure of execution. The process is made up of searches, tests, trials and corrections.

Keywords:

Light, art, design, glass, colour, innovation, technology.