How to prepare an intermediary presentation about the work in progress on your art/design project

0_ Content

Every intermediary presentation should include a defined goal of the project that you are from now on committing to.
 That doesn’t mean, it can still evolve and change with further ongoing experiments and progress. But at the moment of the presentation you should have clarified all conceptual questions and know for sure what you want to do. Your project may be very open-ended and have a focus on experimentation, in which case it's a good thing to not be too determined with the outcome of your project - nevertheless it is necessary to define what, how and when you will do which thing.

Include your initial research question, as well as the experiments that you already conducted. Prioritize being concise over including every little detail from your progress so far.

Prepare accurate / high quality / realistic media to support the imaginative aspect of your presentation (high quality rendering of your prototype, work in progress videos, 2D/3D idea visualizations, a paper model, a software simulation, … )

For the sake of becoming understandable: reduce the complexity of your project presentation to a degree that it you could as well easily explain to someone outside of the media art bubble (your grandma, random person in the tram, … )

Advocate for your project. Make your audience understand and feel what interested you about your project in the first place.

1_ Rhetorics

Rehearse your presentation. Record yourself if your unsure about your pacing or length of the presentation.

When working with unstable media (as it is the case for almost all practices in the media arts, regarding all electronics, mechanical, biological, digital media), pre-record a backup video in case of failure during the presentation.

Not optional: don’t exceed the time constrain of the presentation.

2_ Reflection

When either lecturers or fellow students offer their critique to you, don't react in a defensive way. Instead, trust your colleagues and teachers that the critique, doubts, suggestions for improvements, maybe even suspicions are opportunities to detect conceptual or technical weakpoints of the current state of your projects. Projects are always partial, subjective, incomplete and probably never really *finished*. In the same sense, not all suggestions are worth to be taken into consideration. So please don't try to *protect* your project idea from criticism, and instead try to absorb those suggestions you find useful and let it help you to make your project as amazing as possible.

Lastly, highly recommended: Export/render your presentation as a PDF or video and archive it for yourself. As your project will probably change with further development, your presentation may contain ideas that don't materialize in your current project, but may be very interesting for you to rediscover in the future.

This document is part of the list of Conceptual Support Resources for Students