“they understood their limitations”

It’s been mentioned here before, and at the Screenings too, that A Communications Primer emerged from a collaboration between the Eames’, George Nelson, and Lamar Dodd, known as ART X. In one of my many online searches for more information about ART X or Sample Lesson for a Hypothetical Course as the Eames’ liked to call it, I came upon a very informative site, under development by Séan Mills:

It was on this site that I came across the video above which is captioned thus:

This is a sample of real audio taken off of Reel-to-reel audiotapes from an Art X lesson. The visual component is simply a placeholder as the original slides and their sequence is lost. The imagery is from a PowerPoint lecture given at Cine in Athens, Georgia in 2008 as a part of The UGA Art Department’s Talk 20 series hosted by then graduate student Brian Hitselberger.

ART X was a project to push Educational Methodologies to their Limits, via an appropriate and compelling use of Media, Narrative, and Cinematic Experience. Here’s what Ray Eames had to say about their approach to ART X:

“It was a way of studying the problem. We were asked to do a thing about the Georgia Experiment; did you know about that? How to improve the teaching of design, and art, really, it was art. George Nelson and ourselves were involved and, instead of making a report, we made a film. Or rather, we put together an hour program made up of film and slides and words and clips of other films. It was intended as an example of how material could be used to give a base for student and teacher from which to develop and expand — not use up all the time, step by step, all of the teacher’s time and the student’s time. And that was shown. But we wanted examples. For instance, we chose the subject of communications, because we were all interested in that and thought we would find little clips of things that would explain it and help it. We couldn’t find any. We had just a terrible waste of time looking at catalogues, trying to find films and finding that it took forty-five minutes to get to a point which was not made clearly. So that’s when we decided we’d have to do something ourselves. And then later, Alexander Girard was called in and put on this — did you ever hear of the “Sample Lesson?” It was shown first in Georgia, then at U.C.L.A. You know, it’s like a club, the people who have seen it and the people who haven’t seen it.”