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3 minute trailer from 14 minute video Midville 2025 experimental AI documentary opera by Steve Dutton and Steve Hawley

Midville 2025 by Steve Dutton and Steve Hawley

‘Midville’ was the pseudonymous name given to a Midlands art school in the United Kingdom when it was studied over a period of three years from 1967 by two sociologists, Charles Madge and Barbara Weinberger. They observed and recorded in great detail the teaching in the fine art course, the critiques, the tutorials, and the assessments where students were classed as either 'interesting' or 'mediocre'.

Totally by chance Madge and Weinberger had arrived at a point when the School was improbably about to become the world centre of conceptual art, from which a new art movement was generated. The resulting book, Art Students Observed, published in 1973 has become a classic document within art teaching literature, a verbatim account of where 'romantic' and 'conceptual' art first collided.

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Six decades  later Steve Hawley traced some the students in the book and

interviewed them about their recollections and experiences (sometimes traumatic). They include ‘Liz,’ described as a ‘puddingy sort of student’, ‘Brian’ the technical whizz kid, ‘Dave’ who brought his chickens into the studio and became the outstanding success of the course, and several others. For once the art school experience is seen completely from the point of view of the students rather than their artist/teachers.

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We have recreated‘Midville’ as a 15-minute AI supported mini collage opera, where the students as they were then and now, pronounce their testimonies via AI voices, avatars, choirs and singers, and real-world original footage, structured around one of the drawing projects briefs as outlined in the original publication. The ‘opera’ is made of three parts based on points A, B, and C of drawing project brief. As "Coutts" reminded the students as he set the first year project;

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For the purposes of this project you will forget the following value concepts so many of the

areas of modern and contemporary art.

A. INVENTIVENESS

B. ORIGINALITY

C. CREATIVITY