Before I lose access to UCSC’s student site admin due to their changes in logging in, I want to post all of the evaluations left by former faculty members. Out of 11 total reviews, six were good and five were kind of mixed. Six of the reviews address me as “Christoph” three address me as “Christopher” and one addresses me as “Chris” and one doesn’t address me at all.

The title of the course is listed with each quarter and includes the title and the professor’s name. I am marking the positive attributes in blue, neutral attributes in purple, critical attributes in red and positive attributes that appear to be glib* in green.

*glib attributes include very unspecific compliments that could apply to anyone/anything

SPRING 2010

MFA EX PROD
Murray,S.E.

Christoph completed all aspects of DANM 215 with professionalism and competence. His installation was complex but he required little assistance and Christoph showed a strong degree of self-motivation throughout. In regard to the quality of his installation, Lady/Applicant: The Lazarus, it was professional-looking and understated. In the classroom, Christoph was present and forthcoming with all time-sensitive materials related to the exhibition’s execution. In addition, he offered his assistance to other students once his work was in order. Christoph was a pleasure to work with, extremely professional, efficient and conscientious always thinking of how he could streamline the process or make my work lighter and I would gladly recommend him to others for these very reasons.

THESIS RESEARCH
Wilson,R.J.

Chris Girard successfully completed work in poetry and poetics on route to revising and filing his MFA thesis on performative, deconstructive, spectral, and urban material dimensions of Sylvia Plath as poet and influence. He worked in post-voice poetics and digital transformations of voice into sound and image, he worked with focused diligence on an array of persona poetic genres; he responded with care and empathy to a range of works and younger authors, he kept evolving and transforming, and worked extremely well with feeback and critique both from myself and others in the poetry seminar, and all of this was brought to bear in his excellent installation project and thesis.

WINTER 2010

PROJECTED LIGHT
Cuthbert,D.L.

The focus of this class was on the advanced exploration of lighting and projection techniques. This was a small, highly interactive hands-on class. Christoph’s projects were all excellent and timely.

THESIS RESEARCH
Gustafson,I.

During Winter Quarter 2009 Christoph Girard conceived of and produced a course of independent study designed to finalize plans for his MFA installation and to strengthen the written component of his written thesis.

Christoph proposed a syllabus that included a reading list, a production schedule, technical tutorials, and meeting times to discuss issues and concepts relevant to his research area. He always came to our meetings with productive questions and topics for discussion and he met deadlines. He was communicative and accepted my feedback and critique positively and constructively.

At the end of the quarter Christoph had finished his audio project and single channel video. And he was able to clarify his thesis paper, focusing and deepening his research topic. Christoph is an excellent poetand has a particular facility with the written word but struggles a bit under the demanding weight of academic writing, with it’s imperatives for generic structure and linear analysis. For the most part, Christoph was able to conform his writing to the genre of masters thesis.

FALL 2009

COMPUTINGFORSOCIETY
Davis,J.E.

Participated in course as expected.

GENEALOGIES/THEORIES
McPhee,C.L.

Christopher Girard has written a briliant first draft for the MFA thesis. He has an extraordinary intellect, rare to say the least; he is a fluid and natural writer, and responded to all the writing assignments with tremendous depth of insight. It is a privilege to read his contributions to scholarship in contemporary art and narrative poetics.I am confident that he is one of the most gifted artist/writers I will ever have the opportunity to know; his criticality in analysis is matched only by his generative imagination.

SPRING 2009

CRITIQUE
Gonzalez,J.A.

Christoph’s participation in the group critique was productively engaged with the aesthetic qualities of the work, with particular attention to the work’s potential audience. His critiques were quite insightful and pointed. Christoph presented his work three times. The first was a remarkably disturbing and engaging sound cut up of Sylvia Plath’s poems The Applicant and Lady Lazarus retitled Lady Applicant: The Lazarus. Because the voice is uncanny in its strange enunciations, and the poem is transformed into a kind of epitaph in the form of a dirge, the effect is eerie and haunting. It invites those of us who know Plath’s work to ruminate on her early suicide, and for those unfamiliar with the poet the work is still an evocative sound piece. The second was a collaborative sound work that used an algorithm to map a relation between electronic musical tones and cut-up audio poetry. The work indicated a sensitivity to the rhythm of the voice and the mood of the poem. The last work was a series of photographs of domestic interiors, exteriors and street signs that (taken as a group) offered a provocative view of wealth and privilege surrounded by various forms of interdiction (signage forbidding access, prohibiting various behaviors, etc.). Several of the photographs were strong individually, but most worked best as a part of a series. Overall, Christoph produced excellent work this quarter.

WINTER 2009

INTRO PROGRM ARTS
Elsea,P.Q.

This course is an introduction to computer programming for interactive art. The languages covered this year were Processing and Max/MSP, with about equal attention given to details of the languages and algorithms common to art applications. Students were required to demonstrate basic knowledge of both languages or intermediate proficiency in one.

Christopher’s work was primarily focused on the textual and poetic possibilities of the languages presented. Indeed, his Max patch was intended as a textual artifact that incidentally produced art as a side effect of the careful arrangement of objects by name. He seemed indifferent to the showier algorithms presented, but did demonstrate understanding of the basic principles of the languages and a direct and disciplined approach to attaining his goals.

INDEPENDENT STUDY
Young,G.E.

Christoph pursued a fascinating course of study this quarter. Appropriating the use of collage from visual art, Christoph took two poems by Sylvia Plath, “Lady Lazarus” and “The Applicant,” and by shuffling and rearranging the individual words from each poem, he created a lexical anagram of Plath’s work. The six-part poem he fashioned used every word from the original poems, and the influence of this forced determinacy created unexpected and quite marvelous pressures upon the newly reconstituted verse. Christoph worked diligently on the structure of this new poem, and the meticulousness with which he worked the line breaks of his poem was rewarded by a wholly new creature: a poem echoing Plath, but a unique, satisfying and independent utterance. Christoph then used a sophisticated audio program to painstakingly make a bank of individual words spoken by Sylvia Plath. He then stitched them together so that Sylvia Plath “reads” his new poem. What might easily have been a glib, intellectual conceit is, in fact, a monstrously beautiful work that questions the nature of authorship, voice, the primacy of text, and authorial intention. Christoph wedded his skills as a poet, a theoretician, and a technician to create a work of genuine power and resonance. It was a treat to work on this project with him.

FALL 2008

RECMETHODS&APPROACH
Murray,S.E.

Christoph Girard was consistently present and attentive to the course materials. Though he was not among the more vocal of the course, his adeptness with the coursework and commitment to its analysis was evident in his weekly reading responses. Christoph demonstrated exceptional aptitude in terms of the writing. His final paper, “The Poetry of Readership” dealt with the problem of authorship and the advent of readership. It was among the strongest of the papers, most notably for its tone and style. Unlike many of the papers in the course, Christoph’s was able to most effectively meld theory with his own interpretation so as not to subsume his own voice. He completed all aspects of the course in an exemplary manner, including responses, presentation and final paper.

ELECTRONIC/ARTMAKNG
Anderson,E.W.

Christopher regularly attended class and contributed to class discussions and critique. His class projects were good incorporating interesting ideas. The work explored methodologies for integrating electronic technology with the content of the work he envisioned. He worked independently to gain knowledge of the technology necessary to realize his projects. He experimented with technologies and aesthetics in his work. He was always willing to offer feedback in critiques. He incorporated suggestions offered in critique into the development of his projects.