Judging Guidelines - some background material to consider...

["James Purchase" <jpurch@interlog.com>]

I've just re-posted some more material to the website which was posted here
on the list back on the 15th and 16th of July on the subject of Judging
Guidelines. I don't re-post it here to avoid swamping your in-baskets with
repeat information, but I think that, for me at least, being able to see all
of the posts on the topic together in one place, makes it easier to guage
overall direction of our thinking. I hope that you agree, and that you take
the time to visit the web-site and look at the "Judging Guidelines page"
before you either finish reading this post, or make further comments of your
own on the subject. Granted, I have selectively picked out the comments
which I present on the web-site, but I have given the message numbers and
the dates, so anyone who wishes to go back into the archives themselves to
see that I have not tried to "slant" or "bias" this by only posting those
comments that I agree with (not too blatantly anyway... <g>).

.......

A lot of really good comments were made by the various people who
contributed to that thread.

This event is about Aquascaping, which is a concious undertaking by an
aquarist to create an underwater scene in a glass box. Regardless of whether
that person is a rank beginner or a seasoned expert, there is a large
element of creativity inherent in the process. Whether the end result is art
or not is a subjective question and not for us to decide.

As Karen pointed out, a successful aquascape must also take certain
technical things into consideration such as appropriatenss of the materials
selected and the long term viability of the set-up. We are, after all, not
looking at a flower arrangement or anything else that is really only
intended as a transient object. Karen's comments about the aquascapes being
based on sound aquaristics is very germaine to ths discussion.

Judging an Aquascape, or providing Guidelines for doing so, has only passing
similarity to Judging a fish, a cat, or a turnip (at least, in my view). The
first is a "creation" of an individual (the aquascaper) while the latter are
really works of Mother Nature (influenced no doubt by selective breeding and
grooming). I think that the criteria used to judge them ought to be at least
a little bit different. How much different I don't know... that's open to
discussion here.

I like what Olga posted regarding her suggestions for the various criteria,
and I also like the things from Amano. I am mindfull of Karen's caution that
we are only going to have access to images of the actual aquascapes, and
that we have agreed to be open in what types of aquascapes we accept, so
both of these lists will need to be fine tuned in order to be appropriate
for our needs and conditions.

Roger's insistence on Art might be overstaing things a little as might my
previous comments on Craft, but both points of view are appropriate as a
backdrop to any discussion of a "hand crafted" thing like an aquascape.

I'm just a little leery right now, of getting bogged down in a discussion of
how much weight to place of the various criteria (i.e. "points"). This will
invariably enter into our discussion, but I think it should do so only AFTER
we have discussed and agreed on what criteria we want the Judges to actually
consider.

James Purchase
Toronto

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