eikonPRO

eikonPRO is a professionalizing structure consisting of a series of workshops whose main goal is to widen students' professional and personal skills and allow them to gain hands-on artistic experience. A second goal is to give students an incentive by providing an environment in which to carry out projects that may be used for technology forecasting. eikonPRO is part of a comprehensive network of companies and specialists.

In collaboration with the academic section of eikon and the EMF, and through participants and assignments, eikonPRO offers a wealth of expertise. All students enrolled in eikonEMF four-year courses participate in professional workshops. The longest sessions (three months) are mainly attended by final-year students and alternate with six-month internships.

Internships

For two three-month sessions, students have the opportunity to immerse themselves in a working environment. Numerous partner companies welcome trainees every year and allow them to work on various assignments while being supervised by specialists in the business sector. Work placements with a language component (mainly in one of the partner languages: German, French or English) are also possible. A partnership with the SOL-Leonardo exchange association offers a range of European countries and companies providing internships abroad. Particular support is offered for internships on other continents.

Assignment Work

eikonPRO is both a research laboratory in the fields of art and communication, and a skills centre. It thus enables practices and experiences to be shared for the benefit of trainees and the school. For a three-month period, work is focused on internal or external production assignments. Within the framework of these assignments, students are involved in developing a variety of projects for the school or for external partners. The school’s strategy regarding artistic innovation and research ensures that these assignments are not competitive on the market.

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Examples of Internal Productions

  • Communication for 2011 Open House (“Human Touch”): Students took on the role of human, interactive terminals as they visited their school, triggered by a button on their shoulder. Deliberately provoking, it put human contact back at the forefront of the school’s focus.
  • START: Organisation of the Presence of eikonPRO at the Forum des Métiers: The working environment of a multimedia designer was re-created in order to show, in three phases (research, production and post-production), the reality of the profession. An interactive video promoting the Forum, called "Don't Miss the Start”, was filmed live and screened for students at secondary schools.
  • Signage for the “Plateau de Pérolles” station: Creation of ecological and decentralised signage prototypes for the “Plateau de Pérolles” station.

Examples of External Productions

  • Vevey Festival of Images (4th to 26th September 2010): Series of capsules based on the clash between “still images and moving images”. Using the work of artists invited to the festival’s eighth edition as inspiration, students suggested a series of video capsules to put the town’s relationship with image into perspective with micro-scenarios. Their work was exclusively broadcast at the festival.
  • Fribourg International Film Festival (19th to 26th March 2011): New York video producer Joan Logue was invited by the FIFF Festival and eikonPRO. As an emblematic figure of video art, Joan Logue joined the faculty for around 15 days to direct students in the production of a series of video portraits (inspired by her “30- second ads”) of actors, film directors and producers invited to the festival. This production, which gave rise to a series of 22 individual and intimate portraits, was presented in an exhibition during the last two days of the festival.
  • Montreux Jazz Festival (1st to 16th July 2011): As part of the “eikonPRO @ Montreux Jazz” project, the entire eikonEMF professional team moved to the Montreux Jazz Festival studios during the festival in order to create video projects with artistic added-value for Montreux Jazz cafés all over the world (Paris, Sydney, Tokyo). This second collaboration with the festival marked a new step in students’ “live” work experience.
  • Switzerland in the Mirror of the World: At the request of the Chair of Modern History at Fribourg University, eikonPRO developed a project for an interactive web site to improve the listing of different media with texts. Supervised by a PhD student and a researcher in contemporary Swiss history, the site will reflect, in an innovative way, how the image of Switzerland changed in the media in the 1970s by presenting radio and TV reports, etc., from international journals from the 1920s to modern day.