"WHY is he doing it, like?"

"To do something different."

"But why, like?"

"Did you never do something different?" asked Cork RTC's Arts Officer, Patricia Harrington of the students who were perplexed by Brian Connolly's performance/installation.

"Would you like to do something different now? Come to an art exhibition. There'll be free wine, but it won't be coming for 20 minutes."

"They spent the 20 minutes going around the exhibition, discussing it," reports Harrington, with satisfaction. "They got out a ruler and measured the different bits of Tom Fitzgerald's work."

In that story lies the essence of Patricia Harrington's work. Appointed this year as the first Arts Officer ever to work in an RTC, her brief is no less than to expand the minds and nourish the souls of the students. A group of RTC teachers had for three years run an Arts Fest in the college, and the point had been made to the management that the 10,000 students studying in Bishopstown's 1970s cluster of lunch box buildings needed the arts in their lives.

It was something that the group of teachers had discovered for themselves. It included Malt Cranitch, who most people know as a fiddler, but who is also a teacher of electronics. Pat Ahern, a guitarist, is a lecturer in mathematics, and Jim Walsh, who teaches law, is a traditional singer. But it had become too much and only the appointment of Harrington, who describes herself as "basically a teacher on a career break", gave them the inspiration to continue.

This year's Arts Fest, which began last weekend and continues until Saturday, is bigger, brighter and more structured than that of other years. It has included, for instance, Samhain, a mythological war between the forces of life and death, directed by Myles Breen and designed by Catherine Mulvihill, with huge Dalek like papier mache costumes made with the help of 20 volunteers from the Crawford College of Art and staged in a gap in the lunchboxes known as the "Atrium". It has included a concert in the Cork Opera House by King Masco from Sierra Leone, of heavily amplified boppy music, whose Caribbean sound showed the strong influence exerted on the culture by the freed slaves, who returned to live in Freetown in the late 1700s.

It has included a booked out concert last night in the Crazy Horse Saloon, by The Helle casters, who play the Fender guitars beloved of Rory Gallagher, returning to "Rory's home town". The Oiche Cheoil at the Cork School Of Music, with musicians including Frankie Gavin, Mairtin O'Connor and Mary Bergin, will be recorded by RTE Radio One on Friday night. And hopes are high that President Robinson who first delayed her visit because of the funeral of the Cathhaoirleach of the Seanad and then cancelled it because her helicopter couldn't brave the storm, will make it to Arts Fest next year.

The festival 45 part of a determined movement within the college to bridge the chasm between "practical" and "academic" disciplines, on which Irish society has insisted; Tableaux Networks, a group set up in the college to explore these interdisciplinary areas, published its first journal on the theme "Science in Culture", and last year toured a performance work, based on life drawing by Noel O'Callaghan to TCD's Samuel Beckett Centre.

Patricia Harrington has found the students' practical turn of mind stimulating: "I needed a psychedelic bomb made and there was someone here who knew how to make a bomb", she says.

The practical context encouraged the viewer to study the nuts and bolts of Brian Connolly's installation. Assembled just outside an entrance to the college, behind the "Atrium" (a lecturer stopped me, as I wandered the endless corridors in search of it, and asked, "Are you lost in Legoland?"), it posited the world's balance of power as a crazy, scientific experiment. A Philip's School Atlas lay gripped by callipers, and punched through at trouble spots all over the world. Through Ireland was with official, pedestrian Belfast scenes, and jam-jars, lined with scenes which could be seen as displaying the fruits of colonialism, such as Illustrated London News Famine drawings. As night drew in, more and more candles glimmered in the jam-jars, now strung to trees on the RTC's lawn, and more hunks were cut out of the black umbrella which sheltered the experiment like a threatened ozone layer, until the experiment collapsed, and the Atlas burst into flames. One piece of cat gut - remained, despite the artist's best, efforts, however - hope asserting itself over art?

"Is this some sort of Andy Warhol thing?" enquired one student, while another enquired of the artist silently mixing wax: "Are you going to put sugar on it?" The most robust response to the art came early, however, and can only be savoured in a strong Cork accent: "What de f--k is dat?"

The installation was part of Arts Fest Art, an exhibition of work by teachers from the country's major art colleges, selected by Mat hew Flowers of the Flowers East gallery in London: "There was nothing identifiably Irish about the submissions," he says, "but they were quirky and I was pleased to see a lot of small works." The most important identifying factor was that the artists were all teachers and thus all formally trained and perhaps partly because their teaching removed them at times from the contemporary maelstrom, there were only traditional materials, he added.

The exhibition includes strong mixed media landscapes by Janet Pierce, full of brooding dark greens and blues lit with chinks of light, and two distinctive Dermot Seymour oils of animals imbued with all the threatening forces of power in this country.

What Arts Fest Art is saying is that you can do more than one thing with your life, and RTC teachers like Malt Cranitch and Pat Ahern have proved it, by being to the forefront of Cork's wild live music scene. Their interests are reflected in Arts Fest. Khanda, made up of Ellen Cranitch, Conor and Ronan Guilfoyle, Tommy Halfredy and Martin Nolan, set the strong shapes of traditional music against the consistent rhythm of jazz, so that the whistles sounded like birds trapped melodiously in a net of percussion. And Maighread Ni Dhomhnaill sang in the Singing Club in The Gables. Her stunningly powerful renditions of songs like An Cailin Gaelach, An Clar Bog Deil, and O'Boyle's Daughter, which hinges on a line which translates something like: "And I will fall into a thousand pieces. If I do not have permission to lie against your bright breast", formed a stimulating contrast with some club members' songs, such as one which climaxed: "Oh Mammy, the cow, ate the piper.

HER mesmerising lecture on her influences showed how bands like Steeleye Span and Pentangle and singers like Joni Mitchell fired the move to sing traditional songs to accompaniment in the late 1960s songs which Ni Dhomhnaill learned from her blind aunt Neill Ni Dhomhnaill: "I would be on the bus from Dublin to Donegal for five or six hours, and then I'd arrive at Neils, and the house would be dark and she'd be in the kitchen singing, or dancing. The sound of the clock ticking loudly is in all the recordings I made of her."

Only a handful of people made it to the lecture, however, and there were sparse audiences for many events: Kieran Ahern's performance of Haniel Long's The Marvellous Adventure of Cabeza De Vaca, the story of a Portuguese explorer who learns the ways of the Indians, had an audience of five at the RTC. Interesting the students will take time, but plainly, the lunchboxes take their toll on some events too, and the stronger the bridge the RTC can build from Bishopstown to the city centre, and to the major arts institutions, the better. The festival will always, and rightly, have its roots in "the Tech", but it should become what Michael Noonan, the RTC's assistant director, described at the absent President's lunch as "a seed planted here, which will become an arts festival for the city".