Items where Year is 2018

Narrative comprehension, memory, motion, depth perception, synesthesia, hallucination, and dreaming have long been objects of fascination for cognitive psychologists. They have also been among the most potent sources of creative inspiration for experimental filmmakers. Lessons in Perception melds film theory and cognitive science in a stimulating investigation of the work of iconic experimental artists such as Stan Brakhage, Robert Breer, Maya Deren, and Jordan Belson. In illustrating how avant-garde filmmakers draw from their own mental and perceptual capacities, author Paul Taberham offers a compelling account of how their works expand the spectator’s range of aesthetic sensitivities and open creative vistas uncharted by commercial cinema.

In the context of a rapidly changing world, Rachel Worth explores the ways in which the clothing of the rural working classes was represented visually in paintings and photographs and by the literary sources of documentary, autobiography and fiction, as well as by the particular pattern of survival and collection by museums of garments of rural provenance. The book analyses the ways in which clothing and how it is represented throws light on wider social and cultural aspects of society, as well as how 'traditional' styles of dress, like men's smock-frocks or women's sun-bonnets, came to be replaced by 'fashion'. This study, with black & white and colour illustrations, both adds a broader dimension to the history of dress by considering it within the social and cultural context of its time and discusses how clothing enriches our understanding of the social history of the Victorian period.

Photography’s role in the historical framing of how we see can hardly be overestimated: heralded as the most extraordinary invention in vision, it was meant to deliver the promise of technology’s ability to enrich and improve human sight. Simultaneously, the medium’s capacity to offer photographic evidence placed it at the crossroads of the techniques of representation and regulation. Even as the machine is ever so rapidly substituting the eye in the forging of endless stream of visual data that we are now subjected to, digital vision still relies on the photographic image.
Against such a background, this article departs from a proposition that if we were to envision different ways of seeing we can start from a reformulated understanding of photography. In order to do so, the article critically examines recent photographic works by Taisuke Koyama and Nihal Yesil and argues that abstract photography in particular enables the recognition of material entanglements between the medium and what it aspires to represent. ‘Following’ such materials as cellophane, aluminium, PVC as well as light, the article also mobilises Karen Barad’s project of agential realism in its view of abstract photography as a tool for looking with, a vehicle that enables the rethinking of the medium and, by implication, the ethical parameters of vision that hinges on it.

The chapter considers elements at play in the establishment of our current historical knowledge. Looking at past events as complex adaptive systems, it demonstrates why the current mediation of history is oversimplified. By formulating the possibility of a complex narrative matrix (environment), it explores its potential in offering both an archive of evidence drawn from multiple agents, and presenting the evolving relationship between them in time. This matrix aligns itself with a simulation of a CAS, the primary interest being the VR matrix' ability to be both an interactive interface enabling exploration of the evidential material from different points of access, and a construction able to reveal its procedural work; a dynamic that elicits the creation of meaning by including the reasoning behind the chosen archival material, the product of the process, and the process itself.

This chapter describes the study the author carried out with two 2nd year acting degree students assessed as dyslexic, and how they gained an autonomy over the processing and performing of Shakespeare’s text. The study aimed to develop inclusive teaching strategies to facilitate the abilities of those with dyslexia and bypass their difficulties with reading. For those with dyslexia the reading and speaking of Shakespeare’s text can present significant challenges. This difficulty undermines practical work and masks the abilities of the dyslexic student actor. Conversely, Shakespeare’s rich language encourages a construction of meaning through visually interpreted modalities. The study demonstrated that the participants created an additional text of drawings, colours and symbols, replacing the alphabetical text, embedding meaning into long-term memory. This chapter shares the experiences of the two students and the author as teacher. These observations offer insights for improving inclusive pedagogical choices, when working with dyslexic acting students.

This essay discusses the recent artistic depictions of contemporary war by four artist-academics based in Australia. The families of all four have served in some of the twentieth century’s major conflicts and, more recently, each has been commissioned in Australia or the UK to serve as war artists. Collaboratively and individually they produce artwork (placed in national collections) and then, as academics, have come to reflect deeply on the heritage of conflict and war by interrogating contemporary art’s representations of war, conflict and terror. This essay reflects on their collaborations and suggests how Australia’s war-aware, even war-like heritage, might now be re-interpreted not simply as a struggle to safeguard our shores, but as part of a complex, deeply connected global discourse where painters must re-cast themselves as citizens of the ‘global South’.

The Second World War necessitated the transferral of labour and supplies from civilian manufacture to war production. Orders initiated by the government, in an attempt to make economical use of limited resources, severely affected the clothing industry from production to consumption. As a result, many contemporaneous sources and contemporary scholars claim that civilian dress was standardised. Scrutiny of trade journals, government documents, Mass Observation records, extant garments, and sewing patterns demonstrates that though manufacturing methods were standardised and simplified, there continued to be a range of styles in women’s dress.

In this article I would like to discuss Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood Cycle – Mythago Wood (1984); Lavondyss (1988); The Bone Forest (1991); The Hollowing (1993); Gate of Horn, Gate of Ivory (1998); and Avilion (2009) – in the context of creative writing praxis. I will argue that Holdstock’s Mythago Wood Cycle offers a powerfully resonant metaphor for the creative process: how stories are created and written (informed by the oral tradition), and how we, as readers and listeners, interact with them. As a novelist, scholar of folklore and folk tales, and professional storyteller it is something I am familiar with and fascinated by, and it dove-tails with my current Creative Writing PhD at the University of Leicester: a dramatization of the creative process in novel form, and so this is a reflection on my ongoing investigation into creative writing research through practice.

A challenge for performers working in interactive and participatory performance forms is a need to navigate between the position of the ‘Architect’, designing and structuring an audience’s experience, and that of the ‘Clown’, sustaining a performance state that is present and responsive to the particularities of individual interactions. While design and structure can preoccupy the development of new work, rehearsing for participatory performance proves a challenge when the pivotal ingredient – an unpredictable audience – is absent. How can training support performers to attend to both performance structure and the immediacies of interactive exchange? How can it support them to think critically about the aesthetics, ethics and politics of both? This article reflects on my pedagogical process of working with a group of undergraduates in spring 2017, exploring training approaches to support their devising process as they created a self-directed interactive theatre piece. It offers an ethnographic glimpse into the studio work and students’ responses, as we investigated approaches to developing the performer as ‘Architect-Clown’. Drawing on 10 years’ experience as a performer-deviser in this field, I sought the tack between these two training zones, applying pedagogic methods that work to develop performance qualities of listening, presence and improvisation, alongside methods aimed at developing a critical and reflexive approach to experience-design. Are the two roles as distinct as is suggested? How might they interact, and what might be gained (or lost) from this cross-training studio approach?

From the inception of sync sound in the late 1920s to the modern day, sound in animation has assumed a variety of forms. This article proposes four principal modes that have developed in the commercial realm of American animation according to changing contingencies of convention, technology and funding. The various modes are termed syncretic, zip-crash, functional and poetic authentication. Each one is utilized to different aesthetic effect, with changing relationships to the image. The use of voice, music, sound effects and atmos are considered as well as the ways in which they are recorded, manipulated and mixed. Additionally, the ways in which conventions bleed from one period to the next are also illustrated. Collectively, these proposed categories aid in understanding the history and creative range of options available to animators beyond the visual realm.

In England’s national parks, architecture represents an important and contested part of landscape planning, inseparable from park conservation ideologies and policies. This paper investigates the competing landscape interpretations surrounding the design and planning of an unrealized dwelling in Dartmoor National Park. In a landscape revered for its ‘iconic’ status, and on a site constrained by local planning policy, planning permission hinged on satisfying the conditions of a clause in national policy whereby a recognized ‘exceptional’ new dwelling might be permitted to override local planning restrictions. This research considers how different constructions of landscape identity influenced the conception and regulation of Dartmoor’s landscape as a context for new architecture. Discourse analysis of interviews and planning documents examines the range of landscape interpretations and notions of ‘appropriate’ architecture among key stakeholders, including locals, planners, and architects. Findings reveal significant rifts in aesthetic design discourses, which are influenced by conceptions of site, landscape character, the built cultural and historic context, and landscape enhancement. In summary, this paper considers the significance of conflicting landscape interpretations for the accommodation of new architecture in protected landscapes.

This article explores the use of animation in the essay film and analyses how screenwriting animation becomes a complex process of translation of the message the film wishes to address. With a focus on issues encountered in the development of two short essay films, Lunch with Family (2016) and San Sabba (2016), the article maps the process that in both cases guided the scripting of animated sequences, and analyses why in the editing room the director chose to use stills from the animations, instead. An example of the narrative techniques applied to mediate silenced history and postmemory in film, this contribution intends to add to the larger discussion on the current state of the art in screenwriting non-fiction.

Within the last two decades, the use of the term laboratory or ‘lab’, as it is often abbreviated to, has become widespread in both the profession and
in education. ‘Spacelab’, ‘Arch LAB’, ‘Laboratory of Architecture’ – these are but some of the names given to architectural practices today. Also, no self-respecting academic institution today lacks a ‘research laboratory’ or ‘lab’ of some kind, often set up in parallel to the conventional studio, but sometimes also as a substitute for it. In a more recent development, the laboratory has also been adopted as a place for exploring architectural themes through writing, as exemplified by the ‘Writing Labs’ set up at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. This development that has seen the laboratory become the very paradigm of conceptualizations of practice and research in architecture revolves, I argue, around a renewed interest in the notion of experiment and the spaces of experimentation. The question I want to raise in this article concerns the role of the laboratory as a metaphor in constructing spaces for writerly experimentation. For, outside the domain of science, how can a laboratory be understood as anything other than a (mere) metaphor?

Zine, self and micro-publishing has seen a spectacular resurgence in the
last decade, with individuals within tight communities pushing the boundaries of the practice in terms of form, content and process.

This paper will examine ways in which this reinvestment of illustrative authorship
has been stimulated by the iterative and performative aspects of zines, self and
micro-publishing, through the discussion of varied publications’ genesis with their
illustrators – including my own self-published book The House.

This paper will consider how performance underpins both the motivation and
creative process of such publications so as to highlight potential contributions of
the scene to wider illustrative authoring practices.

To mark the centenary of the signing of the armistice and the end of the First World War, the Shrine Trustees are pleased to present Flowers of War. Artists and jewellers Kirsten Haydon, Elizabeth Turrell and Neal Haslem have created this beautiful and reflective commemorative wreath using hundreds of floral emblems from battlefields around the world. Inspired by those found on those same battlefields and the native flowers of those countries and all of the Allied nations who fought alongside Britain in that war. Our guest speaker Professor Paul Gough, will speak to us about his presentation, ‘Seeds, soil, saplings, Reflections on the Flowers of War and Peace’. (Introduction by Shrine of Remembrance, Melbourne CEO Dean Lee)

The accident has long been acknowledgedas a catalyst fororiginal thought and can offer new insights to the practitioner wishing to develop thingswhich have never been contemplated or seen before. If we accept Virilio’s (2007) description of the accident as “profane miracle”, how can we instigate such mishaps, or even recognise their potential in the increasingly homogeneous digital landscape in which Illustrators find themselves?Is it even possible to override the restrictive mental parameters we are preconditioned to accept?This paper will aim to locate ways in which students of illustration can thrive by instigating accidents or disrupting the inhibitive characteristics of the technologies that surround us. I intend to seek out contemporary illustrators and investigate how they jump starttheir own creative process in order to develop a repertoire of strategies that reveal, or disclose,ways in which eurekamoments can occur. It will investigate whether the D.I.Y mind-set (forever associated with punkattitudes and tastes) that encouraged experiments, riskand feedback, is still relevant to current illustration practices. It will point towards ways in which art educators can incite innovativevisual thinking and nurture image makersthat stand in opposition to algorithmical mediocrity; Illustrators match-fit for the 21stCentury.

The notion of the meme began with Richard Dawkins’ media-gene metaphor before a further propagation and refinement by psychologist Susan Blackmore. Removed from this original contextualisation, within today’s colloquial understanding of ‘Internet memes,’ one important aspect relating to Dawkins’ original metaphor is still relevant. The Internet meme as a unit of cultural exchange, in order to survive, has to reproduce. With this in mind I will explore examples of memes that function and spread primarily through a process of image-media led reproduction and
subsequent mutation. This is a contemporary, intuitively anxious process that has drawn association with Soviet Film-maker Dziga Vertov’s ‘visual bond’ concept of media led social bonding

Central to this practice-based investigation is the concept that the iPad has the potential to provide the appropriate tools and resources required to create a body of new and original artworks. I suggest that the iPad enables the artist to re-define the concept of an artist’s studio and facilitates a move away from the traditional studio towards a new virtual studio. This investigation considers the affordances of the iPad in engendering new ways of visualising intimate, private, domestic and public space, through filmmaking, photography, and digital drawing and painting.
The practice-based element of this doctorate is interwoven with an investigation of relevant critical theory and is presented as a descriptive analysis of my virtual studio. The research explores the contemporary methodologies of arts-based research; autoethnography and visual and digital ethnography. My contribution to knowledge is that the iPad is a virtual studio that enables myself and other artists to create new modes of creative practice.
I have examined and analysed the historical technological contexts that form the foundations for the emergence of a new means of artistic production. I have also addressed questions around machine replicability and the role of new media in shaping the cultural landscape.
An autonomous case study reflects on the emergence of new ethical codes of practice in relation to new media iPad art and considers the role of digital integrity within new Fine Art digital practices. It investigates the emergence of innovative online digital artistic communities who use the iPad as the main tool for the creation of iPad art and then access social networking platforms for its dissemination. It further researches a blog of female peers to consider the duality of the iPad as a complementary toolkit to traditional media.

This creative writing PhD thesis consists of a novel and a critical reflective essay. Both articulate a distinctive approach to the challenges of writing genre fiction in the 21st Century that I define as ‘Goldendark’ – one that actively engages with the ethical and political implications of the field via the specific aesthetic choices made about methodology, content, and form. The Knowing: A Fantasy is a novel written in the High Mimetic style that, through the story of Janey McEttrick, a Scottish-Cherokee musician descended from the Reverend Robert Kirk, a 17th Century Episcopalian minister from Aberfoyle (author of the 1691 monograph, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies), fictionalises the diasporic translocation of song- and tale-cultures between the Scottish Lowlands and the Southern Appalachians, and is a dramatisation of the creative process. In the accompanying critical reflective essay, ‘An Epistemological Enquiry into Creative Process, Form and Genre’, I chart the development of my novel: its initial inspiration, my practice-based research, its composition and completion, all informed both by my practice as a storyteller/poet and by my archival discoveries. In the section ‘Walking Between Worlds’ I articulate my methodology and seek to defend experiential research as a multi-modal approach – one that included long-distance walking, illustration, spoken word performance, ballad-singing and learning an instrument. In ‘Framing the Narrative’ I discuss matters of form – how I engaged with hyperfictionality and digital technology in destabilising traditional conventions of linear narrative and generic expectation. Finally, in ‘Defining Goldendark’ I articulate in detail my approach to a new ethical aesthetics of the fantasy genre.

This research project explores the notion that by anthropomorphizing nature through an emergent practice of landscaped inspired costume design a sense of connectivity between humans and nature can be bridged. It builds on somatic costume research by Dean (2014 and 2016) and asks the question: How can the body be used as a somatic landscape to create a playful public engagement performance tool to promote a connection with the natural landscapes of Dorset.

A costume -design -led approach was executed by combining theoretical and empirical research that explored the connectivity between the landscape and the body. This included field trips and visual hands-on research included rock rubbing, sketching, fossil hunting, archival research and investigative walking. Most significant was the dialogue with the earth scientists from the Jurassic Coast Trust who supported the research and its development. Combining this practice-based approach with theories in social scientists (Tams et al. (2013), Berry & Wolf-Waltz (2014) and Lumber, Richard and Sheffield (2017)) the outcome of this research highlights how the intervention of performance, or more specifically costume design in performance, can be used as a method to get its audience to think about natural landscapes. Cited in Resonance in Rocks: Building a Sustainable Learning and Engagement Programme for the Jurassic Coast, Proceedings of Geologists’ Association, the work was referred to as a ‘remarkable piece of interpretation’ Khatwa Ford, (2018).

This research concluded in an exhibition at Dorset County Museum in 2018. The research explored how scenographic design processes can be used in the creation of visual art, with a purpose of reconceptualizing the complex ideas of deep time and the Anthropocene. Howard (2009) states that ‘Scenographic story telling brings an individual angle to a well-known work so it can be presented to a fresh audience’. I claim that by approaching this art work from a scenographic view point I have developed an exhibition that unpacks the complexity of Earth’s story in a playful and engaging way. Deep time is a notion of geological time determined by the long and dense history of Earth’s development over 4.5 billion years. In this exhibition I used a Longcase Clock, together with other interactive artefacts, to consider emerging theories about time. The Anthropocene is currently an informal term to signify a contemporary time interval in which surface geographical processes are dominated by human activities (Zalasiewicz, Crutzen, Steffen, 2012). By using the construct of the Anthropocene in the artwork I encouraged the audience to think about the world and to be naturally curious about its future. This artwork is the outcome of research which engaged with museum collections, earth scientists and natural forms as well as the development of materials. I collaborated with a theatre director to create dramaturgy in these static artefacts ‘using metaphor[s] to draw [people] into a world plausible for tackling obscure and abstract ideas’ (Braund, 2015).

‘Evolution’ was a curated exhibition that presented a critical examination of the agency of the tools, media, and processes of architectural design through a case study of the evolution of process at Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA). The extensive exhibition, and supporting catalogue, traced the practice’s journey from analogue to digital methods over the past forty years.
Working collaboratively with both ZHA and the Zaha Hadid Foundation, the exhibition drew from their extensive collection of archived models, drawings, and paintings to offer a critique of how the changing tools of the architect have influenced the designs process, materiality and outcomes. McLening worked with fellow researcher David Lund and Woody Yeo from ZHA to create a series of interviews with architects and modelmakers at the practice so as to enrich the lines of enquiry.
Employing the relational perspective of actor-network theory, the exhibition viewed tools and media as active agents in the design process; reframing the contribution of design tools such as models, drawings, and computers from being seen purely in terms of Giovanni’s ‘instruments of vision’ to being acknowledged as active partners in the architectural design process.
The research was disseminated through two galleries– one dedicated to the complete design archive of an early, pre-digital building project; the other to the practice’s contemporary digital design methodologies. A 15,000 word publication provided deeper contextualisation about the evolution of process illustrated by the artefacts on display. Through its original focus on the evolution of the design tools used at ZHA rather than its built outputs, the exhibition charted the architects’ changing relationship with the non-human participants of the design process from drawing, painting, and modelmaking, to the use of computer-aided design, generative coding, virtual reality and big data; revealing the active agency of design tools as collaborators in the creation of architectural designs.

This website provides guidelines for the propagation of mutually beneficial relationships between small specialist museums (small defined as museums with fewer than five FTE staff) and their related industry, including a range of case studies of successful interactions.

Funding is becoming ever harder for small museums to secure at a time when the expectation is that they will become independently more resilient. This project involved 20 small museums with different specialisms and a range of businesses exploring ways that museums and industry can work together to mutual advantage. It was the first time that museums had collaborated on exploring the relationship between museums and their industries and is the only resource to provide case studies of such interactions.

Creation of the resource involved a series of collaborative stages including an online survey which explored existing practice: how museums made contact with their related industry, time spent talking to them, and the nature of any ensuing engagement; two seminars at which experiences were shared; development of four sample interactions with different companies; and creation of the resource. The latter includes an account of existing practice; a ten-step guide to developing relationships with industry with downloadable models and templates for each step; the four case studies; and a benefits analysis of the process. Peer-review was undertaken by representatives of the partnering museums and by users of the resource.

Web rather than paper publication makes it more easily available and allows users to take the path through that best suits their needs. The resource is unique: there is no other resource that aims to build museum workforce skills in interaction with industry. It is already a primary point of reference for small specialist museums, and will, in time, contribute significantly to increased engagement between museums and industries enabling museums to serve their industries better and to become more resilient.

The Hidden Stories app delves deep into the untold history of Leicester’s Cultural Quarter, bringing the area to life through poetry, plays and narrative non-fiction.

The app operates via locative technology that triggers fragments of writing at specific locations; the texts are effectively connected with the location and history they are exploring, with content being unlocked as the user moves around the area.

Each text is displayed differently within the app, taking advantage of the framework to emphasise the ideas being presented by the writers and reflecting the concept of hidden stories.

Hidden Stories was commissioned by Phoenix and developed by Cuttlefish Multimedia as part of Affective Digital Histories, a research project investigating how communities change with urban decline and regeneration. The five pieces of creative writing used in the app were commissioned and edited by Corinne Fowler, director of the University of Leicester’s Centre for New Writing. To find out more visit affectivedigitalhistories.org.uk.