If cinema represents the 'most replete and consuming instance of an interface for dreaming', what more can we expect of virtual technologies and Artificial Intelligence, or indeed, of computation in general, to create animated works that surpass our longstanding, heterogeneous, heritage of time-based visual media? The promise of VR and AI is arguably that of an ontological and ethical shift, one that takes us closer to a posthuman animation. Through a practice-based research process the author reports on the ways in which a VR/AI work, 'Return to the Library of Babel', deploys procedural animation and emergent spaces, engendering a dynamic, animated realm, one of situated, emergent, subjects and objects, within what Sara Ahmed frames as a political economy of, and, one might add a logic, of 'disorientation'. The paper was first presented at the 1st ANIVAE workshop on Animation in Virtual and Augmented Environments, 19 March 2018, Reutlingen, Germany.
Vija Celmins Untitled (Desert/Galaxy) from 1974, presents a dual image drawing of a dark night sky filled with stars and other illuminated celestial objects juxtaposed with a close-cropped view of a desert floor. This image acts as a provocation to trace the entangled histories of the Cold War 'space race' with the development of satellite technologies and atmospheric/meteorological monitoring. Any analysis of this historic era of manned space exploration cannot now be separated from the accelerated development of the computing and information technologies that have shaped the contemporary technosphere. It also highlights the expansion of environmental monitoring that led, paradoxically, to a greater understanding of climate change and the planetary impacts of new technologies. A picture emerges of the material significance of the earthbound landscapes that supported the growth of these technologies and their extra terrestrial destinations recoupling the earth with the sky, proximity with distance, and speed with slowness. The NASA images of Earth from space (Earthrise, 1968 and Blue Marble, 1972) are considered in relation to Peter Sloterdijk's redeployment of the 1960s concept of Earth as a 'spaceship' in order to map a non-anthropocentric atmospheric politics that offers a "trans-human symbiosis" based on environmental reciprocity. Weaving together historical/temporal dimensions and geographical locations through the material/immaterial metaphor of the cloud, the paper concludes with artist Craigie Horsfield's cloud tapestries (2008), woven translations of film stills of the sky taken from his earlier social film project that took place on the island of El Hiero in 2002. This island marked the original location of the zero line of longitude and point from which the Europeans navigated their ships to the 'new' world marking an originary moment of global circulation and capital expansion.
Crafting Futures is an ongoing British Council funded project which addresses the global threat to intangible heritage; as researchers in the School of Communication, RCA, our role has been to co-create methods for knowing with, not knowing about, the largely tacit community knowledge of craft and its surrounding networks of meaning; From 2019 we have worked with craftspeople within Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan to generate visual and sonic narratives; at the centre of our research methodology is the imperative of countering and moving beyond naturalised colonial assumptions about what counts as knowledge. The project methods arose from discussions and image/sound making workshops with craft leaders, practitioners and intergenerational craftspeople. We have found the ideas of De Santos (2018, 2016) and Appadurai (2006), useful in bringing mindfulness to the assumptions, power relations and biases of our backgrounds, the idea of Knowing With (de Sousa Santos, 2018, 15) not knowing about, has informed the way we have co-designed, framed and run the workshops and discussions which we will present in the proposed visual and sonic essay. As Appadurai (2006) states, research risks remaining an elite process and is 'normally seen as a high-end, technical activity, available by training and class background to specialists in education, the sciences and related professional fields. It is rarely seen as a capacity with democratic potential, much less as belonging to the family of rights' (Appadurai, 2006). We have aimed to prioritise the Right to Research (Appadurai, 2006) for all those we have worked with. At the same time, we are acutely aware of the dangers of idealising our own methodology, and the construct of participatory practice. We are anxious, therefore, not to frame the actions and discussions we have held with participants as 'data' to be harvested. Our visual/sonic essay will present that work and its processes while also addressing key questions: + How was this knowledge generated and for whom? + How does the role of community affect the generation of knowledge? + How can communities counter cultural & economic isolation and foster new networks of knowledge?
Creative industries in China provides a fresh account of China's emerging commercial cultural sector. The author shows how developments in Chinese art, design and media industries are reflected in policy, in market activity, and grassroots participation. Never has the attraction of being a media producer, an artist, or a designer in China been so enticing. National and regional governments offer financial incentives; consumption of cultural goods and services have increased; creative workers from Europe, North America and Asia are moving to Chinese cities; culture is increasingly posit.
Two years after artist Mark Farid broadcast all of his digital communications online, in real-time for one month for the project Poisonous Antidote. All of Farid's personal and professional emails, text messages, phone calls, Facebook Messenger, web browsing, locations, Twitter and Instagram posts, as well as any photographs and videos Farid captured. Regardless of the time, duration, or intimacy of the content Mark amassed, there was no restriction on the content publicised. Continuing the theme of the project - just how intimately can you know someone through their only their digital footprint - film-maker, Sophie le Roux collated and assembled the relevant information from Farid's digital footprint to make the Poisonous Antidote film.
The following interview with the Precarious Workers Brigade (PWB) reflects on the theme of collaboration in relation to work, the creative industries and Higher Education. As the PWB outline in their book Training for Exploitation? Politicising Employability & Reclaiming Education, a resource for students, teachers and cultural workers, exploitative labour conditions in the arts are often obscured by claims that celebrate autonomous and independent work. As we discuss below, 'collaboration' might very well operate as a term that ostensibly redeems various forms of exploitation in the cultural sector and higher education. Describing new forms of post-Fordist labour relations, 'collaboration' simultaneously valorises them as expressive of an affectual co-operation.
To coincide with the final reading of the Investigatory Power Bill (Oct 2016), Poisonous Antidote was an online and physical exhibition exploring just how intimately you are able to comprehend a person - their humour, temperament and rationale - through only their digital footprint. From the 1st - 30th September 2016, www.poisonous-antidote.com was a live newsfeed of artist Mark Farid's realtime digital footprint. This included all of his personal and professional emails, text messages, phone calls, Facebook Messenger, web browsing, locations, Twitter and Instagram posts, as well as any photographs and videos Farid captured. Regardless of the time, duration, or intimacy of the content Farid amassed, there was no restriction on the content publicised. Besides the projected display at Gazelli Art House - in collaboration with designer and programmer Vicente Gasco - a 3D printer in the gallery space in London transformed the artist's data at 24-hour intervals, creating an expanding digital landscape: an abstract sculpture formed of 30 unique and adjoining parts, each modelling a day of Farid's digital life.
To coincide with the first draft of the Investigatory Powers Bill (Nov 2015), Data Shadow was an interactive art instillation commissioned by Collusion, in partnership with Arts Council England, the University of Cambridge and The Technology Partnership. Located in All Saints Gardens, Cambridge, all visitors were required to interact independently with the installation, entering one at a time. On entering the 8 x 2m shipping container, the participant was greeted by a woman holding a contract of consent. Until signed, the woman remained silent, directly staring the individual in the eyes (a physical manifestation of Terms & Conditions). Once signed, candidates proceeded to join the WiFi. Participants progressed to the second half of the container, divided by a partitioning door. With sensors tracking the participant's movements, their realtime (digital) shadow was cast by a projection on two, facing walls - one filled with 1000 characters from their most recent text or WhatsApp messages, the other a collage of 64 images from the participant's mobile phone.
This chapter brings forward the possibility of capturing creativity and human experience through a visual ethnography approach, applying the use of 'zines' as a means of capturing individual engagement with a process. Zines (small (maga) zines) have roots in the do-it-yourself movement. The idea and use of the zine has emerged over time, from the early leaflets and pamphlets produced by independent publishers in the late eighteenth century, to the amateur press movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the subculture of fandom that emerged in the 1930s in science fiction, to spread later to the punk and riot grrrl movements. Zines operate at the intersection of art and activism, spanning the spectrum of social justice issues such as ecology, tenant's rights, disability and political activism. This continues in current times in which they have also become tools for expression by individuals whose voices might otherwise remain silent such as adolescent girls writing against gender, race and class stereotypes. Whilst acknowledging the lineage of zines as a form of social action, in this chapter we focus on 'the zine method' for use within the research process in the data collection and analysis stage. By zine method we mean the design response of the 'zine' as a means for self-reflection and to improve communication Chapter in the book: Beyond Text Learning through Arts-Based Research. Editors: Adams, Jeff, Owens, Allan.
From gluing audience members to their seats and purposefully selling the same ticket to more than one person, artists associated with the Historical Avant-Garde often sought to provoke and antagonise by employing disruption via interruptive processes. This paper responds to Claire Bishop's call for more agonism (Bishop, 2004) by inserting the heckler as both method and object into art performance. It is a hybrid of practice and theory, statement and response, test and experiment; it is a combination of all these things because you can't really envisage a heckler without taking him out for the night putting him in the world and observing the exchanges that take place. We think that practicing heckling has got to be worth the aggravation. This paper seeks to do two things: first to explore the heckler as a 'device' for reassessing the potential of interruption in democratic exchange, in particular in relation to contemporary theories of art and participation and second to try it out; to put the heckler at the centre of an artwork. In short, we propose a rethinking of the heckler. Part 1: Heckle, Hiss, Howl and Holler asks if there is something worth considering in the process of heckling for democratic exchange and, Part 2: Contract, Collaboration, Countdown and Confrontation strikes out to see what happens when you present an artwork that trials a performance about heckling via the act of heckling. The inhospitable performance Contract with a Heckler demonstrates a complex knitting of theory and practice whereby argument is supported by the undertaking of action (by the necessity of experiencing interruption in practice) and reveals working with interruption on a theoretical, practical and emotional level can be exciting, provocative and dangerous. Exploring contractual agency through hostipitality (Derrida, 2000) wherein a host may be as hostile as she is hospitable, this performance reimagines the event of performance as an event of (in)hospitality by embodying an ambivalent conviviality and employing heckling to disrupt convivial participation (Bourriaud, 1998).
In Britain in the late 1880s, two pop cultural icons had an extraordinary meeting: one, Ally Sloper, the fictional star of comic books and stage productions and the other Jack the Ripper, the real-life serial killer who was instantly fictionalised on page and stage as the bogeyman of the moment. The aim of this chapter is to explore the way in which this dynamic developed, with a focus on a single issue of 'Ally Sloper's Half-Holiday' (October 20, 1888), which appeared at the point in time when it was first realised that the killings were being done by a lone individual, and when panic was at its peak. What was at stake politically in the comic's reaction? What can it tell us about Victorian attitudes to fear, death, and poverty? About the status of women? Finally, about law and order, and the social contract that existed between citizen and police?
Participating artists were invited to respond to a film, scene, character or theme from the Kubrick archives, shining new perspectives onto the cinematic master's lifework. Pioneering conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth created an installation of text from Kubrick's films based on the language of Kubrick's work, while Britain's foremost political artist Peter Kennard juxtaposed images of characters set in the War Room of Dr Strangelove with present day leaders of nuclear states, in a statement about the renewal of Trident. Inspired by the Stargate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, film maker Doug Foster invited visitors to experience an endless, widescreen tunnel and referencing the same film, Mat Collishaw made spaceman's helmet featuring otherworldly sights and sounds. Doug Aitken's 'Twilight', is a public pay phone bathed in a luminous glow, which will be reminiscent of the Dr Strangelove scene where Mandrake attempts to make a collect call to the President of the United States. Sarah Lucas exhibited 'Priapus', a phallic sculpture suggestive of the iconic murder weapon in A Clockwork Orange. The exhibition was supported by artist Christiane Kubrick, the director's wife of 41 years, who exhibited a painting and Jan Harlan, Kubrick's Executive Producer for 28 years. It was additionally endorsed by Warner Bros. Pictures, who collaborated with Kubrick on all his films since 1971 List of participating artists: Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin / Carl Craig / Charlotte Colbert / Chris Levine / Christiane Kubrick / David Nicholson / Dexter Navy / Doug Foster / Doug Aitken / Futura / Gavin Turk / Harland Miller / Haroon Mirza & Anish Kapoor / Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard / Invader / Jamie Shovlin / Jane & Louise Wilson / Jason Shulman / Jocelyn Pook / John Isaacs & James Lavelle with Azzi Glasser / Jonas Burgert / Joseph Kosuth / Julian Rosefeldt / Keaton Henson / Koen Vanmechelen / Marc Quinn / Mark Karasick / Mat Chivers / Mat Collishaw / Max Richter / Michael Nyman / Michele Lamy / Mick Jones / Nancy Fouts / Nathan Coley / Norbert Schoerner / Paul Fryer / Paul Insect / Peter Kennard / Philip Castle / Philip Shepherd / Pink Twins / Polly Morgan / Rachel Howard / Rut Blees Luxemburg / Samantha Morton & Douglas Hart / Sarah Lucas/ Seamus Farrell / Stuart Haygarth / Thomas Bangalter / Toby Dye / Warren du Preez & Nick Thornton Jones
This report comes out from a Brainstorming session organised through the Voices of Culture process, a Structured Dialogue between the European Commission and the cultural sector. This process provides a framework for discussions between EU civil society stakeholders and the European Commission with regard to culture. Its main objective is to provide channel for the voice of the cultural sector in Europe to be heard by EU policy-makers. In addition, it aims to strengthen the advocacy capacity of the cultural sector in policy debates on culture at a European level, while encouraging it to work in a more collaborative way. The Audience Development via Digital Means Brainstorming Session, held on 18 and 19 June in Amsterdam, has provided a space for exchange and discussion between around 35 participants representing the cultural sectors from the EU Member States. The present report is the result of this discussion. It was presented to the European Commission at a Dialogue Meeting in October 2015 in Brussels. This document has been edited by three of these participants, coordinated via online digital means and in consultation with all 35 participants.
