Faculty of Arts, Design and Humanities
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Browsing Faculty of Arts, Design and Humanities by Research Institute "Institute of Arts, Design and Performance"
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Item Open Access Agentive Green Mobility: Everyday Performance Training for Women on Wheels(Taylor and Francis, 2024-10-01) Garton, RosieThrough the lens of everyday performance, I examine how females on bicycles are marked as both highly visible spectacles and invisible ‘others’. In developing the feminist promise of the mechanically monstrous cyborg, I offer a new revolutionary figure of hope – the cycleborg – who puts her otherness to use. In painting the image of the cycleborg, I suggest that she offers a position for the cycling female to make subversive use of her patriarchally-assigned image of the monstrous other. As she rallies against her training of feminine comportment, the cycleborg simultaneously welcomes her instinctive gendered training to navigate hostile, patriarchal climates. She joins her feminist killjoy allies in training to be a seen and heard nuisance. As our fast and fuel-less cycleborg pedals between exhaust fumes and traffic-jammed revving motors, she performs her honed physical, spatial and sensorial skills in an agile and agentive mode of environmentally-friendly mobility. An awareness of performance training offers this daily practice of green living a toolkit from which to understand the complex positioning of her embodied and gendered urban mobility and to carry out her spatial act of resilience. I argue that as an unfamiliar and more-than-human hybrid, she has the potential to make use of her performative hypervisibility to emphasise both a re-thinking of hegemonic attitudes whilst also presenting the potential for human agency and responsibility in the future of the environment.Item Embargo AI: artistic collaborator?(Springer, 2024-09-30) Anscomb, ClaireIncreasingly, artists describe the feeling of creating images with generative AI systems as like working with a “collaborator”—a term that is also common in the scholarly literature on AI image-generation. If it is appropriate to describe these dynamics in terms of collaboration, as I demonstrate, it is important to determine the form and nature of these joint efforts, given the appreciative relevance of different types of contribution to the production of an artwork. Accordingly, I examine three kinds of collaboration that can be found in the philosophical literature on artistic authorship—collective authorship, co-creatorship, and co-production—to determine whether human-AI interactions comprise joint efforts as per such kinds. As I find, collaboration is a concept that invokes rich psychological terms and so one to used be with care in relation to generative AI, which does not yet meet the conditions to count as an artistic collaborator in the senses derived from the literature. To progress discussions on ethical and legal issues that are raised by image-making practices involving generative AI, and further research into the distinctive qualities afforded by interactions with these systems, I argue that we ought to frame their contributions to the production of visual artworks in terms of a “generative” contribution and describe the interactions between humans and generative AI systems as “AI-assisted production”.Item Metadata only Item Metadata only Before The Fighting”, Mother Said, ‘The Airport Sparkled(2024-08-20) Taylor, MariaItem Open Access Collaboration and Conflict in the Women's Art Movement(Taylor and Francis, 2024-10-16) Curtis, HarrietItem Embargo Creating Images with Generative AI: An Imaginative Aid(Routledge, 2024-08-01) Anscomb, ClaireIncreasingly, both public and professional creators are being assisted by generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems in the production of images. Concerns have been expressed about the potential for these technologies to decrease human creative agency or aesthetic diversity. To examine whether these concerns are warranted, the psychological and philosophical literature on creativity and imagination is examined. Drawing on this, two senses are distinguished in which generative AI systems can be used as imaginative aids: (1) to aid a user in visualizing an idea; and (2) to aid a user in cognitive play. The latter, unlike the former, is central to creativity and it is also rarer in the use of these systems. The case is made that to facilitate this kind of use more widely and ameliorate the aforementioned worries, the development of these systems ought to focus on not only technical improvements, such as greater control over elements like training data, but also attitudinal changes, so that users do not suffer from illusions of creatorship that may inhibit the development of their aesthetic aims and autonomy.Item Open Access Dance teaching in HE: further thoughts on the possibilities of artistic citizenship for decolonial practice(Taylor and Francis, 2024-06-16) Adewole Elliott, FunmiBuilding on my argument in a recently published book chapter, ‘Toward Decoloniality and Artistic Citizenship’ (2023), this article discusses how the concept of artistic citizenship could create a conceptual space for decolonial thinking for dance teaching within the Higher Education (HE) curriculum. This interrogation is informed by my role as a lecturer who teaches dance practice based on African dance styles and principles in UK HE. I argue that making artistic citizenship an explicit part of the critical framework for dance pedagogy creates a common vantage point for students of all cultural backgrounds and better conditions for their development as culturally literate artists who will work in globalised contexts. The concept of citizenship in relation to artistic practice can be used to generate a theoretical context for existing hybrid dance training in HE, which in Britain has evolved to reflect the multicultural nature of society. This theoretical context will support the research and practice of Black students and those of global majority heritage who require conceptual maps delineating how dance practices that draw on their cultural heritage have existed as part of professional practices, as well as enhancing the cultural literacy and political awareness of the whole student body.Item Embargo Dancing and the Stance: Mapping a Creative Practice in African Dance-Drama(Edinburgh University Press, 2023-12-01) Adewole, FunmiThis paper documents ‘Funmi Adewole Elliott’s Practice as Research project into her solo performance practice which is derived from African dance-drama. Her aim is to develop the theoretical context of her practice. Using methods from proposed by Robin Nelson, Linda Candy and Ernest Edmonds, her project focuses on the making of a short solo performance The Blind Side (2022). Through analysis of The Blind Side, Adewole Elliott describes how she utilises conventions of African storytelling and Neotraditional Creative Dance to create the performance piece and locate it discursive context. The project opens up a space of ‘know-what’ for her practice leading her to form three lines of inquiry; the conceptual-cultural domain in African dance-drama, the physical dramaturgy of the storyteller and what physical dramaturgy can offer Neotraditional Creative Dance practice.Item Open Access Development of sustainable, antimicrobial essential oil microcapsules for use within healthcare textiles(2024-04-11) Silver, Katie; Davies, Angela; Shen, Jinsong; Qutachi, Omar; Laird, KatieThis study aims to investigate a sustainable, environmentally friendly alternative to current antimicrobial finishes for healthcare textiles.Item Metadata only Dis_place: Reflections on Creating Mixed Reality Performance using Virtual Reality Technologies(International Journal of Creative Media Research, 2021-10) Wise, KerrynDis_place is a mixed reality performance that takes audiences on a journey using a range of virtual reality (VR) technologies, immersive sound, and live dance performance. Through close analysis of my practice as research project, this article presents reflections on the developing creative strategies and approaches to making VR-based mixed reality performance. It traces the creative process in the making of the work, combining links to the VR artwork, video footage of the live performance, and images from the project. This is combined with my observations and analysis of audience feedback. Through this analysis, the writing assesses the affordances of using VR technologies within immersive performance practices, addressing some of the technological, practical, choreographic, and conceptual concerns. Concluding that these technologies have huge potential for offering audiences new embodied encounters that can shift perspectives and produce transformational, intimate, emotive, and unsettling experiences.Item Open Access Editorial: Seeking solidarity and wonder through performance(Taylor and Francis, 2024-06-16) Curtis, Harriet; Clarke, AlissaThis is the Editorial for the special issue of Studies in Theatre and Performance (44.1, 2024) on ‘Seeking solidarity and wonder through performance’. In it, the editors situate the special issue and its contributions in existing and evolving contexts of solidarity, and in particular the changing global contexts of violence, fracture, precarity, and warfare that continually inform and shape the creative practices and processes through which solidarity might be realised and enacted. The Editorial summarises and frames the issue contributions, and with them invite readers to consider: commitment and work as a means of shaping and breaking solidarity; states of vulnerability that enable connection with others; intercultural processes and practices as modes of solidarity; intersectional, feminist, queer, and decolonial approaches as forms of collective action and resistance; past acts of solidarity and collective resistance; notions of collective engagement between self, other, and environment; radical models of collaborative or collective artistic practices and processes; and the possibilities (with and within solidarity) of wonder, hope, and surprise.Item Open Access Found in Translation: unlearning ‘expertise’ in inclusive dance practice(2023-08-31) Doughty, Sally; Smith, SueNames of presenters: Sally Doughty and Sue Smith Nature of proposal: Presentation/provocation Title: Found in Translation: unlearning ‘expertise’ in inclusive dance practice Abstract: This presentation/provocation responds to the conference theme of ‘addressing hierarchies’, and suggests how ‘unlearning’ can challenge histories of inclusive dance practices. We reflect on our research undertaken as part of Critical Mass, an inclusive mass choreography performed at the Commonwealth Games 2022 Opening Ceremony. Interrogating how disabled and non-disabled young people learn the codified dance styles of Breaking and Kuchipudi, we propose that embedding inclusivity more rigorously in dance practices, from studio to management, promotes unlearning as a guiding disposition. Our provocation is that unlearning expertise in/of the dancing body radically shifts expectations of ‘difference’ in dance practices. Interrogating inclusive participation and translation within Breaking and Kuchipudi, we propose that good practice includes challenging individuals to explore and move beyond existing movement boundaries without prioritising certain bodies or expressive capacities over others. This, in turn, challenges current operational and conceptual hierarchies in dance pedagogy and production. Translation, interpretation and authenticity promote individual expressions of identity, participant-led agendas and the generation of new communities (Bartlett 2017; Whatley 2007; Elin and Boswell 2004), that support reinterpretation and invention rather than fulfilling the physical geometry of codified dance vocabularies. Through unlearning loyalty to a movement idea (‘that’s not a headspin, this is!’) we propose new insights for studio practice and pedagogy in which people with different bodies and neurologies can idiosyncratically express movement whilst being united by qualities, efforts, direction and intention. Approaching movement translation from this perspective requires a degree of unlearning (McLeod et al 2020; Visser 2017; Risner 2009) and the acknowledgement that earlier learnings may be incorrect and reductive. We therefore set a provocation for unlearning that challenges traditional ways of using translation in inclusive dance practices, and reimagines traditional hierarchies or ‘cascades’ of knowledge as more rhizomic structures with multi-directional forces of expertise that inform processes, experiences and outcomes.Item Metadata only From revolution to revenue stream: How corporate targets co-opt social movement attacks(Academy of Management, 2024-07-09) Marquez-Gallardo, S. L.; Krabbe, A. D.Research on social movements has shown that activist attacks on corporate targets can help to create new market opportunities. Because these opportunities tend to be oppositional to incumbent industries, theory posits that incumbents are unlikely to exploit these opportunities. However, we suggest that corporate targets might be able to leverage activist attacks to their own advantage. Drawing on a longitudinal study of commercial academic publishers’ responses to the Open Access Movement, we propose a theoretical model of how incumbent organizations can benefit from the market opportunities resulting from social movement attacks by manipulating powerful third-party stakeholders’ perception of alignment or misalignment with the corporate targets and social movement respectively. To do so, corporate targets first co-opt social movements’ frames by exploiting the distance between activists’ and powerful stakeholders’ concerns. Second, corporate targets redefine social movements’ claims to create new market opportunities that is aligned the powerful stakeholders’ concerns. Our paper moves beyond the current focus on how social movements create new, oppositional markets to how corporate targets co-opt social movement attacks to enhance their market position.Item Metadata only Full-parallax digital holography, anatomy, and art(SPIE, 2023-03-08) Dalenius, Tove NoorjahaanWorking in the full-parallax digital format with the CHIMERA holography technology, which offers a 250 micrometre hogel size ensuring a clear image, this project explores anatomical imaging from an artist’s perspective. A completed hologram visualises anatomical MRI scans, adapted from a 3D printable model of the Bulbo-clitoral organ, building on studies in urology. A collage approach has been taken to include structural detail and creative vision. The work takes advantage of the available colour representation offered through continuous wave RGB laser technology. Transparent modelling options are explored. A Practice-Based Research method has been adopted to investigate creative possibilities in display holography.Item Metadata only home|wohnen(Flat Time House Gallery, 2023-09-29) Hay, Marie; Golob, S.; Soden, D.The film seeks to explore the potential for ‘dwelling’ in domestic settings against the backdrop of two threats identified by German philosopher Martin Heidegger: the slide into an inauthentic life and the intense pressures of the modern world. The artists explore the interplay of these themes and their links to topics on which Heidegger is strikingly silent, such as family, through a poetic dialogue of Speakingdance, the voice and the written word.Item Open Access Hot mess: vulnerability and seduction in the work of Lucy McCormick(2023-04-14) Curtis, Harriet‘Hot mess’ is a peculiarly gendered term suggesting public displays of disarray and disorder which reveal or enact vulnerability (as a mode of self-destructiveness) and near-collapse. It can also be read as a term of affection or kookiness (as well as potential exploitation). Hot mess is a simultaneously permissive and dismissive term, which resists the possibility of being known and of being legible. In this 10-minute ‘bit of stuff’ on hot mess (or ‘hot stuff’), I want to discuss a few brief moments of performance by UK artist Lucy McCormick, who, I argue, embraces the contradictions of the ‘hot mess’ as an endearing, mischievous, and seductive strategy in live performance, notably, in Life: LIVE! (2021, Battersea Arts Centre, London) and Lucy & Friends (2022, Yard Theatre, London).Item Open Access "I want your pity. That's what I want": the sexiness and silliness of the hot mess in performances by Katherine Araniello(2024-07-15) Curtis, HarrietThe ‘hot mess’ is a contested state or identity, shifting and unstable; a spectacle that courts attention, dares us to laugh, and reveals our own desires for acceptance. The hot mess is relatable in her ordinariness and imperfections; she is also a diva, an attention (and pity) seeker. UK artist Katherine Araniello (1965-2019) expands the playfulness and eroticism of the hot mess as an empowering positionality by complicating who gets to be messy and how. Araniello consistently critiqued stereotypes of disabled people as vulnerable, and of cultural initiatives that re-frame disability as exceptional, inspirational, or heroic. Pity, a key affect in her performances, is harnessed alongside sexiness and silliness as signifiers of ‘vulnerability’. The self-assuredness and strident exhibitionism depicted by Araniello subverts the focus on overcoming apparent hardship or tragedy to reach empowerment, by instead seeming to exploit her own physical difference to achieve her wants. In work focused on sex and sexuality, Araniello places the disabled person in the position of control but draws attention to the devious ways in which that power is wielded. The development of sexual self-assuredness, silliness, and erotic aesthetics becomes especially compelling in later video works that combine bold visuals with explicit lyrics. Araniello’s power stems not from producing the expected narrative of tragedy and desperation, but by laying claim to the ideology of ‘feeling hot’. Pity and shame as tools in Araniello’s creative arsenal frame the hot mess as silly, sexy, and disarming in an affective resistance of a tragedy model of disability.Item Metadata only In Regent’s Park(2024-06-07) Taylor, MariaItem Open Access Innovative Infusion(DMU Gallery, 2024-05-07) Gogna, RajeshInnovative Infusion- Collaboration with Dr. Lionel Dean Rajesh Gogna- Principal Investigator Artefact- Tea Pot Examine the properties of Direct Printing in Precious metal (Silver) to explore and test the limits of the technology/ parameters to creating large scale decorative artefacts. Joint Research with Lionel Dean. (Product Design) Bring your imagination to life with DMLS (Digital & Analogue Craft) Heimerle + Meule, together with its English subsidiary Cooksongold, offers direct metal laser sintering (DMLS) technology, an innovative approach that follows the motto of ‘Making the impossible possible’. With this technology, extremely high-quality, delicate, highly complex jewellery and watch parts can be produced, ready for final processing, directly from CAD files. This efficient, design-oriented production solution shortens the time between design concept and implementation, thereby increasing the cost-effectiveness of the jewellery production process. Even the most discerning jewellery makers can make use of this technology to design completely new product lines that meet their exacting quality standards. This additive process allows the jewellery maker an incomparable and virtually limitless versatility in design – everything from hollow bodies and even geometric shapes that were previously impossible to represent can be easily produced using the laser sintering technology.Item Open Access Lingering in action: contemporary performance and scenes of stasis(2024-09-04) Curtis, HarrietActs of lingering are framed by the conditions that govern the spaces in which they occur, including those where they are expected, welcomed, tolerated, and discouraged. In temporal terms, lingering suggests staying beyond a fixed period of time or refers to contexts in which there is a loosely understood time frame after which lingering might cease. In this paper, I think through lingering as a critical and creative practice. This is one of the beginnings of a research project that explores the spaces, temporalities, and politics of lingering in relation to: archives and residual materials; activism, protest, and occupation as acts of lingering (of lingering as action); lingering in the gallery, the alley, the doorway (of thresholds and of holds/holdings of items, subjects, and in-betweenness); lingering legacies, including of shame, guilt, and desire; and affective states of lingering, persistence, refusal, and letting go. Ultimately, I want to ask: how are subjects constructed, shaped, and policed by practices of lingering? How might performance connect and complicate lingering as scenes of action and/or of stasis? Drawing on an understanding of the spectator-scholar as invested in and meditating on forms and practices of performance that requires thinking deeply and challenging the terms on which we encounter art, I am interested in lingering as a commitment to staying with complexity, uncertainty, and discomfort, of holding fast, not moving off, on, and not letting go for longer than may be useful, comfortable, or, indeed, productive. In the context of this Working Group, I want to explore the possibilities of the ordinariness of lingering in performance and everyday life, particularly in the sense of the delaying of beginnings and endings, conversational exchanges that linger on knotty subjects and work through uncertainty, and scenes of stasis that might facilitate a practice of lingering in/as action.