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Natural Language Processing for Creatives
No full textWe look at different ways the output of generative text models can be developed by humans before they are presented as art / performance. We cover instances where humans don’t just generate lyrics, they record the songs (AI Song contest), where they don’t just generate scripts, they get actors to perform it (Sunspring, Date Night), they don’t just generate stories, they do readings (Algonory – Shardcore). We do a generative film club where we watch two films written with different models (CharRNN and GPT-3) and compare their strengths and weaknesses as scriptwriters.
This is about encouraging students to take the stance of Human as Collaborator, rather than Human as Curator, and explore ways to take the extra step beyond just presenting the text (or image, or audio) from a model as the final outcome
I Like It because It’s been Worn Before: The Sensory Longevity of Worn Clothing
Get PDFThis chapter highlights that designing for extended clothing lifetimes should include a focused creative reflection on user’s multi-sensory perceptions of clothing in long-term use – introduced here as sensory longevity of clothing. As Bridgens and Lilley (2017) note, while designers are producing objects that are to be used in the future, they rarely look at that future. However, if clothes are to be worn over extended periods of time, learning to project long-term use must be at the core of the design process. The research presented here highlights that while the current fashion system is geared towards an obsession with newness and constant change, women’s relationships with clothes in their wardrobes can unfold slowly, through multi-faceted considerations and sensory perceptions that often favour familiarity acquired through long-term use over the push to look for new and supposedly better, choices.
This chapter builds on the relationship of sensory comfort and construction details to clothing longevity, as these have received little consideration in research to date. For an extended discussion of sensory experiences, and other contextual aspects of emotional durability of clothing, please compare also with Burcikova (2017, 2020, 2021). The discussion concludes with a proposition of a Reflexive framework for sensory fashion and textiles design (Table 4.1) that opens tangible pathways to implementing sensory analysis of wardrobes into design practice.The approach presented here opens new opportunities especially for the expanding segment of micro and small sustainable fashion businesses (MSEs), who are increasingly recognised as leaders in human-scale, holistic innovations within the fashion sector (Aakko, 2016; Connor-Crabb, 2017; European Commission, 2019)
Towards transformative sustainable fashion education: The Fashion Business School’s approach
Get PDFThis chapter explores how transformative sustainable pedagogies are being implemented in the Fashion Business School (FBS) at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts, London. Specifically, providing an understanding of how sustainability is embedded in the teaching and learning experience of fashion business students. Adopting Burns et al. Model of Sustainable Pedagogy (2019), this study takes a qualitative, multiple case study approach to showcase the transformative nature of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) initiatives in order to inform future thinking in teaching and learning practices for fashion sustainability education. Across the five case studies and the four dimensions of Burns et al. model, our findings reveal 14 common aspects that emphasise a shift and advancement towards ESD within the FBS, resulting in seven key positive student outcomes. Limitations include ESD definitions, data and metrics. The case studies were not designed in accordance with Burns et al. model, thus their alignment to and evaluation against it is restricted. As fashion business educators, the deployment of ESD transformation frameworks are urgent, imperative and beneficial for framing curriculum development and improving accountability and measurement responsibilities. The study makes a valuable contribution to the emergent field of ESD and transformative T&L. It is one of few studies focusing on fashion business and SD and the only known study to explore diverse ESD initiatives and approaches collectively within a HE fashion business context. It both challenges HEIs and offers areas for improvement towards transformative sustainable education in fashion
Supporting primary teachers to address loss and death in the classroom: a case study of an interdisciplinary, creative pedagogical intervention using education, children’s literature, architecture/design and the arts
Get PDFSchools inevitably face difficult discussions with children about loss and death, irrespective of whether it is factored into formal teaching. A range of societal factors in many countries, not least a lack of training, compound to leave many teachers unprepared to manage these sensitive issues. Whilst resources and guidance are widely available, there is a gap in generating pedagogical tools which are underpinned by solid theoretical grounding. This article addresses that gap, reporting on a case study of staff (n = 12) working in an infant school in England, where an interdisciplinary project was implemented to explore whether creative pedagogies could empower staff to address these difficult topics with young children. Contextualised within thanatology, (the study of death and its social practices), an intervention was designed and co-created with teachers synthesising education, literature, architecture/design and the arts. The paper details its theoretical and practical development, and the participants’ responses to it. The article concludes that despite initial ambivalence among some school staff about using creative pedagogies, responses at the end of the study were positive and confidence had increased. The need for theoretically sound approaches is supported as part of the long-advocated calls for mandatory death/life education, although the potential dissonance between academics and practitioners’ views about the value of theory is acknowledged. However, the paper argues that co-created interdisciplinary projects such as this can help bridge theory-practice divides. Furthermore, they can offer practical spaces for reflection and confidence building in time-effective ways to benefit teachers and children
Decentring fashion – Participatory practices for shifting narratives and regenerating cultures
Get PDFAgainst the backdrop of the 'Decolonising Fashion and Textiles' project, key themes have emerged from the research observations and public discussions corroborated through the‘Shifting Narratives’symposium we held at the London College of Fashion, UAL, in January 2024. These themes capture the multifarious meanings attributed to cultural sustainability and community resilience, which help frame the parameters of fashion in this context and to which the authors of the papers published in this Special Issue have responded. The themes presented here relate to cultural sustainability and community resilience and are defined more specifically in the context they resonate with. This Special Issue is organised by correlating papers to these themes.The discussion on decoloniality foregrounded in this Special Issue aims to invert power in how knowledge is presented. In discussing the themes below, we highlight the voices of the participants and MA students from the London College of Fashion, UAL, who were involved in a collaborative project brief aligned with our research. We have chosen to use direct quotes from the participants and others involved in the project to give voice to their concerns and the space they deserve, which they are often denied.
While findings from our research point towards the invaluable lived experience of refugees and what it truly means to be human, we hope that the papers included in this Special Issue will inspire you – the reader – with multiple ways in which design and fashion can be used to challenge perceptions and narratives around marginalised groups and to engage in participatory and decolonised processes aimed at fostering cultural sustainability and community resilience. We would like to invite you to join us on a collaborative journey to develop practices of resistance to the hostile environment in which we live, nurturing ethics of care and repair and contributing towards unlocking people’s freedom to express their shifting identities and their abilities to access resources, representation and power – in and through fashion
Causarious v0cation (a mixer)
No full textPerformance by Owen G. Parry and Tamara Tomić-Vajagić, with sound installation by Anika Vajagić and Owen G. Parry.
Causarious v0cation is a mixer event within The Big Mixer exhibition, reflecting on the idea that people and objects might relate in vicarious, indirect and unpredictable ways. How might the exhibited artworks at The Big Mixer effectuate new, covert or unpredictable connections and meanings if we re-approach them as sensuous objects?
The act of “Shipping” new character pairings in fanfiction, and the iconic social media performances of mixologists Mixie and Munchie (@2girls1bottl3) become our guides for ‘vicarious causation’ (Graham Harman) - a metaphysics of human-non human object relations 000 including the relational (sensuous) and real objects, along with some other resources, such as out-of-date Urban Dictionary definitions.
The Big Mixer
5th Dec-16th Dec, 2024.
The Big Mixer is a group exhibition curated bt Fine Art postgraduates Flowfinch (@finchy973) and Assembling art (@assemblingart), that merges traditional and experimental art forms. The upstairs space features a classic white-cube gallery, while downstairs the space retains its roots as a bakery, complete with an iconic food mixer.
In English, 'mixer' evokes both a food mixer and an audio mixer, but it also represents a group in fusion, gathering, conversation, and exchange. Brought back to life, the mixer located in the gallery, is a symbol of social convergence and disruption. The Good Rice gallery is a two-floor art project space by Central Saint Martins, 'challenging who & what gallery is for.
Acts of hospitality: Relations between ‘guest’ and ‘host’ as art practice
No full textMy research centres on my experiences as an artist, a ‘guest’ and ‘host’ in rural communities in Ireland, where building relationships at a local level has revealed wider notions of hospitality towards ‘outsiders’ on a national and international scale. Over time, it’s become clear that the act of being a guest, or host, is deeply personal, shaped by an entanglement of influences and experiences, built up over time that make up who you are. When tracing the complex dynamics of hospitality in rural communities in Ireland, I am also uncovering the historical and cultural conditions that lie beneath or behind my ‘Irish’ identity. In this research, I consider the perspectives of guest and host, not as binary but as interconnected. The movement or flow between perspectives is embodied in acts of hospitality.
I have identified the hotel as an ideal site to explore how the role of guest and host play out and are expressed. How these roles were enacted and are remembered opens a philosophical and ethical discussion around patterns of difference. Under the title The Hotel, I set out to trace the complex dynamics of hospitality in rural communities in Ireland, while questioning what is revealed about wider notions of hospitality on a national and international scale. This enquiry consists of a body of practical, site-based, and archival research, interwoven with contextual and conceptual research, from which the perspectives of guest and host are disrupted and expanded. An emergent form of hospitality is revealed, if we understand ‘emergence’ as the disclosure of complexity, ‘the way patterns and complex systems are formed from apparently simple actions and interactions’ (Nelson, 2013, p.46). We can perceive a praxis between action and idea, as an emergent method of hospitality. This praxis, of building relationships over time, while exploring the historical and cultural conditions that lie beneath or behind Irish identity, is central to my research into hospitality as art practice
Multimodal Storytelling: Language, Process and Radical Interdisciplinarity
No full textCreative Practitioners have had to evolve their vision, methods and communication skills to keep up with the pace of technological development and distribution across platforms and genres. This has led to the adoption of speculative design practices within the rapid pace of creative application (the Fourth Industrial Revolution) which often has limited scope for reflection. Based on a series of case studies, this presentation explores the role of dialogical aesthetics and radical interdisciplinarity across diverse modes of communication (screen, sound, space and language), methods of inquiry and engagement in multimodal storytelling
Building Sketch-to-Sound Mapping with Unsupervised Feature Extraction and Interactive Machine Learning
Get PDFIn this paper, we explore the interactive construction and exploration of mappings between visual sketches and musical controls. Interactive Machine Learning (IML) allows creators to construct mappings with personalised training examples. However, when it comes to high-dimensional data such as sketches, dimensionality reduction techniques are required to extract features for the IML model. We propose using unsupervised machine learning to encode sketches into lower-dimensional latent representations, which are then used as the source for the IML model to construct sketchto-sound mappings. We build a proof-of-concept prototype and demonstrate it using two compositions. We reflect on the composing processes to discuss the controllability and explorability in mappings built by this approach and how they contribute to the musical expression
HEREWEAR HUB
Get PDFThe HEREWEAR HUB is an online repository of systemic knowledge derived from the HEREWEAR project partners. HEREWEAR is an EC Horizon 2020 project which aimed to empower a bio-based, local and circular textiles ecosystem. Extensive research was conducted by the author during the 4 year duration of the project to build an understanding of stakeholder perspectives which informed the design, content and format of the HEREWEAR HUB. The HUB includes an animations, short films, diagrams and texts which are all part of the design translation from codified scientific knowledge into resources for the stakeholder community