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The circularity radar: a digital tool for SMEs to assess circular opportunities
Get PDFThe transition to more sustainable and circular business models (CMBs) is complex, and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) often struggle with the intricacies and additional costs of achieving sustainability. To address these challenges, we developed an interactive web application – the Circularity Radar – in the open-source language for statistical computing and data visualisation R. We used the Shiny package, which provides desirable features for businesses such as a choice between local or online deployment that preserves data privacy, an interactive interface that allows users to specify the conditions under which computations are executed, and dynamic visualisations rendered through input variables. The Circularity Radar can provide low-cost insights to guide SMEs and practitioners in retail and manufacturing industries in exploring the drivers of their sustainability transition, assessing their situations, and understanding the obstacles they must overcome. Our tool incorporates a digital companion framework that involves seven elements of circularity: sustainable materials, sustainable operations, eco-design, product stewardship, R-terms, strategic organisational positioning, and social aspects. Additionally, the Circularity Radar presents alternative instruments and metrics businesses can use to quantitatively and qualitatively assess their progress regarding CBM implementation
'Qoede Lee'; 'Evelyn Taocheng Wang'
Get PDFShort articles on artists Qoede Lee and Evelyn Taocheng Wang for the 2024 Venice Biennale catalogue curated by Adriano Pedrosa
Dressing up in the collections? Digital dressing and the future of fashion history
No full textAs exhibitions like Fashion City make clear, fashion exhibitions can be extremely immersive experiences, creating a multi-layered sensorial experience for visitors. This paper explores how digital technology could help to further elevate the experience of fashion in museums. It questions how digital can help to offer more engaging and immersive experiences with fashion- potentially including the opportunity to digitally ‘dress up’ in pieces from museum collections.
Using Made in Code: Reimagining the Experience of Fashion (March 2023)- a prototype installation presenting a state-of-the-art creative and technical collaboration at the V&A- as a starting point, this paper explores current technological capabilities and what skills and resources are needed to drive forward truly compelling digitally enhanced fashion experiences. Alongside this it considers how digital technology could help to alter visitor perception of garments and potentially open up collections to new audiences
Birkenstock in Britain
Get PDFThe remarkable history of a shoemaking dynasty, which dates back to 1774. The remarkable story of a shoemaking dynasty that goes back to 1774 in the Hessian province, leads via an orthopaedic shoemaker's workshop in Frankfurt to the manufacture of the brand core, the footbed, and finally to the industrial production of a "German export hit" for millions of brand lovers around the globe. This book not only sheds light on the zeitgeist phenomenon that is Birkenstock but also provides an insight into the entrepreneurial energy behind the brand, which ultimately catapulted it into the league of global lifestyle brands. From a scientific perspective, the authors trace Birkenstock’s arrival in key sales markets and describe the cultural exchange that took place there. Special topics interspersed through the book round off the understanding of the industrial and contemporary historical context. This book is a profound, varied, and knowledgeable account of 250 years of history; coinciding with the 250th anniversary of the shoemaking tradition, it opens up a new perspective on a brand whose perception has often been characterized by clichés, prejudice, and misconceptions
Pilot Journeys: Narratives of collaboration and prototyping in participatory meanwhile
Get PDFThis document presents an in-depth analysis of the T-Factor pilot prototypes conducted in Amsterdam, Bilbao, Kaunas, Lisbon, London, and Milan. These prototypes were undertaken to explore innovative approaches to sustainable urban regeneration, with a particular focus on participatory meanwhile use: the creative reuse of spaces during periods of transition or redevelopment. This study provides a comprehensive examination of how each pilot city's unique historical, cultural, and socio-economic context influenced their respective approaches to participatory meanwhile.
Through narrative interviews with the pilots, feedback and reflections from collaborators, and causal loop diagrams, the document offers a detailed understanding of some of the complexities involved in urban regeneration processes. It explores the strategies employed by each city, the specific challenges they faced, and the best practices that emerged from their experiences. The findings from these pilot prototypes are not only critical for understanding the dynamics of urban regeneration in these cities but also provide valuable insights and transferable strategies for other cities globally facing similar challenges.
Beginning with a pilot-by-pilot overview, this executive summary aims to highlight the key aspects and learnings from each city's pilot project, offering a concise overview of the collective experiences and lessons learned. The executive summary ends with challenges and best practices, conclusions and recommendations, and future implications of the study
Hierarchies
No full textLarge-scale paintings of landscapes are on the ground floor of the gallery. They seem to be set at late evening or night; one can see the gloaming stretch out beyond the grass. In one we seem to be looking through a window or a doorway out at the landscape, in the others we are standing in the grass. The works hang against the walls unstretched. Elsewhere in the space there is a mirror, reflecting the street outside the gallery through its rather odd windows, and pot plants.
Landscape, like still life, was thought by the theories of the Academy to be one of the lower rungs of painting, well down from History Painting and Portraiture. Whilst the latter two could take man (and the gender here is specific) as the measure of all things, Landscape was relegated because of its lack of human subject matter.
And yet of course the human presence is here; in the presence of the viewer, in the presences of those passing by on the street reflected into the gallery by the mirror. Even in the presence of the assumed action of tending the plants (one imagines there are instructions for the gallery workers to keep the plants alive). Yet perhaps a different sort of presence comes into play here; one that is not the type pictured by the History genre; one that is more everyday, not always-male, mindful of mundane responsibilities (water that plant).
Downstairs there are more unstretched paintings. Their status as not being stretched again gently tugs at those hierarchies. An abstract expressionist would have stretched them, and then posed stern-faced for that famous photo with Hedda Stern, the only female artist pictured posed awkwardly higher than the men (the irony!) There are also two works that are stretched but on closer inspection they are not paintings. They are prints, both referencing paintings that are in the show. On closer inspection it is possible to see the evidence of the printing process, some parts, for example, are somewhat pixellated.
To get downstairs you have to go through a door which then enters into a communal space shared with the flats above the gallery and then down some stairs which are not particularly well signposted. As you leave the ground floor space, another mirror reflects back at you finding your way through a somewhat unreconstructed small corridor. The mirror through the doorway does not quite reflect a painting of a doorway on the wall opposite.
Then also downstairs, another doorway opposite you as you enter the space, reflecting the space you’ve just been through. or perhaps offering an alternative way out, a different future. And finally a landscape fully at night.
One can see the passage of time happening, in the translation of one medium to another, in the everyday that is happening outside, in the slightly odd, awkward passage from one gallery to another, in the way that you walk through the spaces of the gallery, constantly reminded of where you have just been or where you might have to return to.
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Hierarchies are provisional. In art history, art historians and theorists spent vast amounts of time articulating why, in their view, certain types of art practice were more valued than others. It seems slightly baffling from a contemporary perspective as to why history painting should be more valued than portraiture or landscape, or why painting itself should be more valued above other mediums such as photography and print-making. And why all those mediums should be seen as more valuable than what are termed the ‘decorative arts’.
In the last forty years or so, many theorists and curators have worked to debunk those hierarchies. The canon has been ‘differenced’ through critiques based on theories about class, gender and race. Museums have been re-hung to displace the clunky hand of chronology. Ways of making art that were thought to have less validity have been increasingly used by artists. Biennials fall over themselves to include works that might not have been consciously made as art objects in the western tradition.
And yet painting persists as first among equals, dominating the markets of art fairs and auction houses. Sometimes it is difficult to remember that at regular intervals in between the 1980s and the early 2000s, an artist, critic or curator would proclaim the end of painting, echoing Paul Delaroche’s reported words after seeing a daguerrotype for the first time. Ad Reinhardt proclaimed it was all over for the medium after he produced black monochromes. Gerhard Richter said painting was “pure idiocy”. Lucio Fontana would slash his canvases.
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Hierarchies are strangely persistent. Despite weighing in on the death of painting, Richter, Fontana and to a less degree Reinhardt would become mainstays of the auction merry-go-round of painting. The death of painting was a peculiarly male thing; as if only male artists had the space where they might proclaim the death of the medium before cashing in on the non-death of painting. In her essay ‘The Architect and The Housewife’ Frances Stark asks: “Were these men not unlike architects in that they were constantly carrying out plans—giving instructions, making constructions?” before using the deliberately “simplistic and reductive: categories of the Architect and the Housewife that could still usefully describe gendered structures of the conditions of making art. The Architects with their grand plans, big studios and statements, the Housewife making work from a domestic situation in a way Stark likens to running the home, “the house not being a site of accumulating production but a site of series of simultaneous productions which bear no evidence of productivity—save for the fact that the home isn’t falling apart.”
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It has been observed by a number of writers that Juliette Blightman’s practice tends towards the transient and the deliberately withheld or obscured. Yet this simply could be another way of saying that her work, rather aiming for timelessness, is located within time. As noted earlier time does not stand still whilst looking at her work, instead it flows by; through the windows of this gallery, through the presence of plants in other exhibitions by her, growing, changing, perhaps fading if the gallery workers are not good with plants, through the progress of the viewer through the spaces of the gallery. She is not an Architect, pursuing an authorative statement, instead there is an inconclusiveness to her practice, which is sometimes deliberately reductive, not to seek the perfection of minimalism, but to sometimes just leave things out. Leaving things out, the grand statements, the market-ready product, is perhaps the only way to think about some simple questions; what is it to make a painting today? What does it do? What does the viewer do when looking at it? How do we do this without setting up another set of hierarchies
CHEERS TO US.S..S… : quotation, allusion, and pastiche in acousmatic music
Get PDFThis article describes acousmatic music as an intertextual artform. It offers three central ways in which specific works of acousmatic music might reference the works of others, using the terms quotation, allusion, and pastiche. Although these terms will be familiar to anyone that has studied intertextuality, the types of references typically found within acousmatic music are fairly unique; the application of such terms requires some discussion, therefore, to clarify the intended meaning in each case. During this discussion, I notice that almost all of the existing literature on this topic focuses upon quotations, despite these being relatively scarce within the practice of acousmatic music. I present the alternative view that allusion and pastiche are more common, but also more difficult to identify and describe. Along the way, I employ Davies’ notion of thick and thin art works (Davies 2004), Lacasse’s notion of the autosonic and the allosonic (Lacasse 2000), and Genette’s notion of the hypertext and the hypotext (Genette 1997a). I apply these terms and concepts to To US.S..S… (Stanović 2021) - an acousmatic work that intentionally references the music of around thirty other composers. Although this level of intentional referencing may be unusual within the field of acousmatic music, I advance the idea that all works of acousmatic music contain references to the works of others, even if these were not directly intended by the composer. Taken as a whole, the article offers a starting point for anyone wishing to conduct intertextual analysis of acousmatic works, while advancing the idea that the study of references in acousmatic music is increasingly important to our understanding of the past, present, and future of the acousmatic tradition
De-tooling Fashion: Tape Measures of Brutality
No full textIn his history of measurement, journalist James Vincent associates tape measures with brutality; why should this matter to students of fashion design and to fashion design education? Expanding upon fashion theorist Sandra’s Niessen’s term ‘defashion’, there is scope to shift fashion making practices away from standardised, heteronormative, racist uniform classifications created using tools such as tape measures, towards liberatory and inclusive fashion making practices: what might inclusive approaches to measuring mean in fashion education and how could they be created and employed?
This presentation will question how fashion’s making processes are built upon and reproduce dominant colonial concepts of the body that measure, classify and construct bodies as plus size, disabled or petite, for example. Discarding these concepts in fashion education is needed to help create and design alternative equitable, anti-racist and inclusive fashion designs. Such processes could help to question why certain fashion design practices hold authority and to speculate on ways to disrupt them.
The presentation will discuss the challenges for re-thinking fashion design education without standardised measurement practices and rethinking the classification of bodies and persons by speculating against monohumanist concepts of the body and towards using alternative fashion tools to support the creation of new and decolonised fashion practices
The Sad Life and Happy Death of Paper Napkin Holder Bear
No full textPremier of a short film about a disposable intelligent object. Using a range of animation methods, from hand-drawn to AI-generated, the film explores our emotional and ethical connections with animals, people and objects