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Net Zero as a Catalyst in fashion micro and small enterprises: Contributing to a wellbeing economy in the UK
Get PDFThis discussion paper is based on ‘Net Zero as a Catalyst’ (ZAC) research findings exploring fashion design entrepreneurs’ purpose and practices responding to climate, environmental and social justice imperatives.
This ambition - to contribute to their own and wider social, ecological and economic wellbeing (referred to throughout this paper as the “wellbeing economy”) - is changing operational practices and approaches in several areas including; governance, the design, use and value of products and services and the role of creative entrepreneurs.
This report identifies examples of work taking place across these three levels of change that could act as pilots in and beyond the fashion sector. Our findings suggest that efforts to operate more sustainably can encourage an expansion of creativity and business distinction. Likewise, design entrepreneurs who ground their creative practice in the context of the wellbeing economy are developing operational practices that align with that creative ambition; meaning operational(putting their own house in order) and conceptual sustainability (making and influencing change in society) can be mutually reinforcing. This paper explores the opportunities to expand on such examples and to link them to the fashion and sustainability policy landscape. This will also help identify ways to lift the current inhibitors of a UK wide expansion of the contribution the sector can make to sustainability goals, with specific reference to a just transition of the fashion sector to net zero emissions, understood as achieving net zero in ways that are as fair and inclusive as possible to everyone concerned, creating decent work opportunities and leaving no one behind. The report seeks to contribute to shifts in how fashion entrepreneurialism is viewed, by demonstrating the viability of connecting environmental, social and business goals and relating them to sustainability cultures. The recommendations of the paper are aligned to sector and wider environmental policy and industry-related goals with an ambition to inform and accelerate a fashion wellbeing economy
Seeing Programming Seeing: Exploring the Pedagogical Values of Functional Errors in Creative Coding
Get PDFCreative coding has been gaining momentum within Art Schools
over the past two decades. However, as a discipline within Art Schools it is still relatively new as a creative pathway. As the use of code as a material for creative expression becomes increasingly prevalent, the methods for teaching creative coding within Art Schools have also begun to diversify. This paper presents a range of alternate teaching examples that emphasise reflective problem solving through error when teaching creative coding within Art Schools.
The paper will review how these examples are implemented, the
impact they have on student comprehension, and the future educational tools they support
ReGo 2.0
Get PDFReGo 2.0 is a participatory practice research project using fashion activism to shift narratives and address issues faced in East London, including youth violence, sustainability and emotional wellbeing, by providing educational and employment opportunities for young people in fashion and related creative industries. The second year of the ReGo fashion activist programme was supported by a grant from Foundation for Future London and delivered via a partnership between Catalyst in Communities (CIC) and London College of Fashion (LCF).
ReGo 2.0 contributed to addressing an issue raised by young East Londoners who, based on their previous engagement with us and other projects, stated that they and their peers feel isolated and excluded from the vast majority of learning or employment locally. Based on their feedback, whilst many projects are short-term, ReGo 2.0 offered on-going and longterm opportunities to participants, contributing to making them become healthy, productive, creative and valued East London residents.
This report analyses the key activities, outputs, outcomes and impacts of ReGo 2.0, as a result of the evaluation process of the year-long project. Throughout ReGo 2.0, we have monitored the number of people participating in the project’s workshops, training sessions, work experiences, and public events, as well as the mindset change and technical and soft skills gained. The evaluation process entailed monitoring the participants’ attendance, observations, participants’ entry and exit questionnaires as well as feedback from trainers and project partners. Throughout the project, we have produced social media posts, evidencing the participants’ journey and results of the project
Counter Memories, Porous Personhood and Dwelling Against 'Progress'
Get PDFIn their major recent anthology, published in 2022, writer and poet Eileen Myles reclaimed pathos from the wretchedness of political rhetoric, all too often used in conjunction with media portrayals to marginalise vernacular, unruly, and incomprehensible opposition by those not aligning themselves with an acceptable image citizenhood in a place such as, say, London.
Myles urged a resistance to despair, advocating for the right to a fullness of life on one's own terms, in refusal of this imposition, and the implication that simply being oneself in a certain location - often desired by developers - is problematic.
As someone who has emerged into a cultural profile from the societal margins and their all-too-ignored traumatic registers, as someone who lives and works with still marginalised and traumatised individuals and communities (and who still lives as one of them in many ways), I am often required to challenge mediated, ‘naturalised’ and even ‘asserted’ ways of looking at others. Notions of 'giving voice to' others erases (lives and environments) and, crucially, masks this process, and hence tethers these lives into trope moulds.
Andrea Luka Zimmerman (Abstract for Politics of Housing, June 2023)
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Politicians and academics will address urgent issues at the ‘Politics of Housing’ international conference at the University of East London on July 6 and 7.
Amidst the current UK housing crisis, politicians including the Mayor of Newham, Rokhsana Fiaz, and the Deputy Mayor for Housing at the Greater London Authority, Tom Copley, are both attending.
Hosted by the
Centre for Social Change and Justice
at UEL, Dr
Anna Minton
(ACE), Professor
Jeremy Gilbert
(ACI), Dr. Debra Shaw, Dr. Penny Bernstock (UCL) and Dr
Lynne McCarthy
(Co-director of CSCJ) are leading the conference in Stratford alongside a number of speakers from London authorities, international universities and housing associations
Re-forming the Chasuble: Links Between Heavy Metal Clothing and Priestly Garments
Get PDFLinks between metal music cultures and organised religions are well established. The subject matters of metal commonly reference religious imagery, narratives and practices, albeit often antagonistically. The role of clothing to communicate metal allegiance is significant. From graphic t-shirts to denim jeans and jackets, leather gear and long hair, the image of the metal musician or fan is used to express membership of metal subcultures. Customised ‘battle jackets’ adorned with band patches, studs and other details mark out committed metalheads. This paper will argue that the battle jacket can be likened to a priestly ‘chasuble’, a decorated robe worn by an official in a church rite or mass. Both garments have performative, decorative and symbolic functions, and externalise the spiritual connection invoked by participation in the rite. By extension, the metal musician or fan can be viewed as a kind of priest or intermediary, facilitating the expression of the atmosphere and values of the live metal experience. The details of the jacket communicate narratives and values of metal. The imagery and texts featured on jackets often seek to be transgressive or allude to the potential for transgression. Subjects depicted may be designed to offend, even to the point of illegality, and violent, blasphemous or morbid themes are common. Denim cut-offs and decorated leather jackets have roots in motorcycle culture. Such clothing in the mid-twentieth century was associated with outlaw values and criminal activity, and something of these associations persist, even if diluted by the appropriation of stylistic codes by mainstream fashion. This presentation will include discussion of a number of artworks made as part of my long-running battle jackets research project
The Arriving Storybook: Bi-directional Storytelling Through Creative Practice and Interactive Media Design
Get PDFArriving is an interdisciplinary research project that incorporated audiovisual and interactive technology to capture and disseminate multigenerational narratives surrounding movement, migration, and arriving at a new place. Employing co-creation and storytelling techniques, conversations and interactions between younger and older generations centered around personal objects related to arriving were documented in audio recordings and portrait photographs and shared in public gallery exhibitions along with an interactive, online e-book. This article reflects on the creative process in designing the Arriving project and, subsequently, the construction of a digital storybook, which has been distributed internationally to foster two-way conversations within international communitie
Envisioning Distant Worlds: Fine-Tuning a Latent Diffusion Model with NASA's Exoplanet Data
Get PDFThere are some 5,500 confirmed Exoplanets beyond our solar system. Though we know these planets exist, most of them are too far away for us to know what they look like. In this paper, we develop an algorithm and a model to translate any given exoplanet’s numeric data into a text prompt that can be input into a trained latent diffusion model to generate a predictive visualization of that exoplanet. This paper describes a novel approach of translating numeric data to textual descriptors formulated from prior accepted astrophysical research. These textual descriptions are paired with photographs and artistic visualisations from NASA’s public archives to build a training set for a latent diffusion model, which can produce new visualizations of unseen distant worlds.
Workshop on Machine Learning for Creativity and Design NeurIPS 2023 Workshop
Headphone Theatre: A Technology-led approach to Performance Pedagogy.
No full textThe approach to teaching Theatre and Performance at Wimbledon College of Arts takes a non-hierarchical approach to theatre materials, placing text, sound, light, bodies, objects and technology at equal stimulus for the development of practice. Taking two examples of student work, one in Kerala, India and UAL students collaborating as part of the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design 2023, this session aims to explore how a technology - binaural sound - can lead a making process and what are the pedagogical implications when students explore the theory and practice of a technology to learn about composition and theatre making
Murty Classical Library of India, volumes 13-38
No full textMany important classical texts in Indian literature have never reached a global audience; others are becoming unavailable even to Indian readers. This strategic design project was commissioned by the Murty Library, with the aim of creating an accessible classical library to provide modern translations of important Indian texts available in print and online. Funded by a trust set up by the Indian industrialist Rohan Murty and overseen by Harvard University Press, a framework was created for the design of the printed book interiors, digital texts and Indic typography for jacket designs.
The challenge of this project is to find contemporary designs solutions to classical texts (pre1800) whilst retaining their spirit and originality. Research is based on key subject areas: history of the book and printing in India, language and scripts of India, reading and reader interactions with texts and bilingual translations employing multi-script typography. The typesetting and design of bilingual Indic texts of such range and complexity is unprecedented in modern book design practice and poses many challenges that are addressed through three lines of enquiry. First, to establish a systematic bilingual book design for English translations of texts in ten different Indian languages and scripts grouped into four categories: North Brahmic (Sanskrit, Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali), South Brahmic (Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada), Perso-Arabic (Urdu, Sindhi) and Prakrit (Pali). Second, to accommodate two genres in the template design: poetry and prose. Third, as Indian texts do not use italics or bold, it is imperative to establish an Indic hierarchy and grammar through the application of typographic rules.
The book designs and typesetting are created by Rathna Ramanathan using bespoke typefaces designed by John Hudson, Fiona Ross and others. Since 2017, a further 25 volumes have been designed, produced and published
‘Against and away from that hushing’: notes and scores for voices
Get PDFKeynote presentation at the Association of Art Historians 49th Annual Conference, at University College London, 12-14 April 2023.
What does it mean to speak in this space ‘for art history’? Speaking ‘to’ not ‘about’, speaking ‘with’ (in disparate company, scattered yet gathering, outside in)… Walking with the words of Trinh Minh-ha and Maria Lugones in my hands and ears, ‘against and away from that hushing of the manyness of the past in the present’, I assemble some off-key notes... to sound out some of the voicings and ventriloquisms echoing in my praxis of the last 30 years, to locate myself momentarily and uncomfortably ‘here’. Invoking words, gestures and interruptions that might be partially read, seen and heard (or not at all), I want to revisit and affirm these as small, tactical acts of disturbance and resistance, decolonial and otherwise. A farcical calling card (1995-ongoing), a disobliging ‘artist’s statement’, my ghosts of AAH conferences past (1998, 2008, 2018), and the multiplicity of voices coming into play in between and since – improvised choruses and ad hoc witnesses to mundane and fabulous displacements, to live archivery, aspiring and refusing (Notes on Return, 2003, Golden, 2005-, A COVEN A GROVE A STAND, 2019, seven x seven, 2021, Centenary, 2022, REWIND/REPLAY, 2022-23). How do you listen and attend to what you cannot hear