15792 research outputs found
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Beyond Human Exhibition
No full textBeyond Human is an exhibition by MA Design students from Central Saint Martins, led by Art and Design studio Burton Nitta. Works create cultural evolutions when imagining beyond the human world to meet the planetary crisis. The thought-provoking exhibition responds to the library, the former site of Sir Isaac Newton's home, a visionary who gave new ways to see the world. The wide-ranging works include performance, sound, film, and design artefacts, some using bio-material grown in collaboration with bioengineering scientists from Imperial College London. Don't miss the chance to explore the world beyond humans. Join us for inspiration and cultural evolutions that challenge current perspectives
Antagonising explanation and revealing bias directly through sequencing and multimodal inference.
Get PDFDeep generative models produce data according to a learned representation, e.g. diffusion models, through a process of approximation computing possible samples. Approximation can be understood as reconstruction and the large datasets used to train models as sets of records in which we represent the physical world with some data structure (photographs, audio recordings, manuscripts). During the process of reconstruction, e.g., image frames develop each timestep towards a textual input description. While moving forward in time, frame sets are shaped according to learned bias and their production, we argue here, can be considered as going back in time; not by inspiration on the backward diffusion process but acknowledging culture is specifically marked in the records. Futures of generative modelling, namely in film and audiovisual arts, can benefit by dealing with diffusion systems as a process to compute the future by inevitably being tied to the past, if acknowledging the records as to capture fields of view at a specific time, and to correlate with our own finite memory ideals. Models generating new data distributions can target video production as signal processors and by developing sequences through timelines we ourselves also go back to decade-old algorithmic and multi-track methodologies revealing the actual predictive failure of contemporary approaches to synthesis in moving image, both as relevant to composition and not explanator
The CharioCity Workshops Report
Get PDFIn March 2020, the pandemic changed our day-to-day life in the UK in ways we could never have previously imagined. All the things we took for granted suddenly shifted, and a ‘new normal’ slowly emerged as we sought to protect ourselves from the virus. Three years on, we are still working on rebuilding areas of the economy and culture that suffered. Some things may be lost forever, but the charity shops on our street have held on. The pandemic shone a new light on them, as donations piled up like mountains outside them during lockdowns; and elderly volunteers understandably feared coming back to work.
During 2021 we wanted to spend time exploring how design researchers and educators might be able to help them. We brought together key stakeholders from the front of house as well as the ‘back end’ of the supply chain. We worked with talented designers and students to develop new tools and creative briefs, to support new partnerships between the charity shop sector and design education. We hope you find the results useful and find new ways to make change on with charity shop partners your high street soon
Fashion Activism and Design for Social Change – The Making for Change: Waltham Forest Project
Get PDFThis chapter explores ways in which fashion activism, design and making can be used to catalyse positive social change and build long-term legacies within communities. To exemplify this, the author reflects on the Making for Change: Waltham Forest project which was developed in partnership between a Higher Education Institution and a local government department in London to address socio-economic issues, such as deprived youth, skills shortage, and high employment rates. Adopting a participatory action research methodology, the designer activated a series of research residencies with heritage fashion manufacturing businesses, which resulted in the creation of a number of artefacts or ‘provocations’ for social change. As an outcome, this fashion activism project contributed to raising people’s awareness of sustainability issues, developing making skills, opening up career pathways, fostering community engagement, and building cross-sector partnerships. Furthermore, while enabling change in others, the design researcher leading the project undertook a process of change in himself and in his own way of engaging with materials and making processes within a social context. In the conclusions of the chapter, the author discusses the challenges experienced throughout this fashion activism project, and outlines recommendations for future work
Genny: Designing and Exploring a Live Coding Interface for Generative Models
Get PDFWe present Genny, a live coding interface for interacting with generative models. By implementing a streamlined generative model API within a Web-based live coding environment, we explore possibilities for how generative models can support live coding. We describe the implementation of our interface components and the backend system for working with generative models, show several design patterns with template code, and describe use of a practical generation method for live coding performance. The system currently enables the generation of two-bar rhythm patterns using lightweight models that support near-instantaneous inference, which are able to suggest and display alternative rhythm patterns based on live coders’ own inputs. Finally, we discuss reflections on this implementation approach, its current limitations, and further possibilities
The ‘Confessional’ Voice in Food Journalism: Decentring Narratives in the Whetstone Radio Collective
Get PDFThis article discusses the use of personal narratives in food media and journalism with a particular focus on podcasting. It situates the research amongst the abundance of lived experiences both in food content and in podcasting, two spaces that have been regarded as providers of the intimacy required to challenge impartiality practices in journalism. Given that the growth of podcasting has arguably failedto include enough non-mainstream voices, our primary research is based on four series of the Whetstone Radio Collective, a media organisation that aims to tell the stories of marginalised communities. Using content and thematic analysis, it establishes that the innovative use of first-person narratives of the hosts—who are overwhelming people of colour and embody stories of migration and displacement that mirror the food stories—is accompanied by conventional journalistic sourcing of experts who are already established voices based in the Global North. A recentring agenda is most obvious when it reclaims histories such as that of black farmers in the US, when it situates the consumption of foods as part of the global trade that drove the colonial project, or when it delves into and criticises foodways such as the social architecture of kitchens
Mapping and Counter-Mapping Pedagogies: In Conversation with Shibboleth Shechter
Get PDFIn this chapter, Nataša is in conversation with Shibboleth Shechter about Shibboleth's critical pedagogic practice with maps. Shibboleth is an educator and researcher. Her scholarship is pedagogic and takes the form of exhibitions, events, conference presentations, and publications on themes of mapping and counter-mapping, sustainability, co-design, civic participation, urban and community resilience. Shibboleth is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a UAL Senior Teaching Scholar, an award that acknowledges her innovative practice and research integrating live project pedagogy into the curriculum. At the time of the book's publication, she is acting as a PhD candidate at the Department of Educational Research at Lancaster University, where her research investigates students’ thinking through mapping to develop a cartosemiotic pedagogy in and for higher education
Orange Screen
No full textThe film ‘Orange Screen’, made by Edmund Clark in collaboration with Max Houghton, has been included in the new Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Galleries at the Imperial War Museum.
IWM’s new Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Galleries provide a vivid account of modern war.
Showcasing the experiences and innovations of artists, filmmakers and photographers, these galleries explore the complex tension between creativity and destruction.
Discover how visual practitioners are also powerful narrators who shape how we think and feel about conflict, and the role of art, film and photography in influencing public opinion.
Over 500 works chosen for display reflect the seismic social, cultural and political changes across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the individual perspectives of their makers
More Real Than Life
No full textMax Houghton examines the fraught links between photography and madness in this monograph essay. Working with close readings of the transcripts of Mary Ellen Mark and Karen Folger Jacobs' interviews with the women in the state of Oregon's only locked psychiatric ward, she explores cultural concepts of haunting and delire, as well as the social and political consequences of male violence and abuse towards women. Taking Mark's legendary images as jumping off points, Houghton asks us to consider the fragile borders of sanity and reality in this journey from seeing to being