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You Dig? Horror, The British Landscape and the Counterculture
Get PDFIn this paper I discuss three now little known, or rather cult horror movies (depending on your taste and field) made in the U.K.. I’d like to discuss them in relation to how their characters and how their plots can be explored in relation to the landscape in which they take place, and to the protagonists’ countercultural attitudes and appearances and the particular political world in which they were produced. Each features an unearthing or haunting of their landscapes as a political act, as central to their narratives
Trajectories of field recording: Sonic fluxes, fuzzy lines and relational space in practice
Get PDFThis practice-led thesis is centred on using sound as a resource for thinking relational encounters and processes of spatial constitution. Starting with Doreen's Massey's conception of space, which posits that space is constituted via interaction, I examine my own field recording practice, and the recorded documents I produce, for ways of thinking the diversity and dynamism of interaction. In doing so, I develop six sonic figures: Volume, Propagation, Reverberation, Masking, Interference and Not-Sounding, and explore the aural flows and fluxes these figures entail for suggestive ways of conceptualising dynamic interaction. Thus, the central question this thesis examines is: if space is the product of interrelations (Massey 2005:9) how might sonic dynamics be used to conceptualise the diversity, complexity and hybridity of interaction itself? Relations are, of course, varied, they might comprise contradictory dynamics or take hybrid forms involving, for example, both conflict and collaboration. The sonic figures I have developed for thinking relationality involve highly variable interactions comprising processes of transformation, amplification, silencing and returns. In using them to conceptualise the dynamics of relations, I explore their fluxes for ways of thinking relational complexity. This approach generates a version of relations as hybrid and mutable, with effects which might too be contradictory or in flux. By expanding the ways in which relations themselves might be conceptualised this thesis offers new approaches to thinking the 'how' of relational constitution, locating in sonic dynamics new ways of thinking the constitutive relational flux which produces space.
I draw on three specific artistic commissions, which took place from 2018 to 2021, to develop and put forward the arguments presented in this thesis. Under Construction (2019) and Ascending Composition 1 (For Planes) (2019) were both installations which were exhibited in London, with Ascending Composition also involving documentation of a sonic intervention, while the third Hawkes End —> River Sowe junction – a sonic transect of the (sometimes absent) River Sherbourne (2021) was a composition for the Coventry Biennial. All of these projects invited me to work within and through a wide range of complex, overlapping, complimentary and conflictual sets of relations. Throughout the thesis I turn to the sonic figures I have developed for ways of conceptualising the dynamics at play in the locations in which I was working, and those entangled with my own practice of field recording in public space
Drift
No full textSession co-presented with Lucy Sabin in the Geographies of Hope interdisciplinary, cross-institutional conference at UCL Department of Geography in 2023. The session included a collaborative performance-lecture "Drift," and individual presentations "Data Drift: Tracing Social Flows through the Sewer" by Sabrina Chou and "Drifting with (Saharan) Dust" by Lucy Sabin.
Drift is a suspension of expectations, an opening of possibilities, a porosity of bodies, an ontological ambiguity of perpetual flow. The two artists, with their mirrored foci on submergence (sewers and data cables) and transcendence (atmospherics and air pollution), present a multimedia session with performative and immersive elements. Through a practice-infused approach, they consider drift as material potential, affective condition, and provisional position. Drift is an imperative to shift circumstances. Drift we must
Introduction: Fashion and Transnational Inequalities – What, Where, Why?
Get PDFIntroduction to the book Fashion’s Transnational Inequalities: Socio-Political, Economic, and Environmental, edited by Serkan Delice and Anna-Mari Almila (London & New York: Routledge)
Cognitive Impact of Social Virtual Reality: Audience and Mere-Presence Effect of Virtual Companions
Get PDFSharing experiences with others is an important part of everyday life. Immersive virtual reality (IVR) promises to simulate these experiences. However, whether IVR elicits a similar level of social presence as measured in the real world is unclear. It is also uncertain whether AI-driven virtual humans (agents) can elicit a similar level of meaningful social copresence as people-driven virtual-humans (avatars). The current study demonstrates that both virtual human types can elicit a cognitive impact on a social partner. The current experiment tested participants’ cognitive performance changes in the presence of virtual social partners by measuring the social facilitation effect (SFE). The SFE-related performance change can occur through either vigilance-based mechanisms related to other people’s copresence (known as the mere presence effect (MPE)) or reputation management mechanisms related to other people’s monitoring (the audience effect (AE)). In this study, we hypothesised AE and MPE as distinct mechanisms of eliciting SFE. Firstly, we predicted that, if head-mounted IVR can simulate sufficient copresence, any social companion’s visual presence would elicit SFE through MPE. The results demonstrated that companion presence decreased participants’ performance irrespective of whether AI or human-driven. Secondly, we predicted that monitoring by a human-driven, but not an AI-driven, companion would elicit SFE through AE. The results demonstrated that monitoring by a human-driven companion affected participant performance more than AI-driven, worsening performance marginally in accuracy and significantly in reaction times. We discuss how the current results explain the findings in prior SFE in virtual-world literature and map out future considerations for social-IVR testing, such as participants’ virtual self-presence and affordances of physical and IVR testing environments
Publishing ecosystems - opportunities and challenges of digital connectivity
No full textEcosystems abound in publishing. They are well established between the booktrade and publishers, agents and editors, suppliers and producers, self-publishers and publishing services. However, the digital environment increases the connectivity of systems to make ecosystems both very effective but also challenging to legacy systems of publishing. The emergent embedded nature of these systems means that publishers need to understand the technicalities to create new ecosystems or work within the systems evolving in the sectors they serve: whether they are using APIs to integrate into researcher’s workflow or recognize the business models used by different audiobook subscription services publishers need to understand the behaviours of different digital ecosystems.
This research will reflect on 3 case studies of ecosystems that have emerged: Amazon and its proprietary and interconnected operations and services for customers and authors; the academic research environments into which publishing has inserted itself; and self-publishing and the services that have arisen in order to support alternative reader/writer economies. It will explore the way these ecosystems connect, the impacts that can have and the closed nature of many of them. It examines the opportunities and the challenges they bring for publishers as they try to integrate with these evolving digital ecosystems
Reflecting on the Role of Creative Practice in Facilitating Young People’s Capacity to Represent and Document Their Own Experiences of Resistance
Get PDFWhile “resistance” is often used to describe “fighting back” against oppression and subjugation, for young people the word resistance is often used by safeguarding professionals to refer to negative, disruptive behaviours rather than evidence of their creativity, agency and strength in the face of oppression. In this paper, we share findings and reflections from Imagining Resistance, a three-year multi-disciplinary project that explored how young people in England (n=20, aged 13–25) who have experienced sexual abuse, violence and exploitation engage in processes and acts of resistance. Imagining Resistance set out to utilise photovoice (Wang and Burris 1997), a qualitative research method centred on photography, in a series of creative workshops with young people. However, our approach changed over the course of the project, influenced by O’Neill’s (2012) concept of “ethno-mimesis”, which involves collecting ethnographic data alongside the creation of visual and poetic responses to prompts offered within flexibly structured creative workshop settings. This shift occurred as the young people pushed back, resisting the intended methodology while remaining open to other creative arts methods. This enabled us to think more critically about how the use of participatory and creative arts methods can facilitate emancipatory research practices that are responsive to young people’s developing understanding of resistance and their experiences of reimagining resistance as a fluid, generative and hopeful collective endeavour
SHIFT HAPPENS
No full textGallery exhibition at Phoenix Art Space, Brighton, as part of their Community Takeover 'A Seat at the Table'. This exhibition included 5 new videos, a wall of monoprints, a reconfigured sculptural chair, drawings and photographs, an live AI experiment and an Open Mic event hosted by Aflo the Poet. Additionally, audiences were invited to participate in a social practice talk & meal (led by artist Katy Beinart), make 'food bank still life' drawings, in collaboration with Phoenix Food Shop, a movement session led by Yael Flexer, and contribute to a postcard archive of reflective texts on the subject of what we 'carry'
Trust in Early Recordings: documents, performances and works
Get PDFOver the past few years, I have arrived at the conclusion that one should feel genuine sympathy for any researcher that is misfortunate enough to study early recordings. This is not because their area of research is so bewilderingly broad. Nor is it because researchers of early recordings are required to read so many different kinds of text. Rather, it is because no matter how far their scholarship advances, and no matter how significant their findings appear to be, scholars of early recordings are constantly questioned about the legitimacy of the very thing that they study. I have experienced this first-hand, since involving myself in a research project focussed on the production and analysis of mechanical recordings; even though the findings of this project were disseminated far and wide, involving both academic and public audiences, specialists and non-specialists, questions about the legitimacy of early recordings almost always dominated proceedings. The precise nature of the questions varied, of course, as did the terminology used. The overarching sentiment remained the same: to what extent can we really trust early recordings
Relic Garden
No full textIn Relic Garden Lana Locke creates an apocalyptic environment of relics of human and non-human life, in a play of sculpture, installation, video and painting.
In this garden, plants are not borne of the ground, but the crucible, alchemised into bronze and aluminium, pinned, potted and placed about the barren space. Contrasting materials like plastic and plaster are forced into the mix, playing in survivalist kinship with the value-laden metal.
Three Graces of cut and shellacked palm fons, are as mortal as they are ethereal. They dance around a dead branch that grows from a tailor’s dummy mount, their monstrous bodies closer to dried out meat than to an idealised female form.
Shiny, dangling, swimsuited bodices hang from above, as if similarly skinned from flesh, suspended in glistening inertia. One of these bodies, Between Labours, takes on a narrative of domestic responsibility, its smoothness interrupted by objects of abjected labour: a prickly feather duster piercing the crotch, a child’s knobbly, knocked-around garden fork slicing through the arms. The swimsuit stretches in leisurely pursuit, querying its fixity of gender and as shiny bioresin stiffens and slickens its bulging contours. Dried flowers spill from its pelvis, at once phallic and womb-like, in a shrivelled, cross-species collusion to battle mortality, as pleasure is interrupted further by a signal of natural demise. It is at once inviting and rejecting tactile interaction: the handheld elements of labour interrupting the desire to touch, with the hand’s familiarity with a less desirable, functional relationship to these tools.
Playing in the background is Locke’s film, Journeys of a Laundry Mountain (2021), which articulates more fully some of the themes hinted at in the objects. The exploration of her own responsibility for the domestic laundry draws out her complicity with heteronormative white patriarchy and colonialism, cut with humourous clips of found footage showing up inherited roles of gender and race. The mountain of tangled laundry that Locke has to sort, moves through locations where she films herself hanging out clothes, from the gentrifying area of South East London where she lives, to her parent’s “junkyard and jungle” in South East Queensland. Filmed in the wake of the Australian forest fires of 2019, she explores the cultural and ecological violence of colonialism on the indigenous culture and landscape there, paralleled with the beginnings of the Covid 19 pandemic, and its origins in our encroachment on and abuse of wild territories. A call is here made for a parental relationship to the earth, which moves beyond our narrow sense of family