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Designing in Conversation With Dance Practice
Get PDFWe present a long-term collaboration between dancers and designers, centred around the transmission of the century-old repertoire of modern dance pioneer Isadora Duncan. We engaged in a co-design process with a Duncanian dancer consisting of conversations and participation in her transmission of Duncan’s choreographies and technique. We then articulated experiential qualities central to Duncan’s repertoire and used them to guide the design of the probes, the sounding scarfs. Our probes sonify dancers’ movements using temporal sensors embedded in the fabric of the scarfs, with the goal of evoking Duncan’s work and legacy. We shared the probes with our Duncan dance community and found that they deepen the dancers’ engagement with the repertoire. Finally, we discuss how co-designing with slowness and humility were key to the dialogue created between the practitioners, allowing for seamless integration of design research and dance practice
Strangers Within: Documentary as Encounter
No full textI am participating and presenting my work on art, class, counter memory and the questioning of normatives and extractive practices in moving image culture.
SoundImageCulture presents evening of screenings, discussions on the occasion of the Brussels launch of the anthology Strangers Within: Documentary as Encounter.
'Strangers Within is edited by Therese Henningsen and SIC-participant Juliette Joffé and published by the independent publishing house Prototype. It explores the idea of documentary as encounter through essays, stories, and other responses by filmmakers, artists, and writers.
The texts engage with the risks of encounter, unsettling assumptions about the distinctions between host and guest, stranger and friend, self and other, documentarian and protagonist.
SoundImageCulture is happy to welcome you to an evening with participating artists and filmmakers Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Mary Jiménez Freeman-Morris, Therese Henningsen and Juliette Joffé.
They will present films and engage in a conversation on their work in relation to questions of representation and encounter
Aesthetic Labor in Religious Contexts: Women Encountering Modest Dress in the Workplace in the UK and Saudi Arabia
Get PDFThis article explores how UK women encounter religious dress and behavior codes in religious work contexts. It compares two very different case studies: women working at faith-based organizations in the UK and women working for secular organizations who travel for work to Saudi Arabia. Using 65 semi-structured interviews, participant wardrobe photographs, and observation in regional modest fashion retail, the article analyzes women workers’ experience in religious contexts as a form of aesthetic labor. It investigates the gendered and religious components which structure women’s different responses to workplace modesty codes. Detailing the additional aesthetic and emotional labor demanded of women in crafting modest professional appearances in religious contexts, the research reveals continuities in how workplace modesty requirements impact on women’s occupational performance and sense of self. The conclusion argues that religion-related workplace modesty codes constitute a religiously-inflected form of organizational aesthetics that may operate simultaneously with, but be experienced differently from, secular-driven organizational aesthetics. We find that religious dress codes are arbitrated by the avoidance of shame, an affect accompanying the government of modesty for all involved. We find that organizations benefit from, but do not recognize or recompense, the additional aesthetic labor that modesty demands of women
Up Close and Personal: Mediated Testimony and Narrative Tropes in Refugee Comics
Get PDFThis chapter examines three refugee narratives in comics form, all located in the context of the European Union's external and Southern border. Produced in differing contexts and aimed at distinct readerships, all three stories describe the journey of an individual. They thus share the ambition to render complex geo-political issues intelligible at the level of lived experience. The analysis considers how processes of mediation, power differentials constitutive of both production and reception, and dynamics brought into play by narrative structures and tropes, all call into question the perceived directness of the personal story
Artificial intelligence as a decolonisation tool: Lessons from libraries, archives and museums
No full textThe decolonial turn in cultural institutions has shed light on existing power dynamics behind galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs) surfacing the existing biases and exclusions generated by Western forms of knowledge production. Cataloguing frameworks used to structure and document collections are modeled upon Western epistemologies. GLAMs’widespread digitisation efforts and adoption of collection management systems and digital methods have supported preservation, accessibility, and research Artificial intelligence is increasingly used by these institutions to facilitate decision making tasks around documenting and cataloging activities as well as to improve user access to the information they hold about their objects. While AI can be perceived as an assisting tool it functions as a threatening one too. This perception holds relevance for GLAMs as postcolonial digital humanities and decolonial computing emphasize how technologies rehearse colonial dynamics (Risam 2021; Adams 2021). Many of these technologies are built upon classification systems and methods, such as statistics, used to control populations in colonial territories and racialized neighborhoods, and employ datasets that misrepresent non-dominant cultures with the use of derogatory terms. However, AI, like other digital tools, can be used as “technologies of recovery” (Gallon 2016) that unmask, repair, and remodel existing inequalities, biases, and other forms of colonial violence. For example, these projects use AI to identify discriminatory and problematic terms in documentation; tackle omissions of historical marginalised people in documentation; and seek to resurface hidden and forgotten objects. Through a series of examples of projects that use AI to decolonise museums and archives, this presentation will highlight strategies proposed by critical, postcolonial, and decolonial digital humanities that can be relevant to a wider AI community that tries to make AI fairer and more equitable – In particular, AI practitioners that are interested in developing systems that address issues around biased and problematic datasets
Send in the Clowns: Scoping Non-Representational Theory as Ally and Method to Foster Inclusiveness in Digital Innovation
Get PDFSend in the clowns is the account of a post-disciplinary, critical, creative practise that over the course of 6 years explored the subject of ‘digital innovation’ and ‘innovating in the digital’. The digital in this context is interpreted in the widest possible sense and includes any instance where cybertechnology relates to/with humans. This framing has put forward my proposed concept of the digiscape; a phenomenological interpretation of cyber-technology.
In 3 distinct interventions (Ch.3,4,5) I have appropriated literatures on inventive methods, sustainable design and diffraction for my thinking. Through the lessons learned from each intervention I have constructed my own interpretation of non-representational theory and methods. I make the case that these can be a fertile ground for emancipatory politics concerning research and development in/on the digital.
Seeking to test my claim that such approaches can be deemed valuable to practising innovators, I have submitted my hypothesis together with a non-representational experiment (‘Lickable Cities’) to CHI 2018 [a] (the pre-eminent journal in the field of Human-ComputerInteraction). The submission was accepted. Ch.6 discusses the implications of this on the scholarship of non-representational-theory and philosophy.
Thus myconclusion is that non-representational approaches are indeed of value to innovators as a means to catalyse a type of awareness(es) that makes otherwise inutterable questions possible. I am claiming that through fostering alliances across methods, traditions, disciplines, writing styles, ethnicities, media and epistemologies- with the help of non-representational theory- more inclusive research is enabled and method itself can be invigorated (Ch.7).
As mywork is concerned with knowing about knowing, and knowing about ways of knowing, myworkis firmly placed within Science and Technology Studies (STS) and is written for an STS audience.
[a]The ‘ACM’ Conference on ‘Human Factors in Computing Systems’, the principal venue for research in the f ield of ’Human-Computer Interaction’ (HCI
Fit But You Know It: Walking Workshop at Multilogue
Get PDF120-minute collaborative workshop (in-person)
In this dynamic ‘walking workshop’ we will address the challenge of decolonising art school education by exploring a core concept in industrially-produced clothing: fit.
The workshop draws on sensory and embodied methods to interrogate an embodied practice. Participants will use movement, textiles, and their hands and bodies to explore fit as a fluid and open-ended process, allowing for diverse perspectives from designers, makers and wearers in knowledge-building.
The standardisation and simplification of fit is critical to fashion's ability to sell, ship and scale products globally. Enlightenment values of universalism underpinning global trade also see to the erasure of our (designers and wearer’s) tacit understanding of how to fit fabric to our own bodies.
Industrially-produced clothing has fit ‘built-in’ using pattern-cutting techniques of darts and seam shaping. By contrast, pre-industrial or contemporary examples of non-western garment archetypes, such as the West African wrapper dress, the Southeast Asian Longi, rely on fitting techniques deployed by wearers’ hands when wrapping, knotting, or rolling.
Art schools and universities are ideal settings to challenge deeply embedded industrial-colonial practices and shift epistemic power relations. This project aims to reconfigure understandings of fit that contribute to academic discourse on social change in fashion education and practice, and encourage pluriversal and collaborative design approaches by future fashion practitioners.
The workshop will take place physically in Berlin. Participation is open to all bodies and abilities
Accelerating Sustainability in Fashion, Clothing and Textiles
No full textThis in-depth volume presents a comprehensive overview of the challenges and emerging opportunities faced by the sector, and provides strategic solutions as to how the sector can substantially accelerate sustainability.
This book collates research and industry best practice to provide a ‘one-stop shop’ exploring the complex and interconnected issues surrounding sustainability in fashion, clothing and textiles. The practical and digestible chapters include innovative examples and perspectives from different regions of the globe, addressing topics from policies to supply chain issues and materials innovation
Where is Living Labour in Fashion and Cultural Appropriation Debates?
Get PDFThis chapter aims to situate the debate on fashion and cultural appropriation within the broader, and crucial, context of transnational capital accumulation and the increasing devaluation of living labour. Its emphasis is on critically analysing the persistence and emotional intensity of the cultural appropriation debate as a manifestation of a deeper and more pervasive issue with contemporary transnational capitalism. To accomplish this, the chapter presents three appropriation allegations from different parts of the world that, at first glance, seem to have nothing in common. It then links these cases together by emphasising how they are signs of a deeper and wider malaise in the face of contemporary transnational capitalism, which is more concerned with endless, destructive capital accumulation and concentration through dispossession, including appropriation of culture, than it is with raising the productivity of labour. The chapter argues that if culture is to be practised as a liberating activity, it is imperative more than ever to maintain that living labour is what produces and reproduces culture, and it is this living labour that is systematically appropriated by capital