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Kvltvrgeist Remaster
No full textAn exhibition of public artworks
'The city itself is the anonymous and multiple
author of the images collected and exhibited as artworks’
– Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction, 2002.
These large-scale banner artworks are created in direct response to the decoration found around the streets of Helsinki. In public space, diverse tableaux are created by multiple authors using posters, stickers and graffiti. Particular spaces in the city are appropriated as informal message boards, where agendas are promoted and discourses negotiated. Often, these take place on the housings for electrical junction boxes, municipal signs or building hoardings. These examples are highly aesthetic, organised within regularly shaped areas that perform the function of the canvas painting support in delineating the composition and balancing the dynamic, even chaotic, styles at play within formal edges.
In response, Tom Cardwell has created a series of detailed paintings that follow the style of ‘quodlibet’ still life paintings popular in the Dutch Golden Age. Elements from Helsinki’s streets are carefully transcribed and recontextualised within paintings that are dense with coded symbolism and evocative imagery. Here, the painted elements are juxtaposed in larger digital compositions used to create exterior fabric banners. In this way, the source imagery is returned to its urban context on the streets of the city
Divergent and Convergent Thinking in Digital Publishing – Creativity and Collaboration for Publishing Innovation
No full textThis paper explores how divergent and convergent thinking has led to successful innovations in publishing, presenting qualitative research into digital publishing projects across different sectors. Understanding this is important from a creativity point of view (as publishers draw ideas from different sectors) and a process point of view (to ensure publishers innovate effectively as they possible).
The research will present 4 collaborative publishing case studies, based on in-depth interviews.
1) Education sector – rethinking approaches to publishing around curriculum design
2) Academic sector – how UX and software development led to new product features
3) Consumer sector – ideas generation from different creative sectors
4) STM – creating environments that encourage divergent thinking through collaboratio
Material subversions and Transmediterranean Dialogues
No full textThis talk with Daniel Sturgis, Professor in Painting (University of the Arts London, Camberwell College of Arts) and Mick Finch, Professor of Visual Art Practice (University of the Arts London, Central Saint Martins) was recorded on 6 February 2025 at the Nationalmusée um Fëschmaart and can be found at this link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzICfXLGtbo
This presentation showed how the cultural and material specificity of abstract painting was used by the artists associated with Supports/Surfaces to escape from more dominant Northern European and American traditions. This artistic approach, which questioned abstraction through a politicised practice based on subverting convention and materiality, could be seen to connect with work by other artists working simultaneously and to similar ends in Italy and North Africa. We brought up questions that arose in these related contexts, in terms of feminism and post-colonisation, which enriched our understanding of Supports/Surfaces and the histories of abstract painting in Europe during this period more generally.
This talk was organised as part of the exhibition "Supports/Surfaces. Notre collection à l'affiche"
Enabling Cross-Cultural Dialogues as a tool for Co-Design – Building Equitable Knowledge Exchange Through Creative Textile Connectivity
Get PDFIn May 2022 rural women weavers from the Jaipur Rug Foundation and BA Textile Design students from CSM, embarked on a design project exploring new channels of knowledge exchange and remote co-creation.
This paper reflects on the project’s aim to facilitate non-hierarchical creative dialogues between international design students and artisan-weavers from the Global South to co-design a collection of handwoven rugs. Participants challenged existing stereotypes and hierarchies, through a process of mapping textile skills and design methods as well as inviting storytelling, gaining a richer understanding of the material and social networks afforded by their diverse contexts. Together they negotiated different cultural starting points towards the development of twelve co-designed rugs using visual, material-based and digital communication methods.
The authors discuss future skill sets for designers and artisans to effectively navigate a rapidly changing global design culture, to reposition themselves within complex power dynamics. Challenges and opportunities for cross-cultural co-design and creative dialogues are identified as connected to existing Western-centric design school thinking such as individual authorship and a linear generic design development process. If textiles can become a tool for social connectivity, how can design educators enable their students to learn non-hierarchical communication and design facilitation methods to develop inclusive and diverse design mindsets?
The paper concludes by proposing new evolved pedagogies including the ethics of design collaborations, visual storytelling, empathy building as well as connecting local heritage to post-colonial contemporary global design culture as key considerations to move towards more inclusive teaching approaches
Sampling the Latent Space: Exploring the Creative Potential of Generative AI Through the Lens of Sample-Based Music Making
Get PDFSample-based composition is a century-old practice in which artists repurpose existing sounds to create new music. As generative AI (GenAI) systems increasingly reuse existing material, they are often compared to sampling and remix practices. In this paper, we draw on the relatively mature tradition of sampling to address a key concern of GenAI: how can a tool which is dependent on the recycling of existing art support meaningful creativity? We present an ethnography and thematic analysis of a sample-based music community, connecting these insights to contemporary challenges in GenAI design. We discuss how designers might support artists in engaging with environmental, fictional, communal, and agential dimensions of GenAI models and data, building on literature about sample-based music to speak not only to generative music but to GenAI systems more broadly
Final Report - Transforming Collections: Reimagining Art, Nation and Heritage
Get PDFTransforming Collections aimed to enable digital search and research across collections, to uncover patterns of bias in collections systems and narratives, to reveal hidden connections, and to open up new interpretative frames and ‘potential histories’ of art, nation and heritage. The project was underpinned by the belief that a national collection cannot be imagined without addressing structural inequalities, contested heritages and contentious histories embedded in objects. In 1999, the late sociologist and cultural theorist Stuart Hall posed the question ‘Whose heritage?’. Hall called for the ‘unsettling’ and ‘reimagining’ of heritage and nation. Twenty-five years on, the need to critically question and transform notions of ‘heritage’ and ‘nation’ remains as urgent as ever.
Led by UAL in close partnership with Tate among 15 partners across the UK, Transforming Collections sought to surface suppressed histories, amplify marginalised voices, and re-evaluate artists and artworks long ignored or side-lined by dominant narratives and institutional practices. The interdisciplinary approach brought together academic and artistic research into collections and museum practices, combined with participatory interactive machine learning (ML) design. The ML development was shaped and driven by researchers’ case studies and questions, terrogating small, bespoke, ‘messy’ datasets as well as larger collections’ data. The focus was not on achieving a technical solution to address problems in collections, but on developing lightweight adaptable tools that can support their critical analyses. The resultant critical analytical tool (ML CAT or Collections Transformer) has the potential to aid the rethinking of habitual formulations, hierarchies and values expressed in collections’ text-based digital records by offering critical prompts; while the creation of dynamic categorisations or tags refined by the user (that would not otherwise be made visible through standard search functions within collections databases), can surface unexpected connections and relations.
Transforming Collections culminated in a major public programme, Museum x Machine x Me, across Tate Modern and Tate Britain, which saw project insights and findings shared with wide-ranging audiences. Foregrounding a series of artistic residencies that critically and creatively engaged with the Transforming Collections research and developing ML tools, Museum x Machine x Me generated dialogues and expanded understandings of the ways in which the Transforming Collections research can support museums in reimagining an inclusive, evolving, (re)distributed ‘national collection’ that enables new, multivocal stories to be told
Co-construction of knowledge in EAP: Reflections on developing a community of practice around language at the university
No full textKeith Piper’s 'Viva Voce': A Filmic Approach to Doing Art History and Confronting the Racism in Rex Whistler’s Mural
No full textIn 2020, against the fevered backdrop of the Covid 19 pandemic and the reignited Black Lives Matter protests, an image surfaced on social media revealing explicitly racist imagery on the walls of Tate Britain’s basement restaurant. There as part of Rex Whistler’s now infamous wrap-around mural – ‘The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats’ (1927) - the image was not unknown to or undiscovered by Tate. The art gallery had for several years been grappling with how to interpret the much-beloved mural’s shocking depictions of colonial violence for its visitors but had made minimal effort to mitigate the offense and upset caused by the images because of its somewhat discreet location in the depths of the building. But after the outrage of 2020, Tate determined to confront the highly contested and controversial artwork by commissioning an artist to respond to it. This paper focuses on the result of that decision – the 2024 film installation ‘Viva Voce’ by Keith Piper, currently on view in the site of Tate’s former restaurant and surrounded by Whistler’s mural. In the paper, I will consider how Piper’s deep interest in art’s histories, and his firmly research-driven practice were vital to his production of the film. I will also discuss how the film itself, with its essay-like structure, temporal ambiguity and critical, investigative lens, exposes the imperial and artistic contexts in which Whistler was working, thereby providing a social art history of the mural and enabling contemporary audiences to make sense of its most disturbing elements
Ten Texts on Painting 2: Amy Sillman
No full textWelcome to episode 2 of Ten Texts on Painting! In this episode Matt and Andrea read two texts by the painter and writer Amy Sillman: ‘On Color’ from 2016 and ‘Ab-Ex and Disco Balls’ from 2011. We talk about paint, colour and different kinds of knowledge. We talk about Sillman’s approach to painting, writing and teaching, and how all those things might connect. We finish up talking about abstract expressionism and feminist performance. It’s a great episode! Amy Sillman is great! You’re great! Enjoy