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Slap-up feeds and class war: lessons learnt from British humour comics
No full textThis paper examines two of the key trends which occurred in British children's humour comics during the 1970s and 1980s - hunger and poverty as motivating narrative drives for child heroes, and the constant presence of class conflict. It uses examples uncovered as part of the research process for 'The Funny Comics Fan Club', a fortnightly podcast which looks at a specific single issue of a British kids' comic in each episode. It attempts to answer why, despite taking place long after the end of rationing, the search for food and the prospect of a 'slap-up feed' as the ideal reward for success remained so dominant, and explore the many ways that class conflict is displayed. Furthermore, it showcases some of the ways in which these comics sought to engage with readers, both in texts and paratexts, and argues that this is a rich resource of cultural activity that deserves more academmic attention
Unseen Boundaries: Listening to domestic environments
No full textThe interwar period witnessed a heightened focus on domestic life and housing reforms, with state intervention aimed at improving living conditions. As historians like James G. Mansell have shown, noise was increasingly seen as a threat not only to public health but also to the privacy of the home, intruding on both physical and mental privacy. Despite this, the role of noise as a factor shaping domestic spaces has received little attention within architectural history. This paper situates its exploration within this overlooked context, focusing on the acoustic challenges faced in Gayfere House, Westminster, built by Oliver Hill for Lord and Lady Mount Temple in 1929.
To explore these challenges, Lady Mount Temple’s complaints to her architect serve as the starting point for an investigation into how noise undermined the intended privacy and functionality of domestic interiors, challenging the notion of the home as a protected, peaceful refuge. Through the sonic landscape of Gayfere House this paper argues that noise acted as an invisible but potent force, influencing how people experienced and inhabited their homes. Building on this case study, the paper will ask: how can we ‘listen’ to the archive and recover the sounds that once filled these spaces?
By considering the sonic dimensions of domestic life, we can access different ways of understanding the lived experience of historical environments, expanding beyond the visual and material evidence that typically dominates architectural studies. This approach not only deepens our knowledge of how interwar homes functioned but also challenges the ocularcentric tendencies in the history of domesticity, offering a more holistic view of the domestic sphere under siege
Survey on the Evaluation of Generative Models in Music
Get PDFResearch on generative systems in music has seen considerable attention and growth in recent years. A variety of attempts have been made to systematically evaluate such systems. We present an interdisciplinary review of the common evaluation targets, methodologies, and metrics for the evaluation of both system output and model use, covering subjective and objective approaches, qualitative and quantitative approaches, as well as empirical and computational methods. We examine the benefits and limitations of these approaches from a musicological, an engineering, and an HCI perspective
5 Mechanisms for Academic Engagement in Civic Priorities
Get PDFResourcing civic work within universities was identified as a major challenge across multiple partnerships through the NCIA action learning programme. We wanted to test a model to support early career academics build expertise and sustain involvement in civic work. Alongside our own experimentation, we wanted to learn from the wider civic, public and community engagement network within higher education; to find out how they support academics to engage with civic priorities and think about how we could evaluate the different models we were sharing
Super Absorbent
No full textA solo exhibition of works by Leigh Clarke.
Maximillian Wölfgang Gallery presented Super Absorbent, a solo show featuring the works of British artist, Leigh Clarke.
Searching through online platforms, Clarke locates avatars and pseudonyms, and imagines them as figurative forms. Physically realising anonymous and invisible occupants in online spaces, the artist abandons the mechanical and digital in favour of a direct and performative approach, using his own weight to apply pressure to create the printed or painted image. The work can be considered in various modes: the subversive exuberance of throwing wet sponges at captive teachers at a school fete (which itself recalls the more-sinister spectacle of stocks in the town square); the sponge’s intended use to clean; sponge as a fast-learner. His compositions reflect on dance culture in the 90’s, remembering shamanic moments of disconnect on dance floors and the united euphoria of strangers in dark spaces. One third of UK nightclubs have closed; this is partly due to the increasing overheads and small margins that the industry bears.
However, rising cost-of-living squeezes us all and means choices are made – increasingly people opt for big one-off blow-outs at photogenic festivals, over a regular night out to a local club. Clarke locates bloggers from social media platforms and imagines them in movement, in physical spaces, resolving differences through human interaction and dance. The crossword prints are of a series that celebrate concentration and puzzle solving by strangers on trains. They derive from the artists collection of unfinished Metro crosswords from his train journeys from Kent to London. Using screenprinting techniques, the artist re-creates the crossword grid, enlarges, and traces the handwriting in fine detail. He sees them as discarded, unresolved and absorbent moments of human thought, outside of social media and AI
Styling the suburbs: Irene Sherman’s dress shops and fashion networks in the twentieth century
Get PDFThe article uses the history of Irene Sherman’s suburban fashion shops to explore the significance of fashion retail for broader suburban distinctiveness. Principally, this is an article about networks and connections between the suburb and the city, retail and manufacturing and finally, the importance of family networks for developing and sustaining a fashion business
Fashion for Every-Body: envisioning all humans to prosper in fashion
No full textHow could fashion be re-invented as an artistic practice based on equality and a fairer system that encourages all humans to flourish? Addressing global inequality in fashion requires exposing discriminatory and exploitative practices, both in the design process of sketching and designing in studios to manufacturing and stitching in factories. This means challenging the domination of colonial extractive knowledge and processes to re-envision alternative fashion systems that call for an end to profit driven wage-labor and money, nations and nation states. How could fashion move away from capitalist modernization?
This paper suggests for fashion to reconstruct counter capitalist and socialist experimentation, fashion should look for inspiration from the socialist theories of Karl Marx and William Morris and past political and socialist experimentation for societal equality. Drawing on socialist visions offers scope for future radical and novel conceptual frameworks which could enable a more egalitarian version of fashion to emerge. Addressing inequality is not new, turning towards histories of global socialisms can show fashion how alternative egalitarian non-hierarchical community principles envisioned societal equality through the arts; the Paris Commune which briefly in 1871 proposed luxury as a shared human right. Here, the concept of communal luxury, taken from the Manifesto for the Federation of Artists, re-envisions artistic practice as a joy that everyone takes part in, a collective endeavor that forms part of daily life so that ‘all art was artisanal and skilled in its production and in the socialisation of its makers’ (Ross 2016, p.58). This approach if applied to fashion would allow for an inclusive and decolonial fashion design system in which designers and those engaged in manual labor could be more closely aligned towards a participatory aesthetic experience, as practiced by the Communards in the Paris Commune.
To work towards a fashion in which all humans flourish and every type of body, regardless of race, ethnicity, ability, gender, class or sexual orientation, requires a process of making colonial logic visible and learning from those who have challenged societal oppression. The Paris Commune shows that another fashion is, indeed, possible
Why Can We See Things? Translating the Unknown into Potential Futures
Get PDFThis article proposes that key approaches from Translation Studies offer a useful springboard for reflecting on the theme of Design and Unknowns. Presenting a range of working definitions, it frames translation as a generative, creative, and transformative process — a tool for thinking about encounters with otherness, the unknown, and the unknowable. The article focuses on the translation strategies of domestication and foreignization as different ways of engaging with cultural idiosyncrasies. These strategies are illustrated through visual examples from the translation of school science textbooks in post-war Japan, showing how translation shaped narratives around science literacy. It concludes by exploring the notion of untranslatability, highlighting how the creative gap of not-knowing within translation can represent an ethic of engagement with the unknown
Ten Texts on Painting 3: Philip Guston
No full textWelcome to the third episode of Ten Texts on Painting. This time, Andrea and Matt watch A Life Lived, a documentary about Philip Guston as he installed a retrospective exhibition in San Franscisco in 1980, and read a lecture Guston delivered on one of his favourite painters, Piero Della Francesca, also around that time. It’s a total love in. Who doesn’t love Guston
Beyond the Visual: Multisensory Modes of Beholding Art
Get PDFBeyond the Visual broadens the discussion of multisensory ways of beholding contemporary art, with a particular emphasis on modes that transcend a dependency upon sight. A central premise is that a shift in the aesthetic engagement afforded by hybrid forms of contemporary art has the potential to open up new sensory and cognitive engagements for blind and partially blind people. This is a subject that has rarely been addressed within the literature on contemporary arts or disability studies.
Bringing together leading international scholars and artists in the emerging field of ‘blindness arts’, including blind and partially blind artists, curators, advocates for inclusive practices and models of audio description, cognitive psychologists, and theorists of installation, performance and sound art, the book offers a detailed consideration of exemplars of such multisensory engagement, pre-eminently in works by blind or partially blind artists. In so doing, the book not only shifts the discussion on access and inclusivity – reconceiving access as integral to the creative process – but argues that this has the potential to enrich the experience of art for all beholders, moving beyond an often-unexamined reliance on vision