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Site-Specific Composition for Brass and Voice: A practice-research enquiry into the creative methods deployed to respond to the challenges and opportunities of producing site-specific participatory music performances in Cornwall
Get PDFThis research enquiry explores a range of appropriate creative methods to produce site-specific participatory music performances in Cornwall. Using a practice-research approach, research questions were identified, compositional and performance strategies were tested, developed and implemented through five pieces. The research question identified is as follows:- What are the creative methods (compositional, rehearsal, direction and performance) deployed to address the challenges and opportunities of producing site-specific community-focused music performances in Cornwall?
From planning to performance, each piece as part of the overall enquiry raised and identified a set of challenges, issues and opportunities throughout the various stages of the process within each piece. A practice-research (Nelson: 2013) methodology was used to offer appropriate solutions for each of the research pieces. Through reflective practice, each piece's outcomes relevant to the research question informed the next research piece. An iterative process was followed in each case so that creative methods could be evolved and adapted to offer solutions for the proceeding piece and in response to the overarching research question.
Throughout the research the brass band is used as the primary musical ensemble with added vocal elements. Many of the site-specific pieces required performances that involved working within large, often outdoor physical spaces. It was therefore an informed choice to work with instruments that were resilient to weather, portable and acoustically directional.
Each of the five pieces presented a public performance and produced multiple forms of documentation: musical scores, video, audio recordings and were accompanied by complementary writing. The findings are summarised in response to the research question and appropriate sitespecific compositional and performance solutions are offered.
It is intended that other artists exploring the field of site-specific participatory music performance can draw upon and use the insights offered by this thesis and project portfolio. It may be that creative practitioners in other artforms, such as visual arts, dance or site-specific sound installation, may find the outcomes useful. It could allow them to develop strategies relevant to their specific practice and thus permeate the insight into a wider field of arts practice
Over The Top: British Drumming, Virtuosity and Showmanship
Get PDFThis paper explores musical virtuosity and greatness through the work of 1960s British drummers alongside models of virtuosity suggested by Matt Brennan and Mandy Smith. In the myriad ‘greatest drummers’ lists that proliferate the drumosphere’s magazines and web content, a trio of British drummers hold sway in the top ten, and often the top three, but there are also British drummers occupying lower tiers of fame, or regard. The triumvirate of Cream’s Ginger Baker, The Who’s Keith Moon and Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham feature highly in these lists but are also accompanied by British drummers Cozy Powell, Ian Paice and Bill Ward alongside Charlie Watts, Ringo Starr and Mitch Mitchell. There is a peculiarity of these three British drummers in particular, when situated in these lists with their largely North American counterparts - Neil Peart of Rush and Terry Bozzio in particular, but followed by Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, Hal Blaine etc.This peculiarity - the U.S./U.K. divide of greatness - can be explored through the work of Mandy Smith (2020) and Matt Brennan (2020). For Smith) it is the ‘primitive’ in opposition to the ‘virtuosic’, as ends of a continuum. For Brennan (2020: 238), it is the ‘showmanship that demand[s] they are] seen as well as heard’ (2020:224). The language of categorization of great rock drummers relies on naming what I call the technician drummer in opposition to personality drummer as ‘virtuoso’, creating a continuum from the primitive to the virtuosic. For example, Terry Bozzio as technician virtuoso and Ginger Baker as personality, or exhibitionist, virtuoso. Brennan (2020) develops aspects of drumming categorized as virtuosic through a number of tropes, which can be explored, through ‘technical rigour and mastery’, through ‘complexity’, and thirdly via the visual component of virtuosity, or ‘exhibitionism’. This paper explores these academic models to tease out notions of British drumming virtuosity
Taking Creative Action
No full textTaking Creative Action A workshop based on Citizens UK’s Five Steps to Social Change, where participants will connect with others and explore creative ways to act on issues they care about
UAL Online: Scalable Assessment Research Project
Get PDFA report of the investigation of the application of AI in UAL assessment practice
Becoming
No full textBecoming (2013/2025) is a live artificially intelligent installation in which an abstract body tries to master all the movements present in an iconic 1980s science-fiction film.
Becoming was created by Marc Downie in collaboration with Nick Rothwell. Commissioned by the Wellcome Collection in London, the artwork was part of the Thinking with the Body exhibition there, where it ran live from September 15 through October 27 2013.
The virtual agent of Becoming was used by choreographer Wayne McGregor in his London studio as an “eleventh dancer” whose role was to instigate new ideas for McGregor and his Random Dance company as they created a new work.
The piece has been rebuilt for retrospective exhibition at Somerset House in 2025 and is on show to the public until February 2026.
A live, artificially intelligent and interactive digital object, Becoming is both an artwork and a practical choreographic tool.
Inspired by the colours and motion of the 1982 film Blade Runner, the work is a development of McGregor’s Choreographic Language Agent, a responsive digital algorithm that was an innovative forerunner to his later work with AI such as AISOMA.
Becoming seeks to bridge the digital-physical divide by eliciting a kinaesthetic and real-time relationship between computer program and human dancer
3D Patterning in the Cosmoscope
No full textCosmoscope is an interdisciplinary project led by professor Simeon Nelson, researched and produced in collaboration with an expert team of artists and scientists culminating in a monumental sound and light sculpture. Inspired by historical astronomical instruments and models of the cosmos, it looks at the infinitesimal to the infinite. Like the world with its calamities and ceaseless change, Cosmoscope has order and disorder built in. Its patterns of light and music intertwine and separate in perpetual evolution giving rise to very small, the human and very large scales sourced from the research into solid-state physics, organic structures, and the large-scale structure of the cosmos
ARLIS/UK & Ireland Research Award Report 2023-4: A knowledge exchange material literacy research project, University of the Arts London (UAL) x UWE Bristol (UWE)
No full textMaterials surround us in our everyday lives, and yet “while they do so much for us, we rarely pause to marvel at them …it’s so easy to forget just how foundational a role they play in our experience of the world” (Corbin, 2018, p.6). One way this can be addressed is through the introduction of physical materials within a teaching and learning context. Numerous arts institutions around the world have collections of materials samples, which are used as sources to inform or inspire their students. Educators (including, but not limited to, academics, librarians and technical staff) use materials and objects to develop students’ knowledge of material properties and processes and empower them to apply a critical approach to their materials selection.
This project has been inspired and informed by various literature, covering topics such as materials libraries and collections, material culture and research, makerspaces in libraries, fabrication and hands-on learning, meta-literacies, object-based learning and pedagogy. Please see our recommended reading list to explore these texts. We identified an opportunity to research and link teaching and making literacy provided by technicians, with librarian-facilitated object-based learning frameworks. There was also a need to address sustainability considerations and be mindful of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, demonstrated in a Students Organising for Sustainability longitudinal study capturing students’ attitudes towards learning for sustainable development, which shows that “approximately 80 per cent of students want their institution to be doing more on sustainable development [and] around 60 per cent of students want to learn more about sustainability” (United Nations, 2014).
This project has identified that there is a growing interest in the UK in creating and utilising materials libraries within higher education, and in particular by library staff for use within their information and academic literacy teaching. Therefore, there is an opportunity for library and technical staff to co-develop materials collections and jointly deliver workshops and resources to support and develop students’ materials literacy. Inspired by CILIP’s definition of information literacy (2018), we have applied this concept to articulate materials literacy as: the ability to think critically and make informed and balanced judgements about the materials we encounter, source and select. It empowers us as citizens to contribute to a more sustainable society by developing our understanding of material origins, properties and environmental impact.
Another project gaining momentum at UWE which has informed this particular collaboration is the Bristol Materials Network which aims to build connections and share knowledge and resources around materials and sustainability, enabling the development of materials literacy for UWE students, staff and the wider community in Bristol. Originally, the network came from a project with the intention to create a materials library at UWE. However, limitations of space, budget and resourcing made this difficult to achieve. Instead, small, portable collections of materials and objects are used to facilitate learning within workshop settings. This approach works well to develop students’ materials literacy and has been key to the knowledge exchange between the two institutions
Choreography Against Cartography: Three Movements on Nam Hwayeon
Get PDFCommissioned essay accompanying Nam Hwayeon's solo exhibition Ripple at CAN Centre d’art Neuchâtel. The text looks at the transcultural hybridisation of art forms, the originality and ownership of cultural artifacts, or the circulation and transformation of knowledge in Nam's work
Wild Waysides: Queer Ecologies and the New Natrual
No full text"Rock on the Shore," Sound and Video Installation, part of Wild Waysides: Queer Ecologies and the New Natrual.
‘Wild Waysides: Queer Ecologies and the New Natrual’ a series of installations at the White Water Gallery North Bay, Ontario, Canada. This exhibition features the work of Mike Wyeld and Charlie Hunter who participated in the inaugural QUEER UP NORTH Artist Residency in Tamagami, Ontario Canada.
Sponsored by the Canada Council for the Arts/Conseil des Arts du Canad
Body Politics: Unpacking Tensions and Future Perspectives for Body-Centric Design Research in HCI
Get PDFHuman bodies are deeply political as they carry historical and social meanings, including race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and abilities. The expanding body-centric research in HCI can be traced in the plurality of methods, theories and domains that take bodies as a central point of departure, when designing or studying interaction with technologies. This one-day workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners within the CHI community to discuss, map, and unpack emerging tensions and challenges on the topic of body politics for HCI. Interested participants are invited to submit examples from their own research, which, in the workshop, will be used as a point of departure to critically reflect on and expand body-centric methods, theories and domains through the lens of body politics. Workshop outcomes will include charting future directions for body-centric research to address challenges and opportunities of acknowledging that bodies are always political in design research