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Umwelt building in creative education: exploring interdisciplinary pedagogies in the module AcrossRCA
Get PDFThe article presents reflections on how a range of concepts and postulates from biosemiotics, generative semiotics, and semiotics of culture can be reunited in the production and implementation of pedagogical practices. Written around the case study of an interdisciplinary module, AcrossRCA, the article describes the use of notions such as Umwelt, semiosphere, the generative trajectory, and criteria for the selection of the corpus as tools to support the dialogue between cultures, languages, disciplines, and professional practices. The sections outline the author’s previous work utilizing semiotics as a pedagogical tool in teaching theoretical subjects in UK creative higher education, and the expansion of the model to accommodate the teaching for AcrossRCA. One of the key insights from the case study relates to the role of the pedagogue and educator as a facilitator of translations, extrapolating the concept from linguistic translations to the translation of cultural practices, ideological positions, and professional and epistemological postulates. The experiment responds to the argument of integrating paradigms within semiotic theories, searching for points of dialogue between the Anglo-Saxon, French, and Russian–Estonian paradigms, in dialogue with critical pedagogy and writings from philosophy, anthropology, and sociology which support the argument for holistic practices across disciplines
FAST UK / Future Art School Trends: Models and Methods of future thinking through participatory art and design pedagogy
Get PDFThe future of art and design education cannot be predicted, but it can be shaped by joining forces across/beyond borders (disciplinary, institutional, geographical) to reconfigure and reimagine hierarchies of knowledge. Drawing on the Learning Platform of ELIA: FAST45 (Futures Art School Trends 2045), FAST UK is conceived of as a means of anticipating and shaping our collective futures by utilising the inherently imaginative, intellectual and creative resources nurtured in UK art schools at a local, regional, and national scale. FAST: UK is an emergent nexus of art and design co-researchers comprising educators, students, and third-sector partners. This workshop applies Inayatullah’s (2008) Futures Triangle, and Voros’ (2017) Futures Cone to produce a collaborative rapid publication responding to key future issues raised by participants. Printed at NTU during the symposium, it will serve as a statement of intent and a call to action. As Breton argued, ‘One publishes to find comrades!
Visual Pleasure & Neural Cinema: How can cinematic myths in AI video systems be identified, measured, and navigated?
Get PDFThis research investigates methods to identify, quantify, and creatively navigate the cinematic myths embedded in generative AI video systems. It is premised on the hypothesis that cinematic iconography, mythologies, and visual tropes—particularly those associated with heteronormative romance, desire, and pleasure—are encoded within AI video models. This hypothesis arises from the critical analysis of cinema as a site of ideological reproduction and the study of bias in AI systems. However, a fundamental challenge emerges: unlike traditional media, AI models lack a stable "text" for analysis, rendering established methods of close reading insufficient. This paper proposes a hybrid methodological framework to address this challenge. By adapting techniques from AI bias detection, such as prompt probing and latent space analysis, for the unique temporal and dynamic nature of video, we aim to make the model itself the object of study. The goal is to develop a framework for diagnosing cultural normativity in AI video systems, while simultaneously empowering artists to transcend their homogenizing limitations and forge new aesthetic possibilities
Strategic Planning and Implementation
No full textAfter studying this chapter, you should be able to understand:
- the meaning of strategic planning and its importance to organisations
- the implications of forces in the competitive environment at the macro and micro level
- the choices and decisions available to help a fashion organisation achieve and retain competitive advantag
A Feral Plot: Making Sculpture and Other Strategies for Survival
Get PDFCollaborative publication exploring some of the conflicted challenges and dilemmas of making sculpture during the climate crisis. Across the format of a 2-sided, foldout blueprint map, Jackson and Locke create conversation and image-based intervention in response to historical and current maps of Camberwell Space, within Camberwell College of Arts. The publication was made in the lead up to Locke's residency of the same name at Camberwell Space, May-September 2025
Screening degli IDE europei e investimenti green cinesi in UE
Get PDFChinese FDI growth in Europe has stirred economic and geopolitical worries. To harmonise oversight, the EU enacted Regulation 2019/452, creating common screening rules. Yet FDI can enhance competitiveness, jobs and innovation, and China, front-runner in green tech, may drive Europe’s green transition. This paper dissects the EU Regulation, its roll-out and likely upgrades, and offers an analysis of Chinese green-sector FDI trends across Europe, showing trend shifts from 2019 to 2024
Spatiotemporal unfixing, image-flow & palinode in photography of the Ukraine war
No full textRussia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has been conveyed to global audiences via a complex range of image practices. This has included digital content that disturbs the traditionally monocular, stilled and privileged position of the ‘war photographer’. This is a theoretical discussion of the functions of social media in destabilising the established temporal characteristics of war photography, focusing on two examples from the work of photojournalist Lynsey Addario in her coverage of the war in Ukraine. It includes a discussion of Instagram’s ‘Stories’ function, in which photography’s ‘fixing’ and ‘capturing’ of war are challenged by means of deliberate, in-built ephemerality. The concept of the palinode – a change of mind or position – is used to further conceptualise war photography’s new and uncharted networks of digital proliferation, potentially representing a kind of unfixing of the atrocity image within what Jay Prosser (2012) has called ‘image-flows’, and making it possible for the limits of photojournalism’s technical and ideological stillness – its fixity – to be challenged
Barbados to Brazil: Dress, Respectability and Domestic Migrant Labour
No full textIn 1910, on the cusp of the rubber fever that gripped South America, New York photographer Dana Bertran Merrill was hired to document the transnational construction of the Madeira-Mamoré railroad, built deep in the Brazilian Amazon. The project became memorialised in the U.S. & Brazilian press as ‘the Devil’s Railroad’, due to the shocking death toll of its exceptionally diverse workforce who had travelled to Brazil from over 52 nations including Britain, Germany, China, Greece, India, the Caribbean, Portugal, and Japan. Merrill was assigned under the premise that he must capture the speed and progress of this imperial project of US capitalist expansion and exploitation of South America. He documented the North American administrative class, Indigenous peoples, Brazilian civil engineers, local rubber tappers, and workers of the Global Majority that included Black Caribbean women who laboured in the hot and humid Steam Laundry on site. These women were responsible for the heavy and repetitive standing labour of washing, starching and ironing clothes and linen for the transnational frontier society that sprang up around the construction of the Madeira-Mamoré railroad, yet scant attention has been given to them in existing historical sources.
Black Brazilian feminist scholar Lélia Gonzalez provides a critical framework to speculate on the diasporic experiences of these anonymous migrant women through the lens of fashion, reorientating our understanding of Merrill’s archive from the vantage point of Caribbean women on the railroad. Gonzalez (1935-1994), the daughter of an Indigenous domestic worker and a black railroad worker, provides a radically different point of departure to move beyond an understanding of how black female labour was devalued under colonial modernity, to recognise them as active subjects involved in processes of resistance, accommodation and reinterpretation through dress. Reading fashion into Merrill’s photographs, as this paper underlines, yields insights into the erasures that have shaped fashion’s histories in Latin America at their intersection with commodity frontiers
A Tale of Two Conceptual Tools: Analysing leverage point tools in relation to a water utility’s circular economy transition
Get PDF‘Design for Transitions’ (DfT) is a nascent and rapidly expanding field that intersects with systems and transitions theories and practices in order to address the “wicked systems” intrinsic to the ‘polycrisis’. We align with DfT and ‘systemic design’ calls to further integrate and deepen related approaches at the nexus of multiple disciplines. More specifically, we aim here to integrate and deepen: firstly, conceptualizations of ‘leverage points’ that overlap/cross-cut DfT and systemic design, and; secondly, the implications of such conceptualizations in relation to practice (e.g. a retrospective case of a regional Australian water utility’s circular economy transition). Taking as one starting point Meadows’s ‘leverage points’ framework, core to several design and systems approaches, we position another approach and model from Zivkovic. Through three analysis processes, we compare the conceptual tools then apply each to analyse the case. Our analysis reveals how each tool surfaces different system and intervention logics, and opportunities for enhancing a systems design approach with respect to the transition in focus. On the basis of our analysis, we discuss some benefits and limits of the two tools, which can contribute to theoretically and practically deepening DfT and systemic design. We highlight the possibility for future work in integrating the two tools together, potentially enabling a multi-dimensional understanding of system components, behaviours, underlying logics, relational fabrics within and outside of the system, and enhanced capacity for change
Relational records: Exploring historical prosperity fashion within business history
No full textThe profit-centric mentality within much of the global fashion industry causes great harm to societies, environments, and international economies. This focus has come under stark criticism from academia, industry, and consumers who call for broader, more inclusive definitions of success. These should consider people, places, interconnections, and relationships, alongside financial gain. This paper explores how our engagement with fashion’s future can be expanded by looking into its past. This backwards gaze employing a ‘sustainable prosperity’ approach can provide both context and examples for current and future industry application. Focusing on fashion businesses established prior to the rise of fast fashion, we indicate the value of non-traditional sources and viewing business success from a more holistic perspective. We ask how ‘prosperity’ might be defined for a more diverse range of fashion firms. Utilising examples from the 19th and 20th centuries, we suggest that the boundaries of business history of fashion methodologies and sources should be extended. These should account for social, environmental, and collective as well as economic and technological success. If we wish fashion to extend the concept of prosperity, this approach should also be applied within historical contexts as well