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Reflection in Creativity Support Tool Interaction: Characterisations for AI-based Music Composition
Get PDFCreativity Support Tool (CST) evaluations in Human-Computer Interaction predominantly apply mixed-methods to assess user engagement. For example, CST evaluations include questionnaires based on the theory of flow: an optimal state where people feel in control and lose self-awareness. Reflection is also crucial in CST interaction. However, reflection is marked by ambiguity and self-awareness, which contrasts with engagement. Few CST evaluations address reflection, and even fewer use reflection questionnaires in systematic mixed-methods evaluations. This thesis challenges the dominance of engagement-based evaluation in CSTs. It argues that a systematic evaluation of reflection in CST interaction is needed to characterise and support the user’s creative process.
The thesis thus develops the Reflection in Creative Experience (RiCE) questionnaire to systematically evaluate reflection in CST interaction. RiCE is applied across user studies in the case study domain of composing music with Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC). The domain represents the state-of-the-art in CST development and provides a rich and specific context for characterising reflection. The focus is on generative AI: models built from datasets that produce new data with similar properties.
A user study with RiCE characterised reflection in artist-researchers’ use of different AI tools; they reflected on their process when curating AIGC in realtime, and reflected on themselves when organising their curated AIGC. A new AI-based musical CST for reflection was also evaluated, characterising reflection’s interplay with moments of focused engagement; during focus, reflection occurs when users are uninterrupted and learn from AIGC.
The new knowledge contributions are the RiCE questionnaire and novel characterisations of reflection in AI-based music composition. RiCE enables the systematic assessment of reflection in different CSTs and study conditionsan advance on existing engagement-focused tools. The new characterisations of reflection provide value to AI-based musical CST users by showing how to invoke different types of reflection in their practice
Sittings: The Role of the Stylist in American Fashion Photography
No full textThis presentation traces back from the role of the stylist, which became popularised in conjunction with the emergence of British ‘style’ publishing in the 1980s and with a particularly London-centric form of style culture, to explore the origins of its American predecessors. It compares the histories and hierarchies of the sittings editor and studio stylist's roles. Drawing from oral history accounts of American stylists and fashion editors, and archival research conducted in the New York Public Library and Fashion Institute of Technology, it discusses the working practices of these intermediary roles in the commercial and editorial photography of the mid twentieth century. While British stylists became recognised for their subcultural capital and unconventional artistry, American stylists had been employed to ensure that fashions were presented in a way that aligned with brand identity and mass consumer tastes
The Missing Case of C. Winifred Harley
No full textHow might writing practices be diversified to address historical silences and reimagine lost interiors? My proposal addresses this question in response to the ‘Imagining the unseen’ theme. To do this, I will present an extract of my research on the architecture of progressive education at Dartington Hall School in Devon, England (1926-87). The internationally celebrated co-educational boarding school initially boasted some of the most modern and specialised educational architecture in the country. Until now, however, historians have not focused on its designed environments, many of which are lost or forgotten.
I will share the story of C. Winifred Harley, a pioneering but overlooked early years educator who was employed by Dartington to advise on the design of its first purpose-built educational facility. To restore Harley’s agency in the design process – as well as to understand the interiors – I offer a creative, layered writing approach which places the marginalised voices of neglected staff or forgotten students alongside the traditionally more dominant ones of headmaster or architect. The method, drawn from site-writing practices and archival research, is a response to Dartington’s own innovations in the field of performance writing and explores an embodied relationship with place and space.
Through the work, I argue that polyvocal forms of writing are a vital mechanism for generating more diverse and holistic understandings of interiors and the communities that use them. On one hand, a greater breadth of academic writing styles creates opportunities for readers to engage with texts who may otherwise be shut out. On the other, the approach reflects the progressive desire to develop the whole learner through interactive and expressive forms of education. The approach has important implications for making built environment practices more inclusive by prompting designers and policymakers to recentre marginalised voices and foster multiple ways of knowing
Thinking with Water in Palestine
Get PDFThis article finds in Palestine’s ancestral water cultures a source of life-affirming resistance against the ecocide in Gaza
New Treatment
No full textAs with some of my other work, in the case of New Treatment (see above), there’s a non-binary simultaneity of object and body, 2D thing and 3D thing, live thing and inanimate thing, however in this case the machine-eye of the camera-viewer-operator within this work and the clothing that this eye is examining don’t stand apart as subject and object but become intra-actively entangled, with these subject-object positions being more explicitly related to how a ‘worker’ might be perceived in certain situations.
The work involves specific modes of looking and behaving that take cues from automated, AI, and machinic processes. Intertwining mechanical precision and tactile intimacy, the automated movement of the camera scans pieces of used medical workwear, slowly following joins, stiches and edges along pre-programmed paths. The camera lens, and therefore also the viewer, feel very close to the objects that are being observed. If the lens was an eye, it would almost skim the surface of the material, and so if the clothing had a body in it (which it has done, and normally does), this would be quite an intimate sort of contact – you’d sense body heat, breath, and scent, and slight movements.
In part echoing the both the sophisticated medical machinery that belongs to this context, and the surgeon’s daily activity, it’s a meticulous and systematic type of viewing that’s seamless and microscopic – something that a human eye can’t quite manage, and yet in this work human subject and technological apparatus aren’t clearly distinct from one-another. The camera’s way of seeing might be detached, automated, at the same time as being generative and performative, therefore both active and reactive rather than simply one or the other. The close-up scrutiny of the body-clothing is something like an examination, but also like a caress. Can a machine look at, or examine a body, or an object, in a tender, empathetic or compassionate way?
The originality of the work lies in its concern with a mode of looking, examining, performing, and working that incorporates the dispassionate gaze and systematic movement of artificial intelligence alongside a form of tenderness and sensitivity that we would hope is more readily associated with human or humane characteristics.
This work continues an interest in work/labour as a aspect of human activity that simultaneously defines, deforms, valorises, and produces subjects or selves as much as it generates objects, commodities and services
Red Lake / Black Mine: Affective Bodies and Material Complicity in Sound Art Practice
Get PDFThis practice-research operates at the intersection of field recording, electroacoustic composition and sound art. It investigates how material—often considered inert—possesses agency, drawing the body of the artist to other affective bodies (sounds, objects, and actions) that exert influence on the creative process.
The key methods include exploring the potential sound of objects in the field and investigating the capacity of sound to influence other materials. For example, the sonic properties of field recordings (onsets, partials, noisiness, centroid, etc.) are used to process sounds, images, and text from the same sites.
The methodology is informed by the practice-research ideas of Nelson (2013) and Wesseling (2016), with a particular focus on iterative discovery and experience. The work emerged through cycles of making, reflecting, and remaking, often guided by the resistances and affordances of material. An interest in the recursive influence of material is inspired by Taussig (2011) and also Lange-Berndt’s description of materials as “wilful actors and agents within artistic processes” (2015: 18). Drawing from the new materialist ideas of Bennett (2010) and Massumi (2011), the research has significant implications for authorship; positioning material as a complicit agent, acting on the artist from the moment of encounter and shaping every phase of the work’s development.
The multidisciplinary thesis is informed by productive collisions with archaeology, anthropology, poetry, land art, and music computing, pushing the boundaries of sound practice and exploring sound in relation to other disciplines, media and sensory registers. The multimodal practice portfolio, comprising sound and video pieces and a printed book of text and images, contributes to a growing body of work dedicated to expanding field recording practice as well as a pluralistic set of concepts and methods that situate sound practice within a wider context
Helsinki’s urban tableaux: Electrical distribution cabinets as street message boards
Get PDFElectrical distribution cabinets are a regular feature on the streets of Helsinki. The surfaces of these boxes are often decorated with stickers, graffiti, event posters and art works which compete for attention and offer clues to a plurality of discourses that signify much about the contemporary life of the city. This article discusses the significance of these cabinets in relation to a series of paintings made for the research project ‘Urban Atlas Helsinki’ during the author’s Fellowship at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (2022–23). The importance of painting as a research method is emphasized due to the visual nature of the subject matter. Through a close reading of a particular cabinet, insights are offered as to the nature of the discourses contained, and what they signify about Helsinki as a contemporary urban culture
Textures of Memory Rewoven
Get PDFIn keeping with Dinh Q Lê’s methodology and as an homage to him, my presentation will proceed as a form of weaving. My point of departure is his The Texture of Memory (2001). This series of works addresses the phenomenon of ‘hysterical blindness’ among Cambodian refugees resulting in images that can be touched. In shifting away from Western psychiatric categorisation of this loss of sight, I aim to weave into Lê’s conceptual loom not only vision and touch but also a sonic dimension, as explored by Buddhist scholar Trent Walker in his study of Khmer Dharma song performances, which provide 'access [to] means of healing and restoring vision' beyond the frameworks of Western epistemologies
Writing at the limits of reason: ¿Por qué es tan malditamente difícil escribir? Es porque nunca fuimos destinados a ser escritos, sino a bailar
No full textWriting at the limits of language
Creative interventions, non-linearity, more-than-rationality and epistemic restorative justice require creation, creativity, uncertainty, and freedom. My/Our work dwells in the uncertain, unsettles text and the textures of language.
Queering the boundaries of prose and the poetic, myOur overall project is one that undermines academic practices of writing and expands/subverts them. This type of work is there to create a conceptual and intellectual space and medium that others, (fellow voices from the epistemic outskirts,) can use the toolbox and arguments and methods I propose to emancipate obsolete forms of rigour and form and assert their own new emerging practices of rigorous queer writing.
Poetry, is not a textual practice; poetry emerges when one is confronted with the boundaries of reason. It is not irrational; it is an imperative consequence and necessity. What is irrational however is to expect those who do not fit the mould to survive/thrive in a[n] medium/IN/stitution that is - restricting/ive at best - . Poetry is not a textual practice; it is a practice of asserting one’s right to life, love and living, in the vicinity of the liminal. Queer writing, as I have witnessed it, and at its most powerful refuses to become the battleground of these anxieties,
writing of queer resistance asserts its ways of knowing and fosters queer live, nurtures compassion, slowness, empathy and surgical objectivity; just not the type of objectivity that they expect
Queering Realities: Design Workflows and Interfaces for a more-than-human virtual Fashion Production
Get PDFThis paper discusses virtual fashion norms through the lens of queer ecology, a theoretical framework recognizing human diversity and proposing nuanced ways of being, loving, and expressing (Muir, 2022). As artists and designers currently explore expansions of the human body and meander the fine line between creature and avatar, they intentionally or unintentionally are moving beyond binary thought patterns, dissolving normative human representation in virtual realms. Through research-based practice, the paper situates professional methods and techniques of designing bodies and fashion for the experience age and highlights opportunities and challenges that arise from working in virtual realities through a comparison with the multimodal and tactile origins of fashion. As a set of parameters different from common fashion making workflows arises, the paper will in a first step convey observations, learnings and performance-studies from a workshop series titled ‘Queering Reality’, bringing together XR designers, staff and students. It then will go on to draw attention to the ‘toolaesthetic’ (Surman, 2024) inherent to the use of certain software and platforms of virtual production and its homogenising characteristics. Although often classed fundamentally different to the traditional fashion experience, the bridging and knowledge of both worlds is demanded from practitioners in any fashion discipline today, bringing about the question of specialism and skilled production and the scrutiny needed to craft fashion experiences that consider the philosophical and technical context of both worlds. By giving insight into the production, development and planning of a fashion experience with focus on audience interaction and participation, the paper will contribute to the understanding and value of developing and exhibiting fashion in a digitally expanded and enhanced format and examine how cultural meaning is crafted through new technologies, shared with and made accessible to audiences