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Milli svefns og vöku - Tra il sonno e la veglia
No full text“Milli svefns og vöku” is inspired by Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s novel Your Absence is Darkness, a story set in the stark, haunting landscapes of Icelandic fjords. While the novel's narrative serves as a visual foundation, the composition focuses on translating its emotional resonance into music—particularly the sense of suspension, disorientation, and solitude. The composition evokes the feeling of a man who finds himself alone, sitting by a church in an isolated countryside. He is enveloped in the silence and vastness of Iceland’s frozen landscape, unsure of his identity or how he arrived there. The narrative in the composition, much like in the book, unfolds like a mosaic, with memories surfacing in fragments and scenes from the past emerging in a nonlinear journey, as though veiled by the fog of lost time.
The composition unfolds like a memory slipping in and out of focus, with passages that mirror the irregular, cinematic quality of flashbacks. The piece seeks to embody a journey of remembrance and longing. Silence becomes as expressive as sound, and every passage aims to be like a voice calling out into the dark, waiting for an answer that may never come
Soundwave(r)s traversing challenger deep: how sonic objects celebrated uncertainty mourned potentials, lost to unwritten rules and bypassed users' resistance to frameworks of reflection on their relationally
No full textIn this paper we (an educator and a psychotherapist) track our journey so far as we investigate, together and with input from other participants, the potentials of using sonic objects in a creative action method (e.g. Chesner & Zografou, 2014) for exploring relational experience in real time. Our differing conceptual frames rub up against each other, exposing sensitivities and blind spots, inviting us eventually to language what has been uncovered through a feeling process, an ongoing action of evoking and provoking in a shared sonic space. The first time we channelled our voices through guitar and synth pedals we were lost (and found) in the moment, mindful, animated spirits (Hu, Yokota & Horvath, 2020). As time progressed, a feeling-knowing-understanding emerged, sounding out (of) peripheries, meaningful aspects of our relation, encountered ‘in the field’. Far out in the ocean, Challenger Deep tugged, longingly: a willing-ness to risk going further, an intuition that there’s more, down on the ocean floor… and simultaneous resistance to the pull, a matching tension. How to meet that need for mutual reflection in darkness absolute? Sonar sensing shaped surface representations. We listened closely, precisely, yet dreamily from a distance as the sound diffused. Sound-scapes (e)merged beings.
Reflecting later the theme of loss emerged next to unspoken-ness, and perhaps being lost, and ambivalence, and space that is perceptible, and accessible through experience, yet elusive, refusing definition. In the vicinity of these words, feelings resonated. The sonar sensor emitted a low base tone. The words returned us to something we were trying to understand. Ettinger (1995), Irigaray (2017) and Stern (1985) questioned our differentiation. Movement, transitions, Relationscapes (Manning 2012)… through layers of past experience, glimpses of potential frames of reference (be)came together and separated out again as we moved between forms that fitted the needs of the experience(r)s
Metaverse for digital health solutions
Get PDFThe intersection of the Metaverse and digital health represents a growing frontier in healthcare technology, promising innovative approaches to enhance health and well-being through immersive virtual environments. However, there is limited knowledge on how this technology can be used not only to enhance user engagement but also support the sustainable use of Metaverse for health and well-being platforms in Metaverse. This study investigates the transformative potential of the Metaverse in digital health for sustainable use, focusing on its capacity to revolutionise healthcare delivery and improve health and well-being outcomes. The research examines the impact of motivation to use Metaverse, Metaverse user experience and trust in the platforms on user engagement which further translates to the sustainable use of Metaverse. The study also investigates the mediation of self-concept between user engagement and the sustainable use of Metaverse. Moreover, immersion level is also tested for moderation and mediation in this study between motivation to use Metaverse, Metaverse user experience, trust in the platforms and user engagement. The study adopted a mixed methods approach including 15 interviews and 152 online surveys. The findings of the study reveal that the motivation to use the Metaverse and Metaverse user experience do not impact user engagement, however, trust in the platforms in Metaverse significantly impacts the user engagement. Furthermore, our analysis also shows that user engagement leads to the sustainable use of Metaverse for health and well-being platforms. Additionally, self-concept mediates the relationship between user engagement and the sustainable use of Metaverse, however, immersion level acts as a mediator and not a moderator between motivation to use Metaverse, Metaverse user experience, trust in the platforms and user engagement. The findings contribute valuable insights into the development of innovative health solutions within the Metaverse, aiming to advance digital health practices and improve health and well-being outcomes. Moreover, the study underscores the critical role of user trust and engagement in the success of digital health platforms, guiding future research and development efforts in this rapidly evolving field. Limitations of the study are acknowledged, and recommendations for future research directions are proposed to further enrich our understanding of sustainable healthcare use in the Metaverse
Rain
No full textA series of unique drawings using a robot to draw on paper.
Each drawing is created with an algorithm, thousands of streaks of rain in 2 angles are drawn with 2 archival pigment pens, each angle uses a different randomised thickness of pen.
The drawing observes Hiroshige's woodcut style of creating rain, where 2 directions of rain gives the illusion of complexity and naturalness. In this series of drawings a computer controlled plotter, a robotic arm, moves a pen across the page.
Each time a drawing is made the algorithm will create new rain, the only human interaction is the creation of the code, allowing the drawing to start and changing the pens
Institutions in the Age of Precarity: Technologies, Materials and Imagination
No full textIn the last decade, workers in art and academia have been at the forefront of escalating crises. How is it possible not only to resist these crises, but to overturn them, reanimating institutions from within?
UK-based designer and course leader at the University of the Arts London Alexandra Antonopoulou and Associate Professor at the Film and Media Department of Queen’s University and independent curator Gabriel Menotti draw from their personal experiences and share two situated perspectives on the matter.
One comes from a two-year study that analyses creative practices and material manifestations created within the cracks of Higher Education institutions as an attempt to understand precarity, cope with its contradictions, and reclaim creativity. Another, from a platform that attempted to expand public agency over museal infrastructure and collections by using mixed-reality technologies. Combined, these perspectives offer strategies on how to promote the (re)birth of creativity within institutional spaces, making use of their shortcomings as opportunities for imagination
The role of arts-based methods in supporting safe and participatory research addressing sexual violence with young people
Get PDFBackground:
The use of participatory visual methods in humanities, health, education and social science research to study ‘sensitive’ subject matter with children and young people is growing. Such approaches have been widely – though sometimes uncritically – celebrated for contributing to safe data elicitation, promoting participant influence and strengthening research dissemination and impact. Some authors have pointed to their political contributions – challenging the traditional politics of representation and fostering critical consciousness and thinking.
Methods:
This article explores these claims, reflecting on a study using creative and participatory methods to explore the concept of ‘resistance’ among young people affected by sexual violence. It begins by outlining the background, rationale and use of creative methods in the project, moving from plans to utilise ‘Photovoice’ methods to a more diverse and responsive set of creative methods.
Findings:
The paper presents evidence for the contribution of such methods to creating safety and fostering participation while developing new conceptual thinking among researchers and participants.
Conclusion:
In this project, the success of creative methods is rooted in the dynamics of what we term spaciousness and playfulness which support dialogical practice. These dynamics are critical to enabling a safe participatory culture that bridges divides between stakeholders of different status, identity and ownership
Curatorial Interruption: Decision-making bias and an ethics of interpretation when analysing worn fashion objects
No full textLecture discussing the five sources informing curatorial bias I identified in my doctoral research
Co-designing social change – Reviewing some methods and tools
Get PDFThis short paper came about when engaging with Cecilia Casas, who asked us and Dr Yanki Lee to share co-design methods and tools at the ESDA (Escuela Superior de Diseño de Aragón) DESIS Social Design Days III (Zaragoza, March 2024). We were asked to discuss the involvement of participants in equitable co-creation and reflect on how best to manage the relationship between what Manzini (2015) calls ‘expert designers’ (those who are design trained) and what he calls ‘diffuse designers’ (those who are not trained in design yet play a crucial role in delivering democratic design solutions).
Manzini (2015) suggests designers should be ‘facilitators’, ‘mediators’ and ‘catalysts’ in the context of design for social innovation, but his work also recognizes that ‘context is everything’. Drawing on our experience of social innovation projects with prisoners (Gamman & Caulfield, 2023) and refugees (Morgado and Mazzarella, 2024), we were aware that not all approaches to co-design can be automatically transferable to different political and geographic landscapes. We found it tricky to translate our UK-based approach for a workshop in a Spanish context, but a helpful dialogue developed with colleagues from ESDA
Repositioning Queer Modernism: Men’s Fashion Photography and the Production of New Gay Subjectivities
No full textThe production of men’s fashion photography is given a conceptual and practical framework in this thesis, establishing it as a vehicle for queer political ideas. In order to do this, it establishes connections between the historical and cultural contexts, themes and techniques of modernist gay figurative art and shows how these are used by contemporary artists and fashion photographers (such as Steven Klein, Alasdair McLellan and Willy Vanderperre) to shape and influence queer narratives of gay self and subjectivity. The study takes into account how style and fashion, when combined with class-based conceptions of masculinity, further express social identity and its performance as a commodity. The thesis focuses on several process-driven ethical issues associated to the creative production of photographic artwork in the context of cultural institutions such as art and fashion in order to contextualise this work and clarify the project’s photography-based technique. It puts together a selection of photos and related essays that emphasise diversity and identity politics that were developed during a career spanning eighteen years. In order to grasp and convey the researchcreation aspects of my practice, the overall study articulates my ongoing engagement with the idea of art making as a means of enabling social awareness through my work in the figurative arts across three photographic genres: documentary, portrait and fashion. The thesis offers fresh perspective on the sexual politics of masculinity in the domains of photographic studies and masculinity studies. It makes a case for the significance of approach in relation to modern and current figurative gay art. The thesis examines contemporary men’s fashion photography through discourse analysis, portraying it as an evolving area of research. It makes recommendations for how modern men’s fashion photography may be conceptualised as a radical new political genre of photography and activated as a form of social critique
