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Age Group Differences in Social Media Language Use: Identity Representation via Emojis and Abbreviations
Get PDFThis paper aims to analyse how age groups impact the use of social media language (SL) in online textual conversations, focusing on the type, polarity, and subjectivity of SL to explore identity representation across different age groups. During data collection in 2023, there were 4.76 billion social media users worldwide; hence, understanding the use of SL is essential for analysing how individuals express their emotions and identities online. SL consists of emoticons/emojis, abbreviations, and mixed language in textual conversations. For this study, a qualitative approach was used, with 46 participants from three age groups: 25-34, 35-44, and 45-54 engaging in mock group conversations for one hour using WhatsApp. The participants were separated into six group conversations. The findings show that the older age groups (35-44 and 45-54) prefer to discuss technical or professional topics, whereas the younger age groups (25-34) are more interested in games, food, entertainment, and fun. Furthermore, for the age group 25-34 there is a high usage of emoticons/emojis, whereas the age group 45-54 uses them the least. These findings indicate that age groups have a significant influence on the use of SL and topic preferences in textual conversations, providing insights that will be used to develop a Natural Language Processing (NLP) tool for online identity classification. This study enhances human-computer interaction by investigating how different age groups use SL in digital environments
Brand Activism: Advertising and Ethics of Visibility
No full textThis book critically examines how brands determine the visibility of social issues through their advertising practices, informing the ways we are persuaded to feel, think, and act as consumers and citizens.
Through a critical analysis of brand responses to ongoing geopolitical events, such as the Ukrainian conflict and the war in Gaza, Scalvini demonstrates how commercial objectives drive ethical stances, leading to the prioritization of certain profit-driven narratives and the exclusion of more politicized ones. Drawing on in-depth interviews with post-Millennial consumers across North America, Europe, and Asia, Brand Activism critiques brands’ reluctance to engage with politically sensitive topics, particularly those affecting the Global South, arguing that this avoidance distorts the representation of moral responsibility in advertising. This book examines how ‘ordinary’ consumers—those not strongly aligned with activist consumption—negotiate the idea that they should take moral responsibility for their spending choices. However, it also discusses the rise of a new generation of consumer activists who reject superficial brand gestures and demand accountability for global justice. Case studies from brands such as Nike, Patagonia, Gillette, Dove, and Ben & Jerry’s are explored in detail to unpack the symbolic, rhetorical, and discursive strategies by which present brand activist campaigns are being hollowed out and re-articulated into a moral discourse
King’s Cross-Pollination: art, music, cinema, and activism in a 1980s post-industrial wasteland
No full textFictioning painting: Or imagining an ‘outside’ to art history
Get PDFThis article seeks to explore the relationship between contemporary painting and fictioning practices, examining the implications for historicization, authenticity and authorship. Taking as a starting point the re-appearance of Walter Benjamin in 1986, I will trace the ways in which painting practice and fictioning discourse have intersected, drawing on recent interviews with the authors of these projects and ongoing research into artist novels. I will discuss Albert Oehlen’s 2021 film The Painter, which is set in Oehlen’s studio and documents the struggle to produce an abstract painting, asking why certain clichés are re-staged in fictional portrayals of artistic labour rather than re-imagined? I will develop a discussion of Oehlen’s use of parody by reading this film as a performance to camera, and will explore the ways that Oehlen plays with plausibility through the use of an actor, a semi-improvised script, and modelling the narrative on the historical precedent of Paul McCarthy’s 1995 video Painter. I will offer a case study from my recent practice-based Ph.D. research in which I worked with Bruce McLean to re-enact his 1969 artwork Underwater Watercolour to highlight the relationship of fictioning practices to archival practice and develop an understanding of fictioning as a performative form of historicization. I will situate these examples in relation to recent theory (specifically, David Burrow’s and Simon O’Sullivan’s survey of ‘Fictioning’ practices in art and philosophy and Carrie Lambert-Beaty’s concept of ‘Parafiction’), positioning my research within a broader discussion of a current trend towards fictioning practices in contemporary art
Cuki Spago
No full textA installation for the open studios event, as part of the invitation-only residency at Mahler & LeWitt Studios, Spoleto, Italy, to coincide with CSM Research Sabbatical. The residency was used to begin work on Christian's fourth book and first novel, 'Arlen'. Alongside the writing, Christian also explored the fabric of the Torre Bonomo via the extension of an ongoing series of exercises carried out in his studio, using fragments of frayed string. He presented these in the installation ‘Cuki Spago’ at his Open Studios
Stones, Ergonomics, Eco-Asemics
No full text“The sculptures are the size of fists, and with their polished surfaces and impeccable ergonomic forms, they recall miniature Brâncusi sculptures. If Modernist sculpture was often influenced by the machinery of the factory (and the battlefield), Christian’s sculptures are informed by the prosthetic forms of technological interfaces.”
George Vasey, ‘Bruised Stones: On the Work of Toby Christian’, 2019
Toby Christian is an artist and educator whose practice centres around writing and sculpture. Over the course of sixteen years he has developed an evolving series of direct stone carvings in marble, and during the past six years specifically, a series of works which aim to explore the simultaneous legacies of technological ergonomics and modernist sculptural practices, including the work of Constantin Brâncuşi. Having exhibited these works in solo exhibitions internationally, he has more recently developed a new extension of this series for the exhibition Flash_Looking, at Belmacz, London, 2024.
Christian’s video presentation contextualises the production of the above series of stone carvings from the studio he has established in the converted 1960s garage of his home in Lewisham, South East London. Through this, Christian conveys the technical process of his work whilst both drawing on research into the questionably patriarchal approaches of 1970/80’s ergonomics studies for efficiency in the workplace, and the Eco-Asemic images produced by unknown insect colonies in the marble dust of his studio window.
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"Brâncuşi is one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, hailed by Henry Moore for stripping back sculpture’s centuries-old overgrowth and restoring its shape consciousness. Brâncuşi’s artistic innovations drew the attention of an international network of Modernist peers throughout his career, including in Britain, where his work was first exhibited in 1913.
In more recent decades, historians have reckoned with the complexity of the artist’s work in new ways, teasing out its dynamics of difference and repetition, transience and permanence, abstraction and embodiment. This conference will invite participants to continue this dialogue, taking this plural view of Brâncuşi as a touchstone for questions about the relationship between British sculpture and the international avant-garde.
This conference marks the conclusion of the Henry Moore Foundation’s research season ‘Brâncuşi and Britain’, organised to coincide with the major exhibition of Brâncuşi’s work at Centre Pompidou, Paris in spring 2024. Alex Potts (University of Michigan) will deliver the keynote presentation.
The Brâncuşi and Britain Research Season has been kindly supported by the Romanian Cultural Institute.
Drawing ‘New Maps’ Critical Cartography and Ethnographical Enquiry Through Drawing Practice
Get PDFHow can new maps be created that deconstruct territorial borders and reevaluate drawing as a methodology? This practice-based research brings together ethnography and critical cartography through drawing practice to produce new maps that relate the formation of cultural and social identity. It challenges the conventional map in socio-political spheres, generating opportunities for hidden narratives and communities to be acknowledged. The new map becomes an open platform not only to make existing knowledge visible but also to generate new insights, to reveal political power and, perhaps, to articulate or mobilise emancipatory impulses. This process is a crucial aspect of research as it contributes to new knowledge. To create a new map, the practice of drawing is employed to find the intersection of these two disciplines and bypass the power relationships inherent in apparently objective scientific map-making. Ethnographic interactions in this research have been made into a creative map through drawing practice, rather than recording participants’ faces or voices. This anonymity has enabled participation by people who were reluctant to expose their identities due to their political status. It also helped to thoughtfully manage their informed consent.
This practice-based research examines certain contemporary drawing practices in terms of mapping, which is explored here through engagement with the Joseonjok people in New Malden, London. Joseonjok people living in London differ from other Joseonjok around the world as they are not only displaced from their ‘homeland’ but also have a particular relationship to the people of South and North Korea living in New Malden. As Joseonjok people in New Malden constitute a minority group, who are geographically far from their origin and less visible in their new environment, critical cartography through drawing could open up a space where they can bypass the difficulties of language, both in everyday speech and in official interactions. This project also reflects upon site-specific and ethnographic research relating to Joseonjok people and their environment, considering their socio-economic and political status. The project approaches drawing as a process-led practice, which allows for ways of seeing and understanding that can be incorporated into the practice of critical cartography to collect, creatively represent and reinterpret findings.
Locating this research within an interdisciplinary framework, these ideas are developed from the point of view of the artist and part of the project’s research method is to explore the potential of the ‘ethnographic-artist’.(1) By analysing my drawings as they are made, I address three research questions:
• How can practice-based research enable marginalised people to creatively assert their identity and claim their rightful place in society?
• How can the integration of the idea of critical mapping and drawing as a means of ethnographic mapping be considered methodologically as part of the research process?
• How can the resulting drawings serve as both an ethnographic map and a work of art?
These questions explore the potential of creative drawing practice to connect the disciplines of critical cartography and ethnography, reimagining drawing as a practice that can contribute new knowledge by embodying the theoretical and methodological approaches of both disciplines.
By addressing these research questions, this research makes original contributions to knowledge in three key areas. Firstly, it introduces a new approach to practicebased research by demonstrating how drawing can serve as a primary ethnographic research method. This research positions drawing as both a critical and creative tool, integrating it with critical cartography to challenge conventional boundaries between art and spatial representation. Secondly, it contributes to the field of critical cartography by developing TalkingMap, a participatory and subjective mapping methodology that prioritises migrant narratives over spatial accuracy. In doing so, it critiques the authority of traditional cartographic practices and proposes an alternative, process-based epistemology of space. Thirdly, this research offers a new perspective in subaltern and migration studies by repositioning migrants as active agents in defining their spatial realities. Rather than situating migration solely within policy frameworks, it foregrounds personal geographies and lived experiences, thereby expanding the discourse on identity, place, and belonging.
These contributions provide rethinking of mapping, identity, and space through the practice of drawing, offering new methodologies for both artistic and ethnographic inquiry.
(1)This idea derived from Hal Foster’s essay ‘The Artist as Ethnographer’ (1995)
Review of The Politics of Vibration
No full textThis is a review of Michael Boon's The Politics of Vibration, Music as a Cosmopolitical Practice, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022, published in Popular Music Journal, Cambridge University Press, 43/3, October, 202
Differentiating the Visual Aesthetics of the Sublime and the Beautiful: Selective Effects of Stimulus Size, Height, and Color on Sublimity and Beauty Ratings in Photographs
Get PDFDespite the philosophical literature concerning the sublime and the beautiful, dating back to Burke (1759/2008), there is still limited empirical evidence regarding the visual aesthetics of sublimity and beauty. The present article asks whether the manner in which photographs are presented can alter the perception of the sublimity and beauty ratings of these photographs. In a set of studies, it is reported that the increase of presentation size increases sublimity more than beauty (Study 1) and that this is mainly driven by the effects of visual angle (Study 3). While increasing presentation height affects both sublimity and beauty positively and in similar degrees (Study 1), the presence of color (vs. black and white [monochrome]) is predominantly related to judgments of beauty (Study 2). Brightness and contrast levels affected neither sublimity nor beauty (Study 3). An important methodological point is that all inferential statistics use linear mixed models, which treat both participants and stimuli as random effects. In addition, each participant receives different random subsets of stimuli, increasing the size of the stimulus set. Overall, the analyses incorporate 233 photographs and 245 participants in total, which allows the generalizability of findings. Sublimity and beauty respond differentially to different presentational cues, which demonstrates the importance of simultaneously considering sublimity and beauty in empirical studies on aesthetic judgments
Dreams of Nations and Other Imaginary States
Get PDFIn this paper, writer Max Houghton discusses the dreams of nations. The end of WWII brought new developments in the way photography was used to foster a sense of belonging. The popular magazine industry in the UK and US published stories about 'home' alongside reportage from conflicts and wars farther afield, in Kenya, South Korea and Vietnam. How were British and American self perceptions and ideas of national identity created through the influential narratives of
Picture Post and Life magazines? How are dreams of nations conjured by the image