15792 research outputs found
Sort by
Experiencing Hybrid Spaces A scoping literature review of empirical studies on human experiences in cyber-physical environments
Get PDFWhether we are taking a leisurely stroll through the city or rushing about our daily business, our everyday lives are today informed, mediated, and entertained by digital technology. As a consequence, new spatial arrangements are constituted that have been conceptualised as hybrid spaces. They evolve in connection with mobile devices and ubiquitous Internet access and are characterized by an imbrication of the physical environment and digital technology. Although hybrid spaces permeate our everyday life, there is little empirical research on experiences in hybrid spaces. This paper presents a scoping literature review on experiences in hybrid spaces. Based on a synthesising reading of research evidence from 28 empirical studies, three overarching thematic strands were identified: place, mobility, and social interaction. However, the empirical research field appears nascent still and lacks convergent and consolidating approaches, particularly across disciplines. Nevertheless, while digital technologies have so far been associated with processes of domestication and a diminishing importance of places, mobile devices and especially AR applications can draw people outside and foster spatial meaning-making. Hybrid practices change spatial uses and produce new patterns of urban functions at multiple levels. Moreover, hybridisation challenges fundamental notions of ‘place’, as digital augmentation allows for the coexistence of an infinite number of modifications of a place and can encompass past, present and future representations. While what we gain and lose through this development remains an open question, we provide concrete guidance for future research on what and whom to investigate, as well as how to do so
Rima dress, c.1947: Jewish émigré entrepreneurship and London wholesale couture
No full textConcealed within the V&A’s extensive fashion collection are many stories of Jewish immigrant entrepreneurship, waiting to be told. One exuberant novelty print crepe dress made c 1947,has a particularly complex (and arguably complete) story of Jewish émigré design success, offering a lens through which to consider the role of Jewish men and women in the London fashion industry in the 1940s, from design inspiration to final product (T.505-1985). The dress, designed and produced by wholesale couture firm Rima (established 1939), made from a fabric produced by textile company Ascher (established 1942), with a print designed by Feliks Topolski, is a rare survival, one of only a handful of known examples of wholesale couture produced before the early 1950s.
The 1930s saw an influx of creative, talented Jewish entrepreneurs, designers and makers arrive in London, having been forced to leave their homes owing to Nazi persecution of Jewish people. Whilst many had highly successful businesses in their own countries- from Poland to Austria, Czechoslovakia to Germany, the majority fled their homes with almost nothing, having to effectively start again on arrival in Britain. This can be seen with some of the figures involved in creating the Rima dress.
This paper will tell the interwoven story of the figures involved with the design and manufacture of this dress, ultimately demonstrating the Importance of immigrant networks for the fashion industry and how these Jewish men and women helped to ensure the post-war success of London fashion, internationally
Wayfaring Stranger + in conversation on practice with Larry Achiampong
Get PDFMy new film Wayfaring Stranger (2024, 69mins) was officially premiered at the British Film Institute, at NFT 1, on the 7th December. I did an introduction outlining the project and artist, filmmaker Larry Achiampong and I were in conversation after the screening. We outlined working outside the mainstream filmmaking apparatus, working with marginalised histories and counter-memories. We spoke about collectivity, generosity in practice, and how our works speak to a need for such care, respect, vulnerability and what it means to make from life. We spoke of gendered and racialised landscapes and of making a life, knowing the structural injustices present in all our lives.
I introduced the film as follows: "Wayfaring Stranger was made by and with people - both in front of and behind the camera - who have all had to find their own way in the world, often amidst challenging circumstances, and even against the odds.
All of us have experienced violence in its various forms. For some this has been prolonged.
This was the beginning. How to make a viable life when that seemed far from a given.
How to move beyond language to the thing itself. How to see landscape as both a place and what it conceals - what has happened to it and to those within it.
How to really see, how to make a community, how to choose.
That we are able to make the film - and show it here - is a privilege that has been denied to so many in the spaces of their own lives - those abused, marginalised, exploited, expelled, erased by the interwoven systems we live under.
To be here with you, and to be able to show work made collectively with a wish for an equally collective life, from the human to the ecological, is a very special thing.
I hope you can enter this film without preconceptions and find a space for yourselves in it.
I'd like to give my deepest thanks to everyone who made it with me and especially now to thank the incredible sound designer Chris Watson, whose unique and extraordinary archive holds the amazing richness of the world's natural sounds, including the voices and songs of species that are no longer with us.
Chris and I strived to create a subtle symphony of the world around us.
A world where there are no more genocides, where there are no more people whose lives are cut short by weapons whose production we in this country directly profit from. A world where a living being means more than a dead life is profitable.
And perhaps somewhere in it lies the hope that Arundhati Roy spoke of when she wrote -
'Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.'
I look forward very much to any thoughts you might have
when Larry and I speak after the screening.
It is another great privilege to be able to share a conversation with such a committed artist and deeply compassionate person.
Thank you so much for coming
and I do hope you enjoy Wayfaring Stranger".
ALZ, 7/12/2
Sanja Ivekovic at the VideoArt Festival Locarno. Between Medium and Politics
No full textDuring the 1980s and early 1990s, Sanja Ivekovic was a regular fixture at the VideoArt Festival Locarno (1980–2001, henceforth VAF) in Switzerland. Showing video works done with or without Dalibor Martinis (with whom she collaborated from 1973 to 1992), the presence of Ivekovic’s work at VAF offers not only a snapshot on some aspect of the development of her practice throughout that decade but it also reflexts significant political and social changes occurring in 1980s Yugoslavia as well as the complex relationships between feminism, media and state socialism explored by Ivekovic
Lygia Clark: The I and the You
No full textCuration of Exhibition of pioneering Brazilian artist.
The 'I and the You' marked the first major UK public gallery survey of the pioneering and influential Brazilian artist, Lygia Clark (1920 – 1988, Brazil).
The exhibition focused on Clark’s artistic journey from the mid-1950s to early 1970s, a particularly volatile period in Brazil’s history in which radical modes of artistic practice also emerged. Clark was a central figure in the Brazilian Neoconcrete movement (1959 – 1961). Frustrated by what they felt to be the limitations of ‘Concrete art’, with its emphasis on non-figurative geometric abstraction, Neoconcrete artists pushed for greater experimentation, expression, colour and poetic sensibility in their practices – as well as proposing a shift in how audiences might participate in artworks.
Encompassing paintings, works on paper, a selection of Clark’s renowned ‘Bichos’, as well as other groundbreaking participatory works, The I and the You showed how Clark’s early formal experimentations and growing interest in the philosophy of experience and therapeutic potential of art led to a gradual closure of the gap between the work and the viewer, and ultimately, between art and life
One-Thing-After-Another
No full textThis is an image-led book and is an artwork.
The publisher Shibboleth's introduction is:
In Shibboleth’s Brief but Richly Illustrated Compendiums of Knowledge series, One-Thing-After-Another has the function to show what happens when images are treated as more than representations and less than things.
The volume is a visual abridgement of the Book of Knowledge, an encyclopaedia from the Fifties. The aim was not to gather all the accumulated knowledge of the ages, but those things that were deemed relevant in postwar Britain, arranged so that they could be understood by juveniles.
Today and post-Brexit, Mick Finch reshuffles the visual apparatus of his childhood atlas into a montage that diagnoses something external about a world that no longer is, and something internal to that same world. Images are words are images. The way children speak sound after sound from word to word sentence to sentence shortness of pauses one tone alone side by side. No order of priority between man and reality. No one doing the looking and no one being looked at. No one being thought and no one doing the thinking. It is unclear whether we are meant to be critical, nostalgic or simply curious about what unfolds across the spreads. We are not called to act, but perceive. We are challenged to accept that framing history is removing ourselves from it in order to explain. Rather than seeing the world as it should be, we are invited to face it as it is: as a visual ecology, a liquid system of representations, a fact sequence. One after another. And we are somewhere in there.
Mick Finch is Professor of Visual Art Practice at Central Saint Martins University of the Arts London.
Adrian Rifkin was Professor of Art Writing at Goldsmiths College, London, until recently.
One-Thing-After-Another
A book by Mick Finch
with a text by Adrian Rifkin
And a picture quiz bellyband by Shibboleth
Printed by Nava Press, Milan in 2024
Rotary print, pp. 208, A5
Edition of 500
Holmen Book Cream 65gr (inside)
Fedrigoni Arena Natural 120gr (cover
Planetary Platform Automation
Get PDFIn his planetary design treatise Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969), Buckminster Fuller described “comprehensively commanded automation” as a fundamental principle for a viable “Earth operating system.” “[A]utomation displaces the automatons,” Fuller claimed, positioning automation as a foundational process of biological and technological evolution, a dynamic bio-technical process of encoding and embedding persistent decisions
Future Memory and the Ungrounding Ground
No full textWeir presents work from an ongoing art research project – Pazugoo. This draws on research at the H.A.D.E.S laboratory in Belgium, alongside residency work with Z33.
Weir has been interested in the materiality of nuclear waste, in terms of how its immense half-lives impact on thought in the present, ungrounding the centrality of human experience. Specifically, he has focused on how this ‘ungrounding’ process is not foregrounded in the ‘marker’ traditions of RK&M, which tend to draw on existing sculptural languages and projections of unchanged futures and people. He has also been critical of how the heroic and geographically fixed narrative of the marker as monument excludes those still impacted through toxicity, understood more ecologically through a post-colonial lens.
Against this, he has proposed a speculative model of nuclear waste marker that:
(i) is distributed across multiple ecologically connected sites,
(ii) is rooted in the earth by being buried underground,
(iii) intersects with local myths of ground and flight,
(iv) has an unknown future viewer, so acts as a speculative catalyst for reshaping the imaginary of the present.
The format he develops for this is local group workshops, leading to 3d-printed demons, which are buried as markers of radioactive waste sites. This has developed alongside writing and theoretical research. For this short presentation, Weir gives a brief overview of the project, focusing on where it is now. He claims, through this, that art in its criticality is vital in re-imagining nuclear futures
Time, Horror, and Iconoclasm
Get PDFPaper delivered at the conference ‘Tradition and Innovation in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and in the film The Green Knight’ at the Université de Lorraine at Nancy (France) on the 21-22 November 2024.
Abstract
The original illustrations of SGGK have experienced intermittent academic reappraisal since their dismissal by Fredric Madden in his 1839 publication; this relates to their quality, meaning, and their potential multiple authorship. Those reappraisals stress the importance of the illustrations as not simply decorative, but as critical and interpretive. Prompted by those insights I have been interested in what can be learned from the images that accompany the poem, those of the original codex, but moreover those of subsequent translations. In 2022 Middlesex University funded the website ‘Representing Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ which brings together illustrations from translations of the poem for comparison, including criticism that demonstrates their importance; both as supporting the texts they accompany aesthetically, and in creating emphasis on certain themes from attitudes independent of the translator. The project also enlisted six contemporary artists, asking them to respond to the poem, with a view to extending the visual language and redressing the privation of attention paid to the text from the fine art canon. In addition, there is analysis of the recent film by David Lowery, its tone and symbolism, making the project a fulsome account of the SGGK visual lexicon.
In this paper I will explore the developing visual language, and its tensions around Gawain and what he embodies. I suggest that there is a growing emphasis on landscape features, that are used to represent different registers of temporality, and on horror motifs, both helping to bring the disturbing implications of the poem to modern audiences. The contemporary art responses develop these themes, grappling with subjectivity as it relates to power and status. I suggest two distinct categories—that speak to the legacy of the poem—become apparent, treating Gawain as either a site of development and becoming, or as a construct in need of demolition
The Armoured Self, Un-becoming the Subject: Reading Julia Ducournau’s Titane (2021) Via Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism
Get PDFIn this paper, I explore what Lisa Tickner calls a ‘dissentient position’ in Modernism that assumes dehumanisation as a value of a new and brutal subjectivity and places the machine as a totemic deity. My understanding of this draws from the aesthetic language of Vorticism, particularly representations of women in the work of Wyndham Lewis. Moreover, I argue that this ‘machinic-modernism’ as Hal Foster describes it, which emerged in the early 20th century as a reaction to industrialised modernity, corporatisation, Taylorism, and Fordism, has a powerful and unacknowledged inheritor in the contemporary Palme d'Or winning film Titane (2021) written and directed by the auteur Julia Ducournau. I argue that the figure of Alexia in Titane, portrayed by actress and model Agathe Rousselle, is a celebration of dehumanisation that follows an anti-humanist path – sexually-combative femininity purged to become a hyper-masculine recruit, emerging as a biomechanical self – I claim that, while the modernism of Lewis and the creative intentions of Ducournau may have stemmed from different motivations, their utmost horizon for the subject and society is the same one, the swapping out of the tension of masculine and feminine for a machinic-self defined by ferocity, abjection, and trauma. I will also refer to the text Filibusters in Barbary from 1932 which is a reflective account of travels in North Africa including revealing attitudes of Lewis’s regarding machines which are, in common with the themes of Titane, anthropomorphised and presented as magical, violent, more frightening than monsters, and as having replaced gods. Ducournau and Lewis are reactive to the same social forces and rebarbative to so-called bourgeois conceptions of femininity in favour of a subjectivity that exists in a highly stratified social organisation