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Integrative Reflections On Social, Local, Biobased & Circular Clothing: Perspectives From Sustainable Textile Stakeholders From The Herewear Project
Get PDFThis paper explores the integration of social innovation within the circular and biobased textile industry, focusing on the HEREWEAR project—funded by the European Union - aimed at creating a sustainable market for locally-produced circular textiles. The study addresses the gap between the technical and logistical advancements in sustainable fashion and the often-overlooked social dimension. Through interviews with project partners, including researchers, social entrepreneurs, and industry practitioners, the paper investigates their perceptions of sustainability, localization, and social enterprise. The findings reveal diverse views on what constitutes sustainable and socially responsible textiles, highlighting the need for a more cohesive understanding and collaboration among stakeholders. Key themes include the progress and challenges of localizing textile production, the complex social and environmental benefits of such initiatives, and the potential for social enterprises to drive systemic change. The study underscores the importance of integrating human and social factors alongside technological advancements to achieve more holistic sustainability outcomes for the fashion industry
Story x Story #171: Rules of the Automated Road (AI & Creative Industries)
No full textInvited to a Mayamada 'Story X Story' podcast to discuss the impact AI is having on creative industries and the students studying today, with hopes of entering those industries tomorrow. Delving into the recent rapid advancements in AI technology and how these tools are impacting the way professionals work.
We also took a view from an educational perspective and considered how young people will need to adapt and change the skills they develop to thrive in an increasingly automated world
A Method with Plasticity: A Conversation with Sojung Jun
Get PDFIn this conversation with Afterall editors Nav Haq and Adeena Mey, Sojung Jun reflects on her practice, which traverses film, sound, sculpture, and installation to explore questions of social and technological acceleration, transcultural movements and hybridity, rhythm and temporality. From her recent work Syncope (2023) to earlier projects engaging with diasporic memory and the legacies of East Asian modernity, Jun unpacks how ‘plasticity’ functions as both method and metaphor. She reflects on topics including colonial infrastructures, speculative fabulation, the sonic dimensions of time, and the poetic fragments of artists like Kim Hyesoon, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Yi Sang
Assembling UK-India Relations through the Cultural and Creative Industries
Get PDFCulture and the creative economy reflect inherently ideological interpretations and meanings when embedded within policy agendas. We situate culture and the creative economy within contemporary UK–India relations by specifically charting the rise of the CCIs as a policy agenda. Utilising the notion of assembling futures (Harrison 2015. “Beyond ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ heritage: Toward an ontological politics of heritage in the age of the Anthropocene.” Heritage and Society 8 (1): 24–42. doi:10.1179/2159032X15Z.00000000036), we argue that the rise of CCIs reflects wider currents and processes of marketisation and neoliberalism alongside more hard power strategies pertaining to the uses of culture within areas of trade, security and defence by respective UK and Indian governments. By analysing the 2030 Roadmap for UK–India Future Relations, we highlight how culture and creativity have been hardwired into the construction of a narrative for strategic UK–India relations precisely as definitional, regulatory, trade and policy terms of the CCIs are being assembled
Why Do I Keep Crying?
Get PDFThis article explores how my performance videos Googling Things in Hell 1 (Tammy) & 2 (Daniel) (2021) capture the contradictory nature of emotional performances in surveillance capitalism and convey them to the viewer. When we perform emotions online through social media posts and comments, or as in these videos, searching for content on Google, personalized content isolates us by using our emotions as data to provide or sell us what the algorithm thinks we want. But the generic nature of our search results shows that our feelings are never truly our own and are always structurally determined by capitalism.
Following Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank's reading of the mid-century psychologist Silvan Tomkins, the article presents a ‘weak theory' of the emotions under investigation by staying close to the surface of the emotional performances captured in the videos. But, by thinking through the aesthetic and form of the screen image, and the textured feel of the activity taking place on screen, the article reveals the ‘strong' theory of emotions deployed by Google Search, which aims at profiting from those emotional performances by interpreting them as potential requests for information about products or services provided by Google’s advertising clients.
This reductive way of interpreting emotions is contrasted by the videos' interest in the specificity of the online performances of emotion captured on-screen. The article concludes by suggesting that these performances of emotion are necessarily interested in the conditions of their own possibility. Using ideas by the artist Andrea Buttner and the affect theorist Lauren Berlant, the article claims that my videos' maintenance of interest in their on-screen performances of emotion might help a viewer acknowledge, understand and reflect on the political conditions in which they take place
Immersive visual music: how contemporary visual music practices have evolved and how immersive technologies can be employed to compose visual music works
No full textThis thesis explores contemporary visual music and its evolution. It addresses recent trends and explores audio-visual relationships, practices, and aesthetics. Visual music has a long tradition of negating representational elements in relation to sound, image, and space, to the degree that the term is often used interchangeably with abstract animation and absolute film. In recent years, immersive experiences have become more prevalent as an aesthetic tendency in art practices and media. This shift towards representation, reality, interactivity, simulation, and immersion has often been directed by new and available technologies. The research presented here investigates how immersive technologies can be employed effectively to compose visual music artwork and explores whether the shift to immersive technologies that seem to naturally emphasise representation is likely to raise a challenge regarding the traditional abstraction of visual music. This study consists of both practice and qualitative research. The literature and contemporary practice review investigate visual music's evolution and current field by discussing key theories and practices. This investigation includes identifying image and sound-making techniques, technologies and media that can be experimented with in the immersive visual music practice. Supplementary interviews conducted with experts in the field of visual music provided important insights into the process, tools and methodologies used in contemporary visual music. The data extracted from these interviews and their analysis played a significant role in the creation of a new framework of visual music classifications, which is part of my contribution to the field. The insights, when compared with the secondary research, identified gaps or less explored areas in the visual music practice and guided the direction of my visual music practice submitted for this thesis. This practice involves experimenting with immersive technologies and representational aesthetics. A series of experiments were conducted to explore different technologies and practices identified in the research on producing immersive visual music. By observing and comparing the experiments, several principles of effective practice were proposed. A final piece incorporating these principles was produced to demonstrate how immersive technologies can be effectively employed in creating immersive visual music
Social Infrastructure as Normatively Contested: Can Cultural Value Help?
Get PDFSocial infrastructure – defined by its promotion of “sociability” and support for “meaningful relationships” – has proliferated public policy discourse in the UK. The underpinning aspiration is to attract investment to deliver on multiple policy agendas. When approached this way, social infrastructure becomes a policy-making tool valued for its effectiveness in achieving goals such as reducing regional disparities and strengthening communities. One issue with this, we argue, is the need to formalize and idealize the concept of social infrastructure. This often obscures that social infrastructures are normatively contested, with different user groups having different norms and agendas. In this paper we ask how the fragmentation reflecting the real state of most communities and the fact that the forms of sociability and relationality promoted are always selective in some sense - can be factored into the policymaking anchored in the idea of social infrastructure. We argue that Social Value approaches used in policymaking should be supplemented with cultural value interventions which can ensure that different normative orientations are represented in the relevant decision-making processes
Fashion's Swiss army knife: Making your digital assets work harder
Get PDFIf Fashion is committed to realising the extended potential of digital assets, the industry needs a clearer map of where the potential lives and a better taxonomy to talk about it. We offer just that in our article for The Interline's DPC Report, 2024
Pockets of Love
Get PDF‘The Love Pockets’ Project
Conversations in making & courage.
Dzaleka Arts Lab (DAL) https://dzalekaartslab.org was formed by the participants of the ‘VITAL Signs’ workshops delivered since 2022.https://www.sustainable-fashion.com/vital-signs. Together we collaborate twice yearly in person in Dzaleka Refugee Camp, Malawi https://www.dzaleka.com/p/dzaleka-refugee-camp.html and throughout the year over WhatsApp groups. This collaborative practice connects and integrates research, KE and the curriculum.
This piece by DAL was created collectively in response to their chosen theme of ‘Home’.
The ‘Pockets of Love’ https://dzalekaartslab.org/pockets-of-love is in practice, a work of resilience and innovation in the form of a creative response to a local scam the refugee team encountered when seeking second-hand clothes to co design and make diverse new pieces as an output of the Lab. They expected to receive enough material to make many artefacts; the small usable amount meant the group had to reimagine what to do. The pockets were the only plentiful parts available, so many weeks of cutting and sewing began.
Knowing that their works would be brought back to the UK, the pockets also suggested a novel way to communicate with others. Within each one is a secret message from each refugee maker to the students back at London College of Fashion, who will, in turn, respond in kind with their own design brief delivered through stitch, print, weave, or a digital response.
The weight and size of the finished piece also suggested it as a unique blanket, intended for healing trauma and the continuance of surprise conversations to inspire research, KE and people across continents; those makers from very different cultures and life circumstances who may otherwise never meet.
The project is now a part of a DAL website, created by our film making collaborator, David Betteridge in November 2024. The site shares all outputs to date and is linked to an arts sales platform (ZORA), thus also creating a new online opportunity for livelihood creation for the group.
Since the creation of the physical piece AI has been used to generate new digital visualisations, trained through the story and images of “Pockets of love”, and these will be added to the above sales platform.
Funds raised through a DAO (Decentralized, autonomous, organization) are sustaining DAL to create further works in collaboration with us informing decolonized curriculum and research
Standing Ground: Re-thinking the painted British Landscape
Get PDFStanding Ground Exhibition Catalogue
Kate Nichols, co-edited by exhibition curators Trevor Burgess and Raksha Patel
Publication launch: Friday 6 September 2024
What does it mean to paint the landscape of Britain today?
The landscapes presented in Standing Ground dramatically expand the British landscape painting tradition, in terms of subject matter, use of paint, and medium. Neither ‘the British landscape’, nor ‘today’s political landscape’ are fixed entities, but common threads that emerge (and at times unravel) in the paintings brought together in Standing Ground.
During and in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, social disparities – including between those with access to green space and those without – became ever more exaggerated. The context of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 reinvigorated discussion of the ongoing impact of slavery and empire on British culture.
Flooding, heatwaves, polluted rivers have all drawn further attention to the environmental desecration and climate catastrophe facing the planet (but disproportionately impacting the global south). Questions of landscape and belonging figure crucially in all of these developments. How might artists ‘Stand Ground’ in these contexts?
Landscape painting is a particularly freighted artistic genre, deeply connected to ideas of national identity. This is especially the case in Britain, where landscape painting is often regarded as the most significant historical national artistic achievement, and the landscapes of Gainsborough, Constable and Turner are sometimes seen as synonymous with British art altogether. Landscape painting is thus fundamental to narratives of British cultural identity, with the latter also fluid like paint itself. Its slippery and not always controllable quality takes on its own forms on the canvas – echoing humans’ failed attempts to subdue the natural world.
(Text: Dr Kate Nichols).
Standing Ground has been co-curated by Trevor Burgess and Raksha Patel (BAN Research Group lead: British South Asian Visual Art Post-Cool Britannia), with contributions and catalogue text from Kate Nichols (BAN Research Group lead: Race, Empire and the Pre-Raphaelites).
The painters in Standing Ground span several decades bringing an intergenerational dialogue about landscape painting today. They are Madi Acharya-Baskerville, Said Adrus, Trevor Burgess, Sir Frank Bowling, Jai Chuhan, Jasmir Creed (BAN Research Group lead: Chai Shai: Asian British Art), Kimathi Donkor, Bruno Grad, Grant Foster, Bhajan Hunjan, Azraa Motala, Raksha Patel and Shanti Thomas.
The exhibition catalogue has been supported through BAN legacy funding for affiliated Research Groups. It will be launched at the exhibition opening on Friday 6 September 2024.
To order a copy of the catalogue or for further information about the exhibition, please contact curators [email protected] and [email protected]