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Updating maximilian.js for Modern JavaScript Live Coding
Get PDFThe original and widely used Maximilian1signal processing library was written in C++ and provided bindings to JavaScript. When WebAudio’s ScriptProcessorNode was discontinued, previous incarnations of maximilian.js were rendered unusable in contemporary browsers. In this paper, we provide details of the new implementation including updates to allow for live coding without interrupting the audio output and a focus on web-based collaborative editing
Locating Exhibition Design as a Means of Marketing Architectural Modernism in Inter-War Britain
Get PDFThroughout the interwar period many dialects of modernist visual languages were developed and often mediated by the technologies of photography, film, and design. This negotiation of modernity was a key feature characterizing the exhibition designs of architect Oliver Hill (1887-1968). Taking Hill’s designs for the “Exhibition of British Industrial Art in Relation to the Home” at Dorland Hall in 1933 as a starting point, this paper investigates Hill’s commitment to consumer education. Exhibition designs, such as at Dorland Hall, proved a perfect vehicle for Hill’s educational imperatives in elevating consumers’ understanding of “good design.” Through a close reading this paper highlights how Hill embraced fashionability, both in terms of market consumerism and in terms of the power that fashion had on improving taste and standards in design during that time
Whose cultural capital? Towards an interdisciplinary understanding of cultural capital through cultural value
Get PDFTwo articulations of cultural capital found in two disciplinary contexts are examined: one from Bourdieu’s sociology and one from Throsby’s cultural economics. These con-ceptions, it is argued, intersect in the notion of cultural value and need to be integra-ted. Bourdieu needs Throsby for cultural capital to be an object of decision-making but Throsby needs Bourdieu to make the definitional feature of cultural capital—cultural value—meaningful. This is because cultural value is not an aggregated sum of individual utilities the way economics conceives of value; but, and in line with Bourdieu, it is constituted through the collective meaning-making of situated social agents. Rather than a static, discrete object of measurement, cultural capital is a mutable and relational object of interpretation in social contexts and must be understood accordingly, before it can be calculated in economic terms. Cultural policy needs the humanities and sociology before it can make use of economics
Disparate Kingdoms Tangled in the Abyss: Biodiversity, Artificial Intelligence and Audio-Visual Performance
Get PDFThe creation of an audio-visual performance responding to a brief relating to biodiversity provoked a range of questions and issues: some at the moment of the work’s initial proposal, some in the development process and yet others retrospectively following the project’s completion. An assemblage of issues, objects and technologies are introduced and framed from a variety of different perspectives (object-orientated-ontology, entanglement theory, political ecology) before a discussion of the creative work itself articulates the intentions that guided the aesthetic and technical choices.
A generative metaphor of “making kin” (Haraway, 2016) guided much of practice which embraces human and non-human participants. In regards to the former, the variable subject positions of creative technologist rubbed against various national affiliations1. Regarding the latter, various technologies (e.g. object-orientated code, DSP, A.I., interface design, OSC) were intentionally troubled by a confrontation with digitally rendered, (un)life-forms derived from the deconstruction of the visual taxonomies associated with Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), Romantic, zoologist, biologist, artist and “scientific racist”.
The aims of the work were to unpack taxonomic bias in contemporary A.I. by using it to rework Haeckel’s, often exquisite, images of natural forms, to thereby problematicise inherited notions of biodiversity, hierarchical groupings of various kinds and the aestheticisation of nature in a post-(neo?) colonial context, and crucially, to create a meaningful audio-visual composition that responded successfully to the brief and could be shared with a diverse Mexican audience
Druids in the Crash Zone
No full textA campfire story of time zones and frame rates.
Druids in the Crash Zone was a story first told around a virtual campfire, then a paper written for a symposium on Anachronism at Queen Mary UoL in 2016. The paper loops internet folklore, 'prehistory', technics and troubled temporalities. Re-circulating the paper in 2024 produced reworkings, new works, stories and performative responses and a set of events first tested at Rehearsal, Rich Mix, London in 2024 and played out in the crash zone of Camp Fire at the Good Rice, London NW1 in January 2025. Events included a seminar round the Camp Fire on Art & Archaeological Skeuomorphery with contributions from Sweden, Norway, Finland and Australia.
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The Garden of Delights on Earth
No full textThe Garden of Delights on Earth is an Arts Council England-funded group exhibition that invites viewers to imagine a sustainable future through the power of art. The exhibition features 19 women and non-binary artists whose work addresses the need for action during the current climate crisis. Bringing together artists who work with live performance, film, print, textile, sculpture and installation, the artworks on show offer a feminist perspective in which, to tackle environmental sustainability in this Anthropocene era
Post-atomic Auralities: A practice-based study of sound and atmospheric effects
Get PDFThis practice-based research investigates the aural connections of sound, temperature, radioactivity and atmosphere. It is sustained by a central question that asks: What are the connections between sound and the nuclear, and how might novel methodologies for sound arts practice activate these relationships?
This research aims to discover how sound and atmospheric conditions interact within sites of nuclear significance and explores the often complex and unique cultures and consequences that emerge from them. This process includes exploring places that are imbued with nuclear histories, many of which remain active sites with complex and unique cultural heritages. The practice I present navigates a path from a series of experimentations with Geiger counters within my workshop space, to citizen data projects and remote sensing, to the development of a ‘nuclear archive’, where digitalmaterial representations of radionuclides and sonic ethnographies of Cold War era bunkers are combined. I explore the geological, historical, cultural, and technological significance of the nuclear to develop new methodologies for sound arts practice that document and attune to the many interrelations of sound and the post-atomic - a term that is widely accepted as descriptive of everything that has existed or occurred after the advent of nuclear weapons.
Through my practice I will introduce ‘documentation as praxis’ as an approach for reconfiguring the roles and function of the site and act of making, while querying the boundaries of documentation in arts practice. In conducting this aural investigation, I aim at discovering where the timelines and consequences of radioactive materials and their enduring cultural effects can be revealed by their sonic potential. This thesis coalesces in the development of my concept of ‘noise-prints’, where documentation and recorded media are activated as wayfinding instruments that are made traceable to the post-atomic auralities that I have uncovered
The Journey Towards Netherness: Exploring Endometriosis Experiences in and through an Improvisational Creative Praxis
Get PDFMonthly disabling pelvic and back pain; burns from heating pads on the abdomen; years of untreatable migraines; a decade of suffering before diagnosis; seven surgeries; multiple organ removals; four rounds of IVF; visible and invisible scars; litres of red, black, and brown blood. These depictions reveal my ongoing, ever-fluctuating journey with endometriosis. My experiences with this debilitating and incurable disease echo the clandestine torment endured by one in ten women (including individuals assigned female at birth who might identify otherwise).
Inspired by veiled narratives of female pain, this doctoral research explores lived-body experiences of endometriosis through a methodological framework which connects improvisation with theory from feminist and disability studies. Specifically, the research expands concepts like maternal interruption, disorientation, and dissonant disability to encompass the female pain experiences of endometriosis. Considering these linkages, the practice focuses on exploring collaboration, crip time, and an improvisational presence (including embodied strategies like somatic consciousness, adaptability, or reverence for the unknown).
Through solo art-making and a series of interactive exchanges with five other endo sufferers, the research discovers novel insights, language, and articulations related to this condition. Over time, and through a dynamic interplay between theory and practice, individual and collective pain journeys were woven into an exploratory body of work which contains small painting studies, narrative and reflective writing, performance art films, and movement improvisation studies. Eventually, the research practice culminated in a live-art concept entitled Nether Space(s), a painscape which blends body-painting, poetry, dance, and an original sound-score.
Additionally, the research’s accumulating insights yield a pivotal revelation: the concept of netherness. Netherness serves as a framework for shifting or ‘cripping’ art-making and life practices to honour and reflect the realities of navigating endometriosis pain. Its creative threads include embodied dissonance/liminality, non-vertical spatial orientations, and unconventional energies or temporalities. Experimenting with and refining these endo-centric idiosyncrasies was integral to the unfurling of Nether Space(s).
In disseminating the evolution of Nether Space(s) and the inception of netherness, this thesis becomes a testament to the creative power of engaging with the disruption, disorientation, invisibility, and scars of endometriosis. Through critical writing, introspection, poetry, photography, and film documentation, the capacity of endo-centric artistic research to provoke, empower, connect, and transform is unveiled
The Phenomenon of Age and the Temporal Extension of Place
Get PDFRuskin once alluded to ‘ageing’ in buildings as “the golden stain of time”, noting “there is actual beauty in the marks of it”.
Whilst we superficially understand the affect to which Ruskin refers, if we consider how physical ‘marks’ upon a building might cause us to feel ‘time’, the situation is less clear. We might similarly question the ‘aesthetic’ response he experiences since these marks must surely corrupt the artistry of the building.
Our whole world is characterised by changes that occur over time; we are surrounded by ripening fruit, growing trees and wrinkling skin (as well as crumbling buildings), and it seems we know objects biographically as much as by their physical qualities. Importantly, as entities change, so does their meaning and it matters to us where an object is within its change narrative (what page of its biography it is on, if you like). Consequently, our perceptual processes are pre-disposed to chronologise the objects we encounter and the research proposes that it is these pre-reflective perceptual ‘judgements’ that we experience as objective age.
The practice-based research project employs phenomenological texts and works of sculpture to investigate the “material-temporality” of natural entities and artefacts. It proposes cognitive mechanisms that might imbue physical objects with temporal characteristics and how our everyday experience of the spatial realm is temporally extended through these perceptual processes. Throughout, the tool of art practice secures the elusive phenomenon of age and repositions temporal sensations within the spatial arena to allow their study.
The thesis finally considers how the perceptual mechanisms through which we understand the growth and decay of Natural entities are applied to man-made artefacts. Here, a curious reversal is apparent where the age we experience from the object derives from a reflectingback of the inherent generational structure of ourselves, the subject
Publication: Rethink, Reframe, Redefine: Co-Creation & Storytelling
Get PDFThis project was designed to shift the dial in terms of who has the power to make editorial decisions in the sharing of humanitarian stories for fundraising. The research uses a model devised by Jess Crombie called Contributor Centred Storytelling (CCS) to facilitate UNHCR’s ambition to prioritise refugee-led storytelling.
Together, over the past two years UNHCR and Crombie have developed, tested and delivered a way of working that prioritises the choices and preferences of people with lived experience, and still delivers an effective fundraising product.
True co-creation requires the sharing of narrative control. This can feel daunting, and risky. But to claim to be co-creating stories we must share power, as co-creation is equitable and not tokenistic