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Feminist science fiction art
Get PDFFeminist science fiction is a category most frequently associated with literature, film, and television. This chapter challenges these associations, theorizing SF art as a space for queer / trans / feminist resistance. Specifically, SF artworks by Sophia Al-Maria, Sin Wai Kin, Tai Shani, and Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley are read as feminist theory––a method drawn from speculative and repro-utopian feminisms––which seeks to locate theoretical knowledge both within and beyond academic writing. Subsequently feminist SF artworks are contextualised within wider feminist and/or science fiction traditions, communities, and discourses. Feminist SF art is framed then not as a genre populated by individual auteurs, but as a community of artists engaged in co-authorship. This chapter focusses specifically on artists working with collaborative worldbuilding, a range of artistic strategies which further embed co-authorship and recursivity into SF art production
Circular cricket batting pads: prototype development
Get PDFThe report highlights the findings and learnings of the development of prototype of a circular cricket batting pad. Circular Cricket Gear (CCG) project is running between 2022-23 and is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)
White Paper: findings, learning and implications for policymakers and other stakeholders related to sustainability and cricket gear
Get PDFThe report highlights the findings, learnings and implications for policymakers and other stakeholders related to sustainability of cricket gear, with particular focus on circularity. Circular Cricket Gear (CCG) project is running between 2022-23 and is funded by Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)
Identity politics: a study of diasporic identity mediated through family photography
Get PDFDrawing from a well-established interdisciplinary history that focuses on the affective power of photography when animated through oral narration, this chapter looks at how diasporic identity is mediated through family photographs. One case study that uses photo-elicitation as research method is referenced in order to consider the mnemonic value of photographs or what can be described as the ‘affect' of the image in evoking critical memories. In doing this, a sense of diasporic belonging to a new homeland, grief, trauma, and loss is investigated. This chapter concludes by highlighting that critical traumatic memories can be inter-generationally transferred into post-memories as the past is brought into the present through discussion and reflection
Cold Light Lite
Get PDFCold Light Lite is a new installation by Keith Sargent and Lindsay Seers. It represents a fragment of a larger work which included two robots, a scaffold structure and VR headsets placed in constructed pods.
The exhibition here at FRAC is shaped by the artists' research into the life and work of Nikola Tesla, the title drawing on historic references to the first electric lights. No longer reliant on fire for illumination, the new electric light bulbs were referred to as 'Cold Light.' Tesla was an inventor, engineer and futurist who performed scientific experiments theatrically, as a showman. He is best known for his contributions to the design of the Alternating Current electrical system. Cold Light takes inspiration from Tesla's visionary revelations in science, his extraordinary consciousness and his non-normative brain. He considered himself to be an automaton reacting to internal and external stimuli. He aspired to give free energy to the world and to raise the level of human consciousness.
Cold Light takes a complex stand on how time exists in the brain and the significance of electromagnetism in all things. The work displays a desire to edit images, objects and sounds in a relational way. It follows the associative way the brain functions as described in neuroscience, rather than the historic theatrical and filmic techniques that create seemingly coherent stories that resolve themselves. Potentially we revise our narratives endlessly. There is an intensity in the unfolding of the work that relates to a neurodivergent state of consciousness – in this case autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Human life appears to make very little sense.
Slippages and repetitions weave between real and virtual elements – sculptural and architectural forms recur, rendered and recombined physically and digitally, calling into question distinctions between materiality and dream states and their interchangeable possibilities.
Research on these subjects has been sustained over many years and developed through dialogues with scientists including Chris Frith, FRS FBA, professor emeritus at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London; Anil Seth, professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex; Paul Fletcher, Bernard Wolfe Professor of Health Neuroscience, University of Cambridge; and science writer Philip Ball
Accelerating sustainability in fashion, clothing and textiles
No full textThe issue of sustainability is characterised as a ‘wicked problem’ in the fashion, clothing and textiles sector and is now coming into increased focus due to growing consumer, business and policy pressures. This in-depth volume presents a comprehensive overview of the challenges and emerging opportunities faced by the sector, and provides strategic solutions as to how the sector can substantially accelerate sustainability.
This book collates research and industry best practice to provide a ‘one-stop shop’ exploring the complex and interconnected issues surrounding sustainability in fashion, clothing and textiles. The practical and digestible chapters include innovative examples and perspectives from different regions of the globe, addressing topics from policies to supply chain issues and materials innovation. Five unique case studies of sustainable businesses provide detailed examples of pioneering practice. Edited by three professionals with long-standing knowledge and expertise, the book takes a global perspective with examples that illustrate the scale and breadth of topics and regions in the scope of sustainability. This holistic approach brings together both academic and industry perspectives on the critical areas that require immediate action to move towards a more sustainable fashion, clothing and textile sector.
This is an invaluable resource for those working in the industry, policymakers and for those in business or academia with an interest in sustainability in fashion, clothing, textiles and related sectors worldwide. It is also relevant to professionals and students in the areas of sustainability, innovation, supply chains, design and development, consultancy, education and training
Review of publication More than a Snapshot: A Visual History of Photo Wallets by Annebella Pollen
No full textThis review is of 'More than a Snapshot' published by Four Corners (Irregulars Number 10). The subject of the book is the frequently overlooked printed photo wallets within which all amateur commercially processed photographs and negatives produced between 1908 to the 1990s were stored. Using images from her own collection of photo wallets, the author of this book, Annebella Pollen, presents a visual history of the photo wallet throughout this period
Full report: findings from online survey: cricket gear users/players
Get PDFThe report highlights the findings of a survey amongst cricket players on the perceptions and activities related to the sustainability and circularity of cricket gear. Circular Cricket Gear (CCG) project is running between 2022-23 and is funded by Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)
Country Girls
No full textSites of horror, be they buildings, towns or landscapes, carry their difficult pasts forward. Mnemonic vestiges (like ruins and mounds), word-of-mouth stories, tours, books, paintings and films all contribute to the making of a myth. And while terrifying fact gradually shifts towards more innocuous folklore, perhaps a sinister undercurrent remains more present than one can fully know.
For Anna Fox and Alison Goldfrapp, growing up in and around the town of Alton in the 1970s, a lingering chill hung over Flood Meadows, a bucolic corner of rural Hampshire. The legacy of the gruesome 1867 murder and dismemberment of eight-year-old Fanny Adams, whose body parts were gradually found scattered across the meadows, lingered on – over one hundred years later – in a current threat of violence, in the adolescent fights and misogyny all around them.
We sense a set-up where chocolate-box prettiness hides a much darker tone of aggression. Growing up in the town it was impossible not to know the Fanny Adams story – a Brothers Grimm fairytale based entirely in reality. Alison’s childhood bedroom looked out across the pastoral meadows and she would find her way out of the back of the garden, through hedges and under a large yew tree, to play there.
Anna and Alison met in and around Alton in the early 1980s, hanging out at Chawton House, where Anna was living. At that time, the vast Elizabethan mansion – creaking with Jane Austen associations – had become a kind of paying commune with no defined private spaces, the site of creative activity and dialogue for younger people in the area. It was here in the early 1980s that Anna, then at art school, first photographed Alison in some light-hearted poses.
While never intended as a literal reference, looking back Anna and Alison were clearly affected by the menacing echo of Fanny Adams in their clinical, sometimes dehumanised close- cropped vignettes of isolated legs, hair and other ambiguous bodily features, without face or other obvious signs of pulsing life. Alison remembers: ‘The tights have a sheen to them, I wanted the legs to look shiny, kinda hyperreal. I wanted the whole body to be like a broken doll or shop mannequin. Nude, smooth and fake.’
The overwhelming sense that life in those leafy lanes was an anachronistic, conscious pretence, perpetuated by a community hanging onto a past that perhaps never really was, is explored in the earliest portraits of Alison dressed irreverently in her mother’s clothes from the 1950s and 60s. From this upright start the two moved on to picture Alison discarding her clothes, roaming the woods, bare-bodied, creating spinning dances to ward off dangerous cows, and, finally, to the series of deathly poses in bluebells, pick-up trucks, fields and rivers.
Anna Fox says: ‘It was a kind of exorcism – I felt we were getting back at the countryside. The 1970s and 80s were not nice for young women stuck in villages or isolated hamlets. No internet and little public transport meant you rarely saw anyone to confess to. And once you were old enough to go out in the small town you felt the brunt of Friday-and- Saturday-night male violence every single weekend.’
Photography by Anna Fox.
Performance by Alison Goldfrapp.
Text by Anna Fox and Alison Goldfrapp
Skims: body positivity or Kimspiration?
No full textIn 2019 Kim Kardashian launched her fashion label SKIMS, which she describes as a 'solutions orientated brand' providing 'solutions for every body'. Predominately focused on shapewear, the brand is couched in the notion of body positivity and inclusivity, promoting its wide range of sizing and nine different colourways. Moreover, across its marketing, it seeks to include a greater number of plus size models and women of colour, whose curves and fuller-figured forms are fully exposed. However, this chapter raises questions as to whether SKIMS really promotes body positivity, or instead operates a means for kimspiration, encouraging women towards the Kim Kardashian slim-thick body ideal, and promoting SKIMS as a tool to achieve a body transformation. Throughout Kim’s career, her body image has been centred stage, and arguably she has been crucial to cultivating the slim-thick look as a mainstream body ideal for young women. Though SKIMS seeks to celebrate every body, emphasis is placed on the ways shapewear garments can sculpt, smooth, and contour the body, cinching in the waist, and enhancing curves. Thus rather than celebrating women's bodies, just the way that they are, the chapter argues that SKIMS promotes the slim-thick ideal, and elevates Kim as body icon
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