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We were here: sexuality, photography, and cultural difference
No full textWe Were Here: Sexuality, Photography, and Cultural Difference offers an unparalleled firsthand account of the influential photographer and curator Sunil Gupta's writing and critical inquiry since the 1970s.
Newspaper articles, speeches, and essays show Gupta’s crucial role at the center of grassroots queer and postcolonial organizing throughout an artistic career lived between Canada, the UK, and India. In his pieces about homosexuality in Indian cities, the AIDS crisis, the Black Arts Movement, or key figures including Joy Gregory and Robert Mapplethorpe, Gupta foregrounds the power of cultural activism in the politically fraught contexts of London and Delhi, and illuminates the essential connections between queer migration and self-discovery. Continually questioning given forms of identity, Gupta offers artists and curators multiple strategies of resistance, carving out space for new ways of imagining what it might mean to live, love, and create
Syntax as an iterative architectural design tool: a teaching experiment using spatial syntactic and isovist analysis
Get PDFWhile space syntax has developed significant explanatory capabilities in the realm of the space- society relationship, its direct applicability within design is relatively nascent. Cases of application at the building scale are comparatively few. In our paper we describe one such instance, an undergraduate architectural design studio at CEPT University in India, which explored the application of scientific methods within creative and speculative design processes. This paper describes the design methods developed through this studio. The process was semi structured, adjusting as the course progressed, in order to incorporate emerging methods.
We propose that analytic tools which provide the precision and accuracy required by researchers are less conducive to the iterative process of design; instead, the capability to test out design ideas roughly but quickly serves the design process better. In this studio course we introduced the theories and methods of space syntax alongside two software tools that enabled both such approaches; DepthmapX, and the isovists.org app. The forms of analysis used in the studio included convex permeability maps, their justified graphs and network centralities; point and path isovists’ local metrics; visibility graph analysis for global measures of visibility. The briefed aim of the studio was to use such tools as an approach to the design of a school building.
We find that successful processes emerged when students used the tools in a rapid yet rigorous iterative process of testing, modifying and re-testing. For most part, contrary to a generative design process, the designer’s intuitions and subjective speculations actively interacted with the objective analysis to arrive at design decisions. Finally, we describe the pedagogical influence of introducing objective methods in a design studio which is conventionally a space of creative or subjective processes
Isovists in a grid: benefits and limitations
Get PDFThis paper aims to extend the investigation of the fundamentals of isovists grids to encompass a wider range of possible grids and hence determine whether there is an optimal grid type and, if so, what would it be. We initially discuss the problem of the selection of grid-spacing (or the interval between isovist generating locations) and will then show, with worked examples, how both the grid size, the orientation of the grid and the selection of its origin can produce variance in any resultant space syntax, i.e., relational, measures, when applied to real world spatial systems. We then go on to show how orthogonal grids can exhibit particular problems when the building or urban area contains curved walls, since the orthogonal grid often does not conform well to arbitrary curves. Another problem we discuss is that of small openings or narrow corridor-like spaces (often missed by larger grids) where there is a mis-match between the grid-spacing and aperture size. In the second half of this paper, we will explore alternative options to the cartesian, orthogonal grid, suggesting a number of alternative grid-types and then introduce a new form of visibility graph analysis that we are terming Restricted Randomised Visibility Graph Analysis, or R-VGA. By applying R-VGA analysis to some test cases, we demonstrate how this method of analysis has considerable advantages over the more commonly used, square-based grid of VGA analysis. Finally, we will present a new, proposed taxonomy, as an entire family of VGA and VGA-derived analyses
Otto Dix and Weimar media culture: time, fashion and photography in portrait paintings of the Neue Sachlichkeit
No full textOtto Dix (1891–1969) was a leading figure of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement in painting in 1920s Germany. This groundbreaking study analyses for the first time in depth the relationship between Dix’s verist-realist portrait paintings and the rapidly expanding mass media culture of the Weimar era.
Focusing on a selection of portraits created in the first half of the 1920s, the book explores four specific aspects: the way in which Dix engaged with fashion and celebrity culture; how he responded to the challenge posed by photography; how he dealt with a situation where black-and-white reproductions were the most common medium through which diverse audiences encountered his work, and the ways in which Dix’s career development ran in parallel with the commentary on his artistic production in journalistic and specialist media publications. Temporality, medium-specificity and reproduction are identified as concerns that drove his aesthetic responses to a historically specific environment.
New archival material, letters and interviews by the artist, and a wide range of publications by art critics, cultural theorists and art historians of the Weimar era are drawn on to reveal new information about key paintings such as Self-Portrait with Nude Model (1923) and Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber (1925)
Post Graduate Research Showcase
No full textThis presentation included PhD practice based research at the annual Birkbeck Postgraduate Research Showcase
Player needs inventory (PNI): an analytical framework for analyzing player motives in video games
Get PDFFocusing on player motives in games with narrative elements, we claim that the needs satisfied by a game depends on the interplay of three player experience dimensions (narrative, mechanics, and social context) and we present a formal approach for studying player motives in video games. Motives of the player are classified into six categories and the resulting Player Needs Inventory (PNI) is utilized in the close reading of a video game to identify how player motives are satisfied with different game user experience dimensions. Three patterns observed after the close reading are: (1) needs satisfied by a game is affected by the narrative of the game, the personality of the protagonist (role), and the social context the player finds himself in, (2) the needs for achievement and affiliation are more dominant than others in the form of fusions and subsidizations, and (3) a wide range of needs can be satisfied with carefully designed game mechanisms and a balanced player experience. Casting aside the motives of a player in the pregame phase and focusing on the motives of the player in the actual game phase, the Player Needs Inventory (PNI) presented in this study offers an analytical framework to understand player motives in video games and the conducted analysis may aid researchers interested in player experience
"I am in favour of a black-and-white print that does not correspond to the original" (Otto Dix): Weimar Germany's print media culture and oil painting in reproduction
No full textOtto Dix is seen as a leading figure of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement in painting in Weimar Germany, and he is without a doubt the most studied and exhibited today. This paper considers Dix's work from a new angle by revealing his efforts to harness the promotional opportunities offered by the reproduction of his paintings in art journals, books and newspapers, while simultaneously insisting on medium-specificity and protecting his original artwork from being 'tainted' by its copy on paper
Chladni plate visualisation
Get PDFThe creation of images made out of sound is an ancient discovery from many civilisations, called Cymatics. Cymatics can be referred to as the science of visualising audio frequencies through the Chladni plate. Over the past several years, many scientists, artists and designers have tried to visually and physically represent sound. Physicalising sound was through using liquids and particles as a medium with sound energy to deform and reform the medium aesthetically, creating a unique texture.
In the visual arts of computer graphics, the texture is the perceived surface quality showing details of the surface model and colour. The use of texture in computer graphics for modelling and gaming industries is still growing, opening new possibilities for new complex textures yet simple to apply. The paper explores methods of integrating art and science, showing the practices of contemporary Chladni visualisation from an artist’s perspective in 3D modelling. The paper also introduces the technique of using computer graphics to compare procedural textures with Chladni’s plate representing visual aspects of our novel approach
I am not content: consequences of managing a likable female image in "onlife"
Get PDFThis doctoral inquiry undertaken between 2015 and 2022 investigates the following premise: Women have to be “likeable” to be seen, thus becoming “content” for social media. The investigation employs an interdisciplinary approach, drawing from the fields of visual arts, social media studies, political theory and feminist studies. At the outset of the research, Jodi Dean’s essay Communicative Capitalism: Circulations and the Foreclosure of Politics (2005), along with Luciano Floridi’s concept of ‘onlife’ (2012), serve as key catalysts with subsequent writings emerging from a constellation of material feminism used to elaborate critical thinking on LIKES and likability as a matter.
This research project employs the concept of “exhibition-as-chapter” (e-a-c), specifically designed for this inquiry. The aim is to drive material artistic experimentation to the fore, as a means to critically disrupt circulation. The e-a-c functions both as a system, and a method. In this approach I delve into the operative nature of the database, establishing a set of rules that physicalises the invisible instructions of the digital. The outcome is three e-a-c’s, that contribute to the creation of a fine-art practice that, whilst rooted in photography, combines with other mediums to draw attention to the developing situations of inequality and imbalance in the arts and wider public life for women artists.
The original contribution to knowledge lies in identifying and developing a theory of LIKES and likability as having material consequences, especially for women in 'onlife'. I propose that the concept of likability enables researchers to understand and interpret how women are engaged with as online content. Moreover, LIKES emerge as a significant characteristic of surveillance capitalist production, influencing contemporary art worlds, and shaping artists’ livelihoods. The final submission of complementary writing makes an original contribution to scholarship in the fields of expanded photography, visual art, and education, with additional impacts on feminist theory and philosophies of the body
It Repeats on You (Again)
Get PDFThis installation comprised of the film 'The Coding Cave and the Performative Fishbowl', alongside drawings, 'ReCollected: Self-Reflective Analytic Drawings', and 'Data Reams on Stand: Data-Date: Conversations in Reams'. All are examples of Scarsbrook's practice as research relating to ways of dealing with the self as entangled diffracted and inseparable subject and object of an individual's study
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