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Introduction: architecture and resilience on a human scale
No full textThis book aims to define the position of architecture in urban resilience discourse, and more significantly describe how architecture and urban practices can make a transformative contribution. In this introductory chapter we trace the emergence of the concept of resilience in ecology and its reception in urban development and the field of architecture to set out the importance of connecting the climate imperatives for resilience with social justice and community imperatives. The focus of this book, is concerned with resilience at the ‘human-scale’, the lived scale of buildings, neighbourhoods and everyday life. The focus on ‘the local,’ does not mean ‘localising’ structural problems, but is considered as one location from which to challenge and transform them. Taking resilience as a transformative concept, this book asks where and what architecture might contribute.
In providing such an introduction, the volume is structured through a series of ‘dialogues’, which aim to cluster chapters together in ways that put different views in tension, to open up difference and discussion, rather than lining up different views positivistically. As the question of how to make neighbourhoods and urban localities are resilient is not specific to any one field and so each section connects architecture to a range of interdisciplinary perspectives. The ‘dialogues’ cover questions of (1) narratives of resilience (2) Community resilience and the right to housing; (3) New pedagogies of resilience; (4) Challenging Climate Denial; (5) Resilience Ethics and Interdependence; and (6) Scales of resilience. Accompanying the written chapters, the book includes practice-based interventions, in the form of interviews, to give space to otherwise unarticulated and valuable knowledge from practice
Mosaic as an experimental system in contemporary fine art practice and criticism
Get PDFThis thesis examines the conventional definition of mosaic and argues against the dominant narrative that subordinates it to painting. It asserts the specific character and general applicability of mosaic as a paradigm for image-construction, presenting the necessity for rethinking mosaic, in terms of both practice and theory, as a constituent presence affecting consideration of certain practices within contemporary art.
More specifically, this thesis argues that the principles of mosaic art, characterised by compositions made through the use of partible serialised units derived from an additive method of construction that is pertinent to art and technology, inform a fluid paradigmatic art category that can be traced back to antiquity and experienced through actual environments, such as in architecture, and in the virtual environments of recent digital technologies. This category is identified in the research as the mosaical and presents a formal set of concerns that provide a new analytical framework for particular debates on sculpture and installation art that is also relevant to art education and digital aesthetics.
The methodological approach used here combines qualitative research that draws on art-historical literature, with visual evidence extracted from artworks through the analysis of formal compositional elements. Philosophically, the study uses a Deleuzian rhizomatic approach to undermine specific art-historical hierarchies. It is also influenced by Laura Marks’ concept of enfolding-unfolding aesthetics, underpinned by an understanding of how historical clues and visual evidence inform a historical horizon constituted of folds. Furthermore, it relies on a space for experimentation that bridges the divide between art and science, in keeping with Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s concepts of graphematic and representational spaces.
This practice-based PhD advances mosaic as an experimental system, conceptually and experientially, embracing the historicity of mosaic as well as its phenomenological ramifications. It proposes a new aesthetic formalism for the digital age by tracing a particular way of structuring the visual where mosaic principles enable the passage from the actual built environment to the image-based virtual environment of digital technologies. Through modernist experiments with the grid, in combination with the use of elemental units of composition, this thesis argues that the ancient tessera has evolved into the contemporary voxel
Practice, discourse and experience: the relationship between design history and architectural history
Get PDFThis Special Issue explores the relationship between architectural history and design history; two disciplines with close subject areas and methodological links, but which have developed distinct institutional and academic identities that often separate them. This introduction frames the articles contained in the issue—which in different ways demonstrate the compelling nature of research that straddles these disciplines—through an examination of the roots such research approaches have within the recent past of each field. Through a re-reading of key moments within the historiography of each discipline in the UK and USA since the Second World War, it is possible to understand how architectural and design history have evolved in relation to each other, and how the expansion of each into the territory of the other has emerged
Remembering the Unknown - multi-screen video installation
Get PDFVideo installation composed from 4 x 11-minute photo/poetic/film essays with dynamic typographic elements representing an experiment in life writing based on post-genomic epigenetic research into the transgenerational transmission of trauma. Text animations and manipulated still images resonate and bring together poetic and philosophical accounts and themes expanded in the paper – Writing in Body – The Dark Matter of the Genome(cited elsewhere). Working from site-specific expanded black and white photography the work offers a subjective accounting of how photography and traumatic events might share common structures.
Roger’s video installation Remembering the Unknown is based on photographic work that reconfigures site-responsive photo work associated with trans historical cultural memory. The work applies montage and dynamic motion graphic poetic texts to enhance psychological connections embedded in the photo works to reference repressed intergenerational memory and trauma. The sections; I Poor Orphan & Here There and Everywhere were created at CERN, Geneva (Switzerland), Matrem, produced within a bioscience and stem cell research context in the UK, and the Home series at Roger’s father’s former Children’s Home, Styal, Manchester in 2019 (UK). The film integration of these works evolved slowly allowing for Roger’s organic and complex methods of autoethnography – allowing correspondences between memory, trauma and family archives. Roger’s autoethnographic methods apply qualitative research methods across numerous disciplines. In Remembering the Unknown she uses self-reflection to explore the subjective experience that seeks to connect life-writing narratives to wider cultural, political, and social meanings. Roger’s research methods use ‘second witnessing’ approaches that intersect with Barad’s diffractive epistemologies of agential realism. Her work resides at the intersections of art and science with regard to ethics, politics and subjectivity. Rogers cites photography theorist, Ulrich Bauer and psychoanalytic theories that re-conceptualize the mechanics of photo operations. Drawing on Bauer’s critical interpretation of photography, the work draws on accounts of second witnessing to explore the dissociative cognitive anomalies of trauma.
Remembering the Unknown is a reflective work and the elliptical form is intended to produce a mesmeric effect. The film aesthetic re-assembles the digitally manipulated series of photos with dynamic text overlays to develop a different synthesis and to explore themes of trauma, self-fragmentation and emotional detachment.
Roger’s visual research seeks to expand these contextual theories to broaden the reach of biosocial approaches to cultural epigenetics and trauma studies through art
Networks, biographies and oral history: personality and the personal in architectural history
No full textNew directions in mobile media and performance
No full textNew Directions in Mobile Media and Performance explores various performative projects and forms of expression that have emerged since the onset of the smartphone. It focuses mainly on new concepts and developments that have emerged in mobile media performance. It also showcases intermedial and interactive art and performance, particularly those that utilise mobile and wearable devices.
It is an extension of curatorial work on mobile performance published in the online magazine Vague Terrain in 2012 [ ]. It brings a unique perspective of emerging and seminal work from a variety of artists, as well as from my research and performance media practice in the background.
New areas in the field covered are those using mobile phones and wearable technologies in performance contexts, from the perspective of the performance creator and their creative process, working with technology as a collaborator, not just a tool or guide.
The book also contextualises my own research and performance practice is also examined within the larger landscape in Chapter 6. It ends with interviews with the artists themselves on their creative process and intentions.
It is the outcome of 3 years of research of artistic works around the world, interviews, in-person viewings of performances, as well as incorporating and reflecting mine own ongoing practice and projects in context
Between the Sunny and the Opaque
Get PDFThe work in this exhibition was produced during a residency at Drawing Projects UK. This collaborative drawing project acknowledges drawing as a state of becoming. This notion of drawing as a developmental practice that recognizes its experiential nature, its processes and its duration, where sensory experience is more than sight, but also embraces gesture, action, and the ethereal.
The collaborative project utilized dialogues between drawing, action, and performance, using various communication methods, including text, sound, voice and mark making. Motivated by an interest in rules and conventions, both the production of new work and the subsequent exhibition considers how space can be articulated through process-led practices that utilize inventory, written and oral systems to delineate and produce content. The project space we worked in during the residency at DPUK was also the subject of the works by its scale, dimensions, contents and light.
The project’s objective was to explore how drawing could evoke the unseen and reconsider how we see, what we perceive and how physical, volumetric representations of body/site can be understood. This objective enabled two specific questions that centered our work and investigations. These asked how drawing functions both with and within space to establish a instance where nothing turns into something and secondly, by hollowing out what may be overlooked within the project space. To hollow out is to magnify what is discovered as we generate distinctions between formless space and its divisions.
A collection of strategies was devised to address this, and from this body of work we derived Chatroom, Headlanders 1, 2, 3, 4 & Space Wrestling 1, Chatroom 2, & Space Wrestling 2 video works. For Chatroom we collected an inventory of words that described the elements and objects of the project space. We created rules that required us to speak these words phonetically using the inventory in no particular order to create a dialogue. This was recorded and typed into a word document; producing the text works in the gallery space. For the video Chatroom piece we collected words that described characteristics of the room, these included murmur, open, slippage, sharp, fizzy, drop, ruptures, dappled & disperse. Here we attempted to speak the words; however, we prohibited the sounds leaving our mouths by holding our mouths closed with our fingers. This was filmed in the space, documenting the iterations of the words as the light left the space, leaving the sounds in ambiguity and darkness. Space wrestling set rules that created opportunity to play two games in the space. Each game used a single piece of confetti, which was moved by creating gestures that directed air and moved the confetti into the opponent’s goal / basket. Within this, spatial gestures indicative of excess energy for minimal effect come into play, both as means to explore drawn space and contest it limits both of action, aim and value.
Headlanders are a series of performative gestures within a predetermined space, that subsequently leads to a space beyond this. To say liberated gestures, means to contest the sedimentary actions we perform daily and instead to allow automatic and instinctual ones to emerge. In each case, Burgoyne and O’Donnell activated a position, in turn albeit absurdly are subsequently seen from that viewpoint. Four Headlands of sorts are arrived at, north to east to south to west. Subsequently displayed as they are within the framed panelling of the foyer gallery, the Headlanders both orientate and re-configure the space and its meetings of artwork and public. In common with all the works from this project, Headlanders is to literally enter the materiality of drawing, not simple rest on its surface e.g, paper, and like drawing this is both to take a position and be seen from a position in time and space
Body mapping: cross cultural influences in the studio
No full textA presentation of the work of students at UCA Rochester documenting their experience of fashion and experimental textiles within the studio via multidisciplinary, issue based work exploring cross-cultural narratives.
As a practising textile artist and University Lecturer specialising in fashion design, I strive to instill a sense of ‘critical adventure’ in fashion and textile students. Encouraging them to question their own understanding, break down perceptions, to re-invent and deconstruct stereotypes and move away from well-worn euro-centric perspectives. My illustrated talk will focus on the students’ creative experience through a series of documented workshops and projects designed to enhance their knowledge of and at the same time question the meta-narrative of ‘Global Fashion’. In short, we see how a group of students begin to identify and contest more and less visible boundaries that permeate fashion systems around the world.
Contextual exploration includes the ground-breaking work of contemporary African and Asian designers such as Manish Arora, Rei Kawakubo, Junya Watanabe and Yohji Yamamoto. With an emphasis on more dynamic ways of exploring fashion design: enveloping the body through draping, wrapping, exploring asymmetry and multiples as well as considering 'clothing' in a more abstract sense. Students study the Japanese aesthetic concepts of 'Ma' exploring the space/gap between the body and clothes, and of 'Wabi Sabi' the acceptance of transience and the innate beauty of imperfection as a conceptual springboard for design and construction.
As students' address ecological concerns, migration, social and gender issues, etc., their design experiments move beyond eurocentric/ethnocentric discourses within fashion to explore dynamic cultural hybrids and weave an alternative future. Outcomes become more politically, socially and ethically engaged through questioning and re-framing issues and perspectives deemed 'global'
Culture lab: art & protest
No full textThis workshop and lecture was offered to 8 artists as part of an artist residency at Metal Culture, Liverpool. The laboratory specifically focused upon the relationship between art and protest, and the workshop interrogated the importance of understanding the potency and utility of objects within protest environments
The Work of Death in Burgin’s Belledonne
No full textThe chapter provides a largely psychoanalytic reading of Victor Burgin's Belledonne that relates the panoramic form of this projection piece to the nearly mechanical operations of Freud's death drive and the unheimlich encounters with non-human agency that pertain in the projection. The gaze in the artwork, the gaze of the zero degree CGI camera, which Burgin calls 'theoretical vision', therefore does not seek satisfaction but instead repetition, excess and destruction. The argument made is that there is a critical structural relationship between the impossible subject position offered by the virtual eye of the virtual camera and the indescribable, psychological object operational in the projection piece. In turn this opens up a deeper rumination on the 'absent' or unseeable aspects of artworks and how such 'viewership' persists over time
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