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The commands of the sadistic capitalist
Get PDFWoolley’s research explores the relation between people and objects, and the impact that images have as producers and disseminators of social values. She interprets commodity packaging and adverts to determine the social ideologies they support and to understand how they shape the identity of the consumer. Her central argument is that commodity culture turns everything into adverts.
Her site-specific work on billboards and social networking sites examine how images are consumed, particularly how ideology is transmitted through commercial visual culture. Because contemporary social relations are mediated, and often dominated, by online social networks Woolley views the sites as the contemporary commercial space where commodity culture pervades social existence. They are spaces where dominant social values are disseminated and reinforced through advertising and celebrity product endorsements. Woolley’s works aim to function as activist interventions disrupting the repetitious order of consumerism and creating a space in which the viewer can critically consider some of the contradictions of capitalist consumption.
Under the pseudonym the sadistic capitalist Woolley posted tweets every day in May 2017 to coincide with Diffusion International Photography Festival in Cardiff. The Tweets bring attention to the sadistic commands of advertising on social networking sites by combining advertising and magazine layouts with by quotations from the works of Sade. In other posts film stills from Pasolini’s film adaptation of Sade’s story, Salo: 120 Days of Sodom are combined with advertising slogans. Hashtags draw attention to the similarity between popular culture texts and the cruel tortures of Sade’s heroes.
The project aims to appropriate commodities and adverts as wish images. In The Arcades Project Walter Benjamin said that by changing the social value of commodities consumers produce wish images that enable them to inhabit the objects and make them act abnormally. This project considers how social networking sites can be used disruptively. Woolley inhabits the space and acts abnormally.
https://twitter.com/sadisticcomman
Aspirational beauty: painting class …the importance of personal narrative in painting
Get PDF“Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.” George Tooker (1920-2011), contemporary American painter. Informed by my identity as a female working class painter and educator, the paper will introduce the concept of Aspirational Beauty, to raise awareness of and celebrate the endeavour of working class painting, often excluded from academic writing. I will also advocate for an egalitarian approach to recruiting for and teaching painting in higher education. Art historian John Golding referred to painting as the “most aristocratic of art forms”. Artist Grayson Perry has cautioned that art schools are turning into posh white ghettos. So how can an education in painting practice be accessible to and have contemporary relevance for all interested students? I will argue that one way is through Life Writing. In my research I use Life Writing as a method to explore and articulate my class background and to inform my painting. Combining perspectives from history, sociology and English literature, Life Writing supports interpretation of the consequences of class as felt and lived beyond the personal, bringing the realisation that what we refer to as autobiographical is largely historically and culturally determined. Significantly, the introduction of life writing within the art academy indicates that institutions are listening to and acknowledging the personal voice. I will present insights into my role as Lecturer teaching studio painting practice to argue that a medium specific course is a timely means for enabling the material, imaginative and cognitive processes involved in painting by facilitating subjective discovery and bringing about both personal clarity and material beauty
Garry Barker: piscean promises - Leeds Arts University
Get PDFAn exhibition of ceramics selected from the 2017 Workshop Press exhibition Piscean Promises. Piscean Promises is an allegorical installation consisting of 200 individually made ceramic fish, usually exhibited alongside a series of allegorical drawings that are designed to highlight the plight of marine life due to the damage that human beings have wrought upon the oceans. This curator’s choice exhibit, was focused on a selection taken from the original ceramic installation
The hunchback and the swan
No full text‘The Hunchback and the Swan’ is a short animation directed by Dotty Kultys and narrated by UK’s Storytelling Laureate Taffy Thomas, MBE. The film was created using mixed techniques: paper cut-outs, collagraphy, pixilation and 2D digital animation. A core group in the production team was made up of UWE Animation students, and the entire process was mentored by Peter Lord, Co-Founder and Creative Director at Aardman Animations. Adapting folk tales for screen was the underlying exploration theme during the film’s production. The investigation process resulted in an article written for The History Press: ‘The challenges of adapting a folk tale’, and in a talk presented at the 2017 FMX Conference in Germany as part of the ‘Animation: The Quest for Young Talent’ thread. ‘The Hunchback and the Swan’ was screened at 25+ festivals worldwide, including the BAFTA qualifying Brest European Short Film Festival in France and the Academy Award qualifying Anima Mundi Festival in Brazil
Notes on design education and (prefigurative) work politics
Get PDFIn this text we are reporting back on the practice-based research Precarity Pilot. The starting point for this research is the fact that in today’s Europe, design graduates are entering into a landscape of precarious work. This research-in-progress thus inquires into how formal and informal design education can be a space where to empower young designers to transformatively engage with the precarious work politics of their profession. As a mid-way result, here we present a series of didactic proposals and strategic questions for how issues of socio-economic precariousness can be transformatively addressed. This result is based on a series of half-day workshops we have been running between 2014-2016 with design students, recent graduates and design educators in the UK, Germany, Poland and Italy. We address these proposals to educators, managers and students alike as we are convinced that everyone involved in education has agency over how the learning process unfolds
Creation and application of curve blend tool
Get PDFThe output is a device, a tool within Maya that enables transition between multiple selected non-uniform rational basis spline (NURBS) curves. Research process: In response to the identification of manual and time-consuming methods when transforming curves using blendshape deformers, Clark developed a tool that enables the automation of this process across multiple curves. The tool was developed using Maya Embedded Language (MEL) scripting, translating the functionality of multiple toolsets into a single application, enabling a more efficient workflow. Clark developed understanding of scripting through the application of existing tools, which encouraged further development through research (arrays, loops, interface design). Following the development of the tool, Clark undertook a process of continual testing, resulting in the ‘room transition’ and ‘CBT people’ proof of concept. Research insight: The project led to the development of an innovative new tool for artists to use within Maya when creating animation with NURBS curves, enabling a more efficient workflow. It also demonstrated the role of creative agency in repurposing and enhancing an existing workflow into a single tool. The process integrates dynamics and also enables the curves to be rendered using paint effects. Dissemination: The tool is openly available for use in Maya
Leisure
Get PDFThe output is an exhibition which addresses the transience, or rather, permanence of pop-ephemera. Blakeley’s artistic practice explores contemporary culture through painted collage. She attempts to blur the past and present, suspending the image in time, making the past more immediate and accessible. By drawing together disparate cultural reference from the 1950s until the present day, she pieces together fragments of history, forming spaces of living nostalgia. The painting process makes something concrete out of the pop-ephemera, the opposite of how the images would otherwise exist, and the end result challenging the expectation versus the reality. Leisure, curated by Sarah Taylor, presented a new body of work by Blakeley, developing ongoing interests in subversive and playful directions. An interpretation text by Professor Derek Horton accompanied the exhibition
Halls without walls: examining the development, dissemination and perpetuation of blues music and blues culture
Get PDFBlues music and blues culture undergo transformations of form and circulation when oral practices are first committed to text as sheet music . Further evolutions occur as performances are remediated as phonograph records and through various broadcast media during the 20th century. Each successive transformation generates discourses of authenticity, ownership and value which enable and constrain definitions of blues music and blues culture.
These discourses have remained largely unexamined as part of the latest cycle of remediation to digital formats and computer-mediated virtual environments since 1996. This paper presents the results of examination on key sites to better understand and illustrate the development, dissemination and perpetuation of the discourse blues music and blues culture such as it is enacted on the internet in the digital age
Forwards always – poetry to read aloud
Get PDFThe output is an illustrated book of nonsense poetry called ‘Forwards always – poetry to read aloud’. It is an edited collection of poems written between 2015 – 2017. The poetry takes an irreverent and nonsensical tone, used as a vehicle for storytelling, observation, satire and critical discourse. Research Process: The book has been designed to be read aloud, between parent and child, performer and audience. Its design promotes performance, it is activated through play, with footnotes and graphic language akin to that of a school text book instructing closer scrutiny, repeated readings, meaning making and play. The book also references 1980s’ poets and paperback Penguins. Research Insights: Play is crucial, we used type, footnotes and the non-sequitur positioning of image and word to promote the performative act of reading the book. The book itself plays with the concept - to read it is to decode it, to unlock it, to perform it and to imagine it. The book is prefaced with a citation from Stephen Natchmanovitch’s critical text, Free Play, Improvisation in Life and Art, 1990. Penguin Putnam, New York. Natchmanovitch suggests that Galumphing (childlike play) is a vital form of meaning making and is of huge evolutionary value. This idea is central to Hodson’s practice-based research and acted as the starting point for much of the books content, both visual and written. Dissemination: The book was disseminated through a reading at an exhibition, 'Forwards Always – Seasonal Observations Through Image and Word', at the Vernon Street Gallery, Leeds Arts University between 15 September and 27 October 2017. It was also shortlisted in the Book category at the Association of Illustrators World Illustration Awards 2018