Arts University Bournemouth
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342 research outputs found
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A Film by Cine Mujer: A Video Essay
No full textFollowing recent endeavours that have unearthed women’s cinema and reclaimed its contribution to film history, this video essay revisits the filmography of the Colombian feminist film collective Cine Mujer (1978–1999). Narrated by three of its members—Eulalia Carrizosa, Patricia Restrepo, and Clara Riascos—through semi-structured interviews that intersect the personal, professional and political, this short film also reuses Cine Mujer’s archive. Its purpose is, one the one hand, to contribute to restoring its legacy and, on the other hand, to reframe and resignify its images within women’s ongoing battle for equality
Flock! Exhibition
No full textThe Flock! exhibition explored the diverse and dynamic uses of flock. It provided an understanding of the applications, benefits and important qualities and uses of flock through the exploration of an array of historical and contemporary flocked objects. The exhibition explored how flock is used across a variety of contexts, including interior design, publishing, and fashion design. It addressed the importance of flock as an important process and surface treatment that is widely used. Importantly it explained that flock is a distinct process and outcome that is not to be mistaken as velvet or referred to just as a ‘fuzzy’ surface.
The exhibition provided visitors with an understanding of flock and how and why it continues to endure and appeal
MAMI Tech Toolkit Utilising Action Research to Develop a Technological Toolkit to Facilitate Access to Music-Making
Get PDFMusic is essential to most of us, it can light up all areas of the brain, help develop skills with communication, help to establish identity, and allow a unique path for expression. However, barriers to access or gaps in provision can restrict access to music-making and sound exploration for some people. Research has shown that technology can provide unique tools to access music-making but that technology is underused by practitioners. This action research project details the development and design of a technological toolkit called MAMI – the Modular Accessible Musical Instrument technology toolkit - in conjunction with stakeholders from four research sites. Stakeholders included music therapists, teachers, community musicians, and children and young people. The overarching aims of the research
were: to explore how technology was incorporated into practices of music creation and sound exploration; to explore the issues that stakeholders had with current music technology; to create novel musical tools and tools that match criteria as specified by stakeholders, and address issues as found in a literature review; to assess the effectiveness of these novel tools with a view to improving practices; and to navigate propagation of the practices, technologies, and methods used to allow for transferability into the wider ecology. Outcomes of the research include: a set of design considerations that contribute to knowledge around
the design and practical use of technological tools for music-making in special educational needs settings; a series of methodological considerations to help future researchers and developers navigate the process of using action research to create new technological tools with stakeholders; and the MAMI Tech Toolkit – a suite of four bespoke hardware tools and accompanying software - as an embodiment of the themes that emerged from: the cycles of action research; the design considerations; and a philosophical understanding of music creation that foregrounds it as an situated activity within a social context
A matter of material : exploring the value of the Museum of Design in Plastics
Get PDFThis thesis, A Matter of Material: Exploring the Value of the Museum of Design in Plastics (MoDiP), sets out to understand how a museum focusing on a single material family can contribute to the societal and museological comprehension of design in plastics. It looks at how museums communicate a group of materials that audiences believe they know and understand, yet that knowledge and understanding may not be the whole story. It explores why it might seem strange that a museum dedicated to plastics even exists, by looking at what museums are, what they have been traditionally, and what they can become.
The contribution to knowledge that this research demonstrates is in the previously unwritten history and close study of MoDiP which is an, as yet, under researched resource. My role as Curator of MoDiP has provided an empirical knowledge and expertise that grounds this contribution in my professional practice. This has enabled an opening of a knowledge embedded in the role of a museum of a contested and devalued material, illuminating the problem of plastics in museums. The study inserts plastics, and the specific collection of them by MoDiP, into the relational museological theory to discover the value of the museum’s practice where complexity is added to the debate about plastics in the current climate. The particular interest of the triangular relationships between audiences, museums, and plastics is demonstrated using new diagrams, a tradition of museum studies especially used by Susan Pearce. The six original diagrams within the thesis are used to illustrate new ideas and concepts.
This research uses the tools of case study as a methodology to make a close study of the functions and collections of MoDiP, and in contrast the Pinto Collection of wooden objects at Birmingham Museums Trust. These tools include interviewing employees, studying documents, and observing practices, and sit alongside the curatorial practices of collections and object research, audience sampling through surveys and social media, as well as visiting other museums and exhibitions and reflecting on such experiences. By using these methods, this work investigates the material qualities of plastics, alongside other materials, and looks at why the placement of some materials within the museum setting might be difficult to comprehend and how, by being the sole focus of the museum, materials can be more deeply explored
After Hortus Malabaricus: Sensing and Presencing Rare Plants
No full textTaking plants of Malabar (present day Kerala, India) as its principal concern, the project, Sensing and Presencing Rare Plants through Contemporary Drawing Practice (Leverhulme Research Fellowshipm 2017-20) engages with and navigates through three distinct but interconnected historical and contemporary sites of knowledge:
- First, the extraordinary twelve-volume seventeenth century illustrated treatise on the flora of Malabar, Hortus Malabaricus, and its twenty-first century English translation
- Second, historical herbaria in Edinburgh and Oxford housing fragile examples of specimens described in the aforementioned publications, and brought to Britain during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
- Third, remote areas of moist deciduous rainforest of Malabar, the centuries-old protection of which has ensured the survival of some of the rarest plants.
The objectives are:
- Establish an original discourse that aims to bridge debates on contemporary drawing, materiality and the vulnerable nature of plant life;
- Enhance an understanding of the vulnerabilities and resilience of rare plants through research at the interstices of fine art, botany and plant science, museology and cultural geography.
Plants have been a ‘currency’ of empires, their collection and distribution having had huge social, cultural and political implications. Today, thousands of plant species are identified as endangered or possibly extinct, while bans on the transportation of plant specimens guard against bioprospecting and biopiracy. This, together with significant ongoing interest in drawing in the expanded field, and in the sensory and embodied experience of museum objects, opens a clear position for research investigating the relationships between rare plant life, drawing and herbaria.
Historically, drawing has been intrinsically connected to the collection and preservation of plants as a vehicle for scientific description and identification. With sophisticated digital visualisation technologies now occupying this central position, the proposed project asserts that contemporary art practices, especially those concerned with themes of ephemerality, are renewing the inspirational basis of botanical illustrations and specimens.
Building on Bowen’s previous extensive research in drawing and states of flux, this project links the extraordinary ephemerality of the natural world to a broader theoretical concern with, as David Howes has written the ‘multiple ways in which culture mediates sensation’. Hortus Malabaricus is remarkable for its in-depth description of Malabar’s plants provided a unique springboard for this investigation. At Edinburgh and Oxford herbaria, investigation of preserved examples of these species generated drawings reflecting the impact of conservation methods, and systems of storage, classification and labelling. Field visits to plant science research facilities and Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary, based in the bio-diverse South Indian rainforest, incrementally expanded an understanding of the ontological status of plant specimens in relation to site, whilst interdisciplinary methods offered new ways to engage with herbaria and navigate through protected areas of remote rainforest. This enabled consideration of how dialogue between science and art might be reflected through the conceptual and material aspects of the resulting art works, and the nature of their reception.
The output, outcomes and dissemination included:
i. An exhibition with gallery talks invited exploration of, and critical reflection on, the research by both specialist and non-specialist audiences, providing opportunities for future research and dialogue. The exhibition was staged at Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh in 2020.
ii. A closing conference offered a platform to review and extend the agenda of fine art practice-led research. Speakers included: Professor Andrew Patrizio, Edinburgh College of Art; Dr Ian Patterson, University of Cambridge; Dr Henry Noltie, RBGE; Joel Fisher and Dr Sarah Casey, LICA. It is anticipated that the papers presented will be published as a collection of texts through Northern Print, Newcastle.
iii. Reflective texts and visual documentation of the project and its dissemination through exhibition and conference papers, were published by Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and linked to social media platforms. The content of the seminars and wider critical themes were articulated, giving academics, practitioners and publics, nationally and internationally, the opportunity to engage with core ideas and outputs.
iv. Core issues which were discussed by Bowen through a conference paper, web article and video interview (University of Oxford) and journal article (DRTP, Intellect Publications)
Out in the open and invisible: The city as archive in essay film San Sabba
Get PDFIndependent filmmaking is often confronted with difficulties. For the team
behind San Sabha (Turina 2016) the issue resided in the invisibilities embedded
in the film's location: a concentration camp within the city of Trieste. This
article will explore how and why San Sabha considered the city of Trieste as an
archive of multiple histories, memories, and postmemory, and how it evolved
into a phenomenological examination of what a landscape can add to the collective memory of a city. Linking other locations in the city, which contribute to the elucidation of stories and histories deprived of public attention,
this article will consider the ontological qualities of the landscape as an archive
where dominant narratives impact the understandings of present and past identities
Illustrating The Jungle Camp: Potential and Limitations of Reportage and Identity Formation
No full textIn recent years, the mainstream press in the UK and France have devoted significant attention to illustrated imagery in communicating contemporary events. In particular, the illustrated image via reportage has become a prominent tool for articulating the identities of individuals at the margin of society, for example victims of war, refugees and displaced people. This article explores this alternative method of reporting by focusing on the considerable coverage that the Jungle camp at Calais has received through reportage across the British and French press and beyond. Utilising Fuyuki Kurasawa’s essay ‘Humanitarianism and the Representation of Alterity: the Aporias and Prospects of Cosmopolitan Visuality’ (2010), the article looks at the reporting of the refugees’ situation through an analysis of illustrations presented in articles and blogs published by The Guardian, Le Monde, Libération and Arte. It examines the potential for reportage illustrations to provide ‘thicker’ representations, more complex discourses and new or alternative approaches to the construction of identities, in particular identities that constitute ‘the other’ within the contemporary European scopic regime. The article finds that the construction of the subjects’ identity follows established tropes which are related to the methods and conditions of creation, and that there is a need to query existing approaches in order to question dominant discourses of identity. Moreover, we suggest that within the case of such image making, it is the identity of the artist/publisher/reader that is ultimately asserted, within the context of a humanitarian discourse
Twisting Metal with Earth
Get PDFThe video Twisting Metal with Earth was produced to explore how weather stations can be useful beyond their function as mechanical sensors. It was suggested that they also act as an aesthetic interface with the hyperobjects of big data and global climate. The video’s animated characters were voiced by interview recordings from couples discussing their experience of weather. One interviewee collected and shared data from his own weather station, others gave more experiential accounts. From the characters’, a conversation emerged that blurred the boundaries between global systems and local experience. Mechanical climate sensors and plants were discussed by the characters as useful objects to think through large and complex topics
The “Idea of Natural History” in the Work of Pierre Huyghe
Get PDFIn Theodor Adorno’s writing the term “natural history” has quite a different meaning to its usual scientific usage. Adorno’s idea of natural history aims at reconciling, in form and in content, the opposing forces of nature and history with the aim of overcoming the division of natural being and historical being that Adorno considered to be the central problem of critical social theory. Through sprawling installations the French contemporary artist Pierre Huyghe creates new forms of interaction between natural systems and artificial constructs. Huyghe’s body of work is submitted to interpretation through Adorno’s dialectic of nature and history to establish the relevance of both Huyghe’s practice and Adorno’s thought to the conditions of the Anthropocene
'The Rememberers' (We Are A Many-Bodied Singing Thing)
Get PDFFocus: Researching and writing an ecological short story about endangered species.
‘We Are a Many-Bodied Singing Thing’ is an anthology of speculative fiction and poetry inspired by endangered species, commissioned by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds ‘Back from the Brink’ project and published in 2020. The brief was for positive speculative writing that raised awareness about 28 threatened species highlighted by the project, including the Violet Click Beetle, the Royal Splinter Cranefly, Eagle’s-claw Lichen, Coral-tooth Fungi, Knothole Moss and the Noctule Bat. Using the ‘Back from the Brink’ resources as a starting point, the author researched a cross-section of endangered species. He combined this with field research, visiting ancient oaks in situ, various botanical gardens, the insect house at Cotswold Wildlife Park, and the Eden Project in Cornwall. The challenge was to then turn this scientific information into a creative narrative. When contemplating current and imminent species extinction it is very easy to slide into despair. As with much contemporary fiction that contemplates the stark existential threat of the Climate Emergency the predictable pathway (in terms of the storyworld paradigm) is one of dystopia. Utopia is a lot harder to imagine. But perhaps a more nuanced and realistic conceptualisation is one Margaret Atwood called ‘ustopia’. And so, this is the approach the author takes. His near-future narrative imagines a world with many problems, but like Pandora’s Box, there is also, critically, hope. ‘The Rememberers’ in Kevan’s story are a group of ecological resistance fighters who use their memories as storage for the minutiae of endangered species. This co-opts Cicero’s ‘method of loci’ (from De Oratore) and turns it into a kind of ark. As a professional storyteller and performance poet, the author has made a study of mnemonic devices and has used them extensively in his performance to memorize text (see The Bardic Handbook, Gothic Image, 2006). This long-term experiential research (1998-) has informed the story in this anthology. The story has been ‘tested’ out on live audiences (via virtual open mics during the 2020 lockdown), including during ‘Writing the Earth’ (AUB, April 2021), the 2-day symposium exploring creative writing and the environment organised by the author, in which creative responses to the climate crisis were extensively discussed with students and a range of guest speakers. ‘The Rememberers’ encourages readers to commit to action, while demonstrating the power of words, especially when embodied. The effort required to learn something by heart is an act of honouring. As a regional organiser for the national annual recitation contest founded by former Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, ‘Poetry by Heart’, the author has seen this first hand: how committing a text to memory can be very empowering – which is the dramatic arc of the story’s main protagonist. Thus, the story itself explores the mnemonic process and the valuation of ecological knowledge within ‘storied’ communities. The short story that resulted from this range of research was included in the published anthology from the RSPB