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A History of Architectural Modelmaking in Britain: The Unseen Masters of Scale and Vision
No full textArchitectural modelmakers have long carried out their work hidden behind the scenes of architectural design, and in presenting a history of architectural modelmaking in Britain for the first time, this book casts a new light on their remarkable skills and achievements.
By telling the story of the modelmakers who make architectural models rather than architects who commission and use them, this book seeks to celebrate their often-overlooked contribution to the success and endurance of the architectural model in Britain over the past one hundred and forty years. Drawing from extensive archival research and interviews with practicing and retired modelmakers, this book traces the complete history of architectural modelmaking in Britain from its initial emergence as a specialist occupation at the end of the nineteenth century through to the present day. It reveals the legacy of John Thorp, the first professional architectural modelmaker in Britain, who opened his business in London in 1883, and charts the lives and careers of the innovative and creative modelmakers who followed him. It examines the continually evolving materials, tools, and processes of architectural modelmaking and outlines the profound ideological, economic, and technological influences that have shaped the profession’s development.
Illustrated with over one hundred photographs of architectural models from previously undocumented archives, this book will be of great interest to architectural modelmakers, academics, and historians, as well as anyone with an interest in architectural history and modelmaking
Art as education: redefining a live art practice as a pedagogical tool, and its perception and place in the learning environment
Get PDFThis research study examined and tested how the pedagogical elements of live art contribute to young people's development and potentially play a transformative role in secondary education. It offered an alternative art syllabus that incites response-ability and respects individual freedom in secondary education, using creative modes of self-exploration that embrace embodiment, vulnerability, and unpredictability. These elements have shown a potential to transform the perception of assessments in education
Haunting and Hauntology in AI Collaborative Image-Making
Get PDFThis paper documents the Author’s experiments with 3D-based AI image generation software, identifying within the visual outcomes a tendency towards hauntology that is seemingly the result of the collaborative image-making process as well as a material quality of the method. The paper suggests that a combination of the authors own aesthetic concerns and working methods, combined with the tendencies inherent within the training method used to develop the Stable Diffusion AI model, results in images that are haunting in a number of ways that align to the conceptual framework of Hauntology: through unexpected traces and glitches; anachronism; notions of shared dreaming / remembering; and through the invocation of the poor image
Joseph Beuys and live scribing: A speculative timeline
Get PDFThis article utilizes similarities and overlaps between the work of Joseph Beuys and the increasingly prominent illustrative and performative practices of live scribing or graphic recording as a springboard into a further discourse regarding management theory and creative practice. The idea of the graphic recorder or graphic facilitator originated from interactions between management theory, architecture and the new age counterculture of the 1970s. In recent times, embodied as the live scribe, such practice may now be considered within a seemingly incongruous overlap of management theory and contemporary illustration.
Joseph Beuys in his own way was also a ‘live scribe’. Designated under his all-encompassing concept of ‘social sculpture’, his was a performative art; constructed with the ambitious aim of healing social ills and reuniting elements of the primitive and modern. This article – delivered in part as an illustrated timeline – will act as a speculative survey of equivalences, links and historical foreshadows resonating between the work of Joseph Beuys and contemporary practices of live scribing or graphic recording
#PrecarityStory: Academic Casualization and Feminist Filmmaking
No full textAmidst the UK higher education strikes, Lorena Cervera and Isabel Seguí codirected #PrecarityStory, a short documentary that exposes the increasing precarisation of academic labour at universities. Released in 2020, the film follows a working day in the life of Isabel who, at that time, was a cleaner, researcher, and teacher at the same British elite institution. This is a (self-consciously) performative documentary (Bruzzi, 2006) inspired methodologically by the transmediatic form of Latin American testimonio, where an individual subject stands for a community and the film is an activist artefact in which ‘reality’ is managed creatively to further the political agenda of the filmmakers. This chapter explores the complexities of this approach in which a filmmaker and an empowered film subject join forces to challenge an exploitative workplace and interrogate the mode of production of collaborative cinemas
Many Paths Through the Forest: Exploring Arborescence and Ecological Themes in Digital Interactive Narrative
No full textIn this article I reflect upon the process of designing and constructing a digital interactive narrative using elements of biomimicry as an intrinsic part of the ecological themes it wishes to dramatise. The ‘branchiness’ of this modern iteration of the chooseyour-own-adventure style of game is supported by a complex substructure of coding and wider ecosystem of coders, mirroring a forest and its exoteric and esoteric networks and labyrinths. Published by West Coast start-up, Tales: choose your own story, Hyperion: tower of the winds (2020) is a 24-part, 96,000-word digital novel set in the storyworld of my fantasy series, The Windsmith Elegy (2004-2012). I argue that Fantasy has a role to play in cultivating ecoliteracy and in modelling alternative modalities in response to the multiple challenges we face in the Climate Emergency. I posit that the design, playing, and prosumer discourse such ergodic texts generate have a mycelial quality to them—rhizomatic structures, which, as Deleuze and Guattari advocate, are
non-hierarchical, resilient, and reciprocal. Acknowledging the compromised entanglement of the digital, I critique the affect and ethics of gaming platforms, which can both raise awareness and be part of the problem: the dirty ecology of every electronic device and virtual noosphere
The Postnatural Animal in Contemporary Art
Get PDFThe thesis uses art practice as a research method to propose novel characterisations of animal life. These characterisations aim to challenge an organicist image of non-human animals. The thesis considers animal bodies and behaviours as subject to aesthetic judgments that are underpinned by deeper ontological and epistemological commitments as to relations between nature and society, in which to be categorised as the former entails a series of privations in relation to the latter – the absence of freedom, subjectivity and creativity. Scholarly research on the history of the perception and conception of animal life within modernity, and subsequent challenges made to these within the contemporary humanities and contemporary art support and inform the practical enquiry. The thesis draws primarily here upon new materialist and post-humanist-oriented animal studies, and on scholarship surrounding the contemporary French artist, Pierre Huyghe.
Positing the Anthropocene as a condition in which the distinction between human history and natural history has collapsed, the thesis argues for disassociating the concept ‘animal’ and the concept ‘nature’. The thesis attends to entanglements of animal worlds and cultural tropes where this equation fails. It proposes an an-organic and dis-harmonious animal life that attest to the end of nature and witnesses the dissonant and incomplete conditions of modernity. Both the written argument and the artistic outcomes propose novel ways to consider animals in relation to visuality. The thesis takes bio-art (i.e., art practice that incorporates living organisms) as of methodological value in this project where it engages the potentiality of animals themselves to challenge a received historical status. Furthermore, art practice is not just seen as a vehicle for depicting animal futures, but as a condition for liberating animals from nature. The thesis thus equates the postnatural animal with their becoming agents within artworks
The relationship between professional autonomy, social power and organisational structure for Heads of Quality as third space professionals in English Higher Education
Get PDFThe increasing complexity of external regulation and quality metrics applied to universities in recent decades has emphasised the importance of the internal role of Head of Quality. This thesis discusses the social power and professional autonomy of Heads of Quality in higher education in England. It considers the types and levels of power and autonomy they exercise, and how this is affected by organisational structure. Following a scoping survey with responses from 52 Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in England, 11 interviews were conducted across three case study HEIs, selected as representatives of particular organisational types, with staff in similar roles interviewed in each case. Alongside the Head of Quality, interviews were also conducted with their line manager, a direct report, and a senior academic with responsibility for quality management. The thesis proposes a new exploratory typology of HEIs according to organisational structure, based on the degree of centralisation / devolution and the strength of hierarchical control. Secondly, it offers an enhanced understanding of the role played by ‘third space’ professionals within English higher education, typified by the Head of Quality. It argues that the ‘space’ in which these third space professionals operate is not uniform, and that while each Head of Quality exercises professional autonomy, the ways in which these are enacted is dependent on organisational type and the availability of different bases of social power. It therefore adds to the literature on third space professionals in higher education, by proposing a more structurally-situated explanation for the phenomenon which also considers organisational type. Finally, the thesis proposes a model of social power and the deployment of professional autonomy according to organisational type. These findings extend our understanding of the exercise of social power and professional autonomy within different types of HEI, and have practical implications for universities, individuals with responsibilities for quality assurance, and the wider professional workforce
Layered Visions and the Teleorama: Constructing Sites of Ruination through a Contemporary Drawing Practice
Get PDFIn this practice-based research project the Teleorama, an historical, miniature optical device, is interrogated as a two-dimensional, drawn, painted or printed form that expands into a three-dimensional layered structure to internally depict a scene or event. This interrogation is brought into a relationship with the subject matter of the spatiality and materiality of modern ruins to address the following principal research question: Can the form of the Teleorama be applied to an investigation of sites of contemporary ruination in order to create immersive drawing-based installations that offer new approaches to fine art drawing practice?
The Teleoramic viewing experience is theorised through ‘layered vision’, a concept describing how the form is constructed to depict a scene from several viewpoints, or distinct spatial locations, and is consequently able to represent multiple moments in time. The Teleorama’s ability to invite the viewer ‘in’ to explore its miniature space is conceptualised through reference to the Picturesque, with which it shares an interest in framing and layering as absorptive devices, evidenced in contemporaneous painting and garden design.
Through constructing maquettes informed by several formal iterations of the Teleorama, and enlarging these to become installations, my practice explores the extent to which such works can convey the fragility and ephemerality observed in my initial encounters with modern ruin sites. The Teleorama’s potential to provide a perceptually and physically immersive experience for the viewer is examined in relation to both its structural form and selected fine art installation practices that employ representational imagery.
Whilst existing two-dimensional art practices address the modern ruin as a subject matter, this research proposes that the multi-layered, semi-enclosed structure of the Teleorama can be used as a basis from which to create immersive drawings of such sites. As such, I propose ‘installation drawing’ as a novel art form that allows for the physical experience of space and apprehension of a remote, virtual place. This dual ability suggests installation drawing as a model that might be adapted to confer this dynamic viewing experience to wider subject matter (and through varied media) by practice-based researchers in the field of Fine Art and beyond across other disciplines
Prints
No full textThe prints figuring in the 2023 edition of the Loudest Whispers annual art exhibition include: Aphrodite and Garbo (2023), Hermaphrodite 13 & 17 (2018), Dreams of Dionysius (2023) and Bacchus in Blue (2023). The prints were also included in the Summer by the River: LOUDEST WHISPERS OVER LONDON event held on 27 August 2023, featuring works projected on a large screen set up outside the London Town Hall