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Serumpun: crafts across borders
No full textThis project Serumpun was intellectually and intuitively driven initiated as a collective endeavour to address the priorities of craft practitioners and communities across Borneo. The long-term collaboration between Wendy Teo, The Borneo Laboratory and Lynn-Sayers McHattie, The Glasgow School of Art laid the foundations for the Cultural-Assets & Vernacular Materials project with Gamia Dewanggamanik and Dr Marianne McAra. Together we, as design and craft practitioners and researchers questioned how we could ‘make visible’, celebrate traditional wisdom and enhance the work of craft practitioners and communities in Borneo to usher in positive change through the lens of sustainability. As the project progressed, the intricate web of geopolitical dynamics, local histories and politics that surround raw material resources and craft more broadly began to unveil the realities faced by practitioners.
To provide a more comprehensive picture of this ecosystem, we recognised that the 11 projects and practitioners within the Cultural-Assets & Vernacular Materials programme played distinct roles within the craft and material landscape, each necessitating tailored facilitation and bespoke approaches. Some entered as designers - a relatively recent introduction aimed at further capitalising and commodifying - the traditional craft market. Accordingly, they faced a complex dilemma negotiating with the community as the quality of production now hinges on market demands. Their presence has the potential to elevate the market value of crafts, however it also runs the risk of diverting these creations from their original purpose as cherished heirloom objects. Others assumed the role of community activists and facilitators, working closely with communities to impart skills and knowledge that are both relevant and compensatory for what may be lacking within the community and crucially to ensure cultural continuity. These facilitators, often possessing backgrounds in cultural practices, oversee multiple community projects through their presence as cultural custodians. Then, there are those who engage as craft practitioners themselves - their roles as skilled artisans have long competed with more financially rewarding opportunities – such as those offered by the extraction economies across the region, a legacy from the colonial era.
In the process of undertaking the Cultural-Assets & Vernacular Materials programme, curating the Serumpun Exhibition and Showcase at the Borneo Cultures Museum - the first of its kind to position craft as a ‘living and embodied’ practice - and compiling this book, we’ve come to understand that the story of Borneo’s craft artisans can only be authentically conveyed by delving into the nuances that surround relationships with crafts, materials, places, locales and politics. Hence, the framework of this book has been constructed to both mediate and meditate on these intricate relationships. Through these pages, we hope to shed light on the rich tapestry of Borneo’s crafts and the profound connections they share with the people, place, and craft practices that shape this extraordinary cultural landscape
Data Poets in Urban Spaces: Enhancing Human Perceptions through AI-Assisted Psychogeographic Walks
Get PDFPaper presented at "The Infrastructures of Socio-Ecological Knowing in the City" workshop at King's college London, in preparation of a special issue due for publication early 2025
In the project "Data Poets," we propose a place-based research methodology that weaves the experiential richness of human sensorial engagement with the potential of generative AI, to reimagine socio-ecological knowing in urban spaces. Drawing from Heidegger's concept of Dasein — 'being-in-the-world' — and Bachelard's "Poetics of Space," this approach looks to the human as an embodied agent, not just a data source, in exploring urban environments.
The 'Data Poets' are AI-powered devices used in psychogeographic walks across Glasgow. These devices serve as data collectors and conversational partners that interpret, echo or contrast the sensorial experiences of participants. This interaction creates a dialogic space where the AI's output becomes a reflective tool, intriguing for its capacity to both align with and diverge from human perceptions.
We seek to discern what can be perceived and recalled through human senses and cognition — the smells, sounds, textures and lived experiences of the city — and how AI can initiate dialogues to deepen our understanding of these experiences. The project challenges the conventional data-centric narratives of urban ecology, emphasising the subjective, phenomenological aspects of urban life
Views of Specialist Clinicians and People With Multiple Sclerosis on Upper Limb Impairment and the Potential Role of Virtual Reality in the Rehabilitation of the Upper Limb in Multiple Sclerosis: Focus Group Study
Get PDFBackground: Finding enjoyable and effective long-term approaches to rehabilitation for improving upper limb (UL) function for people with multiple sclerosis (pwMS) is challenging. Using virtual reality (VR) could be a solution to this challenge however; there is a lack of reporting on pwMS’ and clinicians’ views on VR-based approaches and recommendations for games for rehabilitation.
Objective: To identify common UL problems and their related current therapeutic approaches in pwMS and 2) to explore the opinions of pwMS and specialist clinicians’ on VR and suggestions for development and design of VR games.
Methods: Separate focus groups were conducted with pwMS, recruited through the MS Society UK’s research network, and clinicians, recruited through the UK’s Therapists in MS network. Ten pwMS (two focus groups) and eight clinicians (five physiotherapists, two occupational therapists and one MS-nurse, two focus groups) were involved. Focus groups were recorded and transcriptions analyzed using theme-based content analysis (TBCA).
Results: People with MS commonly reported their UL problems interfered with activities of daily living (ADL) and resulted in the loss of meaningful hobbies such as writing. Many pwMS neglected UL exercise and found strategies for adapting to the UL impairments. Similarly, clinicians stated UL rehabilitation was neglected within their service and that it was challenging to find interesting treatment strategies. VR was suggested by both participant groups as a solution, being convenient for pwMS to access and could provide a more engaging and disguised approach to exercise. There were shared concerns with cybersickness and disengagement with using VR approaches. Both groups agreed games should be meaningful and adaptable for users, but suggested different VR activities, with clinicians suggesting games directly reflecting ADL and pwMS more abstract activity.
Conclusions: VR was well received by both pwMS and clinicians for UL rehabilitation. Recommendations are made for the development of VR rehabilitation games which are personalized and customizable for the varying ability of pwMS
Churches Grown from Seeds
No full textSeries of rendered photogrammetry scans capturing the ruins of Armenian and Georgian churches in Kars, northeast Turkey.
If churches grew from seeds, perhaps you would think the chapels and monasteries in the Kars region of present-day Turkey were carried by the winds or on the fur of a wild animal, across the border from Armenia. They are scattered throughout the landscape, erupting from fields and valleys. Of course, this is not correct, these Medieval Armenian churches are human-made, they were grown from stone and mortar, and they have existed on the land long before lines of contemporary states were drawn and the national border fences were constructed. But maybe, if churches did grow from seeds, you would wonder why haven’t they grown so well here? Why are their roofs misshapen, their walls arching towards the ground?
The scans were produced during field research, funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, and undertaken as part of my master’s thesis titled ‘The Armenian Ruins of kars: Mapping for Expanded Narratives of a Contested Borderland’ (Kadir Has University, Istanbul). The work is exhibited as part of the Creative Action Coalition’s ‘Cogs in The Machine: Breaking the Mechanisms of Oppression’ exhibition
Mercury Revisited
No full textMercury Revisited
Sonic Soundscape, played in the Reid Lecture Theatre for the Queer Materialities Live event on 14th March 2024.
‘Queer Materialities Live' featured live performances, short screenings, readings, singing, discussions, and artworks that approach the lecture theatre as exhibition space. The Queer Materialities Research Network foregrounds artistic research through practice in all its pluralities. It is an inclusive group that welcomes those that identify as queer alongside those that do not, but engage in queer methods of making. Queer Materialities Live! mobilises notions of queer across the grammatical spectrum as verb (to queer); as noun (the queer) and as adjective (the great queering). It seeks to actualise and question queer community through presentation, response, liveness and sensory experimentation
Landscape as Archive
Get PDFLandscape as Archive is a collaborative creative research publication which explores a particular hyperlocality on the Altyre Estate, a Bronze Age cist site. The authors key in to this specific point in the landscape, 57.577883,-3.6408845, in the contemporary moment, to address the disruptions and traumas of archaeological extraction, to explore the impact of this archaeology in the now, and to ask questions around the ethics of storage and retention in museum collections. Through a combination of archaeology, site walking, archive research and creative practice, the authors open a space for the affective addresses of the deceased; this combination of research, practice and autobiography, surfaces questions of death, belonging and bereavement. The Fieldguide shows ways of thinking and making with the potential for new intersubjective relations to manifest between the human and the world. To think of the landscape-as-archive through the lens of the archaeology in and of the present, is to orient our attention to the surface. Here, at the surface, we slip between different temporalities and in so doing become fully conscious
Creative Perspectives Towards Trans-disciplinary Learning Models: Clothing as a Medium for Creative Enhancement and Education
Get PDFAs a significant part of childhood material culture, children’s clothes and their design contribute to shaping their social identity, gender, age, as well as to developing their senses of and supporting their interactions with their environment. IN2FROCC gathers together historians, anthropologists, sociologists, ethnologists, museum
curators, childhood practitioners, designers, industry representatives, in a hub for the research and experimentation into children’s clothes across the globe, time and social ecosystems.
This international and interdisciplinary network seeks to engage in an innovative, inclusive and organic manner with current research on children’s dress codes, fashion and clothes. Original
in its approach, IN2FROCC opens up to practice-based research, in order to inform the mechanisms involved in design processes and children’s interactions with their material environment. Developed as part of this programme, and with a specific focus on child-led action
research, projects such as “Tell me”, explore more precisely the learning potential of clothes for children, enhancing the opportunities provided by this socialising tool to support educators creatively and raise the environmental and cultural awareness of future responsible citizens
tit-bits
No full textThis book is a catalogue of the exhibition tit-bits held at South Block, Glasgow in November 2023. It is prefaced by Carl Lavery’s essay 'Bits and Pieces: Fiona Robertson, the Grotesque and the Dave Clark Five'.
The catalogue provides colour documentation of the exhibition, stills from the film and a short accompanying text. A concluding section of the catalogue documents, and expands on, the poster work distributed at the exhibition. The drawings featured in that poster work are presented here alongside a translation of a text by Jean Dubuffet taken from the catalogue of Dubuffet’s 1947 exhibition Portraits
Ornament and Crime: Power, gender and domestic opulence in Gomorrah (2014-21)
Get PDFItalian TV series Gomorrah – The Series (2014–21) presents a contemporary dramatization of the lives of the Neapolitan Camorra based on Roberto Saviano’s novel (2006). This visual analysis critically examines the symbolism of the fictional domestic interiors of the main protagonists, Genny Savastano and Ciro
Di Marzio, who inhabit the La Scampia neighbourhood of urban Naples. The rise in quality contemporary TV dramas which give high attention to character development, relationships and the elongated storyline has allowed the production quality to flourish. Thus, fictional interiors within quality TV series, such as
Gomorrah, have become integral for the viewer to assimilate narrative and meaning from the interior spaces. In this close analysis, I use the lens of interior design to examine the mise en scène via the combination of components from the atmosphere, set, lighting and narrative. June Whiteread (2017) suggests the mise en
scène of film and TV allows our eyes and imaginations to consider how it might feel to be in, to smell and to emulate the emotion with the fictional interior. Key to this visual scrutiny is how the curation of objects, furniture, colour palettes, ornamentation and decorative motifs serve as narrative backdrops. This critical analysis explores the boundaries of power, class and gender through the fictional interiors of Gomorrah, where the hard, masculine architecture conceals the jewel-like interiors encased within the darkness
Printshop! 2024
No full textExploring new possibilities for a dialogic and collaborative space of making through Letterpress printing, artistic collaboration, workshops and public engagement.
Printshop! is a hands-on celebration of printing and the creative potential of print and typography for public engagement developed by Edwin Pickstone and Tramway, Glasgow.
Gallery text:
Printshop! is a participatory print exhibition that everyone can get involved in, centred around a programme of free drop-in printmaking workshops* and our in-house letterpress.
This year, Printshop! 2024 features a collaborative project by printer and typographer Edwin Pickstone, and animator Ross Hogg, that explores the interplay between print and animation. It is accompanied by a generative electronic soundtrack created by electronic musician Konx-Om-Pax.
When Printshop! is not playing host to artist-led workshops, visitors can still drop in during gallery hours to see the exhibition, and to try letterpress printing available in the gallery for its duration.
All Printshop activities are run by professional artists and designers. The workshops are free to join with materials provided and no booking required.
Workshops hosted by:
Zephyr Liddel & Ben Ashton: Stencil Screen Printing
Erin Bradley Scott: Sign-Writing, Mono-print and Stencil Lettering
Ruth Kirkby: Letterpress Printing
Alice Dansey Wright: Hand Painted Lettering on Textiles
Mobile Print Studio: Screen Printing
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