232 research outputs found
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Designing (for) transitions and transformations: Imagination, climate futures, and everyday lives (2024)
No full textThe theme track ‘Designing (for) Transitions and Transformations: Imagination, Climate Futures, and Everyday Lives’ at DRS 2024 includes 21 papers covering a wide range of approaches to design’s role in transformative change in the pursuit of sustainable, just and resilient futures. In this editorial, we present a variety of perspectives from conveners of this track in which we highlight what we each found interesting or noteworthy about the papers we read and how these affected our position towards the design, transitions and transformations field, but also the wider
trends and calls for further work or different directions. Moreover, we reflect on our own perspectives on this emerging landscape, questioning how each of us uses
design/transition methodologies in our own work, why we find these useful and which topics or themes we focus on.
Keywords: transition design; climate futures; transformations; imaginatio
Imagining Bodies and Performer Training : The Legacies of Jacques Lecoq and Gaston Bachelard
No full textThis book is a practical and theoretical exploration of the embodied imagining processes of devised performance in which the human and more-than-human are co-implicated in the creative process. This study brings together the work of French theatre pedagogue Jacques Lecoq (1921-1999) and French philosopher of science and the imagination Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962) to explore the notion of the imagination as embodied, enactive and embedded in the devising process. An exploration of compelling correspondences with Bachelard, whose writings imbue Lecoq's teaching ethos, offers new practical and theoretical perspectives on Lecoq's 'poetic body' in contemporary devising practices. Interweaving first-hand accounts by the author and interviews with contemporary international creative practitioners who have graduated from or have been deeply influenced by Lecoq, Imagining Bodies in Performer Training interrogates how his teachings have been adapted, developed and extended in various cultural, political and historical settings, in Europe, Scandinavia, Asia, and North and South America. These new and rich insights reveal a teaching approach that resists fixity and instead unfolds, develops and adapts to the diverse cultural and political contexts of its practitioners, teachers and students
The Research Studio Episode 3 Noemi Gunea
No full textInterview with Noemi Gunea on her research into the pedagogy of post-dramatic theatre at Wimbledon College of Arts. We talk about the nature and politics of post-dramatic theatre, details of her recent piece "Zen and Zeroes", inclusivity, personal values, and what it’s like to undertake a pre-determined research studentship. noemigunea.co
Play = Object’, Tangible Territory
No full textThis collaborative essay documents a pair of creative workshops organised by the Pattern and Chaos research group, Norwich University of the Arts. The workshops engaged the idea of creative play through the speculative exploration of small found objects; this article by the workshop hosts considers critical models for collaborative and creative play as experienced through objects
The Centenary of Caring Project: A Co-Created Public Art Exhibition Expressing How Covid-19 Impacted On Health and Social Care Settings in East Anglia
No full textBackground: The centenary of caring was a collaborative arts-based project, that combined university students with community-based practitioners, working during the COVID -19 pandemic, across health and social care settings.
Problem Statement: To co-produce artistic expression of the impact and experience of the government enforced lockdowns, exploring what effect this enforced isolation had on local communities’ wellbeing. The proposition was to capture evidence of how creative art engagement can be utilised as a public health strategy, through capturing how those living and working in our care settings had been affected by the
pandemic.
Methods: A stakeholder perspective was sought, through including the public, care home residents, health, and social care practitioners, working together with university students and academics, engaged as collaborating partners during early peaks of infection across the UK of the COVID-19 pandemic (i.e., April – July 2020).
Key Findings: Engaging with creative arts enables an inclusive process from which to promote a positive influence on our social and workplace environments. Few studies using co-production activities have attempted to bridge the gap between focused engagement with creative arts and evidencing this approach as a public mental health strategy.
Contributions: The centenary of caring project promoted positive stakeholder engagement in creative arts engagement for improved psychological expression. The work stimulated cross cultural interest for creative arts engagement, as a public health engagement strategy. Policy implications are for a collaborative approach (between health and higher education institutions) to improve investment in coproduction, through collective arts engagement, as a process for sustaining healthy communities
Eva Švankmajerová: From the Interior
Full text linkEva Švankmajerová (1940-2005) was a leading artist of the post-war Czech and Slovak surrealist group. Though primarily known as a painter, her practice also extended into graphics, ceramics and a fertile collaborative partnership with Jan Švankmajer. The focus of this paper is Švankmajerová’s imaginative and deeply personal exploration of identity, gender and the body in the context of domestic environments and objects through artworks that seek, in František Dryje’s words, to unmask “everything false, everything which camouflages, everything with which people deceive themselves”. The snares of domestic environments, objects and roles become spaces in which to renegotiate identity through ‘painting from the interior’, an identity bound up in Švankmajerová’s complex and sometimes anguished response to the construction of gender within post-war Czechoslovak society
The Anxious Spiral
No full textThis essay considers the figure of the spiral as a universal morphological form, symbol and myth, with particular focus on its appearance in the international avant-garde through figures such as Alfred Jarry, Marcel Duchamp, Frederick Kiesler and groups including Cobra and the Situationist International. Looking at a range of examples, from spirals in scientific and archaeological contexts to the appearance of the spiral in art, architecture, literature, photography and film, it pays particular attention to the spiral’s ability to connect the apparently polarised dynamics of pattern and chaos, and examines the availability of this privileged figure to divergent paths running from ideas of spirituality and sacred geometry to mid- and late-twentieth century representations of anxiety, hysteria and mind control