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Radiant Heretic with Yumino Seki (Live Group)
No full textA splinter group of Spirit of Gravity, made up of Caleb Madden, Luke Pendrell, Grant Cieciura & Tiago De Sousa perform an original audio piece. This particular work features Yumino Seki who is a U.K based independent dance artist, Butoh practitioner, performer, teacher and somatic movement educator & therapist
Time and space in a dish: Examining the relationship between materiality and space in the early modern saloop stall
Get PDFWalking in the early morning in London in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries you would have come across a new consumption space, the saloop stall. These stalls operated for only a few hours before being packed away. Yet in their time they offered to labouring Londoners, its watchmen and chimney sweeps, a warm respite. Taking a microhistorical approach, this paper provides the first critical examination of these spaces. It looks to establish the temporality of these stalls and how they were situated in the broader urban routines. It also analyses the role materiality played in establishing these spatialities. This paper looks to reframe the stall’s ceramic cups and hot tea urns, demonstrating how they were crucial to creating a space of labour and sociability, removed from the domestic context they have often been associated with. This research is approached via a wide range of sources such as contemporary literature, visual culture and court testimonies. Consideration is given to material and sensorial attributes; factors that inform the creation and use of this space at every turn. It hopes to provide an example of the value taking a material and sensory-based approach when researching itinerant street traders
Collaborative online international learning for design education: A framework for studio-based learning
Get PDFThe ability to think beyond disciplinary and geographical boundaries is essential for future designers to approach complex challenges and make a meaningful impact. Traditionally, these skills are developed in a studio environment where students can participate in mobility programmes and connect with peers from other disciplines; however, the COVID-19 pandemic has limited these opportunities due to social distance requirements. This article presents a framework for collaborative online international learning (COIL) for studio-based courses as an alternative for educators who want to foster interdisciplinary and intercultural learning in online and hybrid environments. The framework emerged from the development and delivery of a COIL initiative for an experience design studio course offered at an Australian University, in partnership with consumer behaviour and intercultural communication courses at a Brazilian University. The collaboration involved peer-to-peer online interactions between 43 undergraduate students enrolled in the three courses. Despite the renewed popularity of implementing COIL in higher education to overcome pandemic barriers, there is little documentation of applying the method in design disciplines and less evidence on how it corresponds to studio pedagogy. This type of computer-mediated collaboration offers an accessible and more inclusive alternative to mobility programmes and can continue to expand the opportunities for students to experience the world during and after the pandemic. The article focuses on the perspective of design education, reflecting on the benefits and challenges of online international collaboration, and provides new insights into the adaptations required to integrate the COIL and studio models
Explore the future Earth with Wander 2.0: AI chatbot driven by knowledge-base story generation and text-to-image model
Get PDFPeople always envision the future of earth through science fiction (Sci-fi), so can we create a unique experience of "visiting the future earth" through the lens of artificial intelligence (AI)? We introduce Wander 2.0, an AI chatbot that co-creates sci-fi stories through knowledge-based story generation on daily communication platforms like WeChat and Discord. Using location information from Google Maps, Wander generates narrative travelogues about specific locations (e.g. Paris) through a large-scale language model (LLM). Additionally, using the large-scale text-to-image model (LTGM) Stable Diffusion, Wander transfers future scenes that match both the text description and location photo, facilitating future imagination. The project also includes a real-time visualization of the human-AI collaborations on a future map. Through journeys with visitors from all over the world, Wander demonstrates how AI can serve as a subjective interface linking fiction and reality. Our research shows that multi-modal AI systems have the potential to extend the artistic experience and creative world-building through adaptive and unique content generation for different people. Wander 2.0 is available at http://wander001.com
The net, knotted out of thought-ends (Blue)
No full textThe net, knotted out of thought-ends (Blue) 2023 Flit net shopping bag; lightbulb Approx. 90 x 30 x 15 cm At the beginning of his book Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan, Jean Daive writes: ‘A recollection: near Avenue Emile-Zola, Paul Celan looks for a grocery store. He buys a lightbulb that he puts in a huge netbag. Carrying the netted lightbulb he moves on in a lordly way. And the net hangs heavy.’ The netted bag, mostly empty, mostly nothing, yet hanging heavy with something that will bring lightness: this seemed a perfect image for Celan and his work. The title of this sculpture is a line taken from Celan’s poem ‘Thick Easter smoke’, published in his 1970 collection Lichtzwang (Forced light)
Trafficking the Earth
No full textTrafficking the Earth is a collection of documents that reproduces historical constellations of appropriation and accumulation, depletion and displacement, violence and its disguise, begun by mining nitrate and copper. It is work of documentation. Photography is the focus but it is only one type of document in historical and contemporary mining landscapes. A photograph is a trace, an imprint of time and space, but as Walter Benjamin wrote, 'to live is to leave traces' and the documents of nitrate and copper are found in many places, preserved and obscured. The Atacama Desert, the Pacific ports of Iquique and Pisagua, mining town of Chuquicamata, the slag heaps of Coquimbo, the City of London, the docks of Liverpool, the waterfront of Swansea, First World War munitions factories and battlefields, English country estates and Oxford Colleges may appear as separate geographies yet they are entangled together in the transport and transformations of nitrate and copper
Seeing the invisible: Revisiting the value of critical tools in design research for social change
Get PDFThe idea that designers can affect society is not new, but social change is increasingly becoming a central purpose of our practice. This chapter discusses how to be an effective cultural intermediary by using our skills strategically to have a positive impact on society. Designers are within what Pierre Bourdieu classified as cultural intermediaries, due to our central role in cultural reproduction. We constantly influence people’s views, beliefs, and behaviors by shaping the aesthetic, functional and perceived value of products, services, and systems. These activities are intrinsic to our practice, and most designers are not aware of the power we hold to influence and shape society. Critical tools can play an important role in design research for social change, helping to see the invisible forces that dominate human interaction, including the connection between our worldviews, design decisions and their potential impact and consequences in society. A case study illustrates how critical tools are used to generate new insights about the sociocultural contexts in which design research takes place, revealing the values, ideologies, assumptions, power relations that are entangled within design activity. By developing a more nuanced understanding of the power of meanings and how we can use them strategically, we can amplify our impact towards cultural transformation and flourishing
A body of memory: Mnemesoid
No full textThis thematic group exhibition explores the role that memory plays in the construction of a person’s sense of self, and how identity, like remembrance, is something that is shaped by experience, history, knowledge of our bodies, and other factors and contingencies. Eschewing supernatural notions of a fixed and eternal soul, A Body of Memory (from neurons to the sea) takes inspiration from a psychological “turn” away from metaphysics and religion, and towards the idea that recalling who we were helps to shape and inform who we are, and what we shall become. Through the work of nine international artists, A Body of Memory (from neurons to the sea) traces the various ways and means through which recollection is not only tied to cognition, but how the plastic, malleable, and mutable nature of memory affects our ties to ourselves and other individuals, both human and non-human. This change in the perception of the self – from something cosmic, intangible, and set, to something more social, embodied, and fluid – opens unique ways of thinking about our shared existence in specific, and memory formation in general. For example, how do the inherited stories and life experiences of our forefathers, foremothers, and other forebears inform not only how we think about ourselves, but how we feel as well? Furthermore, how do our learned senses – of taste, and touch, but also of pain and thirst, for example – read the world, and how do these processes and organs construct people’s worldviews and specific emotions at the same time? Like a light shined through a prism, the exhibition at Kunsthall Trondheim casts various impressions on how life can be awakened from resting archives and other evidentiary means. For example, in Libita Sibungu’s project Quantum Ghost (2019–2023), the artist uses sound and language to create an aural experience that explores processes of constructing and deconstructing experience as a way to channel the often-incomprehensible nature of holding or thinking about a memory. How stories change through different tellings and their transmission between different generations, and how each of those generations carries and holds these reports, can likewise be illustrated through Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi’s film work INTO THE VIOLET BELLY (2022), an intimate collaboration between the artist and her mother – who fled Vietnam after the end of the American War via a near-calamitous sea journey – which blends family lore, mythology, science fiction, and digital abstraction, and for which the artist has made a new presentation, In it snakes entwine while the stars tremble (2023), specifically for the exhibition together with the architect George Vlasis Pakalidis; or seen through the artificial intelligence and spiritual medium called Piña, in the VR installation Piña, Why is the Sky Blue? (2022) by Stephanie Comilang & Simon Speiser, which safekeeps and broadcasts a chronicle of inherited knowledge, memories, and dreams for the future. Similarly, Tai Shani’s open-source program Mnemesoid, an almost infinite database of experiences – named after the Greek goddess of memory Mnemosyne – is fictively presented at “the end of all time”, where the program replays moments on the limit of experience that have defied its capacity to produce a satisfactory sensory dimension; moments of intense touch, love – erotic and spiritual – and self-consciousness. A Body of Memory (from neurons to the sea) also hosts a seductive encounter with the sea slug Aplysia californica – which has been utilized as a test subject in neurological studies regarding human beings’ memory formation – through Helene Nymann’s installation and interpretive film that can be seen as a celebration of this little creature: Selva of Selves (S.O.S) (2020). How hair can record and account for knowledge and experience in African traditions is presented in Binta Diaw’s installation Uati’s Wisdom (2023), which refers to both the West African deity and water goddess Mami Wata, and the ancient Egyptian word for ocean water, “Uati”. The search for lost ancestral history animates a post-apocalyptic future in which everyone has disappeared, and oral transmission is deemed (almost) impossible in Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s film The Boat People (2020), while a near-death experience is the central subject of a new commission by Yngvild Sæter, which delves into traumatic memories, and how they can be reactivated as both something strengthening and healing. Delving into the associations between memory and identity in relation to technology, diasporic legacies, and neuroplasticity, the exhibition A Body of Memory (from neurons to the sea) urges the audience to reflect upon the question of who or what speaks with, and through you, when you communicate in shared gestures
Design futures, ecological citizenship & public interest technologies = HCI regenerative interaction opportunities …?
Get PDFDesign practice(s) improve circumstances applying foresight, instigating creative Human Computer Interaction (HCI) proposals within systems. HCI physically and digitally embodies technologies through human touchpoints. We refer to HCI points as Public-Interest Technology (PITs), a growing field comprising expertise working to ensure technology is created, deployed, and used responsibly. This article reports on design-led opportunities combining Design Futures (Domain 1), Ecological Citizen-ship (Domain 2) questioning Public-Interest Technologies (Domain 3). Design Futures navigates ‘preferable futures’ based on real-world, tangible situations within the context of climate futures and stewardship of environment(s), we rely upon for ‘all life’. Ecological Citizen(s) catalyzes empowered agents, informing Public-Interest Technologies as (at this point in history) the people of the UK have never been so excluded, disconnected, and deprived from our natural world(s). Interested parties do both actions; calling out where technologies improve the public good, and question whether certain technologies should be created. Insights are appropriate to the HCI community as they cultivate design and community-led opportunities for technologies in the field, through design practice-led approaches. We report on a Regenerative Design Field Kit with Smithery consultancy, deployment with Royal College of Art MA Design students. Highlighting the toolkit’s development, precedents, leading to a Field Kit. The parts: a viewing frame, (teaching tool) facilitating the examination of worlds and 40 core questions based on The Design Council’s systemic design framework and the RSA’s 10 core capabilities. Work yields valuable insights from Domains (1–3), mapping HCI opportunities for Ecological Citizenship within PITs
Housing experimentation and design guides: Affordable housing in Guangzhou since 2006
Get PDFThis paper examines the recent growth of government-led affordable housing in Guangzhou ad-dressing a paucity of global housing studies that explore experimental and contextual policy ap-proaches in China. It also addresses the lack of Chinese housing studies recognizing the impact of housing design governance, including regulatory controls and design standards, on housing preferences, supply, and lifestyles. Since 1995, the supply of affordable housing has surged, now surpassing that of market housing. This response to failures in the private housing market and a lack of equitable access to housing signifies a significant shift, acknowledging the need to re-establish a state-led and long-term public housing supply after decades of housing marketiza-tion. Employing an architectural design research perspective, this paper investigates the interplay between affordable housing supply and the emergence of housing standards, examining resultant housing design outcomes. It poses the question: What changes in housing policy and interventions in housing markets are necessary to increase public rental housing supply, and how do these changes affect housing outcomes? The paper explores these questions through a discussion of the key moments in affordable housing policy and housing estate development in Guangzhou that fa-cilitated the creation of widely accessible public housing and long-term housing assets. This pro-vides new insights into China’s unique approach to translating central government social welfare and housing policy through contextual design experimentation and pilot housing projects, de-parting from the conventional top-down policy implementation found in most other countries