3983 research outputs found
Sort by
Towards an uncausal practice of visual communication
Get PDFThis practice-based PhD introduces the concept of uncausality as both method and methodology to uncover potentialities for action and thought beyond habitual patterns of causality and experience. The concept derives from an investigation of asemic writing’s paradoxical dynamic, also referred to as ‘asemic effect’. Asemic writing’s formal and gestural resemblance to conventional writing evokes expectations of legibility and semantic meaning. At the same time, any effort to retrieve meaning remains unsuccessful. The asemic effect is detached from its immediate context and explored to offer a dynamic that is divergent from the ‘causal pleasure’ of human-computer interaction. The direct and predictable causality between human action and computer reaction not only appeals to, but also consolidates the human being in their position as the all-knowing agent in the face of an increasingly complex world. This thesis critiques the emphasis on pleasure, power and control that confines human thought and action to the comfortable, protected realm of the already known, hindering any venture into the unknown. The concept of uncausality taps into the potential of an encounter with the unknown, the nonsensical and the dissonant. The contemporary condition that asks humans to revaluate their habitual ways of being underlines the urgency for such an exploration. While this research originates from a practice of visual communication with a focus on interactive type design, it follows a transdisciplinary methodology, after Guattari, to weave a heterogeneous net of connections across disciplines and modes of research. It draws on the philosophical explorations of Deleuze and Guattari, their own sources and thinkers who followed them. This research engages in a practice and process of programming visually abstract real-time human-computer interfaces to explore, test and expand on the concept of uncausality. The iterative nature of the process of programming becomes an entry point to create, and encounter, a continuous mutation of the relation between cause and effect, action and reaction. The practice, conscious of the symbiotic relationship between culture and technology, explores an approach to interactivity that maintains human action and thought in a state of physical and intellectual tension. Introducing the concept of uncausality, this research hopes to invigorate practices that keep the human mind elastic in a confrontation with a changing world
Pine mist sake set
No full textThis artefact explores the development of form and the effect of light on glass using kiln casting processes. The processes involved explored how variations in glass thickness influence tone and depth of colour. That alongside differing qualities in material translucency informing interactions of material and light. By cross-applying techniques from ceramics and cast glass, the research introduces new methods for process and material application. The work was formed initially through lathe-turning wax to create precise models, combined with gestural hand techniques to shape features that encourage flow such as the ‘lip’. This approach showcases expanding possibilities for glass process and design through form, light, and material. The artefact was acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in 202
Supplementary materials for thesis 'Anamersion: Toward a postcinematic poetics of immersion'
Get PDFThis dataset contains the underlying research materials related to the 2023 PhD thesis Anamersion: Toward a postcinematic poetics of immersion. Included in this dataset are the following: (1) Practice-based work UNICA (Anja Kirschner, 2022, video): submitted as MP4. (2) UNICA exhibition catalogue: submitted as PDF. Anja Kirschner: UNICA, edited by Junia Tiede, Dennis Brzek and Markus Hannebauer, with an introduction by Junia Thiede and Dennis Brzek and texts by Claire Finch, Lisa Jeschke and Luisa Lorenza Corna, Fluentum with DISTANZ, Berlin, 2022 (3) External link to official webpage of “Anja Kirschner: UNICA” solo exhibition at Fluentum, Berlin: www.fluentum.org/en/exhibitions/unica (4) A selection of earlier practice-based works: New Genres (Anja Kirschner, 2018, site specific VR installation): submitted as 23 JPG files; including exhibition views from the solo exhibition “New Genres” at Kunstbunker – Forum für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Nuremberg, 14 July – 26 August 2018, and digital stills of the VR animation. A selection of drawings: submitted as 7 JPEG files; including an exhibition view from the group exhibition “Kathy Acker: GET RID OF MEANING” at Badischer Kunstverein Karlsruhe, 5 October – 2 December 2018. Riley (Anja Kirschner, 2017, video): submitted as MP4
Kingfisher design: Better for everyone: Project report: 10-week scoping study
No full textThis project is a collaboration between the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design (HHCD) at London’s Royal College of Art and the international home improvement company, `Kingfisher plc’. It sits within Kingfisher’s overarching ‘Better for Everyone’ strategy which has inclusivity at its heart and envisions homes that are better for all – across the life stage, level of ability, gender, ethnicity, etc., and without compromising on aesthetics and / or affordability. The brief was to explore and develop a deeper understanding of user needs, challenges, and aspirations in relation to kitchen and bathroom design, with both immediate application for their product range, and long-term impact for the business and brand. Key questions that informed the study design and project delivery include: Based on the insights gathered by Kingfisher to date, what are the research gaps that will require further investigation? Above and beyond existing challenges and immediate user needs and requirements, what is the high-end engagement experience people can expect from kitchen and bathroom design in their price range? What emergent design opportunities arise from the above insights? How do these compare to the current state-of-the-art in inclusive kitchen and bathroom design? What long-term and strategic opportunities lie ahead for inclusive kitchen and bathroom design? This project combined the benefit of an overview of academic and ‘grey’ literature, e.g., existing best practice and reports, together with the inclusive design research capabilities of the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design. The main primary research method was a participatory workshop with a carefully selected group of 11 ‘lead users’, that took place on Monday 5 June 2023. This report presents the findings from the workshop and the literature review, which together form a portfolio of insights and innovation opportunities. These serve to inform both immediate design directions, as well as the wider ‘Better for Everyone’ Kingfisher vision
Chronicle of a practice-based thing: Network optics, epistemic crisis and the fabrication of voice
Get PDFChronicle mobilises the popular academic trope of the ‘PhD journey’, together with Dziga Vertov’s cinematic tenet of a ‘communist decoding of reality’, to interrogate contemporary practice-based research’s ontological claim to epistemic singularity and innovation. The project deploys the findings of an enquiry into avant-garde authorial techniques and revolutionary film practice — conducted initially during research into the Soviet director, and subsequently the avant-garde archive more broadly interpreted. An intermedia work of critical writing, video and poetry, it documents the moulding of a voice and methodology analogous with the experiential realities of mass digitisation and carceral capitalism (Thylstrup, Wang) as these are manifest in the neoliberal university and in everyday life. Knowledge claims and documentary specificity, this endeavour suggests, must contend with the hegemonic power of our most ubiquitous digital tools (Chun, Golumbia), whose relation to capital and temporality refracts in unexpected ways across the state, institution and home. Experimentation with form and medium engages the analytical categories of the project’s foundational discourses — Marxism, feminism, visual studies — while occupying an indeterminacy that is simultaneously fragile and inexpert (‘all too human’), over-extended and grandiose (‘more than human’). This stratagem consciously echoes both Futurist and Soviet rhetoric, and our own era’s abolitionist and neofascist politics, the conflict of which underlies the text. Further exemplars in historiography, poetry and practice-based research (Hartman, Boyer, Palmer) are embraced to supplant the ‘anxiety of influence’ (Bloom) with a joy in un-originality, running against the grain. Swinging between scales, affects and assumed capacities, the uncertain status of the human scholar is illuminated, as she faces an era of automation, devalorisation and social struggle (Kotouza, Kundnani, Clover, et al.). Chronicle situates itself at the intersection of domestic, emotional, creative and intellectual labour, paying homage to feminist, anticolonial, and black-radical writing-and-making practices whose exclusion from conceptions of self, voice, enlightenment and humanity in notionally liberal-democratic societies fomented their innovations and revolutionary drive. Drawing on a theoretical corpus in transition, Chronicle asks who and what produced it; who and what its author, her freedom and expressivity? The PhD simultaneously argues and embodies the reality that, like education, artistic research and creation occurs within the recurring crisis of capitalism and its environment, and its epistemological status is always constitutively relational
Times new plural: The multiple temporalities of contemporary life and the infosphere
Get PDFExperiences of time and temporalities in contemporary life are analysed, with Floridi's conception of the infosphere as a central concept. The effects of instantaneous communication and digital information are shown to result not simply in the obvious acceleration of many aspects of life, but in multiple temporalities. The informational spaces of Floridi's hyperhistorical time form a new time-based society, with our informational activities expressed in linear, cyclic, re-cyclic, and iterative processes. Examples from the information sciences, particularly information seeking and “slow information,” are given, and an outline model for time literacy is presented
AiLoupe at Intertextile 2023
No full textAiLoupe allows designers and material developers to discover and assess textile materials for material identification, knowledge and selection. Identifying materials takes you to each Material Data Card, showing sensory subjective data, translating the tactile, physical elements of touching the materials digitally. AiLoupe uses the Sensory Materials Library which is an AI research project for materials selection in the product design process by improving conventional materials libraries with sensory and human experience properties of materials. We have demonstrated how AiLoupe can present sustainable alternatives as ‘like for likes’ to traditional less sustainable materials that Designers are more familiar with
Hyborg Agency: Cultivating conversational AI creatures through community connections
Get PDFHyborg Agency, an interactive art installation, integrates a digital forest with a human discord chat channel, enabling communication with AI deer or 'hyborgs'. The forest metaphorically represents human society, where AI agents use the large language model (LLM) ChatGPT to learn and grow by summarising conversations and updating their knowledge base, assimilating community thoughts as enriching nutrients
An exhibition in negative: Nigel Henderson, Parallel of Life and Art and the photographic image
Get PDFThis essay focuses on a series of photographic negatives relating to the ground‐breaking exhibition Parallel of Life and Art, which opened at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1953. Painstakingly preserved by one of the five exhibition‐makers, the artist‐photographer Nigel Henderson, these dark, translucent forms of photographic image offer the basis for a new interpretation of the exhibition. Crucially, they show how Parallel of Life and Art was rooted – technologically, aesthetically, and conceptually – in photographic negativity. This engagement with the negative found concentrated expression in four photographic images that Henderson created and integrated into the display. Simultaneously rejecting and reworking the conventions of modern art, these images enacted complex forms of negation, which inflected the exhibition as a whole. Read in dialogue with the negatives from Parallel of Life and Art, they pose profound challenges to the established distinctions between the artwork, the photograph, and the exhibition in post‐war Britain