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Thinking through making: Crafting technology for textiles
Get PDFA collaborative project between Istanbul Modern and Royal College of Art (RCA), London, “Thinking Through Making: Crafting Technology for Textiles” concentrated on textile and crafts. Artists, designers, academics, and creatives with expertise in their fields centered around this project aimed to build an interdisciplinary network that focused on the ways 21st century technologies and craft heritage could be incorporated in the field of textiles while working together
Learning from “The Sounding Object”: Sound design in the critical reimagining of museum object narratives
Get PDFThis article advances an expanded understanding of sound design practice, demonstrating its use as a critical tool in communicating design histories in museums. It draws on experiments undertaken as part of a live research-based pedagogical project between the RCA and V&A called ‘The Sounding Object’. Our focus on new directions in critical sound design contributes to new and contemporary conceptions of sound design, and to an underdeveloped research area (sound) in the discourse on the multisensory museum and in communication and experience design in museums, especially as institutions re-open to the public following pandemic closure
The scientist’s social network: Reimagining crystallographic diagrams ahead of the 1951 Festival Pattern Group Collaboration
Get PDFDespite current enthusiasm in the humanities for interdisciplinarity, little research exhibits approaches for deep, critical historical explorations of cross-field interactions between science and design. This chapter addresses this gap through a case study of the 1951 Festival Pattern Group (FPG) for the Festival of Britain, in which pattern designs were derived from crystallography diagrams. In this essay, the story of the FPG, particularly of how the project was catalyzed, illuminates how postwar British industrial design cultures engaged with science. In doing so, it presents an opportunity to hone approaches for generating richer understandings of interactions between design and science disciplines, both in the past and the present, using the concept of networks as a lens. I trace the circulation of crystallographer Helen Megaw’s diagrams among networks of designers, artists and scientists during the germination of the FPG. It shows that cross-disciplinary social networks and the specific ideas, books, practices and images that flowed (and mutated) among them were key to the FPG project. Each actor involved in the group’s development, from an architect to a design policy officer and even fellow scientists, interpreted Megaw’s diagrams differently, according to the ideological and aesthetic frameworks of each figure’s particular brand of modernism. This challenges historiographical assumptions that the FPG reflects a generalised mid-twentieth-century modernist urge to unite art and science, and complicates understandings of the role of science in modernist design more broadly. Monolithic historical categories, such as ‘molecular’ design, dissolve, revealing a complex network of relationships, interests, and even disciplinary disjuncture teeming below the surface of the FPG’s patterns
From curating to Cedong: Long March: A walking visual display and the emergence of contemporary Chinese curating
Get PDFLong March: A Walking Visual Display (abbreviated as Long March) was an internationally renowned large-scale curatorial project curated by Lu Jie and executive curator Qiu Zhijie in China in 2002. It involved over 150 artists in an intense journey of temporary exhibitions and events along the historical and revolutionary Long March route in China. Based on four years of archival research and nearly thirty interviews with key participants, especially with Lu Jie, this thesis, as the first significant research on Long March, restores the international trajectory of the project in the wake of globalisation in the Chinese art ecology. The thesis details how the project grew out of Chinese artists’ and critics’ concern over the dependence of contemporary Chinese art on Western art and its art system in the 1990s. Influenced by the surging experimental curating practices in the West and in China, the two curators creatively appropriated work models of Socialist China — revolution propaganda and mass mobilisation — in their curatorial practice. In so doing, they attempted to open up alternative spaces and invent new approaches to art in a Chinese context. This thesis argues Long March reinvented Western curating for the Chinese context. Having greatly expanded the discourse and practice of curating, Long March became a watershed moment in the emergence of independent curators and curating in mainland China. To shed light on the transcultural factors shaping the project, this thesis embodies a chronological order in three sections: 1) Lu’s early trajectory in mainland China, Hong Kong and abroad as a young artist, editor, and art dealer (1964–1998); 2) the birth of the project’s curatorial proposal at Goldsmiths, London, and its development in New York (1998–2001); 3) the project’s mobilisation and realisation in China (2002). Sourcing from first-hand documentation, internet archives, video footage and interviews, the research restores the complex dynamic of the project’s realisation, especially its unprecedented open nature of organising, improvisational display of artworks by curators as agents of artists, and clashes caused by different understandings of exhibition-making. The gap between the original curatorial concept and the on-site execution led to the project’s halt halfway, demonstrating the tension in curating between an individual’s creative approach and the realities of the murky and muddy process of collaboration. Re-examining Long March in relation to contemporary Chinese art, this thesis considers how the project has opened new spaces and reactivated overlooked local approaches for contemporary art in China. Curating as an unsolidified discipline also made it possible for Long March and Lu Jie to demonstrate a heterogeneous mode of artmaking and understanding of art. This thesis argues that the approaches and intentions found in Long March differed fundamentally from typical approaches to curating and participatory art practices of the West, with its aim to mobilise participants and instigate practitioners for self-reflection instead of displaying artworks as objects. I conclude by arguing that the work of Long March and similar curatorial projects in China should be understood as cedong, which initially means to devise plans, mobilise the public and instigate people for political movements. Free from the burden of art history and the long tradition of museums, Cedong can liberate curating and inspire more self-instigated actions reacting to urgency
Once more with feeling: A reinvention of ‘hysteria’ using photography, performance, and autofiction
Get PDFI use photography, performance, and autofiction to interrogate and represent contemporary female experience in identification with the condition known as hysteria. I am interested in the hysteric’s relationship with truth-telling. Sigmund Freud says hysteria is rooted in repression of a thought or memory which may then return in the form of bodily symptoms. By embracing the psychoanalytical use of the term “hysteria,” this project seeks to understand what the hysteric has to say and asks: how can art practice be used to listen to hysteria today? In my art practice, I tell the hysteric’s story “once more with feeling.” I produce narratives in image-text artworks, weaving together references to Breuer and Freud’s Studies in Hysteria (1895), Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), and other literary works, as well as personal experiences which I situate in fiction. In doing so, and by working in a fragmentary way using photographs, performances, film, and writing, my work slips constantly between fact and fiction. This slippage builds upon the ambiguity that characterises the hysteric’s speech and her reputation as an unreliable narrator. I discuss artworks by Sharon Kivland, Louise Bourgeois, and Mary Kelly specifically in respect of their direct correspondence with hysteria and psychoanalysis and use of image-text relations. Like them, I open up a space between image and text in which my character asks what is her desire, and the viewer/reader may hear echoes of their own uncertainties. I look to Moyra Davey, Fiona Tan, and Mary Kelly as artists working with interdisciplinary practices and those who draw upon intertextuality. Photography, specifically its indexical relationship to the real, remains a core component of this project, but in its expanded use, in collaboration with other mediums, it forms a language of its own and goes beyond the image. Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan posits the female hysteric as one who never ceases to ask the question “What is it to be a woman?” Utilising autofiction as a feminist art practice, I situate the question of hysteria alongside Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Liz Stanley, and Lauren Fournier’s key arguments that women must insert themselves into text and that by “writing woman” we begin to take back control of our own voices and bodies. The now infamous black-and-white photographs of hysterics taken at the Salpêtrière hospital in the late nineteenth century have become synonymous with hysteria. Thus, hysteria tends to be relegated to an outdated theatre of suffering. Taking my lead from Freud, who turned away from the observation of symptoms to listen to what his female patients were telling him, I focus on my protagonist’s internal conflicts in an attempt to listen to what she has to say. Once More with Feeling generates an engagement with hysteria in contemporary times that represents the hysteric in ways which do not reduce her to the sensationalist spectacle of an idealised suffering. By foregrounding her desire it considers again the question ‘What does woman want?
“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, …”: Josephine Baker and modern architecture across the colonised Arab world
No full textA story that unfolded in the shadow of the Second World War is that of African American and Black French performer Joséphine Baker, who at times travelled alongside, in advance of, or behind Allied soldiers, alternately conducting acts of espionage and entertainment. Her perilous trajectory across the shifting borders of the war zones of North Africa and the Middle East is known only in broad terms. Evidence that could detail the series of places where she performed between 1941 and 1943 is almost completely lost. This installation follows a few of the faint traces, speculations, rumours, and documents that indicate Baker’s presence in military camps, clubs, cabarets, casinos, theatres, and ‘gin joints’ across the region. Reconstructing the story of a few of the locations where Baker performed the exhibition aims to untangle a web of cross-border relations that have since become hardened by national boundaries, and of trajectories now severed
Education and illustration: Methods, models and paradigms
Get PDFThis editorial offers a review of the events leading up to and during the ‘Education and Illustration: Models, Methods, Paradigms’ Illustration Research conference hosted by Kingston University, London in 2021. Voiced as dialogue between the issue editors, Rachel Gannon and Mireille Fauchon, it is a reflection on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the organization and production of this research event. The extreme circumstances required the organizers to adapt the conference format, unexpectedly effecting customary dynamics. This is discussed with consideration of the socio and geopolitical contextualising backdrop during that poignant historical moment and how this informed the tone and content of the sessions. Reconsidering the model of the academic research event invited more diverse, experimental and innovative presentations. This authors attribute this shift to the event taking place wholly online, a first for the Illustration Research Network, and the decision to accommodate a more formalized student presence. The critical reflection also articulates how experience and insight gained during the landmark Illustration Research event subsequently informed the editorial decisions made for the Journal of Illustration Volume 9 Numbers 1 & 2. The editorial closes with scrutiny of accessibility, inclusion and appropriate modes of communication with regards to the representation of illustration research and what considerations are provoked in terms of validity and rigour in the representation of scholarly knowledge
Bio-Brutalism; five case studies framing the emergence of new raw aesthetics at the intersection of material regeneration, environmental design, and crafts
Get PDFAs we move towards an environmental and regenerative paradigm for crafts, with new objectives, methods, and practices, questions arise regarding the aesthetics of these emerging forms. To address this issue, the main author developed a module aimed at exploring furniture design at the intersection of regenerative materials, structures, and aesthetics. In this context, five cases have been selected to frame the quintessential characteristics of these new raw aesthetics. These case studies showcase varying approaches, with some generating new aesthetic qualities by introducing novel processes, while others embrace a strictly analogue approach to highlight literal aesthetics. The resulting aesthetics have been categorised in this paper as Bio-Brutalism. This emerging aesthetics retains the essential elements of traditional Brutalism, such as stripped-down, raw, monolithic appearance, non-treated finished surfaces, and a commitment to preserving design heritage. However, it also diverges in significant ways, with three core elements identified: subtractive locality, time-based dynamic aesthetics, and nature-human hybrid collaborative processes
Morphology-property relationship in radially oriented anchored carbon nanotubes on polybenzimidazole nanofibers
Get PDFIntroducing carbon nanotubes (CNTs) capable of anchoring on nanofibers establishes new possibilities in many applications, such as lithium–sulfur bat- teries and laminated composites. Direct growth and attachment of CNTs elim- inate dispersion challenges such as detachment or transfer of CNTs onto another medium and damage to CNTs, making them inadequate for practical applica- tions. This study facilitated the direct growth of conductive CNTs on curved, high-temperature resistant polymeric polybenzimidazole (PBI) nanofiber sur- faces via chemical vapor deposition (CVD). Control of CVD process parameters, including nucleation and growth times (10 or 15 min) and catalyst concentration (1 or 10 mM) at 600 °C resulted in the growth of radially oriented CNTs on PBI nanofiber surfaces and provided morphology-dominated behavior both on physical and electrical properties. Morphological analyses showed that opti- mizing catalyst concentration (10 mM) and CVD process parameters, including nucleation (15 min) and growth times (10 min and 15 min), yielded uniform CNT coverage and conformity. A systematic exploration of mesoscopic mor- phologies revealed a strong correlation between physical parameters such as CNT array lengths and electrical conductivity, up to 0.039 ± 0.004 S/cm. The proposed CNT growth method could offer in situ structural tunability to respond to application-related requirements from energy storage to the rate capability of lithium-based batteries
Material connaissance as a tacit knowledge co-creation method
Get PDFThis paper builds on a model developed to engage in shared material experience in a protocol inspired by wine tasting: the Material Connaissance Method. In this paper the theoretical framework and motivation is discussed. In the first section the material experience model based on wine tasting protocols is briefly presented, followed by a literature review in the fields of material experience and tacit knowledge co-creation. The paper concludes with a reflection of the initial pilots of the protocol and their theoretical repercussions. The main contribution of the paper is the proposal of a framework for engaging in research through design as a way to understand the tacit dimension of material experience in the context of upcycling