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The world we live in: An Arts Council Collection touring exhibition
No full textThe World We Live In: Art and the Urban Environment: a new touring exhibition of painting, sculpture, photography, and film that explores themes from urban development to migration and the relationship between inner cities and suburbia. Artists featured include Rut Blees Luxemburg, Eduardo Paolozzi, Suzanne Treister and Rachel Whiteread. TOUR DATES & VENUES 5 February - 2 May 2022 Leicester Museum & Art Gallery 21 May - 4 September 2022 Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery 18 September 2022 - 1 January 2023 Glynn Vivian Art Galler
Scenarios for reducing the environmental impacts of the UK clothing economy
Get PDFIn the 21st century the carbon emissions, material consumption, and impact on planetary boundaries associated with clothing have increased dramatically, driven in large part by fast fashion. The UK represents a typical, affluent, import-reliant Global North country, with clothing consumption per capita at double the global average and the impacts largely offshored. Progress towards a sustainable, circular clothing economy in the UK has been sluggish, as it has been globally. Here, we develop scenarios exploring how, over the coming two decades, the UK clothing economy could achieve the ambitious reductions in environmental impacts necessary to bring humanity's impact back within planetary boundaries. The scenarios consider the impacts of production- and consumption-focused changes, and the modelling uses material flow analysis to develop an assessment of energy consumption, carbon emissions, water consumption, and land use. We find that cleaner production and recycling alone could provide significant benefits for land and water use, reducing footprints by 60–70% by 2040. But to meaningfully reduce energy use, transformational changes will be required throughout supply chains at consumer and post-consumer stages. The same is true if the UK clothing economy is to be on track for net-zero by 2050, which requires these changes to be well under way within the next decade in order to halve emissions. Given the scale of change required, it seems highly unlikely that current clothing business models are compatible with a sustainable future
Design, systemic change and navigating sustainable impacts
Get PDFDesign is experiencing a fundamental transformation, moving from a philosophy of disruption towards a period characterised by sustainability and accountability. Systemic change requires a commitment to the longer term, moving beyond quick fixes and rapid innovation to consider the broader contexts of design work, design interventions and their potential impacts on sustaining existing systems or developing alternatives. We posit that for sustainable transitions and wider systemic changes to be accomplished by design, a new approach is necessary. Engaging with emerging and diverse matters of concern, such as more-than-human design, design futures and speculation, design for policy and design activism informed by the decolonial lens, we propose ways that practice-based design education can be informed. In our view, for systemic change to emerge, we need to shift from an industrial, mass production-inspired model of education to a pluriversal one that fosters the emergence of systemic changers. This paper examines different roles and issues facing design for systemic change as discussed at a public event hosted by the Design Products MA programme at the Royal College of Art. Leading thinkers based in the UK, Finland, France, and Brazil shared perspectives on design for environmental and social sustainability based on their expertise in sustainable transitions, systemic contradictions, ecological restoration, and multi-species design. Through thematic analysis of the presentations and discussion that followed, we identify four key questions in the context of systemic change: how can designers situate themselves and work with others? What are the most critical considerations? At what scale is design most effective? What does design work for systemic change look like? We map relevant debates, theories and exemplars presented by the speakers, supported by additional references used in teaching and research in the Design Products programme. From our position as design educators and researchers, we reflect on what systemic change could mean for ‘Design Products’ and the design field more broadly. The paper provides an overview of current discussions and issues in design for systemic change, offering insights to help designers visualise and navigate this journey towards viable futures
Using supernormal stimuli and eroticism to create artworks: An experiment in countering cultural hegemony and the complexity of postcoloniality in Chinese public space
No full textThis is a practice-led research project that presents a critical analysis of cultural hegemony and the complicated situation of post-coloniality in Chinese urban space. It attempts to offer an alternative solution via a series of public artworks and a written thesis. The practice-based outcomes are based on ‘supernormal stimuli’, derived from evolutionary psychology, that trigger the viewer’s desire regardless of their racial, cultural, gender or individual differences. I use supernormal stimuli in the production of my artworks, not to sell them as commodities but as a subversive tool to reveal the issues within modernisation and consumerism, as well as using them to explore the utilitarian capitalist relations between viewers and public space. I contend that the energy induced from this desire represents people’s particular status and position, which could potentially disrupt and even reshape the existing socio-political and cultural political issues like cultural hegemony and postcoloniality. As part of this analysis, this research investigates a deeper sense of coloniality and the role of Westernisation in the process of Chinese modernisation in the late twentieth century. This is addressed by analysing the complexity of post-coloniality, modernisation, industrialisation, Westernisation and globalisation: China is a partially Westernised country where people’s collective subconscious has been developed through the Communist Revolution. As a result, Chinese public space, that worships European prototypes, prestigious artists and Western values, denies the feelings of the public, which leads to a self-censored and self-colonised mindset among the public as a result of postcoloniality, westernisation, modernity and industrialisation. The other focus of this research is bodily affect. I use supernormal stimuli and eroticism in the production of my artworks and compare how these two approaches provide a differing sense of affect during the encounter between the viewer and the artwork. By inducing different emotions from the viewer, with the use of robotic technology, AR interfaces and physiological sensors (ECG heartrate monitors), my art practice aims to provoke a multiplicity of feelings. Such complexity between the human emotions and bodily affect (that Donna Haraway termed “material semiotics”) is not only suppressed in public space, but also excluded in a patriarchal and hegemonic environment, as the sensuousness and fluidity of eroticism is not available within contemporary hegemonic environments at the representational level. In my research, I propose that material semiotics evoked by supernormal stimuli and eroticism could extend to the biological level and reverse the logic that if representation has a direct impact at the biological level of survival, when we target the biological level of bodily affect, it could also influence and even re-shape the representational level. I would like to bring the multiplicity of sensuousness back to the public space, as an act of resistance. Within a politically sensitive environment like China, people are restrained from expressing critical opinions verbally. The intention of my research is to allow people’s subaltern people’s voices to be heard through bodily affects provoked by my work. My research argues that artworks produced using supernormal stimuli and eroticism are able to induce Sylvia Wynter’s notion of “non-symbolic representation” and Haraway’s notion of material semiotics. Affective embodiment, in this sense, goes beyond linguistic representation. By escaping the existing political system based around patriarchy, post-coloniality and reason, art can work to liberate sensuousness and bring eroticism and desire into representation. Erotic sensitivity to feeling, caring, fragility, sharing between differences, relations of use challenge the spoilt sense of privilege, creating energy and movement. This has the potential to reshape the existing repressive system of power involved in cultural hegemony and the complex situation of post-coloniality in Chinese public space
Subversive performance in the age of human capital
No full textContemporary art relies on an expansionist, modernist ideal and still progresses through a critique of earlier forms of democratisation. But beneath this democratic drive, lurks a creeping crisis. Under neoliberalism, criticality has become a zone of value production. A self-deprecating irony, exposing and re-enacting this position of impotence, is one of the few gestures left in the arsenal of critical art. Against this irony, this book pits overidentification. This term has been taken to mean a kind of parodic mimicry of institutional power. Using a broad tapestry of sources, from political philosophers to art theorists, from post-Marxist critiques of labour to ethnographic studies, it proposes an interpretation of overidentification that does not collapse into ironic posturing. The authors differentiate this from bad faith flirting with taboo aesthetics by focusing on practices grounded in a genuine identification with power that ushers the kind of excess implied by overidentification. It is these forms of overidentification that destabilise the metastasis of liberal-democracy. Staging forms of critique not so readily absorbed into the structure of the present, these subversive performances herald a future beyond the democratic paradox
Green Social Prescribing in practice: A case study of Walsall, UK
Get PDFThis paper presents a case study of Green Social Prescribing (GSP) in Walsall, a medium-sized urban area located in the West Midlands, UK. GSP is a means of enabling health professionals to refer people to a range of local non-clinical nature-based activities, e.g., community gardening and conservation volunteering. As a new practice to address multiple challenges in health and sustainability, GSP has been promoted by the UK government and the NHS in the past few years. There is as yet limited evidence and knowledge about how this approach is implemented at a local level. This paper addresses this gap of knowledge, by exploring how GSP is implemented in Walsall as a case study. Based on extensive engagement and research activities with the local partners to collect data, this paper reveals the local contexts of GSP, the referral pathways, and people's lived experience, discussing the challenges, barriers, and opportunities in delivering GSP at the local level. This study suggests that a more collaborative and genuine place-based approach is essential, and alongside GSP, investment into infrastructure is needed to move the health paradigm further from 'prevention' to 'promotion' so that more people can benefit from what nature can offer
Confidence and doubt in doctoral research: The temptation of certainty
Get PDFMany aspects of doctoral supervision are well known from methods and methodology to research questions, philosophies and epistemologies. A core aspect that is touched upon less frequently yet is central to the lived experience of the researcher (and that is essential for rigour and trust occupying a significant amount of cognitive effort) is confidence and doubt. The use of confidence and doubt to drive research is a daily experience for the researcher yet the practice and challenges are infrequently addressed directly in doctoral environments. Confidence can be essential as a driver when researchers with strong convictions lack complete arguments to justify actions based on experiential, innate or purely intuitive motivations. Doubt can act as a valuable aid to personal critique and can mitigate the excesses of over-confidence. Overconfidence can blind a researcher to critical flaws whereas excessive doubt can destroy promising findings and innovations before they are proven. The authors explore how the initial worries and concerns from novice researchers about reliability and rigour transform into an exchange between confidence and doubt which become central generators balancing critique, risk, experimentation, and honesty. We review a wide range of diverse theories and concepts exploring different perspectives with a view to supporting those building research careers with positions from which to gather insight to strengthen their practices. Particular value can be gained from the decision-making routes that can follow from a better understanding of what underpins the drive for certainty
Against the norms: Designing violence prevention through engaging men
Get PDFEngaging with men is an essential effort towards preventing violence in our communities. At the same time, violent behaviours are deeply embedded into our societies and construct what it means to be ‘masculine’ in a way that naturalises it. Getting men into a space to challenge their behaviours can therefore be a challenge. In this article, we discuss the findings from a recent study with designers designing to tackle intimate partner violence. We focus on four participants' experiences of developing design interventions to engage men in violence prevention. The findings highlight strategies that engage with men in a dialectical space of critical reflection and implementing alternative behaviours. It brings key considerations for designers to think about when counteracting the normalisation of violence (or other behaviours) and community acceptance
No sex please: Film, feminism and sex in the 1970s and 1980s
No full textThis text aims to explore the representation of sex and relationships within the context of the sex positive and negative debates of second wave feminism. Using examples from Vivienne Dick (Liberty’s Booty, 1980), Bette Gordon (Anybody’s Woman,1981) and Tessa Hughes Freeland (Baby Doll, 1982) this chapter discusses why these artists filmmakers and their work have been elided by the Anglophone second wave feminist debates, dominated by the sex negative position. This context has made a hostile environment for these artists who have focussed on the lived experience of women as sexually active agents. Dick, Gordon and Hughes Freeland deliver an empathetic portrayal of the complexities of women’s lives as lived rather than as abstract categories of representation. Often shot on a near zero budget, working with friends and filming them, using fast montages, and an extreme form of parallel editing (as opposed to ‘long look’ work) these films proffered a punk aesthetic that offered its own negation of the expectations and politics of femininity within the works that speak urgently to the concerns of young women today in exploring community, care and a flat organisational approach to their world
Andromeda's howl
Get PDFA performance on the collective political and spiritual form of call and response in use, through the lens of Andromeda