4,775 research outputs found
The social body mind map
No full textDr Dean Kenning will discuss the Social Body Mind Map – a diagrammatic tool to enable critical reflection on one’s art work with respect to unconscious process and social forces. He will locate the SBMM in the context of diagrammatic theory, and in particular with diagramming as a method of representational thinking that combines words and images. Kenning proposes that we can think of diagrams not just as statistical and explanatory tools, but also as exploratory tools. By way of example he will draw a SBMM
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Capital
No full textGroup exhibition of posters and film produced by 'Capital Drawing Group' [Andrew Cooper, Enda Deburka, Dean Kenning and John Russell]
Attention, Entropy and the Arrow of Time
No full textFinal Episode of a four-part web-based presentation by the Diagram Reserach Group, undertaken as part opf the Delta Research Placement at Flat Time House 'to undertake remote research with the John Latham archive'.
The Diagram Research Group (DRG), a collaboration between artists David Burrows, John Cussans, Dean Kenning and Mary Yacoob, will conduct four illustrated discussions online that explore their interests in diagrams in relation to Flat Time and Latham’s ideas concerning the unification of scientific and artistic bodies of knowledge and the primacy of time and event (rather than space and matter).
Each episode took the form of a verbal presentation accompanied by images and diagrams which appeared on a specially consturcted web platform during the talk and subsequesnt group discussion. Each episode was led by one member of the Diagram Research Group (David Burrows, John Cussans, Dean Kenning, Mary Yacoob).
The episode Kenning lead was entitled 'Attention, Entropy and the Arrow of Time' and was written up as follows:
I will look at John Latham’s concept of ‘attention unit’ or Delta and link this to questions of time, particularly as they pertain to entropy or the second law of thermodynamics. I argue that Latham’s works often involved entropic and negentropic processes, and yet he does not seem to include entropy within his overarching theory of time and event. This is surprising given the singular importance entropy plays within physics as determining an ‘arrow of time’ i.e. non-reversibility. However, certain physicists such as Carlo Rovelli construct a relativistic model of entropy, suggesting that the relation between order and disorder is a function of what we consider to be special. If all probabilities of energy flow patterns are equally (in)significant then time does not exist. I link this idea back to the notion of ‘attention’ in order to think about what, in the art world, gets understood as ‘special’ and therefore ‘separated out’ for further attention in anti-entropic processes (studio, gallery, archive, etc). Different levels of separating out of ‘order’ from ‘disorder’ by ‘gatekeepers’ (Maxwell’s Demon) may be said to constitute a personal career or cultural timeline – a process of ‘distinction’ without which we lose a ‘sense of direction’
Poor poor School
No full textPoor poor school is run by artists and writers Dean Kenning & Owen Parry. It is an inflatable school. A diagram of a possible school. A school within a school. A 3d model of a school hollowed out of cheap polystyrene. Dean is curator of the forthcoming Poor Things exhibition along with Emma Hart – a show at The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh exploring sculpture and social class, which asks questions about aesthetic composition, taste and availabilism. Owen runs a ‘PooR Theory’ seminar at Central Saint Martins and makes things up. He says ‘despite its name, PooR theory is not necessarily a “bad theory” or a “low theory”, although it can and often does challenge or undermine hierarchies of value and taste. Instead, PooR theory forms and spreads through experimental, open-ended, idiosyncratic, and sometimes super-natural processes – it is a theory in search of a theory – a language in search of a form and can thus be particularly generative for art practice.
Sick Monday
No full textSick Monday is an Arts Council England funded project, comissioning new short videos from artists. The project takes inspiration from the 'video nasty', and the capacity some of those films have to represent social and political content in exuberantly expressive forms. The curators Dean Kenning, Liam Scully and Vanessa Scully each asked five artists along with themselves to respond to a chosen 'video nasty' main feature (Street Trash( DK), Society (VS), Reflections of Evil (LS)), which were then screened over the course of three programmes in cinemas and galleries throughout 2018, alongside artist film posters. In total eighteen new artist videos were produced over the period, and have been collated on DVD, alongside a comissioned essay by horror film theorist Dr Lindsay Hallam. In July and August 2019 the works were shown as part of an installation at The Horse Hospital, and all eighteen films were presented together in a screening for the first time. The artists are: Antoine Catala, Sophie Carapetian, Dean Kenning, Beagles & Ramsay, Lee Holden & Josephine Wood, John Russell, David Burrows, Vanessa Scully, Birgit Ludwig, Anita Delaney, Noor Afshan Mirza & Brad Butler, A.K Bindesbøll & Ava Fersi, Laure Provoust, Ada Wesolowska, Ben Rivers, Jason File, Liam Scully and Paul McCarthy
Renaissance Man
No full textRenaissance Man is a mechanised figure, with casts of the artist’s face, hands and feet, assembled around an aluminium trough with moving limbs. Two versions were commissioned in 2017 by Greene Naftali gallery and Piper Keys (supported by Elephant Trust). The works were concerned with two main, related, research concerns. The first was to develop a ‘compulsive’ anti-aesthetic, one that would challenge a contemplative, and class bound mode of artistic spectatorship, and to eschew a professionally slick and conceptually refined type of contemporary art whose surfaces exclude material slippage. In this respect horror, humour and ‘idiocy’ (see Kenning, ‘You Cannot Be Serious! Art, Politics, Idiocy’) were employed to produce something weird, crude and unnerving.
The second research concern was to undermine the idealized, humanist model of intellectual progress, represented by the male modern artist, with his technical prowess and creative assertion of selfhood, and in its place to assert something more abject, compulsive and machinic, closer to the decentred and sexually determined subject put forward by psychoanalysis. In the work Kenning imagines himself metamorphosed into a mechanised animal, on all fours, locked in a single repetitive movement. He is rendered into what Jacques Lacan has called, in a reversal of Cartesian ontology, a ‘jammed machine’ (Seminar II).
The artistically debased genre of kinetic art enabled a method of production whereby Kenning relinquished control over an array of compositional effects, focusing on getting the mechanism moving rather than on formal concerns. The finished sculptures displayed a compulsive character, embodying a ‘weird’, unnerving, somewhat crude (anti) aesthetic through seesawing and hinging movements and accidental sounds. The effect of this was witnessed in audience reactions to the work, which ran from laughter to wonder, anxiety to offence (Dan Graham: ‘it’s the most offensive work in the show!’
Practical Advice to Entrepreneurs Series by ACE Adjunct Professor Dean Shepherd: Practical advice on managing new venture survival
No full textThe author, Dean Shepherd, is of entrepreneurship—how entrepreneurs think, decide to act, and feel. He recently realized that while his publications in academic journals have implications for entrepreneurs, those implications have remained relatively hidden in the text of the articles and hidden in articles published in journals largely inaccessible to those involved in the entrepreneurial process. This series is designed to bring the practical implications of his research to the forefront
Practical Advice to Entrepreneurs Series by ACE Adjunct Professor Dean Shepherd: Practical advice on whether to grow the business
No full textThe author, Dean Shepherd, is of entrepreneurship—how entrepreneurs think, decide to act, and feel. He recently realized that while his publications in academic journals have implications for entrepreneurs, those implications have remained relatively hidden in the text of the articles and hidden in articles published in journals largely inaccessible to those involved in the entrepreneurial process. This series is designed to bring the practical implications of his research to the forefront
Practical Advice to Entrepreneurs Series by ACE Adjunct Professor Dean Shepherd: Practical advice on making the business more entrepreneurial
No full textThe author, Dean Shepherd, is of entrepreneurship—how entrepreneurs think, decide to act, and feel. He recently realized that while his publications in academic journals have implications for entrepreneurs, those implications have remained relatively hidden in the text of the articles and hidden in articles published in journals largely inaccessible to those involved in the entrepreneurial process. This series is designed to bring the practical implications of his research to the forefront
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