945 research outputs found
Hawaiian Appliqué quilt, by quilter from New Zealand
No full textImage of Hawaiian Appliqué quilt created circa 1932 by a quilter from New Zealand. Also includes questionnaires describing the quilt completed by Rachel Middleton Jensen as part of the Utah Quilt Guild\u27s documentation days held from 1988-1994. This quilt required one year to make and was given to Angus Taylor Wright and Martha Jane Middleton in 1933 by a native sister of New Zealan
Preface: Angus Hawkins and the Victorians
No full textAngus Hawkins’s Modernity and the Victorians diagnoses a disorder in the scholarship on Victorian Britain, and proposes an interpretative remedy. It explores how twentieth-century social scientists invented a condition labelled ‘modernity’; examines how this scheme came to infect the study of Victorian political and social history; and discusses its influence within successive rounds of historiographical debate about the nature of the period. The book insists that the ‘modernization theory’ beloved of twentieth-century sociologists cannot be made to fit the facts of nineteenth-century British history, and that a satisfactory grasp of the dynamics of the period must rely on alternative conceptual frameworks.1 Angus intended the volume to be bracing, realised his approach was partial, anticipated that it might attract criticism, and hoped that it would motivate debate.
In producing this short study, Angus was targeting an audience beyond the modern British historians towards whom his previous scholarship had mainly been addressed. He aspired to reach students of historiography, historically minded social scientists, and perhaps even a wider popular constituency interested in how present preoccupations can distort readings of the past. All these groups will have their own responses to the arguments presented in the book, and it is easy to imagine them disagreeing about it. But making sense of the text requires us to set it in context with Angus’s wider agenda as an interpreter of Victorian political and intellectual life, and with his broader contributions to the history of modern Britain over a long career. Modernity and the Victorians is in some ways a departure from his earlier work, not least in adopting the extended essay form, and it certainly reveals new dimensions to his historical interests and thinking. But it also engages with, and expands on, many of the same fundamental questions with which he had been concerned for decades
Japan and the British Library: Power, Legitimacy, and Bibliomigrancy in the Japanese Collection
No full textThe British Library is one of the largest national archives in the world, playing host to one of the widest-ranging and diverse collections of any library. The Japanese collection is but one of the many foreign collections housed in the British Library. With calls for the transformation of national archives growing, the issues of power, cultural capital, and the migration of books are becoming increasingly prevalent within the literary sphere. This study was undertaken to assess how books travel and what this ultimately means both for the books themselves, as well as the institutions where they are kept. To further narrow the field of study, the Japanese collection acted as the core focus for this analysis. Evidence was obtained via interviews with experts, analysis of the Japanese collection, and research into the context surrounding the collection, national libraries, and the act of bibliomigrancy. Previous research found that national libraries remain somewhat hidden from the controversies that plague other national institutions. Analysis of the Japanese collection through the lens of power and cultural capital served to demonstrate this while offering further insight into the life of foreign collections within national libraries. Both former and current curators from the British Library acknowledged that foreign collections such as the Japanese collection increase the legitimacy of the British Library. However, these collections are more at risk than national collections due to their exclusion from the national archive. Despite this, the Japanese collection has not been considered for possible relocation due to the complex history of many of the books found within it. Ultimately, more attention needs to be given to foreign collections such as the Japanese collection to truly understand how books, libraries, and readers themselves are all implicit in the formation of power and cultural capital
Autumn leaves : sound and the environment in artistic practice
No full textThis publication is a book that represents an innovative, international and multi-disciplinary approach to conceptualising the dynamic relationships between sound and the environment. The editorial process involved directly commissioning textual, graphic and photographic work. The vast majority of the book represents new work, produced specifically for this publication. For the purposes of tracing historical development, an article from 1974 and three older projects have been revived and recontextualised. In addition to the editorial responsibility, the researcher wrote the introduction and conducted three original interviews. The book draws work from visual, sound and performance art, acoustic science, anthropology, cultural studies, public policy, and architectural theory. Just as it is true to say that these disciplines have not previously been brought together in this way, equally, it is no exaggeration to identify the contributors as the leading international lights in the field: Chris Watson, Tim Ingold, Hildegard Westerkamp, Christina Kubisch, Alvin Lucier, David Toop. The book is published by Double Entendre, the French publisher of the premier sound arts journal, Vibro. The book is accompanied by an audio compilation published by the German record label, Gruenrekorder (Gruen 053). www.autumn-leaves.gruenrekorder.de. The researcher co-curated the compilation, selecting relevant work that illustrated the book’s themes. The book was the catalyst for a one-day symposium at the Tate Britain called The Performance of Sound (May 19th, 2006), which the researcher co-organised. The researcher was invited to speak on the book at the Audio Extranautes: Flux, Distance, Sociability symposium at the Villa Arson in Nice in December 2007. Autumn Leaves has been reviewed in the French journal Mouvement; in MCD where the reviewer reported that “this book deserves to be translated into French”; and Soundscape: The Journal of Acoustic Ecology. Soundscape 7 (1), Autumn, 2007 reprinted an interview conducted by the author from the book. Autumn Leaves, edited by CRiSAP co-director Angus Carlyle, seeks to draw together a number of different perspectives on how the environment is made audible through sound. The perspectives contained in the book are made manifest through more traditional textual analyses, interviews, image-based works (both photography and graphic illustration) and ‘artist’s pages’ (which combine different registers of information).
Among the articles included in the book are a superb deconstruction of the concept of soundscape by anthropologist Tim Ingold; an intriguing analysis of sound from an acoustic point-of-view (or point-of-audition) by Bill Davies; Steve Goodman’s dynamic opening up of city sound to a bass materialism provoked by Greg Lynn’s ‘blob’ architecture; Salome Voegelin’s evocative mapping of sci-fi aesthetics onto the project of acoustic ecology; a wonderful meditation on the heard and the unheard by David Toop; Sylvain Marquis powerfully drawing out the ‘presence’ of Phill Niblock; Rahma Khazam finding new ways of listening through an inspired conceptual conversation between art, architecture and relational aesthetics; and a re-print of Hildegard Westerkamp’s pioneering discussion of soundwalking from 1974.
Interviews include a wide-ranging discussion with Alvin Lucier about his work and working practices; an exploration of Christina Kubisch’s long-standing commitment to teasing out the complexities of the sounds that surround us; Peter Cusack providing an exciting account of his Sound of Dangerous Places project; Chris Watson talking us through his inspirational field-recording; and Max Dixon offering fresh perspectives on how the development of strategies for noise in urban environments meshes policy with research into bio-acoustics, acoustics and creative practice.
Images include Dan Holdsworth’s haunting representations of anechoic chambers through Charles Fox’s photographs of microphone arrays in the wilderness, Axel Stockburger’s ASCII art evocations of video-game space and Nicholas Gansterer’s intricate diagrams of our heard world.
What remains of the book is devoted to the artists’ pages. In these a whole host of contemporary practitioners spanning the disciplines of graphic design, music, photography, performance and visual art offer their provocative takes on sound and the environment. Here we encounter John Wynne and Tim Wainwright presenting their collaborative work in Harefield Hospital; Aki Onda pursuing his Cinemage project; Claudia Wegener finding poetry in ear- and eye-witnessing; an unpacking of the theories and technologies behind the exciting Locus Sonus audio streams; NYSAE opening up its portfolio of acoustic ecology-inspired activities; Goran Vejvoda mobilising a modular manifesto from his three decades of sound art; the Gruenrekorder label reviewing the thinking behind its 40 releases; Jem Finer show-casing his Score For A Hole in the Ground; Cathy Lane mapping her memories of the Hebrides; Zoe Irvine making an art of places out of abandoned audio tape; and Mira Choi introducing her noise-responsive graphic software.
The editorial work and its presentation has been a collaborative venture with the designer Ian Noble.
Autumn Leaves is CRiSAP's first book and is edited by CRiSAP Co-Director Angus Carlyle[/b] and published by the exciting French sound art initiative Vibro / Double Entendre. It contains work by a variety of artists including several of CRiSAP's members - Salomé Voegelin, John Wynne, Peter Cusack, Cathy Lane and David Toop
Who paints the house? Scotswomen as housepainters and decorators from 1820
No full textIn the early 21st century it is still considered unusual to find a woman in paid employment as a skilled housepainter and decorator. Tradeswomen, in these most domestic of building trades, were working throughout Scotland during the 19th and 20th centuries. The women were those whose work self-identities were sufficiently strong to be recorded in directories and census returns. These are women who worked, not middle class or amateur women interior decorators dabbling in the arts and crafts because it was fashionable. The historical record is compared with contemporary records of women taking paid employment in these fields and also with the strong market created in modern times by the many TV DIY programmes encouraging women into DIY. The high level of present and past involvement of women in house-painting and decorating shows that the aptitude and ability exists at both the professional and amateur levels. The factual reality is compared with perception and prejudice within the industry and the barriers that were and are placed in front of women wishing to do this work
The forgotten first: John MacCormick's 'Dùn-Àluinn'
No full textThe first Gaelic novel, John MacCormick's Dùn-Àluinn, no an t-Oighre 'na Dhìobarach, was serialised in the People's Journal in 1910 before being published in its entirety in 1912. Within a year of the publication of Dùn-Àluinn as a novel the second Gaelic novel, Angus Robertson's An t-Ogha Mòr, appeared in print, underlining the renaissance which Gaelic literature was experiencing. Both novels, while remarked upon by contemporaries and by general studies of Gaelic literature, have been all but ignored to date, with no criticism or analysis of either having been published. The main aim of this article is to offer some general comments about MacCormick's Dùn-Àluinn and thus to open up both the novel and indeed other early twentieth-century Gaelic writers and their work to further scrutiny. Consideration will be given to the author himself, the contemporary Gaelic literary scene and finally some of the more interesting aspects of the novel itself
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