147 research outputs found
Definitions of, and critical perspectives on creative citizenship
No full textAs the concept of engagement grows, and the possibility of relating art practice,
research and public engagement expands, this paper explores the issues around what it
means to be an ‘engaged artist’ within an ‘engaged university’. As cultural policy
becomes an increasingly significant component of the economic and physical
regeneration of towns and cities across the UK, it asks what will the cultural legacy be of
socially engaged art practice?
Gert Biesta, in ‘Good Education in an Age of Measurement: Ethics, Politics, Democracy’
(2010) is seriously concerned with the instrumentalisation of education, in particular how
the principles of relentless auditing are reframing educational practices, and how
accountability may actually exacerbate the normative question of ‘what is good
education?’. Biesta’s concern is whether measurement can be tamed, and utilised to
reconnect with the question of how to recognise good education, with particular
reference to democratic citizenship.1 t Biesta does not suggest that measurement is
wrong, but seemingly perverse in its current application and is in need of dialogue with
respect to citizenship. Biesta is similarly concerned with the interrelationships between
1 Gert Biesta, Good Education in an Age of Measurement: Ethics, Politics, Democracy (Interventions:
Education, Philosophy, and Culture) (Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Publishers, 2010), p.1.
learning, identity and agency in people’s lives, and how cultural citizenship and
education responds to the complexities of contemporary societies.
In 2011 we commenced a formal partnership with Huddersfield Art Gallery to offer a
programme of art and design exhibitions featuring the work of our colleagues at the
University of Huddersfield. We asked the question of how art and design practice might
impact upon the locale, and what we should look for in order to better understand this
impact and its value? Biesta might have responded to these questions with, ‘it depends’;
it depends on whether all gazes can be invited, encouraged and equalised through the
interpretation and mediation of ‘the exhibition’.2 Artists, curators, universities and
research councils are now all considering what it means to be ‘engaged’
Steve Dutton, Percy Peacock, Steve Swindells : Entropic Gym
No full textIn the pamphlet for their exhibition with Peacock, Dutton and Swindells describe a performance where they visited castles in England and threw texts from the ramparts. Cheung argues that the operation of their installation remains incomplete without a viewer to re-experience it. Biographical notes
Reflections On Creativity: Public Engagement and the Making of Place
No full textThe biennial event Arte-Polis brings together to Bandung, Indonesia, creative champions from different places around the world, to share and learn from their creative experiences on place-making. Participants come from a diverse range of disciplines, including architecture, landscape architecture and planning, business and management, cultural and development studies, design and visual arts, digital-media and information-communication technology, economics and geography, as well as the arts and humanities.
The inaugural Arte-Polis was held between 21-23 July 2006 on the ITB campus in Bandung, Indonesia. The event hailed the theme “Creative Culture and the Making of Place” through an international seminar on Urban Culture, a design workshop on Dago Creative Corridor, an exhibition featuring on Heteropia and 36 Frames, as well as a bazaar offering a Taste of Bandung. Keynote speakers of the 2006 Arte-Polis international seminar were Prof. Alexander R. CUTHBERT of the University of New South Wales, Australia, and Prof. Dorodjatun KUNTJORO-JAKTI, former Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs, Republic of Indonesia.
Building on the successes of the first four Arte-Polis in 2006, 2008, 2010 and 2012, Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB) is pleased to present Arte-Polis 5, consisting of an international conference and workshop with the theme "Reflections on Creativity: Public Engagement and the Making of Place". This biennial event is an initiative of the Architecture Program at ITB's School of Architecture, Planning and Policy Development in collaboration with other creative institutions, to be held on 8-9 August 2014 in Bandung, Indonesia's city with a long heritage of creative culture, communities and collaborations.
The aim of Arte-Polis 5 is to bring all layers of individual or group in society, not limited to creative industries and people that involve in information technology, to share their knowledge and experience about potential, effect and impact of information technology towards place making, public policy, social wellbeing, environment quality, cultural heritage and urban economy.
International Conference
The peer-reviewed Arte-Polis 5 international conference will critically address the theme "Reflections on Creativity: Public Engagement and the Making of Place" through a number of diverse Tracks, such as:
A. Creative Engagement Through Design Praxis
The topics include, but not limited to: creative community participations, livelihood of the city and creative community, designs for multiple and plural community, smart design and place-making, design innovation and global markets, design of public spaces, creative expression, creative collaboration and transformation.
B. Digital Technology Enabling Public Engagement
The topics include, but not limited to: smart cities, Global Positioning System and place-making, social media and creative communities, environmental modelling for sustainability, design computation and multimedia design for creativity, virtual/ augmented reality for documentation, copyright and standard for creative industry, web-based city management, discourse in contemporary value in creative society.
C. Planning Methods for Wider Public Engagement
Topics include, but not limited to: creative governance and collaborative partnerships, craft communities empowerment, public-private collaborations, creative infrastructure and planning method, web-based creative entrepreneurship, human development for creative living, smart governance and professionalism.
D. Public Engagement for Cultural Heritage
Topics include, but not limited to: arts, festivals and creative places, creative heritage preservation and conservation, cultural tourism and public engagement, society as place-branding, virtual media for cultural documentation, public engagement for cultural industry, social campaign for cultural heritage, web-based heritage management, social entrepreneurship in cultural heritage
ROTOЯ Review
No full textThe ROTOЯ partnership between Huddersfield Art Gallery and the University of Huddersfield was established in 2011. ROTOЯ I and II was a programme of eight exhibitions and accompanying events that commenced in 2012 and was completed in 2013. ROTOЯ continues into 2014 and the programme for 2015 and 2016 is already firmly underway. In brief, the aim of ROTOЯ is to improve the cultural vitality of Kirklees, expand audiences, and provide new ways for people to engage with and understand academic research in contemporary art and design.
Why ROTOЯ , Why Now?
As Vice Chancellors position their institutions’ identities and future trajectories in context to national and international league tables, Professor John Goddard1 proposes the notion of the ‘civic’ university as a ‘place embedded’ institution; one that is committed to ‘place making’ and which recognises its responsibility to engaging with the public. The civic university has deep institutional connections to different social, cultural and economic spheres within its locality and beyond.
A fundamental question for both the university sector and cultural organisations alike, including local authority, is how the many different articulations of public engagement and cultural leadership which exist can be brought together to form one coherent, common language. It is critical that we reach out and engage the community so we can participate in local issues, impact upon society, help to forge well-being and maintain a robust cultural economy. Within the lexicon of public centered objectives sits the Arts Council England’s strategic goals, and those of the Arts and Humanities Research Council – in particular its current Cultural Value initiative. What these developments reveal is that art and design education and professional practice, its projected oeuvre as well as its relationship to cultural life and public funding, is now challenged with having to comprehensively audit its usefulness in financially austere times. It was in the wake of these concerns coming to light, and of the 2010 Government Spending Review that ROTOЯ was conceived. These issues and the discussions surrounding them are not completely new. Research into the social benefits of the arts, for both the individual and the community, was championed by the Community Arts Movement in the 1960s. During the 1980s and ‘90s, John Myerscough and Janet Wolff, amongst others, provided significant debate on the role and value of the arts in the public domain. What these discussions demonstrated was a growing concern that the cultural sector could not, and should not, be understood in terms of economic benefit alone. Thankfully, the value of the relationships between art, education, culture and society is now recognised as being far more complex than the reductive quantification of their market and GDP benefits. Writing in ‘Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century)’, Ernesto Pujol proposes:‘…it is absolutely crucial that art schools consider their institutional role in support of democracy. The history of creative expression is linked to the history of freedom. There is a link between the state of artistic expression and the state of democracy.’ When we were approached by Huddersfield Art Gallery to work collaboratively on an exhibition programme that could showcase academic staff research, one of our first concerns was to ask the question, how can we really contribute to cultural leadership within the town?’ The many soundbite examples of public engagement that we might underline within our annual reports or website news are one thing, but what really makes a difference to a town’s cultural identity, and what affects people in their daily lives? With these questions in mind we sought a distinctive programme within the muncipal gallery space, that would introduce academic research in art, design and architecture beyond the university in innovative ways
Apocotropes, Dutton and Peacock, The Dog and Duck, Dutton and Swindells
No full textThe article focuses on the relationship between the documentation of an art work and the art work itself by citing two projects by the artists Steve Dutton and Steve Swindells. The article suggests that the artists were attempting to blur
the relationships between the work of art and its documentation by creating both simultaneously
In Conversation with InDialogue curators Heather Connelly and Rhiannon Jones and InDialogue Chair Steve Swindells
No full textThis session was a crucial part of the dialogic process and methodology. The session was positioned to close the InDialogue 2016 symposium. This conversation took place between Steve Swindells, acting as Chair, and founders Heather Connelly and Rhiannon Jones. The conversation was a research activity to allow us to disseminate activities and questions raised during InDialogue. It was a research process for the sharing of knowledge and allowed a space for drawing together key ideas, questions and reflections from the symposium programme of activity. It was important that initial learning and evaluation of the InDialogue methodology of how it brings people together was also discussed with the public who had actively engaged with the symposium, and who were invited to contribute their feedback and reflections. Key notional thoughts were shared on ideas of transformation and how are we being transformative in our practices, in the way we are thinking about language, and practice and research, and that idea of ‘trans’. Rhiannon Jones pulled together different talks, questions and discussions from the InDialogue Symposium and weaved them together for this event. It was important to demonstrate the through narratives started at InDialogue and link back to the definitions of dialogue that InDialogue methodologically draws on, see Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces, 2010. David Bohm, On Dialogue, 1996. Mikhail Bahktin, Art and Answerability, 2009. Start YouTube video at 34:5
Writing Encounters: ‘Institute of Beasts’ (2008)
No full textIn 1998 Steve Dutton and Steve Swindells formed the artist collaboration Dutton and Swindells. In 2008 they completed a three-month artist residency programme at Ssamzie Space, Seoul, South Korea. During the residency the artists founded the Institute of Beasts by introducing live animals into the studio as members of a faculty; to suggest new readings of the work but also as a strategy to potentially generate art as a form of encounter in which different compulsions or pathologies pull in various ways but equally live together in a frame or scenario in much the same way as practice can exist as performance, text and as object. An interesting aspect of having an animal(s) in the studio is the unpredictable nature of what happens to the work when it becomes a perch, a hutch or a burrow and what happens to the artist's practice when they share a space with other animal(s). This article and accompanying images form a written/visual extension to a presentation they delivered at Writing Encounters, York St John University, 1113 September 2008
One to Twenty
No full textOne to Twenty is a large piece of inflatable sculpture measuring 7 x 13 metres, which traces the exterior shape of glove patterns used to create the ‘Firemaster’ gloves at Southcombe Gloves at Stoke-sub-Hamdon at a precise ratio of1:20. Artists collaboration Barber Swindells (Claire Barber and Steve Swindells duo) were fascinated by the process of glove-making specifically by Southcombe Brothers. This is one of the few surviving glove making family businesses in the area producing gloves using a combination of traditional skills, tools and machines, as well as new technologies. Their specially designed lime green ‘Firemaster’ gloves are much loved by firemen, and account for more than 80% of the UK market. The leather becomes flexible when wet and hardens as it dries, and then becomes flexible again after being worn in action, and the sculpture is built to reflect these flexible properties
Mining Couture commission
No full text'Mining Couture' emerges from Barber Swindells' (Claire Barber and Steve Swindells collaboration)commission at the Leicester County Council Snibston Discovery Museum, UK, as part of the Transform regeneration programme.
Throughout the commission Barber Swindells worked across the Snibston site where links to other collections were established including those at the National Coalmining Museum in Wakefield.
By juxtaposing the fabrics and material processes of coal-mining and fashion, and their respective site-specific and non-site specific natures, the project reveals the rich collisions between contrary worlds. This is further explored by situating functionally ambiguous and ephemeral artefacts within the hard and utilitarian landscape of industrial production. The arrangement, moreover, provided the context for reframing metaphorical relationships between coal-mining and fashion; between the macro-scale of the geological seam, managed and exploited for its material resources (through engineering operations) and the micro-scale of the stitched seam, whose tightness, looseness, slackness (or frayed condition) affords varied natures of the fashioned garment.
The outcome of this archive-driven process resulted in an inflatable sculpture based on a Snibston ventilation fan (made by an inflatable ‘bouncy castle’ business - KLC Castles), adaptions of an original ‘Pit Brow Lass’ work-wear and an artist’s book Mining Couture, Black Dog, London, [paperback ISBN9781907317927; 143 pages]
Brown-Field Site
No full textFocusing upon an actual brown-field site in Sheffield, Sons of the Desert present a text-based work based upon the idea of a brown field site as a potential site for cultural regeneration and imagination. A brown-field site anticipates the process of a city’s natural entropy but it also suggests an opportunity for regeneration and reconstruction. Sons of the Desert are Steve Dutton and Steve Swindells
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