New research project: Weaving Codes – Coding Weaves

‘Weaving Codes – Coding Weaves’, a collaborative project involving Alex Mclean with Ellen Harlizius-Klück, Dave Griffiths, Kia Ng, Emma Cocker, Lovebytes + many others has been funded, by an AHRC Digital Transformations Amplification award. Starting in September 2014 the projects asks: “What are the historical and theoretical points at which the practice of weaving and computer programming connect? What insights can be gained if we bring these activities together, through live shared experience? How do digital technologies influence our ways of making, and what new digital technologies can we create to explore their social use in creative collaboration? Our research challenge is to unravel industrial and contemporary technological developments in weaving and computer programming, in order to expose and challenge assumptions, and make the human processes involved visible. In particular, to explore and communicate the nature of mathematical thinking in ancient weaving, and creative thinking in contemporary computer programming, bringing key contributions to discussion of making in the humanities”.

I have been invited to act as a project writer or even critical interlocutor on this project, attending several of the events and workshops, in order to produce a piece of writing as response. My intent is to develop ideas around the Penelopean practice of ‘weaving and unweaving’ alongside reflections on how the trope of weaving is central to the concept of kairos, ideas that emerged as part of a previous collaboration involving Alex and the Live Notation Unit resulting in my recently published text, 'Live Notation: Reflections on a Kairotic Practice', Performance Research, 'On Writing and Digital Media'.

Publication: Emerging Landscapes

The publication Emerging Landscapes (eds.) Davide Deriu, Krystallia Kamvasinou and Eugenie Shinkle (Ashgate Publishing, 2014) which includes my chapter ‘Towards an Emergent Knowledge of the Margins: Reflections on an Urban Retreat’ is now available.

 

Emerging Landscapes brings together scholars and practitioners working in a wide range of disciplines within the fields of the built environment and visual arts to explore landscape as an idea, an image, and a material practice in an increasingly globalized world.

 Drawing on the synergies between the fields of architecture and photography, this collection takes a multidisciplinary approach, combining practice-based research with scholarly essays. It explores and critically reassesses the interface between representation - the imaginary and symbolic shaping of the human environment - and production - the physical and material changes wrought on the land. At a time of environmental crisis and the ‘end of nature, ’shifting geopolitical boundaries and economic downturn, Emerging Landscapes reflects on the state of landscape and its future, mapping those practices that creatively address the boundaries between possibility, opportunity and action in imagining and shaping landscape.

Publication: On Writing and Digital Media

My article 'Live Notation: Reflections on a Kairotic Practice' is available in the current issue of Performance Research, Volume. 18, Issue 5, 'On Writing and Digital Media',  eds. Ric Allsopp and Jerome Fletcher. More information here.

A limited number of free copies of my article can be accessed here.

Event: Loitering with Intent

I was in Stockholm from 5 – 9 March, attending the conference Loitering with Intent: A Feast of Research and the Society of Artistic Research AGM. Loitering with Intent (5 – 7 March) brought together Stockholm University of the Arts and the Society for Artistic Research to explore formats for sharing knowledge that emerge from artistic research practices. The Loitering with Intent conference foregrounded performative modes of exposing practice as research, celebrating the fragile balance between sensory, situated and spoken forms of knowledge. Invited artists included: Henrik Agger, Louise Bjurholm, Magnus Bärtås, Nils Claesson, Florian Dombois, Kristina Hagström-Ståhl, Paul Landon, Brita Lemmens, Tero Nauha, Kirsi Nevanti, Poste Restante, Michael Schwab, Koen Vanmechelen, Magnus William Olsson, Rasmus Ölme.

This event has provided an impetus for me to finally start archiving some of my own research within the Society for Artistic Research online catalogue, a purpose built repository for international artistic research. To date, I have started ‘expositions’ for my Close Reading/Live Writing projects and also for the collaborative research undertaken with Open City. More to follow soon.

Event: Just What Is It That Makes Today's Art Schools So Different, So Appealing?

I have been invited to chair the discussion panel around Community and Place at this forthcoming symposium at the ICA.

Just What Is It That Makes Today's Art Schools So Different, So Appealing?

ICA, London, 29 Mar 2014

Situating current art schools within the context of an historical legacy of self-organised, experimental and alternative education models, this symposium aims to interrogate the content of art and design education. In May 1968 students and a few staff occupied Hornsey College of Art in a protest derived from frustration and discontent of teaching methods, curricular relevance and art school resources. Hornsey College of Art, later to become Middlesex University, became renowned for its experimental and progressive approach to art and design education. In the North East, Richard Hamilton and others pioneered a new, radical method of art training at Newcastle University which was to influence higher art education for generations to come. In London the St Martins 'A' course took sculpture students into a radically new pedagogical experiment whilst Art & Language founded their collaboration within Coventry School of Art.

From today’s standpoint, where art and design pedagogy has gained new attention and prompted strong criticism within contemporary art discourse, this moment can be seen as the start of a new wave of thinking about how art and design is taught in the UK. What is interesting from a contemporary perspective is that these new forms of teaching and resistance emerged from within the art institutions, detaching them absolutely from past modes of teaching and learning. Beset on one side by the emergence of ‘open schools’ and gallery-led pedagogical projects, and on the other by the emergence of independent commercial ventures that teach specialist skills and techniques, today’s UK art schools may be arriving at a similar turning point. In a climate where University managements suspend students over participation in protests this symposium will examine the possibilities for change and ask how art school teaching can equip our young people for their futures.

Situating current art schools within the context of an historical legacy of self-organised, experimental and alternative education models, we will probe further, aiming to interrogate the content of art and design education. It will explore current concerns around the desire of students to learn ‘skills’ as well as the role of the tutor who is no longer the expert. It will examine the art school as a community of ideas and resistance as well as how the institution develops ‘officially’ and ‘unofficially’. In a discourse dominated by models, this symposium will ask; can art and design be taught? And if so, how? What is the current art school experience and what could it be?

Speakers include scholars of the history of art pedagogy as well as tutors, students and those engaged in pedagogical initiatives external to established institutions: Lucy Rose Bayley, Prof. Jon Bird, Prof. Sonia Boyce, Maurice Carlin, Kelly Chorpening, Dr. Elena Crippa, Emma Cocker, David Cross, Ian Dawson, Emily Druiff, Anna Harding, Anna Hart, Dr. Nicholas Houghton, Timothy Ivison, Maria Lisogorskaya, Dr. Loraine Leeson, Andrew McGettigan, Louisa Minkin, Prof. Nicholas Mirzoeff, Prof. Lucy Renton, Dr. Hilary Robinson, Harriet Warden, Martin Westwood, Laura White and Prof. Neal White. In partnership with Middlesex University, London

Exhibition: New performative drawing

The Art of Bombing – New performative drawing

28 February – 19 March 2014
P74 Gallery,

Ljubljana, Slovenia

The project The Art of Bombing – New performative drawing highlights the performative aspect of drawing and the processual side of its creation, exploring how it connects with performative artistic practices, such as interventions, happenings, public actions, performance art, public lectures, and public art. Back in 1969, Tomaž Šalamun dragged a continuous line around Petrovaradin Fortress in Novi Sad; in ‘The Snake’, Milenko Matanović released wooden sticks tied together with string into the Ljubljanica River, thus they were drawn by the river currents; David Nez used a rope to bend stalks of wheat to create new lines in the landscape.
 The exhibition The Art of Bombing – New performative drawing represents the new generation of this genre, including work by Nikolaus Gansterer and Emma Cocker, Anja Jelovšek, Darinka Pop-Mitič and Veli&Amos. Curated by Tadej Pogačar.