Visual Arts
Dialectical Reversal in About Two Worlds
Dialectical reversal in About Two Worlds presents a work in two parts. In the first part pages from a facsimile edition of William Morris' Kelmscott edition of his late romance The Wood Beyond the World has been overlaid with enlarged recreations of pages from Russian artist El Lissitzky's book About Two Squares. In contrast in the second part Edward Burne Jones' illustration of the Maid from The Wood Beyond the World has been overlaid onto a facsimile edition of About Two Squares. Morris saw beauty in the past wanting to elevate Victorian society from the ugliness imposed by industrialisation for Lissitzky the Russian revolution and the rapid advancement of science and technology meant the old world was no longer recognisable. He sought a new visual language that could express the socialist world he believed he was helping to construct. About Two Worlds presents both artists work in a dialectical relation.
Flux
‘Flux’ is an ongoing investigation of Edmund Burke's aesthetic theory of the sublime through fictional ‘scapes’ and fabricated narratives. Utilising alternative photographic processes and materials the work attempts to explore the fluidity and slippery nature of images. Their ambiguous quality attempts to encourage shifting perspectives that can flip between pattern and chaos having the potential to be at the same time both and neither and ultimately leaving the work to sit most comfortably in a liminal space where the commonly perceived binary pair meet and overlap.
‘You'll Never Walk Alone’: A Song of Community and Struggle, 1945–2021
This chapter considers Raymond Williams' ideas of community and structure of feeling in relationship to the last major football match in England before the sport was halted by the COVID-19 crisis the Liverpool vs Atlético-Madrid Champions League Final at Anfield Stadium in Liverpool. It was a game attended by 52267 people including 3000 Atlético Madrid supporters. In the months that followed the UK government's decision to allow the game to go ahead would be held partly responsible for the rapid spread of Coronavirus in Liverpool. The chapter also discusses the history of Liverpool FC supporters with a focus on the impact of events such as the Hillsborough Disaster (1989) and the COVID-19 pandemic and the significance of the matchday song “You'll Never Walk Alone” in relationship to times of difficulty for the club's fanbase.
The Anxious Spiral
The spiral exemplifies the tensions between pattern and chaos as a privileged figure that embodies both – between spring and swarf a bridge between evolving harmonic structures and ideas of vertigo instability and collapse taking in threads such as morphology in nature and architecture the spiral in the Cobra group early C20 speculative cosmology appearances of the spiral in the avant-garde film and popular culture. The spiral is read as a mobile link between evolving harmonic structures and vertigo instability and collapse.
Pattern Evolution
It is usual for a pattern design to encompass one or sometimes two structures (providing support for motifs and design elements). This practical research explores the potential of transformation and mutation of these structures as themes and variations.
In this practice-led research project an iterative building-up and transformation of multi-layered pencil drawings explored the potential of combining and blending pattern structures within a single composition. As if recording a narrative within music graphic marks denoting geometric pattern evolved danced and reformed across the design resulting in new iterations of once familiar pattern structural devices. Tone and frequency of marks provided depth as well as accents within the whole. In this initial series of drawing exercises it is clear that transformation of motifs contains great potential for continued exploration. The process identified repetition as a fruitful new avenue of enquiry. The drawing will continue.
You Guys Are So Stochastic
This article discusses the process and outcomes of a collaboration between mathematician Karoline Wiesner and artist Lucy Ward concerning the emergence of complex pattern through drawing. Complexity Theory describes ways that systems made up of many parts behave. A complex system is one that has many interacting components and although they are complicated complex systems may sometimes be reduced to a few simple rules from which global order or patterns can emerge. Instead of being a purely observational tool drawing was used to indicate and record action movements and developments laying down traces of activity or signifying lines of communication. The resulting drawing made in ink and pencil describes the performance of a number of systems of drawing and shows the emergence of a grid structure through the application of many tiny marks.
The Unrepeating-Repeat
This contribution comprises three interwoven yet distinct parts: drawings (‘Various iterative un re peat(s)’) others' words (‘Associated Thoughts on the Unrepeating-repeat’) and my written voice (‘Unrepeating-repeat: reversal once more seek-seek afresh’). I invite the reader to experience each element separately through to its end and then return to engage with another. Each open page spread purposely holds these three elements together to allow the unfolding engagement with the unrepeating-repeat to spill out from one component and seep into the other(s).
The Moments I am Looking For …
Artists' research processes are often hidden. Visual information gets stored on tapes and memory cards as well as notebooks and sketchbooks. Visual memories also get lodged in our brains and the process of making ideas visible finds us rifling through material that has been stored away - sometimes for years - in search of something that resonates with our current thoughts. Reviewing these in fresh contexts wrought by external events can bring new readings to discarded or overlooked images. Often we don't know what we are looking for until we see it. This chapter uses three video projects as a means to consider how reviewing visual material sometimes leads to unexpected discoveries and chance encounters which with hindsight connect with other images across time and space. As visual motifs appear and reappear in different contexts a pattern (and practice) emerges.
Crumpling: An Exploration of Nature
This chapter brings together contributions addressing the almost invisible or unnoticed the imaginary and the inconsequential. Entropy disintegration collapse intense observation and mindaltering activities are states or processes which impact on the formative/making practices and critical thinking which are addressed through discussion of specific examples. That the intersection between pattern and chaos can evoke a poetic response is noted. The materialityimmateriality of sound is also subjected to a ceaseless coming and going between all and nothing. Particles of dust and particles of perception seem to intermingle while the infinity to which nothingness points is also captured.
Ghost Flower 3
Four images and text summon the ghost of a girl from the authors home village of Cottingley in West Yorkshire. Ghost Flower 3 pays homage to an inventive deception that has endured for over a century and left an imprint on the place and the author.
Unfolding Thinking: Nanotechnology Meets Fine Art Practice
An exploration of an artist residency within the Centre for Interdisciplinary PhD Training and Research in Nanoscience (NanoDTC) at the University of Cambridge (UK). The project set out to recognise similarities explore possible confluences and develop connections by researching and deconstructing the physical and theoretical concerns of scientists working in the nanotechnology field within the framework of a fine art practice.
Imago Images
This paper draws on an outcome of my recent design practice Imago Images which was inspired by the butterflies I frequently observed in my Norwich garden. The outcome comprises two distinct visual elements a limited edition set of artist books and a self-generated animation produced by creative coding. The animation provides a companion counter-piece to the books. Viewed together the books are fixed and static whereas the animation is constantly evolving and unlimited. In describing the creative process and the visual methodologies associated with Imago Images ideas of unpredictability ambiguity visual change and altered states are explored. The contrast between the books and the animation can be likened to a butterfly's transformation from the immobile chrysalis to the active and moveable adult (or imago) stage. It shifts from representational images of particular single species to the construction of heterogeneous forms through the combination of observation and conjecture. In doing so imaginary butterflies populate an imaginary world. Imago Images reflects contemporary interests in the interface between writing drawing film typography and creative coding in the making of new and alternative connections through hybridised visual design practice.
Clouds in the Machine
The cloud is a form that shifts in shape morphs dissolves and reassembles. Its mutability lends itself perfectly to pareidolic visions - the tendency to see images in random stimuli. It is a ubiquitous symbol easily understood and assimilated and its shapeshifting propensities lend it endless appeal. Its position above the earth separates us from the lesser-known mysteries beyond which has led it to be characterised as a portal for other religious or mythical worlds.
Here I describe and probe the cloud as it figures in a body of artwork made for an industrial-scale laundry in Norfolk UK. The research was designed to test a dual function of pattern: as something that could disrupt the appearance of the laundry by appearing out-of-place and secondly to provide a visual metaphor for the repetitive processes of the laundry.
The role of ritual communication in consumption: A consumer coffee experience
Rituals are part of the consumer experience of goods especially food and drink and can contribute to consumer enjoyment of and fidelity to a specific product. However we lack detailed description of food/beverage-related rituals and their potential impact on consumer perceptions in particular whether and how communicating those rituals to consumers influences their attitudes. Here we use coffee as an example of a ritualized product within the UK market to explore this potential relationship and identify opportunities for design. In Study 1 we identified rituals associated with coffee preparation and consumption. In Study 2 we found that several procedural aspects of the rituals identified in Study 1 were not consistently conveyed in coffee advertising indicating a potential gap in communication with consumers. In Study 3 we showed that communicating such rituals to consumers resulted in significantly greater willingness to pay for coffee mediated by perceptions of social attention. This work connects growing interest in the psychological mechanisms of ritual with work on consumer perceptions and behaviour and carries significant implications for the design of messaging around food experience.
Introduction: Design and the Changing Educational Landscape
Transdisciplinarity is a term used to describe a process in which disciplines work together to explore problems subordinating disciplinary processes and methods for the common goal of solving the problem or challenge (Blessinger P. & Carfora J. M. 2015 p.30). Along with an overview of the purpose of the book and outline of the chapter structure this chapter defines key terms and provides a framework for understanding teaching and learning in transdisciplinary forms. The book covers four sections: Designing Effective Transdisciplinary Curricula Strategies for Incorporating Global Experiential Learning in Design Programs Transforming Professional Identities through Transdisciplinary Learning and Global Transdisciplinary Education.
Developing Twenty-First-Century Design Professionals through Impactful Curricula
There has been a systemic shift in contemporary design professions with the concomitant need for placing the requisite 21st century skills and capabilities for such professions at the forefront of curriculum design. This chapter describes the development of a new Bachelor of Design curriculum which drawing on internal and external stakeholder needs and sound educational precepts includes a suite of transdisciplinary Impact Lab units titled Place People Planet and Purpose. Alongside specialisation in one of seven disciplines labs form a compulsory part of the curriculum - discrete yet linked units of study scaffolded across the program and designed to engender transdisciplinarity in authentic design contexts. Whilst the charter for the Labs is robust the challenges of delivering such units are also outlined. A clear case is made for links between transdisciplinarity and ‘impact’ in the curriculum within a future-focused narrative of ethical responsible and transformational design for positive global change.
Curriculum Design and Development to Enhance Transdisciplinary Skills Development
This chapter reflects upon the development of an undergraduate design course in a major Australian University. The course accommodated up to 600 students per year in the disciplines of architecture fashion industrial design interior design interactive design and landscape architecture. This curriculum was developed with several features to facilitate and encourage transdisciplinary learning. These included several units shared by multiple disciplines large units focused on team collaboration and groups of elective units to facilitate cognate and non-cognate secondary fields of study chosen at the student's discretion. This chapter discusses the contextual motivations for the curriculum decisions behind this course development the attempts at facilitating transdisciplinarity within an undergraduate design degree and reflections on fourteen years of implementation. The successes and failures of these attempts at curriculum divergence are presented along with observed barriers to transdisciplinary learning.
Authentic Project-Based Learning: Designing a Pavilion for the Botanica Festival
This chapter discusses an undergraduate design studio for a temporary bamboo pavilion as part of the Botanica festival in Brisbane Australia. The festival takes place in the Brisbane Botanic Gardens and the Pavilion accommodates the same cultural programs as the Serpentine and M Pavilion. However the Botanica Festival includes a series of site-specific art installations within the gardens with pavilion sited alongside these works. In the design of the pavilion students were encouraged to borrow from the discipline of sculpture and digital media to develop a 'site-specific’ response. In this approach the site is treated as though it is a living ‘client’ or ‘user’ of the intended space. The students were also taught to use software that would support them in making evidence-based decisions for how their designs responded to the micro-climate of the site. This approach can be described as an art-led technical solution to a design problem. Working with an authentic brief to design the pavilion fostered students ability to engage with a systems based as well as materials based approach to sustainable design.
Transforming Engagement through Authentic Collaboration: Transdisciplinary Learning for Design Students and Preservice Teachers
This transdisciplinary case study explores the transformation of students' professional identities through authentic learning. It is underpinned by our curiosity about whether transdisciplinary learning based in authentic contexts can generate new ways of responding to 21st-Century challenges while simultaneously deepening higher education student learning engagement. It reports on a learning and teaching initiative which connected students from two different faculties in an Australian higher education context. The students—preservice teachers and design students (from the disciplines of architecture interior design landscape architecture and industrial design)—collaborated in teams to co-design an early childhood learning centre on a local project site. Our data confirmed the students' deep learning engagement through a transformational pedagogy and the development of their unique professional identities through enhanced opportunities for transdisciplinary collaboration. Findings suggest that this model while not without its challenges has considerable merit to offer the field of higher education.
Making Things Online: Transforming an Interdisciplinary Design Fabrication Unit for Online Delivery
COVID-19 necessitated the immediate shift of teaching and learning to online causing significant impact to teaching practice. The challenges posed for design education were exacerbated as online environments conflict with the hands-on nature of design education. This chapter reflects on the iterative design of Introducing Design Fabrication a large interdisciplinary design unit for online. It is framed using Daniel Pratt's perspectives of teaching which comprises beliefs intentions and actions. This chapter emphasises the importance of strong underlying beliefs that drive teaching practice and ensuring that subsequent intentions and actions are consistent with these regardless of the challenges faced. In the case of Introducing Design Fabrication this involved leveraging the potentials of online teaching tools to maintain an interdisciplinary and collaborative experience conducive to sharing perspectives. Key to this was creating environments that afforded visibility and flexibility and comprised clear and structured tasks that provided variety and freedom for creative expression.
The Travelling Professional in New York: A Study of an Experiential Transdisciplinary Study Tour
Internationalising the curriculum is a central agenda for most Higher Education providers considering the increasing need for graduate capabilities to embrace global ways of thinking and doing that span both social and professional domains. The Design industry is characteristically international in outlook and as such Design graduates irrespective if they plan on working or living abroad benefit from meaningful and robust exposure to both disciplinary and inter/transdisciplinary global perspectives during their study. The desire for accelerating authentic international experiences comes with significant risk from both an institutional level and for those directly engaged in the international activity. This chapter explores the transdisciplinary New York Design and Art Australian University study tour proposing that an international study amplifies the risk / reward relationship to build a space where on tour ‘risky learning’ occurs fostering and encouraging a new milieu of the travelling Design professional.
Contemporary Design Education in Australia
This book offers a range of approaches to teaching higher education design students to learn to design collaboratively and creatively through transdisciplinary multidisciplinary cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary learning experiences.
It highlights that the premise of traditional disciplinary silos does little to advance the competencies needed for contemporary design and non-linear career paths. It makes the point that higher education should respond to the impacts of a changing society including fluctuating market demands economic variations uncertainties and globalization.
Chapters highlight approaches that address this changing landscape to meet student industry and societal needs and reflect a range of design education contexts in which the authors have taught with a focus on experiences at the Queensland University of Technology Australia but also including collaborations and comparative discussions elsewhere in Australia and globally spanning Europe Asia the Middle East and the United States.
The book is positioned not as a definitive theoretical model for transdisciplinary design education but instead as a collective of chapters in which many forms of learning are explored through overarching themes of curriculum design and experiential and authentic learning and collaboration transforming professional identities and design cultures.
Architecture, Film, and the In-between
The long-established dialogue between architecture and film offers an interdisciplinary platform for a critical examination of spaces of in-between.
Apart from architecture informing scenography and cities serving as backdrops to the moving image films have actively participated in shaping the public opinion about architecture and its allied disciplines. While architecture and design may not necessarily be central themes in a film their spatial contextualization of the narrative informs cinematic productions. Screen Space and the In-Between looks at both the filmic imagination/representation of architectural in-betweenness as well as the in-between spaces within the inherent architectural structure of filmic expression.
On the one hand cinematic production serves as a site to project utopian fantasies of the built environment and on the other hand the processes tools and methods involved in both architecture and film function as mediators between abstract ideation and its materialized manifestation.
The book interrogates the filmic creation of spatial imaginaries through the anthropological lens especially as the disciplines in the built environment react to the liminal spaces of the cinematic. It adopts cinematic experiences of the built environment as a vantage point to reframe ongoing theoretical debates about liminal spaces.
Foreword by Mark Foster Gage
Contributors: Giuliana Bruno Beatriz Colomina James F. Kerestes Graham Harman Ferda Kolatan Juhani Pallasmaa Eva Perez De Vega Mehmet Sahinler Patrik Schumacher Maria Sieira Alican Taylan Vahid Vahdat Jason Vigneri-Beane Jon Yoder Michael Young
Spectacle, Entertainment, and Recreation in Late Ottoman and Early Turkish Republican Cities
The short lived Tulip Era breathed a new life into Ottoman social life and novel elements of art architecture and new spaces of leisure and entertainment that both men and women could participate and enjoy emerged during the early 18th century. Later during the 19th century triggered by the state policies to establish closer relationship with European states as well as by the royal urge to be seen and felt by their subjects more intensively and more interactively these novelties in social life were predominantly adopted and instrumentalized by the ruling elite and found their reflection in major urban centers of the empire. With the emulation of the ruling elite by various classes and due to an increasing social mobility among classes the new forms of entertainment and recreation gradually permeated into the rest of the society and ended up having a long-term impact on the Ottoman society.
Hence during the 19th century a modern urban life in Ottoman cities has emerged shaped by these new forms of recreation and entertainment and by new regimes of visibility. Ripping open of their traditional nuclei in the second half of the 19th century these urban centers accommodated –along with new trade financial industrial and residential facilities– different types of entertainment and recreation ranging from opera to cinema and from concerts to sports. Thus the late-Ottoman cities witnessed the emergence of new architectural and urban facilities such as theatres opera houses clubs performance halls sports fields and public parks. These spaces of entertainment and spectacle represented the modernizing face of the empire and also embraced by the Republican elite after the foundation of the young Turkish Republic. These public/social spaces were utilized for the making of the modern Turkish nation.
This edited volume offers an analysis of the forms and spaces of spectacle entertainment and recreation during the late Ottoman and early Republican eras. Each article focuses on different forms on spectacle entertainment or recreation in varied cities of Ottoman Empire or Republican Turkey. The edited volume aims not only to shed light on how such urban or architectural spaces were developed and shaped but also to scrutinize their impact on social cultural urban life in the modernizing Ottoman Empire and Republican Turkey.
Part of the Critical Studies in Architecture of the Middle East series.
Bridging measurement and cultural interpretation: Experiencing the form-giving of men’s briefs
This article explores the first-hand experience of the diversity in styles of men’s briefs. It questions the standard categorization of briefs based on coverage and leg length. Due to the advent of internet-based sales channels the scope for design has widened dramatically. The quality and experience of underwear styles is not captured in waistband dimensions and information on fabric. The article questions some ideas about designers’ ability to communicate product understanding given the tacit non-verbal and haptic qualities inherent in briefs. It also raises questions about research paradigms common in industrial design research. This article is thus both about the subject (men’s briefs) and the means of research (research paradigm). The article combines aspects of design research used for industrial design and approaches such as wardrobe studies and interpretation used in fashion research.
Community Arts Education
This edited collection offers global perspectives on the transverse boundary-blurring possibilities of community arts education.
Invoking ‘transversality’ as an overarching theoretical framework and a methodological structure 55 contributors – community professionals scholars artists educators and activists from sixteen countries – offer studies and practical cases exploring the complexities of community arts education at all levels.
Such complexities include challenges created by globalizing phenomena such as the COVID-19 pandemic; ongoing efforts to achieve justice for Indigenous peoples; continuing movement of immigrants and refugees; growing recognition of issues related to equity diversity and inclusion in the workplace; and the increasing impact of grassroot movements and organizations.
Chapters are grouped into four thematic clusters – Connections Practices Spaces and Relations – that map these and other intersecting assemblages of transversality. Thinking transversally about community art education not only shifts our understanding of knowledge from a passive construct to an active component of social life but redefines art education as a distinctive practice emerging from the complex relationships that form community.
The Architect's Dream
Sean Pickersgill demonstrates that the goal of creating meaningful architecture can take a variety of critical and philosophical paths. The importance of architecture as an expression of broad complex social drivers is complemented by the equally popular idea that architecture as an intellectual pursuit retains its own autonomy as a self-referential culture. This book uniquely places the emphasis for innovation in architecture within the domain of critical thinking generally and a specific understanding of the semantics of built form.
The book draws on a broad range of subject areas from film to philosophy to anthropology to mathematics and economics to show that the path to meaningful creative practice is always based in an understanding of the principal drivers for change and meaning in society.
It is not a simple recipe book or workshop manual for others to reproduce. It requires the engaged reader to employ their own creative abilities to find what potential lies in each of the propositions and it will encourage the scholastic architect to continue to mine the rich veins of intellectual culture to demonstrate the latent purposiveness inherent in all meaningful architecture.
Mimicry, Adaptation, Expression
This chapter examines evolutionary and ethological concepts of mimicry in response to Gemma Anderson's ‘Isomorphology’ project and its development into artworks and methodologies that she names ‘Isomorphogenesis.’ The chapter culminates in a comparison of the dynamics of cephalopod camouflage with processes involved in the activity of drawing. Whilst there is a descriptive language that we can borrow from scientific studies of cephalopods that might illuminate the mimetic adaptive and expressive qualities of drawing I will propose conversely a reading of cephalopod ‘artistry’ in the light of Isomorphogenesis as an alternative means of thinking about the dynamics of cephalopod rapid camouflage and perhaps also about multi-species interactions within their broader ecosystems.
Drawing Out the Superorganism: Artistic Intervention and the Amplification of Processes of Life
The true slime mould Physarum polycephalum is a single-celled organism which spends much of its life creeping around the forest floor feeding on rotting vegetation. Comprised of many cells all operating within a single cell membrane this many-headed amoeba possesses a form of proto-intelligence which enables it to operate far beyond its physiological means. Despite having no sensory organs or a brain the slime mould has demonstrated that it can recognize pattern by anticipating events and is entirely selforganising with no centralized control system—purely a mass of cellular cytoplasm pulsing in a synchronous flow. This chapter examines the behaviours of this intriguing organism as mediated through a series of time-lapse studies designed to draw out inherent processes of life. Responding to given interventions–a series of invitations and interruptions utilizing known attractants and repellents–a performative stimulus/response emerges. The imaging technologies employed amplify the biological world of the slime mould to human spatiotemporal scale. The intention of the studies is to reveal the underlying processes at play within this fascinating and beautiful organism and through the aesthetic and technological devices employed to entice other humans to observe and take note.
Drawing the Dynamic Nature of Cell Division
Representing the dynamic nature of biological processes is a challenge. In this chapter we describe a collaborative project in which the authors – an artist a philosopher of biology and a cell biologist – explore how best to represent the entire process of cell division in one connected image. Our attempt to address this problem involved developing a series of group exploratory exercises we call “Drawing Labs” in combination with one-to-one sessions and discussions between the authors. This led to the idea of a “mitosis score ” which was applied to cell division in different organisms and cancer cells and gave rise to new drawings that highlight the dynamic flow of the process. Feedback from leading experts in cell division confirmed the ability of these drawings to communicate knowledge and understanding of cell division. We propose that drawing labs have value both in communicating the dynamic nature of biological processes and in generating new images insights and hypotheses that can be tested by artists and scientists.
Metamorphosis in Images: Insect Transformation from the End of the Seventeenth to the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century
The paper examines the development of the concept of insect metamorphosis from the end of the seventeenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Studying the work of Jan Swammerdam (1637-1680) Pierre Lyonet (1706-1789) and Johann Moritz David Herold (1790-1862) it shows how those researchers developed an understanding of metamorphosis through the work with their hand and pencil. They played and experimented with pictures by trying out new techniques of drawing and composition that enabled them to record the changes in an insect's life and thus render them visible.
Flow, Attend, Flex: Introducing a Process-Oriented Approach to Live Cell Biological Research
Below are some reflections on developing an active “process-oriented” scientific methodology based on 25 years of cell biology research and teaching stimulated by the work undertaken in collaboration with Gemma Anderson and John Dupré on ‘drawing the dynamic nature of cell division’ and other chapters in this book. Drawing on known the psychological concepts of ‘Flow’ and ‘Flex’ (see below) and the “delicate empiricism” of Goethe (1749-1832) (Anderson 2017) I suggest ways in which the cultivation of the imagination intentional creativity and a participatory relationship with microscopic life applied thoughtfully and validly can provide new knowledge and insight of the natural world.
Drawing as a Pragmatist Visual Epistemology
The chapter frames drawing as a pragmatist visual epistemology: a mode of inquiry carried out with pen or pencil on paper in which one formulates visual hypotheses and experiments with the consequences of seeing phenomena in certain ways. It articulates three ways in which drawing can function as a visual epistemology and a mode of inquiry in its own right: delineating reconfiguring and structuring.
Drawing the Origami Embryo as a Stratified Space–Time Worm
We re-vision Kathryn Tosney's “origami embryo” as a stratified topological space using the methods and ideas of stratified Morse theory
Drawing to Extend Waddington's Epigenetic Landscape
The authors an artist a mathematician and a biologist describe their collaboration examining the potential of drawing to further the understanding of biological processes. As a case study this article considers C.H. Waddington's powerful visual representation of the “epigenetic landscape” whose purpose is to unify research in genetics embryology and evolutionary biology. The authors explore the strengths and limitations of Waddington's landscape and attempt to transcend the latter through a collaborative series of exploratory images. Through careful description of this drawing process the authors touch on its epistemological consequences for all participants.
Drawing Processes of Life
Drawing Processes of Life is the product of biologists philosophers and artists working together to formulate new ways of representing our new approach to life. It is a mutualistic symbiosis where identities are transformed information and nutritive substances shared and where new organisms emerge.
Originating from an AHRC-funded interdisciplinary project it derives from Gemma Andersons’ work on the methodological and epistemological value of drawing as a technique in biological research and from her collaborative work on visualising living – biological – processes through artistic processes. It also draws on John Dupré’s recent work on biology as process and the need to develop representations of biological systems that more adequately capture their processual nature. Hence the book has intertwined aims: to show how better to represent biological process through drawing and to demonstrate the scientific value of drawing as a method.
The book presents this work and locates it in a broader historical and contemporary perspective on the relations between art and science. The project outcomes are interwoven with the work of leading scholars in the field. Many of these contributions also stress the problems presented by the processual nature of biological phenomena a central focus of Anderson and Dupré’s own work.
Contributors include Chiara Ambrosio Heather Barnett Alessio Corti Katharina Lee Chichester Johannes Jaeger Wahida Khandker Jonathan Phillips Berta Verd James Wakefield and Janina Wellmann. Foreword from Scott F. Gilbert and Afterword from Sarah Gilbert and Scott F. Gilbert.
The perspectives presented here constitute a powerfully integrated and vital set of themes of interest to artists scientists philosophers students and post-doctoral researchers.
Collaborative Thinking, Creating and Learning on a Remote Greek Island: Towards Community Art Education for Sustainability
This chapter contributes to understanding collaborative artmaking for sustainability as a form of community art education particularly in isolated communities. A/r/tographic roles in an intergenerational community art-making collaboration on a Greek island are discussed in relation to a theoretical cultural ecology framework. A three-level analysis of the community artwork demonstrates the potential of community art education to contribute towards the co-constitutional nature of community sustainability.
Introduction: Community Arts Education: Transversal Global Perspectives
This book is an international collaboration among 55 community professionals scholars artists educators and activists from sixteen countries. ‘Transversality’ signifies both the overarching theoretical framework and the methodological structure for reimaging the complexity of community arts education. The authors explore how community art education shifts our understanding of knowledge from a passive construct to an active component of social life. Thus community arts education becomes a distinctive practice emerging from the complex relationships that form community. Throughout this book studies and practical cases demonstrate these complex interrelationships from varied geographical locations. Yet across chapters these authors think transversally: considering and embracing blurred boundaries among the arts cultural practice and educational discourse as well as intersecting roles of artists community professionals educators learners and the public. Such collective inquiry aims to develop a methodological and conceptual framework for new approaches to community arts education.
Conversations With Gardens: Artful Spaces in Community Art Education
The educational potential of multimodal digital technologies performed as public pedagogies in a community art context is explored through a heritage garden and museum space in Quebec Canada. Using a walking methodologies approach this chapter chronicles the incubation of an immersive digital technology project that evolved from an audio walk to an experimental collaboration between les Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens and the PRISME Innovation Lab at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Through an interactive digital interface the human nonhuman and more-than-human agents forming the Jardins de Métis community become entangled in dynamic thinking-making intra-actions underscoring the complexity of the project. An assemblage of tensions and event-encounters with diverse agencies form intriguing connections and transversal refractions: being and becoming through public art and community exchange. Walking-with this garden initiates a metaphoric conversation dialogic and relational between co-constituents of a place and spaces within that place.
Seeing What Unfolds: New Ways of Exploring Community Art Education in Formal Learning Spaces
This chapter is designed around the affect of the fold. The fold unfold and refold is a metaphor for openings opportunities and becomings in-between inside|outside. We use the metaphor of the folding process of making paper aeroplanes as a creative action and practice that is iterative when the paper is folded unfolded and refolded symmetrically. We-unfold a/r/tography as community art education and fold and refold our processes to explore how through making and writing in relational dialogue with artists we see art education as a site of and for affect that enables and opens provocation interruption and contestation.
Finding Possibility in the Liminality of Socially Engaged Arts: Fostering Learning and Wellbeing With Refugee Youth
This chapter introduces a socially engaged arts project called ‘Youth Artists and Allies Taking Action in Society’ (YAAAS) uniquely designed for educators and refugee high school students to work side by side in a collaborative partnership. After a project overview a literature review reveals the essential ways in which trauma-informed practice social-emotional learning and culturally sustaining pedagogy can intersect with socially engaged art to support both the learning and wellness of refugee youth. The chapter describes the pedagogical and curricular practices of YAAAS to illustrate how the liminality afforded by socially engaged arts has allowed YAAAS to become an exceptionally generative space of learning and wellness.