The cultural and creative industries

A critical and Historical account of the cultural and creative industries as a policy discourse. It argues that the emergence of a cultural policy discourse was part of a progressive democratic politics from the 1960s onwards, taking cognizance of the emergence of new kinds of commercial popular culture. It suggests that this period saw the merging of aesthetics and culture in particular ways. The creative industries come from a different source which combined innovation theory, embedded economics and entrepreneurialism in ways that resulted in a much less progressive politics. The chapter ends by suggesting the the idea of the creative industries is now at an end.

The unfinished landscape fractal geometry and the aesthetics of ecological design

During the late 20th century it was proposed that a design aesthetic reflecting current ecological concerns was required within the overall domain of the built environment and specifically within landscape design. To address this, some authors suggested various theoretical frameworks upon which such an aesthetic could be based. Within these frameworks there was an underlying theme that the patterns and processes of Nature may have the potential to form this aesthetic — an aesthetic based on fractal rather than Euclidean geometry. In order to understand how fractal geometry, described as the geometry of Nature, could become the referent for a design aesthetic, this research examines the mathematical concepts of fractal Geometry, and the underlying philosophical concepts behind the terms ‘Nature’ and ‘aesthetics’. The findings of this initial research meant that a new definition of Nature was required in order to overcome the barrier presented by the western philosophical Nature¯culture duality. This new definition of Nature is based on the type and use of energy. Similarly, it became clear that current usage of the term aesthetics has more in common with the term ‘style’ than with its correct philosophical meaning. The aesthetic philosophy of both art and the environment recognises different aesthetic criteria related to either the subject or the object, such as: aesthetic experience; aesthetic attitude; aesthetic value; aesthetic object; and aesthetic properties. Given these criteria, and the fact that the concept of aesthetics is still an active and ongoing philosophical discussion, this work focuses on the criteria of aesthetic properties and the aesthetic experience or response they engender. The examination of fractal geometry revealed that it is a geometry based on scale rather than on the location of a point within a three-dimensional space. This enables fractal geometry to describe the complex forms and patterns created through the processes of Wild Nature. Although fractal geometry has been used to analyse the patterns of built environments from a plan perspective, it became clear from the initial review of the literature that there was a total knowledge vacuum about the fractal properties of environments experienced every day by people as they move through them. To overcome this, 21 different landscapes that ranged from highly developed city centres to relatively untouched landscapes of Wild Nature have been analysed. Although this work shows that the fractal dimension can be used to differentiate between overall landscape forms, it also shows that by itself it cannot differentiate between all images analysed. To overcome this two further parameters based on the underlying structural geometry embedded within the landscape are discussed. These parameters are the Power Spectrum Median Amplitude and the Level of Isotropy within the Fourier Power Spectrum. Based on the detailed analysis of these parameters a greater understanding of the structural properties of landscapes has been gained. With this understanding, this research has moved the field of landscape design a step close to being able to articulate a new aesthetic for ecological design.

Fashion, the body and technology : tracing early 20th century techno-utopian ideas, aesthetics and impulses in 21st century wearable technology

‘Wearable technology’, or the use of specialist technology in garments, is promoted by the electronics industry as the next frontier of fashion. However the story of wearable technology’s relationship with fashion begins neither with the development of miniaturised computers in the 1970s nor with sophisticated ‘smart textiles’ of the twenty-first century, despite what much of the rhetoric suggests. This study examines wearable technology against a longer history of fashion, highlighted by the influential techno-sartorial experiments of a group of early twentieth century avant-gardes including Italian Futurists Giacomo Balla and F.T. Marinetti, Russian Constructivists Varvara Stepanova and Liubov Popova, and Paris-based Cubist, Sonia Delaunay. Through the interdisciplinary framework of fashion studies, the thesis provides a fuller picture of wearable technology framed by the idea of utopia. Using comparative analysis, and applying the theoretical formulations of Fredric Jameson, Louis Marin and Michael Carter, the thesis traces the appearance of three techno-utopian themes from their origins in the machine age experiments of Balla, Marinetti, Stepanova, Popova and Delaunay to their twenty-first century reappearance in a dozen wearable technology projects. By exploring the central thesis that contemporary wearable technology resurrects the techno-utopian ideas and expressions of the early twentieth century, the study concludes that the abiding utopian impetus to embed technology in the aesthetics (prints, silhouettes, and fabrication) and functionality of fashion is to unify subject, society and environment under a totalising technological order.

Strategic aesthetics in advertising campaigns : implications for art direction education

For over half a century art directors within the advertising industry have been adapting to the changes occurring in media, culture and the corporate sector, toward enhancing professional performance and competitiveness. These professionals seldom offer explicit justification about the role images play in effective communication. It is uncertain how this situation affects advertising performance, because advertising has, nevertheless, evolved in parallel to this as an industry able to fabricate new opportunities for itself. However, uncertainties in the formalization of art direction knowledge restrict the possibilities of knowledge transfer in higher education. The theoretical knowledge supporting advertising art direction has been adapted spontaneously from disciplines that rarely focus on specific aspects related to the production of advertising content, like, for example: marketing communication, design, visual communication, or visual art. Meanwhile, in scholarly research, vast empirical knowledge has been generated about advertising images, but often with limited insight into production expertise. Because art direction is understood as an industry practice and not as an academic discipline, an art direction perspective in scholarly contributions is rare. Scholarly research that is relevant to art direction seldom offers viewpoints to help understand how it is that research outputs may specifically contribute to art direction practices. This thesis is dedicated to formally understanding the knowledge underlying art direction and using it to explore models for visual analysis and knowledge transfer in higher education. The first three chapters of this thesis offer, firstly, a review of practical and contextual aspects that help define art direction, as a profession and as a component in higher education; secondly, a discussion about visual knowledge; and thirdly, a literature review of theoretical and analytic aspects relevant to art direction knowledge. Drawing on these three chapters, this thesis establishes explicit structures to help in the development of an art direction curriculum in higher education programs. Following these chapters, this thesis explores a theoretical combination of the terms ‘aesthetics’ and ‘strategy’ as foundational notions for the study of art direction. The theoretical exploration of the term ‘strategic aesthetics’ unveils the potential for furthering knowledge in visual commercial practices in general. The empirical part of this research explores ways in which strategic aesthetics notions can extend to methodologies of visual analysis. Using a combination of content analysis and of structures of interpretive analysis offered in visual anthropology, this research discusses issues of methodological appropriation as it shifts aspects of conventional methodologies to take into consideration paradigms of research that are producer-centred. Sampled out of 2759 still ads from the online databases of Cannes Lions Festival, this study uses an instrumental case study of love-related advertising to facilitate the analysis of content. This part of the research helps understand the limitations and functionality of the theoretical and methodological framework explored in the thesis. In light of the findings and discussions produced throughout the thesis, this project aims to provide directions for higher education in relation to art direction and highlights potential pathways for further investigation of strategic aesthetics.

Inflammatory cytokine responses to progressive resistance training and supplementation with fortified milk in men aged 50+ years : an 18-month randomized controlled trial

We examined the effects of progressive resistance training (PRT) and supplementation with calcium-vitamin D(3) fortified milk on markers of systemic inflammation, and the relationship between inflammation and changes in muscle mass, size and strength. Healthy men aged 50-79 years (n = 180) participated in this 18-month randomized controlled trial that comprised a factorial 2 x 2 design. Participants were randomized to (1) PRT + fortified milk supplement, (2) PRT, (3) fortified milk supplement, or (4) a control group. Participants assigned to PRT trained 3 days per week, while those in the supplement groups consumed 400 ml day(-1) of milk containing 1,000 mg calcium plus 800 IU vitamin D(3). We collected venous blood samples at baseline, 12 and 18 months to measure the serum concentrations of IL-6, TNF-alpha and hs-CRP. There were no exercise x supplement interactions, but serum IL-6 was 29% lower (95% CI, -62, 0) in the PRT group compared with the control group after 12 months. Conversely, IL-6 was 31% higher (95% CI, -2, 65) in the supplement group compared with the non-supplemented groups after 12 and 18 months. These between-group differences did not persist after adjusting for changes in fat mass. In the PRT group, mid-tibia muscle cross-sectional area increased less in men with higher pre-training inflammation compared with those men with lower inflammation (net difference similar to 2.5%, p < 0.05). In conclusion, serum IL-6 concentration decreased following PRT, whereas it increased after supplementation with fortified milk concomitant with changes in fat mass. Furthermore, low-grade inflammation at baseline restricted muscle hypertrophy following PRT.

Tax evasion, inequality, and progressive taxes : a political economy perspective

The standard approach to tax compliance applies the economics-of-crime methodology pioneered by Becker (1968): in its first application, due to Allingham and Sandmo (1972) it models the behaviour of agents as a decision involving a choice of the extent of their income to report to tax authorities, given a certain institutional environment, represented by parameters such as the probability of detection and penalties in the event the agent is caught. While this basic framework yields important insights on tax compliance behavior, it has some critical limitations. Specifically, it indicates a level of compliance that is significantly below what is observed in the data. This thesis revisits the original framework with a view towards addressing this issue, and examining the political economy implications of tax evasion for progressivity in the tax structure. The approach followed involves building a macroeconomic, dynamic equilibrium model for the purpose of examining these issues, by using a step-wise model building procedure starting with some very simple variations of the basic Allingham and Sandmo construct, which are eventually integrated to a dynamic general equilibrium overlapping generations framework with heterogeneous agents. One of the variations involves incorporating the Allingham and Sandmo construct into a two-period model of a small open economy of the type originally attributed to Fisher (1930). A further variation of this simple construct involves allowing agents to initially decide whether to evade taxes or not. In the event they decide to evade, the agents then have to decide the extent of income or wealth they wish to under-report. We find that the ‘evade or not’ assumption has strikingly different and more realistic implications for the extent of evasion, and demonstrate that it is a more appropriate modeling strategy in the context of macroeconomic models, which are essentially dynamic in nature, and involve consumption smoothing across time and across various states of nature. Specifically, since deciding to undertake tax evasion impacts on the consumption smoothing ability of the agent by creating two states of nature in which the agent is ‘caught’ or ‘not caught’, there is a possibility that their utility under certainty, when they choose not to evade, is higher than the expected utility obtained when they choose to evade. Furthermore, the simple two-period model incorporating an ‘evade or not’ choice can be used to demonstrate some strikingly different political economy implications relative to its Allingham and Sandmo counterpart. In variations of the two models that allow for voting on the tax parameter, we find that agents typically choose to vote for a high degree of progressivity by choosing the highest available tax rate from the menu of choices available to them. There is, however, a small range of inequality levels for which agents in the ‘evade or not’ model vote for a relatively low value of the tax rate. The final steps in the model building procedure involve grafting the two-period models with a political economy choice into a dynamic overlapping generations setting with more general, non-linear tax schedules and a ‘cost-of evasion’ function that is increasing in the extent of evasion. Results based on numerical simulations of these models show further improvement in the model’s ability to match empirically plausible levels of tax evasion. In addition, the differences between the political economy implications of the ‘evade or not’ version of the model and its Allingham and Sandmo counterpart are now very striking; there is now a large range of values of the inequality parameter for which agents in the ‘evade or not’ model vote for a low degree of progressivity. This is because, in the ‘evade or not’ version of the model, low values of the tax rate encourages a large number of agents to choose the ‘not-evade’ option, so that the redistributive mechanism is more ‘efficient’ relative to the situations in which tax rates are high. Some further implications of the models of this thesis relate to whether variations in the level of inequality, and parameters such as the probability of detection and penalties for tax evasion matter for the political economy results. We find that (i) the political economy outcomes for the tax rate are quite insensitive to changes in inequality, and (ii) the voting outcomes change in non-monotonic ways in response to changes in the probability of detection and penalty rates. Specifically, the model suggests that changes in inequality should not matter, although the political outcome for the tax rate for a given level of inequality is conditional on whether there is a large or small or large extent of evasion in the economy. We conclude that further theoretical research into macroeconomic models of tax evasion is required to identify the structural relationships underpinning the link between inequality and redistribution in the presence of tax evasion. The models of this thesis provide a necessary first step in that direction.

Review: "Transfigured Stages : Major Practitioners and Theatre Aesthetics in Australia" by Margaret Hamilton

In Transfigured Stages: Major Practitioners and Theatre Aesthetics in Australia, Margaret Hamilton traces the emergence of a postdramatic performance aesthetic in Australian theatre in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s through what she characterizes as an ‘analysis’ (p. 15) or ‘critique’ (p. 16)of a series of pivotal productions. For Hamilton, the transfigured aesthetic in the spotlight here is one typified by a focus on memory, imagination, desire, fear or disgust as facets of the human condition; by a visual, televisual or interactive dramaturgy; and, most critically, by a metatheatrical tendency to make tensions in the theatre-making process part and parcel of the tensions in the performance itself (pp.18–20)...

A home-based progressive resistance exercise programme for patients with venous leg ulcers : a feasibility study

This study aimed to assess the feasibility of a home-based exercise program and examine the effects on the healing rates of venous leg ulcers. A 12 –week randomised controlled trial was conducted investigating the effects of an exercise intervention compared to a usual care group. Participants in both groups (n = 13) had active venous ulceration and were treated in a metropolitan hospital outpatients clinic in Australia. Data were collected on recruitment from medical records, clinical assessment and questionnaires. Follow-up data on progress in healing and treatments were collected fortnightly for 12 weeks. Calf muscle pump function data were collected at baseline and 12 weeks from recruitment. Range of ankle motion data were collected at baseline, 6 and 12 weeks from recruitment. This pilot study indicated that the intervention was feasible. Clinical significance was observed in the intervention group with a 32% greater decrease in ulcer size (p=0.34) than the control group, and a 10% (p=0.74) improvement in the number of participants healed in the intervention group compared to the control group. Significant differences between groups over time were observed in calf muscle pump function parameters; (ejection fraction [p = 0.05]; residual volume fraction [p = 0.04]) and range of ankle motion (p = 0.01). This pilot study is one of the first studies to examine and measure clinical healing rates for participants involved in a home-based progressive resistance exercise program. Further research is warranted with a larger multi-site study.

Postoperative pain relief using intermittent intrapleural analgesia following thoracoscopic anterior correction for progressive adolescent idiopathic scoliosis

Background Thoracoscopic anterior scoliosis instrumentation is a safe and viable surgical option for corrective fusion of progressive adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS) and has been performed at our centre on 205 patients since 2000. However, there is a paucity of literature reporting on or examining optimum methods of analgesia following this type of surgery. A retrospective study was designed to present the authors’ technique for delivering intermittent local anaesthetic boluses via an intrapleural catheter following thoracoscopic scoliosis surgery; report the pain levels that may be expected and any adverse effects associated with the use of intrapleural analgesia, as part of a combined postoperative analgesia regime. Methods Records for 32 patients who underwent thoracoscopic anterior correction for AIS were reviewed. All patients received an intrapleural catheter inserted during surgery, in addition to patient-controlled opiate analgesia and oral analgesia. After surgery, patients received a bolus of 0.25% bupivacaine every four hours via the intrapleural catheter. Patient’s perceptions of their pain control was measured using the visual analogue pain scale scores which were recorded before and after local anaesthetic administration and the quantity and time of day that any other analgesia was taken, were also recorded. Results 28 female and four male patients (mean age 14.5 ± 1.5 years) had a total of 230 boluses of local anaesthetic administered in the 96 hour period following surgery. Pain scores significantly decreased following the administration of a bolus (p < 0.0001), with the mean pain score decreasing from 3.66 to 1.83. The quantity of opiates via patient-controlled analgesia after surgery decreased steadily between successive 24 hours intervals after an initial increase in the second 24 hour period when patients were mobilised. One intrapleural catheter required early removal due to leakage; there were no other associated complications with the intermittent intrapleural analgesia method. Conclusions Local anaesthetic administration via an intrapleural catheter is a safe and effective method of analgesia following thoracoscopic anterior scoliosis correction. Post-operative pain following anterior thoracic scoliosis surgery can be reduced to ‘mild’ levels by combined analgesia regimes. Keywords: Adolescent idiopathic scoliosis; Thoracoscopic anterior spinal fusion; Anterior fusion; Intrapleural analgesia; Endoscopic anterior surgery; Pain relief; Scoliosis surgery

Waterfalls, science and aesthetics

Waterfalls and rapids are a subject of study by scientists and scholars from a variety of academic and professional backgrounds. Unlike cave research, known as speleology, which also involves many different disciplines, the study of waterfalls is not generally regarded as a distinct branch of knowledge. Long neglected as subjects of research, waterfalls have received considerable attention since the 1980s. This paper traces the study of waterfalls from the late eighteenth century, a period when both a scientific and an aesthetic interest in landscape developed in Europe, to the present. The work of geographers, geologists and others who studied landforms and landscapes is examined, with particular attention to those who expressed a special interest in waterfalls, notably Alexander von Humboldt. The study argues that the scientific and aesthetic approaches to landscape research are not incompatible and supports the view that both are necessary for a full understanding and appreciation of the environment in which we live.

Worldly feelings made material : cosmopolitan aesthetics, affect and recent relational art

The openness and compassion implicit in the social transaction of recent philosophies of cosmopolitanism is reflected in the aims of the body of interpersonal, process-driven artworks commonly referred to as relational art. In attempting to bring art into life, specifically as a point of intervention in the lives of its spectators, the affective power required to realize the communal and participatory aims of many of these artworks is central. Relational art practices invite the individualising distinctiveness of the spectator yet ultimately seek the collective affect of the artwork’s formulated community. Like cosmopolitanism, this is a felt community where the obligatory affective investment is imagined as open and empathic built on mutual exchange and generosity. They suggest that it doesn’t matter so much what we feel about art but what and how we feel through art. The artworld’s public spheres have become increasingly affective worlds, where the artwork’s coerced and managed human relations are conceived as interstices for a more open exchange with art and each other. With reference to Sydney Biennale’s recent All My Relations exhibition, this paper will interrogate how worldly feelings are made material by the requisite emotional and aesthetic labour of feeling for and with others in relational art.

Progressive adult antimetropia

Antimetropia, a sub-classification of anisometropia, is a rare refractive condition in which one eye is myopic and the fellow eye is hyperopic. This case report describes the ocular characteristics and atypical refractive progression in an adult male with a moderate degree of non-amblyopic antimetropia over a 20-year period. The potential mechanisms underlying unilateral axial elongation, anisometropia and myopia progression in adulthood are discussed.

Aesthetics of mundane interactions

John Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics is used as a conceptual basis for designing new technologies that support staff-members’ mundane social interactions in an academic department. From this perspective, aesthetics is seen as a broader phenomenon that encompasses experiential aspects of staffmembers’ everyday lives and not only a look-&-feel aspect.

PANORAMA : explorations in the aesthetics of social awareness

In this paper we reflect on our experiences in developing PANORAMA, a playful application meant to promote and support social awareness in a work environment, through art-inspired visualisations of social processes and personal contributions. With respect to the design of PANORAMA, we found common notions of visual semiotics helpful in determining the overall composition of the screen layout. More in general, however, the development of PANORAMA proved to be an exercise in interaction aesthetics, which as we will argue in this paper may greatly benefit from common notions in interactive video game play. In this paper we will only briefly discuss technical and deployment issues, since our main contribution here is to establish the relation between the aesthetics of interaction and game play.

The ethics, aesthetics and practical politics of ownership in co-creative media

What is ‘best practice’ when it comes to managing intellectual property rights in participatory media content? As commercial media and entertainment business models have increasingly come to rely upon the networked productivity of end-users (Banks and Humphreys 2008) this question has been framed as a problem of creative labour made all the more precarious by changing employment patterns and work cultures of knowledge-intensive societies and globalising economies (Banks, Gill and Taylor 2014). This paper considers how the problems of ownership are addressed in non-commercial, community-based arts and media contexts. Problems of labour are also manifest in these contexts (for example, reliance on volunteer labour and uncertain economic reward for creative excellence). Nonetheless, managing intellectual property rights in collaborative creative works that are created in community media and arts contexts is no less challenging or complex than in commercial contexts. This paper takes as its focus a particular participatory media practice known as ‘digital storytelling’. The digital storytelling method, formalised by the Centre for Digital Storytelling (CDS) from the mid-1990s, has been internationally adopted and adapted for use in an open-ended variety of community arts, education, health and allied services settings (Hartley and McWilliam 2009; Lambert 2013; Lundby 2008; Thumin 2012). It provides a useful point of departure for thinking about a range of collaborative media production practices that seek to address participation ‘gaps’ (Jenkins 2006). However the outputs of these activities, including digital stories, cannot be fully understood or accurately described as user-generated content. For this reason, digital storytelling is taken here to belong to a category of participatory media activity that has been described as ‘co-creative’ media (Spurgeon 2013) in order to improve understanding of the conditions of mediated and mediatized participation (Couldry 2008). This paper reports on a survey of the actual copyrighting practices of cultural institutions and community-based media arts practitioners that work with digital storytelling and similar participatory content creation methods. This survey finds that although there is a preference for Creative Commons licensing a great variety of approaches are taken to managing intellectual property rights in co-creative media. These range from the use of Creative Commons licences (for example, Lambert 2013, p.193) to retention of full copyrights by storytellers, to retention of certain rights by facilitating organisations (for example, broadcast rights by community radio stations and public service broadcasters), and a range of other shared rights arrangements between professional creative practitioners, the individual storytellers and communities with which they collaborate, media outlets, exhibitors and funders. This paper also considers how aesthetic and ethical considerations shape responses to questions of intellectual property rights in community media arts contexts. For example, embedded in the CDS digital storytelling method is ‘a critique of power and the numerous ways that rank is unconsciously expressed in engagements between classes, races and gender’ (Lambert 117). The CDS method privileges the interests of the storyteller and, through a transformative workshop process, aims to generate original individual stories that, in turn, reflect self-awareness of ‘how much the way we live is scripted by history, by social and cultural norms, by our own unique journey through a contradictory, and at times hostile, world’ (Lambert 118). Such a critical approach is characteristic of co-creative media practices. It extends to a heightened awareness of the risks of ‘story theft’ and the challenges of ownership and informs ideas of ‘best practice’ amongst creative practitioners, teaching artists and community media producers, along with commitments to achieving equitable solutions for all participants in co-creative media practice (for example, Lyons-Reid and Kuddell nd.). Yet, there is surprisingly little written about the challenges of managing intellectual property produced in co-creative media activities. A dialogic sense of ownership in stories has been identified as an indicator of successful digital storytelling practice (Hayes and Matusov 2005) and is helpful to grounding the more abstract claims of empowerment for social participation that are associated with co-creative methods. Contrary to the ‘change from below’ philosophy that underpins much thinking about co-creative media, however, discussions of intellectual property usually focus on how methods such as digital storytelling contribute to the formation of copyright law-compliant subjects, particularly when used in educational settings (for example, Ohler nd.). This also exposes the reliance of co-creative methods on the creative assets storytellers (rather than on the copyrighted materials of the media cultures of storytellers) as a pragmatic response to the constraints that intellectual property right laws impose on the entire category of participatory media. At the level of practical politics, it also becomes apparent that co-creative media practitioners and storytellers located in copyright jurisdictions governed by ‘fair use’ principles have much greater creative flexibility than those located in jurisdictions governed by ‘fair dealing’ principles.