Mixed Messages: American Correspondences in Visual and Verbal Practices

Mixed Messages presents and interrogates ten distinct moments from the arts of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century America where visual and verbal forms blend and clash. Charting correspondences concerned with the expression and meaning of human experience, this volume moves beyond standard interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to consider the written and visual artwork in embodied, cognitive, and contextual terms.<br/><br/>Offering a genuinely interdisciplinary contribution to the intersecting fields of art history, avant-garde studies, word-image relations, and literary studies, Mixed Messages takes in architecture, notebooks, poetry, painting, conceptual art, contemporary art, comic books, photographs and installations, ending with a speculative conclusion on the role of the body in the experience of digital mixed media. Each of the ten case studies explores the juxtaposition of visual and verbal forms in a manner that moves away from treating verbal and visual symbols as operating in binary or oppositional systems, and towards a consideration of mixed media, multi-media and intermedia work as brought together in acts of creation, exhibition, reading, viewing, and immersion. The collection advances research into embodiment theory, affect, pragmatist aesthetics, as well as into the continuing legacy of romanticism and of dada, conceptual art and surrealism in an American context.<br/>

Enhancing social work students��� learning experience and readiness to undertake practice learning.

This project set out to evaluate the effectiveness of social work education by analysing student perceptions of the strengths and limitations of their education and training on the Bachelor of Social Work, Queen���s University, Belfast (QUB) at different stages of their ���learning journey��� through the programme.<br/>The author���s primary aim in undertaking this study was to contribute evidence-based understanding of the challenges and opportunities students identified themselves within contemporary practice environments. A secondary aim was to test the effectiveness of key approaches, theories and learning tools in common usage in social work education. The authors believe the outcomes generated by the project demonstrate the value of systematically researching student perceptions of their learning experience and feel the study provides important lessons which should help to inform the future development of social work education not only locally but in other parts of the UK.

Participatory Sonic Arts: towards a socially engaged art of sound in the everyday (The Som da Mar�� Project)

Participatory and socially engaged art practices have, for a couple of decades, emerged a myriad of aesthetic and methodological strategies across different media. These are artistic practices that have a primary interest in participation, affecting social dynamics, dialogue and at times political activism. Nato Thompson in ���Living Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011��� surveys these <br/>practices, which range from theatre to urban planning, visual art to healthcare. Linked to notions such as relational aesthetics (Bourriaud, 1998), community art and public art, socially engaged art often focuses on the development of a sense of ownership by the part of participants. If an artist is working truly collaboratively with participants and addressing the reality of a particular community, the long-term effect of a project lies in the process of engagement as well as in the artwork itself. Projects by New York based artist Pablo Helguera, for example, use different media to engage with social inequalities through participative action while rejecting the notion of art for art sake. <br/><br/>���Socially engaged art functions by attaching itself to subjects and problems that normally belong to other disciplines, moving them temporarily into a space of ambiguity. It is this temporary snatching away of subjects into the realm of art-making that brings new insights to a particular problem or condition and in turn makes it visible to other disciplines.��� (Helguera, 2011)<br/><br/>Socially engaged practices develop the notion of artwork about or by a community, to work of a community. In this chapter we address how socially engaged, participatory approaches can form a context for the sonic arts, arguably less explored than practices such as theatre and performance art. The use of sound is clearly present in a wide range of socially engaged work (e.g. Helguera���s ���Aelia Media��� enabling a nomadic radio station in Bologna or Maria Andueza ���Immigrant Sounds ��� Res(on)Art (Stockholm)��� exploring ways of sonically resonating a city, or Sue MacCauley���s ���The Housing Project��� addressing ways of representing the views of urban dwellers on public scape through sound art. It is nevertheless rare to encounter projects which take our experience of sound in the everyday as a trigger for community social engagement in a participatory context. <br/>We address concepts and methodologies behind the project Som da Mar��, a participatory sonic arts project in the favelas of Mar��, Rio de Janeiro. <br/>

Som da Mar��: Um Projeto Participativo de Arte Sonora

In May 2014, the participative Project Som da Mar�� brings together the creative energy of a group of inhabitants from a cluster of favelas in Mar�� (Rio de Janeiro)* through the sonic arts. The work recalls everyday experiences, memories, stories and places. These memories elicit narratives that leave traces in space while contributing to the workings of local cultural.<br/><br/>The result of four months of workshops and fieldwork forms the basis of two cultural interventions: an exhibition in Museu da Mar��** and guided soundwalks in the city of Rio de Janeiro. These interventions present realities, histories and ambitions of everyday life in the Mar�� favelas through immersive sound installation, documentary photography, text and objects.<br/><br/>Som da Mar�� brings together various groups of participants who together have developed themes, materials and strategies for the articulation of elements of everyday life in Mar��. Participants include secondary level students under the Funda����o de Amparo �� Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ) ���Young Talent��� scholarships and their families, post-graduate students at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), PhD students from the Sonic Arts Research Centre (Queen���s University Belfast) and members of the Cia Marginal, a theatre company based in Mar��. The project also counts with the participation of academics from music, ethnomusicology, visual art and architecture at the UFRJ and a partnership with the Museu da Mar��. Over thirty people have come together to make this project possible.<br/>

On the ability to metaphorize: Talking trees and singing tigers in the English classroom

This article reviews and discusses how metaphor as a trope has been regarded as an essential element in rhetorical approaches to reading and to writing. In addition it considers the extent to which, while metaphor-making is a fundamental cognitive capacity, a metaphorizing habit of mind may be especially pertinent to some aspects of aesthetic activity in English and it has salience also in a multimodal environment. There is exploration of how contemporary practice in the English classroom could accommodate and consolidate the ability to metaphorize.

Bright Molecules for Sensing, Computing and Imaging: A Tale of Two Once-troubled Cities

The circumstances in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and in Belfast, Northern Ireland, which led to a) the generalization of luminescent PET (photoinduced electron transfer) sensing/switching as a design tool, b) the construction of a market-leading blood electrolyte analyzer and c) the invention of molecular logic-based computation as an experimental field, are delineated. Efforts to extend the philosophy of these approaches into issues of small object identification, nanometric mapping, animal visual perception and visual art are also outlined.

Reinforced concrete wall construction formed with OSB:First published use in the United Kingdom and acknowledged by Terry Pawson Architects as the source of inspiration for the internal concrete finish of the 2010 Carlow VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art.

The artefact was published in the following : <br/><br/>Bennett, D., (October 2007), Architectural Insitu Concrete, RIBA Publishing, London, , ISBN 124-3671-245, pp 101-103 <br/><br/>Bennett, D., (2008), Concrete Elegance Four, London, Concrete Centre and RIBA Publishing, pp cover, c, 4, 9-12 &amp; back.<br/><br/>Stacey, Professor M., (2011) Concrete: a studio design guide, London, Concrete Centre and RIBA Publishing, pp74-75.

Regarding the Real: Cinema, Documentary, and the Visual Arts

<i>Regarding the Real: Cinema, Documentary, and the Visual Arts</i> develops an interdisciplinary approach to documentary film, focusing on its cultural and formal relations to other visual arts, such as animation, assemblage, photography, painting, sculpture, and architecture. The book considers the work of figures whose preferred film language is associative and fragmentary, and for whom the documentary is an endlessly open form, an unstable expressive phenomenon that cannot but interrogate the validity of its own narratives and representational modes. Combining close analysis with cultural history, <i>Regarding the Real</i> calls for a re-assessment of the influence of the modern arts in subverting the structures of realism typically associated with documentary filmmaking.

Contemporary Radio Art and Spatial Politics: The Critical Radio Utopias of Anna Friz

The article explores the work of the Canadian sound artist Anna Friz over the last decade. Her work deals explicitly with issues of technology and the relative absence of women's voices on radio. Exploring her work as a composer, installation artist, instrumentalist, performance artist and storyteller, and contextualising these practices within feminist critiques and radio conventions, the article explores Friz's ���self-reflexive radio���. Ideas of ���supermodernity���, ���displacement��� and ���critical utopia��� are deployed to discuss specific pieces of Friz's work in relation to identity and space. The article argues that Friz reconfigures the radio as a site of resistance to dominant constructions of contemporary globalised space and cultures, the politics of informational capitalism and the uneven flows that these cultures and politics engender.

This is Not a Photo Opportunity: Verbal/Visual Struggle in Francophone Travel Narratives

This article explores the ethics and aesthetics of representing travel and intercultural encounter in textual and photographic forms. Taking as its starting point two textual accounts of journeys in the course of which photographic narratives were also produced, the article explores the possibilities and limitations of textuality and visuality and thus considers the implications of, or new opportunities afforded by, reading ��� and ultimately publishing ��� these narratives as iconotexts. Focusing on Pierre Loti's L'Inde (sans les Anglais) (1901) and Ella Maillart's Oasis interdites (1937), the article also offers an alternative perspective on writers whose work is commonly associated with an imperialist or exoticist discourse, with clich�� and one-dimensionality. As such, it aims to replace the monolithic, orientalist vision often attributed to these writers with ambiguity, ethical hesitation and a plurality of perspectives. Using these examples as a springboard, the article seeks to argue that verbal/visual mobility in narratives representing mobility contributes to resisting static, monolithic perceptions of other cultures. Using the work of British graffiti artist Banksy as a foil for exploring photography as cultural commodification and art as commodity, the article also seeks to engage with current debates in Humanities research on ekphrasis and iconotextuality and on the problematics of representing other cultures within an ethical and/or humanist frame.