Participatory Sonic Arts: towards a socially engaged art of sound in the everyday (The Som da Maré 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
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.

“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)

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.
We address concepts and methodologies behind the project Som da Maré, a participatory sonic arts project in the favelas of Maré, Rio de Janeiro.

Som da Maré: Um Projeto Participativo de Arte Sonora

In May 2014, the participative Project Som da Maré brings together the creative energy of a group of inhabitants from a cluster of favelas in Maré (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.

The result of four months of workshops and fieldwork forms the basis of two cultural interventions: an exhibition in Museu da Maré** and guided soundwalks in the city of Rio de Janeiro. These interventions present realities, histories and ambitions of everyday life in the Maré favelas through immersive sound installation, documentary photography, text and objects.

Som da Maré brings together various groups of participants who together have developed themes, materials and strategies for the articulation of elements of everyday life in Maré. Participants include secondary level students under the Fundação de Amparo à 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 Maré. 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 Maré. Over thirty people have come together to make this project possible.

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 :

Bennett, D., (October 2007), Architectural Insitu Concrete, RIBA Publishing, London, , ISBN 124-3671-245, pp 101-103

Bennett, D., (2008), Concrete Elegance Four, London, Concrete Centre and RIBA Publishing, pp cover, c, 4, 9-12 & back.

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

Regarding the Real: Cinema, Documentary, and the Visual Arts 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, Regarding the Real calls for a re-assessment of the influence of the modern arts in subverting the structures of realism typically associated with documentary filmmaking.

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 cliché 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.

Robust visual tracking based on online learning sparse representation

Handling appearance variations is a very challenging problem for visual tracking. Existing methods usually solve this problem by relying on an effective appearance model with two features: (1) being capable of discriminating the tracked target from its background, (2) being robust to the target's appearance variations during tracking. Instead of integrating the two requirements into the appearance model, in this paper, we propose a tracking method that deals with these problems separately based on sparse representation in a particle filter framework. Each target candidate defined by a particle is linearly represented by the target and background templates with an additive representation error. Discriminating the target from its background is achieved by activating the target templates or the background templates in the linear system in a competitive manner. The target's appearance variations are directly modeled as the representation error. An online algorithm is used to learn the basis functions that sparsely span the representation error. The linear system is solved via ℓ1 minimization. The candidate with the smallest reconstruction error using the target templates is selected as the tracking result. We test the proposed approach using four sequences with heavy occlusions, large pose variations, drastic illumination changes and low foreground-background contrast. The proposed approach shows excellent performance in comparison with two latest state-of-the-art trackers.

Thou art a strange fellow:Dissonance and Discordance in Intercultural Shakespeares

Any performance of the intercultural necessarily, and always, advances the question of the cultural since it involves the inter-action and interplay of unique and particular cultural performance styles and modes. Intercultural theatre, according to Pavis, is a hybrid theatrical form “drawing upon performance traditions traceable to distinct cultural areas. The hybridization is very often such that the original forms can no longer be distinguished.” The result of this collaboration of forms is, however, often not a ‘hybrid’ where cultural texts work cohesively and in unison to produce a harmonious mise en scene. Instead, intercultural performances are performances at the interstices and at the intersections of cultures. They raise problems of authorship, authority and performance unities and expose a sense of cultural foreignness. Consequently, intercultural performance can be said to be meta-theatre that queries the construction of culture since it places alongside performance traditions that confront.

Music, as performative unit, is a significant line of action by which the intercultural spectacle is constructed. Integral to Western theatre, and certainly more so in traditional Asian performance forms, the deliberate ‘fusion’ and ‘blending’ of musical styles in intercultural performances underscore not a harmony of diverse sounds but the possible dissonance and discordance already performed by the visual and verbal texts. The paper thus seeks to examine, in particular, the musical elements in intercultural performances such as Ong Keng Sen’s Lear (Theatreworks, 1999) and explore the ways in which music could possibly intensify the confrontation of performative texts resulting in a disruption of performance unities. When watching and listening to Lear, the question of the ‘local’ thus arises not merely with identification and alienation from what is seen but also what is familiar and foreign to one’s ears.

‘5 ways to say your prayers’:The Art and Architecture of Curating People, Place and Creativity in a Post-Conflict Context. The Shed, Galway, Ireland 18th June – 23rd July 2013 Includes: 1. Co-Curation of Exhibition with Peter Mutschler, Director of PS² and 2. Morrow’s individual work as part of the exhibition, entitled ‘Departures & Arrivals: Academic Interactions with the Activities, Artists and Archive of PS² ’

This exhibition profiles the curatorial approach of PS² and the work of creative practitioners who have practiced alongside and with the organisation. PS² is a Belfast-based, voluntary arts organisation that initiates projects inside and outside its project space. It seeks to develop a socio-spatial practice that responds to the post-conflict context of Northern Ireland, with particular focus on active intervention and social interaction between local people, creative practitioners, multidisciplinary groups and theorists.
Morrow has collaborated with PS² since its inception in 2005, acting as curatorial advisor specifically on the projects that occur outside PS² . She regards her involvement as a parallel action to her pedagogical explorations within architectural education.

Morrow's personal contribution to the Exhibition aimed to:
-interrogate PS² spatial projects
-contextualise PS² curatorial practice
-open up the analytical framework and extend to similar local practices

The Shed, Galway, Ireland is a joint Galway City Arts and Harbour Company venture. The exhibition subsequently travelled to DarcSpace Gallery, Dublin (Sept 2013).

Adaptive NormalHedge for robust visual tracking

In this paper, we propose a novel visual tracking framework, based on a decision-theoretic online learning algorithm namely NormalHedge. To make NormalHedge more robust against noise, we propose an adaptive NormalHedge algorithm, which exploits the historic information of each expert to perform more accurate prediction than the standard NormalHedge. Technically, we use a set of weighted experts to predict the state of the target to be tracked over time. The weight of each expert is online learned by pushing the cumulative regret of the learner towards that of the expert. Our simulation experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive NormalHedge, compared to the standard NormalHedge method. Furthermore, the experimental results of several challenging video sequences show that the proposed tracking method outperforms several state-of-the-art methods.

Robust visual tracking using structurally random projection and weighted least squares

Sparse representation based visual tracking approaches have attracted increasing interests in the community in recent years. The main idea is to linearly represent each target candidate using a set of target and trivial templates while imposing a sparsity constraint onto the representation coefficients. After we obtain the coefficients using L1-norm minimization methods, the candidate with the lowest error, when it is reconstructed using only the target templates and the associated coefficients, is considered as the tracking result. In spite of promising system performance widely reported, it is unclear if the performance of these trackers can be maximised. In addition, computational complexity caused by the dimensionality of the feature space limits these algorithms in real-time applications. In this paper, we propose a real-time visual tracking method based on structurally random projection and weighted least squares techniques. In particular, to enhance the discriminative capability of the tracker, we introduce background templates to the linear representation framework. To handle appearance variations over time, we relax the sparsity constraint using a weighed least squares (WLS) method to obtain the representation coefficients. To further reduce the computational complexity, structurally random projection is used to reduce the dimensionality of the feature space while preserving the pairwise distances between the data points in the feature space. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms several state-of-the-art tracking methods.

Deep Salience: Visual Salience Modeling via Deep Belief Propagation

Visual salience is an intriguing phenomenon observed in biological neural systems. Numerous attempts have been made to model visual salience mathematically using various feature contrasts, either locally or globally. However, these algorithmic models tend to ignore the problem’s biological solutions, in which visual salience appears to arise during the propagation of visual stimuli along the visual cortex. In this paper, inspired by the conjecture that salience arises from deep propagation along the visual cortex, we present a Deep Salience model where a multi-layer model based on successive Markov random fields (sMRF) is proposed to analyze the input image successively through its deep belief propagation. As a result, the foreground object can be automatically separated from the background in a fully unsupervised way. Experimental evaluation on the benchmark dataset validated that our Deep Salience model can consistently outperform eleven state-of-the-art salience models, yielding the higher rates in the precision-recall tests and attaining the best F-measure and mean-square error in the experiments.

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.

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.