The Uncertainty of Experience: On George Brecht's Event Scores

George Brecht, an artist best known for his associations with Fluxus, is considered to have made significant contributions to emerging traditions of conceptual art and experimental music in the early 1960s. His Event scores, brief verbal scores that comprised lists of terms or open-ended instructions, provided a signature model for indeterminate composition and were ‘used extensively by virtually every Fluxus artist’. This article revisits Brecht’s early writings and research to argue that, while Event scores were adopted within Fluxus performance, they were intended as much more than performance devices. Specifically, Brecht conceived of his works as ‘structures of experience’ that, by revealing the underlying connections between chanced forms, could enable a kind of enlightenment rooted within an experience of a ‘unified reality’.

The Art of Refusal: The Experiences of Grant Makers and Grant Seekers

This research project explores the communications’ experiences and practices of
selected grant making and grant seeking organisations, at the point of grant refusal. It was funded by the Charities Aid Foundation, and undertaken through collaboration with the Association of Charitable Foundations (ACF).
The research context is the enhanced competition for funding in which many grant seeking organisations experience the disappointment of refusal; whilst grant makers also face multiple pressures, in responding to grant seekers’ needs. This is an operating environment in which subsequent organisational learning appears demanding.
The aims of the research were to:
- Increase understanding of the communications demands, challenges and
opportunities in giving, receiving and sharing news of grant refusal
- Identify opportunities for organisational learning in these situations, for grant
makers and grant seekers
- Contribute to future practice improvement and development, by drawing on
the reported experiences and practices of participating respondents.

The research focuses on private, formal grant makers (foundations and trusts); and their grant seeking organisational constituencies. It excludes study of public grant makers’ grant refusal processes and those of individuals making personal gifts, direct businesses’ grant making, and grant making by community foundations and by other operating and fundraising charities. A staged research process began in 2008, and field research completed in 2009/2011.

Big Ears – sonic art for public ears: Reflections on collaborative training

This text critically reflects on the higher education public engagement training program, entitled ‘Big Ears – sonic art for public ears’. The authors detail the objectives and aims as well as the benefits of this initiative for the enhancement of the student learning experience. We consider Schmidt’s (Schmidt, 2012) notion of mis-listening and Christopher Small’s concept of ‘musicking’ (Small, 1998), and develop a critical argument on how public engagement has changed researchers’ views and attitudes about their own research. The text explores how the creative interaction with a young audience has had great impact on the students’ learning experience as well as on their employability/transferable skills, because Big Ears stresses the importance of pulling practice as research away from the academic argument of why artists should be supported inside an institution, and into the realm of the real – what to do when making art, how to make it relevant and applicable to audiences.

The Use of ART in Elderly Patients after 2 years

Caries experience is high in the elderly, and barriers to care for older adults include fear and cost. Access to care is especially problematic in the case of frail and homebound elderly. Objective: to compare the survival of restorations placed using Atraumatic Restorative Treatment (ART) and a conventional technique using rotary instruments and a resin-modified glass-ionomer (CT) to treat carious lesions in older patients. Methods: In this randomised clinical trial, 99 independently living adults (65-90 yrs) with carious lesions were recruited from a geriatric day hospital and a community centre and randomly allocated to receive either ART or conventional restorations. They received tailored oral hygiene instructions and scaling and polishing of teeth prior to restoration placement. The survival of restorations was assessed 6, 12 and 24 months after restoration placement by an independent examiner. Results: Ninety-nine patients participated in the trial, 46 males and 53 females, with a mean age of 73.2 (SD: 6.8). In total, 300 restorations were placed, 142 ART in 51 patients and 158 conventional restorations in 48 patients, with an average of 2.8 ART (SD: 1.83) and 3.2 conventional (SD: 2.62) restorations placed per patient. After 2 years, 88 ART and 117 conventional restorations were assessed. The restoration survival percentages were 93.1% and 94%, respectively. Conclusion: ART was found to be as effective as a conventional restorative approach to treat older adults after 2 years and could be a useful tool to provide dental care for older dentate adults.

Folly: Art after Architecture

FOLLY brings together Irish and international contemporary artists whose work has been inspired by iconic buildings of architectural modernism. From Eileen Gray’s seminal E1027 to Mies Van der Rohe’s restored Farnsworth House, Paul Rudolph’s demolished residences to Walter Gropius’s imagined Chicago Tribune Tower, the buildings referenced in FOLLY have had a mixed collection of fates.

Their presence in this exhibition affords them another afterlife. The qualities that make the architecture significant are played-with, exposed, re-canonised, made ambiguous, and eulogised. By creating fictional moments, questioning conventional documentation or excavating troubled histories of production, each artist invites you to think about how we experience and understand architecture today.

Blending Art and Science in Nurse Education: The Benefits and Impact of Creative Partnerships

Blending Art and Science in Nurse Education: The Benefits and Impact of Creative Partnerships

This paper presents the benefits of an innovative education partnership between lecturers from the School of Nursing and Midwifery, Queens University Belfast and Arts Care, a unique Arts and Health Charity in Northern Ireland, to engage nursing students in life sciences

Nursing and Midwifery students often struggle to engage with life science modules because they lack confidence in their ability to study science.This project was funded by a Teaching Innovation Award from the School of Nursing and Midwifery, Queens University Belfast, to explore creative ways of engaging year one undergraduate nursing students in learning anatomy and physiology. The project was facilitated through collaboration between Teaching staff from the School of Nursing and Midwifery and Arts Care, Northern Ireland. This unique Arts and Health Charity believes in the benefits of creativity to well being.

RESEARCH OBJECTIVE(S)
To explore creative ways of engaging year one undergraduate nursing students in learning anatomy and physiology.

METHODS AND METHODLOGY
Students participated in a series of workshops designed to explore the cells, tissues and organs of the human body through the medium of felt. Facilitated by an Arts Care artist, and following self-directed preparation, students discussed and translated their learning of the cells, tissues and organs of the human body into striking felt images. During the project students kept a reflective journal of their experience to document how participation in the project enhanced their learning and professional development

RESULTS
Creativity transformed and brought to life the students learning of the cells, tissues and organs of the human body.

The project culminated in the exhibition of a unique body of artwork which has been exhibited across Northern Ireland in hospitals and galleries and viewed by fellow students, teaching staff, nurses from practice, artists, friends, family and members of the public.

CONCLUSION
The impact of creativity learning strategies in nurse education should be further explored.

REFERENCES
Bennett, M and Rogers, K.MA. (2014) First impressions matter: an active, innovative and engaging method to recruit student volunteers for a pedagogic project. Reflections, Available online at: QUB, Centre for Educational Development / Publications / Reflections Newsletter, Issue 18, June 2014.

Chickering,A.W. and Gamson,Z.F. (1987) Seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education The American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, March. http://www.aahea.org/aahea/articles/sevenprinciples1987.htm, accessed 8th August 2014

Fell, P., Borland, G., Lynne, V. (2012) Lab versus lectures: can lab based practical sessions improve nursing students’ learning of bioscience? Health and Social Care Education 3:1, 33-38

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.

The idea, the machine, and the art: word and image in the 21st century

Taking in recent advances in neuroscience and digital technology, Gander and Garland assess the state of the inter-arts in America and the Western world, exploring and questioning the primacy of affect in an increasingly hypertextual everyday environment. In this analysis they signal a move beyond W. J. T. Mitchell’s coinage of the ‘imagetext’ to an approach that centres the reader-viewer in a recognition, after John Dewey, of ‘art as experience’. New thinking in cognitive and computer sciences about the relationship between the body and the mind challenges any established definitions of ‘embodiment’, ‘materiality’, ‘virtuality’ and even ‘intelligence, they argue, whilst ‘Extended Mind Theory’, they note, marries our cognitive processes with the material forms with which we engage, confirming and complicating Marshall McLuhan’s insight, decades ago, that ‘all media are “extensions of man”’. In this chapter, Gander and Garland open paths and suggest directions into understandings and critical interpretations of new and emerging imagetext worlds and experiences.