Building Information Modelling in UK Construction Projects: A State of the Art Review

This paper aims to present a state-of-the-art review of the scope and practical implications of the Building Information Modelling (BIM) platform in the UK construction practice. Theoretical developments suggest that BIM is an integration of both product and process innovation, not just a disparate set of software tools. BIM provides effective collaboration, visual representation and data management, which enable the smooth flow of information throughout the project’s lifecycle. The most frequently reported benefits are related to Capital Cost (capex) and Operational costs (opex) and time savings. Key challenges, however, focus on the interoperability of software, capital installation costs, in-house experience, client preference and cultural issues within design teams and within the organisation. The paper concludes with a critical commentary on the changing roles and a process required to implement BIM in UK construction projects, and suggests areas for further research.

CNN Interactive just got more interactive

Interactive gallery installation which playfully re-contextualised online news feeds from CNN’s website with a soundtrack of found music in order to comment on an online environment where 'serious' news and trivial 'infotainment' often occupy the same space. ‘CNN Interactive just got more interactive’ aimed to investigate the balance between information and ‘info-tainment’ on the web. It demonstrated how the authority and presence of global news corporations online could be playfully subverted by enabling the audience to add a variety of emotively titled soundtracks to the monolithic CNN Interactive website. The project also explored how a work could exist dually as website and gallery installation. ‘CNN interactive’ contributes to the taxonomy of new media art as a new form of contemporary art. One of the first examples in the world of a gallery installation using live Internet data, it is also one of the first attempts in a new media art context to address how individuals respond to and comprehend the changed nature of the news as an immediate phenomenon as relayed by network communications systems. 'CNN interactive’ continues Craighead and Thomson’s research into how live digital networked information can be re-purposed as artistic material within gallery installation contexts but with specific reference to online-international news events, rather than arbitrary data sources (see e-poltergeist, output 1). ‘CNN Interactive’ was commissioned by Tate Britain for the exhibition ‘Art and Money Online’. This was the first gallery exhibition in Tate Britain featuring work that utilised and explored new media as an artistic area, and the first work commissioned by the Tate to operate simultaneously as an online gallery artwork. Selected reviews and citations include ‘Digital Art’ by Christiane Paul, 2003; ‘Internet Art: The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce’ by Julian Stallabrass. (2002); ‘Thomson & Craighead’ by Lisa Le Feuvre for Katalog Journal of Photography and Video, Denmark. All work is developed jointly and equally between Craighead and her collaborator, Jon Thomson, (Slade).

Beacon

Artwork using Internet search engine technology to make people’s online desires, interests and orientations visible, presenting random search term enquiries in a variety of forms including a railway information sign, an art gallery installation and an online website. activity, curiosity and desire. The project sampled and analysed how ‘search terms’ were used by the public as live data. It then re-presented them on a website, in a gallery and latterly on a bespoke mechanical railway flap-sign, thus creating a snapshot of online enquiry at any give time. Beacon’s originality lies in the manner in which it has taken abstract digital data and found different expressions for it. Thus the work extends debates in media arts that focus on purely virtual and online expressions of data, by developing online information into new non-digital material forms and contexts such as railway signs. This research has been developed over a three year period. Initially with software only and then on receipt of AHRC small grant (£5000) with the lauded Italian manufacturer Solari of Udine, Italy and BFI Southbank. It represents the culmination of a body of research that asks whether live data can be used as material to make artworks. Beacon was specially developed for the Tate Britain programme 40 artists 40 days, produced in conjunction with the UK Olympic Games bid and intended to “create a unique countdown calendar that will focus attention on Britain’s exceptional creative talent”. The project is exhibited by the Tate website ‘Tate Online’ presently in perpetuity. The gallery version of this work is currently held in five private collections in the USA and is shown regularly in galleries around the world. The railway flap-sign is owned by BFI Southbank and will eventually be sited there permanently. All work is developed jointly and equally between Craighead and her collaborator, Jon Thomson, (Slade).

(un)childhood: performing the voices and times of childhood through relational video-making

This practice-based PhD is comprised of two interrelated elements: (i) ‘(un)childhood’, a 53’ video-essay shown on two screens; and (ii) a 58286 word written thesis. The project, which is contextualised within the tradition of artists working with their own children on time-based art projects, explores a new approach to timebased artistic work about childhood. While Stan Brakhage (1933-2003), Ernie Gher (1943-), Erik Bullot (1963-) and Mary Kelly (1941-) all documented, photographed and filmed their children over a period of years to produce art projects (experimental films and a time-based installation), these projects were implicitly underpinned by a construction of childhood in which children, shown as they grow, represent the abstract primitive subject. The current project challenges the convention of representing children entirely from the adult’s point of view, as aesthetic objects without a voice, as well as through the artist’s chronological approach to time. Instead, this project focuses on the relational joining of the child’s and adult’s points of view. The artist worked on a video project with her own son over a four-and-a-half year period (between the ages of 5 and 10) through which she developed her ‘relational video-making’ methodology. The video-essay (un)childhood performs the relational voices of childhood as resulting from the verbal interactions of both children and adults. The non-chronological nature of(un)childhood offers an alternative to the linear-temporal approach to the representation of childhood. Through montage and a number of literal allusions to time in its dialogue, (un)childhood performs the relational times of childhood by combining children’s lives in the present with the temporal dimensions that have traditionally constructed childhood: past, future and timeless.

Landscapes of the invisible: sounds, cosmologies and poetics of space

In this PhD by Publication I revisit and contextualize art works and essays I have collaboratively created under the name Flow Motion between 2004-13, in order to generate new insights on the contributions they have made to diverse and emerging fields of contemporary arts practice/research, including digital, virtual, sonic and interdisciplinary art. The works discussed comprise the digital multimedia installation and sound art performance Astro Black Morphologies/Astro Dub Morphologies (2004-5), the sound installation and performance Invisible (2006-7), the web art archive and performance presentation project promised lands (2008-10), and two related texts, Astro Black Morphologies: Music and Science Lovers (2004) and Music and Migration (2013). I show how these works map new thematic constellations around questions of space and diaspora, music and cosmology, invisibility and spectrality, the body and perception. I also show how the works generate new connections between and across contemporary avant-garde, experimental and popular music, and visual art and cinema traditions. I describe the methodological design, approaches and processes through which the works were produced, with an emphasis on transversality, deconstruction and contemporary black music forms as key tools in my collaborative artistic and textual practice. I discuss how, through the development of methods of data translation and transformation, and distinctive visual approaches for the re-elaboration of archival material, the works produced multiple readings of scientific narratives, digital X-ray data derived from astronomical research on black holes and dark energy, and musical, photographic and textual material related to historical and contemporary accounts of migration. I also elaborate on the relation between difference and repetition, the concepts of multiplicity and translation, and the processes of collective creation which characterize my/Flow Motion’s work. The art works and essays I engage with in this commentary produce an idea of contemporary art as the result of a fluid, open and mutating assemblage of diverse and hybrid methods and mediums, and as an embodiment of a cross-cultural, transversal and transdisciplinary knowledge shaped by research, process, creative dialogues, collaborative practice and collective signature.