Souvenir of the fine art section, Franco-British Exhibition, 1908 /

Mode of access: Internet.

Foot notes : or, Walking as a fine art. /

Mode of access: Internet.

Transformative realism: reflections of reality in political avant-garde and contemporary fine art film - Spanish Labyrinth, south from Granada

A turn towards documentary modes of practice amongst contemporary fine art video and filmmakers towards the end of the 20th Century, led to moving image works that represent current social realities. This drew some comparisons of these forms of art to journalism and industrial documentary. The practical research is embodied in a single screen film that responds to recent political and ecological realities in Spain. These include the mass demonstrations that led to the occupation of Madrid’s Plaza del Sol and Spain’s in 2011 and largest recorded forest fires that spread through Andalusia in August of the following year. The film, titled Spanish Labyrinth, South from Granada, is a response to these events and also relates to political avant-garde film of the 1930’s by re-tracing a journey undertaken by three revolutionary filmmakers, Yves Allegret, René Naville and Eli Lotar, in 1931. The theoretical research for this project establishes an historical root of artists’ film that responds to current social realities, in contrast to news media, in the Soviet and European avant-garde movements of the 1920s and 1930s. The main aim of this method is to argue the status of the works that I identify, both avant-garde and contemporary, as a form of art that preceded a Griersonian definition of documentary film.

Catalyst: reimagining sustainability with and through fine art

How might we begin to explore the concept of the “sustainable city” in a world often characterized as dynamic, fluid, and contested? Debates about the sustainable city are too often dominated by a technological discourse conducted among professional experts, but this technocratic framing is open to challenge. For some critics, sustainability is a meaningless notion, yet for others its semantic pliability opens up discursive spaces through which to explore interconnections across time, space, and scale. Thus, while enacting sustainability in policy and practice is an arduous task, we can productively ask how cultural imaginations might be stirred and shaken to make sustainability accessible to a wider public who might join the conversation. What role, we ask, can and should the arts play in wider debates about sustainability in the city today? We explore a coproduced artwork in the northeast of England in order to explain how practice-led research methods were put into dialogue with the social sciences to activate new perspectives on the politics, aesthetics, and practices of sustainability. The case is presented to argue that creative material experimentations can be used as an active research inquiry through which ideas can be tested without knowing predefined means or ends. The case shows how such creativity acts as a catalyst to engage a heterogeneous mix of actors in the redefinition of urban spaces, juxtaposing past and present, with the ephemeral and the (seemingly) durable.

The fine art of conversation: the pragmatic skills of school-aged children with hearing loss

This chapter synthesizes the findings of a number of recent studies conducted by the authors. The focus will be on spoken interactions between school-aged students who are deaf and hard of hearing, and their hearing peers. Many of the participants in these studies have worn hearing aids and/or cochlear implants since infancy and have been educated in inclusive settings. The context of these studies includes face-to-face interactions during a question/answer game, in free conversation, and during an expository task. This chapter will examine the verbal and nonverbal conversational skills 'of these students within these different contexts. Using a range of quantitative and qualitative analyses, the development of pragmatic skills in students with hearing loss will be documented, and possible implications for language support and the development of social skills will be discussed.

2006 International digital art awards : Beijing film academy galleries, China

The field was the curation of new media within large-scale exhibition practice for Chinese audiences. The context was improved understandings of the intertwining cultures and concerns of Chinese and Western contemporary practitioners. The research uncovered a range of connective and dialogical concerns around cultural displacement and re-identification, germane to the chosen group of media artists. The methodology was principally practice-led. The research brought together 31 practitioners from Asian, European and Australasian cultures within a major highly visible Chinese exhibition context. By identifying and promoting a distinct commonality within difference amongst the diverse practitioners the exhibition successfully activated a global dialogue that incorporated environmental and cultural identity agendas within a major Chinese educational and public context - thereby promulgating cross-cultural understanding, despite the often oppressive shadowing of domestic political processes. The project was developed under the international aegis of IDA Projects (established since 1999) and was substantially supported by the Fine Art Department of the Beijing Film Academy, QUT Precincts and Platform China Art Institute. It built upon IDA’s 2005 inaugural new media exhibition at the ‘Today Art’ Museum in Beijing – now recognised as one of the leading art spaces in China. Numerous peer-reviewed grants won included the Australian Embassy in China and the Australia China Council. Through subsequent invitations from external curators the work then traveled in a range of reconfigured formats to other major venues including the Block Gallery at QUT, Brisbane and ZAIM Artspace, Yokohama Japan. A major catalogue with authoritative essays was also printed.

Art, biology and technology. Interdisciplinary relations in the science lab

Bio art, understood as the convergence of the relations between art, biology and technology, constitutes a useful case study to discuss the meaning of interdisciplinarity in the artistic field. This paper explores different discourses around interdisciplinarity in order to challenge certain generic approaches for their ineffectiveness when assessing artistic practices. It is proposed that the analysis of interdisciplinarity must address the singular connections produced in the artistic practice itself, considering the impossibility of reducing the complexity of interdisciplinary dialogues into generic considerations. Taking bioart as a case study, different kinds of relationships between the artist and the lab are identified and analyzed, ranging from the use of the lab as a true atelier and as a resource for materials and techniques, to the rejection of the lab by proposing amateurism as an alternative. estrategias amateur, pasando por su utilización como fuente de técnicas y materiales.

A World Drawn: An Introduction to the art of Julian Opie (for a Polish Audience)

Essay in a monograph associated with the exhibition Julian Opie: Sculptures, Paintings, Films at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, Poland, 18 October 2014 to 25 January 2015. Slyce attempts to re-examine the lineaments of Opie's practice for a new and broader audience. During which, he calls attention in the writing to the processes of its commissioning and early request to do so for a 'Polish audience'. He attempts to bring to light some of these often invisible moves in the commissioning of catalogue essays, while also re-examining Julian Opie's practice in light of its established reception in Britain.

Digital Debris of Internet Art: An Allegorical and Entropic Resistance to the Epistemology of Search

This Ph.D., by thesis, proposes a speculative lens to read Internet Art via the concept of digital debris. In order to do so, the research explores the idea of digital debris in Internet Art from 1993 to 2011 in a series of nine case studies. Here, digital debris are understood as words typed in search engines and which then disappear; bits of obsolete codes which are lingering on the Internet, abandoned website, broken links or pieces of ephemeral information circulating on the Internet and which are used as a material by practitioners. In this context, the thesis asks what are digital debris? The thesis argues that the digital debris of Internet Art represent an allegorical and entropic resistance to the what Art Historian David Joselit calls the Epistemology of Search. The ambition of the research is to develop a language in-between the agency of the artist and the autonomy of the algorithm, as a way of introducing Internet Art to a pluridisciplinary audience, hence the presence of the comparative studies unfolding throughout the thesis, between Internet Art and pionners in the recycling of waste in art, the use of instructions as a medium and the programming of poetry. While many anthropological and ethnographical studies are concerned with the material object of the computer as debris once it becomes obsolete, very few studies have analysed waste as discarded data. The research shifts the focus from an industrial production of digital debris (such as pieces of hardware) to obsolete pieces of information in art practice. The research demonstrates that illustrations of such considerations can be found, for instance, in Cory Arcangel’s work Data Diaries (2001) where QuickTime files are stolen, disassembled, and then re-used in new displays. The thesis also looks at Jodi’s approach in Jodi.org (1993) and Asdfg (1998), where websites and hyperlinks are detourned, deconstructed, and presented in abstract collages that reveals the architecture of the Internet. The research starts in a typological manner and classifies the pieces of Internet Art according to the structure at play in the work. Indeed if some online works dealing with discarded documents offer a self-contained and closed system, others nurture the idea of openness and unpredictability. The thesis foregrounds the ideas generated through the artworks and interprets how those latter are visually constructed and displayed. Not only does the research questions the status of digital debris once they are incorporated into art practice but it also examine the method according to which they are retrieved, manipulated and displayed to submit that digital debris of Internet Art are the result of both semantic and automated processes, rendering them both an object of discourse and a technical reality. Finally, in order to frame the serendipity and process-based nature of the digital debris, the Ph.D. concludes that digital debris are entropic . In other words that they are items of language to-be, paradoxically locked in a constant state of realisation.

Universal Museum - universal language? Art historian - curator

Marshal McLuhan’s prophetic vision of the global village is about to be realized. If we are aware of the fact that mass communication reduces the dimensions of our world and makes it more unified and universal, we should take this into consideration when planning the Universal Museum and the language that should be used in it. As curators, educators and museum staff we should not ignore the fact that the spectator/viewer is drawn to the exhibits not only by their own merit, but also guided and assisted by verbal messages, i. e. Labels, brochures. Catalogues etc. Hence, the crucial question is what we, the museologists, use as a means of communication when preparing for a Universal Museum. Should we use pictorial semiotics? This may be a partial solution, which is mainly restricted to objects that can be manipulated and moved by the visitor, as is the case in most of the technological museums. But since the range of objects on display at museums is vast and varied - fine art, archaeological finds, ethnographic objects etc., it may not be the answer to the whole spectrum of exhibits. Dr. Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof, being an optimist, hoped that by introducing Esperanto to the multi-lingual world population, humanity would be able to bridge and diminish the gap of linguistic differences, thus creating a better understanding between the international communities. Unfortunately this vision was not realized. Esperanto was and still is an utopian and esoteric phenomenon. The barriers between nations still exist although, as mentioned earlier, mass media do help, in some ways, to reduce them.

Public Art Commission Rung by Rung, Tina O'Connell

Research based on a significant public art commissions awarded through competition (peer reviewed) – Pearse Street Clinic Public Art Commission (€20K). Research was examining issues of the relationship between sculpture, exchange and communication, health and well-being. The research used an approach to question the aspirations and dreams of those who were visiting the health centre as part of a routine of daily life. Based on the aspirational concerns of individual visitors, and secondary research of positive effects of light, the final output draws on ideas based around the language of physical signage to occupy a space concerned with visitor health and wellbeing – a Health Clinic. The output has had an impact both at the site and more broadly in the context of examining sculpture and fine art as a social catalyst - based on work of socially-engaged historical practices. The installation at Pearse Street work in Dublin in Nov 09 has received critical and local acclaim. Further commissions within the public arena have been forthcoming despite difficult local economic landscape.

A series of performances in 'Translating Reviews from 1990: Art Forum'

Participation in group exhibition themed around the 25th anniversary of the Elba Benitez Gallery in Madrid. My work comprised a series of performances in which I translated reviews from the magazine Art Forum from 1990. The performances took place in various locations in London, throughout the run of the exhibition, and were streamed live to an iPad in the gallery in Madrid. I made audio visual recordings of the performances via the streaming media, which located me as the performer alongside the viewers in a single split image. These recordings were then archived in a shared folder held between the gallery and me, and which visitors to the exhibition could access when a performance was not taking place. The work extends my concerns with translation and performance, and with a consideration of how the mechanism of the gallery and the exhibition might be used to generate innovative viewing engagements facilitated by technology. The work also attempts to develop thinking and practice around the relationship between art works and their documentation - in this case the documentation and even its potential for distribution is generated as the work comes into being. The exhibition included works by Ignasi Aballí, Armando Andrade Tudela,Lothar Baumgarten, Carlos Bunga, Cabello/Carceller, Juan Cruz, Gintaras Didžiapetris, Fernanda Fragateiro, Hreinn Fridfinnsson, Carlos Garaicoa,Mario García Torres, David Goldblatt, Cristina Iglesias,Ana Mendieta, Vik Muniz, Ernesto Neto, Francisco Ruiz de Infante,Alexander Sokurov, Francesc Torres and Valentín Vallhonrat.

Contemporary Art UK (Art World Series)

Adventures Close to Home: the British art scene from “then” to “now” is an introductory essay to the forthcoming Art World Series published by Blackdog to cover contemporary art in the United Kingdom. Previous titles have looked at North America, South America and Eastern Europe.