Creative industries in China : art, design and media

Creative industries in China provides a fresh account of China’s emerging commercial cultural sector. The author shows how developments in Chinese art, design and media industries are reflected in policy, in market activity, and grassroots participation. Never has the attraction of being a media producer, an artist, or a designer in China been so enticing. National and regional governments offer financial incentives; consumption of cultural goods and services have increased; creative workers from Europe, North America and Asia are moving to Chinese cities; culture is increasingly positioned as a pillar industry. But what does this mean for our understanding of Chinese society? Can culture be industrialised following the low-cost model of China’s manufacturing economy. Is the national government really committed to social liberalisation? This engaging book is a valuable resource for students and scholars interested in social change in China. It draws on leading Chinese scholarship together with insights from global media studies, economic geography and cultural studies.

Public realm and transport, international best practice case studies and opportunities for Brisbane

This report was prepared for Lat 27 Pty Ltd for the purpose of conducting a City Centre Public Realm and Active Transport Study for Urban Renewal Brisbane, Brisbane City Council. In this review, we highlight some key learnings and recommendations from innovative projects across the globe to inform public realm design and help facilitate active transport in subtropical Brisbane. Traditionally, Australian cities have been have been based on northern European models. This report is informed by the view that planners and urban designers must look beyond that paradigm to redefine and re-conceptualise our city in a different way, one that values our unique local identity and climate. In re-designing Brisbane’s public realm, therefore, design interventions and responses must celebrate our unique identity and outdoor lifestyle and address the subtropical climate's reality of life in warm humid summers and cool dry winters. The current period of rapid urban change, and the imperative to adapt to climate change, together offer an opportunity to prioritise and integrate design features that provide shade and shelter from sun and summer rain, open and permeable urban environments that facilitate cooling air movement, and connections to water and nature, so that the urban built form co-exists within an inviting, functional and memorable natural landscape. To inform this transformation, this review provides insight into international experiences and best practices. To date, although there is much practice-based knowledge, academic studies outlining learnings and recommendations from case studies (especially in a subtropical context) remain rare. Thus, a range of sources (industry reports, websites, journal articles and books) have been utilised.

Improvisation, process drama and dramatic art

This paper re-conceptualises the notion of improvisation as it has developed in schools since the 1960s. It outlines the theoretical case for naming the distinctive improvisational practice that has emerged in schools - namely Process Drama. The paper sketches seven characteristics of Process Drama and then outlines the case for seeing it as an emerging but robust form of dramatic art. It concludes by arguing that drama teachers, in developing process drama, have created a new form of both education and art.

Review: Barbara T. Hoffman (ed) - Art and Cultural Heritage : Law, Policy and Practice

In Art and Cultural Heritage: Law, Policy and Practice Barbara Hoffman as editor brings together an impressive array of practitioners from a variety of fields (from archaeologists to lawyers), to present in single volume aspects of policy, law and practice relevant to cultural heritage, which are not normally addressed in such texts. The book is indeed a comprehensive work to be recommended to policy makers, practitioners, students and other interested readers...

Confronting consensus : the art and politics of Christopher Howlett

The article discusses the art career and works of Brisbane artist Christopher Howlett. Howlett has engaged with a number of political issues in a range of media. Issues include the artist as 'labourer', art in the age of tabloid media, art and celebrity culture in media such as performance, installation, sound works, and digital frameworks.

Project 27 : insights into a production-centred study on art direction and love

This paper offers insight into the development of a PhD in advertising art direction. For over half a century art directors within the advertising industry have been adapting to the changes occurring in media, culture and the corporate sector, toward enhancing professional performance and competitiveness. These professionals seldom offer explicit justification about the role images play in effective communication. It is uncertain how this situation affects advertising performance, because advertising has, nevertheless, evolved in parallel to this as an industry able to fabricate new opportunities for itself. However, uncertainties in the formalization of art direction knowledge restrict the possibilities of knowledge transfer in higher education. The theoretical knowledge supporting advertising art direction has been adapted spontaneously from disciplines that rarely focus on specific aspects related to the production of advertising content, like, for example: marketing communication, design, visual communication, or visual art. Meanwhile, in scholarly research, vast empirical knowledge has been generated about advertising images, but often with limited insight into production expertise. Because art direction is understood as an industry practice and not as an academic discipline, an art direction perspective in scholarly contributions is rare. Scholarly research that is relevant to art direction seldom offers viewpoints to help understand how it is that research outputs may specifically contribute to art direction practices. There is a need to formally understanding the knowledge underlying art direction and using it to explore models for visual analysis and knowledge transfer in higher education. This paper provides insight into the development of a thesis that explored this need. The PhD thesis to which this paper refers is Strategic Aesthetics in Advertising Campaigns: Implications for Art Direction Education.

Catherine or Kate, the royal name dilemma : humour and performance in collaborative art practice

The traditional model of visual arts practice is one that privileges highly individuated reflection and research on studio based, predominately material outcomes. This archetypal approach to thinking about cultural production tends to overlook all of the conceptual and contextual collaborations that take place, both informally and formally in the process of making artworks. The aim of this practice-led research project is to creatively and critically explore the potential for actively engaging in a collaborative process for making artworks. It will focus on this approach to research and making through performance and video based works made in conjunction with Kate Woodcroft. Through doing this it aims to explore the possibilities for thinking and working beyond singular, materially based practices and develop new understandings for this as a model for generating new and unexpected creative outcomes. Key departure points for this discussion include; tertiary performance, conceptual art, and humour.

Catherine or Kate : the tertiary spaces of collaboration, performance and humour in contemporary art

The traditional model of visual arts practice is one that privileges highly individuated and predominantly material investigations and outcomes. This approach overlooks and devalues the formal and informal dialogues and collaborations that take place in the process of making art. This Masters research project considers how the experience of working in collaboration can generate a new model for thinking about practice-led methodologies in visual arts. It aims to do this by mapping out and elaborating on the processes and approaches to making that fellow Masters student Catherine Sagin and I have come to use in our alliance as ‘Fiona Mail’, ‘Catherine Sagin’ and ‘Catherine or Kate’ respectively. The fluidity of our collaborative moniker is one example of the way this project creatively explores and re-assesses the implications of collaboration. Drawing upon the contextual frames of conceptual art, performance art, and comedy this research looks at the significance of and possibilities for working as a collaborative duo.

Sweat : the subtropical imaginary

Does heat have a cooling effect on culture? Sweat argues the reverse: culture thrives in the subtropical zones. While acknowledging that the subtropical generates ambivalence—being cast as alternately idyllic or hellish—Sweat nonetheless seeks to develop the specific voices of subtropical cultures. The uneasy place of this sweaty discourse is explored across art, literature, architecture, and the built environment. In particular, Sweat focuses on the most commonly experienced situation, the everyday house. While it addresses subjects from Japan, Brazil, and France, Sweat centres on Brisbane, Queensland—long in the shadow of Sydney and Melbourne in the Australian cultural psyche—due to its enduring and self-conscious attention to subtropical living.

An interview with Jacques Rancière : on medium-specificity and discipline crossovers in modern art

Jacques Rancière's work on aesthetics has received a great deal of attention in recent years. Given his work has enormous range – covering art and literature, political theory, historiography, pedagogy and worker's history – Andrew McNamara and Toni Ross (UNSW) explore his wider critical ambitions in this interview, while showing how it leads to alternative insights into aesthetics. Rancière sets aside the core suppositions linking the medium to aesthetic judgment, which has informed many definitions of modernism. Rancière is emphatic in freeing aesthetic judgment from issues of medium-specificity. He argues that the idea of autonomy associated with medium-specificity – or 'truth to the medium' – was 'a very late one' in modernism, and that post-medium trends were already evident in early modernism. While not stressing a simple continuity between early modernism and contemporary art, Ranciere nonetheless emphasizes the on-going ethical and political ramifications of maintaining an a-disciplinary stance.

What young children say about art : a comparative study

Given the opportunities, young children can be prolific in their productions of drawings and paintings. In the study reported in this paper, we had two questions about this. Why do young children draw and paint? And, what does this prolific activity do? We consider that particular ways of seeing art position children, and children use their artistic activities to position themselves, producing their identities. We interviewed a group of children in Hong Kong, aged between 4 and 5 years, (n=27), and a group of children in Brisbane, Australia, who were of similar ages (n=15). The cross-cultural dimension added another dimension to our thinking and conversations around art and young children.

Open in art, nature and emergence

The interactive art system +-now is modelled on the openness of the natural world. Emergent shapes constitute a novel method for facilitating this openness. With the art system as an example, the relationship between openness and emergence is discussed. Lastly, artist reflections from the creation of the work are presented. These describe the nature of open systems and how they may be created.

Exploration and reflection in interactive art : glass pond

Glass Pond is an interactive artwork designed to engender exploration and reflection through an intuitive, tangible interface and a simulation agent. It is being developed using iterative methods. A study has been conducted with the aim of illuminating user experience, interface, design, and performance issues.The paper describes the study methodology and process of data analysis including coding schemes for cognitive states and movements. Analysis reveals that exploration and reflection occurred as well as composing behaviours (unexpected). Results also show that participants interacted to varying degrees. Design discussion includes the artwork's (novel) interface and configuration.

Emergence and the art system ‘plus minus now’

Emergence is discussed in the context of a practice-based study of interactive art and a new taxonomy of emergence is proposed. The interactive art system ‘plus minus now’ is described and its relationship to emergence is discussed. ‘Plus minus now’ uses a novel method for instantiating emergent shapes. A preliminary investigation of this art system has been conducted and reveals the creation of temporal compositions by a participant. These temporal compositions and the emergent shapes are described using the taxonomy of emergence. Characteristics of emergent interactions and the implications of designing for them are discussed.