Computing, Design, Art: Reflections on an Innovative Moment in History

The paper is concerned with the role of art and design in the history and philosophy of computing. It offers insights arising from research into a period in the 1960s and 70s, particularly in the UK, when computing became more available to artists and designers, focusing on John Lansdown (1929-1999) and Bruce Archer (1922-2005) in London. Models of computing interacted with conceptualisations of art, design and related creative activities in important ways.

Impossible Participation

The chapter critiques the rise of participation in art since the 1990s – a development that sees artists and curators searching continually for new and increased levels of audience inclusion. While there has been much discussion about what might be gained by participating in an artwork, we ask what might be lost by this act. We also question the extent to which participation is a useful social or aesthetic strategy in circumstances where it remains bound by the institutional structures of the artworld. For this reason, our work is an attempt to transform the broader ‘apparatus of art’ and to create works in which the roles assigned to individuals and groups remain fluid and subject to continuous negotiation. As a means of an attempt at resisting absorption into the institutional structures of the artworld, we privilege a form of participation that remains immanent in the work, but that never crystallizes into a single or definable role. Kathryn Brown , art historian and editor of Interactive Contemporary Art, says, ‘It is, perhaps, a fitting end to the discussions of the present volume that the most interesting and valuable form of participation envisaged by Freee is one that must remain impossible.’

Perception-based painterly rendering: funcionality and interface design

Painterly rendering (non-photorealistic rendering or NPR) aims at translating photographs into paintings with discrete brush strokes, simulating certain techniques (im- or expressionism) and media (oil or watercolour). Recently, our research into visual perception and models of processes in the visual cortex resulted in a new rendering scheme, in which detected lines and edges at different scales are translated into brush strokes of different sizes. In order to prepare a version which is suitable for many users, including children, the design of the interface in terms of window and menu system is very important. Discussions with artists and non-artists led to three design criteria: (1) the interface must reflect the procedures and possibilities that real painters follow and use, (2) it must be based on only one window, and (3) the menu system must be very simple, avoiding a jungle of menus and sub-menus. This paper explains the interface that has been developed.

O desenho à maneira dos mestres como metalinguagem

Relatório da Prática de Ensino Supervisionada, Mestrado em Ensino de Artes Visuais, Universidade de Lisboa, 2011

A obra no gerúndio

Tese de doutoramento, Belas-Artes (Instalação), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Belas-Artes, 2014

A luz na pintura de representação : mito, representação e luz na prática pictórica : (1550-1650)

Tese de doutoramento, Belas-Artes (Pintura), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Belas-Artes, 2014

O trompe l’oeil barroco na Igreja do Menino Deus em Lisboa : métodos e técnicas

Tese de doutoramento, Belas-Artes (Geometria), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Belas-Artes, 2014

Potencialidades da arte pública relacional na arte/educação:práticas da cidade como sala de aula

Tese de doutoramento, Belas-Artes (Educação Artística), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Belas-Artes, 2014

Cinema 2.0 : modalidades de produção cinematográfica do tempo do digital

Tese de doutoramento, Sociologia (Cultura, Comunicação e Estilos de Vida), Universidade de Lisboa, Instituto de Ciências Sociais, 2014

Griots cosmopolitas : mobilidade e performance de artistas mandingas entre Lisboa e Guiné-Bissau

Tese de doutoramento, Antropologia (Antropologia da Etnicidade e do Político), Universidade de Lisboa, Instituto de Ciências Sociais, 2014

Ficção e encenação : o desenho como narrativa visual

Tese de doutoramento, Belas-Artes (Ciências da Arte), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Belas-Artes, 2014

Ecos do silêncio : para um estudo iconológico do fado

Tese de doutoramento, História (Arte Património e Restauro), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Letras, 2015

How the sublime became "now": time, modernity and aesthetics in Lyotard's rewriting of Kant

Writing in the late 1980s, Nancy gives as examples of the "recent fashion for the sublime" not only the theoreticians of Paris, but the artists of Los Angeles, Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the sublime may of course no longer seem quite so "now" as it did back then, whether in North America, Europe, or Japan. Simon Critchley, for one, has suggested that, at least as regards the issue of its conceptual coupling to "postmodernism," the "debate" concerning the sublime "has become rather stale and the discussion has moved on." Nonetheless, if that debate has indeed "moved on"-and thankfully so-it is not without its remainder, particularly in the very contemporary context of a resurgence of interest in explicitly philosophical accounts of art, in the wake of an emergent critique of cultural studies and of the apparent waning of poststructuralism's influence-a resurgence that has led to a certain "return to aesthetics" in recent Continental philosophy and to the work of Kant, Schelling, and the German Romantics. Moreover, as Nancy's precise formulations suggest, the "fashion" [mode] through which the sublime "offers itself"-as "a break within or from aesthetics"-clearly contains a significance that Critchley's more straightforward narration of shifts in theoretical chic cannot encompass. At stake in this would be the relation between the mode of fashion and art's "destiny" within modernity itself, from the late eighteenth century onwards. Such a conception of art's "destiny," as inextricably linked to that of the sublime, is not unique to recent French theory. In a brief passage in Aesthetic Theory, Adorno also suggests that the "sublime, which Kant reserved exclusively for nature, later became the historical constituent of art itself.... [I]n a subtle way, after the fall of formal beauty, the sublime was the only aesthetic idea left to modernism." As such, although the term has its classical origins in Longinus, its historical character for "us," both Nancy and Adorno argue, associates it specifically with the emergence of the modern. As another philosopher states: "It is around this name [of the sublime] that the destiny of classical poetics was hazarded and lost; it is in this name that ... romanticism, in other words, modernity, triumphed."

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).

Criatividade e instituições: novos desafios à vida dos artistas e dos profissionais da cultura

Trata-se de uma abrangente colectânea internacional, organizada por dois dos melhores especialistas portugueses da área, Vera Borges e Pedro Costa, na qual se faz o ponto da situação das profissões artísticas e culturais no actual contexto de reconfigurações criativas e institucionais à escala global em que hoje operam as indústrias culturais, desde as artes plásticas às performativas e destas aos media de entretenimento. Cruzando a economia e a sociologia, bem como os estudos territoriais, este livro deixa-nos com uma visão panorâmica dos actuais campos culturais inédita em língua portuguesa. Manuel Villaverde Cabral Investigador Emérito do ICS O livro colige uma série de ensaios, alguns mais conceptuais e de banda larga, outros claramente direccionados para estudos de caso, tendo como mote o ciclo de seminários «Artists and cultural workers: careers and labour markets» e representando alguma da investigação mais inovadora e rigorosa que se tem produzido em Portugal e no estrangeiro sobre a economia da cultura, em cruzamento com a geografia e a sociologia da arte e das profissões artísticas, em particular no polémico e ambíguo domínio das «actividades culturais e criativas»