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»

Thomson-Craighead at Studion

Moderna Museet invited Mejan Labs to curate two installations by the British artists Thomson & Craighead. This solo exhibition was in Studion at Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Works included: BEACON when it is shown as a data projection in a gallery. As with the online version and railway flap sign, live web searches are continuously relayed as they are being made around the world -in this case onto a gallery wall in series and at regular intervals as an endless concrete poetry. Decorative Newsfeeds use a live feed from the web to present up to the minute headline news from around the world as a series of pleasant animations, allowing viewers to keep informed while contemplating a kind of readymade sculpture or perhaps an automatic drawing.

Horizon & BEACON

Timecode was a group show at Dundee Contemporary Arts in 2009. Others Artists included where Douglas Gordon, Tatsuo Miyajima, On Kawara, Ceal Floyer, Christian Stock. Thomson and Craighead where commissioned to make an new installation,Horizon and accompanying limited edition print for the exhibition. Also included in the exhibition was a Beacon in the form of a railway flapsign. Horizon is a narrative clock made out of images accessed in realtime from webcams found in every time zone around the world. The result is a constantly updating array of images that read like a series of movie storyboards, but also as an idiosynratic global electronic sundial. BEACON as a unique mechanical railway flap sign built by Solari of Udine in Italy. As with the online and projected version of BEACON, this mechanical half-flap sign continuously relays live web searches as they are being made around the world presenting them back in series and at regular intervals as an endless concrete poetry.

Barry Lieberman & Friends, Maria Larionoff and Robin McCabe, May 6, 2012

Concert program for Barry Lieberman & Friends present Guest Artists, May 6, 2012

Radical interiors: Cindy Sherman's ‘Sex pictures’ and Kathy Acker's 'My mother: demonology'

In 1989, the American visual artist Cindy Sherman produced her ‘Sex Pictures’, a number of photographic images of two medical mannequins whose bodies had been dismembered and reconstructed to form abstract configurations that alluded to pornographic poses. Sherman's series was a response to the National Endowment for the Arts controversy, in which American artists such as Andres Serrano and the late Robert Mapplethorpe, whose work was considered obscene by the Republican Congress, were censored. Many artists in the culture-war period had their grants rescinded. The American avant-garde writer Kathy Acker published My Mother: Demonology in 1993. A prominent concern of Acker's in the work is what she termed her ‘writing freedom’ in a climate of cultural expurgation by the Republican elite. In particular, Acker was worried that she was ‘internalizing certain censorships’. This article addresses Sherman's and Acker's work in a comparative context to explore, through the theoretical work of Julia Kristeva, the ways in which their responses to a climate of political censorship can be read as forms of intimate revolt. Kristeva's notion of ejection—the act of placing something beyond the scope of the possible—transpires as ‘a condition of art's creation’ in Sherman's and Acker's work. Acker and Sherman use the pornographic reference in their work to disrupt and dislocate the narrative and image from convention in order to de-eroticize the body, against heteronormativity's terms, and empower the female sex organs. Eversion—that is, in Sherman's and Acker's works, the act of turning the institutional and maternal body inside out—emerges as a mode of resistance to the danger of the writer and the artist internalizing cultural restrictions. The everted body creates a site of radical interiority which becomes the (impossible) site for the radical (re-)embodiment of the feminine subject.

(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.