Interactive sensory objects for and by people with learning disabilities

This project engages people with learning disabilities to participate as co-researchers and explore museum interpretation through multisensory workshops using microcontrollers and sensors to enable alternative interactive visitor experiences in museums and heritage sites. This article describes how the project brings together artists, engineers, and experts in multimedia advocacy, as well as people with learning disabilities in the co-design of interactive multisensory objects that replicate or respond to objects of cultural significance in our national collections. Through a series of staged multi-sensory art and electronics workshops, people with learning disabilities explore how the different senses could be utilised to augment existing artefacts or create entirely new ones. The co-researchers employ multimedia advocacy tools to reflect on and to communicate their experiences and findings.

Interactive sensory objects for and by people with learning disabilities

This project engages people with learning disabilities to participate as co-researchers and explore museum interpretation through multisensory workshops using microcontrollers and sensors to enable alternative interactive visitor experiences in museums and heritage sites. This article describes how the project brings together artists, engineers, and experts in multimedia advocacy, as well as people with learning disabilities in the co-design of interactive multisensory objects that replicate or respond to objects of cultural significance in our national collections. Through a series of staged multi-sensory art and electronics workshops, people with learning disabilities explore how the different senses could be utilised to augment existing artefacts or create entirely new ones. The co-researchers employ multimedia advocacy tools to reflect on and to communicate their experiences and findings.

Vem är samen? : En läromedelsanalys av hur samisk kultur och identitet presenteras i Undervisningsmaterial i historia och religion

The aim of this essay is to study how the Sami are presented in four textbooks about religion and history that are used in the schools of the majority culture of Sweden today and one book of ideas asto how a textbook could look like from a Sami's perspective. Its aim is not only to study how the Sami are presented but also to discuss how students who read these books could interpret what it means to be a Sami and what their culture is about. It is also meant to discuss how the Sami identitycould be formed. In order to be able to discuss this the essay uses three different kinds of theories about identity and culture. The analysis showed that there is little information about Sami culture, identity, religion and historypresented in the four textbooks used in schools of the majority culture and that these books seem to want students to think that the Sami are troublemakers but are and should be assimilated into the majority culture.

Movies, Mind and Meaning : Studying Audience and Favourite Films

Construction of identity and meaning is becoming increasingly important in both media studies and religion scholarship. (Lövheim, 2004) Meaning construction outside traditional religion has become more interesting for religious studies and what individuals in the audience do with all messages circulated through media in everyday life has attended increasing interest within media studies (Stout and Buddenbaum, 2001). Motion pictures, soap operas and advertising are all examples of media contents which generate ideas among its audience which to a various degree are used as resources within the construction of identity (Jansson, 2001). The investigation of what modern humankind’s world views look like and what components they are composed of, in this context seems to be an important topic of investigation (Holm and Björkqvist, 1996). The ways in which the development of media has effected the daily lives of individuals is interest as is the nature of the self and the ways in which the process of self-formation is affected by the profusion of mediated materials (Thompson, 1995). Film and religion are my interest within this larger frame. The topic is not exactly new but the combination of film and religion has during the last ten years resulted in a rapidly growing number of books by scholars interested in this field (Lyden, 2003). One growing focus is on the role that films can and do play within the emerging and developing valuesystem of people in the West today (Marsh, 2004). The British theologian Clive Marsh’s point of departure is very similar to my own. Viewers bring to a film life-experience, immediate concerns and worldviews and the exploration of this interplay between movies and the interpreting process of meaning making is the very focus in this paper. Theoretically, the semeiological model of Alf Linderman is combined with cultural cognitive approaches used by a number of Scandinavian media scholars developing perspectives in audience theory (Linderman, 1996, Höijer and Werner, 1998). 13 individuals, their favourite movie and what it means to them in their life My aim is to examine how individuals comprehend film and what the meaning process look like. In this paper I present the outcome of 13 interviews with young people about their favourite film. I suggest how it is possible to interpret how they interrelate film comprehension with their personal beliefs and their culturally constructed worldview from a sociocognitive point of view. Examples of films chosen range from Disneys Lion King (1994), sciencefiction and fantasy successes like The Matrix (1999) and Lord of the Rings (2001) or the next best movie ever according to www.IMdb.com The Shawshank Redemption (1994) as well as the Swedish blockbuster Så som i himmelen (2004), aka “As in Heaven”.

The Björling 'Opera' : A children's Nursery Academy and an Italian Conservatory in Miniature

The aim in this chapter is to develop a deeper understanding about the informal Björling 'School' in Sweden. Contextually the example is related to the micro history of opera education contributing to the macro perspective illuminating a provincial example of the concept of domestic opera schooling. The specific focus was on Karl David Björling (1873-1926), the teaching parent of the Swedish tenor Jussi Björling (1911-1960) and his brothers Gösta and Olle.   The Björling family model of opera schooling belongs to the classical canon of domestic home education which was common during the epoch. The phenomenon is also within the field of opera singing an important reference to the historical context of the Nordic opera history of vocal education.   The uniqueness concerning the Björling School seems to be the rigorous and exceptionally early training. David Björling’s pedagogy was rooted in earlier German theories of musical upbringing. It's clear from his results that he was familiar with the neo-humanistic ideal on which reformed music education was based. Of a specific interest is the term Gesang als Unterricht as a concept for developing childrens musical and memorising capacities.   Conceptually the roots of the Björling model are in the eighteenth-century Romantic view of prodigies and their abilities. The extensive touring is connected to the promotion of wonder-children, and David Björling’s educational style to the conservative Master-pupil tradition.   David Björling's vocal ideal was a part of the contemporary debate about “The decadence of the singing art”, and seems to have its roots in an older Italian tradition. There are recurring similarities between his educational methods and the didactic principles of the Lamperti School: Enjoying a revival around the late 1800s and early 1900s, it has been called the natural or the national school. Nevertheless, through authentic experiences and gramophone recordings the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso became David Björling’s pedagogical role model.

Look down, look up : Barbara Bolt's art beyond representation

I review the thinking of Barbara Bolt in her recent book, which is informed by Martin Heidegger’s theory of art. Bolt argues that it is in the flux of art practice, where the artist responds bodily, with hands and eyes, to the encounter with the materials of practice, that visual art produces real material effects. That is, through the praxical encounter, art does not merely represent, it performs radically. Bolt thus argues for a materialist ontology of the work of visual art. I examine what Bolt means by ‘real material effects’ and ‘radical performativity’.

In developing my own project on the poetic response to visual art, particularly portraiture, I have freely adapted Heidegger’s theory of art to propose that the poet responds to the visual encounter in a manner similar to that of Heidegger’s preserver, by restraining usual knowing and looking. In this way the poet facilitates the emergence from the work of visual art of truth about being and earth, as defined by Heidegger. In my forthcoming article ‘Ekphrasis and illumination of painting’, I argue that the poet, like the artist, restrains seeing-as and operates in a mode approximating mere seeing, as these terms are defined by Heidegger and Wittgenstein.

In the present article I propose to examine the role of looking down and looking up in non-representational art, and in particular Bolt’s ‘oil stain paintings’ exhibited in the Forty-five Downstairs gallery in Melbourne in conjunction with the launch of her book.

I propose to expose some blind spots in the thinking which underpins theories derived from Heidegger. I will examine the way ‘representation’ has been constructed in twentieth-century thought, and will argue that Heideggerian truth and Bolt’s ‘real material effects’ result from the privileging of perception over knowledge. I will examine, with particular reference to portraiture, Bolt’s assertion that the referent can be rehabilitated in Western thought and traced in ‘real material effects’. I will argue that ‘representation’ is an unstable process occurring within and outside signification, and that this very instability enables us to confidently predict that all art produces ‘real material effects’, or in other words, Heideggerian truth.

Music, language and emotion

This paper attempts to demonstrate the link between art and pain, or more specifically between music, forms of poetic language and emotion – a link that for me is often emphasised in times of grief and sadness.

Melbourne 2006: marketing south-eastern Australian aboriginal art

The Aboriginal cultural sector is dynamic and highly valuable to the Australian economy, returning an estimated $100 million dollars annually. The majority of Aboriginal artists and art works have been perceived to be in northern Australia— eighty per cent of them are in fact in this region—but Aboriginal artists in south-eastern Australia are emerging as a strong force as they struggle for recognition from commercial and national galleries, curators, art dealers, newspaper critics, and buyers. If marketing is to be effectual, the Aboriginality of the art must be presented in a form that is understood and accepted by the audience. Thus changing public perceptions is crucial to marketing south-eastern Aboriginal art. The primary task of this article is to discuss this marketing priority for Aboriginal art and artists in south-eastern Australia, previously neglected in marketing literature. Specifically, the upcoming Melbourne Commonwealth Games are proposed as an opportunity for intensive marketing of the region’s Aboriginal arts.

Modern dance, domestic life and civil society

In her book The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (2000) Seyla Benhabib uses the concept of an ‘alternative genealogy of modernity’ to help her both to understand Arendt’s political philosophy and to rethink the potential for civil society to become a progressive political force at the beginning of the twenty first century. The idea of an alternative genealogy of modernity refers to a heterogeneity of social and political forms, spaces and acts that might be used to remap and redefine a modernity whose dominant topology has been shaped by the binary division between so-called public and private spheres. Alternative modernities have already been elaborated and explored from a range of different perspectives including feminist and postcolonial ones: for example, in Rita Felski’s Gender of Modernity (1995) and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincialising Europe (2000). In this paper I want to elaborate upon the idea of an alternative genealogy of modernity from my perspective as a dancer. Thinking through the sociality of art and, more specifically, of some historical dance-making practices can make visible alternative spaces and processes of the (potentially) political. In the West, the modes of art-making form part of an as yet not fully explored arena of the social and of social practices. Modernist and Romantic ideologies have tended to preclude attention to the specific sociabilities of art-making. On the one hand Modernist ideology and art discourses have promoted the idea of an art work’s ‘autonomy’: its radical separation from the social relationships, the bodies and the conditions of its making. On the other hand Romantic ideology, still pervasive in popular conceptions of art practices, construes creation as interiority and individualistic expression. Socialist feminist and Marxist discussions of art have emphasized the social conditions of art-making but these have tended to be concerned with the social inequalities instituted within the public/private split rather than seeking to destabilize that division itself by posing questions of differences within the social. In my discussion below I draw on aspects of early modern dance practice and creation in taking up Benhabib’s concern to mobilise an alternative genealogy of modernity towards a renewal and reactivation of civic life. This project involves unsettling clear distinctions between the so-called ‘public’ and ‘private’ but, at the same time, as Benhabib cautions ‘the binarity of public and private spheres must be reconstructed and not merely rejected’. (2000:2006)

Changing perceptions : marketing south eastern Australian aboriginal art

The Aboriginal cultural sector is dynamic and highly valuable to the Australian economy, returning an estimated $100 million dollars annually. The majority of Aboriginal artists and art works have been perceived to be in northern Australia-eighty percent of them are in fact in this region-but Aboriginal artists in South Eastern Australia are emerging as a strong force as they struggle for recognition from commercial and national galleries, curators, art dealers, newspaper critics, and buyers. If marketing is to be effectual, the Aboriginality of the art must be presented in a form that is understood and accepted by the audience. 1 Thus changing public perceptions is crucial to marketing South Eastern Aboriginal art. The primary task of this paper is to discuss this marketing priority for Aboriginal art and artists in South Eastern Australia, previously neglected in marketing literature. Specifically, the upcoming Melbourne Commonwealth Games are proposed as an opportunity for intensive marketing of the region's Aboriginal arts.

Catalog of Paintings Exhibited in the Colby College Art Museum May 8 -22- 1974

This catalog describes paintings by the author, completed as his Senior Scholar Project in art and exhibited in the Colby College Art Museum. Images of the paintings are not available.

History, memory, and the politics of programming : the video work of Richard Fung

Richard Fung, a Toronto-based video artist and cultural critic, was born in Trinidad in 1954, and attended school in Ireland before immigrating to Canada to study at the University of Toronto. Richard Fung has taught at the Ontario College of Art and Design, and has been a visiting professor in the Department of Media Study at the State University of New York in Buffalo. He is currently the coordinator of the Centre for Media and Culture in Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.

Using narrative inquiry to explore the impact of art on individuals

Discourse about the impact of art has been prominent in academic and arts industry discourse over the past two decades. Contention in the discourse has led to the call for new research frameworks that place the experience of the individual as central to understanding the impact of art. The authors present the background of this discourse and outline narrative inquiry as a research method that elicits individual experiences. The authors present the findings of a narrative inquiry and establish that the way individuals experience art and its impact is far broader in scope than previous research suggests.