General guide to the collections of the Pennsylvania museum and school of industrial art in Memorial hall, Fairmount park, Philadelphia, Pa.

Preface signed: E. A. B. [i.e. Edwin Atlee Barber]

Retrospective and comparative exhibition of paintings by the late George Inness, N.A. and a few examples by the late A.H. Wyant, N.A. from the George H. Anslie [i.e. Ainslie] Collection ... New York : Detroit Museum of Art, Nov. 1st to Nov. 30th inclusive, 1913.

All paintings except two are from the George H. Ainslie Collection.

Towards Wider Sharing of Iconographical Art Content

Information and multimedia technologies that have been developed during the past couple of years provided new e-tools to memory institutions (viz. museum, libraries, galleries, etc.), reviving the valuable treasure made by generation of people. Digital libraries (DLs) are such powerful contemporary tools for cultural heritage presentation, preservation and archiving. However, DLs power will in-crease significantly if they use mechanisms for ubiquitous sharing of their e-artefacts and they distribute attractive content in the social networks, reflecting community demands and needs. This paper presents a service for automatic sharing of iconographical artefacts and full collections from the Bulgarian Iconographical Digital Library to selected Facebook communities. In this case the service will be used for widely promotion of knowledge about East-Christian Iconographical Art and Culture, but I could be used not only for this and not only in this domain.

Fieldworks from the Museum of the Void: Experiments in the Event of an Archive

This exhibition was a research presentation of works made at Center for Land Use Interpretation [CLUI]base in Wendover, Utah, USA between 2008-2010. The project was commissioned by the Centre For Land Interpretation in USA and funded by The Henry Moore Foundation in the UK. Documentation of research conducted in the field as made available as video and installation. An experimental discourse on the preservation of land art was put with GPS drawings and research information displayed as maps and documents. In examining physical sites in Utah, USA, the project connected to contemporary discourse centred on archives in relation to land art and land use. Using experimental processes conceived in relation to key concepts such as event structures and entropy, conceptual frameworks developed by Robert Smithson (USA) and John Latham (UK), the 'death drive' of the archive was examined in the context of a cultural impulse to preserve iconic works. The work took items from Lathams archive and placed them at the canonical 'Spiral Jetty', Smithson land art work at Rozel Point north of Salt Lake City. This became a focus for the project that also highlighted the role of the Getty Foundation in documenting major public artworks and CLUI in creating an American Land Museum. Work was created in the field at extreme remote locations using GPS technologies and visual tools were developed to articulate the concepts of the artists discussed, to engage the exhibition audience in ideas of transformation and entropy in art. Audiences were encouraged to sign a petition to be used in future preservation of spiral jetty currently facing development challenges.

Restrung new chamber festival : an exploration of contemporary string practice

The Restrung New Chamber Festival was a practice-led research project which explored the intricacies of musical relationships. Specifically, it investigated the nature of contemporary string practice, with "New music" at its core. For the purposes of this project, "New music" will be defined in terms of representing a "global sonorous space" (Nancy 2007:12), which Hulse describes as "a spectacular comingling of styles and an unprecedented explosion of creative possibilities" (Hulse n.d.:2). Approaches to staging such an event are contextualised through a comparative analysis with relevant Australian and European festivals. The Restrung model derived inspiration from both art music and popular music festival models, in several aspects. One strategy was to engage audiences through combinations of musical, visual and spatial features. Another strategy was to encourage interaction by audiences with installations, workshops and forums. Restrung represents a new and distinctive model which presented art music within an immersive environment. This exegesis presents an evaluation framework which investigates the relationship between curatorial input and the experiential qualities of the festival. The context of an overview of trends in arts festival curation informs the discussion, as well as approaches to identifying new and receptive audiences. It is expected that the evaluation framework will provide a useful and practical guide for curators working in contemporary string practice, hybrid arts, experimental and cross-art form festival design.

Come together : forging publics in Brisbane's Gallery of Modern Art

The Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) in Brisbane, Australia’s third largest city, recently staged ‘21st Century: Art of the First Decade’. The gallery spaces were replete with a commissioned slide by Carsten Höller, an installation of Rivane Neuenschwande’s I Wish Your Wish (2003), a table of white Legos, a room of purple balloons and other participatory or interactive artworks designed to engage multiple publics and encourage audience participation in a variety of ways. Many of the featured projects used day-to-day experiences and offered new conceptions about art practice and what they can elicit in their public – raise awareness about local issues, help audiences imagine different ways of negotiating their environs or experi-ence a museum in a new way. At times, the bottom floor galleries resembled a theme park – adults and children playing with Legos and using Höller’s slide. This article examines the benefits and limitations of such artistic interventions by relating the GoMA exhibition to Brisbane City Council’s campaign of ‘Together Brisbane’ (featuring images of Neunenschwande’s ribbons); a response to the devastation brought to the city and its surrounds in January 2011. During the Brisbane floods, GoMA’s basement was damaged, the museum closed and upon reopening, visitor numbers soared. In this context, GoMA’s use of engaged art practice – always verging on the ephemeral and ‘fun’ – has been used to project a wider notion of a collective urban public. What questions does this raise, not only regarding the cultural politics around the social and participatory ‘turn’ in art practice, but its use to address a much wider urban public in a moment of crisis.

Cutting on action : interference strategies in contemporary art practice

The domestication of creative software and hardware has been a significant factor in the recent proliferation of still and moving image creation. Booming numbers of amateur image-makers have the resources, skills and ambitions to create and distribute their work on a mass scale. At the same time, contemporary art seems increasingly dominated by ‘post-medium’ practices that adopt and adapt the representational techniques of mass culture, rather than overtly reject or oppose them. As a consequence of this network of forces, the field of image and video production is no longer the exclusive specialty of art and the mass media, and art may no longer be the most prominent watchdog of mass image culture. Intuitively and intentionally, contemporary artists are responding to these shifting conditions. From the position of a creative practitioner and researcher, this paper examines the strategies that contemporary artists use to engage with the changing relationships between image culture, lived experience and artistic practice. By examining the intersections between W.J.T. Mitchell’s detailed understanding of visual literacy and Jacques Derrida’s philosophical models of reading and writing, I identify ‘editing’ as a broad methodology that describes how practitioners creatively and critically engage with the field of still and moving images. My contention is that by emphasising the intersections of looking and making, ‘reading’ and ‘writing’, artists provide crucial jump cuts, pauses and distortions in the medley of our mediated experiences.

The paradox of autistic art

Certain autistic children whose linguistic ability is virtually nonexistent can draw natural scenes from memory with astonishing accuracy. In particular their drawings display convincing perspective. In contrast, normal children of the same preschool age group and even untrained adults draw primitive schematics or symbols of objects which they can verbally identify. These are usually conceptual outlines devoid of detail. It is argued that the difference between autistic child artists and normal individuals is that autistic artists make no assumptions about what is to be seen in their environment. They have not formed mental representations of what is significant and consequently perceive all details as equally important. Equivalently, they do not impose visual or linguistic schema -- a process necessary for rapid conceptualisation in a dynamic existence, especially when the information presented to the eye is incomplete.

Looking into the light : reinventing the apparatus in contemporary art

Technical images such as photography, film and video, are dependent on apparatuses for their production and dissemination, yet the apparatus itself is often hidden or obscured in the experience of the work and the discourse that surrounds it. This practice-led research identifies key practice strategies to foreground the apparatus both in the production of work and in its presentation. It therefore develops critical and generative strategies to explore and interrogate the workings of the 'apparatus-audience complex,' and the particular modes of spectatorship that this entails.

Artscience in practice : exploring the critical and creative potentials of transdisciplinary art and science practice using a methodological and conceptual framework of creative becoming

In response to a growing interest in art and science interactions and transdisciplinary research strategies, this research project examines the critical and conceptual affordances of ArtScience practice and outlines a new experiential methodology for practice-lead research using a framework of creative becoming. In doing so, the study contributes to the field of ArtScience and transdisciplinary practice, by providing new strategies for creative development and critical enquiry across art and science.

The double risk of primitivism

This essay examines the possibilities for practices that appeal to the primitive in the contemporary cultural context. The idea of the primitive is driven by a desire to challenge the limitations of Western culture, while at the same time attracting the charge of promoting Eurocentrism. This essay investigates this double risk and how artists have sought to evade it, confound it, or accentuate it.

Revolving kaleidoscope : site-specificity and the part object in contemporary installation art

This practice-led research project explores the possibilities for restaging and reconfiguring contemporary art installations in multiple and different locations. By exploring ideas and art that demonstrate a kaleidoscopic approach to creative practice, this project examines how analysing artists' particular processes can achieve new understandings and experiences of installation art. This project achieves this through reflection on, and analysis of creative works made throughout the research, and a critical examination of contemporary art practices.

Directing experience : an exploration of active analysis and visual cognition theory in the training of contemporary directors

The focus of this research is the creation of a stage-directing training manual on the researcher's site at the National Institute of Dramatic Art. The directing procedures build on the work of Stanislavski's Active Analysis and findings from present-day visual cognition studies. Action research methodology and evidence-based data collection are employed to improve the efficacy of both the directing procedures and the pedagogical manual. The manual serves as a supplement to director training and a toolkit for the more experienced practitioner. The manual and research findings provide a unique and innovative contribution to the field of theatre directing.