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The Space of Thirdness: Intermediating performative treatments in artists’ moving image
In this chapter, I focus on how the screen in contemporary artists’ moving image might function as an intermediate space that performatively treats divisive social issues such as sexism, racism and ecological damage. Focusing on Rehana Zaman’s Sharla Shabana Sojourner Selena, 2016, and Jeamin Cha’s Sound Garden, 2019, I explore how both films differently engender such an intermediate space in which the oppositional conflicts that arise from said social issues can be played with rather than reactively defended against. I argue that such performativity has the potential to unhinge psychic life from what feminist relational psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin calls ‘the dangers of complementarity’ which involve the either/or positionalities of asserting power over another or succumbing to the power of the other. To bypass this double bind, Benjamin developed the concept of ‘thirdness’, which I use as a metaphor to think through the performative treatments proffered in my two case studies
'Nothing More Precious': the Emotional Inheritance of a Hair Locket
This open access book uses new methodologies from the history and sociology of emotions to analyse why people select specific tokens of family inheritance, and how this influences personal identity, cultural heritage, and national memory.
Much of our cultural heritage emerges from family histories – with many of the objects curated in museums, stories passed between generations, and monuments marking notable figures being the direct product of familial collections, donations, and investments. This edited collection uses emotion as an analytical tool to interpret such behaviours, and offers novel ways to investigate how and why family inheritances from a range of social, racial, and ethnic groups maintain their cultural power, as they move through time and from the private to the public spheres.
Drawing on a variety of case studies, and exploring items ranging from Victorian library chairs, to quilts, religious texts, and pieces of intergenerational writing – this volume considers the role of objects and inheritances in the emotional lives of individuals and families, and acknowledges them as agents in the creation of histories and identities. Combining insight from scholars of the history of emotions with that of historians and researchers situated outside the academy, this collection allows fresh insights on family history and material culture to emerge
The Invisible Lives of Selfies
The selfie has rapidly emerged as a significant aspect of visual culture. Selfies can be considered a kind of self-portrait, with roots in artistic self-representation, popular photography, and digital imaging. However, the visual image is only one, albeit crucial, component of the selfie. How that image circulates, how it is consumed and commented upon constitutes key considerations of how selfies work. But the vast majority of actions that affect selfies occur without much knowledge of the selfie taker. In this way, selfies implicate a host of concerns beyond the representational, including commercial, ethical, and political issues arising from their status as data.
The selfie, while clearly a visual phenomenon, also includes data traces, facial recognition and tagging systems, data tracking and analytics that are invisible to most selfie makers and consumers. These back-end processes invoke multiple concerns in the realm of privacy, surveillance, and security, in part due to the enormous amount of information – data – posted selfies contain.
This article focuses on the “invisible” aspects of the selfie, turning the gaze to understanding what we don’t see when we look at, post, and comment on selfies. The analysis reveals what lies beneath selfies, asking: What is being done with selfie data? Several aspects are discussed, including how selfies produce machine readable data, used by programmers, marketers, and governments. AI filters and facial recognition software makes an appearance, along with their inherent racial and visual biases - mirrored, reflected, and caught in the shadows. Finally, this article frames filters, data selfies and the face as particular genres of visual culture increasingly linked with algorithms, filters, and data, to question the cultural, political, and social implications of the selfie
The Development of Corporate Design: Brand Identity, Graphic Design and Professionalism in Post-war Britain
Chronicling the emergence of brand consultancy, this book explores how the development and proliferation of brand identity systems transformed the working methods and ideals of practicing graphic designers working in post-war Britain.
Practitioners in Britain were at the forefront of efforts to transform corporate identity design into a recognised practice with its own codified methods. Focussing particularly on the British experience, the book also draws on the influences and developments in this formative era in other countries, including the US and Germany. During this period designers were struggling with two conflicting paradigms - the socially motivated, free spirited artist-designer and the design entrepreneur as corporate agent.
David Preston uses three key design agencies as the springboard to explore this foundational period in the history of graphic design labour practices - the practical rationality of Hans Schleger & Associates, the systematic methods of Henrion Design Associates and the Design Research Unit and their design manual as an instrument of control. These design agencies created some of the most striking and successful brand identities of the era - the KLM logo, the British Rail double arrow, the John Lewis branding of the 1960s, Glenfiddich's iconic triangular bottle, the Post Office's house style, the National Theatre logo and many more. The case studies look at the power at play, how branding became systematic, the struggle between motives and standards, and draws on first-hand interviews with key actors and archival material.
A valuable contribution to our understanding of British post-war graphic design and the history of branding
HEREWEAR: Final Progress Report
The project HEREWEAR (Bio-based local sustainable circular wear) aimed at the creation of a European ecosystem for locally produced circular textiles and clothing made from bio-based resources. On the technical side, emerging sustainable technologies for wet and melt spinning of cellulose and bio-based polyesters, for yarn and fabric production and for coating and colouring have been developed and piloted at semi-industrial scale. HEREWEAR also worked on the minimization of microfibre release via measures along the textile manufacturing process. Further, the sustainability and circularity of our clothing and textile sector was supported via connecting regional micro factories and via platform-supported, networked production resources.
The main focus of the WPs in the last reporting period is presented below.
WP1 – UAL led on this work. Design for bio-based circular textiles focused on the finalisation of the software feature of partner CIRCFASH that aims to support fashion brands and designers to create more circular and bio-based products with local aspects. After a series of updated and improved versions, the so-called Design Inspiration Tool was launched on their website.
WP2 – Biorefinery and WP3 – Wet & melt spinning finished during Reporting Period 2. Related activities focused on the upscaling of the developments and were linked to WP5 for the production of the required bio-based textiles for the prototypes and to WP7 to assess the biorefinery potential of alternative feedstocks.
In WP4 – Bio-based textile intermediates manufacturing focus was given to the bio-based dyeing and finishing processes. In addition, the guidelines for industrial scale-up of the investigated textile processing steps were elaborated.
WP5 – Demonstration bio-based garment production & validation took up the results from previous WPs for the creation and validation of garments. A range of garment prototypes was produced using HEREWEAR bio-based materials (both straw based cellulose and biopolyesters) and applying our HEREWEAR design approaches. These garments have been fully assessed for their performance as well as circularity potential.
WP6 – Environmental & social assessment evaluates the sustainability of the HEREWEAR garment prototypes while comparing them with their reference counterparts, which shows the promising positive impact of using bio-based input material. In addition, a Global Sustainability Assessment was performed leading to the same conclusion.
WP7 – Stakeholder community building focused on the organisation of a series of HEREWEAR community events and the organisation of some “proof of concept” exercises with a selected set of community members to validate the HEREWEAR scenarios. Also, the long-term sustainability of both the HEREWEAR Community and the HEREWEAR Hub was ensured.
WP8 – Innovation management & Impact continued the dissemination activities to ensure visibility and engagement towards the HEREWEAR project and community. During this period additional focus was given to the business models, the creation of a policy brief and the interaction with standardisation. Finally, the training material was further developed under the umbrella of the HEREWEAR Hub Resources.
From coordination side, the focus has been on the continuous project management processes, mainly related to communication, quality management (e.g. for internal review of project deliverables), reporting (e.g. M36 and final reporting) and the clustering activities with projects with similar goals for a more sustainable textile industry (e.g. twin projects and ECOSYSTEX).
Overall, the project led to the creation of over 70 prototype garments, effectively demonstrating both HEREWEAR's technical achievements and its supporting services for design and networked manufacturing. These garments serve as an excellent showcase of the HEREWEAR vision and valuable promotional material to support the project towards exploitation and commercialization. Additionally, the HEREWEAR Community and Hub will play a key role in preserving and advancing the project's legacy
Helsinki’s urban tableaux: Electrical distribution cabinets as street message boards
Electrical distribution cabinets are a regular feature on the streets of Helsinki. The surfaces of these boxes are often decorated with stickers, graffiti, event posters and art works which compete for attention and offer clues to a plurality of discourses that signify much about the contemporary life of the city. This article discusses the significance of these cabinets in relation to a series of paintings made for the research project ‘Urban Atlas Helsinki’ during the author’s Fellowship at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (2022–23). The importance of painting as a research method is emphasized due to the visual nature of the subject matter. Through a close reading of a particular cabinet, insights are offered as to the nature of the discourses contained, and what they signify about Helsinki as a contemporary urban culture
René Berger. Esthétique et mass media – Sélection de cours et des actes du colloque «Art, technologie et communication», 1970-1972
The present volume focuses on the pedagogical activities of René Berger, who largely developed his ideas in the early 1970s through his teaching at the University of Lausanne and, to a lesser extent, through the organization of conferences at the Cantonal School of Fine Arts and Applied Arts in Lausanne. This work does not aim to trace the genealogy of his thought or his analytical models by identifying a hypothetical point of origin (in this case, his pedagogical practice). Instead, it offers fragments of a theory in progress, whose relevance and modernity are heightened by recent debates in media history and archaeology.
As an educator, Berger positions himself as a witness and analyst of ongoing technological upheavals, including television, video, computer networks, and the proliferation of travel and communication technologies. His courses, titled “Aesthetics and Mass Media,” taught in the Art History Department at the University of Lausanne from the winter semester of 1969 to the summer semester of 1980, reflect a desire to theorize these transformations and assess their impact on our modes of perception and aesthetic experience.
This book centers on the partial publication of René Berger’s teachings during his tenure as director of the Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts in Lausanne, where he also served as a lecturer and later an associate professor at the University of Lausanne. Despite their historical nature, the collected texts remain relevant today. Rooted in a specific time and context, René Berger serves as an attentive witness to the “origin of the future” (the title of one of his works) or, if you prefer, anticipates the approach of media archaeologists, who, for instance, link the typewriter to the computer and the phonograph and film to electronic files
Inheriting the Family: Objects, Identities and Emotions
Much of our cultural heritage emerges from family histories – with many of the objects curated in museums, stories passed between generations, and monuments marking notable figures being the direct product of familial collections, donations, and investments. This edited collection uses emotion as an analytical tool to interpret such behaviours, and offers novel ways to investigate how and why family inheritances from a range of social, racial, and ethnic groups maintain their cultural power, as they move through time and from the private to the public spheres.
Drawing on a variety of case studies, and exploring items ranging from Victorian library chairs, to quilts, religious texts, and pieces of intergenerational writing – this volume considers the role of objects and inheritances in the emotional lives of individuals and families, and acknowledges them as agents in the creation of histories and identities. Combining insight from scholars of the history of emotions with that of historians and researchers situated outside the academy, this collection allows fresh insights on family history and material culture to emerge
Positioning for Purpose: Mapping brand strategy to sustainable design
SiDE Symposium, IIT Delhi:
Design Education has witnessed several shifts and expansions in its post-Ulm evolution. The Sustainability in Design Education Symposium aims to explore various positions, pedagogies, and projects in postcolonial discourse that have addressed sustainability in its environmental, cultural, social, and economic dimensions over the past five decades.
About my paper:
‘Positioning for Purpose’ is a five-week studio project written for second-year Graphic Communication Design undergraduates. Run as a Knowledge Exchange project in cooperation with the marketing firm FreshBritain, the brief asks students to explore how mainstream consumer brands can be strategically repositioned for the benefit of people and planet. Through the project students learn to work with archetypes as a mechanism to reframe and redirect brands towards ‘net positive’ futures.
Brand Strategists have an important role to play in informing sustainable design policy. Unlike most designers, they work ‘upstream’ and have capacity to directly influence business decision-making. At present, very few design students are exposed to brand strategy, and as a result, their potential to affect change within this context is limited. This deficit presents an opportunity that is addressed in the project described here
“How Does the Other Half Tweet?”: Analyzing the Construction of “Otherness” During the 2022 Brazilian Presidential Campaign
This study focuses into the dynamics of discursive othering and populist mobilization in Brazilian politics, specifically focusing on the highly contentious 2022 presidential election between Jair Bolsonaro and Lula da Silva. Drawing from a dataset of tweets from Bolsonaro's and Lula's official accounts during the crucial second round of the campaign, we employ a comparative approach to elucidate how these candidates leveraged social media platforms to construct and legitimize discourses of “Otherness”. Through qualitative analysis, we explore (1) the nuanced strategies employed by each campaign to otherize opponents and their supporters; (2) the role of discursive othering in reinforcing polarization within Brazilian society; and (3) the nexus between discursive othering and populist rhetoric in the context of the 2022 election