Your flight has been cancelled: Stock vector landscape as a digital non-place

This article presents and analyses the results of a research workshop conducted during and after the 2022 Transitus symposium at Falmouth University. The article aims to explore our visions of physical space, travel and migration through stock landscape illustration. The workshop invited illustrators to draw a five-step sequence of images customising a stock landscape by turning it into a view out of their window, thus exploring how a visual digital ‘airport’, a utopian hub of a stock landscape, disintegrates into particularities of individual experiences. The resulting sequences of images were put together in an online magazine about illustration, slonvboa.ru, and are available here: http://slonvboa.ru/nonlandscape (Accessed 10 June 2023) This webpage collects 30-minute drawings from fourteen illustrators based in ten countries: Armenia, Dubai, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom, with ten of the participants being based outside of their home country. Building upon the idea of the ‘nomadic illustration’ suggested by Catrin Morgan and Marc Augé’s notion of ‘non-place’, this article will explore further similarities between nomadism and the circulation of stock imagery. It will thus use the term ‘nomadic’ not only as a metaphor, but also as a direct link to migration studies and studies of digital nomadism, which often describes the precarious occupation of a migrating illustrator. This project will aim to highlight the unlikely possibilities that stock illustration may offer as a point of connection, rather than presenting stock landscapes an alienating utopian abstraction. It will also analyse how individual authorial strategies deal with the notion of space, and how artistic means shape our visions of private and public spaces

Creative parameters: Reimagining film practice

The global pandemic forced the film industry to adapt its practices. The primary driver of these changes was the economic imperative for production to continue. Similarly, film production courses had to deploy new methods to enable student films to be produced. Through this process new and often creative working methods were devised. This necessity for change also allowed for a critical reassessment of standardised industrial filmmaking - this emphasised that until this point there had been a general unwillingness to reflect upon the industrial production and educational norm, with its ecological unsustainability, exclusive practices and embedded hierarchies. So, the imposing of ‘restrictions’ in fact became an opportunity for creative discovery and to rethink practice related possibilities. In this paper the authors will draw on their experience of teaching MA Film Practice, at Arts University Bournemouth, and the need to reimagine disciplinary engagement and devise new curriculum components. This process transformed restrictions into ‘creative parameters’. It also focused the course’s practice based research ethos and enhanced the student reflexive and reflective development. These innovations are now embedded in the course’s structure and have facilitated a departmental debate concerning ‘standardised’ working methods (copying historical normative models), and how we can foster a more inclusive and inventive learning environment. Further to this, the graduating students, now emerging reflective practitioners – more socially, ethically and conceptually aware – can potentially affect new standards and approaches to film production, and in doing so promote original and diverse work, as well as embracing inclusive and ecologically sustainable methodologies. This paper will consider the instructiveness of this academic innovation and its potential to inform future film practice

Blending leadership philosophy and practice in the aid sector in South Asia

Leaders of international humanitarian and development organizations (IHDOs) contribute to providing aid to many of the world’s poorest and most disaster-affected people in South Asia. Challenges they face include increasing demands for compliance, accountability, and transparency against the need to deliver on intended results and objectives. Leaders are required to provide vision, strategy, consistency, and security in contexts that are increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA). Constant changes and instability in the operational, political, and social environments in South Asia contradict traditional linear thinking and planning of programs and cycles. IHDOs, with their increasing regulations and procedures, and dwindling organizational space and time stymie innovation and creativity, while calling for increased yet potentially inappropriate professional standards to be applied against ground realities and human capital available. Diverse cultural dimensions must be accounted for including those of the country, the people, the organization, the team, and the leader themselves. Further, IHDO leaders must establish and nurture relationships with a multitude of stakeholders, aside from their teams. These include their organizational hierarchy and peers, donors, government representatives, clients, service providers, local civil society organizations, academic institutions, media, and their program beneficiaries; each relationship comprising its own nuances and consequences. Leaders must be versatile if they are to be successful, appropriately balancing the application of their characteristics and competences. For this, a new philosophy, theory, and practice of leadership versatility is presented that leaders and their IHDOs can promote and apply in their endeavors to face and overcome the above challenges in South Asia

Many Paths Through the Forest: Exploring Arborescence and Ecological Themes in Digital Interactive Narrative

In this article I reflect upon the process of designing and constructing a digital interactive narrative using elements of biomimicry as an intrinsic part of the ecological themes it wishes to dramatise. The ‘branchiness’ of this modern iteration of the chooseyour-own-adventure style of game is supported by a complex substructure of coding and wider ecosystem of coders, mirroring a forest and its exoteric and esoteric networks and labyrinths. Published by West Coast start-up, Tales: choose your own story, Hyperion: tower of the winds (2020) is a 24-part, 96,000-word digital novel set in the storyworld of my fantasy series, The Windsmith Elegy (2004-2012). I argue that Fantasy has a role to play in cultivating ecoliteracy and in modelling alternative modalities in response to the multiple challenges we face in the Climate Emergency. I posit that the design, playing, and prosumer discourse such ergodic texts generate have a mycelial quality to them—rhizomatic structures, which, as Deleuze and Guattari advocate, are non-hierarchical, resilient, and reciprocal. Acknowledging the compromised entanglement of the digital, I critique the affect and ethics of gaming platforms, which can both raise awareness and be part of the problem: the dirty ecology of every electronic device and virtual noosphere

Introduction to Screen Narrative: Perspectives on Story Production and Comprehension

World-leading filmmakers and scholars come together in Introduction to Screen Narrative: Perspectives on Story Production and Comprehension to offer the reader cutting-edge insights into how screen narratives work. This collection explores a variety of mediums (e.g. feature film, television, animation, video games) and how they have evolved. It also explores how major artists have innovatively subverted narrative conventions (David Lynch, Jean-Luc Godard, Bela Tarr), and how academics from a variety of traditions (film scholars, philosophers and cognitive psychologists) have shed insight on screen storytelling from different disciplines. Books on screen storytelling have traditionally fallen into two separate camps. This first is screenwriting manuals, which are designed to help the reader with story construction, building characters and writing dialogue, along with formatting scripts and finding agents. The second camp is books on film narratology, which aim to make the reader aware of the broad norms of moviemaking and how particular films relate to those norms, currently and historically. This collection is the first of its kind in drawing a bridge between the two domains. Offering state-of-the-art surveys of narrative from internationally-renown researchers, theoreticians, and media practitioners, this collection is a key text in understanding contemporary research from a range of disciplines in a single, accessible resource designed to engage both novices and experts in the field of screen storytelling

#PrecarityStory: Academic Casualization and Feminist Filmmaking

Amidst the UK higher education strikes, Lorena Cervera and Isabel Seguí codirected #PrecarityStory, a short documentary that exposes the increasing precarisation of academic labour at universities. Released in 2020, the film follows a working day in the life of Isabel who, at that time, was a cleaner, researcher, and teacher at the same British elite institution. This is a (self-consciously) performative documentary (Bruzzi, 2006) inspired methodologically by the transmediatic form of Latin American testimonio, where an individual subject stands for a community and the film is an activist artefact in which ‘reality’ is managed creatively to further the political agenda of the filmmakers. This chapter explores the complexities of this approach in which a filmmaker and an empowered film subject join forces to challenge an exploitative workplace and interrogate the mode of production of collaborative cinemas

Ecological Vision in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner'

The 250th anniversary of the birth of Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) was celebrated in 2022. In recent times, one of his most famous poems, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (initially published in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1798), has gained increasing resonance as a proto-environmental text. It warns the reader, or listener (personified by the listener-within-the-poem, the Wedding Guest), that when humankind mistreats nature there are devastating consequences. In the age of the Anthropocene and the climate emergency, it is a poem that speaks to our time. This article considers this ecological interpretation of the text and its connection to other literary ‘texts’ across a range of media. It surveys how the poem’s semantic field, imagery and themes contribute to its meaning, and how contemporary readings show the impact of this context on its reception

Internalizing the Present in the Articulation of the Future: Masculinity, Inequality, and Trying On New Possible Selves

Young men, especially from working-class backgrounds, often lack the space, capacity, or opportunity to reflect upon masculinities and their role in shaping future trajectories. By devising mechanisms to engage young men differently in creative activities, participants in our project were supported to think beyond assumed futures and explore new possibilities. Mobilizing the theory of possible selves, this article draws on data across three creative university outreach workshops in England with 18 participants who were given the opportunity to explore masculinities using creative writing, photography, and dance/movement. Combining artifact analysis and semi-structured interviews, the article argues that these workshops created safe spaces for young men to articulate their concerns and fears about harm and risk in everyday life while facilitating an exploration of alternative possible selves

Creative improvisation jamming, under the COVID cloud

This visual essay will explore the themes of collaboration, play, the digital intermediatory space and how we engage with the digital ‘other’ of yourself. The research builds on the work of Stark Smith's The Underscore (1987). This long-form dance improvisation structure is used to frame the creative journey which takes place within a jam session offers a platform to explore and consider how the experience might be re-framed with in an online context. The research also draws upon the writing of Weber, Mizanty & Allen (2017) who present digital conference tools as a method to create and teach choreography, and Francksen’s writing around how the use of digital technology produces the digital body, which can interact with the performative body (2014). The research further extends the understanding of these digital spaces as places for intangible, ephemeral, and communal play. This new practice gave a chance for reflection on both our artistic practices and our lives during the pandemic; Halprin’s Life/Art Process has been a supportive model for understanding the therapeutic nature of jamming practice (1995). The drawings and short films created during this project document the process, but also have currency as individual artefacts. The observations and recommendations below will be presented alongside empirical research about the relationship between the artists’ practice and how through drawing and movement they found beneficial creative exchange, in a temporary digital space

A History of Architectural Modelmaking in Britain: The Unseen Masters of Scale and Vision

Architectural modelmakers have long carried out their work hidden behind the scenes of architectural design, and in presenting a history of architectural modelmaking in Britain for the first time, this book casts a new light on their remarkable skills and achievements. By telling the story of the modelmakers who make architectural models rather than architects who commission and use them, this book seeks to celebrate their often-overlooked contribution to the success and endurance of the architectural model in Britain over the past one hundred and forty years. Drawing from extensive archival research and interviews with practicing and retired modelmakers, this book traces the complete history of architectural modelmaking in Britain from its initial emergence as a specialist occupation at the end of the nineteenth century through to the present day. It reveals the legacy of John Thorp, the first professional architectural modelmaker in Britain, who opened his business in London in 1883, and charts the lives and careers of the innovative and creative modelmakers who followed him. It examines the continually evolving materials, tools, and processes of architectural modelmaking and outlines the profound ideological, economic, and technological influences that have shaped the profession’s development. Illustrated with over one hundred photographs of architectural models from previously undocumented archives, this book will be of great interest to architectural modelmakers, academics, and historians, as well as anyone with an interest in architectural history and modelmaking