A new paradigm? Crowdsourcing and the social benefits of community publishing.

Crowdsourcing is changing the publishing landscape. Unbound, publisher of Paul Kingsnorth’s Booker longlisted novel The Wake (2014), describes itself as: ‘A new way to connect authors and readers. Authors present a pitch, you pledge, and when the goal is reached the book is written.1 According to Professor Gillian Rudd: ‘Unbound’s crowdfunding basis challenges the assertion that e-readers are killing paper books.... Could Unbound free both writers and readers?’2 Much has been written about the historical importance and recent significance of reading communities, particularly in the context of social mobility and gender (eg Hartley, Kiernan, Fuller, Radway, Squires, Rehberg: 2011)3. However, community publishing as a ‘third way’ in terms of rethinking the emergent tension between print and digital has yet to be comprehensively explored. This paper will present the findings of a community Kickstarter publishing campaign. The project team consists of a professional designer, proofreader, co-writer and co-founder (me), project manager, and illustrator, as well as Jess, the chef. All of the team (apart from Jess) are mothers at a primary school in Cornwall, which has responded to the 2014 government requirement that all infants be provided with free school meals, by serving food that is locally sourced, allotment grown and inspired by chefs such as Ottolenghi. This paper will track a live crowdsourcing project in the wider context of an industry in flux. (258 words

Intertextually Ignored Sapphic Vapours

'Environments' POLYply, a cross-genre reading and performance series based at the Centre for Creative Collaboration in Kings Cross. Readings & Screenings. Gillian Wylde Prudence Chamberlain Luke Roberts The Royal Holloway Poetics Research Centre comprises a number of staff members in the English department with an interest in contemporary poetry and poetics and in the use of text across diverse media: Professor Robert Hampson and Drs Will Montgomery and Redell Olsen. Among the research specialisms of the centre are contemporary writing of the modernist tradition, site-specific writing, performance, sound art, the British Poetry Revival, conceptual poetics and radical lyric. The Poetics Research Centre embraces both theoretical and practice-based work: in parallel with their critical activities. https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/english/research/poeticsresearchcentre/home.aspx#ad-image-

BA(Hons) Photography FOTOSIUM 2016

Symposium by BA(Hons) Photography focussing around a theme of the digital. Emerging and internationally renowned guests gave talks and conducted portfolio reviews for final year students

Spiral at Compass Festival, Leeds

A new iteration of Spiral, originally commissioned by the Barbican (2007), London, for the Barbican Centre and surrounds. 'Onto a map of Holbeck, Gregg Whelan and Gary Winters of Lone Twin will draw a spiral, a path cutting through offices, cafés, schools, old mills, theatres, shops, homes. Over the course of a week, Whelan and Winters will attempt to walk the spiral’s impossible path, following it through walls and under doors. The difficult journey is further challenged by the collection of objects, unrestricted in size or nature, donated by people encountered on the route. Whelan, Winters and the growing snowball of materials, will gradually spiral through the neighbourhood, finding their journey’s end at Holbeck Underground Ballroom, the spiral’s geographic centre. To mark the end of the seven day walk, you’re invited to gather at HUB for food and drink, where Gary and Gregg will dismantle the collection of objects. A chance to review the week of encounters, to share stories from their travels and to reclaim items they have collected along the way.

Hollow Vertices: A performance environment for live coding and interactive media

Hollow Vertices is an improvisatory audio-visual performance environment. The sonic components are co-created through live coding in the real-time audio synthesis language, Supercollider. This results in the creation of dense percussive and ambient textures. The two sound sources are linked through a custom built network upon which each performer has control over the others’ code. This produces developmental elements in the composition. This is combined with an amplified clarinetist using a custom programmed pedal board in Max/MSP to drive live audio effects. The composition converges disciplines and mediums by augmenting sensorial modalities through human-computer interaction. This is realized through employing different programming languages, combinations of instruments, and reacting to the collective output while maintaining awareness of individual contributions to the composition

M(OTHERHOOD)

ART & LIFE, TATE ST.IVES The Last Portrait addresses grief, mourning and melancholia as perpetual state of searching. Searching for what has been lost. I find it a heightened psychic state that seeks particular spaces to find expression. Much of my work as an artist is drawn from the metaphor of working with the unfathomable depth of dark places such as black holes, the Hadal zone in the ocean and an ancient well in a Jack Perry’s (1990-2006) memorial garden in Lamorna. This presentation will focus on the space within an image titled The Last Portrait that opens up as a portal into another dimension. I will discuss this image as Hyperobject in relation Timothy Morton theory on the unfathomable space that inconceivable objects and events can give way to

Graphic Designers Research | Falmouth University | Nov 20th 2015. Concept and Curation: Dr. Jessica Jenkins

Renowned speakers from education, publishing and design practice will be discussing how research meets graphic design as an academic and professional discipline. Graphic Design research is understood from the perspectives of both critical practice and scholarship. What is the nature of graphic design research? How can we integrate research and teaching? How can we define audiences for research? How is research disseminated? What is the special relationship between graphic design research and publishing? These and many more questions will be raised and discussed in an open, participatory forum

'Wilderness'

‘Wilderness’ is a 2017 feature film funded by the School of Film & Television at Falmouth University, produced by professionals utilising a crew comprised predominantly (75%) of undergraduate film students with no prior professional on set experience. The film production of ‘Wilderness’ was both a research question and a research method. The aim of ‘Wilderness’ was to prove that universities could incubate feature film productions that were originated by staff and crewed by students that would be indistinguishable in form and content from films made under similar economic and creative circumstances elsewhere in the independent and micro-budget filmmaking sector. ​ The success of ‘Wilderness’ on the film festival circuit, amongst critics and by being acquired for International distribution by Sparky Pictures is testament to this thesis. The fact that this film was made by a university film department in collaboration with film students was not the narrative that led to the film being so well received and it became clear that the film would not have been any different if it had been entirely, or largely produced by professionals. ​ The production of ‘Wilderness’ was designed to test the hypothesis above and at each stage the project exceeded expectations. The achievements were possible by approaching the production from an independent filmmaking tradition, using the work of John Cassavetes as detailed in the book Cassavetes on Cassavetes (ed. Ray Carney, Faber, ) as a guide. ​ This approach differs from both student expectations, albeit unrealistic ones, about the kind of experiences available in a university context as well as from the nominal approach to production education film courses in universities strive for, namely the replication of industry norms and cultures in the classroom setting. ​ In reality, university film education can much closer replicate independent film production than what might be termed ‘elite’ or even ‘mainstream’ industry production and a further reality is that independent filmmaking is where most graduate development opportunities reside for students emerging from film courses. By approaching ‘Wilderness’ as an independent film and educating students as to that particular context it became possible to complete a period feature film production with so many non-experienced participants involved in the fourteen days set aside. ​ Following the production, we did not expect the film to be so well-received on its own terms as a late 1960s set romantic drama in a variety of contexts - festivals, critics, distributors. In addition, ‘Wilderness’ led to increased attainment and career opportunities for students involved as well as follow-up research projects including the short film Backwoods (2018) and the formation of the Sound/Image Cinema Lab, the production and research centre based at Falmouth. The most wide-reaching legacy of 'Wilderness' is that it informed and made possible all film co-production projects the School of Film & Television has embarked on since 2016, from Jamie Adams' Songbird featuring Hollywood star Cobie Smulders in 2017 to the BFI/BBC/Creative England backed Make Up (2019) and most notably Mark Jenkin's BAFTA Award-winning Bait (2019).​ ​

Museums And The Web - Conference Item for The Intangible Archive

Archives can be esoteric places that are difficult to access. Augmented Reality applications tend to focus on visual experience. How can pervasive mobile technology be used to make oral history archives accessible to a wider audience in creative and playful ways? For a community archive with almost no budget

The Glass Half Full

Prize winning film director Eleanor Yule and university lecturer David Manderson decode the negativity surrounding Scotland in arts and culture. Miserabilism is a familiar trait to those in Scotland but The Glass Half Full is the first comprehensive study into the phenomena, defining and analysing its cause and effect. Using examples from, amongst others, Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, the authors identify the phenomenon , described by Andrew Hagan as ‘a drowsy addiction to imagined injury’. Drawing on their own experiences as creative Scots, Yule and Manderson thoughtfully analyse the effect of this filmic and literary crutch on the way local and international audiences perceive Scotland.In the current political climate as Scotland is scrutinised from every side, this latest offering from the OpenScotland series persuasively argues the importance of film and literature in shifting the nation’s cultural image from negative to positive