On The Hill: the narrative podcast as a creative manoeuvre for remediation into podcasting

Abstract To be update

Total Meditation

Presentation materials used by publishers at London Book Fair and Frankfurt Book Fairs 2015/1

Games-based Techniques and Collaborative Learning Between Arts Students in Higher Education

‘Games-based techniques and collaborative learning between arts students in higher education’ This thesis investigates how implementing game-based techniques delivered through digital resources can impact collaborative learning between arts students in higher education. Research into games-based learning has paid little attention to its use in the Creative Arts: STEM subjects or vocational training are often the main areas in which games-based techniques and serious games are implemented. There is compelling evidence collected from the fields of collaborative learning theories, educational technology and games research to suggest that games-based learning could be used to enhance collaboration between arts students. The phrase games-based learning within this thesis refers to the creation of an activity that utilises game mechanics to engage students, encompassing learning content and an activity that has a learning outcome. This study examines the characterization of game mechanics, identifying which mechanics could benefit specific skills required to meet learning outcomes for enhancing and facilitating collaboration in the arts. Leadership, decisionmaking, communication, and creating a feeling of positive interdependence are traditional skills commonly regarded as needed for successful collaboration. This paper rests on the foundational notion that in the Creative Arts, skills such as improvisation, visualization and conceptualization are core. This thesis presents a conceptual framework for the application of game mechanics to digital resources in the Creative Arts. This framework has been developed within a Design-Based Research methodology to provide coherence for further empirical inquiry and has informed the creation of an experimental prototype resource. Rather than whether achievement of learning outcomes has been met, many games-based learning initiatives take student and staff satisfaction with a resource as measure of success. This thesis acknowledges the difficulties in iii measuring impact on learning outcomes and to help navigate this terrain it provides methods and tools that may be used to address relevant concerns. The contribution to knowledge from this research is a conceptual framework - a ‘roadmap’ for those looking to apply game mechanics in Arts-based subject areas; empirical evidence supporting the specific impact of games mechanics on learning outcomes and the use of Personal Meaning Maps as a research tool which support the analysis of collaborative workin

How do the personal backgrounds, experiences, attributes and entrepreneurial motivations of students and graduates from Falmouth University influence their decision to engage in entrepreneurial activity?

This case study considers the extent to which creative graduates wanting to start a business upon graduation share common personal backgrounds, experiences, attributes and motivations. Considering identifiable tendencies and exploring how factors or traits might influence decisions to engage in entrepreneurial activity. Gender, age, relative experience, family background, household income, family support; response to parental attitudes, formal education, experience in industry and risk aversion were explored. Measures of entrepreneurial motivation were; personal wealth creation, social goals, creative independence, desire to do well, market need, perceived difficulty in obtaining a full time job, not working for someone else, and perceptions about entrepreneurship. Data was gathered from 71 applicants to the Graduate Pre-Incubation Programme (‘GPIP’), a four year programme of business support for Falmouth graduates, using a two stage process of self-administered questionnaires and a follow up ‘e-interview’. Findings include; women are less likely to start businesses; mature graduates are more likely to start-up; over 50% of respondents came from low income groups; graduates who receive parental encouragement may be more likely to succeed in their business; and creative independence was an important influencing factor

Four poems

Four poems published in The Quint (a double-blind, peer-reviewed interdisiplinary journal) disseminating new knowledge in the areas of literature, history, the arts, popular culture, education, the social sciences, and aboriginal studies. The journal also publishes interviews, artwork, creative writing, and reviews. All issues of the quint are archived in Library and Archives Canada (Ottawa, Ontario)

You Were Never really Here: Representations of Artificial intelligence in Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror

Abstract “Once memories and dreams, the dead and ghosts become technologically reproducible.” Friedrich Kittler (1999:11) Black Mirror (2011-) is a science-fiction television series written by Charlie Brooker and first broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK before moving to Netflix in 2016. The show takes an anthology approach, presenting each of its stories as a discrete episode commonly situated in dystopic, near-future settings. The series is orientated around three main themes; (1) the development, use and exploitation of technology, (2) the ethics related to the deployment of this technology by members of the public and corporations, and (3) an exploration of the nature of what constitutes consciousness specifically related to artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic technology. It is the third of these themes that this paper addresses, considering how the series presents artificial intelligence as a philosophical discourse within which the implications of the impact of technology on society can be concentrated both in terms of its future and present day applications. In the first episode of Season Two, Be Right Back (Harris, 2013) this is expressed in a story of the recently widowed Martha (Hayley Atwell), who reconstructs a version of her deceased husband Ash (Domhnall Gleeson) through a machine-based consciousness that draws upon the data created from his lifetime of publicly available digital activity. Initially, Martha’s interaction with Ash’s AI-self is confined to a text-based chat bot. “The more it has, the more it’s him,” states Martha’s friend Sarah, who initially sets up the account and advises that she had communicated with the same software after her own husband died to help mitigate her grief. This exchange prompts Martha to add Ash’s record of emails, still images, audio and video to the dataset that AI-Ash is able to draw upon, the creation of such information a real-world process that Jose Van Dijick and Thomas Poell have described as the “datafication” of a life mediated online (2013). Now able to communicate with her aurally, AI-Ash gathers more data from Martha as they converse on the phone and she recounts moments that she had spent with her late husband. Eventually, Martha buys a humanoid android clone and imprints upon it Ash’s likeness, allowing AI-Ash’s transition to physical manifestation and to whom Martha provides even more data to the cloud-based storage where AI-Ash’s consciousness is stored. “You look well,” Martha observes, as Android-Ash emerges from a bath of nutrient gel. “The photos we keep tend to be flattering,” the android replies, offering the first sense that this embodied self is already inauthentic – encumbered by what Joseph Walther describes as “hyperpersonal”, or extremely selective, representation of Ash’s self familiar to all users of social media platforms (2011). Despite Martha’s intentions in continuing life with a new version of her husband, Android-Ash lacks the imperfections that form part of her understanding of his humanness. This theme of replicating human consciousness through artificial intelligence technologies is presented in a number of Black Mirror episodes, including White Christmas (Tibbetts, 2014), San Junipero (Harris, 2016), U.S.S. Callister (Haynes, 2017) and Black Museum (McCarthy, 2017). As in so much other science fiction, from Frankenstein (Shelley, 1818) to Ex Machina (Garland, 2015), the series uses this notion of questioning the use of the technology to recreate or feign consciousness in order to present a wider discourse around notions of identity, memory and the formulation of the human self and subjectivity. The artificial intelligence of Be Right Back deviates from the notion of consciousness and identity of these other examples however. As AI-Ash’s consciousness is constructed from fragments of the singular human Ash’s online activity and Martha’s memories of their interactions, so the AI can only ever hope to represent an augmented reality that can only reflect the mediated nature of Ash’s incomplete digital self. This imperfect copy of the human Ash is a simulacrum, a likeness, unable to ever attain what Martin Heidegger describes as having “an openness-of-being” (1977: xxxv). Despite the AI’s physical existence through the Android-Ash body, the machine intelligence does not meet the Heideggerian definition of “Dasein” (1977) - determined by being both present within the world and directly relating with it. Instead it is encumbered to constantly adding or adjusting the incomplete digital memory that constitutes AI-Ash. Initially hoping the cyborg will serve as a continuation of her husband, Martha soon becomes frustrated by her engagement with the Android/AI-Ash, realising that her creation is something very different and Other. She begins to understand that AI-Ash can only ever be a simulation or poor substitution of her late husband, as the data from which its consciousness is drawn is by forever destined to remain incomplete. “You are not enough of him”, she acknowledges. “You aren’t you […] just a few ripples of you. There’s no history to you. You’re just a performance of stuff that he did without thinking.” As Ex Machina presented questions as the nature of machine consciousness, Be Right Back offers a more direct critique of the present, rather than the near future. Charlie Brooker’s presentation of the possibility of life after death through artificial intelligence technologies, proposes a more immediate philosophical question. What is the nature of the human self already disrupted by a second life through the engagement with social media and other online technologies? The relationship between AI-Ash and his human counterpart is perhaps closer than Martha realises, with the episode having presented the human Ash as being similarly augmented. He too is disconnected from his reality with Martha - distracted by the draw of his phone and virtual spaces, and subsequently less aware or responsive to his own, real surroundings than his AI simulacrum. As Jean Baudrillard argues, a hyperreality is a substitution of the real with the signs of the real. AI-Ash is, in Baudrillard’s terms, a simulation – “no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation of models of a real without origin or reality”. Brooker’s insight in this episode is not this representation of an inhuman simulacrum, but rather to comment critically on Ash’s social media present, as Baudrillard describes and as Martha despairs prior to her husband’s death, as “A hyperspace without atmosphere” (1983: 1-3). Indicative Bibliography Baudrillard, Jean. Foss, Paul, Patton, Paul and Beitchman, Phillip (Trans). 1983. Simulations. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotexte. Blazer, Alex E. 2017. ‘That’s a bit creepy, what you’re doing”: Black Mirror and the Perverse Gaze,’ presented at SouthEast Coastal Conference on Languages & Literatures (SECCLL), Savannah, GA, USA, 2017. [WWW] http://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/seccll/2017/2017/52 (Accessed 1 June 2019) Brooker, Charlie. 2013. ‘Episode 2.01: “Be Right Back” Transcript’. In 8Flix. [WWW] https://8flix.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Black-Mirror-2-01-Be-Right-Back.pdf (Accessed 1 June 2019). Buckland, Warren. 2014. ‘Introduction: Puzzle Plots,’ in Hollywood Puzzle Films. New York, US: Routledge. Cave, Stephen and Dihal, Kanta. 2019. ‘Hopes and fears for intelligent machines in fiction and reality’, in Nature Machine Intelligence, volume 1, pp.74-78 . Cirucci, Angela M., Vacker, Barry (Eds). 2018. Black Mirror and Critical Media Theory. Lexington. Dickerson, Lillian. 2017. ‘20 Recoding and Rebooting: Death and Rebirth Beyond Humanity in HBO’s Westworld’, in Endres, Thomas G. (Ed.) 2017. The Image of Rebirth in Literature, Media, and Society, Proceedings of the 2017 Conference of the Society for the Academic Study of Social Imagery. Greeley, US: University of Northern Colorado. Garland, Alex. 2014. Ex Machina. Film 4/DNA Films. Harris, Owen. 2013. ‘Be Right Back’. Black Mirror, Channel 4. Season 2, Episode 1, Broadcast 11 February 2013. Harris, Owen. 2016. ‘San Junipero’. Black Mirror, Netflix. Season 3, Episode 4. , Broadcast 21 October 2016. Haynes, Toby. 2017. ‘U.S.S. Callister’. Black Mirror, Netflix. Season 4, Episode 1, Broadcast 29 December 2017. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Harper and Row. Jiménez-Morales, Manel & Lopera Marmol, Marta. 2018. ‘Why Black Mirror is Really Written by Jean Baudrillard: A Philosophical Interpretation of Charlie Brooker’s Series’. In Cirucci, Angela M. and Vacker, Barry (Eds). 2018. Black Mirror and Critical Media Theory. Lexington. Joy, Lisa and Nolan, Jonathan. 2016. ‘The Reality of A.I.: Westworld,’ in HBO, 10 October 2016. [WWW] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKTbFwyLuuM (Accessed 1 January 2018). (Accessed 1 June 2019). Kittler, Friedrich, Winthrop-Young, Geoffery & Wutz, Michael (Trans). 1999. Gramophone, film, typewriter. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. McCarthy, Colm. 2017. ‘Black Museum’. Black Mirror, Netflix. Season 4, Episode 6, Broadcast 29 December 2017. Nolan, Jonathan. 2018. ‘Jonathan Nolan, Co-Creator, HBO’s Westworld. Interview with Kingsley Marshall’. Interview conducted 3 September 2018. Unpublished transcript. Osterman, Cody. 2015. ‘Black Mirror, serial, and the affair: Popular culture’s obsession with memory’, presented at The Ray Browne Conference on Cultural and Critical Studies, Green State, Ohio, USA, 2015. Retrieved from http://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/rbc/2015conference/panel14/2/ (Accessed 1 June 2019). Salem, Benadette. 2015. ‘Black mirror: technostruggles, capitalism, and media culture in the United Kingdom’. MA Thesis, University of Lancaster, UK. [WWW] https://www.academia.edu/19274981/Black_Mirror_Technostruggles_Capitalism_and_Media_Culture_in_the_United_Kingdom (Accessed 1 June 2019) Shelley, Mary. 1818. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones. Singh, Greg. 2014. ‘Recognition and the image of mastery as themes in Black Mirror (Channel 4, 2011–present): an eco-Jungian approach to ‘always-on’ culture’. In International Journal of Jungian Studies, Vol. 6(2), pp.120-132. Steenhaut , Sofie. 2017. ‘Between The Real And Simulated The Representation Of Mediated Relationships In Black Mirror’s “San Junipero” And “Be Right Back”. MA Thesis, Ghent University. Tibbetts, Carl. 2014. ‘White Christmas’. Black Mirror, Channel 4. Season 2, Episode 4, Broadcast 16 December 2014. Ungureanu, C. 2015. ‘Aestheticization of politics and ambivalence of self-sacrifice in Charlie Brooker's The National Anthem’. In Journal of European Studies, Vol. 45(1), pp.21-30. Van Dijck, Jose. 2009. ‘Users like you? Theorizing agency in user-generated content’. In Media Culture Society, Vol 31(1), pp.41-58. Van Dijck, Jose & Poell, Thomas. 2013. ‘Understanding social media logic.’ In Media and Communication, 1(1), pp.2-14. Walther, Joseph, B. 2011. ‘Theories of computer mediated communication and interpersonal relations’. In Knapp, Mark. A. & Daly, John A. (Eds.). 2011. The SAGE handbook of interpersonal communication. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. pp.443-479

The Aesthetics of Asymmetrical Warfare: Cinematic representation of 21st Century Conflict

The paper asserts that innovative production practices have been adopted by filmmakers, in part, as a response to representing the compromised nature of recent conflicts that have been complicated by unknowability and complexity. Contemporary warfare has been characterised as asymmetrical; where new modes of 21st century conflict can be distinguished from the “old wars” of the 20th century in terms of their politics, use of technology and combat tactics (Freedman and Barnett, 2003; Kaldor 2012). Joshua Clover has described this as having presented an “unnarratability” (2009: 9) to the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and, more recently, Syria. I argue that filmmakers have made use of unconventional and sophisticated combination of sound design, cinematography and visual editing in cinema in order to emulate transmedia representations of these conflicts and that this aesthetic builds upon news media, documentary, video games and emergent forms such as first-person combatant-originated footage. A number of films advance what I describe as a Gulf War Aesthetic, which privileges verisimilitude through the combination of subjective first-person point of view with a similarly subjective sonic point of audition. This paper makes use of The Hurt Locker (Bigelow, 2009) as a primary case study in order to certain tendencises of this aesthetic and brings together two traditions of analysis – the study of film’s production discourse through practitioner interview and the textual analysis of the intrasoundtrack, or relationship between the visual components of the film and elements of the soundtrack – dialogue, effects, music and silence (Altman, Jones and Tatroe: 2000: 339-346). Indicative Bibliography Altman, R., Jones, M. and Tatroe, S. (2000) ‘Inventing the Cinema Soundtrack: Hollywood’s Multiplane Soundsystem’, in Buhler, J., Flinn, C., and Neumeyer, D. (eds.) Music and Cinema (Music/Culture). Hanover, US: University Press of New England, pp. 339–359. Bigelow, K. and Boal, M. (2009) ‘Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal Interview’. Interview with Kingsley Marshall for Unpublished Transcript, 20 September 2009. Clover, Joshua. (2009) ‘Allegory Bomb’, Film Quarterly, 63(2), pp.8-9. The Hurt Locker (2009) Directed by Kathryn Bigelow [Film]. USA: Summit Entertainment. Freedman, L.D. and Barnett, R. (2003) ‘Asymmetrical Warfare: Today’s Challenge to U.S. Military power’, Foreign Affairs, 82(3), p. 151. Kaldor, M. (2012) New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era. 3rd edn. Washington DC, US: Stanford University Press. Sergi, G. (2004) The Dolby Era: Film Sound in Contemporary Hollywood (Inside Popular Film). Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Stilwell, R. (2001) ‘Sound and Empathy: Subjectivity, Gender and the Cinematic Soundscape’, in Donnelly, K. (ed.) Film Music: Critical Approaches. New York, US: Continuum, pp. 167–187. Stilwell, R. (2003) ‘Breaking Sound Barriers: The Soundscapes of The Loveless to Blue Steel’, in Jermyn, D. and Redmond, S. (eds.) The Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow: Hollywood Transgressor. London, UK: Wallflower Press, pp. 32–56. Stilwell, R. (2015) ‘Audiovisual Space in an Era of Technological Convergence’, in Richardson, J., Gorbman, C., and Vernallis, C. (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics. Oxford, UK: Oxford Universit

Photographic work exhibited in 'ON AIME L'ART.. !' Collection Lambert, Avignon, France

Wendy McMurdo’s photographic work ‘The Somnambulist’ was exhibited in 'ON AIME L'ART.. ‘ at Collection Lambert, Avignon, France, (6 July - 5 November 2017) This exhibition comprised over 400 works from the agnès b. collection and took the form of a 'journey of the senses'. It was organised around artists the collector has often been the first to collect, as well as worldly relationships or unusual aesthetics and strong ideas that seem like positive obsessions. Besides Billingham, artists shown were A-ONE, Berenice Abbott, Absalon, Jef Aerosol, Leila Alaoui, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Kenneth Anger, Diane Arbus, Eve Arnold, Fernando Arrabal, L’Atlas, agnès b., Gaston Bachelard, Hei Bai, Roger Ballen, Banksy, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Bäst, Sir Cecil Beaton, Ernest J. Bellocq, Abdelkader Benchamma, Edo Bertoglio, Pierre Bodo, Alighiero Boetti, Léonard Bourgois-Beaulieu, Éric Bouttier, Emanuel Bovet, Brassaï, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, Jared Buckhiester, Pierre Buraglio, Alexander Calder, Cyprien Chabert, Roman Cieslewicz, Larry Clark, Claude Closky, Jean Cocteau, Denise Colomb, Pierre Comte, Serge Comte, Chano Devi, Nicolas Dieterlé, Alain Dister, Robert Doisneau, Claudine Doury, Shepard Fairey, Nat Finkelstein, Futura 2000, Cyprien Gaillard, Regina José, Galindo, Gilbert & George, Stephen Gill, Gina, Allen Ginsberg, John Giorno, John Goba, Nan Goldin, Douglas Gordon, Gotscho, Antoine Le Grand, Rafaël Gray, Bobby Grossman, Hervé Guibert, Raymond Hains, Simon Hantaï, Mona Hatoum, Lucien Hervé, Katsuhiko Hibino, Damien Hirst, Dennis Hopper, Peter Hujar, Ikon, Bodys Isek Kingelez, Izis, Cameron Jamie, Louis Jammes, JayOne, Jen-Cri, Daniel Johnston, Pablo Jomaron, JonOne, Donald Judd, Seydou Keïta, André Kertész, Pierre Klossowski, Alberto Korda, Harmony Korine, Germaine Krull, Tseng Kwong Chi, Helen Levitt, David Lynch, David Mach, Robert Mapplethorpe, Ryan McGinley, Wendy McMurdo, Jonas Mekas, Duane Michals, Vincent Michéa, Radenko Milak, Marcel Miracle, Pierre Molinier, Moze, Dominique Nabokov, NASA, Max Natkiel, Nebay, J. D. Okhai Ojeikere, Jean-Michel Othoniel, Abbé Pierre, Richard Prince, Lola Reboud, Hugues Reip, Pierre René-Worms, Clare Richardson, Alexandre Rodtchenko, Werner Rohde, Willy Ronis, Christian Rose, Dieter Roth, Chéri Samba, Amadou Sanogo, Richard Schroeder, Malick Sidibé, Roman Signer, Patti Smith, Jivya Soma Mashe, Takeshi Sumi, Claire Tabouret, Dominique Tarlé, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Barthélémy Toguo, Gus Van Sant, Alan Vega, André Villiers, Massimo Vitali, Andy Warhol, John Waters, Bruce Weber, Weegee, Roger Welch, Robert Wilson and William Wilso

THE COASTGUARD BY MARIE MACNEILL - audio recording

It’s Peter’s birthday and the first day of his enforced retirement. There’s a present for him on the table wrapped in blue tissue paper. But his wife, Mary, won’t come out of the back room. His daughter, Lia loves him dearly and wants to come and celebrate but Storm Lear is brewing. Her husband, Cal is pushing plans for Peter to sell his clifftop house. Peter is standing his ground. Literally. After all, he is THE COASTGUARD and some things need to be protected to the death