The Soft Power of Ephemeral Communities a Short History of Las Vegas Technology Conventions, 1959-2019

This article presents an overview of the large Las Vegas–based technology conventions: Comdex, CES (the Consumer Electronics Show), and NAB (the NationalAssociation of Broadcasters trade show)

Community-based environmental monitoring goes to school: translations, detours and escapes

Community-school partnerships are an established practice within environmental science education, where a focus on how local phenomena articulate with broader environmental issues and concerns brings potential benefits for schools, community organisations and local communities. This paper contributes to our understanding of such educational practices by tracing of the diverse socio-material flows that constitute a community environmental monitoring project, where Australian school students became investigators of and advocates for particular sites in their neighbourhood. The theoretical resources of Actor-Network Theory are drawn upon to describe how the project—as conceptualised by its initiators—was enacted as both human and non-human actors sought to progress their own agendas thus translating the concept-project into multiple project realities. We conclude by identifying implications for sustaining educational innovations of this kind

Beyond the Angel of the North : museology and the public art cityscape in Newcastle-Gateshead

PhD ThesisThis thesis explores the ways in which museological ‘collections thinking’ can generate new knowledge of public art’s material and cultural afterlives within a time of increased institutional and academic interest in the aftercare and everyday use of public art. Taking Newcastle-Gateshead (the home of the UK’s best-known public artwork, The Angel of the North) as a case study, the thesis asks: what happens if we examine the public art cityscape through the concepts and management principles applied to museum collections? How might consideration of the commonalities and tensions between museum and city-based collections offer new understandings of permanent public artworks, and what is the relevance of this for their future presentation and management? In bringing these museological paradigms to bear upon public art production this thesis generates new understandings of the character of city-based collections and the dynamics of the audience-artwork encounter as enacted within the urban cityscape. The thesis addresses the relevance of ‘collections thinking’ to public art in four ways. Firstly, examining the temporal dimension, the Newcastle-Gateshead public art cityscape exists as an unintentional collection, one that has ‘crept up’ on the city over a 55-year trajectory of commissioning activity. Looking back into this timeline, permanent public artworks are shown as essentially time-vulnerable in both their physical materiality and their valorisation. Secondly, looking across the cityscape, a speculative typology of the city’s public artworks is presented. This suggests that the Newcastle-Gateshead collection is representative of most forms of permanent public art practice, but can also be situated within a distinctive Northern-English culture of post-industrial artistic production. Expanding further on the spatial dynamic of collections, the thesis explores the comparative value and significance of public artworks both within and outwith their relation to geographically-rooted notions of site and place. In doing so it suggests alternative ways of constructing value around public art, particularly in relation to artistic authorship and long-term ‘use-value’. Thirdly, ‘collections thinking’ engenders an original investigation of institutional interpretive practice around public art production. This analysis shows that iv Newcastle-Gateshead’s public artworks are firmly mapped within an ‘interpretive cartography’ of artistic intention, materiality and sense of place. Finally, through an analysis of public art audience’s in-situ ‘arts talk’ (Conner 2013) the thesis argues that public art meaning-making exists in the balance and tension between three factors: the potentialities of the artwork; audience-held domain knowledge; and crucially the specific ‘in-the-moment’ contexts of the encounter. In examining the post-commissioning phase of public art production through these cycles of interpretation and audiencing, and in reevaluating the relevance and potential of museological thinking for public art practice, this thesis offers an extension to the existing interdisciplinarity of public art research and a way of rethinking the long-term management and curation of public art.School of Arts and Cultures (SACs) at Newcastle University for travel and fieldwork, and of course, to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) who generously funded my PhD

Porto Maphazardly - Representation of Place in Graphic Design

This project, Porto Maphazardly, examines the role of a graphic designer in exploring alternate means of mapping a location. A square in the Portuguese city of Porto was mapped through five sensory approaches: sound, smell, taste, activity, and color perception. The data that was gathered was translated into visuals to create a generated, but totally unique, graphic portrait of a place. The portmanteau maphazardly in the title combines the word ‘map’ with the adverb, ‘haphazardly,’ which means to do something determined by accident rather than design, without a clear plan or at the mercy of chance. The coining of the word is meant to evoke the extent to which the illustrations developed in response to observations, encounters and circumstance, rather than a client brief or a designer’s pre-decided aesthetic. In this report, the project is contextualized between the theory of critical cartography in the field of sociology, and the mapping works which already exist in the graphic design field, including the works of Paula Scher, Pedro Pina, Jeremy Wood, Alison Barnes and Kate McLean. The report presents a synthesized definition of ‘map’ for use in a visual, graphic analysis. A limited survey of the principles of information design is discussed, in its relation to traditional cartography, infographics, and our cognitive interpretations of maps. Finally, a brief analysis of changes in the nature of maps (smart-maps) is included, focusing on how user-centered maps have changed how one interacts with a city. The project endeavors to work in the realm of ‘designer as researcher,’ and is influenced by the writing of Russell Bestley and Ian Noble on visual research, in which the experiential nature of the data collection influences the design process. The methodology was developed through a series of test projects and by the application of ‘walking as method,’ and the report introduces the generative systems which were used to transform data— notes, photographs, and recordings—into illustrations. The final mappings are presented along with an analysis of successes and failures