University for the Creative Arts staff research 2011

This publication brings together a selection of the University’s current research. The contributions foreground areas of research strength including still and moving image research, applied arts and crafts, as well as emerging fields of investigations such as design and architecture. It also maps thematic concerns across disciplinary areas that focus on models and processes of creative practice, value formations and processes of identification through art and artefacts as well as cross-cultural connectivity. Dr. Seymour Roworth-Stoke

Apologetics and Popular Culture Phenomena: A Critique of Ted Turnau\u27s Method Concerning Anime

Limited work has been performed in the field of Christian apologetics and popular culture, much less the intersection between anime and Christian apologetics. One scholar who has attempted to broach this gap has been Ted Turnau, who has developed a five-step diagnostic method for apologetically engaging popular culture phenomena. However, his method contains key flaws. Using the work of Thomas Lamarre, a scholar in the field of anime studies, a central contention will be made: that the material and technology of anime have processes that affect how viewers inhabit and orient themselves in the world, which in turn influences their formative practices and habits. This idea is neglected by Turnau, which hurts his overall argumentation. Three lines of derivative critique shall be launched against Turnau - his cognitive approach to narrative, overemphasizing the form of anime versus its function, and lack of attention paid to audience reception

Film policy and the emergence of the cross-cultural: exploring crossover cinema in Flanders (Belgium)

With several films taking on a cross-cultural character, a certain ‘crossover trend’ may be observed within the recent upswing of Flemish cinema (a subdivision of Belgian cinema). This trend is characterized by two major strands: first, migrant and diasporic filmmakers finally seem to be emerging, and second, several filmmakers tend to cross the globe to make their films, hereby minimizing links with Flemish indigenous culture. While paying special attention to the crucial role of film policy in this context, this contribution further investigates the crossover trend by focusing on Turquaze (2010, Kadir Balci) and Altiplano (2009, Peter Brosens & Jessica Woodworth)

On-line data archives

©2001 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.Digital libraries and other large archives of electronically retrievable and manipulable material are becoming widespread in both commercial and scientific arenas. Advances in networking technologies have led to a greater proliferation of wide-area distributed data warehousing with associated data management challenges. We review tools and technologies for supporting distributed on-line data archives and explain our key concept of active data archives, in which data can be, processed on-demand before delivery. We are developing wide-area data warehousing software infrastructure for geographically distributed archives of large scientific data sets, such as satellite image data, that are stored hierarchically on disk arrays and tape silos and are accessed by a variety of scientific and decision support applications. Interoperability is a major issue for distributed data archives and requires standards for server interfaces and metadata. We review present activities and our contributions in developing such standards for different application areas.K. Hawick, P. Coddington, H. James, C. Patte

The Comic Grotesque: Troubling the Body Politic in American Graphic Satire from World War I to the Great Depression

This dissertation examines the comic grotesque as a strategy of critical engagement within the thriving field of U.S. graphic satire from World War I through the Great Depression. During this period, artists across the political spectrum were using disruptive bodily forms, along with references to pain, vulgar associations and crude techniques, to challenge political authority, undermine attempts to smooth over political turbulence, and address communal anxieties about social tensions and the direction of the nation. Emerging in the context of record unemployment rates, the explosion of political radicalism, dramatic shifts of gender and class power dynamics, and emerging threats of fascism, these iconoclastic, rebellious, or evocative bodies gained popular attention within a thriving publishing industry that maintained much of its readership during the Depression through its graphic satire. I focus on works in the magazines The Masses, New Masses, Daily Worker, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair. Through case studies examining such artists as John Sloan, Robert Minor, Henry Glintenkamp, Jacob Burck, Gardner Rea, James Thurber, and William Gropper, I argue that the comic grotesque served as a means of challenging the often totalizing construction of society embedded within many of the debates in the period around recovery and progress. This project draws from the field of disability studies, recent scholarship on eugenics culture, and studies on political citizenship in the U.S., as well as the theories of the grotesque by such early twentieth century figures as Mikhail Bakhtin and Kenneth Burke, to consider the various ways that the comic grotesque was used as a form of sociopolitical activation. The comic grotesque not only served as a metaphorical tool, I argue, but also as a means of challenging viewers\u27 ideological foundations through somatic forms of engagement. At the same time, artists also utilized grotesque racial and gender stereotypes, in the process justifying and reaffirming racial prejudices. This project also situates these works within broader traditions of the comic grotesque that may be traced back to the early modern period, particularly as a tool of critique employed by such artists as British eighteenth-century caricaturist James Gilray, French nineteenth- century artist Honoré Daumier, and U.S. nineteenth century graphic satirist Thomas Nast

Viatopias: Exploring the experience of urban travel space

The title of this research is constructed from: `via' - route and töp(os) -a place. Viatopias are urban spaces of continual travel or flux that incorporate multiple forms of perception and inscriptions of meaning. My aim has been to define and describe the increasingly important fluid perceptual spaces that have developed between static nineteenth century destinations. Viatopias such as passageways, underground tunnels, train tracks, and the North Circular escape a sense of destination, operating as ever-changing experiences or events. The practice has sought to produce digital representations of these urban travel spaces that exist in constant flux, to communicate the experience of Viatopias. The research explores themes such as: The North Circular as a Deleuzian Route exploring driving as performance; Plica, Replica, Explica an unfolding of experience through digital media; The Making of Baroque Videos, using Baroque architectures of viewing; Mobilizing Perception treating human vision as an artifact; Mirrors For Un-Recognition disassembling nineteenth century controlled vision; Sound as an Urban Compass considering urban audio experience; Narrative Practice in New Media Space analysing contemporary approaches in digital media; and Convergent Languages, Digital Poiesis investigating the dislocation of representation in different digital languages. These conceptual frameworks developed in symbiosis with the practice. The visual practice presents a collection of digital videos that extend and complicate these concepts through experimental visual and audio techniques such as layering, repetition, anamorphic distortion, and mirroring to produce visual immersion and the fracturing of space. The concluding digital works incorporate video with audio and text resulting in integrated visual statements that attempt to stretch the viewer's perception, in the process offering a glimpse of a new experience within urban space

Cut And Mix Culture: Visual Explorations Of Contemporary Diaspora Identity

In a globalised world, some black diaspora artists have used the agency of blackness as a strategy to interrupt our default thinking about visual arts formed by a dominant Western culture. This strategy, in combination with the methodologies of collage and street art, is an effective tool for black diaspora artists to interrupt the senses and challenge reductive ‘either/or’ categorisations (e.g. primitive vs. modern). The black diaspora identity has been established through a vocabulary developed by significant twentieth-century African-American texts and the field of cultural studies. It has also been shown through dialogic theory that black cultural identity is fluid in nature and can be redefined. This model of redefinition can be applied to my studio practice through Japanese and black cultural signifiers. In this paper, I establish that that I am a black diaspora artist and present the development of my artwork and the theoretical contextualisation through the texts of theorists Kobena Mercer and Stuart Hall and linguist Mikhail Bakhtin, and through the artists Romare Bearden, Firelei Báez and Swoon

An exploration of learner autonomy in an international university in Japan

Sociocultural perspectives on learner autonomy demand a whole-life perspective on the learner, who has agency in the construction of their identity. The full implications of this have not until now been accounted for in learner autonomy research. Central to an understanding of the autonomy in learner autonomy from a sociocultural perspective, I argue, is the relationship between choices and values. Through participatory ethnographic inquiry that involved the iterative process of generating multimodal qualitative data and relating it to theories of learner autonomy, identity and personal autonomy, I conceive learner autonomy as: the capacity to exercise control in learning (a process of identity construction), which amounts to self-definition through self-direction on the basis of authentic values arrived at through self-reading; in relation to the affordances and constraints inherent to the embodied, sociohistorical and emplaced self. This universal construct is manifested in ways that are particular to place. In the English medium, international, liberal arts university, situated in Japan, that was the context of this inquiry, learner autonomy was manifested in students’ attempts to reconcile disruptions to their identities caused by the heterogeneity of the student body, the English (foreign) language environment and opportunities for experiencing novel ways of life. The emotional responses to these disruptions prompted self-reading, which led to self-definition and often self-direction, which were afforded by opportunities for friendships (which afforded emotional support and opportunities for value-oriented dialogue), an institutional ethos of autonomy, opportunities for the development of knowledge (which facilitated the development of knowledge of oneself in relation to the world) and support for participating in communities of practice. This thesis documents the inquiry from its autobiographical and contextual origins, through its positioning in relation to learner autonomy literature, development of the theoretical framework and research methods, presentation and interpretation of data on the learning trajectories of students at the university, and discussion of its implications for the field, for practice and for the Japanese educational context

Between Selves and Others: Exploring Strategic Approaches within Visual Art

Full version unavailable due to 3rd party copyright restrictions.This body of research investigates how visual artists express ideas or meanings about Otherness and issues of belonging in their art. The focus of this study is on women artists with an (East) Asian diasporic background; however, the context of the inquiry includes other American and European artists of various cultural backgrounds. A further aim is to explore the artistic strategies and the historical circumstances of the works as well as to understand the theoretical correlations. The author of this study is a visual artist who has been exploring similar issues in her own artistic practice. In order to examine various themes of Otherness, selected pairs of artists – where at least one is a woman artist of (East) Asian diasporic background – are compared and analysed using the following four categories: literary devices (such as irony, parody, connotation or juxtaposition), reappropriation (cultural references which are reclaimed and transformed), anamorphic situations (distortion of conventional ways of viewing in order to become aware of other bodily senses and experiences), and theoretical correlations (connections between artistic practice and relevant theoretical concepts). The specific artists and artworks chosen are: Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1965) with Patty Chang’s Melons (at a Loss) (1998), Lorna Simpson’s work in the 1980s and 1990s with Nikki S. Lee’s Projects (1997-2001), Guillermo Gómez-Peña with Fiona Tan, and Yong Soon Min with Mona Hatoum. In addition, the author presents critical social and cultural developments that influenced these works such as the historical background of representations of Asian women in America, the rise of the Asian American movement, and the shift in contemporary art discourse from concerns of ‘identity politics’ to a ‘post-identity’ framework. Finally, correlations are made between the artistic strategies and relevant theoretical discussions about representations of race and gender, the role of power, knowledge, and truth in ethnographic practices of identification and categorization, and the function of place and ‘cultural identity’ in relation to concepts of origin and belonging. The results of this research confirm the significance of cultural, historical, and geographic experiences on both the conception and reception of visual art and indicate that various artistic strategies have the potential to expose and undermine culturally constructed meanings of difference. Despite the abundance of research conducted in this area, the scope and framework of this particular study are original not only because it is written from the perspective of a practicing artist, but also because the focus on artistic practices from women artists with (East) Asian diasporic backgrounds is located within a more wide-ranging investigation of artistic approaches that articulate and interrogate themes of Otherness