Where clouds are made...

Where clouds are made... explored Didcot A Power station in the last few months of its active life as it approached it’s closure in 2013. This was a commissioned project, jointly funded by Npower and South Oxfordshire Council. Through the project and exhibition we explored different types of physical and social relationships that people had with the power station over it’s working life. For our exhibition at Cornerstone Arts Centre, Didcot, we made a wooden scaffolding structure referencing part of the pre-fab construction process. It was made to the same scale as one of the cooling towers, but represented a fragment of the whole. The almost imperceptible arc across the gallery floor drew attention to the enormity of the whole and the difficulty of comprehending the scale. Seen through the construction, we made a series of laser-cut wall drawings playing with the 70’s language of dials and switches within the control room

Guidelines for Organizing Art Exhibitions on Addiction and Recovery

Outlines the Innovators Combating Substance Abuse program's model for exhibiting art by those in addiction recovery as a way to offer insight into substance abuse and recovery. With lessons learned and submissions, selection, and installation guidelines

The First Year of Teaching Classroom Research to Increase Student Learning

Victor and Janisha were two of the focal students in Daniels's research project on her first year of teaching in an urban public school. Together they reflect the two major groups in this high school that has 45% Latino, 35% African American, ..

Videogames in the museum:participation, possibility and play in curating meaningful visitor experiences

In 2014 Videogames in the Museum [1] engaged with creative practitioners, games designers, curators and museums professionals to debate and explore the challenges of collecting and exhibiting videogames and games design. Discussions around authorship in games and games development, the transformative effect of the gallery on the cultural reception and significance of videogames led to the exploration of participatory modes and playful experiences that might more effectively expose the designer’s intent and enhance the nature of our experience as visitors and players. In proposing a participatory mode for the exhibition of videogames this article suggests an approach to exhibition and event design that attempts to resolve tensions between traditions of passive consumption of curated collections and active participation in meaning making using theoretical models from games analysis and criticism and the conceit of game and museum spaces as analogous rules based environments

Designing the venue logistics management operations for a World Exposition

World Expositions, due to their size and peculiar features, pose a number of logistics challenges. This paper aims at developing a design framework for the venue logistics management (VLM) operations to replenish food products to the event site, through a combination of qualitative and quantitative research approaches. First, an in-depth interview methodology, combined with the outcomes of a literature review, is adopted for defining the key variables for the tactical and operational set-up of the VLM system. Second, a quantitative approach is developed to define the necessary logistics resources. The framework is then applied to the case of Milan 2015 World Exposition. It is the first time that such a design framework for a World Exposition is presented: the originality of this research lies in the proposal of a systematic approach that adds to the experiential practices constituting the current body of knowledge on event logistics

Sex in the city: the rise of soft-erotic film culture in Cinema Leopold, Ghent, 1945-1954

Since the 1990s, film studies saw a disciplinary shift from approaches favoring a textual and ideological analysis of films to a broader understanding of the socio-cultural history of cinema under the banner of new cinema history. This turn not only allowed for ‘niche’ research domains to flourish such as film economics or cinema memory research, or for new empirical and critical methodologies to be applied to film and cinema history. This change in researching and writing film/cinema history also shed light on previously marginalized, neglected or uncharted film cultures and histories, burgeoning scholarship in for instance (s)exploitation cinema. This contribution examines a peculiar part of post-war local film culture in the Belgian city of Ghent, more precisely the one around the city-center soft-erotic cinema Cinema Leopold (1945-54). The research is based on a programming and box-office database compiled from archival sources and contextualized by other data (internal and external correspondence, posters,…) coming from the business archive of Octave Bonnevalle, Cinema Leopold’s founding pater familias (material kept in the State Archives of Belgium; RAB/B70/1928-1977). The database now contains information on 625 film titles shown between 1945 and 1954, out of which 233 were unidentified (due to lack of information). Although the database is at times crippled by source inconsistencies, it is extremely rich in documenting the everyday practices of a cinema that gradually turned into a soft-erotic movie theater. The database allows for some remarkable findings concerning shifts in the origin of films, their production years, genres, censorship and popularity. The key finding is that Cinema Leopold started out after the Second World War with a child-friendly, mainstream Hollywood-oriented film program, as did most cinemas in Ghent, but its profile slowly tilted towards more mature audiences and provocative film genres. These included French ‘risqué’ feature films containing some forms of nudity like Perfectionist/Un Grand Patron (Ciampi, 1951) and documentaries on venereal diseases like the successful Austrian Creeping Poison/Schleichendes Gift (Wallbrück, 1946), but also auteur movies such as Bergman’s Port of Call/Hamnstad (1948) were shown. It is interesting how Leopold walked a fine line between innovative, bold European art-house cinema, soft-erotic ‘didactic’ movies and flat-out commercial soft-porn. By 1954, Leopold had gathered a loyal crowd, which kept the cinema alive until 1981 despite the several law suits and trials. This micro-history offers a remarkable example of the post-war flourishing of alternative, yet profit-driven cinema circuits, riddled with media controversies and censorship

Russian Orthodox Church in the Structure of State Administration in the XIX- Beginning XX Centuries

The article outlines the key areas of the charitable and educational activities of the Orthodox Church, which are analyzed during religious reforms in the 19th and early 20th centuries. in Russia. It is shown that at that time the scale of charity aid and the responsibilities of charitable organizations increased; the control over the distribution of aid has improved, the role of the Church in the social protection of the population has increased. The conclusions made in the article allow us to look at a holistic picture of the Church's activities in providing the educational process in Russian church schools during the period under study. It turned out that the concrete activity of the clergy, which was impossible without the proper level of education, placed the clergy in the most literate category of the population. It is the priests, in the absence of a developed education system in Russia, began to introduce primary public education. This article helps to understand and systematize the position of the Church as a spiritual and moral institution that preserves Russia's cultural heritage. Of particular importance is the regional nature of the topic under study, which makes it possible to understand the general and specific relations between the Church and the state. For the international community, the article will be useful as an archival exhibition, which is a rare publication that reveals the relationship between the Orthodox Church and the state in Russia in the 19th and early 20th centuries

Countering a Legal Threat to Cultural Exchanges of Works of Art: The Malewicz Case and Proposed Remedies

The ability of U.S. museums to borrow for exhibition works of art from museums owned by foreign governments is seriously threatened under a ruling of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia in the case of Malewicz v. City of Amsterdam that is now on appeal. If upheld, future cultural exchanges may be seriously curtailed; in fact, there is evidence that the case has already had a chilling effect on the willingness of foreign lenders to permit their works of art to travel to the United States. The case in question involves works of art lent by the city of Amsterdam to two U.S. museums that, under the terms of the 1965 Immunity from Seizure Act, were protected from seizure while in the United States. At issue in the case is a separate statute, the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act, under which foreign governmental entities whose property is at any time in the United States are immune from suit here unless the property involves a violation of international law and commercial activity. The District Court held that the Immunity from Seizure Act only protects works of art from seizure; it does not preclude suits for damages against the owners; and that the loan of art works to U.S. museums is commercial activity as that term is used in the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act. In order to assure continued cultural exchanges, legislation is needed that will extend the Immunity from Seizure Act to protect a foreign owner from any suit based on the presence of artwork in the United States that has received protection under the Act.This publication is Hauser Center Working Paper No. 42. The Hauser Center Working Paper Series was launched during the summer of 2000. The Series enables the Hauser Center to share with a broad audience important works-in-progress written by Hauser Center scholars and researchers