Product placement

The exhibition brought together a range of artists and product designers who share an interest in how objects are made, displayed / marketed and sold in contemporary culture. The exhibition questioned issues surrounding the production, technology and marketing of commodities, but on a wider scale, how (and by whom) participation in consumer activity is structured or framed. Each artist and product designer was ‘paired’ in order to produce a new object, multiple or edition for exhibition. Via this cross-disciplinary collaboration, new working processes were to be found and explored, as well as allowing a re-appraisal of the conceptual elements of their practices. The resulting polymorphic objects (often neither product or artwork) were placed in an installation developed for the exhibition. Through an architectural re-working of the gallery, the space becomes a parody of 'catalogue' stores - mimicking their structure of experience with catalogue kiosks, service point (with uniformed assistant) and market hall/storage space. Merging this structure into the space intended to amplify the functional similarities and behavioral prompts of gallery, retail and warehouse spaces

STATIC! The Aesthetics of Energy in Everyday Things

Abstract: Static! is a project investigating interaction and product design as a way of increasing our awareness of how energy is used in everyday life. Revisiting the design of everyday things with focus on issues related to energy use, we have developed a palette of design examples in the form of prototypes, conceptual design proposals and use scenarios, to be used as a basis for communication and discussion with users and designers. With respect to design research and practice, the aim has been to develop a more profound understanding of energy as material in design, including its expressive and aesthetic potential, thus locating issues related to energy use at the centre of the design process

Fusing Arts, Culture and Social Change: High Impact Strategies for Philanthropy

Examines the role of the arts in engaging, educating, and building communities and addressing social, economic, environmental, and other injustices. Calls on arts grantmakers to focus more resources on supporting social change in underserved communities

Conversations about creativity and chronic illness II: Textile artists coping with long-term health problems reflect on the creative process

This qualitative study explored the origins of interest in textile arts among a group of women living with long-term health problems. The part that illness played in motivating engagement in creative arts was of particular concern. Twenty four women were interviewed, aged between 29-72 years. Most were hobbyists and but the sample included some publicly acclaimed textile artists. A minority had engaged in art continuously since their earlier years. Most of the women had discovered (or re-discovered) textile arts, in middle and later life. Several factors facilitated this. The narratives indicated that the women’s pre-existing resilient personality as well as extensive support structures may have encouraged a reflective attitude and a problem-solving approach to living with illness. The experience of biographical disruption, stemming from the crisis of illness, dissatisfaction with unproductive time and a growing need for self-fulfilment, appeared to create a search for a meaningful occupation. The discovery of textile art as a meaningful occupation (as opposed to other ways of living with illness) appeared to be encouraged by early role models, enjoyment of art at school, the discovery that adult personal and professional interests could be expressed through artwork, and chance events. Textile art at school appeared to provide a form of ‘cultural capital’ for these women, who returned to this art medium and the skills learned earlier, when crisis occurred. The findings indicate that a negative event such as illness may have life-enhancing effects. Rehabilitation specialists might focus more on the arts as a resource for adults living with illness

Is Creativity Lost in Translation? A discussion of the cultural underpinnings of creativity

Abstract In the interrelated knowledge economy the fostering of creativity is key and as such is the focus of many government initiatives internationally. But is an international definition of creativity achievable or even desirable? Comparisons of different cultures’ propensities for creativity are problematic when we consider that most creativity research has taken place in Western cultures, with Western measures; and when creativity is defined as revolutionary this has often presented a dichotomous view of creativity that equates Westernisation with modernity. As a form of communication, creativity is open to mis- translation across cultures and despite some consensus between the West and Confucian heritage cultures on the desirable attributes to facilitate creativity, misunderstandings of creative practice based on cultural general tendencies such as individualism and collectivism remain. This paper reviews the literature on the development of concepts of creativity in Western and Confucian heritage cultures as well as reporting on a qualitative research study into the understandings and practice of creativity in a London art and design college in order to comment on the existence of a cross-cultural creativity divide and suggest that rather than be set against each other, creativity is enhanced by cultural creativity exchange and cross-cultural collaboration

Valuing the Intersection Between Arts, Culture, and Community: An Exchange of Research and Practice

This report is based a half-day gathering of thirty-five practitioners and researchers that took place on September 12, 2013, at Downtown Art's East Village studio. Downtown Art is a member of Fourth Arts Block, a nonprofit coalition of cultural and community groups that lead the development of the East 4th Street Cultural District, the only official cultural district in Manhattan. This gathering was convened by Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts -- New York (NOCD-NY), a citywide alliance of artists, activists, creative manufacturers, and policy makers committed to revitalizing New York City "from the neighborhood up." Through presentations, questions, and dialogue, participants learned about the structural inequities that exist in cities and philanthropy and gained deeper insight into the power of neighborhood cultural clusters as sources of community health and resilience.The exchange grew out of NOCD-NY's initial explorations around a collaborative research agenda that responds to the shared needs of members. NOCD-NY recognized that coordinated efforts could broaden and deepen the impact of members' research (e.g., door-to-door surveys, oral histories, community asset mapping) already under way in their respective neighborhoods with the multiple goals of strengthening practice, understanding neighborhood and artist needs, case making, and field learning. At the same time, NOCD-NY members continue to grapple with one of the key challenges in this work -- identifying and communicating appropriate measures for the social, community, environmental, and economic impacts of these districts. While most people readily acknowledge that there is some degree of relationship between culture, community, and economy, the concrete connections are complex, subtle, and still largely undocumented. As a coalition of community-based cultural leaders, NOCD-NY was eager to tell a compelling story without falling back on data sets that diminish or dilute these complex connections. This gathering offered an entry point from which to explore research approaches and tools that can make visible the value of this work

The plot thickens: The aesthetic dimensions of a captivating mathematics lesson

We present an analysis of a sixth-grade mathematics lesson in which an aesthetically-rich moment of mathematical surprise, inspired by a decontextualized integer addition problem, spurred students to ask mathematical questions and actively sustain inquiry into the lesson’s central ideas. In order to understand how the unfolding mathematical content enabled this moment, we interpret the lesson as a mathematical story. Using this narrative framework, we describe the aesthetic dimensions of the story including its plot, density, coherence, and rhythm, and connect them to the unfolding mathematical content. This analysis demonstrates how these aesthetic elements of a lesson can be recognized and how they help explain the students’ productive engagement. This framework offers a potential tool for researchers and practitioners who seek to understand, design, and enact captivating mathematical experiences.Accepted manuscrip

Ellen Banks: Musical Manifestations: Compositions in Wax, Paper, and Yarn

This is the catalogue of the exhibition "Ellen Banks" at Boston University Art Gallery

Tile Pattern KL-Divergence for Analysing and Evolving Game Levels

This paper provides a detailed investigation of using the Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence as a way to compare and analyse game-levels, and hence to use the measure as the objective function of an evolutionary algorithm to evolve new levels. We describe the benefits of its asymmetry for level analysis and demonstrate how (not surprisingly) the quality of the results depends on the features used. Here we use tile-patterns of various sizes as features. When using the measure for evolution-based level generation, we demonstrate that the choice of variation operator is critical in order to provide an efficient search process, and introduce a novel convolutional mutation operator to facilitate this. We compare the results with alternative generators, including evolving in the latent space of generative adversarial networks, and Wave Function Collapse. The results clearly show the proposed method to provide competitive performance, providing reasonable quality results with very fast training and reasonably fast generation.Comment: 8 pages plus references. Proceedings of GECCO 201