Hadrian’s Wall as Artscape

This paper draws upon the concept of “artscape”, a term adopted in studies of contemporary urban and borderland contexts. Nine artworks sited along Hadrian's Wall form the case studies. These interventions aim to challenge the traditional concept of Hadrian's Wall as a fixed and well-defined ancient monument set within an unchanging landscape. Many of the projects reflect, directly or indirectly, upon the ethics of contemporary bordering practices. The artworks may have succeeded, at least to a degree, in challenging people's understandings of the current significance of the Wall by encouraging local people and visitors to contemplate the constraining characteristics of modern borders and frontiers. However, the communication of Hadrian's Wall as “open to all” elides ethical issues and the paper explores the extent to which these artworks may have encouraged or provoked public responses

Museum and Exhibition Curation Techniques in Nazi Germany: An Analysis of Curation and Its Effects on Art, Artists, and the Public

Museum development in Europe changed rapidly from the middle of the 19th century through the end of World War II. This development included elements of exhibition design and curation techniques. The combination of these elements created a space for the changing public to acquire new opinions and knowledge of artworks. With the addition of governmental powers influencing the museum design, museums became buildings of education for many different purposes, at the government’s disposal. In Germany during World War II, the Degenerate Art Exhibition was designed as a counter exhibit to the Great German Art Exhibition. This exhibition’s purpose was to give an approved Third Reich education to their public: the knowledge of identifying Aryan versus Degenerate Art. Curational techniques developed from the mid-18th into the 19th century were changed and manipulated to suppress the opinions of the public into a submission to the ideology of the Third Reich

Generating Insight Into the Nature of Existence; The Process of Unraveling Logic

This paper discusses the author\u27s creative practice as it relates to the evolutionary origins of the unique aspects of human consciousness and their implication throughout time. A methodological approach that models cognitive systems that have developed based on these implications is described. The art works that these models generate are described in the context of contemporary art practice as well as their relevance to the author\u27s personal spiritual journey, especially in light of his involvement with Zen Buddhism and eastern philosophy

Nostos

Nostos is an exhibition of paintings and textile works that are manifestations of my experience of this extraordinary past year. The work reflects several themes: documentary of the everyday as a form of resistance, feminist art practice, and art-as-therapy. A feminist perspective reclaims domestic or quotidian subject-matter as socially and culturally significant, and acknowledges the place of traditionally female labor in the pantheon of fine art. In representationally-painted images and stitched “maps,” I process personal realities such as domesticity, comfort, geography, the passage of time, and how I observe the world

Performing the New Face of Modernism: Anti-Mimetic Portraiture and the American Avant-Garde, 1912-1927

At the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession in 1912, Alfred Stieglitz received the final proofs for Gertrude Stein's experimental text portraits "Henri Matisse" and "Pablo Picasso" and subsequently published these poems in the journal Camera Work. Soon afterward a number of visual artists working in the United States began grappling with the implications of such hermetic depictions. Entering into a trans-Atlantic conversation, this fledgling modernist community created radical images that bear witness to the evolving nature of subjectivity and to an extensive culture of experimentation in portraying the individual in the first quarter of the twentieth century. One of the most salient aspects of the modernist worldview was the desire to break with the past. Earlier styles, exhibition standards, subject matter, and teaching methods all came under attack, but none more basic - and symbolic - than the ancient Greek (via the Renaissance) idea of mimesis. Freed from the expectation to replicate reality "impartially," painters and sculptors began instead to emphasize more and more their own subjective experiences through expressive color choices or formal exaggerations. Portraiture, previously so closely linked to flattering transcription and bourgeois values, became the genre par excellence for testing modernist ideals and practices. This doctoral thesis examines the small group of artists working in the United States who advanced an extreme, anti-mimetic approach to portraiture through the dissociation of the sitter from his or her likeness. Drawing on performance theory, this dissertation re-imagines the portrait as a series of events within a social nexus. It also aims to reaffirm the agency of the United States avant-garde in the 1910s and 1920s as its members sought to establish, and then maintain, their status on the American cultural scene specifically through the employment of unconventional portraiture. Through the contextualization of particular objects, the consideration of period poetry, and the incorporation of newly available archival sources, the research presented here illuminates the complex intersections of modernity, representation, and subjectivity, and charts the changes in a specific mode of visual production during the fifteen-year span of 1912 - 1927, thereby demonstrating Charles Demuth's dictum that "In portraiture...likeness is a means not an end.

Taking the Perfect Selfie: Investigating the Impact of Perspective on the Perception of Higher Cognitive Variables

Taking selfies is now becoming a standard human habit. However, as a social phenomenon, research is still in the fledgling stage and the scientific framework is sparse. Selfies allow us to share social information with others in a compact format. Furthermore, we are able to control important photographic and compositional aspects, such as perspective, which have a strong impact on the assessment of a face (e.g., demonstrated by the height-weight illusion, effects of gaze direction, faceism-index). In Study 1, we focused on the impact of perspective (left/right hemiface, above/below vs. frontal presentation) on higher cognitive variables and let 172 participants rate the perceived attractiveness, helpfulness, sympathy, dominance, distinctiveness, and intelligence, plus important information on health issues (e.g., body weight), on the basis of 14 3D faces. We could show that lateral snapshots yielded higher ratings for attractiveness compared to the classical frontal view. However, this effect was more pronounced for left hemifaces and especially female faces. Compared to the frontal condition, 30° right hemifaces were rated as more helpful, but only for female faces while faces viewed from above were perceived as significant less helpful. Direct comparison between left vs. right hemifaces revealed no effect. Relating to sympathy, we only found a significant effect for 30° right male hemifaces, but only in comparison to the frontal condition. Furthermore, female 30° right hemifaces were perceived as more intelligent. Relating to body weight, we replicated the so-called “height-weight illusion.” Other variables remained unaffected. In Study 2, we investigated the impact of a typical selfie-style condition by presenting the respective faces from a lateral (left/right) and tilted (lower/higher) vantage point. Most importantly, depending on what persons wish to express with a selfie, a systematic change of perspective can strongly optimize their message; e.g., increasing their attractiveness by shooting from above left, and in contrast, decreasing their expressed helpfulness by shooting from below. We could further extent past findings relating to the height-weight illusion and showed that an additional rotation of the camera positively affected the perception of body weight (lower body weight). We discuss potential explanations for perspective-related effects, especially gender-related ones

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

Autoethnography as Self-portrait: An Autoethnographic Analysis of Trauma-Sensemaking through Art

This project thesis is centered around coping with early onset childhood trauma through an autoethnography of narrative and art creation. The goal of this project is to understand more deeply how the art making process synthesizes or disrupts trauma sense-making through the introspective lens of the artist as scholar. The project consists of an interactive art exhibit and this written scholarly analysis of the creation and display of this exhibit. This includes an introduction to my life as a trauma survivor and Greek-American woman, informed by communication scholarship and other relevant fields regarding narrative theory, Greek history, religious and trauma studies. Within the socially constructed “life-world,” the epistemological assumptions of subjective-narrative research focus on the interpretations of lived experience, not to produce generalizable knowledge (Kvale, 1996). Because trauma-sensemaking is both analytical and symbolic, inspired by previous autoethnographic scholarship, this project is written in both a creative and academic voice (Fink, 2022). In addition, the project thesis discusses relevant extant literature surrounding autoethnographic methods and artistic practice and outlines the plans and outcomes of my art exhibit and the design of the autoethnography, including a description of the art-making plan and a discussion of the various art media involved in the project, such as creative writing and painting

Hearts and Minds: Examining the Evolution of the Egyptian Excerebration and Evisceration Traditions through the IMPACT Mummy Database

Egyptian mummification and funerary rituals were a transformative process, making the deceased a pure being; free of disease, injury, and disfigurements, as well as ethical and moral impurities. Consequently, the features of mummification available to specific categories of individuals hold social and ideological significance. This study refutes long-held classical stereotypes, particularly dogmatic class associations; demonstrates the apocryphal nature of universal heart retention; and expands on the purposes of excerebration and evisceration implied by synthetic and radiological analyses. Features of the embalming traditions, specifically the variable excerebration and evisceration traditions, represented the Egyptian view of death. Fine-grain analyses, through primary imaging data for these traditions, have recently been made possible on a large scale through the development of a radiological mummy database. The IMPACT Radiological Mummy Database is a multi-institutional, collaborative research project devoted to the scientific study of mummified remains through primary data from medical imaging modalities. This first application of IMPACT addresses the evolution of Egyptian excerebration and evisceration, and how suites of features in mummies of differing age, sex, status, and location differ and how they relate to the fate of the recipient’s afterlife and to sociopolitical and ideological changes and interactions

GRAND CHALLENGE No. 5: COMMUNICATING ARCHAEOLOGY Outreach and Narratives in Professional Practice

Communicating archaeology to non-expert audiences can convey the role and value of the discipline, implant respect for heritage, and connect descendant communities to their past. A challenge facing archaeology communicators is to translate complex ideas while retaining their richness and maximizing audience engagement. This article discusses how archaeologists can effectively communicate with non-experts using narrative and visual tools. We provide a communication strategy and three case studies from North America. The examples include the packaging of archaeological theory in the shape of mystery novels for student consumption; the use of artwork to anchor archaeological narratives in public outreach; and, the use of historical fiction to reformat archaeological content for Indigenous communities. We conclude with a discussion of outreach capacities and some of the risks and rewards of professional interactions with non-archaeologists