Rich pictures for stakeholder dialogue:A polyphonic picture book

We describe the design and use of a ‘polyphonic picture book’ for engaging stakeholders and research participants with findings from an interdisciplinary project investigating how UK citizens create and manage online identities at three significant life transitions. The project delivered socio-cultural and technical findings to inform policy-making and service innovation for enhancing digital literacy in online self-representation. The picture book presented findings through multi-perspectival, fictional scenarios about experiences of life transition. We describe our use of the book with our stakeholders in five workshop settings and our evaluation of the visual format for fostering stakeholder dialogue around the findings and their transferability. This paper contributes methodological insights about using visual storytelling to scaffold interpretative, dialogical contexts of research engagement

A Monstrous Alliance: Open Architecture and Common Space

The contemporary built environment is absorbed by a dualist spatial organisation model divided between public and private space. Within this restrictive grammar, public space, despite its democratic promise, is heavily indoctrinated and anesthetised under the hegemony of regulatory apparatuses and control mechanisms, whereas private space has catalysed, if not directly engendered, prevalent spatial problems, such as ever-increasing slums, discriminatory gentrification and ecological catastrophes, despite its self-approving assurance. Underneath this dysfunctional couple lies common space, a third category that constitutes the shared spatial commonwealth of our entire natural and cultural milieu.The multitude, as an emerging body of self-organising political and spatial actors, has already started to unearth the potential of common space, actualising emergent and interactive spatial configurations all around the world. In this new, self-organisational model, architects do not become obsolete; rather, they leave behind their conventional roles as submissive experts and cosmetic speculators. By becoming anomalous architects, they affirm and augment the opening of spatial and architectural milieus to a myriad of new possibilities.This article theorises the possibility of a monstrous alliance between anomalous architects and the multitude, between open architectures and common space. Two specific case studies accompany these theoretical frameworks: the Gezi Event (Istanbul, 2013) demonstrates the actual emancipation of common space through the self-organising activity of the multitude, while Open-Cube (Antalya, 2013) attests to an early open architecture experiment based on the potentiating activity of the anomalous architect.

On not being Dubai: infrastructures of urban cultural policy in Istanbul & Beirut

This paper compares how Istanbul and Beirut both attempt to underline their cultural and developmental uniqueness today in contrast to a metonymic menace — Dubai, standing in for spectacular yet supposedly culture-less Gulf cities. Even amid their own speculative construction frenzies that threaten local heritage, Turkish and Lebanese city-shapers assert theirs are “real” cities because they have “civilization” and “history.” By addressing their own efforts to build, defend, or oppose physical infrastructures related to local urban culture, Istanbullus and Beirutis rely on and reassert strategic, phatic discourses that frequently reference Gulf cities as counterpoint. Analysis focuses on how each city crafts a distinctive urban profile via civilizational appeals to historic senses of culture, inflecting infrastructural developments related to bridging (Istanbul) and bordering (Beirut). Historical truisms are deployed with marked flexibility to showcase these cities as “not Dubai.” This study offers lessons on the particular worlding of Middle Eastern cities and the role of discourses in the material-symbolic infrastructure of implicit urban cultural policy

Cities' Identity Through Architecture and Art

Intended to be a guide for academics, scholars, and interested leaders, this book was designed to critically assess issues related to architectural identity, the city as a scene, the city as an organism, the city as a subject, and the planning or rather approaching of one. A pressing issue for many researchers in the field, the book discusses the negative repercussions resulting from globalization. Studies have indicated that globalization, despite all the positive effects, has resulted in a loss of identity within a city. As a city develops over time, its identity is evolving as well and may even be lost due to rapid and constant changes it is subjected to. Discussed as well are examples and tendencies in dealing with urban identities as well as the transformation of cities and urban cultures mentioned in terms of form, identity, and art. This book is a combination of innovative research submitted to a conference on Cities’ Identity Through Architecture and Arts (CITAA) whereas scholars from all over the world gather in one venue to discuss cultural, historical, and economic issues of the city. Thus, the book offers a collective and global solution that is applicable on a universal level. The research presented in this book was conducted by authors, or rather participants of the conference from, three different continents of the world and organized by IEREK. It was a distinct opportunity for them to share their thoughts with leading scholars and professionals in the field of Architecture, Arts, and Planning. The research and materials in this book are directed at those who are actively engaged in the decision-making processes and to a heterogeneous audience who has an interest to critically examine all the new literature available in the field. A special word of thanks should be made to the editors of this book and to all the authors and co-authors of the chapters who collectively provided the academic community with unique and increasingly valuable literature

Claim, Consume, Curate: Placing Value on Functional Art

This paper is the written portion of the thesis requirements for University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee\u27s Art History, Museums and Curatorial program. It corresponds with the other component, a museum-style exhibition in the Emile H. Mathis Art Gallery, as its catalog. The catalog and exhibition together address the factors of change in decorative art reception since the modern era and how museum institutions can continue to broaden the conditioned meanings of such art in a dynamic, responsive way. These changes and suggestions are illustrated through objects and their display in the exhibition vignettes “The Home,” “The Boutique,” “The Museum,” and “Storing Stuff.” These settings appear as separate spaces but exist together as one exhibition. As participants walk through the exhibition, they notice items of overlap showing how functions of identity, consumption, and aesthetic all bleed together in the life of just one object. Differing styles of object labels in each section also speak to the variety of functions a decorative art object can have. The storage section concludes the exhibition by showing that conditioned value trickles all the way down into how people store their surplus at home, at a store, and in a museum. Spoons in a drawer organizer are ready for daily use in the kitchen. Spoons twist-tied in cardboard packaging are ready to be shipped, displayed, or sold. Spoons in Gaylord Archival boxes are prepped for preservation. Which function do you value most? Which spoon seems the most valuable? Why do you think you understand it that way

SPACE AND TIME IN THE MURALS OF THOMAS HART BENTON AND DIEGO RIVERA: REPRESENTATION AND MEMORIALIZATION OF NATIONAL IDENTITIES

In this study, I will show how the categories of linear time and horizontal space in the United States and cyclical time and vertical space in Mexico persist into the 20th century and are revealed in the public mural art of Thomas Hart Benton and Diego Rivera. Incorporating the thinking of Mikhail Bakhtin, Martin Heidegger and Rudolf Arnheim, I will demonstrate that the murals articulate the origin stories of each nation by drawing on the chronotopes (time-space) utilized by each artist to serve as the formal structures of national memorials. I will argue that in the United States a national identity and collective memory are associated with a linear sense of time in which the past is insignificant and the present is simply a necessary step towards the future while a horizontal concept of space prevails in which the axis mundi expands and tilts outward and is best associated with the ideas of manifest destiny, constant change, progress, freedom and open space. In contrast, we find in Mexico a national identity where collective story and memory are associated instead with a cyclical sense of time in which the past, present and future are constantly linked and concurrent, and a vertical concept of space around which one centers identity that lessens the distance between diverse peoples physically as well as culturally. Building on the work of Paul Ricoeur, Raymond Williams, Erika Doss, Yi Fu Tuan and Hannah Arendt, I will further show that the representations in the chronotopes of Benton and Rivera are incomplete and need to be expanded upon to shape a more inclusive national understanding of “we” in both countries that reflects the diversity of its citizens.https://digitalmaine.com/academic/1042/thumbnail.jp

Contemporary Public Arts and the Contested Urban Public Space

Art is a defining element of urban culture through creative dynamics that reflect territorially embedded mechanisms but also particular social and cultural processes. Public art presents us with the possibility of unmediated social interaction that leads to greater access to the production and use of urban public space. Public art’s presence in the urban space is dynamic and interactive that communicates the complex forms of globalization, cultural hybridity, and plurality in contemporary daily life—where we experience politics. Through a multi-disciplinary lens, that combines urban studies, visual studies, sociology, artistic research, art history and political philosophy, this issue maps the contemporary landscape of public art to capture art’s critical place in the reified politics of the urban space. The aim is not to provide an exhaustive description of the politics of arts in the public spaces but rather to provisionally reconcile the lack of a dialectical perspective in the critical discursive tools of the scholarship on urban public arts.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Landscapes of the invisible: sounds, cosmologies and poetics of space

In this PhD by Publication I revisit and contextualize art works and essays I have collaboratively created under the name Flow Motion between 2004-13, in order to generate new insights on the contributions they have made to diverse and emerging fields of contemporary arts practice/research, including digital, virtual, sonic and interdisciplinary art. The works discussed comprise the digital multimedia installation and sound art performance Astro Black Morphologies/Astro Dub Morphologies (2004-5), the sound installation and performance Invisible (2006-7), the web art archive and performance presentation project promised lands (2008-10), and two related texts, Astro Black Morphologies: Music and Science Lovers (2004) and Music and Migration (2013). I show how these works map new thematic constellations around questions of space and diaspora, music and cosmology, invisibility and spectrality, the body and perception. I also show how the works generate new connections between and across contemporary avant-garde, experimental and popular music, and visual art and cinema traditions. I describe the methodological design, approaches and processes through which the works were produced, with an emphasis on transversality, deconstruction and contemporary black music forms as key tools in my collaborative artistic and textual practice. I discuss how, through the development of methods of data translation and transformation, and distinctive visual approaches for the re-elaboration of archival material, the works produced multiple readings of scientific narratives, digital X-ray data derived from astronomical research on black holes and dark energy, and musical, photographic and textual material related to historical and contemporary accounts of migration. I also elaborate on the relation between difference and repetition, the concepts of multiplicity and translation, and the processes of collective creation which characterize my/Flow Motion’s work. The art works and essays I engage with in this commentary produce an idea of contemporary art as the result of a fluid, open and mutating assemblage of diverse and hybrid methods and mediums, and as an embodiment of a cross-cultural, transversal and transdisciplinary knowledge shaped by research, process, creative dialogues, collaborative practice and collective signature