Experimental and Creative Approaches to Collecting and Distributing New Media Art within Regional Arts Organisations

This article is an overview of preliminary research undertaken for the creation of a framework for collecting and distributing new media art within regional art galleries in the U.K. From the 1960s, artists have experimented using computers and software as production tools to create artworks ranging from static, algorithmic drawings on paper to installations with complex, interactive and process-oriented behaviours. The art-form has evolved into multiple strands of production, presentation and distribution. But are we, as collectors, researchers, artists and enthusiasts facing an uncertain future concerning the integration of new media art into institutional cultural organisations? Recently, concerns have been raised by curators regarding the importance of learning how to collect new media art if there is to be any hope of preserving the artworks as well as their histories. Traditional collections management approaches must evolve to take into account the variable characteristics of new media artworks. As I will discuss in this article, although regarded as a barrier to collecting new media artworks, artists and curators at individual institutions have recently taken steps to tackle curatorial and collections management activities concerning the often unpredictable and unstable behaviours of new media artworks by collaboration and experimentation. This method has proved successful with some mainstream, university and municipal galleries prior to acquiring or commissioning new artworks into their collections. This paper purports that by collaboration, experimentation and the sharing of knowledge and resources, these concerns may be conquered to preserve and make new media art accessible for future generations to enjoy and not to lament over its disappearance

Open to change: slowing down to explore and innovate

A specific type of knowing comes from the handling of materials in the handcrafting of an artifact. This research looks at the relationship between the handcraft of weaving, and the decision-making process and knowledge of the textile designer. It investigates the potential for new design opportunities to be opened up for the commercial designer by moving out of the studio and back into the workshop environment. As an educator, manager and formerly a designer trained in textile design, this research explores an established industrial production method of weaving but revisited using a craft-like approach. Slowing down the creative process to engage with the materials themselves, this paper starts to explore the potential of hand woven leno structures to be used within the landscape and to explore the process of change in response to environmental factors. Architect Philip Beesleys’ work seeks to achieve a balance with nature, submitting itself to the natural cycles and inevitable decay, in which he deliberately designs mesh structures with weak and fragile links, whose materials soak up environmental forces. This paper starts to further explore the value of haptic intelligence and empathy for materials, also adopted by Beesley in his Haystack Veil (1997) and later Holozoic series. The process of creating leno structures on a handloom, has resulted in outcomes difficult to predict using digital software, confirming weaving as an emergent system (Philpott, 2011), where disparate threads are combined into dynamic structures. There is a delicate relationship between textiles and the landscape, in response to which the designer of performance fabrics is required to create, indestructible solutions, with a lifetime guarantee. By embracing the science of uncertainty, fresh ideas and new solutions have the potential to be created

How could a rational analysis model explain?

Rational analysis is an influential but contested account of how probabilistic modeling can be used to construct non-mechanistic but self-standing explanatory models of the mind. In this paper, I disentangle and assess several possible explanatory contributions which could be attributed to rational analysis. Although existing models suffer from evidential problems that question their explanatory power, I argue that rational analysis modeling can complement mechanistic theorizing by providing models of environmental affordances

Constructive Interpretation in Design Thinking

This thesis explores the role of interpretation in design activity through the development of a computational model of constructive interpretation. It asks the question: how does the construction of interpretations from expectations within a situation affect design activity? This work hypothesises that designers construct their world from their expectations through interpretation. In interpreting their own work designers are able to make unexpected discoveries and explore the implicit knowledge held within their expectations of the world. These expectations are grounded in experience. A conceptual model for constructive interpretation is described. Knowledge held by designers is represented in a perceptual symbol system, in which knowledge organised in a hierarchy. Within this hierarchy, higher layers represent an increased level of abstraction. Knowledge is learnt through experience in an environment. The topmost layer in this hierarchy is the situation.Interpretation occurs through pull from the expectations. Expectations in a layer are changed by the layer above. The construction of expectations utilises knowledge about the world that the designer gains through experience. A computational framework for this conceptual model is described: (i) based upon conceptual spaces, where expectations within the situation perturb each other; and (ii) based upon a hierarchy of unsupervised learning networks, where prototypes represent convergence zones within conceptual space. Constructive interpretation is implemented in a number of demonstrations utilising modified self-organising maps linked together to represent layers in the conceptual model. Demonstrations show: (i) how situations are changed through construction from implicit expectations; (ii) how situations co-ordinate concepts through expectations that are grounded in experience; (iii) how construction from expectations produces stability in a chang ing environment; and (iv) how useful rather than accurate in! terpreta tions can be produced by constructing from expectations. A model of constructive interpretation in design is developed in which a system iterates through generation of designs from expectations and constructive interpretation. In one experiment an agent has experience with a number of floor plans. It uses its experience to draw in a design medium and interpret its own work. Through constructive interpretation from implicit expectations the situation changes leading to a new space of designs. It provides a model of the way that designers make unexpected discoveries within their work that are useful to the design task, through expectations, and relevant to the source, as the basis for constructing the interpretation. Another experiment uses sets of growth indicators about countries as concepts. The model shows how the space of designs changes through constructive interpretation and explores the effects of salience weighting upon the construction of interpretations. The work looks towards a situated model of design: a model of design that integrates interpretation, expectation and memory into the one cognitive framework. Constructive interpretation has applications for models of analogy and computational creativity. Future work in constructive interpretation is described

Mad spaces

Paper presented at COMMON-PLACE Seminar, The Lighthouse, Glasgo

Varieties of Professional Domains and Employability Determinants in Higher Education

This paper discusses graduates employability and early career success. In this context it follows multiple goals. First, it overviews the key research issues, results and concepts related to HE graduates’ transition. While this classification remains on the level of a simplified meta overview, it indicates the need for the contextualisation of graduate models and improvements in the interpretation of results. Second, it provides a short overview of the graduate transition models developed in early stages of the DEHEMS project and prior to it. Third, it applies theoretical considerations and the model developed in previous sections to a case study analysis of two domains. The data set relates to Slovenian graduates 5 years after they graduated from the HEGESCO international survey. The preliminary analysis leads to general conclusions and recommendations for further analysing and comparing different professional domains. Some concluding observations related do domain varieties are: a) graduates’ professional success is a multidimensional concept and requires modifications when applied to analytical models of study domains, b) even when the results of different study domains appear to be similar, their meaning can differ a lot when the interpretation is placed within the specific context of a professional domain, c) the principles and responsibility of the competencies incubation phase from education and the labour market should be interpreted and understood in line with the expected function of the HE institution, e) knowing the prevailing logic behind graduates’ jobs, such as managerialism, bureaucracy or professionalism in relation to graduates’ career observations might be another factor in determining graduates’ career success factors, f) when considering the factors of career success or the quality of jobs, one should be aware there might be an important difference when considering a model on an individual-level or a country-level basis.

Suppression-Induced Forgetting on a Free-Association Test

The repeated suppression of thoughts in response to cues for their expression leads to forgetting on a subsequent test of cued recall (Anderson & Green, 2001). We extended this effect by using homograph cues and presenting them for free association following suppression practice. Cue-target pairs were first learned under integrating imagery instructions; then in the think/no-think phase students practiced suppressing thoughts connected to some homograph cues, with or without the assistance of thought substitutes that changed their meaning. Below-baseline forgetting on the subsequent free-association test was found in the production of suppressed targets. Following aided suppression, this effect was also obtained in the production of other responses denoting the target-related meaning of the homograph cues. Discussion emphasizes the ecological value of the test; rarely do people deliberately attempt recall of unwanted thoughts

Reinterpretation processes and humour understanding in English-speaking young adults with dyslexia

The aim of this study is to assess whether and how lexical and syntactic ambiguity are resolved in jokes by readers with and without dyslexia. This research focuses specifically on an important phenomenon of language comprehension, i.e., the ability to access word meaning quickly and effortlessly in sentences which, in this specific work, are made more challenging by the presence of “lexical and syntactic ambiguity”. The present study addresses the ambiguity in punchlines from a semantic perspective with the aim of showing how different types of ambiguity are perceived by readers and how they reanalyse jokes by considering their ambiguous forms. This work focuses on homonymy in jokes where the humorous effect is triggered by words whose disambiguation does not involve a change of word class (i.e., “bat” has two meanings that belong to the same word class, both are nouns) and words whose disambiguation instead requires a change in word class (i.e., “seal” has two meanings that belong to two different word classes, noun and verb)

Supervised Classification: Quite a Brief Overview

The original problem of supervised classification considers the task of automatically assigning objects to their respective classes on the basis of numerical measurements derived from these objects. Classifiers are the tools that implement the actual functional mapping from these measurements---also called features or inputs---to the so-called class label---or output. The fields of pattern recognition and machine learning study ways of constructing such classifiers. The main idea behind supervised methods is that of learning from examples: given a number of example input-output relations, to what extent can the general mapping be learned that takes any new and unseen feature vector to its correct class? This chapter provides a basic introduction to the underlying ideas of how to come to a supervised classification problem. In addition, it provides an overview of some specific classification techniques, delves into the issues of object representation and classifier evaluation, and (very) briefly covers some variations on the basic supervised classification task that may also be of interest to the practitioner