The art, poetics, and grammar of technological innovation as practice, process, and performance

Usually technological innovation and artistic work are seen as very distinctive practices, and innovation of technologies is understood in terms of design and human intention. Moreover, thinking about technological innovation is usually categorized as “technical” and disconnected from thinking about culture and the social. Drawing on work by Dewey, Heidegger, Latour, and Wittgenstein and responding to academic discourses about craft and design, ethics and responsible innovation, transdisciplinarity, and participation, this essay questions these assumptions and examines what kind of knowledge and practices are involved in art and technological innovation. It argues that technological innovation is indeed “technical”, but, if conceptualized as techne, can be understood as art and performance. It is argued that in practice, innovative techne is not only connected to episteme as theoretical knowledge but also has the mode of poiesis: it is not just the outcome of human design and intention but rather involves a performative process in which there is a “dialogue” between form and matter and between creator and environment in which humans and non-humans participate. Moreover, this art is embedded in broader cultural patterns and grammars—ultimately a ‘form of life’—that shape and make possible the innovation. In that sense, there is no gap between science and society—a gap that is often assumed in STS and in, for instance, discourse on responsible innovation. It is concluded that technology and art were only relatively recently and unfortunately divorced, conceptually, but that in practices and performances they were always linked. If we understand technological innovation as a poetic, participative, and performative process, then bringing together technological innovation and artistic practices should not be seen as a marginal or luxury project but instead as one that is central, necessary, and vital for cultural-technological change. This conceptualization supports not only a different approach to innovation but has also social-transformative potential and has implications for ethics of technology and responsible innovation

When conventional procedures are no longer the rule for application: design as a discipline opens up to new possibilities

This paper discusses the development of the prototype application ‘LabanAssist’. It looks at the design rationale used for the creation of what is fundamentally a system for recording dance knowledge on a score, as identifiable and replicable signs and symbols. A system made necessary because the conventions of other established disciplines, such as engineering and computer science practices, were no longer considered to be effective alone, in facilitating the production of well-designed cultural artefacts (Calvert, Fox, Ryman, & Wilke, 2005; Ebenreuter, 2005). It is important to ask how can we understand design as a discipline amongst other fields of study with longstanding conventions and traditions and if the discipline of design offers effective ways of thinking about the creation and art of making products or services for the enhancement of the human experience? Is design a discipline because it adheres to existing and established rules of interdisciplinary knowledge from which it draws, or is it a discipline in its own right that as a significant field of intellectual development utilizes interdisciplinary knowledge as a basis for creativity and invention?” While there is no simple answer to these questions, the design approach adopted for the development of the prototype application ‘LabanAssist’ offers a working example in which the central theme of grammar, or more particularly the rules of a language, depart from the conventional use for its practical application. This application is one in which a literal understanding of grammar is no longer seen as an adequate basis for the generation of dance knowledge expressed via symbolic writing systems. Instead, this research focuses on the way in which the figurative aspects of language can be represented in the design of an interface to orient user thinking and facilitate the generation of diverse movement compositions. Keywords: Labanotation; Grammar; Literal; Figurative; Tropes; Poetic Constructs; Broad Terms; Interface.</p

TV 2.0: animation readership / authorship on the internet

Traditional platforms for animation, such as broadcast television or cinema, are rapidly becoming obsolete as a new type of spectator demands more choice, the ability to interact with animated content and access to global distribution for their own user-generated work. Audiences are no longer satisfied with receiving a top down distribution of content from traditional cinema or broadcasters. Internet technologies are emerging to address this demand for active spectatorship and enable communities of interest to evolve their own alternative distribution methods. Viewing animation online has become increasingly accessible with the mass adoption of broadband and the emergence of new file formats. TV 2.0 is an amalgamation of Internet technologies that combine video on demand with the social networking capabilities of Web 2.0. In the age of TV 2.0, the role of the viewer has increased in complexity with new possibilities for active interaction and intervention with the content displayed. This new audience seeks a form of spectatorship that can extend beyond the passive recipience of programming distributed by elite broadcasters. TV 2.0 on the Internet has changed both methods of distribution and traditional patterns for the viewing of animation. However, any potential for democratic participation in the visual culture of moving images that this could entail may be a brief historic moment before the assimilation and control of active readership by mainstream corporate culture

Friendly chimeras: the evolution of critical creative practice in exhibition design

This paper aims to develop and articulate an historical perspective on the relationships between exhibition design, academic endeavour in the humanities and professional development. It reflects on design culture and educational philosophy and traces the recent history of curriculum development in exhibition design. The exhibition design course at University of Lincoln has a sixty-year history. Reviewing the way its philosophy has evolved reveals a consistently dynamic reflection of real-world interests. This has involved a pragmatic and somewhat eclectic appropriation of theory, particularly from the expanding field of museology, and its integration into an increasingly critical mode of creative practice. When the course became an undergraduate honours degree in 1991 the �project rationale� was introduced as an alternative to the traditional undergraduate dissertation. The principle of integrating theory and practice proved enormously successful and now applies throughout the curriculum. Discourse analysis is applied to articles and course documents from the period 1970 to 1999. Bibliographical survey is also used to analyse the range and type of literature used to support students� studies. This is set against a background of influences on the exhibition design curriculum. These include contemporary changes in design practice, the growth of research into and for design, and changes in the national and institutional frameworks for course development. The paper concludes with an evaluation of the role of the humanities in exhibition design creativity and highlights outstanding issues in the discipline

Glitch Poetics:Critical Sensory Realism in Contemporary Language Practice

A practice-based research project that introduces the term "Glitch Poetics" as a mode for reading and writing in the digital age: this term overlaps different creative (and uncreative) writing methodologies, and forges new lines of connection between "new media" and the literary and textual. The work is relevant to fields such as Literary Theory, Experimental Writing, Electronic Literature and New Media Art. The research methodology was interdisciplinary, including: synthesising key conceptualisations of "glitch" from media theoretical areas such as media archaeology and software studies, and new media art practitioners such as Rosa Menkman, with those of historical approaches to 'poetics'; performing close readings of contemporary literature, performance and other artistic language practices; and producing art works that move between live performance, exposition and textual practice. Over the course of 4 years, the project achieved a significant level of depth, concluding that "glitches" offer a moment of correspondence between the (already diverse) concerns of poetics and those of critical media practices, forming new disciplinary allegiances and necessitating new hybrid forms of critique. In recent published material I have also illustrated how this critical framework can be deployed to analyse influential books and artworks alongside emerging technologies. The new term "Glitch Poetics" gained traction through a publications in national specialist media, such as Art Monthly, Resonance FM and Poetry Wales, and was developed through interdisciplinary contexts including invited talks at Transmediale festival, Onassis centre in Athens, academic appearances at conferences for new media, literature and poetics, and as a chapter in the Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature. The practice-based components were commissioned by the Bluecoat and FACT, and a final outcome was developed into a publication with Entr'acte records in Antwerp, streamed in its entirety on The Wire website

The Body In Avant Garde Poetry

This thesis examines the use of the body in avant-garde poetics, relating it to both theory and contemporary culture. An outline of how the body has been depicted, represented, and formalized in modernism is made, and contemporary issues involving the body, from what Meredith M. Render calls the “alienability” of the body to posthuman hybridity and technological transcendence. Language poetry, including the works of M. SourbeSe Philip, Clark Coolidge, Steve McCaffery, Charles Bernstein, Karen Mac Cormack, Lyn Hejinian, and Bruce Andrews is then examined for the body’s fraught usage in a generally non-referential poetics. The body’s place in conceptual writing combines contemporary technologies with a look back at Antonin Artaud’s corps sans organes

Gateway to the World: Data Visualization Poetics

In my creative research practice, I am interested in stretching new technologies and programmable languages in order to explore multimodal digital textualities. During the last seven years, I have developed projects assisted by programmers in order to create language-art media work through the exploration of interactive grammars, aesthetics, and poetics in digital writing. My interest in new literacies, new text, the reader/writer/performer of generative texts, sound, and visual interfaces in a world of unstable, generative visual words, is reflected in my creative work, and this essay considers how these concerns have unfolded through the development of an application for the iPad. The application, titled Gateway to the World (2014), was developed specifically for an exhibition in Hamburg, Germany. It is an exploration of data visualization poetics that use open data to visualize the routes of the vessels arriving at and departing from the Port of Hamburg, with the names of the vessels being mapped to Wikipedia entries. This paper establishes a context for the app through the discussion of artists’ and designers’ works, the presentation of ideas, notions, and concerns related to the creation of data visualization projects, as well as the creative process involved in the production of the application

From Visual Poetry to Digital Art: Image-Sound-Text, Convergent Media, and the development of New Media Languages

This research arises from my practice as a professional artist and my concern with issues of language and communication, particularly, the investigation of ways that arouse emotion and rational thought at once through language. Visual Poetry is a form of expression, which provokes both, and I saw the potential to expand its underlining principles further with the emergence of new technologies. With the digital medium, the main elements of visual and sound poetry: image, sound and text, can now be incorporated into the same piece of work. The aim of this study is to explore new digital communicative systems that interweave visual, oral and semantic elements of language, to produce new media languages where the pre-linguistic and linguistic maintain their symbiotic identities. This study examines theoretical and artistic concerns emerging from the area in-between, which is created by interlacing image, sound and text in the same artwork. It addresses the following series of questions: How to transfer the main concepts from Visual Poetry to Digital Art? How does computer technology transform image, sound and text to create new media languages? What is the role of the author, reader, writer, producer in these new interactive textualities of image, sound and text? How has this affected the new conventions of reading, looking, producing, using and thinking? What does the digital add to the interactivelexts of Visual Poetry? What new meanings and processes of thinking, understanding and interpretation are appearing? In which way do new technologies enhance the collaborative nature of practice? This investigation brings knowledge from other disciplines into the art field and it explores different serniotic models such as the linguistic the visual and the aural. It blurs the barriers between the visual and the linguistic: between different art forms such as fine art, visual poetry and sound art/poetry in a new digital and technological arena. It questions the conventions applied to these critical areas with the aid of the new tools and critical concepts available through digital technology. This study challengest he viewer/listener/userw ith an interface of signsf rom different languages and serniotic systems: the visual (still and moving images), the audible and the linguistic, to participate and explore the multiple possibilities within a work. This investigation seeks to contribute to a new body of knowledge in the development of the areas of Visual Poetry, Digital Art and the new genre of Electronic Poetry, by creating new, innovative, digital artworks for which, as a new form of expression, critical and analytical conventions are still in the process of development