"Darling Look! It’s a Banksy!” Viewers’ Material Engagement with Street Art and Graffiti

This chapter examines viewers’ affective encounters with street art and graffiti, with attention to the critical framework provided by Rancière (2004), whose work suggests a method for investigating our aesthetic practices of participation (or exclusion) and looking (or not looking). Viewers’ material engagements with street art and graffiti represent a disruption of the expectable order that demonstrates that what we see, according to our usual division of the sensible, could be otherwise – thus revealing the contingency of our perceptual and conceptual order. Our examination of the visual dialogue on just one city wall highlights the temporal, site-specific and participatory elements of graffiti and street art as a form of communication, or visual dialogue. We demonstrate that viewers are not passive recipients of the artist’s intentions, but are instead competent social actors capable of understanding, appreciating, and actively and materially engaging with street art and graffiti

Icanlearn: A Mobile Application For Creating Flashcards And Social Stories\u3csup\u3etm\u3c/sup\u3e For Children With Autistm

The number of children being diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is on the rise, presenting new challenges for their parents and teachers to overcome. At the same time, mobile computing has been seeping its way into every aspect of our lives in the form of smartphones and tablet computers. It seems only natural to harness the unique medium these devices provide and use it in treatment and intervention for children with autism. This thesis discusses and evaluates iCanLearn, an iOS flashcard app with enough versatility to construct Social StoriesTM. iCanLearn provides an engaging, individualized learning experience to children with autism on a single device, but the most powerful way to use iCanLearn is by connecting two or more devices together in a teacher-learner relationship. The evaluation results are presented at the end of the thesis

Feeling Beyond Words: Ineffability and Haptic Translational Praxis of Black German Writings

In this article, I focus on selections from Black German essayistic and creative writings that center experiential knowledge that is personal and often multisensory. My case studies are excerpts from Farbe bekennen: Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte (1986), its English translation by Anne V. Adams (Showing Our Colors 1992), and Natasha Kelly’s collection of interviews from her documentary film, Millis Erwachen (Milli’s Awakening) (2018), which Kelly herself translated. These texts, I argue, explore the ways in which words fail to fully express the visceral reaction of living while Black in Germany, particularly those that seek to make connections across geographic, linguistic, and generational differences. Focusing on the concept of transvivência (Araújo, Silva, and Silva-Reis) and hapticity of Black life (Tina Campt), I propose a model of translation that acknowledges the limitations of spoken and written words to convey all meaning and yet suggest that awareness through annotation, page format, and explanation might gesture toward more nuanced cultural references and ineffable experiences. Translation of Black-authored works into another language suggests a two-fold translation, from experience into language, from one language into another. I argue that hapticity combined with translation as transvivência has the ability to bridge what is felt and experienced with that which is read and observed. I conclude with a discussion of my own experience of translating Sharon Dodoa Otoo’s essay “Liebe” ‘Love’ from Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum (Your Homeland is Our Nightmare)

Acconci’s Pied-à-terre: Taking the archive for a walk

To kick the habit of conventional scholarship this article appeals to the affective draw of the archive via an imaginative pedestrian peregrination. It takes a walk through the uneasy spaces of Vito Acconci's 1972 work Anchors and listens to the dialogue of conflicting voices which still demand to be heard, forty years after their construction. It becomes unclear who is initiating the dialogue; the text is hard to read and perverse. The resulting disorientation of Anchors is matched by a later, larger, exhibition in Paris: Les Immatériaux, co-organised by French Philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. Here the labyrinthine confusion of spaces, sounds, smells and sights acts out an excess of information, echoing the affective intensity of Acconci's Anchors. However, the parallel between Acconci and Lyotard comes through a stumbling manner: eager to avoid the foot-fall that forms a well-trodden path the aim is to keep moving. We cannot dust off these archives whilst reclining in a recumbent posture; we must leap to our feet and become participants in their performance. Neither must we aim to decode the unarticulated voices which grunt and girn their way into our reading. Such bodily emissions were termed the ‘affect-phrase’ by Lyotard, not in order to decipher their meaning, but to acknowledge their effect in leaving conventions of communication provocatively unfulfilled. Let us proceed on foot

Translation and human-computer interaction

This paper seeks to characterise translation as a form of human-computer interaction. The evolution of translator-computer interaction is explored and the challenges and benefits are enunciated. The concept of cognitive ergonomics is drawn on to argue for a more caring and inclusive approach towards the translator by developers of translation technology. A case is also made for wider acceptance by the translation community of the benefits of the technology at their disposal and for more humanistic research on the impact of technology on the translator, the translation profession and the translation process

Spectators’ aesthetic experiences of sound and movement in dance performance

In this paper we present a study of spectators’ aesthetic experiences of sound and movement in live dance performance. A multidisciplinary team comprising a choreographer, neuroscientists and qualitative researchers investigated the effects of different sound scores on dance spectators. What would be the impact of auditory stimulation on kinesthetic experience and/or aesthetic appreciation of the dance? What would be the effect of removing music altogether, so that spectators watched dance while hearing only the performers’ breathing and footfalls? We investigated audience experience through qualitative research, using post-performance focus groups, while a separately conducted functional brain imaging (fMRI) study measured the synchrony in brain activity across spectators when they watched dance with sound or breathing only. When audiences watched dance accompanied by music the fMRI data revealed evidence of greater intersubject synchronisation in a brain region consistent with complex auditory processing. The audience research found that some spectators derived pleasure from finding convergences between two complex stimuli (dance and music). The removal of music and the resulting audibility of the performers’ breathing had a significant impact on spectators’ aesthetic experience. The fMRI analysis showed increased synchronisation among observers, suggesting greater influence of the body when interpreting the dance stimuli. The audience research found evidence of similar corporeally focused experience. The paper discusses possible connections between the findings of our different approaches, and considers the implications of this study for interdisciplinary research collaborations between arts and sciences