JuxtaLearn DELIVERABLE Report D3.5 Service scenario documentation

The purpose of Deliverable 3.5 is to provide guidelines to creating juxtaposed performance, particularly to advise non-drama teachers on what to do and how to manage performance in stage 3 of the JuxtaLearn process. Building on pedagogies of threshold concepts and juxtaposed learning, it explains the performance steps, orchestrating learning through participative video making and story making with peers. It provides guidance for teachers, offering resources that include suggested lesson plans and example timings. Thus, in the absence of a shared touchable with JuxtaLearn software, it suggests a practical additional and alternative to using the software of WP4 touch table

JuxtaLearn D3.2 Performance Framework

This deliverable, D3.2, for Work Package 3 incorporating the pedagogy from WP2 and orchestration factors mapped in D3.1 reviews aspects of performance in the context of participative video making. It reviews literature on curiosity and engagement characteristics of interaction mechanisms for public displays and anticipates requirements for social network analysis of relevant public videos from WP6 task 6.3. Thus, to support JuxtaLearn performance it proposes a reflective performance framework that encompasses the material environment and objects required, the participants, and the knowledge needed

Legislative art as Policy and Pedagogy

The primary medium for artist Laurie Jo Reynolds is that of political lobbying. She refers to her practice as “legislative art,” adapting the term “legislative theater,” a technique for grassroots lawmaking developed and coined by Brazilian director and playwright Augusto Boal, who both founded the Theater of the Oppressed and served as a member of the Rio city government from 1993 to 1997. By linking the discourses of art and law, Reynolds’ practice can be understood as a form of education, highlighting the restrictions required for creativity, and the possibilities afforded by structure. In my essay I bring together European political theory, modern American politics, and contemporary conceptual art in order to magnify the possibilities of what Friedrich Schiller called “aesthetic education.” While other scholars have understood art and art education as a process of pleasurable exploration, or formal disciplinary explication, I hope to suggest a way of engaging art education as an intellectual pursuit with open-ended political possibilities

The Art of Planetary Science: Art as a Tool for Scientific Inquiry and Public Discourse around Space Exploration

Art can be a powerful tool in science engagement efforts to help facilitate learning and public discourse around space and space exploration. The Art of Planetary Science is an annual exhibition combining science and art which aims to help people to connect more meaningfully to science outside of traditional education models. Works solicited from scientists and from the public explore the beauty of the universe, as well as communicate and abstract scientific concepts from an artistic framework. These events offer the public a unique perspective on science and an opportunity to participate in dialogue around how and why we explore space. As an extension of the exhibition, a series of workshops for artists and educators focuses on techniques in creating science-driven art and how it can be used as a tool for scientific inquiry. We will discuss our success with these efforts and the important role that art can play in shaping the evolving narrative of humanity's relationship to space.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures, special issue on art and scienc

Open mic: a documentary film exploring humorous narratives

This documentary investigates hardship and identity through humor. The film shadows the lives of three individuals who are all going through a watershed experience with their identities ranging from changes in their family dynamics, gender, or environment. Participants will be writing and performing a stand-up routine in front of a live audience that focuses on a story about their identity. The film underscores how, or if, the sender’s use of humor helps them cope or achieve closure. The film does not explore the audience’s reaction to humor. Using in-depth interviews with each comic, the film centers around the sender, highlighting the intrapersonal impact communicating through humor has on them. The scope of topics within the interviews include recounting their adversity, understanding their coping methods, discovering their humor style, and reflecting on their comedy performance in the context of their hardship

The Techne of YouTube Performance: Musical Structure, Extended Techniques, and Custom Instruments in Solo Pop Covers

They begin with a note, a chord, the tap of a button, or the triggering of a loop: through progressively layered textures, samples, and extended performance techniques, solo cover songs on YouTube often construct themselves piece by piece before the viewer’s eyes and ears. Combining virtuosity and novelty in a package ready-made for viral online popularity, this recent and rapidly growing internet phenomenon draws together traditions old and new, from the “one man band” of the nineteenth century, to the experimental live looping of 1980s performance art, to contemporary electronic music. Building on a number of recent studies that examine the affordances and restrictions of writing and performing music on various instruments, the case studies in this article explore how these YouTube performers use theoretical and instrumental expertise to convey complex textures through a minimal collection of musical materials. In each case, the instruments themselves are arranged, modified, or even created in order to make these performances possible. These videos often incorporate looped or layered elements, arranged to take advantage of a song’s harmonic or rhythmic structures; and they frequently feature customized, self-created, or otherwise unconventional instrumentation. Through their sparse, economic construction, these intricate arrangements are each the end product of a careful analysis of each song, and they have much to teach us about the harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic structures of popular music

'Couture military' and a queer aesthetic curiosity: music video aesthetics, militarised fashion, and the embodied politics of stardom in Rihanna’s 'Hard'

Music video is an underappreciated type of audiovisual artefact in studies of the aesthetics of world politics, which typically privilege linear narrative storytelling and struggle to communicate how sonic and embodied practices also constitute world politics as sensory experiences through which individuals make sense of the world. Yet the ways in which music video invites spectators’ senses to work together, and to filter meaning through their knowledge of stars’ own ‘meta-narratives’, expose an intimate and affective continuum between the politics of stardom and attachments to collective projects such as militarism. This paper explores that continuum through a study of Rihanna’s video ‘Hard’ and the aesthetic strategies it used to visualise her performance of a ‘female military masculinity’ in a fantasised space employing signifiers of US desert war

“Get Your Geek On”: Online and Offline Representations of Audiotopia within the GeekyCon Community

This thesis examines the musical community of GeekyCon, a convention centered around popular media, such as Harry Potter, Broadway, and Disney. The GeekyCon community results from the connection between the unofficial convention Facebook group and the yearly physical event. This interconnectivity allows both the live and mediated space of GeekyCon to function as a heterotopia, a concept first conceived by Foucault (1967) as a separate space outside of the dominant society in which ideas and identities can be freely explored. Through ethnographic research, including participant observation as well as interviews, I present the music of GeekyCon as an audiotopia, a sonic realization of heterotopia theorized by Josh Kun (2005). The musical experiences present at GeekyCon, both virtual and physical, provide members of the community with a means to negotiate personal as well as group identities and to decide what it means, as the convention slogan says, to “Get Your Geek On. I divide the thesis based on several overarching musical themes important to the GeekyCon community. After my initial introduction, the second chapter, entitled “Why are the Wiggles Performing at GeekyCon?” elaborates on the concept of audiotopia. This chapter draws on examples from the Facebook group to demonstrate the way in which music found at the convention creates a site for group identity formation and negotiation, thus demonstrating iterations of audiotopia. The third chapter, “Yes All Witches,” further analyzes the inclusive and feminist environment found within this community. Drawing from the previous chapters’ discussion of audiotopia, I argue that the music at GeekyCon, specifically wizard rock, functions as an aurally enacted safe space. The next chapter, entitled “We’re All in This Together,” describes the participatory and performative practices at GeekyCon. The musical theater singalongs found at the convention blur the line between participatory and presentational music and help establish a sense of community at the convention. I furthermore connect the performative musical practices to a larger discussion of performativity within feminist scholarship. Finally, I conclude with a summary chapter placing my thesis within the larger fields of ethnomusicology and fan studies