Visualising Music with Impromptu

This paper discusses our experiments with a method of creating visual representations of music using a graphical library for Impromptu that emulates and builds on Logo’s turtle graphics. We explore the potential and limitations of this library for visualising music, and describe some ways in which this simple system can be utilised to assist the musician by revealing musical structure are demonstrated

INVISQUE: Intuitive information exploration through interactive visualization

In this paper we present INVISQUE, a novel system designed for interactive information exploration. Instead of a conventional list-style arrangement, in INVISQUE information is represented by a two-dimensional spatial canvas, with each dimension representing user-defined semantics. Search results are presented as index cards, ordered in both dimensions. Intuitive interactions are used to perform tasks such as keyword searching, results browsing, categorizing, and linking to online resources such as Google and Twitter. The interaction-based query style also naturally lends the system to different types of user input such as multi-touch gestures. As a result, INVISQUE gives users a much more intuitive and smooth experience of exploring large information spaces

Abstraction’s ecologies : post-industrialization, waste and the commodity form in Prunella Clough’s paintings of the 1980s and 1990s

This article’s aims are twofold: firstly, it argues that Prunella Clough’s engagement with consumer items in her paintings of the 1980s and 1990s constitute a sustained engagement with the fluctuating nature of the commodity form, moving beyond the established critical narrative whereby these works are understood as simply redeeming “everyday” materials. Secondly, in order to do this, it proposes new artistic frameworks for Clough’s work, moving away from her early association with Neo-Romanticism to foreground her relationship with Pop and Minimalism, and with Post-Conceptual painting. Clough’s late works, it finds, powerfully condense histories of industrial production and painting in Britain.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Toile

Toile is a painting series that explores constructions of taste and the semiotics of manufactured fabrics. Through the use of irony, paradox and deconstructions of rhythm, shape, color and form, the paintings are a response to the formal and historical content in the fabric. The idyllic landscape, notions of identity, sexism and liminality are some of the themes considered in the series. The paintings in this exhibition attempt to correct and mediate outdated models of representation through the exploration of painting as a process that is open and malleable

Lisa Blas: Meet Me at the Mason Dixon

The Schmucker Art Gallery at Gettysburg College is extremely pleased to mount the remarkable series of paintings, photographs, and mixed-media installation by contemporary artist Lisa Blas entitled Meet Me at the Mason Dixon. This exhibition is an official part of Gettysburg area’s 150th Commemoration of the American Civil War as well as Gettysburg College’s Kick-Off event for this significant anniversary. Gettysburg provides an especially appropriate backdrop for the exhibition, as the artist took the history of this “hallowed ground” and its current resonances as the subject of her work. Blas traveled the Gettysburg National Military Park, as well as to the Antietam National Battlefield, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Archives and the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia, among many other sites, to investigate how national identity and cultural myths are shaped in response to this momentous period of American history. The title of this exhibition, Meet Me at the Mason Dixon, invokes an encounter at a historical boundary line known for centuries of conflict. The Mason-Dixon Line originally was intended to solve a British colonial dispute. Later, it divided the northern from the southern United States based on the legality of slavery, and as such, symbolizes the massive fracturing of the country during the American Civil War. To contemporary artist Lisa Blas, however, the Mason-Dixon emblematizes the tensions implicit in the concept of historical memory. How are traumas witnessed and remembered? What becomes codified as history, and what other narratives are thereby repressed? What age-old divisions haunt us in the present? Blas comprehends such questions as open-ended, visualizing the past as fundamentally, and persistently, conflicted. [excerpt]https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/artcatalogs/1006/thumbnail.jp

Images in Space: The Challenges of Architectural Spatiality in Comics

A selection of hypercomics that extend the concept of the Infinite Canvas are examined to address the challenges of architectural spatiality. As comics gradually leave behind the trappings of the printed page, the language and tropes unique to print are slowly being modified and replaced by new structures native to the screen. Infinite Canvas comics have expanded and made explicit the spatial network at the heart of the medium. The hypercomic form has introduced new approaches to the creation of branching, multicursal narrative structures. Videogame tropes and game spaces have merged with the comics medium, creating distinct new hybrid forms. As the medium becomes increasingly distanced from its origins in print, it becomes essential to consider other forms comics could potentially adopt as a result of this shift in their underlying tropes and processes. The chapter takes as its primary case study an architecturally mediated hypercomic created as a practice-lead inquiry into the workings of the form. Alongside comics theory, the paper draws on the study of narrative space within videogames and new media. It considers the use of tropes appropriated from digital comics and explores the tension between fixed sequence and freeform exploration inherent in architecturally mediated works. Ways in which the relative position in three dimensional space between reader and panel sequence can be used for narrative effect are explored. An analysis of how spatial depth impacts on the reader’s experience of panel sequences is included whilst considering the narrative and navigational roles played by perceptual tags. Lastly, the importance of site specificity in architecturally mediated works is examined.Peer reviewe