Composing the North: a musical study of identity, transformation, and reflection

In 2015, occursus – a network of artists, researchers, and academics with an interest in space and spatialities in art – commissioned a series of musical compositions based on a small patch of land close to the centre of Sheffield, England. The land in question, which houses one of the world’s oldest cementation furnaces, has witnessed a remarkable period of transformation; initially standing among some 2,500 furnaces in the heart of the industrialised city centre, the national decline of steel production resulted in dereliction and for much of the past sixty years the furnace towered over wasteland. occursus acquired the land in 2012, and turned it into a community arts space, now known as Furnace Park. This article explains how a series of composers responded to this park through the creation of new musical works. Although most attention is directed to the author’s own work, Foundry Flux (2015), the primary focus of the article is on the collective approach to occursus’ objectives which, to the surprise of all of the commission-holders, focused their attention way beyond the tiny patch of land in the heart of Sheffield; the project became a catalyst for: 1) studying the identity of the city; 2) observing and initiating transformations of that identity; and 3) reflecting upon one’s own role within such identity transformations. In combining these three, those in the group found themselves engaged in a practical process of composing the north

Rich Situated Attitudes

We outline a novel theory of natural language meaning, Rich Situated Semantics [RSS], on which the content of sentential utterances is semantically rich and informationally situated. In virtue of its situatedness, an utterance’s rich situated content varies with the informational situation of the cognitive agent interpreting the utterance. In virtue of its richness, this content contains information beyond the utterance’s lexically encoded information. The agent-dependence of rich situated content solves a number of problems in semantics and the philosophy of language (cf. [14, 20, 25]). In particular, since RSS varies the granularity of utterance contents with the interpreting agent’s informational situation, it solves the problem of finding suitably fine- or coarse-grained objects for the content of propositional attitudes. In virtue of this variation, a layman will reason with more propositions than an expert

Composing the plastic city : a reflection on methods, motivations and meanings

In 2015, occursus – a network of artists, writers, researchers and academics with an interest in space and spatialities in art – commissioned a series of musical compositions based on a small patch of land on the edge of Sheffield. The patch of land, still home to one of the world’s oldest cementation furnaces, was once situated at the heart of the industrial city centre where it was engaged in the production of blister steel. Following the national decline of this industry, the land lay forgotten and derelict until a recent rediscovery, or re-imagination, of the space produced Furnace Park – a community park that invited reflection upon the changing nature of the city through the act of artistic engagement and activity