Person to Person in Costa Rica

While still in the midst of their study abroad experiences, students at Linfield College write reflective essays. Their essays address issues of cultural similarity and difference, compare lifestyles, mores, norms, and habits between their host countries and home, and examine changes in perceptions about their host countries and the United States. In this essay, Kara Barlow describes her observations during her study abroad program at Centro Cultural e Histórico José Figueres Ferrer, in San Ramón, Costa Rica

Caring deception : community art in the suburbs of Aotearoa (New Zealand) : a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Fine Arts at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand

In Aotearoa (New Zealand), community art practice has a disadvantaged status and a poorly documented national history. This thesis reinvigorates the theory and practice of community art and cultural democracy using adaptable and context-specific analyses of the ways that aesthetics and ethics can usefully co-exist in practices of social change. The community art projects in this thesis were based in four suburbs lying on the economic and spatial fringes of Aotearoa. Over 4 years, I generated a comparative and iterative methodology challenging major binaries of the field, including: ameliorative vs. disruptive; coloniser vs. colonised; instrumental vs. instrumentalised; and long term vs. short term. This thesis asserts that these binaries create a series of impasses that drive the practice towards two new artistic categories, which I define as caring deception and the facade. All the projects I undertook were situated in contested space, where artists working with communities overlapped with local and national governments aiming for CBD and suburban re-vitalisation, creative city style initiatives, community development, grassroots creative projects, and curated public-art festivals. I worked within and around these structures, by practicing a methodology of caring deception. I applied a selection of artistic terms of engagement to vernacular structures such as public fountains, festival marquees, popup venues and community centres to negotiate deceit, resentment and care in the making of the art work. This thesis asserts that the methodology of caring deception creates a social ethics in action that can become embodied in the form of the art work

Inspection report: Itchen College

Dates of inspection: 1–5 March 200

Intraneuronal information processing, directional selectivity and memory for spatio-temporal sequences.

Interacting intracellular signalling pathways can perform computations on a scale that is slower, but more fine-grained, than the interactions between neurons upon which we normally build our computational models of the brain (Bray D 1995 Nature 376 307-12). What computations might these potentially powerful intraneuronal mechanisms be performing? The answer suggested here is: storage of spatio-temporal trajectories; thus, neurons have some of the capacities required to perform such a task. In the retina, it is suggested that calcium-induced calcium release (CICR) may provide the basis for directional selectivity. In the cortex, if activation mechanisms with different delays could be separately reinforced at individual synapses then each such Hebbian super-synapse would store a memory trace of the delay between pre- and post-synaptic activity, forming an ideal basis for the memory and response to phase sequences

Imagining intimacy : rhetoric, love and the loss of Raphael.

This article looks at the problem of historical narrative painting in terms of the idealisation of Raphaelesque conventions. It deals with the neglected “Raphaelitism” that Pre-Raphaelitism claimed to reject, seeking to articulate what is termed here an aesthetic of intimacy in contrast to the alienating surface complexity of Pre-Raphaelite art. The aesthetic of intimacy downplays pictorial surface but plays on the ideal of the penetration of surface itself as a revelation of the form of truth to which art gestures. O’Neil’s paintings use the model of Raphael’s pictorial “softness” in order to develop a pictorial strategy in which the viewer is encouraged to attend to the subtle variations of body language. The article appeared in a themed issue of Visual Culture in Britain that was edited by Barlow himself. It is part of the same broad project as Barlow’s monograph, Time present and time past: The Art of John Everett Millais, namely the re-examination of models of “progressive” art by exploring ways in which artists formerly deemed to be “academic” were engaging in complex ways with the problems of representation and tradition. Barlow’s Introduction and the issue as a whole addresses the question of modernity in relation to the conceptualisation of history painting. In this instance, however, the intent is to examine the problem further by looking at an artist who specifically positioned himself as an enemy of stylistic innovation