Telling people where to look in a soccer-based decision task: A nomothetic approach

Research has shown that identifiable visual search patterns characterize skilled performance of anticipation and decision-making tasks in sport. However, to date, the use of experts’ gaze patterns to entrain novices’ performance has been confined to aiming activities. Accordingly, in a first experiment, 40 participants of varying soccer experience viewed static images of oncoming soccer players and attempted to predict the direction in which those players were about to move. Multiple regression analyses showed that the sole predictor of decision-making efficiency was the time taken to initiate a saccade to the ball. In a follow-up experiment, soccer novices undertook the same task as in Experiment 1. Two experimental groups were instructed to either look at the ball, or the player’s head, as quickly as possible; a control group received no instructions. The experimental groups were fastest to make a saccade to the ball or head, respectively, but decision-making efficiency was equivalent across all three groups. The fallibility of a nomothetic approach to training eye movements is discussed

Delegated Peformance: Outsourcing Authenticity

An essay is presented on delegated performance in which nonprofessionals are hired to perform at a particular time on behalf of the artist on his or her instructions. The author stated that this social turn started since 1990s in contemporary art against the tradition of 1960s and 1970s where artists like Chris Burden, Vito Acconci and Gina Pane performed themselves. The author referred to the trend of live installation started in Europe in 1990s in which guards for exhibition were hired. The Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan assembled a soccer club of foreigners to play local matches in 1991

La caja negra, el cubo blanco, la zona gris: Las exhibiciones de danza y la atención de la audiencia

Relocated from the “black box” of experimental theatre to the “white cube” of the gallery, dance in the museum brings about new forms of performance —the dance exhibition— and new protocols of audience behavior that permit, even encourage, smartphone photography. This is the “gray zone” of recent performance, which is both a symptom of, and compensation for, the virtualization of contemporary perception.  Trasladada de la “caja negra” del teatro experimental al “cubo blanco” de la galería, la danza en el museo genera nuevas formas de actuación —la exhibición de danza— y nuevos protocolos de comportamiento del público que permiten, incluso fomentan, la fotografía con smartphone. Esta es la “zona gris” de la actuación reciente, que es a la vez síntoma y compensación de la virtualización de la percepción contemporánea

Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics

A critique of relational aesthetics, as theorized by Nicolas Bourriaud, and exemplified in the work of Rirkrit Tiravanija and Liam Gillick. Using Laclau and Mouffe\u27s theory of democracy as antagonism, the paper proposes instead a \u27relational antagonism\u27 found in certain projects by Santiago Sierra and Thomas Hirschhorn

Divisão digital

Originalmente uma conferência proferida pela autora, o artigo discute a ainda baixa utilização das plataformas digitais para criação de obras de arte. Nos anos 1990, houve, ao contrário, a recuperação de máquinas fotográficas, filmadoras, projetores e outros dispositivos analógicos, antigos, como se a arte resistisse de alguma forma a aceitar um novo código linguístico. O “impulso de arquivo” anunciado por Hal Foster pode estar intimamente ligado a essa resistência

Dance in the Museum

This paper argues that the art world’s current fascination for dance follows on from a previous high point of interaction in the late 1960s and 1970s, and before that, a moment in the late 1930s and early 1940s. It traces these first, second and third waves of dance in the museum at three institutions: the Tate in London, and the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Three institutional histories are sketched, drawing out the differences between their approaches. The conclusion presents the four most pressing possibilities/problems of presenting dance in the museum: historical framing, spectatorship, altering the work’s meaning, and financial support

Participation

An anthology of key writings on the topic of participation in art, from the 1950s to the 2000s

An Inquiry into of the Use of Narrative in Educational Leadership; A Tool for Finding Motive and Morality in Autobiographical and Instructional Works

It is said that there are only four different genres: tragedy, comedy, romance and irony (Frye, 1957 quoted in Bruner, 1996: 95). So to which category does the growing body of narrative accounts written by educational leaders belong? For many, being a leader in education can mean isolation as well as tremendous pressure (Stern, 2009) and so where do current educational leaders turn for guidance in how to best fulfil their roles? In the current educational climate there is the expectation that educational leaders will be able to ‘turn around’ a school, or that the results of a school will continue to improve over time. Understandably, educational leaders may look outside of themselves for inspiration and guidance from those who have been successful. In a situation where educational leaders are under a great deal of pressure, have limited time and do not necessarily have the opportunity to seek guidance from those within their sphere of acquaintance, they can turn to literature for help. As technology and the means through which we can access written material is developing, educational leaders and teachers can access mainstream publications from sites such as Amazon in seconds and receive their books the next day. For many educational leaders who are not undertaking qualifications at universities, accessing books through mediums such as Amazon is easier, cheaper and quicker than exploring peer review publications. It is easier to search Twitter for guidance than it is to trawl through books in a library. This has the potential to create a concerning state of affairs for the education system, as it is possible that educational leaders are seeking guidance from sources that are ineffective, poorly researched, misleading, or not suitable for their context. Using the popular online shop Amazon, I have collected a sample of authors whose books are aimed at teachers and educational leaders. The authors of these pieces are extraordinary. Extraordinary in that they hold the esteem of enough people to make it possible for them to be published and special because they have acted or succeed within the educational profession long enough to 5 see themselves and be perceived as examples for others to follow. In the same way that Bruner reminds us, ‘history never simply happens: it is constructed by historians’ (1996:91), our understanding of what good educational leadership consists of is constructed by educational leaders who have this level of gravitas within the education system. The aim of this research is to explore the narrative process, how memory and experience can act as instructional tools in the current educational system. Through this piece of research, I aim to explore questions surrounding the use of these texts and the impact they can have on educational leadership in the United Kingdom. What do these texts reveal when they are read through the lenses of narrative analysis? How are instructions or guidance imparted by authors through the texts read by educational leaders? What consideration have authors taken when writing for their audience? Are there morality issues that need to be taken into consideration when reading these texts? Bruner (1996) argues that are two kinds of narrative: instructional and storytelling. However, my hypothesis is that there is more to this than a dichotomy, that storytelling, in fact, is instructional in nature within the education system in the United Kingdom. With the books that I am exploring in this dissertation, there appears to be an overlap, a subtlety about where instruction begins and storytelling ends; it is important to determine how storytelling is used by educational leaders as well as whether this is an intentional action used in both written and verbal form. Important also, is the understanding of the process through which the story is created by the author, written, read by the reader and then interpreted by them, potentially then being applied to their own educational practice consciously, for example changing a behaviour policy, or unconsciously, such as having a predetermined view of teachers. As Squire et al. tell us: ‘the creation of the story as a co-construction of the narrator, the audiences of the media in which the story appears is characteristic of all narratives.’ For instance, 6 ‘written narratives are shaped by the writer or writers, and their actual, intended or imagined audiences, but also by writers’ and audiences’ levels of literacy, and by the medium of writing itself: what it provides, in terms of complexity, and the possibility of rereading and remaking meanings, and what it leaves out, for example, paralinguistic speech features such as laugher and sighs (Squire, Davis, Esin, Andrews, Harrison, Hyden and Hyden, 2014; 25). It is for this reason that an exploration of these pieces is essential, as their motives are interpreted and reinterpreted at different points. The process through which these texts go through is one that makes them an important area of study within the fields of educational research and narrative. Firstly, these books are written by an educational leader who has been identified by actors such as OFSTED, the Department for Education, educational publishing houses and so on, as an exemplary individual. They then reflect on their life’s work as a teacher and an educational leader, identifying and interpreting events that retrospectively seem important in their journey. These are then communicated from memory into written form. The purpose of these books may vary: some are overtly instructional, some are memoirs and some are an intentional amalgamation of the two. They are then published and sold to their readers, who in turn read them and draw their own interpretations from the text. These interpretations are they either discarded, adapted or applied without change to a new educational setting by the reader. The focus of this dissertation is to explore this process and identify ways in which the interpretation of these texts can impact the practice and decision making of current educational leaders. By understanding this process in greater depth, my aim is to be able to critically evaluate the texts that are used by many teachers and educational leaders to inform their current practice (see fig. 1)

This progressive production: Agency, durability and keeping it contemporary

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 17(5), 71-77, 2012 [copyright Taylor & Francis], available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13528165.2012.728447.Tino Sehgal is a Berlin based Anglo-German conceptual artist who creates ‘constructed situations’; a process whereby he hands over the delivery of the work to selected ‘interpreters’ or in the case of the Tate Modern (London) 2012 commission, to ‘participants’, who he rehearses and supports to carry out the instructions which embody his vision. Each time a Sehgal work is presented, it is animated by those he has asked and paid to participate, for an audience who are often called upon to engage with a question or conversation. In taking this approach, Sehgal explicitly rejects the idea of the artist as a making of objects. However, unlike the sorts of transitory and ephemeral works of art created in the 1970s which were a deliberate challenge to the commodification of art and by extension the artist, Sehgal constructs situations for other reasons which will be explored in this article. This article will also start to consider how dependence on interpreters or participants extends, transforms or circumscribes authorial control. It will begin to consider the extent to which the construction of live artworks that potentially exceed the life time and certainly the physical presence of the maker represent long-term duration. Does such an approach extend the field of influence and the potential for lasting impact? What impact does duration have on the re-enactor/interpreters capacity to comply with the artist's instructions and what investment do they have in embodying another's artistic vision, particularly if they are required to do so for an extended period of time