On the necessity of wonder: how to explain an artwork to a committee

This essay emerged from an exhibition in 2006 in which notions of the Wunderkammer became central in the curation of the show. It brought together work by Anna Boggon, Silke Dettmers and Helen Maurer, three artists employing the language of what one could call the 'contemporary surreal' ('The Wrong End of the Telescope', Three Colts Gallery, London). The history and concept of the Wunderkammer is critical for the argument pursued in this article, which calls for the re-instatement of 'wonder' and the idea of 'the marvellous'. These are vital ingredients for visual arts practice but are unacknowledged in today's art academies. It takes on board the current debate of 'visual arts practice as research' and extends the argument of authors such as Sullivan (Art Practice as Research, 2005) and Barone, by demonstrating conventional academic definitions of 'knowledge' and artistic practice to be irreconcilable. The importance of not knowing. Wunderkammern and Curiosity Cabinets. Some thoughts on the real, the surreal and the contemporary surreal. The aspirations of words and the difficulties with 'proof'. Heterotopias. Questions rather than answers

A Survey of Sport Fishing in the Illinois Portion of Lake Michigan March through September 1997

F-52-R12Report issued on: May 1998INHS Technical Report prepared for Illinois Department of Natural Resource

Convolutional 2D Knowledge Graph Embeddings

Link prediction for knowledge graphs is the task of predicting missing relationships between entities. Previous work on link prediction has focused on shallow, fast models which can scale to large knowledge graphs. However, these models learn less expressive features than deep, multi-layer models -- which potentially limits performance. In this work, we introduce ConvE, a multi-layer convolutional network model for link prediction, and report state-of-the-art results for several established datasets. We also show that the model is highly parameter efficient, yielding the same performance as DistMult and R-GCN with 8x and 17x fewer parameters. Analysis of our model suggests that it is particularly effective at modelling nodes with high indegree -- which are common in highly-connected, complex knowledge graphs such as Freebase and YAGO3. In addition, it has been noted that the WN18 and FB15k datasets suffer from test set leakage, due to inverse relations from the training set being present in the test set -- however, the extent of this issue has so far not been quantified. We find this problem to be severe: a simple rule-based model can achieve state-of-the-art results on both WN18 and FB15k. To ensure that models are evaluated on datasets where simply exploiting inverse relations cannot yield competitive results, we investigate and validate several commonly used datasets -- deriving robust variants where necessary. We then perform experiments on these robust datasets for our own and several previously proposed models and find that ConvE achieves state-of-the-art Mean Reciprocal Rank across most datasets.Comment: Extended AAAI2018 pape

Raft

'Raft', Silke Dettmers, 2003. Exhibited at Mark Barrow Fine Art, 5. Mar - 28. Apr 07

Immersed in the Ensemble Mindset: "This is Our Song About Us!"

Balm in Gilead requires a unique level of orchestration and scoring by the ensemble, similar to the specificity of reading and playing a piece of music. The play exemplifies the need for ensemble stage managers, who lead productions with an ensemble mindset, establishing themselves as one with the ensemble, demonstrating the same level of focus, attention to detail, and storytelling as the actors and director. I guided our production with this ensemble approach, earning the trust of the players as I embraced each artistic choice fully, voiced technical curiosities, and shared in the collective language of the storytelling.As I engaged the sensibility of an ensemble stage manager, I successfully integrated myself into the show’s artistic scope. I referenced the spirit and culture of ensemble we had pledged to uphold, regularly discussed character and story, and addressed issues while appealing to a sense of community. I used plural pronouns from day one. The play was ours, and I included myself and the stage management team when talking about the creative process. I stood and joined the ensemble for the opening and closing ritual of each rehearsal. I gave multiple lines when prompting, showing that I understood the actors’ needs within the complex text. When calling the show, I was one with the action onstage, fully engaged. Surfacing a group purpose resulted in discipline, community, and communal responsibility in both process and product. This ensemble approach to stage management contributed to a production driven by the company’s interconnected accountability

How to Enhance Interdisciplinary Competence—Interdisciplinary Problem-Based Learning versus Interdisciplinary Project-Based Learning

Interdisciplinary competence is important in academia for both employability and sustainable development. However, to date, there are no specific interdisciplinary education models and, naturally, no empirical studies to assess them. Since problem-based learning (PBL) and project-based learning (PjBL) are learning approaches that emphasize students’ collaboration, both pedagogies seem suitable to enhance students’ interdisciplinary competence. Based on the principle of constructive alignment and four instructional principles on interdisciplinary learning, this paper proposes that students profit more from interdisciplinary PBL (iPBL) than interdisciplinary PjBL (iPjBL). A pre-post study was conducted with a sample of 95 students participating in iPBL and 183 students participating in iPjBL. As expected, multilevel models on students’ development in (a) interdisciplinary skills, (b) reflective behavior, and (c) recognizing disciplinary perspectives show that iPBL enhances students’ interdisciplinary competence more than iPjBL