Cast Contemporaries: artists respond to the completion of the Cast Collection Project at Edinburgh College of Art

Cast Contemporaries is an exhibition that explores contrasting responses to the fate of plaster cast collections in art schools. Many contemporary artists question the relevance of preserving reproductions of antique sculptures, anatomical figures and architectural details. However a growing number of young and emergent practitioners are rethinking the role of these historic educational resources. Edinburgh College of Art has one of the most important cast collections in the UK and, following a two year project in which this unique legacy has been conserved and researched, Cast Contemporaries considers the casts as catalysts for future visual arts experimentation. The exhibition, which reinterprets Edinburgh’s casts with contemporary artworks, is a collaboration between Chris Dorsett, an artist based at Northumbria University whose exhibitions combine contemporary fine art practices with museum display, and Margaret Stewart, curator of the Collection at the College. Dorsett was appointed Honorary Research Fellow at Edinburgh University to curate this exhibition for the 2012 Edinburgh Festival. The 29 contributing artists included: Christine Borland, Gareth Fisher, Kenny Hunter and Alexander Stoddart. A sixty page illustrated catalogue has been produced with 3 essays: 'Contemporaneity: having been there' by Chris Dorsett 'Athena in "The Boeotia of the North"' by Bill Hare 'The Cast Collection at Edinburgh College of Art' by Margaret Stewart More information is available on the project website: http://castcontemporaries.weebly.com

Creativity: can artistic perspectives contribute to management?

Today creativity is considered as a necessity in all aspects of management. This working paper mirrors the artistic and managerial conceptions of creativity. Although there are shared points in both applications, however deep-seated and radically opposed traits account for the divergence between the two fields. This exploratory analysis opens up new research questions and insights into practices

Stuckism, punk attitude and fine art practice : parallels and similarities

My doctoral project, researched between 2006 And 2011, asks if the rapidly expanding art movement known as Stuckism has an approach that can be related to Punk ‘attitude’ in the late 1970s. Theorists of youth-based subcultures have extensively explored the notion of generational attitude (Hebdige 1979, Sabin, 1999) and the ambition of this PhD has been, from the start, to describe the development of Stuckism in terms associated with the rise of Punk within my own generation. As an active member of the original Stuckist group I have had to engage with the same sense of iconoclastic hostility that played such an important role during my time as a Punk musician from 1977 to the present. Thus the research I discuss in this thesis has been shaped by a set of aims and objectives that, firstly, address the similarities and parallels between two distinct historical moments and, secondly, embrace the fact that I am undertaking my research from within the subject group as it coheres into a viable force in the international arts scene. The parallel between Punk and Stuckism may not be immediately obvious for historians or critics. Both are separated in time as distinct episodes in our current cultural story (Bech Poulson, 2005; Evans, 2000) and both are associated with different art forms that address contrasting socio-cultural audiences. Whilst Punk operated, first and foremost, in the context of popular music, Stuckism is a creature of the visual arts, a response to dominant trends amongst gallery and museum directors rather than an appeal to radicalized, media-oriented youth. However, I am not able to examine this contrast from a retrospective point of view and so have built my methodological approach on the hope that the ‘narrative turn’ in contemporary social studies and cultural anthropology (Marcus & Fischer, 1984) offers me a persuasive mechanism for capturing the ongoing development of my practice as a painter with Stuckist and Punk affiliations. As my creative activities have contributed to the idea of Stuckism I have explored how the narratives of identity I associate with Punk attitude have helped form the identity of the group. Here my initial model was research on the narrative construction of identity in professional or social domains described by Czarniawska (2004). However, as I accumulated and published accounts of Stuckism using my growing archive of interviews with other artists in the group (Lynn, 2006) I began to use methodological procedures suggested by Ochs & Capps (2001) to develop a system of interpretation that drew out, I felt, many commonalities with the Punk movement. As a result, my thesis both describes and debates the relevance of Stuckist practice within contemporary art. At the time of writing, the movement, although prominent within media circles, is barely represented in terms of serious and considered debate, whereas Punk is, in many ways, over represented. My ultimate ambition has been to address this situation.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

The rural based artist in Britain and Thailand : an investigation into the creative processes by which artists have rejected the metropolitan context of contemporary art

In my home country there has been an assumption that innovative art is entirely an urban affair. As a result, Thai artists treat the city of Bangkok as a point of cultural focus modelled on Western art capitals such as New York and London. However, in the UK there is a thriving non-metropolitan art culture in which progressive and experimental practices are promoted in rural areas. Given that many Thai artists grow up in agricultural villages (and often explore rural topics in their art) it seems strange that Thailand has no viable alternative to the metropolitan model. My research project has developed new forms of creative practice for rural- based art in Thailand using practical and philosophical approaches derived from Western art. The methodology I have applied to this challenge has involved the dis-location of my practice in both urban and rural areas. During my doctoral project I have produced artworks on the City Campus at Northumbria University and in Banpao, my home village in northeast Thailand where I have pioneered one of the first rural art centres in my country. The body of practical work documented in this thesis is a synthesis of the processes of painting and agricultural work. The images are digitally manipulated photographic collages printed on the kind of canvas support I used when I began my career as a painter in Bangkok. Alongside this practical submission, my thesis begins by describing the contemporary urban/rural divide that allows us to continue to define an area of arts practice as 'rural-based'. I then move on to examine the homesickness and nostalgia that is conventionally said to motivate ruralism. I explore the desire to retreat from the problems of city life in relation to British art and, following a section on present-day life in my home village, the artists working in Bangkok who most epitomise the problems of making rural art in Thailand today. The conclusion to the thesis is reached through an engagement with Proustian reverie, Theravada Buddhism, environmental aesthetics and the philosophy of John Dewey. This leads me to speculate on the aspects of ruralism that make the British version so forward-looking and experimental. As a result, I am able to describe how nostalgia-driven forms of expression do not automatically produce sentimental artworks and propose an approach to rural art that could still carry a great deal of creative resonance for contemporary Thai artists.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

An investigation into the Japanese notion of 'Ma' : practising sculpture within space-time dialogues

The ancient Japanese space-time idea of ma has many aspects, not only in philosophical and artistic pursuits, but also in everyday life. Ma is difficult to pin down because it is an entirely relational concept and the word is only intelligible within our most subjective responses to temporal and spatial discontinuities: its key characteristic being a unity of experience across two fields of aesthetic encounter usually kept apart in the West. These subtle shifts of meaning and attribution within a single spatio-temporal domain have made ma difficult to adapt for Western purposes. Whereas the cultural critic Mark C. Taylor (1997) recognizes ma as the art of ‘spacing-timing’, the art historian James Elkins (2003) confines ma to our appreciation of negative spaces in the visual arts. Both fail to note the broader field of references used by the Japanese and my doctoral project was initiated as a response to the rich spatio-temporal ambiguity of the term and the subtle forms of dialogic awareness it can introduce into the everyday routines of a creative practitioner who is, like myself, from Japan. Because ma operates at so many levels, throughout this thesis I relate my discussion to historical and contemporary artists, performers, writers, film-makers, architects, gardeners, psychologists, philosophers and theologians.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Buddhist meditation as art practice : art practice as Buddhist meditation

This thesis explores the impact of meditation on art practice. Its basic hypothesis is that Buddhist meditation can expand creative capacity by enabling the practitioner to transcend the limits of everyday sense experience and consciousness. Artists engaging in meditation develop a closer, more aware relationship with their emptiness mind (kongxin), freeing them from preconceptions and contexts that limit their artistic creation. Because this practice-led research focuses on how to expand one‘s freedom as an artist, I use two models to explore studio practice, then compare and contrast them with my own prior approach. A year-by-year methodology is followed, as artistic practice develops over time. The first model is studio practice in the UK, the second is Buddhist meditation before artistic activity. The research took place over three years, each representing a distinct area. Accordingly, in area 1 (the first year), I compared studio art practice in the UK with post-meditation art practice; in area 2 (the second year), I compared studio art practice in the UK with prostration practice at Bodh-gaya, India plus meditation before act activity; in area 3 (the third year), I compared studio art practice in the UK with entering a month-long meditation retreat in Taiwan before practicing art. By Buddhist meditation I refer more specifically to insight meditation, which K. Sri Dhammananda has described as follows: Buddha offers four objects of meditation for consideration: body, feeling, thoughts, and mental states. The basis of the Satipatthana (Pāli, refers to a "foundation" for a "presence" of mindfulness) practice is to use these four objects for the development of concentration, mindfulness, and insight or understanding of our-self and the world around you. Satipatthana offers the most simple, direct, and effective method for training the mind to meet daily tasks and problems and to achieve the highest aim: liberation. (K. Sri II Dhammananda 1987:59) In my own current meditation practice before art practice, I sit in a lotus position and focus on breathing in and breathing out, so that my mind achieves a state of emptiness and calm and my body becomes relaxed yet fully energized and free. When embarking on artistic activity after meditation, the practice of art then emerges automatically from this enhanced body/mind awareness. For an artist from an Eastern culture, this post-meditation art seems to differ from the practices of Western art, even those that seek to eliminate intention (e.g. Pollock), in that the artist‘s action seem to genuinely escape cogito: that is, break free of the rational dimensions of creating art. In my training and development as a studio artist, I applied cogito all the time, but this frequently generated body/mind conflict, which became most apparent after leaving the studio at the end of the day: I always felt exhausted, and what was worse, the art that I created was somehow limited. However, my experience was that Buddhist meditation, when applied before undertaking art practice, establishes body/mind harmony and empties the mind. For this artist at least, this discovery seemed to free my art as it emerged from emptiness through the agency of my energized hand. It was this, admittedly highly personal, experience that led me to undertake the research that informs this thesis.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Ruptures and Wrong-Footings: Destabilizing Disciplinary Cultures

In this transcribed conversation, three artists from the research group The Cultural Negotiation of Science (UK) consult each other on the different generational perspectives they bring to the contested field of arts-science research. Traversing territories between art-practice, physics, genetics and critical theory, their practice-based strategies actively destabilize the binary nature of cross-disciplinary dialogue in productive ways, allowing the spaces between artistic and scientific modes of enquiry to become sites of learning, both within and beyond academic institutions

A computational approach to managing coupled human–environmental systems: the POSEIDON model of ocean fisheries

Sustainable management of complex human–environment systems, and the essential services they provide, remains a major challenge, felt from local to global scales. These systems are typically highly dynamic and hard to predict, particularly in the context of rapid environmental change, where novel sets of conditions drive coupled socio-economic-environmental responses. Faced with these challenges, our tools for policy development, while informed by the past experience, must not be unduly constrained; they must allow equally for both the fine-tuning of successful existing approaches and the generation of novel ones in unbiased ways. We study ocean fisheries as an example class of complex human–environmental systems, and present a new model (POSEIDON) and computational approach to policy design. The model includes an adaptive agent-based representation of a fishing fleet, coupled to a simplified ocean ecology model. The agents (fishing boats) do not have programmed responses based on empirical data, but respond adaptively, as a group, to their environment (including policy constraints). This conceptual model captures qualitatively a wide range of empirically observed fleet behaviour, in response to a broad set of policies. Within this framework, we define policy objectives (of arbitrary complexity) and use Bayesian optimization over multiple model runs to find policy parameters that best meet the goals. The trade-offs inherent in this approach are explored explicitly. Taking this further, optimization is used to generate novel hybrid policies. We illustrate this approach using simulated examples, in which policy prescriptions generated by our computational methods are counterintuitive and thus unlikely to be identified by conventional frameworks

C. L. Downing, Salvation from Cinema: The Medium is the Message. New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. Pp. viii, 196. Pb. £33.99. ISBN 978-1-138-91394-3

Review of this book on theology and film for Modern Believing