Barge culture : the ebb and flow of cultural traffic

Early moving image devices and viewing apparatus more often than not used the city as their muse. Displaying and re-representing urban views, they revealed the spaces of illusion in our everyday environment, offering prefilmic spectacles to a receptive public. Social as much as than architectural, this interest in observing our immediate environment has provided us with a rich history of the relationship between architecture and the human body. Early films such as Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera and Laing's Metropolis create an interplay between the viewer and their spatiotemporal confines. The ability in film to manipulate time through freeze framing and slowing, and the multiplication and acceleration of movement, renders time as something elastic and magical. In the structures of many modern films such as Memento and Mulholland Drive, narrative structures are played with and chopped up, representing in themselves a fracturing of thought in different space-time structures. This paper reflects on urbanism and the ways in which artists use the city, revealing abstract notions of cultural use. It presents a curated project and a selection of works which map the city in different ways. </p

Fast and Slow Networks

Digital technologies are the accelerator pedal of contemporary visual culture. Artists, in response, are producing evermore dynamic content, framing how such technologies are reshaping our urban culture. They are also exploring through their practice, ways of socialising these technologies; making them more person orientated and relative. This project highlights how technologies of the information age mirror older, slower networks of the industrial past. Interval is interested in the collision of physical person2person networks with their digital counterparts, and has brought together a group of artists and DIY technologists to explore this conception. Interval will set out on a journey along Manchester's canal network on a barge, hosting a selection of projects in this 'mobile media' space. Live work created aboard the boat will simultaneously be streamed over a custom-built wireless network and projected inside a shipping container located at the Museum of Science and Industry. Interval's selection of mobile locations responds to our express culture; to the supermodernity of impermanence. Through making the work mobile, the audience is encouraged to slow down, to relocate from network time to 'not-work' time, get swept away over Manchester's glittering waters, and join the flotsam and jetsam of barge culture

Curatorial cultures : considering dynamic curatorial practice

The practice of curating is live and temporal. It has shifted dramatically from its anonymous backstage origin within dusty museums to a role at the forefront of modern art, and is responsible for conjuring both a synergy and a dynamic that operates across a multitude of levels. Curation is a rapidly growing practice and discourse that is fundamentally shifting the ways in which we view and receive art. Much of this shift has been influenced by the works being curated, and with a growing body of works being process-led as opposed to object-based; the practice of curation has had to evolve accordingly. This evolution also encompasses the use of alternative exhibition spaces, a movement away from white-walled galleries, and the historic agendas these imply. The increased integration of media-related artworks into mainstream art agendas has contributed to this development of the curatorial role, as it has for collectors, gallerists and archivists. Although it can be argued that performative and interactive works have been curated using traditional methods for a long time now, it is really media-practices that are demanding an alternative perspective. This paper will look at how responsive methods and approaches are called for when curating media-artworks, and how they shift the curatorial role to that of an active practitioner. It will consider curation as praxis; positioning it at a point between what is known and what will be revealed. It will refer to actual exhibition strategies employed by the author, and look to further discuss how dynamic curatorial approaches can be integrated into mainstream curatorial roles, and how these can subsequently evolve thinking on the presentation and display of contemporary art.</p

An Argument for the Improvisational Design of Customer Service Behaviours

The thesis examines the role of improvisation in the theory and practice of design for service and management-oriented design thinking. This examination reveals several features that design thinking and improvisation share, which has significance for service innovation - as it suggests that these features might be incorporated into ‘real-time’ service encounters to make service workers’ improvised behaviours more designerly. Manzini’s ‘action platform’ concept is explored, and used to illustrate how design and improvisation might be combined

The Writing on the Wall: Examining the Literacy Practices of Home Renovation Work

Home renovation workers have historically belonged to the blue-collar workforce. Their jobs are often stereotyped as less cognitively complex than those belonging to their white-collar counterparts. While prior research has revealed the cognitive complexity of such work, there is still a gap in research investigating the literacy practices of “blue-collar” workplaces. Through the lenses of New Literacy Studies and activity theory, this case study examines the texts used in a room remodel, the literacy practices surrounding the texts, and the sociocultural implications of these practices. Through document-based and retrospective interviews, the primary participant is given a voice in identifying and describing the practices and values associated with the texts in his workplace. Literacies identified during interviews are examined in context through observations. The findings indicate the importance of texts not just for facilitating the renovation work, but for developing the social relationships necessary for working together. Influenced by the work of Brandt and Clinton, this study looks beyond the limits of the local to examine how the literacy practices of home renovation workers shape and are shaped by globalizing forces. By situating home renovation work within the larger network of the Information Age, this study questions the extent to which new workplace literacies are blurring the line between knowledge work and manual labor

Developing Voice Through Narrative Writing

Among the many rules taught to students as they engage in the writing process is the instruction to remain objective and avoid writing in first-person. Though there are certainly instances in which it is inappropriate for students to use the word \u27I in their writing, students often misunderstand this instruction and their writing suffers as a result. Students often produce writing which lacks voice in their struggle to remain objective. This project seeks to prove the importance of voice in all forms of writing and provide a method for teaching students how to include voice in their own work. The project includes ten days of lesson plans focused on narrative writing. The plans ask students to complete a personal narrative through which they will be given the opportunity to develop their own voice. The project also seeks to provide a way to teach students to apply what they will learn about voice through narrative writing to other writing endeavors. In this way, narrative writing can serve as a stepping stone by which steps may improve in all areas of writing