Walking Code

This paper describes an early stage research project that seeks to apply Situationist concepts of psychogeography to urban walking as artistic and activist practice. The project seeks to ultimately create a syntax that can be used to describe and codify the subjective spatial practice of walking in the city. This process is a conceptual and discursive exercise to generate new knowledge about urban space as embodied data space that seeks to create a practical open framework that can be deployed to algorithmically generate walking experiences tailored toward specific desires and activities. This will be achieved through the development of algorithmic methods to analyze, comprehensively describe and codify urban walking movements, developing a granular understanding of spatial movements. Walking in this project is understood as a performative act situated within urban systems based on data and algorithmic processes. As urban space is increasingly defined, determined and abstracted by these processes this effort seeks to propose a counter-movement building a language of urban walking to appropriate these processes to create rich crowd sourced walking experiences that suggest alternative user-centric modes of reclaiming the right to the city. This, of course, will also be embedded in data

Augmented Interventions: Re-defining Urban Interventions with AR and Open Data

This chapter proposes that augmented reality art and open data offer the potential for a redefinition of urban interventionist art practices. Data has emerged as a significant force in contemporary networked culture from the commercial commodification of online presence as practised by internet giants Facebook and Google to the 2013 revelations of the unprecedented scale of the US Government’s data collection regime carried out by the NSA (Gellman and Piotras, U.S., British intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program, http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us- internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845- d970ccb04497_story.html, 2013). Big data and its effective deployment is seen as essential to the efficient running of any enterprise, from city governance to commercial enterprise and, of course, government intelligence services. In parallel to developments in big data open data sources have proliferated opening access to myriad data sources previously only available to Government and corporations. We have seen advances in techniques of data scraping and manipulation which have democratised the ability to parse, analyse and effectively manipulate data, developments which have powerful implications for artists and activists. This chapter examines the possibilities for redefining the activist art practice of urban intervention with data and augmented reality to introduce new hybrid techniques for critical spatial practice (Rendell, Critical spatial practice. http://www.janerendell.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/critical-spatial-practice.pdf. Accessed 18 September 2017, 2008). The combination of AR and Open Data (in the broadest post-wikileaks sense) is seen to provide a powerful tool-set for the artist/activist to augment specific sites with a critical, context-specific data layer. Such situated interventions offer powerful new methods for the political activation of sites which enhance and strengthen traditional non- virtual approaches and should be thought of as complementary to, rather than replacing, physical intervention. I offer as a case study this author’s NAMAland project, a mobile artwork which used Open Data and Augmented Reality to visualise and critique aspects of the Irish financial collapse

Exploring Student Engagement and Collaborative Learning in a Community-Based Module in Fine Art

This article is based on masters research1 into student and civic engagement using a case study of an innovative Community Based Module in a Fine Art degree course (McGarrigle, 2009). 2 (Flyvbjerg, 2006) notes that contrary to some common misunderstandings around case study research, it is possible to use individual case study to test theory particularly in relation to falsification. The research presented here is based on student’s repsonses to Coates’ (2007) quantitative study of student engagement and attempts to test his engagement typology which identifies the terms passive, intense, independent or collaborative to apply to students’ approaches to online and general campus learning. In a participatory action research framework, low agreement was found between students (n=13) and lecturers (n=3) in assigning these terms to student postings to online discussion fora. This presents a challenge to the validity of such a narrow typology, and discussions with this student group suggested the addition of ‘adaptive’ as a valid student approach to the varied demands of third level learning. Further evidence from the case study found greater student collaboration in discussion fora when linked to practical course activity. Qualitative analysis of discussion threads using conversation analysis provided evidence for collaboration in deeper knowledge construction when supported by lecturers’ contributions. Collaborative approaches to learning may support learning within a social constructivist paradigm, though acknowledgement must be made of the context of an individualistic society where competition may present real or imagined barriers to student collaboration. An argument is made for Pedagogies for Community Engagement to promote these ways of learning to in order to develop active and engaged citizens of the future

Locative Media as Remix

While data-driven art is not new, recent developments in technical, artistic, and social spheres have coalesced to produce new opportunities for artists and activists who remix data with space and place to form locationally specific political critiques of great power and flexibility

An Arts Based Narrative Inquiry into Learning in an Early Childhood Education and Care Degree

Within a rhizomatic, arts-based narrative inquiry into my practice as a lecturer in a Third Level Institute of Technology I attempt to deterritorialise the pedagogical spaces of an Early Childhood degree. Inspired by Richardson and St. Pierre’s (2005) notion of writing as inquiry and Creative Arts Practices (CAP) Ethnography I experiment with poetry, art and film in order to find my research voice and move through the complexity of learning using the rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). An epistemological dialogue with my past traces a movement away from the dominance of positivist psychology as I step gingerly into autoethnography. I position myself within emerging stories of learner, teacher and researcher and formulate a research project that explores learning and teaching in an Early Years degree in Ireland. Using the troublesome concept of intelligence in a first year psychology class a Learning Carnival is devised to transform the passive lecture space and mount a challenge to dominant psychometric traditions. A focus group allowed students to articulate the role of musical, kinaesthetic, linguistic and other ‘intelligences’ (Gardner, 1983) in the ways they learned and a film called ‘Practice and the Internet’ was made to playfully deconstruct some of the findings. Troublesome knowledge is better conceived as troubling knowledge embracing uncertainty in learning and promoting an active process over a static entity. Likewise intelligence as a noun already presupposes a measurable entity and limits the potential to conceive learning as active, open ended and consisting of various creative processes. Following a number of pioneers of arts based research and identity construction (Leitch, 2010; O’ Grady, 2012), a self-study method prompted students’ writing, portraits, masks and images to explore how they constructed their lives in their final year of a professional Early Childhood course. In collaboration with the students a short film called ‘A Murmuration of Early Childhood’ celebrated their artwork and collective poem ‘Imagine a Child’. An assemblage of research data allowed individual voices within a collective participant voice to merge with the academy and maintain their primacy in a powerful evocative performance text called ‘A Dawn Chorus’. In exposing the influences on the author’s researcher and learner identity the thesis performs a becoming-other and achieves a relative deterritorialization of the pedagogical spaces of teaching and learning (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). In producing a challenge to dominant understandings of learning and intelligences the thesis makes a significant contribution to knowledge and scholarship through the use of arts-based narrative inquiry providing creative alternatives to teacher education in the Early Years. The autoethnographic lens highlights the complex political and social contexts that frame educational experiences and structure relationships between learners and educators and raises questions about the marginalisation and feminisation of childcare in Ireland. Of significance in this study are the ways that learners demonstrate their own agency within limited subject positions and the power of education to provide a route to exhibit and express a personal identity beyond that of mother, father, old, young, male, female, carer. Employing Arts-Based Narrative Inquiry, the thesis makes a significant contribution to knowledge through its focus on creative processes from conception to representation producing a piece of work that is polyphonic, dialogic and novel in the Bakhtinian sense (see Kim, 2016, pp. 72-76). To open up inquiry through creative media means going beyond the predictable and stepping into the unknown world of discovery where meaning emerges from the playful interactions between learners and educators – resonating with the notion of aesthetic play in narrative inquiry (Latta, 2013, in Kim, 2016, ps. 85 - 88). It is hoped that this work will join a burgeoning literature in narrative inquiry that empowers other educators to enter liminal moments of risk and improvise on a tune, take lines of flight and challenge modes of thinking that limit human experience

Preserving Born Digital Art : Lessons From Artists\u27 Practice

This paper looks at the complex nature of developing effective and appropriate strategies for the preservation of born digital art, in particular networked art. These issues are approached from the perspective of artist practitioners, focusing on a case study of the preservation of a net art project by the author. It is suggested that any preservation strategy begins with artists and the conservation practices that are inculcated into the very act of creation. The paper proposes that for institutional digital art conservation initiatives to be successful they must originate from a pre-existing culture of preservation within digital art communitie

Hazardous Biological Activities in Outer Space

The purpose of this article is to focus on space acts that may be classified as ultrahazardous (specifically microbiological research) and to discuss how these activities are or will be affected by current or future legal regulations. Legal standards from both a United States and an international perspective will be discussed

Impact16 Transdisciplinary Symposium, Pact Zollverein, Essen Germany

IMPACT16 is an encounter with HOOD, RYBN.ORG und FORMATIONS, three expert collectives whose diversified forms of cooperation and flexible working practices transcend disciplinary boundaries. How and where do alternative realities come about both in and between different fields of knowledge? How can we productively uncover contradictory ›rift zones‹ in today’s world? What kind of frameworks for action can we cultivate? Informed by multiple perspectives and practices in the arts, politics, technology, sociology, economics and science, the contributing collectives’ inquiries and strategies circumvent disciplinary limits and constraints and open up new spaces for thought and action. The transdisciplinary symposium offers 30 participants from broad backgrounds in the arts and science, time and space for in-depth exchanges and interventions as well as experiments in both practice and thought. IMPACT16 takes place as part of the module ›Techniken des Transfers‹ within the project framework of the Alliance of International Production Houses which enables, for the first time, special conditions of support for participants. Impact is a transdisciplinary symposium that brings together artists and advanced students, practitioners and theoreticians from the natural and social sciences, technology, architecture and urban planning, philosophy, political activism, as well as from the visual and performance arts. It takes place over 4 days at Pact Zollverein center in Essen German

The construction of locative situations: locative media and the Situationist International, recuperation or redux?

A trend exists within locative media art of invoking the practices of the Situationist International (SI) as an art historical and theoretical background to contemporary practices. It is claimed that locative media seeks to re-enchant urban space though the application of locative technologies to develop novel and experimental methods for navigating, exploring and experiencing the city. To this end, SI concepts such as psychogeography and the techniques of detournement and the de ́rive (drift) have exerted considerable influence on locative media practices, but questions arise as to whether this constitutes a valid contemporary appropriation or a recuperative co-option, serving to neutralise their inherent oppositional qualities. The paper will argue that there is an identifiable strand of locative art works which through their contin- gent re-appropriation of situationist techniques can be thought of as being involved in the ‘construction of locative situations’, and that these (re)applications of situationist practices point to future directions for locative media’s artistic engagement with the accelerating ubiquity of locative technologies