3 worlds in 1: London international

video work selected and curated by Edward Lucie-Smith as part of the 'London International' section. Exhibition Dates June 30th – July 31st 2011 Klaipeda Culture Communication Centre, Baznyciu str.4, LT-91246 Klaipeda Lithuania. Website: www.kulturpolis.l

When the image takes over the real: Holography and its potential within acts of visual documentation

In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes discusses the capacity of the photographic image to represent “flat death”. Documentation of an event, happening, or time is traditionally reliant on the photographic to determine its ephemeral existence and to secure its legacy within history. However, the traditional photographic document is often unsuitable to capture the real essence and experience of the artwork in situ. The hologram, with its potential to offer a three-dimensional viewpoint, suggests a desirable solution. However, there are issues concerning how this type of photographic document successfully functions within an art context. Attitudes to methods necessary for artistic production, and holography’s place within the process, are responsible for this problem. The seductive qualities of holography may be attributable to any failure that ensues, but, if used precisely, the process can be effective to create a document for ephemeral art. The failures and successes of the hologram to be reliable as a document of experience are discussed in this article, together with a suggestion of how it might undergo a transformation and reactivation to become an artwork itself. Available in the edited book, 'Holography: a Critical Debate Within Contemporary Visual Culture' by Andrew Pepper.University of Derb

The performance of pain: the consequences for the performing body and its portrayal of mental health

In 2001 the performance artist Kira O’Reilly wrote an article for A-N magazine1 that reflected on the institutional anxieties provoked by ‘Wet Cup’ a performance that includes the cutting and suctioning of her flesh through ‘cupping’ to draw blood. The art institution, despite inviting O’Reilly to perform the work, demonstrated their fears at showing ‘risky’ work through a process which aimed to sanction the ‘health’ of the artwork and subsequently its reflections on the artist herself. They asked O’Reilly to respond to various health and safety demands to account for her mental state and bodily health to prove that she was ‘safe’ to perform2. In asking her to conform to their demands they were making both internal and public assurances that the work was art and not the product of catharsis or breakdown. The institutional unease that O’Reilly could be acting out a psychiatric or psychological disorder through ‘Wet Cup’ demonstrated the sense of mistrust the performing body can instill. Kira O’Reilly’s experience follows a tradition within performance art that inflicts physical pain or suffering. In situating the physical or psychological transgressive within easy and ‘live’ grasp this type of practice presents the performing body as a confrontation to be negotiated. Indeed, when an artist chooses to cut or open their body or remove it from social interaction, their motives are scrutinized for deviance, distress and sanity. Are they mad, eccentric or just responding to questions that ask what it is to be observed and physical creative objects? This paper will analyse the consequences of making performance from physical acts of pain and how this can be understood as sane regarding institutional and public risk. It will reflect on the trauma, stigma and perceptive danger involved with making performance work that includes cutting, or isolating the body from more regular, everyday activity. The paper will reflect on the consequences for the artist, and perceptions of their health both in, and beyond the gallery. The year long works by Tehching Hsieh and the exploration of physical and mental limits through performance by Marina Abramović with be examined along with O’Reilly

She Works - She Writes (performance) and Research and Collaboration (artists talk)

‘She Works - She Writes’ is a work that simultaneously incorporates the narrative documentation of a live action as an integral element of its performance. It analyses the processes and methods of the body as archival record and interpretative account and explores the dialogue between the body politic, as the objectifiable property of performance, and its socialisation as documentary artifact. Effectively, it examines the ways in which the live can be denied being made static through documentation. In expanding and exploring the role of the documenter and their methods of communication in this way, a sense of narrative, of interpretation, is engaged. The document tells a story - it describes an actuality. Yet is it possible to take the document as a true account of the event being transcribed? This dilemma is explored in this work as the documenter will act as the communicator of a ‘hidden’ performance, a performance that only they can see. Beyond hearing the sounds of the ‘hidden’ performer, the audiences understanding of the work will be wholly reliant on the process of textual documentation. The documenter is effectively the sole observer of the methods and processes informing their narration, and they are relied upon to communicate the truth. Like looking through a lens that has been set up for someone else and responds to their viewpoint only, they are positioned to respond to the process of documentation and to analyse their relationship to it. The performer’s body will be denied politicization here, as its objectification will be denied. Instead the documenter, the usually veiled interpreter of the live experience, will trade places with the performer. In this way they will become the body of objectification by communicating the archival legacy of the live event. ‘She Works - She Writes’ is a development from ‘Live / Archive’ which was made and performed as part of a residency in Spring 2012 at Grace Exhibition Space, New York. The performance and accompanying talk titled 'Research and Collaboration', which discusses and details the varying approaches in our work, were scheduled by invitation from Miami International Festival

Performing lost space: discussing an exercise in recording architectural detail with the performing body

The interior of the contemporary art space provides its users with a sterilised laboratory for the placement and experience of art. Increasingly, its bleached interior presents an a priori condition for the legitimate assignment of artworks within the complex milieu of the contemporary city. Such interiors have become an architectural typology, a predetermined homogenous non-place within which artworks reside. In this sense we can look to Lefebvre to understand the condition of the gallery space for ‘inasmuch as abstract space tends towards homogeneity, towards the elimination of existing differences or peculiarities, a new space cannot be born (produced) unless it accentuates differences.’ (Lefebvre: 1991, 52) The work of the artist, by contrast, liberates difference. More specifically, the art of performance simultaneously generates and exposes marginal space within the gallery interior; a corporeal action that deposits residual stains and blemishes across the galleries internal skin, leaving marks and traces that resist homogeneity to create a temporary site of differential experience. The lost, forgotten or overlooked marginal zones and irregularities of a gallery space become a point of ephemeral spectacle and this paper addresses the impact of this spatial and corporeal collision. The research that informs and situates these phenomena traces the irregularities, blemishes and scars that resist conventional mapping; marks that exist within an alternative, unconventional and unbleached space before, during and after a performance act. Recorded through orthographic drawing conventions, the research generated a narrative cartography of corporeal intervention within the interior of X Church Slumgothic, a heavily used semi-decayed community art space in Gainsborough. The co-authors of this research formed a practical collaboration that fused the dynamics and complexities of the performer’s body with the fixed conventions of architectural drawings. The discussion in this paper between performer and draughtsman explores how the body becomes an instrument to record and describe an arts interior beyond, yet from within, traditional architectural systems of representation

⇔ (A ⇔ B means A is true if B is true and A is false if B is false)

⇔ Bartram and O'Neill Negotiating a collaborative relationship has enormous benefits: a sense of comradery, when the making of art can be an isolating process; the ongoing dialogue and critique that can add confidence to a work when it has been tested by two minds rather than one; the knowledge of shared responsibility. There are also huge risks that can be so great they often remain unspoken: trust, ownership, authorship. In a new work developed for In Dialogue Bartram & O'Neill will explore some of the complications of collaboration in a performance dialogue which will take place on a series of blackboards over the course of a day. This durational work will allow both artists and viewers to reflect on the issues raised by collaborative working through a visual dialogue. The work will take as it starting point a statement make by Bartram & O'Neill which will appear in a forthcoming issue of TAJ Q How is the collaborative relationship of Angela Bartram and Mary O’Neill negotiated? What is the aim? Who initiates, and who is the instigator in developing the work? Does it matter? Bartram: The collaboration transcends the boundaries between performance and its legacy, between the performer and observer, between author and interpreter. Rather than the documentation being produced by an onlooker outside the performance, the generation of an accompanying texts becomes integral to the performance itself. Thereby creating a text that is embedded in the physical experience of the performance. In the case of Oral / Response the repetition and rhythm of the action of crushing the sticks of charcoal and blowing the dust is echoed in the tat-tat-tat thud of inscribing the text on the shared surface. O’Neill: Communication and development are negotiated through a dialogue. The partnership is equal in its response to the varying methods and processes that make up its sum parts. Integral to this performance is the distinction between cooperation and collaboration as defined by Pierre Dillenbourg (1996). According to Dillenbourg, “cooperative work is accomplished by the division of labour among participants, as an activity where each person is responsible for a portion of the problem solving...” whereas collaboration involves the “mutual engagement of participants in a coordinated effort to solve the problem together.” (Dillenbourg, 1996) In collaboration the disciplinary ghettos of performance and documentation are abandoned in favour of a mode of practice that allows for a greater level of mutual critique. Performers work together towards a shared goal, the success of the performance, rather than focus on the individual contribution. To this end auto/ethnography enhances the processes of give and take, self-critique, and improvement that enhance the collaborative synergy

Doing less but getting more: Improving forced-choice measures with IRT.

Multidimensional forced-choice (MFC) questionnaires typically show good validities and are resistant to impression management effects. However, they yield ipsative data, which distorts scale relationships and makes comparisons between people problematic. Depressed reliability estimates also led developers to create tests of potentially excessive length. We apply an IRT Preference Model to make more efficient use of information in existing MFC questionnaires. OPQ32i used for selection and assessment internationally is examined using this approach. The latent scores recovered from a much reduced number of MFC items are superior to the full test?s ipsative scores, and comparable to unbiased normative scores

Non-radiative de-excitation of deep centres

We develop a quantitative theory of the ratio R of radiative to non-radiative de-excitation based on the Dexter-Klick-Russell criterion for the occurrence of luminescence. The model invokes three essential elements: a promoting mode, an accepting mode, and a set of lattice modes which ultimately absorb the vibrational energy. The ratio R is determined by the relative population of the relaxed excited and ground states. We show that Rnx(a)/ng(a), where nx(a) and ng(a) are the numbers of vibrational quanta in the accepting mode associated with the excited state and the ground state, respectively, at the crossing of their adiabatic potential energy curves. The result is consistent with experiment

Concerning bodies [stream convenors and panel chairs]

The 'Concerning Bodies' stream is a collaboration with Eric Daffron (USA) and Becky McLaughlin (USA) that is part of the London Conference of Critical Thought, Royal Holloway University of London, 6-7 June 2013. The stream has two parallel strands detailed below: Stream Title: Concerning Bodies This stream has two points of focus: firstly, the representation, and ethical implications, of bodies (both human and animal) in visual cultures and, secondly, the account of the body (and body parts) in Lacan and Foucault. Papers are invited that address any of the concerns detailed under these two headings: The Body and Ethics – Dead or Alive (Angela Bartram and Mary O'Neill): The body is an important site for analysis of the physical and the social condition. Whether human or animal, the body provides information and experience that communicates what it is to be alive – even in death. This has made the body a source material to be analyzed, scrutinized, dissected, and surveyed in the pursuit of knowledge. The human and animal body has historically been used in medical studies, art education, as a donor material, for reference, and creative practice. The appropriateness of the use of bodies in medical enquiry has historically been sanctioned because it has educational benefit. Could the same level of permission be applied to artistic enquiry? What legislates the appropriate use of the dead body in anatomy and biomedical classes and procedures? What informs the decision that the life room is a place for studies of the live human body only? What ethics govern artistic studies of the socio-physical body in art education and creative practice? We seek papers that discuss the role of critical theory in our understanding of the use of the body in visual culture both historical and contemporary, including, but not limited to: • somataphobia, • scopophilia, • scopophobia, • dissection, • necrophobia, • taxidermy Body Parts and Partial Bodies; Body Cuts and Cut Up Bodies: Lacanian and Foucaultian Approaches (Becky McLaughlin and Eric Daffron): Both Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault took the body as an object of critical inquiry but explored it in divergent ways. This panel will bring together scholars working from Lacanian and/or Foucaultian perspectives to interrogate not simply the body but, more specifically, parts of the body. Collectively, the papers selected for this panel will aspire to answer, among other questions: How do Lacan and Foucault cut up the body, what new forms of subjectivity emerge when we pay attention to particular body parts, and how can we bring Lacanian and Foucaultian theory to bear on ethical concerns about the body? Topics for paper proposals include but are not limited to: • fragmented bodies and bodily decomposition • mirror stage and self reflection • self-abuse and body cutting • disciplined and "docile" bodies • torture and punishment • "subindividuals" • sexuality, sexuation, and oversexed bodies • "technologies of the self" • the voice, the gaze, and the fetish • spanking and other sex games • amputation and disability • addiction and obsession, medicine and therap