One Hour - Visual Practice Exploring a Collective History

This chapter considers how the exhibition One Hour uses multiple imagery to position viewers within a familiar visual historiography. Comprised of 3,600 images extracted from the digital photographic archive held by the Hampshire Cultural Trust, One Hour presents scopic fragments of a collective whole with each image denoting a second in time, accumulating as one hour of experience constructed through the multiple identities that formed a local community between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It considers how accumulation, and the responsive capacity of wonder to render meaning from this process, can build relationships between the subject and the viewer. The curatorial practice of contextualizing material culture by the use of archival photography is addressed with the photographed individual reinstated as the producer and consumer of associated material culture, referencing Keene’s observation of the archive as a ‘medium’.1 The text considers the resonance of the individual through a new paradigm of viewing where the criteria for inclusion is that each original individual is looking at the camera, and now at us. The consequent phenomena of advanced technology as a digital interface which disseminates this gaze is seen to manifest a secondary instance of the camera ‘as a kind of mechanical eye’.2 The nuance of images dissected from documentary evidence of social, military, business and familial groups undertaking daily activities, celebrations, rituals, traditions and skills creates layers of interpretive meaning that encourage the viewer to both meander and fixate upon imagery. Reinstated from within the archive, each individual questions our understanding of visibility as we become the observed, repositioned and engaged within a familiar and collective visual historiography. 1. Keene, Suzanne (2005) Fragments of the World: Uses of Museum Collections. Oxford: Elsevier Butterworth- Heinemann, p.116 2. Henning, M. (2009) Technological Bodies in Photography A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge, p.19

A Gadamerian approach to interpreting pain: model-making metaphors through embodied cognitive theory

This paper will discuss how the conceptualization of embodied, abstract notions such as pain, which is multi-modal, non-visual and subjective, has the potential to be communicated visually using model making, as it is traditionally understood in the fields of architecture and design. We propose a new methodological approach to research where Gadamer’s understanding of intersubjective interpretation (2004) used in conjunction with Simulation theory (Gallese and Goldman 1998) in embodied cognitive science, provides a strong framework in which to formulate a palette of materials and forms to visualize subjective experience. This novel approach to design research is currently being undertaken within the field of Health Sciences to produce metaphorically provocative, descriptive models of the lived experience of people with Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) to help bridge the gap in understanding between the sufferer and the public. This paper seeks to engage briefly with two questions integral to the research being undertaken; how does one understand another’s pain, and how can one conceptualize and communicate abstract notions such as pain visually using material and form as language

Significant Walks

This paper will describe the trajectory of research between Thinking Path and Significant Walks and how the latter explores the reality of walking for individuals with chronic low back pain. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, Significant Walks pools the expertise of a research team that share a mutual interest in the resonance of walking as an interpretive tool and who came together following Shirley Chubb’s exhibition Thinking Path, which took Charles Darwin’s daily ritual of walking the same path in the grounds of his family home as its inspiration. The collaborative research team are working with a group of participants who are invited to identify a personal walk that encapsulates memory, reminiscence and familiarity as well as being a measure of their physical experience. Manifested as an immersive digital artwork, a methodology has been identified that synthesizes eye level video documentation of participant’s personal walks with simultaneously gathered streams of kinematic data recording the movement of the spine. Researchers and participants work together to explore how the interpretive qualities of visual effects can be applied to each body of synthesized footage in order to express the nature and resonance of personal movement whilst walking. Each micro journey expresses individual experience through the interpretation of clinically accurate data and acts as a vehicle for precise accounts of physical movement whilst also presenting the reflective individual at the core of scientific understanding

Intervention, location and cultural positioning : working as a contemporary artist curator in British museums

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