Grappling with movement models: performing arts and slippery contexts

The ways we leave, recognise, and interpret marks of human movement are deeply entwined with layerings of collective memory. Although we retroactively order chronological sediments to map shareable stories, our remediations often emerge unpredictably from a multidimensional mnemonic fabric: contemporary ideas can resonate with ancient aspirations and initiatives, and foreign fields of investigation can inform ostensibly unrelated endeavours. Such links reinforce the debunking of grand narratives, and resonate with quests for the new kinds of thinking needed to address the mix of living, technological, and semiotic systems that makes up our wider ecology. As a highly evolving field, movement-and-computing is exceptionally open to, and needy of, this diversity. This paper argues for awareness of the analytical apparatus we sometimes too unwittingly bring to bear on our research objects, and for the value of transdisciplinary and tangential thinking to diversify our research questions. With a view to seeking ways to articulate new, shareable questions rather than propose answers, it looks at wider questions of problem-framing. It emphasises the importance of - quite literally - grounding movement, of recognising its environmental implications and qualities. Informed by work on expressive gesture and creative use of instruments in domains including puppetry and music, this paper also insists on the complexity and heterogeneity of the research strands that are indissociably bound up in our corporeal-technological movement practices

Senses of liveness for digital times

Performing arts allow us to creatively challenge digitally remediated experience, and to collectively reflect on and explore its prolific scales, materials, and modes of existence. Through celebrations of diversity and idiosyncracy, live performance helps us counter the normative pressures of digitisation. This keynote looks at how theatre - Artaud's crucible - is a uniquely powerful means for mobilising the poetic energies that characterise what is human, and what it is to be human. This in turn is seen as a source of vital resilience, tuning our senses of liveness to digital - and post-digital - times

Creative methodologies for understanding a creative industry

The chapter presents a conceptual framework for the identification and analysis of value creating and value capture systems within creative industry contexts based on theoretical and empirical studies. It provides a ‘digital economy’ perspective of the creative industries as a micro-level example of a wider analytical problem, which is how society changes itself. The increasing level of innovation and creativity produces greater levels of instability in social structures (habits, norms etc.) Completely new industries can arise (and ‘creatively’ destroy old ones) as new stabilised patterns form, particularly where entry costs are tumbling, such as digital milieu. Observations of workshops over several days with creative groups, interviews with creative enterprises, literature reviews on creative industries, business models and value systems have informed the analysis and conceptualisation. As a result we present a conceptual framework that we suggest can capture how novelty arises as emergent order over time. We have extended previous work that investigates the significance of emergence in theorising entrepreneurship into an exploration of how to articulate the creation and flow of value and effective ontology in a creative landscape. In the digital economy, the creative industries revolve around dynamic, innovative and often unorthodox collaborations, whereby numerous large, small and micro-businesses come together for the duration of a project, then disband and form new partnerships for the next project. Research designs must therefore address multiple contexts and levels presenting an analytical challenge to researchers. Methodologically, we suggest that the framework has analytical potential to support the collection of data: ordering and categorising empirical observations concerning how different phenomena emerge over time across multiple levels of analysis and contexts. Conceptually, the work broadens the notions of ‘business model’ to consider value creating systems and particular states reached by those systems in their evolution. The work contributes new concepts for researchers in this field and a wider framework for practitioners and policy makers

Setting live coding performance in wider historical contexts

This paper sets live coding in the wider context of performing arts, construed as the poetic modelling and projection of liveness. Concepts of liveness are multiple, evolving, and scale-dependent: entities considered live from different cultural perspectives range from individual organisms and social groupings to entire ecosystems, and consequently reflect diverse temporal and spatial orders. Concepts of liveness moreover evolve with our tools, which generate and reveal new senses and places of vitality. This instability complexifies the crafting of live events as artistic material: overriding habitual frames and scales of reference is a challenge when handling infinitely scalable computational phenomena. With its generative affordances, improvised interactive programming, and notational possibilities, live coding introduces unique qualities into the performance arena. At the same time, performance history abounds in adaptive systems which anticipate certain live coding criteria. Historic performance and contemporary coding practices raise shared questions that can enhance our understanding of live art, notably to do with feedback, fixed versus on-the-fly programmable conceptual and physical frameworks, and inscriptive practices and notation methods for live action. I attempt to address such questions by setting live coding in a wider performance history perspective

Creative methodologies for understanding a creative industry

Objectives The production of innovation or novelty in creative interactions is normally represented in research either as normative patterns of behaviour (being creative) or as post-hoc empirical objects (new firms, new products etc.) The structure of creative practices, i.e. what particular forms of interactivity produce successful novelty (i.e. which becomes ‘normal’ and not novel, which creates and captures value), is not well researched. This paper provides a ‘digital economy’ perspective of the creative industries as a micro-level example of a wider analytical problem, which is how society changes itself. The increasing level of innovation and creativity produces greater levels of instability in social structures (habits, norms etc.) Completely new industries can arise (and ‘creatively’ destroy old ones) as new stabilised patterns form, particularly where entry costs are tumbling, such as digital milieu. Prior Work The authors have undertaken a stream of research that utilises the field of entrepreneurship to study the emergence of novelty. This has been informed by entrepreneurship theories (e.g. effectuation), by complexity theory (e.g. emergence) by constructionist theory (e.g. patterning and identity formation) and by critical realism (morphological perspectives). Approach Observations of workshops over several days with creative groups, interviews with creative enterprises, literature reviews on creative industries, business models and value systems have informed the analysis and conceptualisation. Results We present a conceptual framework that we suggest can capture how novelty arises as emergent order over time. We have extended previous work that investigates the significance of emergence in theorising entrepreneurship into an exploration of how to articulate the creation and flow of value and effective ontology in a creative landscape Implications In the digital economy, the creative industries revolve around dynamic, innovative and often unorthodox collaborations, whereby numerous large, small and micro-businesses come together for the duration of a project, then disband and form new partnerships for the next project. Research designs must therefore address multiple contexts and levels presenting an analytical challenge to researchers. Value Methodologically, we suggest that the framework has analytical potential to support the collection of data: ordering and categorising empirical observations concerning how different phenomena emerge over time across multiple levels of analysis and contexts. Conceptually, the work broadens the notions of ‘business model’ to consider value creating systems and particular states reached by those systems in their evolution

Mothers of invention: an afterword

This paper offers a personal perspective on exchanges at the 2014 NIME panel entitled Gender, Education, Creativity in Digital Music and Sound Art, and also draws on discussion at the 2013 Oxford MusDig Gender Roundtable. Neither anachronistic institutional positions in a fast evolving cultural environment, nor opportunistic promotion of market-driven education programmes doomed to swift obsolescence, is likely to foster the diversity needed to sustain new creative energies in digital music and sound art. Class and race barriers are often indissociable from those that characterise gender discrimination, but this is not just a question of intersectionality. It also concerns thinking specifically about the gendered constructions of the objects and concepts we employ, and about the objectification of gender itself. This overview of a decidedly heterogeneous array of projects and initiatives endeavours to reflect our panel's emphasis on the imperative to uphold diversity and otherness

Crafting a critical technical practice

In recent years, the category of practice-based research has become an essential component of discourse around public funding and evaluation of the arts in British higher education. When included under the umbrella of public policy concerned with the creative industries", technology researchers often find themselves collaborating with artists who consider their own participation to be a form of practice-based research. We are conducting a study under the Creator Digital Economies project asking whether technologists, themselves, should be considered as engaging in practice-based research, whether this occurs in collaborative situations, or even as a component of their own personal research [1]

Motion in Place: Sounding Spaces, Movement, Affect and Technologised Mediation

This paper discusses an AHRC-funded interdisciplinary project being undertaken by researchers at the Universities of Sussex, Bedford, Reading, King's College London and FEUP/INESC Porto. The Motion in Place Platform project is developing methodologies and tools to articulate the human experience of moving through place. As such it explores an often bracketed liminality that resides between material environments on the one hand and immaterial cognitive and behavioural processes on the other. A key technology used by the MiPP team is motion capture and we have been developing multi-channel movement recording suitable for use in the field. Two comparative case studies are discussed to illuminate the scope of the project

Motion in Place: a Case Study of Archaeological Reconstruction Using Motion Capture

Human movement constitutes a fundamental part of the archaeological process, and of any interpretation of a site’s usage; yet there has to date been little or no consideration of how movement observed (in contemporary situations) and inferred (in archaeological reconstruction) can be documented. This paper reports on the Motion in Place Platform project, which seeks to use motion capture hardware and data to test human responses to Virtual Reality (VR) environments and their real-world equivalents using round houses of the Southern British Iron Age which have been both modelled in 3D and reconstructed in the present day as a case study. This allows us to frame questions about the assumptions which are implicitly hardwired into VR presentations of archaeology and cultural heritage in new ways. In the future, this will lead to new insights into how VR models can be constructed, used and transmitted

Genomic, Pathway Network, and Immunologic Features Distinguishing Squamous Carcinomas

This integrated, multiplatform PanCancer Atlas study co-mapped and identified distinguishing molecular features of squamous cell carcinomas (SCCs) from five sites associated with smokin