Fugitive Objects

This paper considers, from a personal perspective, the intersection between decorative arts, craft and sculpture and the opportunities and challenges provided by making ephemeral work, particularly in the context of museums. There has been a tendency for ceramics to be critically isolated from sculpture and fine art in western cultures in the 20th century, and whilst there is currently a renewed interest in clay as a material within contemporary art, such work is often positioned, collected and theorised from a separate perspective to ceramics viewed in the context of craft. There is much to gain from greater integration of the two, moving away from a linear understanding of ceramics, towards an approach as plastic and three-dimensional as clay itself, and part of a broader understanding of sculpture. How may ceramics operate as a site of live production, learning, and performance? What are the implications of documentation and the collection of ephemeral works through visual and non-visual media; such as photography, film, re-performance and writing? Materiality, land art, craft theory and museology provide useful in roads to exploring this territory and defining ways in which ceramic sculpture may be understood outside traditions of the artist as lone author, making as a studio practice and the permanence of objects

Peripatetic Making: a borrowed space, time continuum

Reflecting on experiences of working in different places, Cummings considers aspects of her approach to working with clay and the ways in which her practice shifts. From the Arctic to Hawaii, factory to museum, Cummings explores how the separate characteristics of these environments have informed her work and processes, and the continuity within her practice as a whole

Beyond the Studio

The model of studio ceramics dominated contemporary ceramics in the 20th-century. For the most part, the terms might be considered inter-changeable. By its definition studio ceramics maintains two key positions; firstly, that that the site of production is a studio – usually that of the individual artist/ potter, and secondly that the outcome of this is a fired ceramic vessel or object, that may then leave the studio as a commodity. Through this paper I will consider from a personal perspective the shifts in education, making and outcomes as part of a ceramic practice, and examine specifically the role of the studio and it’s relevance within the expanded field of ceramics today

Material Performance: Presentation/panel discussion

Paper given at Uppsala Konstmuseum, Swede

On the evolution of non-axisymmetric viscous fibres with surface tension, inertia and gravity

We consider the free boundary problem for the evolution of a nearly straight slender fibre of viscous fluid. The motion is driven by prescribing the velocity of the ends of the fibre, and the free surface evolves under the action of surface tension, inertia and gravity. The three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations and free-surface boundary conditions are analysed asymptotically, using the fact that the inverse aspect ratio, defined to be the ratio between a typical fibre radius and the initial fibre length, is small. This first part of the paper follows earlier work on the stretching of a slender viscous fibre with negligible surface tension effects. The inclusion of surface tension seriously complicates the problem for the evolution of the shape of the cross-section. We adapt ideas applied previously to two-dimensional Stokes flow to show that the shape of the cross-section can be described by means of a conformal map which depends on time and distance along the fibre axis. We give some examples of suitable relevant maps and present numerical solutions of the resulting equations. We also use analytic methods to examine the coupling between stretching and the evolution of the cross-section shape

An Evolutionary View of the Critical Functions of Slot Machine Technology

The U.S. gaming industry has grown from its infancy in the early 1930s to a maturing giant in the 1990s. With this growth has come an evolution in management functions associated with one of the major components of casino operations, the slot department. These functions; counting, analysis, security, maintenance, and marketing, have evolved through an iterative process of technology; applying science to enhance functionality. This paper traces the expanding applications of gaming technologies, and provides a framework for understanding the past, present and future uses of technology in casino slot operation

Study of low frequency hydromagnetic waves using ATS-1 data

Low frequency oscillations of the magnetic field at ATS-1 were analyzed for the 25 month data interval, Dec., 1966 through 1968. Irregular oscillations and those associated with magnetic storms were excluded from the analysis. Of the 222 events identified, 170 were found to be oscillating predominantly transverse to the background magnetic field. The oscillations were observed to occur most frequently in the early afternoon hours. They also seemed to occur more frequently during Dec., Jan., and Feb. than at any other time of the year. During a given event, the frequency was fairly constant. The event duration varied between a minimum of 10 min. and a maximum of 14 hrs and 26 min. During a given event the amplitude varied