Vesica: using Neolithic British ritual art and architecture as a model for making contemporary art

Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/646 on 08.03.2017 by CS (TIS)Can the creative practices of British Neolithic art and architecture be used in the making of contemporary art? This dissertation describes my practice making works of art based on the Neolithic model, presented in a gallery setting and occasionally in the landscape. The creative process is grounded on research into prehistoric British art and ritual architecture and records my process of understanding the work of ancient Britons as a framework for the concurrent process of making new objects for display. Without extensive research and direct experience of the Neolithic art and architecture I would not have been able to create the responsive work that has grown from it. I visited dozens of sites in England, Scotland, and Ireland, immersing myself as much as possible within them, on them and around them; I breathed the damp air and sheltered from the rain under their roofs; I ate in them, I touched, measured and aligned them. I visited them in daylight and at night; summer and winter; on solstices and ordinary days; sometimes by car but mostly on foot. I read copious texts by academic archaeologists in my effort to get into the minds of the people who made these places and got to know the archaeological scene well enough to deliver a paper at the Theoretical Archaeology Group Conference in 2005, taking questions from distinguished Professors Julian Thomas and Mike Parker Pearson. My research included the types of space that remain and explores patterns that exist within the structures, interpreting, based on the archaeology, how the places Neolithic people made might have been used in ritual; in addition it includes an exploration of the decoration and phenomena of the spaces. The process of understanding the Neolithic shaped and transformed my creative practice and profoundly affected my practice of making art and introducing a shamanic theme into the way I share it. The work I make is therefore a response to the ancient practices of the men and women, a collection of objects that a Neolithic artist might make today. Finally the thesis is concerned with identifying three strategies used by contemporary artists; Reconstructing, "Artefacting", and Responding to Neolithic spaces, then documents how these three strategies are used as models in the creation of the practical work that corresponds with the written work. Issues of presentation are explored at some length, born of the dilemmas I experienced when making decisions of where and how to show people what I had made.Dartington College of Art

Basic and degenerate pregeometries

We study pairs $(\Gamma,G)$, where $\Gamma$ is a 'Buekenhout-Tits' pregeometry with all rank 2 truncations connected, and $G\leqslant\mathrm{Aut} \Gamma$ is transitive on the set of elements of each type. The family of such pairs is closed under forming quotients with respect to $G$-invariant type-refining partitions of the element set of $\Gamma$. We identify the 'basic' pairs (those that admit no non-degenerate quotients), and show, by studying quotients and direct decompositions, that the study of basic pregeometries reduces to examining those where the group $G$ is faithful and primitive on the set of elements of each type. We also study the special case of normal quotients, where we take quotients with respect to the orbits of a normal subgroup of $G$. There is a similar reduction for normal-basic pregeometries to those where $G$ is faithful and quasiprimitive on the set of elements of each type

Plant health sensing

If plants are to be used as a food source for long term space missions, they must be grown in a stable environment where the health of the crops is continuously monitored. The sensor(s) to be used should detect any diseases or health problems before irreversible damage occurs. The method of analysis must be nondestructive and provide instantaneous information on the condition of the crop. In addition, the sensor(s) must be able to function in microgravity. This first semester, the plant health and disease sensing group concentrated on researching and consulting experts in many fields in attempts to find reliable plant health indicators. Once several indicators were found, technologies that could detect them were investigated. Eventually the three methods chosen to be implemented next semester were stimulus response monitoring, video image processing and chlorophyll level detection. Most of the other technologies investigated this semester are discussed here. They were rejected for various reasons but are included in the report because NASA may wish to consider pursuing them in the future