Coming to Our Senses

In order to grasp the significance and potential of live arts curating, I claim it is essential to understand the coming-to-visibility of the curator function in the artworld from the 1960s. This helps to navigate the question of whether the arrival of this discourse and practice for performance in the last decade is an extension of a curatorial remit founded in the gallery arts. Has the scope of curatorial work expanded, or is there a parallel operation for live arts? I argue that a third possibility remains, that it signals a mutation of curatorial practice that bears on both the formerly visual arts and on the shift ing ground of live arts. What becomes possible when curatorial work lays aside its visual privilege, its expert eyes and the authority of its insights?

The visual gamut and syntactic abstraction

Charles S. Peirce’s second trichotomy, which introduces the concepts of iconicity, indexicality, and symbolicity, is probably the only piece of his semiotic that is familiar to visual artists and designers. Although the concepts have found their way into the academy, their utility in the field has been reduced for a couple of reasons. First, as with all of Peirce’s philosophy, his second trichotomy is a concept that is subtle, fluid, and difficult to fully grasp in a sound bite. Second, there has simply been no bridge concept that would form a working connection between that philosophy in its logical guise and the studio practice in the visual arts. The purpose of this article is to remedy that situation by investigating the subtle ways the second trichotomy functions within the visual sphere, and to then suggest a model that can serve to bridge the divide between pure theory and practice. The article makes four main points: first, using examples from visual identity and the graphic arts, it demonstrates how the modes of icon, index, and symbol tend to be blended; second, examples from fine art are used to illustrate how the concept of abstraction, as used in the art world, can only be partially accounted for within the second trichotomy, but can be modeled by supplying a syntactical supplement; third, it expands on and elaborates a previously sketched model, the visual gamut, which makes it possible to classify visual entities according to their position within a map of semantic and syntactic space; finally, it concludes by suggesting ways this enhanced version of the visual gamut model might be used in the analysis of, or creation of, art and design, presenting suggestions for further study.

Relevance of Informal Arts Education on Formal Visual Arts Education in Southeast Nigeria

The existence of informal arts education centres has raised a lot of controversy in arts education and practice in Nigeria. Often people do not regard the products of these informal arts centres as artists. They regard them as artisans even though most of them are being trained by formal artists and are being imbibed by their artistic traditions. It is, therefore, pertinent to investigate these informal arts centres and assess their existence and their influence on formal arts centres. This study was, therefore, designed to explore the assessment of informal arts education and its influence on formal art education in southeast Nigeria. The research questions were on the: educational relevance of informal arts education on formal art education, the influence of arts education on formal art education and on whether informal and formal art education can co-exist. The questionnaire was used to elicit vital information from the respondents. The findings revealed that the existence of informal arts education is relevant to formal art education, informal arts education influences formal art education and informal arts education can co-exist with formal art education. The paper recommended that the Ministries of Education should encourage and ensure that the formal art schools and informal arts centres co-exist.

A large scale study of reader interactions with images on Wikipedia

Wikipedia is the largest source of free encyclopedic knowledge and one of the most visited sites on the Web. To increase reader understanding of the article, Wikipedia editors add images within the text of the article’s body. However, despite their widespread usage on web platforms and the huge volume of visual content on Wikipedia, little is known about the importance of images in the context of free knowledge environments. To bridge this gap, we collect data about English Wikipedia reader interactions with images during one month and perform the first large-scale analysis of how interactions with images happen on Wikipedia. First, we quantify the overall engagement with images, finding that one in 29 pageviews results in a click on at least one image, one order of magnitude higher than interactions with other types of article content. Second, we study what factors associate with image engagement and observe that clicks on images occur more often in shorter articles and articles about visual arts or transports and biographies of less well-known people. Third, we look at interactions with Wikipedia article previews and find that images help support reader information need when navigating through the site, especially for more popular pages. The findings in this study deepen our understanding of the role of images for free knowledge and provide a guide for Wikipedia editors and web user communities to enrich the world’s largest source of encyclopedic knowledge.

Considering the Visual Arts and the Autism Spectrum

This chapter explores the visual arts and the autism spectrum. Descriptions and working definitions of “visual arts” and “autism spectrum” will be presented. The four defining and observable characteristics that make the autism spectrum will be considered. The purpose of the autism spectrum coordinates increasing possibilities that need to be discussed and evaluated for each person by many people. Five disabilities that preceded the autism spectrum organization will be identified. The five disabilities have been joined together in the autism spectrum. The authors invite people identified as being on the autism spectrum to consider engaging in art activities often. Art is a joyful activity for many people. Some people who are on the autism spectrum seem to be very artistic. This observation is being studied and discussed by many professionals at this time. What are positive ways for people on the autism spectrum to express their artistic talents?

Image and Word in Postmodern Poetry: Friederike Mayröcker’s BROTWOLKE

This article explores the interplay of visual arts and poetic images in postmodern poetry, focusing on the case of Friederike Mayröcker’s poem BROTWOLKE, nach Karla Woisnitza (1996) [BREADCLOUD, after Karla Woisnitza]. The article shows that BROTWOLKE belongs to a group of texts whose titles indicate an ekphrasis or an intermedial quality, but whose specific point of reference is absent. Rather than referencing to a specific painting, the poem thus showcases different aspects of the visual. Offering a close reading of the poem, the article explores Mayröcker’s special technique of image-writing and its dynamic effect on the reader. The article argues that the poem both “shows the word” and “writes the image.” It is shown that Mayröcker’s stream-of-consciousness is a process that refers to the act of writing in the first place and then to an inventory of texts and images that float the text as a stream of sense-data.