Participatory, art-based appreciative inquiry with artists labelled/with intellectual and developmental disabilities

People labelled/with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) participate in community-based studio programming across the United States, yet their experiences and preferences for studio programming are not well known. The goal of this research was to learn what artists in a community-based studio think is important about their studio and what they want to change in the future. Using art-based appreciative inquiry and online methods, the artists were prompted to talk and create artwork about ‘what is most important’ in the studio and ‘what we want for the future’. The artists reported that the most important aspects of the studio are the staff and their friends at the studio and the opportunity to make art that is motivated by their interests. The wishes expressed by the artists included increased opportunities to be social, to make more money, to have more community access and more choice and control in the studio.

“In the First Place, We Don’t Like to Be Called ‘Refugees’”: Dilemmas of Representation and Transversal Politics in the Participatory Art Project 100% FOREIGN?

100% FOREIGN? (100% FREMMED?) is an art project consisting of 250 life stories of individuals who were granted asylum in Denmark between 1956 and 2019. Thus, it can be said to form a collective portrait that inserts citizens of refugee backgrounds into the narrative of the nation, thereby expanding the idea of national identity and culture. 100% FOREIGN? allows us to think of participatory art as a privileged site for the exploration of intersubjective relations and the question of how to “represent” citizens with refugee experience as well as the history and practice of asylum. The conflicting aims and perceptions involved in such representations are many, as suggested by the opening sentence of Hannah Arendt’s 1943 essay “We, Refugees”: “In the first place, we don’t like to be called ‘refugees’”. Using 100% FOREIGN? as an analytical reference point, this article discusses some of the ethical and political implications of representing former refugees. It briefly considers recent Danish immigration and asylum policies to situate the project in its regional European context and argues that, similarly to its neighbouring countries, Denmark can be described as a “postmigrant society” (Foroutan). To frame 100% FOREIGN? theoretically, this article draws on Arendt’s essay, Trinh T. Minh-ha’s concept of speaking nearby, as well as the feminist concept of transversal politics (Meskimmon, Yuval-Davis). It is hoped that this approach will lead to a deeper understanding of what participatory art can bring to the ethical politics of representing refugee experience.

Design and Implementation of Human-Computer Interface for Participatory Art Video Development Platform Based on Interactive Non-linear Algorithm

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology is innovatively combined with participatory video for artistic creation and communication to improve the enthusiasm of art lovers for artistic creation and communication and expand the application range of AI technology. First, the interactive framework of interactive participation video is proposed based on the analysis of the related literature of interactive non-linear video. Then, a questionnaire is designed accordingly to analyze the social needs of people on art social platforms. According to the survey results, the participatory art video online communication platform is designed and preliminarily realized. Finally, a participant video eye movement control experiment is conducted to test the performance of the participatory art video development platform. Meanwhile, the platform is evaluated through field research from two aspects of test efficiency and user experience. The results show that the operation time of the participatory art video development platform is much shorter than that of the control group. It takes only approximately 15 s to complete the annotation operation with low SD, indicating that the system performance is stable. The accuracy of the platform also reaches 100%.

Computer Games as Social Sculptures

By drawing on Joseph Beuys's notion of "social sculpture" and bringing together the discussions on participation from participatory art, participatory design, and game design, this paper seeks to expand the notion of participation in digital play. The expansive definition of participation allows us to better grasp computer games as a critical platform for dialogue and action, and computer gameplay as a transformative process of sculpting social fabric. By analyzing existing games in light of the concept of social sculpture, this paper explores how Beuys's central tenet-the discourse of participation-can "politicize" the practice of digital gaming and game design. Furthermore, the paper proposes a participation-centered game design approach that is politically responsible and engaging, attempting to arrive at new knowledge that will help to make games that can function as a platform for participation and social commentary.

Notes From the Field (From the Desk): To Hold

The last seminar of my “Introduction to Literary Theories” course in the fall semester of 2020 involved really difficult material on gender and race; it was exposing; none of the students had their cameras on. I was nearly in tears. Kept composure. We had been navigating well through the semester, with this and the other first-year module on poetry—subjects adjacent to theatre as a result of my situation within a department of English literature. This semester, I've been more bold, gently asking students to turn cameras on; I remember, though, always, Owen Parry's articulation of audience participation at the start of a Zoom event for the Welsh National Theatre. Some people hang back; some people are highly present (front-row types—I was always one of those); but all of this is good.1 I've been relaxing my need to “see” everyone out there. As a committed lecturer—a relapsed performer who has found solace in lecture stages—I'm always keen to read the room, normally; to see body posture, faces, engagement or puzzlement, and to respond to this; everything nonverbal that goes on. I was devastated, unsurprised, at the end of a conversation with a colleague on the development of what may become a major “Creative Hub,” to hear that our lecture halls might be replaced with sort of multifunction rooms, as if movable chairs meant we could suddenly be free. I think not enough is understood of the theatre of a lecture hall—the theatricality, the performativity, of what goes on—ways this is live, deeply so; ways students are not “passive” at all listening. That we don't need to go to “participatory art” in order to find ourselves within an ethical, social, committed space together; everything of that sort is lost with screens, or nearly. The sentiment of speaking out into a void.

Polite Applause: The sonic politics of ‘Clap for Carers’

Between March and May 2020, an estimated 37 million people across the United Kingdom took part in the ‘Clap for Carers’ initiative against the backdrop of the global coronavirus pandemic. Participants stood on their doorsteps or balconies, or at their windows to clap, cheer and make other sounds, officially in praise of public health workers. The initiative was unique in British history, comparable in mass engagement only to certain instances of the ‘minute’s silence’, yet diametrically opposed in the sonic agency it appeared to permit. Drawing on interviews with participants, as well as published documentation and media reports, I ask how this sonic agency was made use of and managed, and to what ends. Charged with the emotional and political weight of the pandemic, Clap for Carers was an increasingly ambivalent phenomenon. While it might not present itself as an artistic practice, participants’ evident attention to sonic materiality justifies approaching it as such. Moreover, exploratory uses of sound and a proliferation of interpretive positions suggested it held some space for the autonomous experiences art entails. While the initiative’s narrowly defined consensus mirrored the pitfalls of some participatory art, these autonomous experiences gestured towards what Voegelin (2019) describes as an ‘echography of the inaudible’, through which a plurality of voices, actualities and political possibilities are heard. In this sense, such experiences of Clap for Carers point to sound’s distinctive capacity for (per)forming agonistic kinds of participatory practice.