“Extra-Special Care”

This paper reads Wes Anderson’s 2014 film The Grand Budapest Hotel through the lens of liturgical theology. It proposes that by revivifying collective memory—both its tragedies and joys—in a rhythmic, sensory, spatial, playful, and paradoxical way, the film forms our “social imaginary” for the better. In exploring the resonances between existing Anderson scholarship and liturgical theology, the paper highlights three key facets of the film: its implication of the present through the mythical stylization of the past; the relationship between M. Gustave and Zero, who find their place together as priest and acolyte of the Grand Budapest Hotel, enacting its liturgy of service against the rising tide of barbarism; and Anderson’s formal and aesthetic vision, which curates and elevates “found” objects and spaces, recognizing them as sacramental. Rejecting metaphysical dualism, the film suggests that communion and mystery are embedded in and enlivened by the material world.

Enter the Matrix: An Examination of Patrick Pound's The Great Exhibition

<p>This thesis considers the practice of New Zealand-born artist, Patrick Pound (b. 1962) through an analysis of his survey show, Patrick Pound: The Great Exhibition, which was staged at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne between 31 March and 30 July 2017. The Great Exhibition demonstrates the complexity and multiplicity of Pound’s practice, exemplifying the interconnectedness of his thinking and his use of an algorithmic approach to collecting, curating and categorisation. His depth of art-historical knowledge plays out as an intricate puzzle. The scope of The Great Exhibition is vast and, while it might appear to mostly involve the arrangement of more than 4,000 vernacular photographs and found objects, alongside 300 items from the NGV’s collection, the methodologies of collecting and curation employed by Pound are multifaceted. I consider the constancy of Pound’s interrogation of authorship and meaning throughout his practice, which is integrally related to his use of vernacular photographs and found objects within The Great Exhibition. I examine our relationship with vernacular photography and how this is exposed in The Great Exhibition. The practices of artists such as Erik Kessels, Joachim Schmid and Marcel Duchamp provide context here. Chapter Three asks how The Great Exhibition fits within a wider context of exhibitions by artist-as-curators such as Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum and Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man. This chapter also examines how computer algorithms can be applied as a framework for understanding The Great Exhibition’s curatorial logic. Pound’s complex system of sorting and categorising into matrices and intersections is considered in relation to writer Georges Perec and his understanding of Alan Turing’s conceptualisation of the ‘Automatic’ and ‘Oracle’ machines. My conclusion reflects on what can and cannot be learned from Patrick Pound’s The Great Exhibition.</p>

Enter the Matrix: An Examination of Patrick Pound's The Great Exhibition

<p>This thesis considers the practice of New Zealand-born artist, Patrick Pound (b. 1962) through an analysis of his survey show, Patrick Pound: The Great Exhibition, which was staged at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne between 31 March and 30 July 2017. The Great Exhibition demonstrates the complexity and multiplicity of Pound’s practice, exemplifying the interconnectedness of his thinking and his use of an algorithmic approach to collecting, curating and categorisation. His depth of art-historical knowledge plays out as an intricate puzzle. The scope of The Great Exhibition is vast and, while it might appear to mostly involve the arrangement of more than 4,000 vernacular photographs and found objects, alongside 300 items from the NGV’s collection, the methodologies of collecting and curation employed by Pound are multifaceted. I consider the constancy of Pound’s interrogation of authorship and meaning throughout his practice, which is integrally related to his use of vernacular photographs and found objects within The Great Exhibition. I examine our relationship with vernacular photography and how this is exposed in The Great Exhibition. The practices of artists such as Erik Kessels, Joachim Schmid and Marcel Duchamp provide context here. Chapter Three asks how The Great Exhibition fits within a wider context of exhibitions by artist-as-curators such as Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum and Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man. This chapter also examines how computer algorithms can be applied as a framework for understanding The Great Exhibition’s curatorial logic. Pound’s complex system of sorting and categorising into matrices and intersections is considered in relation to writer Georges Perec and his understanding of Alan Turing’s conceptualisation of the ‘Automatic’ and ‘Oracle’ machines. My conclusion reflects on what can and cannot be learned from Patrick Pound’s The Great Exhibition.</p>

“Where Children Play Among the Ruins of the Language”: A Nest of Ninnies and the Literary Legacies of New York Dada

Narration and dialogues in A Nest of Ninnies rely largely on linguistic equivalents of what are known as “found objects,” or “ready mades,” in the visual arts. This endows Ashbery’s and Schuyler’s novel with a sense of humor much like the one developed by the New York Dadaists in the years 1916-1920. Because of the high incidence of camp humor in the novel, affinities between it, as well as the camp aesthetic more generally, and the New York version of Dada, may be seen. Yet the principal claim of the article is that this novel is part of the literary legacy of New York Dada, a movement significantly different from the original Dada of Zurich.

The Virtual is Material: Music Improvisation in Post-Digital Ecologies

Link to performance: https://vimeo.com/640946914/cf858052e1AbstractThis performance-lecture was originally presented at the DRHA (Digital Research in the Humanities and Arts) conference in 2021 in Berlin. 3BP (Paul Stapleton, Adam Pultz Melbye and John Bowers) presents three views on the creation of an online performance ecology that allows the trio to improvise together, despite living in three separate locations. Rather than trying to overcome the instabilities and artefacts introduced by the fluctuations in data transfer, 3BP describe how such properties become native to the trios understanding of its own practice, affording new areas of creative exploration and consideration. The trio draws on Karen Barad’s use of terms such as diffraction and apparatus to discuss how music-making and improvisation embedded in run-away technologies affords emergent behaviour that transcends reflection to allow for diverse and unstable non-linear performances.BiosPaul Stapleton is an improviser and sound artist originally from Southern California. He designs and performs with a variety of modular metallic sound sculptures, custom made electronics and found objects in settings ranging from Echtzeitmusik venues in Berlin to the annual NIME conference. Paul is currently Professor of Music at SARC in Belfast, where he teaches and supervises research in new musical instrument design, music performance, sound design and critical improvisation studies. www.paulstapleton.net Adam Pultz Melbye is a double bass player, composer and audio programmer based in Berlin, currently undertaking a practice-led PhD at Sonic Arts Research Centre in Belfast.&nbsp; Adam has released three solo albums and appear on another 40+ releases. He has created sound installations, composed music for film, theatre and dance, and performed in Europe, the US, Japan and Australia, his work appearing at Murray Art Museum Albury (Australia), The Danish National Gallery and Wien Modern (Austria). www.adampultz.com John Bowers is an artist-researcher with an academic background in the social and computing sciences, design, music and critical theory. As an improvising musician, he works with modular synthesisers, home-brew electronics, reconstructions of antique image and sound-making devices, self-made software, field recordings, esoteric sensor systems, and spoken text. He often combines performance with walking and the investigation of selected sites to research an imagined discipline he calls ‘mythogeosonics’. He has performed at festivals including the Venice Biennale, Experimental Intermedia New York, Transmediale/CTM Vorspiel Berlin, Piksel Bergen, Electropixel Nantes, BEAM London, Aldeburgh Festival and Spill Ipswich, and toured with the Rambert Dance Company performing David Tudor’s music to Merce Cunningham’s Rainforest.

KURT SCHWITTERS’ MERZ WORKS OUTSIDE THE SURFACE: MERZBAU

The objective of this study is to explore and interpret Kurt Schwitters’ outside-the-surface Merzbau works in terms of form-meaning relationship. The study was carried on according to hermeneutic model. Documents were used as data collection tool. The study group consists of Merzbau works by Kurt Schwitters. It has been found out by the data obtained that the Merzbau works the artist made in Hannover, Germany and Norway were destroyed, and that his work in England, which he started making in 1947, is his only Merzbau work that survives until today. In the study, analyses were made based on the photographs left from the works and correlations were made with other artists’ works produced at the time. It has been observed that Schwitters composed his works by assembling trashes and found objects to which he assigned his own meaning. It has been seen that this resembles Cabinet of Curiosities in Renaissance. By placing his Merz works on a space, Schwitters transformed them into installations. Therefore, it has been found out that there is a connection between V. Tatlin’s corner counter-reliefs and his transforming the object into an artwork by isolating its worldly task. It has also been observed that the artist influenced Art Povera with the materials he used. It has been stated that throughout his lifetime, some additions could be made on Merzbau works that he created on the basis of concepts such as limitlessness-irregularity-infinity, and therefore, the endpoint of his works can be related to his moment of death. Keywords: Kurt Schwitters, Dada, Installation, Inherent, Avant-garde

Lifelines

There is an imbalance across design disciplines in how the user is theorised, represented and ultimately configured. It is suggested that normative user-centred design, as practiced in product design and human-computer interaction (HCI), can lead to a lack-based approach which, when applied in a health and wellbeing context, tends to align unreflexively with a medicalised view of the person. In contrast, the use of self in research is a concept well-developed in health care ethics and care professions, while the interpersonal relationship is valued and analysed in psychotherapy and counselling research and practice. Inspired by these, this article presents a discussion on the sometimes deeply relational nature of doing design with users when viewed through the lens of the Person-Centred Approach (PCA) (Rogers 1961/1967). A case study is used to illustrate an encounter of relational depth as experienced by students working directly with individuals to design prosthetics. Lifelines is a creative project brief developed by Jivan Astfalck (2008; 2011), which asks students to represent ten significant moments in their own lives through the creative use of materials and found objects. In this case, the brief was altered so that another person (the ‘user’) would be represented. The aim was that the student designers would experience moving beyond implicit conceptions of the user as defined by a need or perceived (dis)ability, and that the intimate and personal nature of identifying and representing significant moments would raise questions about expectations of objectivity in design and research. The case study demonstrates that working in this way can be experienced as profoundly moving, with powerful moments of personal transformation and interpersonal growth. In discussion, it is suggested that through such moments of encounter, it becomes possible to examine the qualities of the relational in action, and to analyse not only problematic processes of othering, but also their converse - meetings at relational depth. The Lifelines brief is proposed as a transformative way for designers to re-engage with the whole person, as both substantial (self-realising) and relational (in time, with others and the world), and as one creative exercise in a potential suite of tools for the strengthening of the “ethical reflex” necessary in Design and HCI (Vandenberghe and Slegers 2016, 514).

A New Materiality Post-Speaker Sound Art

How do sound artists function in a ‘post-speaker’ approach to production? Due to the market proliferation of reasonably-priced loudspeakers, rendering them portable and reduced in size on the gallery floor, a standard emerged in which soundworks were formed of prerecorded sounds played back from loudspeakers in gallery spaces. In these instances technology served as the material, shape and form of both sound sculpture and installation, the speaker representing a conveyance of ‘truth’. As a reaction, ‘post-speaker’ soundworks grew gradually as an awareness amongst artists who consciously avoided employing generic loudspeakers, or sought to hide them, perceiving them to be empty vessel conveying artifice. Since even before the loudspeaker was affordable, perhaps as a way of adapting to the loudspeaker’s expense, and later as a reaction to its ubiquity, there has been an ebb and flow towards building on the physical experience of a work, either by generating the sound in the gallery space itself or by using the loudspeaker in innovative ways. The reaction to speakers is a self-conscious continuum created by omission whereby sound sculpture and installation increasingly return to kinetic tendencies, and hand-made and found objects in immersive works that eschew or deconstruct the speaker’s homogeneity altogether.

This Person Does Exist

This Person Does Exist is an artistic approach to exploring a large dataset of photographic portraits in a randomised manner. The dataset was originally created by Nvidia Research Lab, which has scraped and analysed creative commons images from the popular image hosting platform Flickr. These pictures were then used to train a machine learning model which can create new stochastic images of faces. In contrast to a popular website that showcases the computer generated images, I am displaying random faces from the dataset with their corresponding metadata. This essay looks into extractivist mechanisms in current machine learning techniques, using the internet to populate and refine databases, while focusing on artistic approaches that expose them. I make the case for Dataset Art as an emerging field which reframes scientific corpora by placing them into galleries and exhibiting them as found objects online. Finally, I argue that this artistic practice is a legitimate way of opening up a larger public discourse, although artists working with human data must be aware of ethical issues and responsibilities regarding privacy and consent.