Slowness as a Strategy of the Contemporary through Films

In Future Studies and the History of Technology accelerating change is a perceived increase in the rate of technological change throughout history. This may suggest faster and more profound change in the future and may or may not be accompanied by equally profound social and cultural change. Responding to the accelerating technological landscape and contemporary life, this paper researches how the concept of ‘time’ plays a significant role. The author, an experimental filmmaker, charts an experiential journey within several pivotal ‘dream films’, along with relevant artists’ moving images in relation to time and slowness in the moving image as critical media. As contemporary life has become more and more fast paced, and one year on the impact of COVID-19 is still being felt, the idea of stillness is beginning to become a more desirable commodity. The author explores ‘slow cinema’, acknowledging seminal directors Andrei Tarkovsky and Claire Denis, as well as art films which frequently emphasise long takes, offering minimalist aesthetics with little or no narrative. In an endeavour to portray different temporalities and reveal and allude to the invisibility of time, the author relates to Julia Kristeva’s notions of intertextuality, transposition and time, and Lutz Koepnik’s concept of slowness as a strategy of the contemporary. The author discusses four ‘dream films’, where painterly, poetic, non-linear narratives, and ‘in-between’ spaces are played out: FRIDA Travels to Ibiza, Cycle, Llafarganu Papagei and Frock.

Concept Generation

Concept Generation is an event where participants create new innovations from market led criteria and trade this intellectual property for beer and peanuts. This critical and comedic project engages participants with a design process appropriated from surrealist techniques, in order to glibly mine the depths of product and service niches, where creative industries have not yet ventured. This workshop investigates the spectrum between creative industries and aesthetic art practice and asks participants to form their own critical position. The social contract between the host and the participant is transparent – the event is free, but participants must create marketable ideas to pitch to the artist, in order to exchange their concept for a beer. The artist has sole right over the intellectual property. This exchange mirrors the exploitation of precarious creative workers, for whom work and lifestyle blend, where a workshop can also become a party. Concept Generation presents the mutability of work and leisure, of consumption and production, of art practice and creative industry, and of creative thinking and marketing. In a satire of ideation, participants are asked to sell their ridiculous idea, and many get carried away with the farce. Production is the only imperative, and the more ridiculous the ideas are, the more we believe they might actually succeed.

Building Teacherly Roles Together

Given that learner agency in making meaning from subjective learning experiences is central to constructivism, how can teachers provide structure without diminishing that agency? This paper comprises an a/r/tographic analysis of a practice-based research project situated outside formal education, which shares the teacher’s role across a community learning group. This group collectively chose and researched a new topic for each session, sharing this research in session and discussing the lesson this made. This model not only provides the basis for a consensual education, but also offers opportunity for empowerment through collectively taking ownership of learning, demonstrating that as engaged learners we can shape the structures through which we build learning agency. As education and culture shape each other, so learners emerge as critical citizens able to re/form community and culture for mutual benefit, open in turn to being re/formed by them. Understanding learning as a creative process, this paper juxtaposes Gert Biesta’s concept of creative practice as a dialogue with the world against the re-emergent concept of cultural democracy. Education re/produces cultural values; by not assuming control of learners’ education for them – by not inhabiting the role of teacher – we do not diminish the space for new, emergent structures to be realised. This paper seeks to show that by performing the teacher’s functions between us, we increase our intrinsic motivation for learning, also allowing for possibilities of new knowledge emerging. As will be shown, constructivism needs no singular teachers, only people to learn alongside and share the practice of learning with.

Editorial

This third issue of Airea presents a second round of articles in response to our call for contributions 'Revisiting interdisciplinarity within collaborative and participatory creative practice', announced in June 2019. Following the second issue that showcased contributions from sound-related areas, the present collection focuses on the breadth of practices in art and design. The contributions in this issue surface knowledge about the way interdisciplinary methodologies and approaches influence and shape spaces and bodies within collaborative and participatory works.

Things we hold dear

This paper reflects on Common-places (2019), a project that was developed in Sheffield on the invitation of Site Gallery to participate in their ‘City of Ideas’ programme. Amidst the urban regeneration processes that are reshaping the city, this programme offered the opportunity to think about novel approaches that art and interdisciplinary practices could bring to processes of urban change. Common-places was proposed as a participatory workshop that engaged the local community, by inviting them to recognise the things they ‘hold dear’ about the areas in which they live or work. The premise was to identify forms of material and immaterial value that would reveal the ‘character’ of a place and its forms of use-value that are important to a local community. The intention was to develop a set of tools to highlight, map, commemorate and ultimately protect this intangible heritage in the context of urban regeneration in Sheffield. The project addressed some of the existing challenges of integrating an expanded notion of heritage in urban planning. Moveover, it reflects on the importance of identifying the use-value of intangible heritage and embraces a more integral and holistic approach to city planning.

Designing Collective Artist Residencies

Starting with an argument for a humanistic approach to climate change, this paper discusses the concept of the ‘Collective Artist Residency’ as a practicable means for engaging with complex socio-ecological issues that require collective answers. Through our analysis of the research project ‘Imaginative Disruptions,’ we propose that there is a need for creative spaces that include artists and non-artists alike, and which engender aimless play, inquisitive making and dialogic contemplation in the face of issues which are too painful, overwhelming and complex to rationally comprehend. We further argue that such residencies can generate comfortable, and even light-hearted, spaces in which people can be uncomfortable together. In other words, environments that feel safe and caring but that also encourage us to challenge status quos and experiment with alternatives via emotional, aesthetic, cognitive, somatic and social processing. The paper closes with five (suggested) guiding principles for designing a Collective Art Residency that supports groups of people to co-reflect upon their fragility whilst re-imagining present and future possibilities for being in the world: deeply participatory, balanced between comfortable / uncomfortable emotions, highly experiential, cross-sectoral and intergenerational, place-based.

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).

Åčçëñtß

In 2018 I was appointed to the position of Glasgow’s first UNESCO City of Music artist-in-residence. Over the course of a year I worked with numerous community groups and choirs across the city to collaboratively devise and realise a new choral/film work, titled Åčçëñtß, which was performed by an audience of over three hundred and fifty people at its premiere at the Glasgow Royal Concert Halls in 2019. Åčçëñtß explores accents as a sonorous social matter – staccatos and lilts, patterns of difference in our voices, as sonic markers of place and community – sounds that I have come to understand as resonating between our individual and collective identities. This paper presents some of the thoery orientating my compositional praxis, speaking nearby a reflective account of some of the compositional considerations and processes undertaken through the project. Through it I explore Karen Barad’s methodology of diffractive thought, Trinh T. Minh-ha’s notion of speaking nearby within the interval, Pauline Oliveros’ practice of Deep Listening, thinking towards how these might meet through my praxis to come close to Timothy Corrigan’s Refractive Cinema. Åčçëñtß speaks to the complexity of authorship and agency in distributed, collaborative composition and the motive relationships between sound and image, spectacle and spectator – between the individual and the communal.

Embodied Complexity in Choral Singing

Amateur musical ensembles draw participants from widely varying disciplines into shared artistic activity in a way that few other artforms do; in particular, choral music, in which bodies both create and directly receive sound, raises profound questions of how performers’ uniquely embodied creative approaches interact. Amateur choral singing therefore offers a lens into how musical creativity is distributed among, and emergent from, a diverse group of individuals. This article explores how the performance of indeterminate and improvisatory choral works offers a powerful example of this distributed creative agency via a network of sounding bodies. This article centres on a case study (March–October 2017) involving three British amateur choirs in the performance of improvisatory choral scores by Kerry Andrew (2005) and Cornelius Cardew (1968–70). Complexity Theory (Davis and Sumara 2006) offers a useful framework for understanding how creative impulses and constructions interact; both the vocal expression and corporeal receipt of these creative ideas occurs in an embodied way, drawing on dance and embodiment theory (Sheets-Johnstone 2009, Downey 2002). The research process and qualitative-data-processing methodology (Charmaz 2014) of the case study are described, before findings are laid out with a view to how they point towards ideas of embodied, complex interaction. These findings offer an important, and hitherto unexplored, view into how Complexity Theory (a common theoretical framework in other fields across the sciences and humanities) might usefully describe musical performance. In transcending attempts to atomise ensemble interaction according to shared intellectual knowledge and verbal communication, the complex, embodied interaction of diverse singers, through the physical connection of sound, might involve those singers in the distributed authorship of a musical work.

Music – Bodies – Machines

This article provides an overview of the Music – Bodies – Machines: Fritz Kahn and Acousmatic Music project and accompanying suite of music – Der Industriepalast. The project is inspired by the work of infographics pioneer Fritz Kahn (1888-1968) who developed works such as Der Mensch als Industriepalast. There is a body of work examining Kahn’s work (Sappol, 2017; Von Debschitz, 2017; Doudova, Jacobs, et al.) that has revealed Kahn’s intent of making the human anatomy accessible to the non-specialised reader through visual metaphors; unlike the descriptive anatomical illustrations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which show how the human body looks, Kahn’s works visually explain how internal structures work using concepts, metaphors, and allusions. This article explores some of the ways in which Kahn’s striking visual images have inspired the composition of five novel acousmatic works of music. The article starts with a survey of existing works making use of similar, extra-musical influences to examine how extra-musical influences such as infographics and painting may influence the formal design of acousmatic music. It goes on to consider how, exactly, the infographics of Fritz Kahn have been used within the project. In some cases, this guides the choice of particular materials (such as the sound of a beating heart to represent an image of a heart monitor), but in other cases, there is influence on phrasing, placement, and even the formal design of entire pieces. Taken as a whole, the article seeks to explore the following questions; 1) What impact does the context of a particular image have on a composers’ response? 2) How do composers respond to visual stimuli in acousmatic music? What is their compositional process? 3) How do such parallels between the specific sonic and visual examples offer new interdisciplinary insight to artistic practices and research? 4) How do sound recording techniques inform acousmatic music and generate new creative processes that operate within the sphere of human-machine relations?