Faculty of Arts

Book Review: Aruna D'Souza and Tom McDonough (eds), The Invisible Flâneuse? Gender, Public Space, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-century Paris. Manchester …

by lesley stevenson

Toulouse-Lautrec

by lesley stevenson

Sister arts or sibling rivalry? Cézanne and the logic of the senses

by lesley stevenson

Manet

by lesley stevenson

Fruits of illusion

by lesley stevenson

Genre Matters: Essays In Theory and Criticism

by lesley stevenson

The Educational System of the United Kingdom. International Education Series.

by Maureen Skinner

Recent Developments in Relation to Professional Staff in UK Higher Education.

by Maureen Skinner

The educational system of the United Kingdom

by Maureen Skinner

The AUA code of professional standards

by Maureen Skinner

Reframing Professional Knowledge, Reclaiming Autonomy: the role of hermeneutical consciousness and language games in Higher Education teaching and learning

by Steve Taylor

The Darwinian rise of Urban Kinetics

by Carol MacGillivray

Presented at the Society of Animation Studies Conference, July 2010 in Edinburgh

Exploring the implications of an apparent new genre in animation; kinetic models that conceptualise change in... more Exploring the implications of an apparent new genre in animation; kinetic models that conceptualise change in space/time and address audiences outside of broadcast media. This paper asks; has a change in audience wrought a new formalism for animation? Drawing on examples of the author’s own work and analysing kinetic and ‘outsider’ animation, the paper reveals how new media and conceptualisations of kinetic expression are changing the landscape of the animation discipline. Like traditional animation, Urban Kinetics has the signature of making the impossible possible; that ‘wow’ factor and appeal that is so eagerly sought by advertisers. Is it animation’s future?

3D for the Web: A Comprehensive Guide to Bringing 3D Animations to the Web

by Carol MacGillivray

Co-authored book with Anthony Head

3D for the Web has now been translated into Russian and Spanish and excerpts from the book are published on Animation... more 3D for the Web has now been translated into Russian and Spanish and excerpts from the book are published on Animation World Network site

John Peel - entry for The A to X of Alternative Music book 2

by Steve Taylor

Draft

I am slowly but steadily compiling a follow-up to 'The A to X of Alternative Music' (Continuum 2004) which will focus... more I am slowly but steadily compiling a follow-up to 'The A to X of Alternative Music' (Continuum 2004) which will focus on the alternative music infrastructure rather than the short biographies of specified artists in the first book.  This is an example entry.

The possibilities of, and barriers to, communicative action within higher education.

by Steve Taylor

Draft

As public funding is reduced in the HE sector and universities focus closely on their admissions strategies while... more As public funding is reduced in the HE sector and universities focus closely on their admissions strategies while striving to minimize numbers of non-completing undergraduate students, it is argued in this paper that there is a crucial and immediate need to develop communities of practice at the heart of the university infrastructure.

Recent work by the Transforming Learning Cultures group has pointed to the central significance of situated learning in the operation of learning cultures. Somewhat pessimistically, the longitudinal study focussing on a range of learning settings in institutions of further education, concluded that there are so many cultural factors at stake within learning environments that the best the tutor can hope to achieve in the context of their chaotic workplace, is to adopt a principle of pragmatic realism. The TLC narrative sets the tutor against the system and, as is expected when taking Bourdieu as a the key theoretical underpinning, makes much of the potential for incommensurable cultural exchange between tutors and learners who are engaged in a relationship where each brings their own varying positions and dispositions to the classroom. Interestingly though, there is little focus on the impact that the tutor can have on the student's learning at the point of actual communication, which more than any determining cultural context, is surely a key determinant of situated learning.

It is suggested that Jurgen Habermas’ theorised dichotomy of lifeworld and system as separate but related spheres of social life provides a useful conceptual framework to begin analysis of the infrastructure and practices of the contemporary British university. It is argued that the significance of this research lies in establishing how far the instrumentally driven social practices associated with the system have infiltrated or to use Habermas’ term, ‘colonised’ the modern university sector.  This paper will then proceed to discuss the possibilities and barriers to the development of    that which Habermas calls communicative action, a concept that has its roots in Kantian reflective judgement and teleology, and links to the notion of the 'idealist' teacher, itself a reaction to the arguably more instrumental and pragmatic approach to teaching pioneered by Dewey that has been the dominant paradigm of teaching since the second world war.

Architectures of Participation: Exploring Authorship Within New Media and Artistic Practice

by Carol MacGillivray

Co-authored with Lucie Hernandez - Workshop accepted by 4th International Conference on the Arts in Society for July 2009 at Venice Biennale

The objective of this workshop is to explore authorship of an evolutionary artifact through a series of interactive... more The objective of this workshop is to explore authorship of an evolutionary artifact through a series of interactive exercises using pyramid group work. The aim is to understand the spectrum of participation that exists from merely viewing visual forms to actually creating content within a predetermined framework.

Art has always required an audience to be complete. Viewed through the prism of perspective, the act of looking with a searching eye allows for connections to be made and interpretations to be formed that contribute to how meaning is created.

But the nature of participation has evolved: With the development of new media, the audience has moved further along the spectrum, they have become participant, with an active role. Not only does the audience now have the ability to navigate and adjust the order in which information is presented, they are also able to actively contribute to it. The implication suggests the audience as participant creates alongside the artist as author/collaborator. The workshop will demonstrate the benefits and constraints incumbent in artistic collaborations and debate how we can move beyond ownership of art to suggest a multi-authored work.

Keywords: Authorship, Interactive, Digital Media, Participation, Audience

Stream: Visual Arts Practices

Presentation Type: 60 minute Workshop Presentation in English

Slices of Time - Appraising the use of Dynamics in Design

by Carol MacGillivray

Paper presented at IV09:DAViz, 13th International Conference Information Visualisation, 2009in Barcelona. Published in IEEE journal. ISBN: 978-0-7695-3733-7. iv, pp.598-604, 2009.

Dynamics, movement, kinetics, animation: So many names for an area so frequently ignored in graphics. Ephemeral by... more Dynamics, movement, kinetics, animation: So many names for an area so frequently ignored in graphics. Ephemeral by nature, such transient devices are frequently ignored over the concrete and contextual. Yet the screen has become the primary source for accessing information and is ubiquitous in urban advertising, stimulating graphics increasingly to include dynamics and visual momentum in their design. This paper seeks to reappraise the application of dynamics for representation and appeal, drawing on implied dynamics in static images, dynamics within the frame and dynamic editing.
Using illustrative examples this paper discusses whether a commonality of kinetic perception in dynamics can be relied upon for engagement and appeal, and offers a new conceptual model for event perception, drawing on cognitive psychology, montage theory and eye tracking technology.
The paper posits that motion is a primary perceptual form and that its application in visualization boosts gestalt comprehension.

Keywords--- Dynamics, Animation, Perception, Cognition, Visualization

Things That Are Not – an Ontology of (De)compostion’

by Paul Ramshaw

Published proceedings of the 7th International Music Theory Conference, Principles of Music Composing: Musical Text, Vilnius, Lithuania, May 9-11, 2007

This paper considers the nature of ideas and their position within a field of power relations by thinking about the... more This paper considers the nature of ideas and their position within a field of power relations by thinking about the discourse that takes place within musical forms in general on a social and institutional level and how music is controlled. It then moves to look at the opposing sides of the discourse in the form of the orthodox/heterodox positions taken by Boulez and Schaeffer with regard to compositional style and process of musique concrete by using Nietzsche’s dualist metaphor of Apollonian and Dionysian visions as essential but opposing creative forces.

Finally some aspects of John Cages thinking on the subject of
indeterminism are brought in which, seem to reconcile the two positions in a way Nietzsche and perhaps Schaeffer, but not Boulez may have agreed with.

Is music production now a composition process?

by Paul Ramshaw

Published proceedings of the Conference, The Art of Record Production, Hosted by the Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM), University of Westminster, London, September 17-18, 2005.

Over the past decade advances in music technologies have unleashed a phenomenon in virtual software instruments and... more Over the past decade advances in music technologies have unleashed a phenomenon in virtual software instruments and digital audio workstations have become refined to the point where they are used by professional producers for recording, creating and editing audio.

Today ‘VST’s can be complex real-time generators and manipulators of audio, to the extent that some even ‘play and produce themselves’. The availability and utility of professional Digital Audio Workstations has enabled pro studio quality production methods for everyone who wants to produce their music in the digital domain.
For music production this revisits old questions on the nature of craft including what levels of skill i.e. technical mastery and understanding, are or should be necessary in order that an audio product can be taken ‘seriously’.
While some think software instruments and processing is good news for those that want tools to stimulate musical creativity, others more traditional in their composition and production methods consider this to be anathema as almost ‘anyone’ can produce what appears to be interesting audio by merely changing various controls.

Though these issues are part of a wider discourse that includes the dialogue about what is and is not music, either in a commercial or academic sense and whether self taught digital music production is a valid enterprise to be considered in record production, this paper seeks to uncover where music production is going and how this will affect the nexus between composition, recording, engineering and production as a whole. In many senses this is answered by looking at the burgeoning selection of digital tools now available that  blur the distinctions between these four processes. To the point where to use Cascone’s (2002) paraphrase of Marshall McLuhan “the medium is no longer the message; rather, specific tools themselves have become the message.”

The subject will be addressed by first considering whether the skill sets necessary for music production skills is changing from a shared group process to an individual one and what are the socio-technical differences in soft production processes that bring this about.  This is elaborated by a discussion on interactivity as a way of understanding how the
production process is mediated at the software level, which considers interactivity and performance, production and composition.

Lost in Music: understanding the hermeneutic process in creative musical composition

by Paul Ramshaw

Published in the proceedings of the 5th International Music Theory Conference, Principles of Musical Composition. Creative Process, October 13-15, 2005, Vilnius, Lithuania

This paper presents a method of understanding the interpretive mechanism of creativity that occurs during composition,... more This paper presents a method of understanding the interpretive mechanism of creativity that occurs during composition, performance and improvisation.
In his seminal work ‘Truth and Method’, Hans Georg Gadamer wrote of being ‘lost in play’: the way towards understanding and interpretation was to recognize that we are only ‘truly’ capable of interpreting something if we are totally absorbed in it. A consideration of Gadamer’s concept of play provides the starting point for generating insights on how we think about doing something creative when we are actually doing it.

The paper also revisits the problem of the hermeneutic circle, seeks to unpack the relevance of Gadamer’s analogy for contemporary approaches to composition, performance and improvisation which it will also be suggested constitutes composition and performance in real time.