Four great video recordings are now viewable online of key sessions from the Nw/Thn: Documenting, Publishing and Disseminating Objects and Experiences workshop symposium, which took place at the University of Sussex on June 24, 2013. The event was oriented towards practice-based/led research students, faculty, working practitioners and professional creative organisations. This collaborative principle was reflected in the involvement of the Creative Critical Practice Research Group (CCPRG), REFRAME itself, and doctoral students from the University of Sussex, Royal College of Art, University of Brighton and University of West London.
As processes and materials generated by practice-based/led research cannot be directly published in the way traditional Arts and Humanities scholarship is, this symposium, set in an interactive and creative environment, offered training on and critical insight into how practice can be represented in DPD. Considering both digital and pre-digital modes of dissemination, NW/THN looked to interrogate two key questions: what do we lose or gain when we document and publish digitally? Are modes of DPD determined by the audiences aimed at by the work, or/and the nature of the ‘output’? Because these questions have a resonance outside of academia, a collaborative, multi and crossdisciplinary discussion about applied approaches took place. The symposium was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and supported by the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, University of Sussex.
Videos of the following sessions are available at the Mediamorphosis website:
1. Gesture and Sound Interactions: research and applications by Frédéric Bevilacqua
Frédéric Bevilacqua is the head of the Real Time Musical Interactions team at IRCAM – Institute for Music/Acoustic Research and Coordination in Paris. His research concerns the understanding and modelling gesture-sound interactions, and the development of gesture-based musical interactive systems. He holds a master degree in physics and a Ph.D. in biomedical optics from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne). He also studied music at the Berklee College of Music in Boston and participated in several music and media arts projects. From 1999 to 2003 he was a researcher at the University of California Irvine. He joined IRCAM in October 2003 to develop gesture research for music and performing arts.
2. Ambulant Performance: The Cricket Seeks a Mate by Justin Grize
Justin Grize studied music composition at Carnegie Mellon University and Musical Theatre at Goldsmiths, University of London. Noticing a persistent animal presence in his own work as a composer and dramatist, from the song cycle Birds and Beasts to the verse tragedy The Hart, he joined the Centre for Research in Opera and Music Theatre at the University of Sussex as a PhD candidate, where his AHRC-funded practice-led project explores strategies of animal representation on the opera (and post-operatic) stage, with a particular focus on insects and other arthropods.
“the cricket seeks a mate” is part of the Ensiferan Variations, a group of works for voice based on the natural music-making activities of the crickets and katydids, collectively known as Ensifera.
Fuelled by a wonder at what might lie beyond the cognitive and perceptual barriers separating us from the ever-present yet essentially unknowable subjective world of animals, and guided by the principle that wherever possible, the work should reflect observed behaviours of its insect subjects, the piece draws on contemporary scientific understanding of Ensiferan musical practices as well as attempts from the 19th and early 20th centuries to transcribe or translate insect sound into a form reproducible by humans.
The Variations themselves are part of a loose collection of works called Arthropoda, which explores through music, sound, installation and performance the territory where our scientific, aesthetic and experiential understandings of invertebrate lives intersect, and is the practical component of an AHRC-funded PhD project investigating representations of animals on the opera stage.
This performance of “the cricket seeks a mate” is made possible through the additional support of CROMT.
3. //Semiconductor //Brilliant Noise by Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt
Semiconductor is UK artist duo Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt. Through moving image works they explore the material nature of our world, how we experience it and how we try to make an understanding of it, questioning our place in the physical universe. Their unique approach has won them many awards and prestigious fellowships, most recently the ‘Samsung Art + Prize UK’ 2012 for new media, the ‘Golden Gate Award for New Visions’ at San Francisco International Film Festival USA 2012 and the ‘Art and Science Award’ at Ann Arbor Film Festival USA 2012.
4. Documenting, Publishing and Disseminating Objects and Experiences – Plenary
Chaired by Professor Sally Jane Norman ( Professor of Performance Technologies and founding Director of the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts at Sussex).