Daniel Miller, UCL

On Wednesday 27th June I went to see the closing display from the ESRC funded five year programme, Cultures of Consumption. For anyone interested in consumption studies there is a huge amount of new research represented here, which can be accessed at http://www.consume.bbk.ac.uk/ As the director Frank Trentmann noted, at one stage they had 85 researchers engaged. If there was a single dominant theme to the programme it was re-thinking the relationship between the consumer and the citizen. With many arguments to suggest that the presumed antagonism between these two aspects of the modern individual, with the citizen being replaced by the consumer, is much too simple. In many instances involvement in consumption has led to greater consciousness of the rights and political involvement associated with citizenship.

As usual in such programme the highlights came from research that contradicts journalistic and academic presumptions. For example we heard evidence that international retailing firms find that they have to raise their standards to meet Chinese consumers who are more demanding than those in other areas. Another paper demonstrated that people have extended family meals in the UK just as much now as in the 1970s (though migrating from dinner table to kitchen table) and that in terms of food behaviour generally there is no evidence for global convergence e.g. becoming more like the US. A point supported by one of the `celebrity’ discussants Sir Terry Leahy the CEO of Tesco who discussed the diversification of Tesco in different markets. One presentation dealt with the increasing use by people of the equity represented by their properties, but that this tended to be used for house extensions or the costs of caring for others rather than hedonistic holidays. Another showed we are more conservative and less reliant on new media for news than is sometimes suggested.

The range of projects varied from understanding the forces that led to the fashion developments of 1960’s London, the spread of Italian coffee, the consumption of the mild drug Khat, the meanings associated with chicken and sugar along the food commodity chain, re-thinking the place of design in material culture, the evidence that the elderly are just as consumer focused as any other age cohort, the housewife in early modern rural England, the use of the internet in accessing medical services and information, the historic formation of the water consumer, a philosophical engagement with the idea of alternative hedonism, transnational histories of the consumption and production of chewing gum, the history of seed culture, and children’s relationship to fashion consumption. I have probably left some out !

In terms of the event itself there were good and bad lessons. The academics summarised their research in less than five minutes with a limit of a single powerpoint, which given a mainly lay audience was very effective and impressive. What one might call targeted bullet points. On the other hand in order to impress the grant givers it was probably necessary to invite celebrity discussants such as a government minister, the head of the consumer association, the head of a branding company and the aforementioned head of Tesco. But this ended up as a very old fashion discussion about how much we should trust the market which blithely ignored, and in effect thereby devalued, the much more nuanced academic research. However, I guess this was a pretty accurate reflection of the actual fate of most of our research, which in my experience does have an impact, but mainly in the longer term through our role in education, rather than, as we would sometimes wish, more immediately within the corridors of power.

Posted by at 5:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Conferences and other events

The American Anthropological Association has launched a fantastic web resource dedicated to a serious exploration of race from multiple perspectives, 'biological', 'social' and so on. The perspective is decidedly American, which is perhaps unusual given the cultural interrogation given to the category, and the international remit of anthropological research within the US, but nonetheless is an excellent resource and exploration of how digital technology can assist with visualizing problems and pitfalls around the category of race.

Link:http://www.understandingrace.org/

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Good Links

Paul Williams, NYU

United States Holocaust Museum: Online Exhibit, Do You Remember When?

Among the various modes of museum display, “online exhibits,” are often disappointing. They are overwhelmingly purely visual, comprising two-dimensional representations of select artworks or artifacts. These are chosen without explanation by the museum and organized in a this-then-that sequence that has little to do with the personal idiosyncrasies of museum visitation – or the cross-institutional, hyper-textual possibilities afforded by the web. While some science and a few art museums offer important exceptions, history museums are particularly guilty of this tendency.

It is heartening, therefore, to find a truly enlightening online history exhibit. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s ‘Do You Remember, When’ exhibition went online in 2001. It is based entirely on a book given by one young man, Manfred Lewin, killed at Auschwitz, to his gay friend, Gad Beck, a half Jew who survived in the small Jewish underground of World War II Berlin. While the book is ostensibly comprised of notes about Friedrich Von Schiller’s 18th century play Don Carlos, it is impossible to read without also detecting the subtext of a doomed friendship in 1940s Berlin.

This dual meaning makes the text especially well-suited to the USHMM’s conceptual criss-crossing between two historical layers. The 17 easily-navigated (and translated) pages of the illustrated handmade book are filled with rollover links to further explanatory material, including audio songs, archival photographs, and recorded sections of interviews with Gad Beck (who entrusted the book to the museum). The well-chosen design and content makes the reading experience near seamless, and allows one to choose their level of immersion in historical detail. (A technical review of the site can be found at http://www.creativepro.com/story/feature/10686.html).

The exhibit verges on that most quality most elusive in online exhibits – being tactile. A diary, or any book, can work better online than in a museum (where pages usually can’t be turned, and interpretive commentary in text-label or audio form is added only clumsily). In ‘Do You Remember, When,’ the viewer gains a real sense of both the intimacy of the primary material (the amateurish drawings, the occasionally disjointed narrative) and the research that went into producing the secondary interpretation. This research stimulated memories (particularly from Gad Beck) but also revealed some gaps that couldn’t be filled in. The result is a rare online document that is not only moving and content-rich, but also provides readers with a vivid insight into both the alignments and disparities cleaving personal memory and archival artifact.

Posted by at 9:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Book Reviews | Good Links | Objects and visual analyses

Copyright: © musée du quai Branly, photo Arnaud Bauman

Mary Stevens, PhD candidate, UCL (French and Anthropology)

Musée du Quai Branly, 8 April to 20 July 2007

Almost a year after it opened, the Musée du Quai Branly remains the subject of intense speculation (including on this blog): how will its highly contested museographical project develop in the future? The dust had barely settled from the inauguration before the emphasis on aesthetics that characterizes the permanent exhibition had started to feel dated. The first major temporary exhibition, D’un regard l’autre, which traced five centuries of western representations of non-western peoples, was interpreted by many as a corrective to the de-historicized aesthetic shock of the galleries above. For all the splendour of its exhibits, New Ireland: Arts of the South Pacific, which runs from 8 April to 2 July, in turn represents a new chapter in the working through of the tension between art and anthropology in the new institution.

The exhibition, which occupies a large section of the ground floor ‘garden’ galleries, presents 150 objects from New Ireland and its neighbouring archipelago, arranged primarily according to location – separate sections display items from the south, central and northern regions – and subsequently according to a combination of aesthetic and functional criteria (Malagan sculptures are divided up into birds, fish, figures and couples and masks for lifting taboos, for example). The exhibition involved an uncommonly long preparation phase (ten years); it was originally commissioned for the Grand palais, a major temporary exhibition space in Paris, but was delayed on account of the upheavals that accompanied the creation of the Quai Branly. During this time, in order to establish a comprehensive database of objects, the curators visited a staggering 132 museums, a very large number of which are represented here. New Ireland: Arts of the South Pacific thus provides a unique opportunity to compare the very finest masks and sculptures to have found their way into European collections.

I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to visit the exhibition with the French curator, Philippe Peltier, in the company of a group of graduate students from the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris. Rather than focusing on the exhibits, Peltier drew our attention to the exhibition design process: what criteria did they use to select objects? How did they work with the designer Massimo Quendolo (well known for his work with the old Musée des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie) to define the layout and feel of the space? What obstacles did they encounter? And how did they negotiate the thorny issue of aesthetics versus context? Peltier’s observations about the exhibition provided a unique insight into what James Clifford has described as the need to ‘track how those who animate this project […] work with and against its spatial and ideological structures.’1

The spatial structures posed the most obvious immediate difficulties. Jean Nouvel’s powerful architecture dominates the space. The ceilings are alternately very low and very high, the space is fractured by giant columns, light seeps in through the edges of the blinds and noise percolates from the access ramp to the permanent exhibition. Quendolo and Peltier therefore took the decision to opt for equal boldness, creating asymmetric moveable walls and plinths in earthy colours. There is also a nod to the architecture of New Ireland, through the incorporation of woven fibre panels into the walls. Peltier explained that he had originally envisaged a very clear, bright space but, short of building a box-within-a-box, Nouvel’s architecture rendered this impossible. The design certainly achieves the desired effect of directing visitor traffic and creating a series of distinct atmospheres. It is not however without its hazards, as Peltier unintentionally demonstrated by tripping over one of his own irregular installations (indeed, the day after the inauguration he confessed to having been busy with a saw and a paint pot, removing some of the shaper corners…).

View of Uli sculptures, highlighting Quendolo’s asymmetric installation. Copyright: © musée du quai Branly, photo Arnaud Baumann

Ideologically, Peltier and his American collaborator Michael Gunn (of the Saint Louis Art Museum) appear to have been subject to more subtle constraints. Whilst the exhibition would never have been commissioned had it not had the necessary aesthetic wow-factor, seen as essentially for drawing in the paying public, the curators had initially also planned to explore a historic angle. All the pieces on display were collected between 1890 and 1914, during the period of German colonisation. An introductory panel explains this, although the theme is not pursued further and questions that fascinated the curators, such as why the colonial period corresponded to a boom in the production of material culture on the island are addressed only in the catalogue. Indeed, whilst the colonial dimension is more visible here than in the permanent exhibition, the conditions in which the collections were gathered are likely to escape all but the most attentive visitors. Moreover, it could be argued that the films used to illustrate Malagan and Tubuan rituals efface the historical dimension, blurring past and present practice in a single atemporal ethnographic whole. Why this discrepancy between original proposal and final outcome? Peltier put it down to a “desire to be simple,” although the origins of this imperative were not clear. Did Peltier himself feel instinctively that the power of the objects would be diminished by their insertion in a more politicized narrative? Or was simplicity the expression of a bigger institutional logic that presumes that the language of aesthetics is the only one understood by the visiting public? The simplifying drive is also evident in the exhibition title. Gunn originally proposed ‘Walking shadows’ in order to draw attention to the role of Malagan sculptures in funerary rituals. The far less evocative final version was imposed by a nervous marketing department that feared that the public would shun an exhibition so abstract sounding.

Speaking at a 2000 conference at the MAAO Peltier asserted ‘our past as a colonial power and the political choices made bind us into a complex network of debts and responsibilities that implies cooperation.’2 And indeed, it is in Peltier and Gunn’s work with the relevant source communities that New Ireland: Arts of the South Pacific really stands out from the other exhibitions at the Quai Branly to date. Having made a preliminary selection of objects they visited a large number of villages on the island with a photo album, soliciting memories, stories and comments to fill holes in the museum documentation. Many of the labels bear witness to this trip, citing local informants (indirectly) to explain the usage and provenance of various items. They also met with contemporary sculptors, whom Peltier would like to have invited to Paris had the cost not proved prohibitive. Nevertheless, New Ireland remains one of the few sites in the museum where there is real evidence of the ‘dialogue of cultures’ the institution so prominently espouses.

Sculptures from south of New Ireland, also showing the fibre panels and asymmetric plinth forms. Copyright: © musée du quai Branly, photo Arnaud Baumann

If New Ireland: Arts of the Pacific overall does a good job of reconciling different approaches it is however also because the subject matter lends itself to disciplinary consensus. Peltier explained that one of the draws of the art of New Ireland is that it does not correspond to western assumptions about ‘primitive’ or ‘first’ arts i.e. it is finely worked, richly coloured and requires a technical mastery that corresponds readily to western conceptions of quality. Moreover, artists have a recognised and distinct status in the communities of northern New Ireland. A detached aesthetic presentation, foregrounding the formal qualities of the work, is perhaps less alien to the producing culture than it might be elsewhere. How the Quai Branly will contend with displaying the items from its collection that can be less readily subordinated to the dominant aesthetic narrative remains to be seen.

References

• James Clifford, ‘Quai Branly in Process’, October 120 (2007): 3-27. Available at http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/octo/-/120. Thanks to Haidy Geismar for highlighting this article on this blog.
  
• Philippe Peltier (2000), ‘Les Musées: art ou ethnographie ?’, in ed. Domique Taffin, Du Musée colonial au musée des cultures du monde: Actes du colloque organisé par le Musée des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie et le Centre Georges-Pompidou, 3-6 juin 1998, Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 205-218 : 215. My translation.

  Posted by at 4:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Exhibition reviews

Patricia G. Lange, University of Southern California
plange@usc.edu

Transitions, From: Missbhavens

Recently, I had the privilege of being an invited curator for the first ever video blogging festival called Pixelodeon, which was held at the American Film Institute on June 9-10, 2007. Pixelodeon is an independent video festival organized to showcase the innovative work of video bloggers and to bring together creators, technologists, and business people to expand their creative outlets and explore potential collaborations. The title of my session was called “Making the Familiar Unfamiliar: The Importance of Physical Place in the Vlogosphere.” The vlogosphere is defined as a series of loosely interconnected video web logs, or vlogs, in which people post video in addition to text or photographs to communicate, enlighten, and entertain viewers. Vlogging contains a number of genres that range from scripted shows to more personal, diary forms in which vloggers document intimate moments in their lives, such as conflict with loved ones, routine events, and surprising encounters.

As I sat down to screen the vast amounts of video to determine a theme for my session, the first thing I noticed was that many vlog titles included a place name. I was struck by titles such as: Minnesota Stories; Beach Walks with Rox; The Delicate Museum; Sustainable Route; Wandering West Michigan; Alicia in Ojai; and Echoplex Park, to name just a few. The intensity of engagement with place in these video blogs belied the prediction that by this century we would all simply exist as meat puppets whose minds would only connect in an abstract cyberspace. The video bloggers who feature place so prominently in their work demonstrate that people continue to experience an embodied sense of place in myriad, important ways. Philosophers have suggested that we are not coherent as human beings except in terms of how we exist in a place. Certainly, the strong emphasis on place in the vlogosphere underscores this profound observation.

I initially planned to screen a group of videos in which bloggers show cased interesting or extraordinary places in their work. Although “travel” vlogs, in which a video blogger documents an exotic place are popular and interesting, what struck me was how so many video bloggers often re-experienced for themselves and their audience familiar or unspectacular places in ways that rendered them strange, beautiful, or destabilizing. In so doing, they showed how people experience places which are tangibly influenced by other people, objects, animals, temperature, light, sound, movement, and other material dimensions. For instance, we’ve all been in an elevator, but what happens when people become trapped inside? In the video Happy Birthday to Me!, two people become frightened when an elevator stops. This unexpected circumstance forced them to consciously experience the elevator as a physical place with dimensions and characteristics that they may not ordinarily observe on a conscious level. Nevertheless the characteristics of the elevator influenced their experience of it as a place.

Instead of seeing an elevator as only a liminal zone that takes people from one place to another, this video blogger helped us to understand that we experience elevators as places in embodied ways with specific expectations about their use and parameters. A number of other videos such as LA Video Cruise, Transitions, and What is Can Shift, also showed how vehicles such as boats and buses, and transport centers such as airports and bus terminals are also distinct places with specific characteristics and unpredictable influences from people and objects that inhabit or travel through them. Although we may think of such transportation centers and vehicles simply as facilitators that move us from one place to another, they are actually places with emotional connotations and regulation of bodies that differ in distinct ways from other places.

The range of video blogs facilitated the investigation of several contrasts, some obvious and some more subtle. Among the obvious contrasts included explorations of small places versus larger city scapes, and so-called natural versus built places. The session also explored a range of emotions and reactions to places, from the frightening to the joyous and many uncertain points in between. A more subtle contrast involved how video bloggers chose to make a familiar place seem unfamiliar. Sometimes video bloggers used straightforward or raw footage to make a familiar place seem odd or wondrous. In the case of Rodents Are With Us, the video blogger needed only to show a few images of rat feces smeared in her closet to illustrate how an intimate space in one’s own home becomes quite frightening.

By viewing these videos, we begin to understand how our feeling-tones for a place are very much influenced by other living things that compete with us to inhabit a place. Similarly, the hallway of an ordinary apartment building took on the feeling of a horror film in the video entitled That b$%@# is crazy! In this video, raw footage set at an off-balancing camera angle included the unsettling and piercing screams of a next door neighbor, once again showing that people influence our perception of and emotional response to place. In contrast, other video blogs such as Bug Mountain used artifice and manipulation of the image through techniques such as colorization or special effects that transform an ordinary walk in the park into something unusual and visually stimulating. We do not always realize how places and the elements within them essentially become characters in our cinematic lives.

Bug Mountain, From: Reasonable Illusions/Shannon Noble

The session also included a number of playful videos that also emphasized physical and existential limitations and experience of place. For instance, the videos We Will Fly and How to Hide in Plain Sight, simultaneously show us our physical limitations while enabling fantasies of human flight or invisibility within a place. In the latter film, for example, an ordinary kitchen becomes the site of a stealth warrior training camp in which a person can literally become invisible to another person in the kitchen. A woman stands innocently drinking coffee, yet she seems to glance in an intruder’s direction, perhaps even preternaturally sensing something while seeing nothing. The video blogging genre is well-suited to show both real and fantastic representations of how people, objects, and subtle characteristics influence an experience of place. They provide a window with which we may fantasize what it might be like to overcome those limitations and exist in extraordinary ways within ordinary places.

Joey & Hiroko: Lesson 27: How to Hide in Plain Sight, From: g14 productions

Perhaps one of the most poignant statements came from the video Tom Bender, in which Bender is interviewed about his philosophy and personal vision of architecture. I was struck by how he turned the ordinary equation of architects building for others to encouraging people to consider what they could give back to a place they inhabit, and thus create a more sustainable, symbiotic existence between people and places. The relationship between a place and the people who occupy it are also shown in the video Teh Hat Factory (sic), which depicts video bloggers and technologists as they create a personalized, physical work space. Their project is a touching testament to the fact that despite the video bloggers’ enjoyment of and extensive participation on the Internet, they nevertheless value a shared work space in which they can physically come together to exchange ideas or simply co-exist in a place that is especially crafted for them.

I thank these video bloggers for contributing such a fascinating set of videos. Their work helped shape a stimulating session that yielded intense discussions and self-reflection among video bloggers who were present at the screening. The discussion prompted some video bloggers to consider how place figured in their work and how it influenced their world view. By re-experiencing familiar places and sharing their perspective, these video bloggers helped contribute to a larger understanding of the intense relationship between human identity and material place in the physical world.

The session will be posted in its entirety on the Pixelodeon site in the forthcoming weeks. In the meantime, the individual video blogs are listed below in the order in which they were screened.

Posted by at 5:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Posted to Conferences and other events

SAFE is a not-for-profit awareness raising and lobbying organization based in the US, which aims to draw attention to the systematic pillaging and looting of archaeological sites worldwide, linking up to the work of British archaeologists such as Colin Renfrew working at the Macdonald Institute at Cambridge University.

http://www.savingantiquities.org/

They encourage student participation through poster sessions and internships, run public programs and have an excellent website. Those in New York should try to attend Oscar Muscarella's subversive tours of the Metropolitan Museum's Greek, Roman and Ancient Near East Galleries. Founded by a group of private individuals in the wake of the looting of the Baghdad Museum, SAFE exemplifies the ways in which concerned individuals can try to make a difference. Of course, targeting concerned scholars is only part of the task - we need to reeducate collectors as to the implications of the trade in antiquities.

The recent re-opening of the newly renovated Greek and Roman galleries at the Met shows just how much Antiquities are still used to boost the reputation of wealthy collectors into immortality. Recent scandals, such as the arrest of Getty Curator Marion True and dealer Robert Hecht and the negotiation by Italian authorities with the Metropolitan Museum to return the famous Euphronios Krater feel as though they exist in a different world to these galleries (even though the krater is still just in the next room, with a small label acknowledging that it is on long term loan from the Republic of Italy)...

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 9:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Exhibition reviews | Good Links | Topics for Discussion

This project draws on UCL's expertise both in curatorship and in e-Science. It takes advantage of the presence at UCL of world class collections across a range of disciplines and of a state of the art colour scanner, the quality of which is unequalled in the UK. The project aims to apply e-science technologies to museum work and artefact analysis, exploring the potential to capture and share in a secure and repeatable manner very large, detailed datasets about museum artefacts, thereby enhancing international scholarship and facilitating the safe movement of artefacts. The ability to share validated 3D colour data could facilitate object-tracking and condition checking, enabling curators and conservators to compare records collected at different institutions and stored remotely, or collected over a period of time under different conditions, in order to assess and monitor change. The project is jointly funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).

The specific aims of the project are to:
* Develop a repeatable methodology for recording the surface detail and colour quality of a range of object types and materials
* Explore the potential for producing validated datasets that would allow closer and more scientific examination of groups of objects, the processes involved in their manufacture, and issues of wear and deterioration.
* Examine how the resulting datasets could be transmitted, shared and compared.
* To begin to build expertise in the use and transmission of 3D scan data as a curatorial tool.

The PhD student will work as part of a team to explore the usage of the developed tools and undertake re-scanning and comparison of the objects on a periodic basis. This work will form the basis of a 4 year PhD investigation of the abilities of 3D colour scanning and e-science based data sharing and visualization for the museum community. The studentship will be supervised by Sally MacDonald, Director of UCL Museums and Collections and will be based in the Institute of Archaeology.

To be eligible for a full award, which covers the cost of tuition fees and a maintenance grant (£14,700 in 2007/8), applicants should be normally resident in the UK. Applicants should have a good background in museum, material culture, conservation, heritage studies or archaeology at honours degree level (first/upper second), and preferably some post-graduate training or museums experience. A strong interest in cultural heritage technologies is essential and experience in computing will be an advantage. The studentship must start no later than 1 October 2007.

Application forms can be downloaded from:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/prospective-students/graduate-study/application-admission

or are available from:

Lisa Daniel, Graduate Programmes Administrator, Institute of Archaeology, UCL, 31-34 Gordon Square, London WC1H OPY. Telephone: +44 (0) 20 7679 7499, email: l.daniel@ucl.ac.uk

Candidates should indicate on the application form under "Programme of Study" that they are applying for the AHRC-EPSRC-JISC Research Studentship.

Further information on the application process may be obtained by email from: Lisa Daniel (l.daniel@ucl.ac.uk)

The closing date for applications is 10 August 2007.

Posted by at 4:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Announcements and Listings

One day Symposium Friday 14th September 2007.

We will be hosting a one day symposium on Friday 14th September 2007. Its starting point is to explore how people involved in textile making are involved in practice based research teams across art, science and technology. We will focus on collaboration between artists, museologists and technologists and their relationship to textiles, touch and technology.

Click below for details

Such collaborations have a variety of outputs, including new forms of electronic communication, interactive databases and art works that are framed within a number of different environments. Museums have provided a range of interactive display that rely on computer technology but how do interactive works that mobilise touch, shape the visitors experience? What are the processes of collaboration involved? How does an engagement with technology affect the quality of audience experience? How are all the senses deployed within multi-modal environments and haptic textiles? What are the issues in IP and technology transfer? How do these issues affect practice based research and team work?

Programme:

Registration, including coffee: 9.00-9.30am

The Small Cinema - Richard Hoggart Building

9.45-10.00am

Introduction: Professor Janis Jefferies

Janis Jefferies is Professor of Visual Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, artist, writer and curator with particular interests in digital art and sound, the relationship between text, textiles, technology and access to cultural artefacts through touch and sound. She is Artistic Director of Goldsmiths Digital Studios and Director of the Constance Howard Resource and Research Centre in Textiles. She is currently project manager for NESTA for activities that include on-line learning resources.

Goldsmiths Digital Studios is dedicated to collaborations among practicing artists, cultural and media theorists, and innovators in computational media. Sited both at Goldsmiths and at the BT Research Laboratories in Martlesham Suffolk, ongoing projects include: developments of new forms of interactive digital moving images (partners include Cambridge University, BT, and Tate Modern), algorithms for music segmentation and analysis, retrieval of musical information (with Queen Mary), development of Haptic (touch) interfaces for artistic creation and access to artefacts (with MIT), and investigations of the second generation of Broadband

The Constance Howard Resource and Research Centre in Textiles is dedicated to the research and study of textiles within a broader context of visual and material culture. It has over 4,000 pieces of textile, some very special commissioned teaching samples, Japanese techno-fabrics, early example of stump work and tiny fragments of lace and embroidery.

10.00-10.45am

Session 1: Touch, Textile, Technology: Collaborative Practice

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Zane Berzina
Moderator: David Littler

Touch, Textile, Technology: Collaborative Practice

Dr. Zane Berzina: Artist, designer and researcher, Dr Zane Berzina, originally from Latvia, is involved in interdisciplinary projects across the fields of science, technology, design and the arts. Her practice and research evolves around responsive, active and interactive textiles, new materials, processes and technologies as well as biomimetic practices. In 2005, Zane completed a practice-based Ph.D. 'Skin Stories: Charting and Mapping the Skin' at the University of the Arts, London using analogies of human skin in relation to her textile practice. Currently she is a Research Fellow at the Constance Howard Resource and Research Centre in Textiles, Goldsmiths, University of London and an Associate of the Goldsmiths Digital Studios.

David Littler: David is director of London Printworks Trust, a leading centre of innovation for textile print based visual arts and educational practice, located in the heart of Brixton, south London. He has worked with a diverse range of artists and organizations including Yinka Shonibare, Jonathan Saunders, Brixton Market Traders' Association and The Hayward Gallery. He is currently developing a solo project "Sampler" combining his dual passions - dj-ing and textiles.

10.45-11.30am

Two Case Studies.

Seamus McGinnis and Kevin Malone: The Silent Community, textile practice within the Institute of Psychiatry (University of Dublin)

Seamus McGinnis is an artist and currently a lecturer in Textiles GMIT, Galway, visiting lecturer in art colleges, at Kilkenny, Co. Cork, Lithuania, Bulgaria and London. Seamus has been selected for many public and corporate commissions as well as exhibited extensively, with solo and collaborative exhibitions internationally and throughout Europe.

Dr Kevin Malone was appointed to the chair of Psychiatry at St.Vincent's University Hospital, University College Dublin in September 2002. He graduated in medicine from the Royal College of Surgeons in 1984. He has authored and co-authored over 70 original research papers in international peer- reviewed scientific journals, and has contributed chapters to over 20 scientific textbooks. He is currently writing a book for the public about depression and other psychological disorders. He is an active Clinical investigator with the UCD Conway Institute for Biomolecular and Biomedical Research, as well as with the Dublin Molecular Medicine Centre, where collaborative studies are underway to investigate molecular genetic and brain imaging factors associated with Suicidal Depression. He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the American Foundation for Suicidal Prevention, a Board member of the Irish Association of Suicidology, and a member of the European College of NeuroPsychopharmacology (ECNP). He has recently established the "Turning the Tide of Suicide (3TS) Foundation" which is dedicated to addressing the problem of suicide in modern Ireland through research, education and support.

This discursive collaboration is being conducted in the Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health Research Unit at St Vincent's Hospital, Dublin. As part fulfilment of a PhD in Suicide Studies under the joint supervision of Professor Kevin Malone, UCD and Professor Janis Jefferies, Goldsmiths, University of London. It is a unique collaboration between art and science.

The research is concerned with suicide and in particular young male suicide in contemporary Ireland. Suicide sits uncomfortably with the current international perception of economically successful Ireland. More young people die each year by suicide than by any other means. Young men are 3-4 times more likely to die in this way than young women.

This will inform a series of art works addressing suicide, utilizing personal textiles and artefacts belonging to the deceased and enriched by the spoken narrative, all of which have been donated by a 100 of the interviewed families.

We will be presenting preliminary findings, including a short DVD, articulating the possibilities and difficulties that present when disciplines interface outside the comfort zone of familiarity.

'Materials Library - a Haptic Emporium

Dr Mark Miodownik (Kings College) and Martin Conreen Design (Goldsmiths):Collaborations in Material Science. www.materialslibrary.org.uk

Dr Mark Miodownik is Head of the Materials Research Group, Kings College London and director of the Materials Library. He received his BA in Materials Science from St Catherine's College, Oxford in 1992, and his Ph.D in turbine jet engine alloys from Oxford University in 1996. His main research expertise is in self-healing materials and biological tissues. In 2001 he organised and chaired a talk series at the ICA on 'Aesthetics in the Arts and Sciences'. In 2003 he was awarded a NESTA fellowship to develop a Materials Library as an interactive space for designers, architects and artists to collaborate with materials scientists.

Martin Conreen is a lecturer in design. He received his BA from Goldsmiths in Fine Art/Sculpture in 1984. His interest in materials and making, led him to work in numerous design fields including furniture design, silver smithing, set building and shoe making to name but a few. Martin's research has focused on material culture, human behaviour and the role of objects in human relationships, as well as contemporary art, emerging materials and methods of production in art and design. He currently has an LCACE (London Centre for the Arts and Cultural Enterprise) funded project "What goes around comes around" to investigate the use of non-traditional snap fast materials (ecological and non-toxic) for rota-moulding proto-types.

The Material Library

Before the modern era, materials were developed by artists and crafts people, artisans, alchemists and dabblers largely through trial and error. The technical sophistication that can be achieved this way is impressive, as a visit to the British Museum amply illustrates.

Materials science is a fundamentally different approach: it is the use and development of theory (physics, chemistry, biology) to understand and develop new materials. Although Materials Science is a fundamentally multidisciplinary approach, one aspect of the subject unites everyone, the link between structure and material properties.
Whether it is macro-structure, micro-structure, nano-structure or atomic-structure: size matters, with each different structural scale presenting its own challenges. By understanding structure at the right scale you can control the corresponding properties such as colour, strength, smoothness, magnetism etc... Material scientists all spend a lot of time trying to observe, control and manipulate structure.

This approach is largely a 20th century innovation, and has yielded more new materials in 100 years than were developed in all previous history. There are hundreds of new materials produced every year. Some seem mundane, such as new aluminium alloys for the car industry, and some miraculous such as silicon chips, glass that cleans itself, polymers that self-heal, transparent concrete, and digital paper.

Materials are gathered together not only for scientific interest, but for their ability to fire the imagination and advance conceptualisation. Our hypothesis is that not only do technical details enhance aesthetic experience but that in generating physical encounters with matter, one provides an often forgotten way into this technical knowledge.

The library is a physical archive of more than 500 new materials and is growing every month. We specialise in new and advanced prototype materials collected from research labs all round the world. The idea of the library is to provide an intellectual and sensual intersection between the arts and sciences. We are not trying to create a comprehensive materials collection, instead we are trying to create a thinking space.

11.30-11.45am short break.

Session 2: Museums and Interaction.
11.45-12.30pm

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Tina Sherwell.
Moderator: Dr Nick Lambert, Birkbeck College, University of London.

Accessing collections through on-line database libraries of textile art and material culture.

Dr. Tina Sherwell is the Programme Leader for Fine Art at The Winchester School of Art, and she has worked on Arts and Humanities Council research which involved TATE Modern and their art media archives. She has written articles on Palestinian art and culture and worked with various Palestinian art and culture institutions over the last 10 years among which she was involved in the establishment of the Virtual Gallery at Birzeit University. She won an award at the Alexandria Biennele of 2001 for her maps of Palestine. She studied textiles at Goldsmiths before completing her Ph.D.

Dr. Nicholas Lambert is technical director of the AHRC Archival Project at the School of Architecture and the Built Environment, University of Westminster and Research Office on the CACHE Project at the School of History and Art, Film and Visual Media, Birkbeck, University of London. He has particular expertise in British computer-based art works from 1960s -1980s and is co-editor of " White Heat and Cold Logic: British Computer Art 1960-1980", MIT Press, 2007.

12.30-1.15pm

Two case studies

The Loom Project: Approaches to Weaving Narrative Threads A project by Alinah Azadeh, artist. Textile and system in collaboration with Jon Bird, (University of Sussex) and ASF Weave.
www.loomproject.com

Alinah Azadeh is a British-Iranian artist based in the UK who uses installation, film, digital media and textiles to develop hybrid artworks that seek to engage audiences in a process of self-reflection and intimate emotional connection with each other. Since her MA in Media Arts Practice at Westminster University in 2001, she has worked with processes such as cooking, weaving and talking to poetically subvert the way we view the function of the everyday. Collaboration and live participation are central to her work, both with experts of other
disciplines and the audience itself.

Jon Bird is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at the University of Sussex. He does artificial life research that focuses on the modelling of adaptive behaviour using computer simulations and robots. He is currently working on the multi-disciplinary Drawbots project which is exploring creativity by building robots that can draw. Applying his research across disciplines, he has published several papers that simultaneously consider both the artistic and scientific potential of emergent and evolutionary systems. He is a co-founder of Blip, a Brighton-based arts-science forum.

Kathleen Mullaniff, Jennifer Wright, Jane Langley.
Pattern Lab: www.thepatternlab.com

Kathleen Mullaniff, Jennifer Wright and Jane Langley have been collaborating and curating exhibitions related to textiles since 2000, enabling artists to explore and interpret both historical and contemporary textile collections and archives. They have now formed The Pattern Lab. Working with textiles has shown that everything is connected and The Pattern Lab will be continuing to develop ideas relating to this expanded field, including science, history and society. Projects have included Loop and Spin working with the V& A and Bankfield Museum, Halifax.

Jane Langley makes paintings that reference textiles; in particular stitch and weave. She revisits the motifs and styles found in a range of textiles, from stitched samplers made by children and fabrics designed for the Festival of Britain in the fifties, to 18th Century silk brocades and 1970's 'abstract' samplers. She also embroiders her own improvised samplers. All this material is transformed into sequences of paintings that merge 'decoration' with narratives that unfold in a reconstructed illusory space.

Jennifer Wright uses constructed plastics, digital print on textiles, vinyl, and embroidery to produce work exploring relationships between contemporary fine art practice, the structures, perception of time/duration and acts of making, experienced within the domestic day and technologies within the home. Her recent installations invite the viewer into interiors within which information from the outside world has been filtered and transformed through the everyday code of the embroidery chart. Photographic images of exterior views taken from within interior spaces, form the basis for a process of encryption and retranslation. These are rendered, initially as digitally printed, vinyl panels of colour-coded squares, akin to video pixels, which cover the windows of the installation space.

Interested in complex relationships between 'hand-laboured' and technologically accelerated means of production she 'relays' this information as through the space of a 'computer vitrine', the viewer witnessing the signal becoming image. On the floor lay 'Rococo rugs', made from thousands of luminous, plastic beads , whilst on the walls multi-panelled images combining embroidery and photography ,are interwoven with the narrative potential of a future landscape and supersaturated with colour. The images appearing to be in a constant state of evolution, as might resemble the corrupt frames of a DVD.

Jennifer Wright is part of the Contemporary Fine Art Research Group (CFAR) at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design (UCE) and a Senior Lecturer in the Fine Art Department.

Kathleen Mullaniff trained at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts gaining a BA Fine Art (Painting) and University of London Goldsmiths MA Fine Art. Kathleen writes: Since 1994 I have used various pictorial means within my painting practice to map and record the decorative. My starting points have been varied and have encompassed the use of decorative printed fabric, photographic imagery and illustrated floral imagery. It is my intention to investigate the idea of home as a place laden with memory and cultural identity. The ongoing question is one of interpretation, the aim being to render the source material in a poetical pictorial form. Fine Art Practice has placed a question mark over the applied and decorative arts, viewing them from a cultural distance. I endeavour to address in my practice pictorial methods that make a contemporary comment on past histories. She has exhibited in Painting as a Foreign Language at Cultura Inglesa Sao Paulo. Fabric Reinterpreting the House at Abbott Hall Art Gallery. Loop at
Bankfield Museum, Showhouse: at PM Gallery and House. In 2004 she participated in Purl at The Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture where three UK artists and three artists from the USA used the textile archive to make original works.

Kathleen is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Middlesex University.

Lunch 01.15-02.45pm
Lunch provided in the Constance Howard Resource
and Research Centre in Textiles.

Session 3: Intellectual Property and Technology Transfer:
Case studies

02.45-04.00pm

Moderator: Rebecca Maguire
Marrice Cumber, Director Own It
Paul Carlyle, Partner, Commercial Division, Media and Technology Shepherd and Wedderburn LLP.

Rebecca Maguire is a Cultural Development Manager at Goldsmiths, University of London, working within the Office for Business Development and responsible to London Centre for Arts and Cultural Enterprise (LCACE) - a collaborative project between seven London universities. The office develops consultancy, showcasing and commercial relationships between Goldsmiths and industry, the voluntary sector and government, working with academics and practitioners from all departments.

Marrice Cumber, director of Own It, www.own-it.org, Creative London Intellectual Property Service. Free advice, events and information for London's creative people on: Copyright, Design Rights, Patents, Trademarks, Branding, Confidentiality Agreements, Licensing, Royalties, Contracts.

Embroidery Pirates and Fashion Victims: Textiles and Anti-Copyright Activism
Kirsty Robertson is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Constance Howard Research Centre in Textiles at Goldsmiths, University of London, England. Kirsty Robertson's postdoctoral work focuses on the study of wearable technologies, immersive environments and the potential overlap(s) between textiles and technologies. She considers these issues within the framework of globalization, activism, and burgeoning "creative economies." Kirsty recently completed her Ph.D. in Visual and Material cultures at Queen's University in Canada in August, 2006. Her dissertation focused on global justice activism and visual culture.

Debates over copyright within crafting communities are particularly thorny, jumping as they do from notions of a common shared history that should be open and welcoming to all, passing through the idea that as an apparently gendered pastime crafting is regularly devalued - something its practitioners should work against, to more recent arguments that there are lucrative opportunities for professional crafters and designers that need to be protected through the copyrighting, patenting and trademarking of designs and processes. These debates have produced two further competing interpretations of the role(s) played by craft in a contemporary setting. The first can be described as a reaction against copyright and trademarking, coupled with frequent misunderstandings of how copyright is used by designers, and fears that what is most pleasurable about crafting is threatened by tighter controls and surveillance. On a second, and often hidden, level, professional craftworkers face not only stigma within the community for protecting their designs, but are also frequently targeted by multinational companies who are able to "steal" their designs and mass produce them without fear of repercussion from the much smaller (and generally poorer) practitioners and designers. From the activist KNITTA graffiti knitters and trademark-busters Microrevolt, to the so-called "embroidery pirates" and swiftly organized coalitions both for and against copyright, and ranging from recent World Trade Organization legislation affecting textiles, through a comparison with the very different approach to copyright in the fashion industry, this paper examines some of these issues, focusing particularly on some of the creative responses to copyright and to copyright infringement.

04.00: Conclusion

4.30-6.00pm: Reception (drinks and nibbles) and Poster Session and video projections in the Constance Howard Resource and Research Centre in Textiles.

The Small Cinema - Richard Hoggart Building
6.15pm, The Man in the White Suit

Introduction: Mark Miodownik.
Showing of the 1951 film, The Man in the White Suit which is a comedy about textiles and technology staring Alec Guinness. A strong fibre
is invented. It repels the dirt and never wears out. What happens to the white suit as it glows?

Publication
Deadline for submitting manuscripts, around the issues of Touch, Textile and Technology, for publication: December 1, 2007. All papers will be sent for peer review and considered for inclusion in a special issue of Textile; Journal of Cloth and Culture. If a full-length manuscript is not submitted by this date, the speaker's 200-word abstract may be printed instead. Guidelines for submission will be sent with paper acceptance.

Registration
Early Bird registration prior to April 1st 2007.
Friends of Constance Howard Resource and Research Centre in Textiles: £55.00
Members of ETN:£55.00
Non members: £65.00
Students: £30.00

Full registration, closing date August 1st 2007
Friends of Constance Howard Resource and Research Centre in Textiles: £70.00
Members of ETN : £70.00
Non members: £80.00
Students: £40.00
www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/constance-howard

Posted by at 7:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Posted to Announcements and Listings

I am seeking proposals of original writings for a forthcoming edited book tentatively titled: “Mundane Stuff: Ethnographic Approaches to Technology as Material Culture.” The deadline for proposal submission is September 1, 2007. Completed chapters would be due some time in the spring of 2008. Serious publisher interest in this book has already been expressed. The writing is intended to be classroom friendly, though the intended audience is comprised mainly of graduate students and scholars.

Studying technology as everyday life material culture means demystifying technology and methodologically approaching technics (i.e. material objects) and techniques (i.e. tactics, strategies) as pragmatic ways of attributing meaning to the world while simultaneously shaping it and being shaped by it. Such as an approach calls for reflexive, creative, situated ethnographic research strategies which employ both abstract knowledge and mundane practices of meaning-making while attempting to understand both users and material objects.

I am seeking three types of proposed chapters.

1. Theoretical chapters which provide both an overview and reflection on one of the following analytical perspectives on technology as everyday life material culture: symbolic interactionism, actor-network theory, cultural studies, and phenomenology. Required length: 5,500 words.

2. Methodological chapters which offer both overview and reflection on the ethnographic study and representation of technology as material culture from the angle of one of the following approaches: performance ethnography, visual ethnography, narrative ethnography, analytical ethnography. Required length: 5,500 words.

3. Empirical chapters which focus on the reporting of original ethnographic research on technology as material culture. Possible topics are limitless. For example, they may include the study of domestic objects, means of transportation, clothing and other body-modifying/adorning objects, workplace objects, toys, landscape, etc. Approximate required length: 7,500 words.

If you are interested please submit a tentative title, 100/150 word abstract, and author bio to Phillip Vannini: Phillip.Vannini@Royalroads.ca or simply contact me to discuss ideas or ask for more information.

Phillip Vannini, PhD
Assistant Professor
School of Communication and Culture
2005 Sooke Road
Royal Roads University
Victoria BC V9B 5Y2
CANADA
Phone: (250) 391-2600 ext. 4477 (no voice mail)
Fax: (250) 391-2694

Posted by at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Announcements and Listings

Sandra Rozental, NYU Anthropology Graduate Student

Museums have been pooling from film in both literal and figurative ways. Galleries are peppered with screens and video installations, film segments and screening areas, but they are also generating "blockbuster" shows and featuring trailer-like advertisements for their exhibitions on television and in cinemas.

The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) is no exception, with the added plus of hosting a the largest ethnographic and documentary film festival in the United States once a year, the Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival. Despite its long and intricate relationship with film, in the last few months, the museum has been greatly transformed by film. Since A Night at the Museum, a film based on a book by Milan Trenc, directed by Shawn Levy, and with Ben Stiller playing the main character, was screened around the world, visitors come to the museum looking for the film's many characters: Attila the Hun, Jedediah, Sacajawea, the Easter Island talking head, and Dexter the monkey, among others. In their quest to merge fiction and reality at the museum, visitors are unavoidably disappointed: not only was the film not filmed in the museum in New York, but it was actually done in a building based on the AMNH constructed as a sound stage in Vancouver, Canada. External shots of the actual AMNH were used throughout the film to make it appear that the story takes place inside the Central Park museum.

Rather than working to correct the misunderstanding, and sport its identity as an institution with an educational and scientific mission, the AMNH has been more than happy to take on its role in the film as a marketing strategy. The IMDB website states that visitors to the AMNH increased 20% after the film's opening, a statistic that clearly did not go unnoticed by the museum's public relations team. These days, the museum has very literally let the museum display and characters constructed by the movie inside its walls, using large cutouts of the film to lure visitors to its giftshop, selling AMNH certified "Night at the Museum" badges, and offering "night at the museum" sleepovers during which, for a huge sum of money, children can spend an actual night in one of the museum's halls, using flashlights and going on expeditions with wild buffalo and a blue whale, waiting for Teddy Roosevelt to come to life.

Sleepover Link:http://www.amnh.org/kids/sleepovers/

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 7:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Exhibition reviews | Good Links | Topics for Discussion

April Strickland, NYU Anthropology PhD Student

CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed is an exhibition of French photographer Frederic Chaubin’s images of late Eastern bloc architecture, and was on view at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City until June 16.

Chaubin’s images, taken over a five year period, include a wide array of structures not often represented in the history of Soviet architecture, such as a Crimean union health center, an Estonian cross-country skiing resort, and secluded summer homes of party leaders in Lithuania and Armenia. The photographs are beautifully composed, and draw attention to the monumental and often witty combination of landscape and architecture, as well as discrepancies between architecture constructed for the public good and vast private residences available only to a slim minority.

Writing of the architects (acknowledged in the exhibit when possible), the website remarks,
“Operating in a cultural context hermetically sealed from the influence of their Western counterparts, they drew inspiration from sources ranging from expressionism, science fiction, early European modernism and the Russian Suprematist legacy to produce an idiosyncratic, flamboyant and often imaginative architectural ménage. Unexpected in their contexts, these monumental buildings stand in stark contrast to the stereotypical understanding of late Soviet architecture in which monotonously repetitive urban landscapes were punctuated by vapid exercises in architectural propaganda.”

http://www.storefrontnews.org/current.php

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 3:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Exhibition reviews