Arts, Volume 8, Issue 1 (March 2019) – 40 articles

In his work, the filmmaker Shindō Kaneto sought to employ various, often seemingly incongruous, cinematic styles that complicate the notions of fiction and documentary film. This paper first examines his ‘semi-documentary’ films that often deal with the everyday life of common people by means of an enhanced realist approach. Second, attention is paid to the fusion of documentary and drama when reenacting historical events, as well as the subsequent recycling of these images in a ‘quasi-documentary’ fashion. Finally, I uncover a trend towards ‘meta-documentary’ that takes issue with the act of filmmaking itself. I argue that Shindō’s often self-referential work challenges the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction while engaging in a self-reflective criticism of cinema as a medium. Full article

We have been working on the creation of media art, utilizing technologies. In this paper, we have focused on media art created based on the visualization of fluid behaviors. This area is named “fluid dynamics” and there has been a variety of research in this area. However, most of the visualization results of the fluid dynamics show only stable fluid behaviors and a lack of unstable or, in other words, unpredictable behaviors that would be significant in the creation of art. To create various unstable or unpredictable fluid behaviors, we have developed and introduced several new methods to control fluid behaviors and created two media arts called “Sound of Ikebana” and “Genesis”. Interestingly, people find and feel that there is Japanese beauty in these media arts, although they are created based on a natural phenomenon. This paper proposes the basic concept of media art based on the visualization of fluid dynamics and describes details of the methods that were developed by us to create unpredictable fluid dynamics-based phenomena. Also, we will discuss the relationship between Japanese beauty and physical phenomena represented by fluid dynamics. Full article

In this paper, I will examine how Japanese documentary filmmaker Tsuchimoto Noriaki (1928–2008) tackled the issue of visual ethics through the representation of Matsunaga Kumiko and Kamimura Tomoko—two young female patients known for the symbolic roles they each played in the history of Minamata disease. I will introduce the ethical challenge Tsuchimoto encountered upon his first visit to Minamata in 1965—especially how he grappled with the question of filming subjects (shutai) who were unconscious and/or unable to express whether they approved the act of filming or not—and how such conundrums were reflected into his representation of Kumiko in her hospital bed. For the analysis of the representation of Tomoko as seen in Tsuchimoto’s documentary, I will bring in W. Eugene Smith’s photograph “Tomoko and Mother in the Bath” as a point of comparison to explore what could be an ethical representation of Minamata disease patients, including the issue of photographs that seem to beautify the tragedy. Based on the above examinations, I will argue that the challenges Tsuchimoto faced upon representing unresponsive subjects and the very struggle to find a way to capture them as humans, not as patients or victims, altered his manner of artistic and political involvement with Minamata disease. And in the current post-Fukushima era, the issue of ethical representation that he kept exploring carries even more significance upon representing disasters. Full article

To speak comfortably of the machine artist (as outlined in the call for papers for this Special Issue) makes key assumptions about what it is to be an artist. It assumes, for instance, that the experience of living as an artist, which includes the socialisation, hard work, single-mindedness, and focused energy of creative activity, is incidental rather than essential since these aspects are not comfortably applicable to machines. Instead, it supposes that what is essential is the artistic product, and it is the similarity of human and machine products that makes it possible to speak of machine artists. This definition of art in terms of products is supported by modern psychological theories of creativity, defined as the generation of novel ideas which give rise to valuable products. These ideas take place in the mind or brain, regarded as a closed system within whose workings the secret of creativity will eventually be revealed. This is the framework of what is widely referred to as “cognitivism”. This definition in terms of novel ideas and valuable products has been widely assumed by artificial intelligence (AI) and computational creativity (CC), and this has been backed up through a particular version of the Turing Test. In this, a machine can be said to be a creative artist if its products cannot be distinguished from human art. However, there is another psychological view of creativity, that of John Dewey, in which a lived experience of inquiry and focus is essential to being creative. In this theory, creativity is a function of the whole person interacting with the world, rather than originating in the brain. This makes creativity a Process rather than a Cognitivist framework. Of course, the brain is crucial in a Process theory, but as part of an open system which includes both body and environment. Developments in “machine art” have been seen as spectacular and are widely publicised. But there may be a danger that these will distract from what we take to be the most exciting prospect of all. This is the contribution of computer technology to stimulate, challenge, and provoke artistic practice of all forms. Full article

The question of whether machines can make art provokes very different answers from pioneers in the field. Harold Cohen refuses to ascribe creativity to his art-making robot AARON, while Leonel Moura argues that since his “Artbots” generate pictures from emergent properties that could not have been predicted by their creator, “they have at least some degree of creativity.” Although the question of whether machines can be artists seems to fall squarely on our definition of the latter, a solution to this philosophical impasse may ironically lie in redirecting the question away from the artist and toward the viewer. Full article

This paper looks at recent examples of how drawing is advancing into the digital age: in London: the annual symposium on Thinking Through Drawing; in Paris: an exhibition at the Grand Palais, Artistes et Robots; a conference at the Institut d’études avancées on Space-Time Geometries and Movement in the Brain and in the Arts; and, at the Drawing Lab, Cinéma d’Été. These events are contrasted to a recent decline in drawing instruction in pre-professional programs of art, architecture, and design as well as in pre-K12 art education due largely to the digital revolution. In response, I argue for the ongoing importance of learning to draw both in visual art and in general education at all levels in the digital age. Full article

In this essay the author discusses the benefits of introducing digital making tools into the glass artist’s practice-based research, both on a professional and student level. Using an example from his personal creative practice as a case study, the author outlines not only the practical benefits of using digital technology, but how when combined with traditional hot-worked glass techniques the synthesis can produce art objects that would otherwise be impossible using either digital or manual means alone. He argues that it is the possibility of inventing novel approaches to art making that can motivate glass artists and students to embrace digital means of making, rather than relying on appeals to practicality and efficiency alone. Includes a description of producing blown glass sculptures that combine fused water-jet cut sheet glass with traditional mold blowing and glass sculpting techniques. Full article

Carl Andre’s opposition between an activating art and a pacifying culture becomes the impetus for wider reflections on artistic autonomy and agency with special reference to how fine art is taught at college. I propose that artistic agency might better be accounted for and enacted by conceiving of it not as something set against or at a distance from culture in general, but ‘as’ culture. Through an overview of various institutional and discursive accounts of artistic production which describe the ways in which art is itself influenced and determined by external factors, and an extended analysis of Raymond Williams theory of culture as ‘collective advance’, I propose that fine art education needs to confront the question of contemporary art’s wider cultural embeddedness, and the political culture of art itself—a politics based in the nature of the social relationships art practice engenders. Full article

Glass has a unique ability to imitate other materials; cross-pollinating with other disciplines to refresh and recreate itself. The creative possibilities of creating glass that imitates other materials such as ceramic, paper, metal, wood, stone, plastic and semi-precious stones are vast. The assertion of this paper is that the use of imitation is a necessary and definitive act within creative artistic practice. Following a range of historical examples to set the context for this article, a range of contemporary glass artists that use glass as a medium for imitation will be introduced and documented through a series of artists case studies. Finally, I will present my current practice-based research into glass as a medium for imitation. I will discuss the material testing and research that has been carried out and introduce two new bodies of artworks that I have developed based on the theme of glass as an artistic medium for material imitation. Full article

This document is a report on developing processes to encourage flow of the graphic image in kilnformed glass. It is also a description and reflection on a body of artworks in glass in which new visual qualities were exposed through a mishap and turned into an aesthetic choice. The research links 2D print approaches to 3D printing and their integration in cast glass. It updates the author’s practice-based PhD research, a study that utilizes glass printing, cutting and fusing processes to combine the printed image within the glass object. The outcomes of the study can be organized under two approaches that have been developed, one appropriate to practical workshop teaching, and the other for the conceptualization and fabrication of new personal artworks. Full article

The French word dispositif, applied to visual art, encompasses several components of an artwork, such as the apparatus itself as well as its display conditions and the viewers themselves. In this article, I examine the concept of dispositif in the context of holography and, in particular, synthetic holography (computer-generated holography). This analysis concentrates on the holographic space and its effects on time and colors. A few comparisons with the history of spatial representation allow us to state that the holographic dispositif breaks with the perspective tradition and opens a new field of artistic research and experimentation. Full article

This article is devoted to the Italian modern project of the 1930s, which involved architecture and design. The main theme is the influence that the autarchic economic policy of the Fascist regime had in the choice of materials and technologies, and, above all, the manner in which this choice led to innovative practices and figurative research. Through significant examples, the essay provides some insight into the style of Italian rationalism, whose contradictory aspects—conditioned by the regime’s policy—shaped urban planning, architecture, and design in the 1930s. I show that the Italian rationalist culture is a field of investigation that is of considerable scientific interest because it represents the idea of an integral project comprised of all the elements associated to a building, including those that are still used today. In particular, I present a case study centered on the Physics Institute of Rome’s Sapienza University (1933–1935) designed by the architect Giuseppe Pagano Pogatschnig, analyzing its materials, technologies, and architectural features, as well as its furnishings. Along these lines, the objective of this investigation is the transmission of a specific knowledge, looking at objects as essential parts of the aesthetics of Rationalism in order to protect and enhance the cultural heritage of modernity. Full article

Our essay discusses an AI process developed for making art (AICAN), and the issues AI creativity raises for understanding art and artists in the 21st century. Backed by our training in computer science (Elgammal) and art history (Mazzone), we argue for the consideration of AICAN’s works as art, relate AICAN works to the contemporary art context, and urge a reconsideration of how we might define human and machine creativity. Our work in developing AI processes for art making, style analysis, and detecting large-scale style patterns in art history has led us to carefully consider the history and dynamics of human art-making and to examine how those patterns can be modeled and taught to the machine. We advocate for a connection between machine creativity and art broadly defined as parallel to but not in conflict with human artists and their emotional and social intentions of art making. Rather, we urge a partnership between human and machine creativity when called for, seeing in this collaboration a means to maximize both partners’ creative strengths. Full article

The essay proposes an art–historical contextualisation of the notion of the “machine as artist”. It argues that the art–theoretical tropes raised by current speculations on artworks created by autonomous technical systems have been inherent to debates on modern and postmodern art throughout the 20th century. Moreover, the author suggests that the notion of the machine derives from a mythological narrative in which humans and technical systems are rigidly figured as both proximate and antagonistic. The essay develops a critical perspective onto this ideological formation and elucidates its critique in a discussion of a recent series of artworks and a text by US American artist Trevor Paglen. Full article

It is important for the history of fashion curriculum, to acknowledge the post-digital environment within which fashion and education now operate. One way to address this, is to move concepts of change in fashion beyond the singular narrative of fashion’s evolution that is visualised in the fashion timeline. This paper describes an approach to developing historical consciousness in fashion students who are native to the networked conditions of the twenty-first century. These students need frameworks capable of analysing the increasingly decentralised drivers of change in fashion, as well as developments in the fashion system that do not show themselves in garment styles and silhouettes. The study describes how visual metaphors have been used in the study of the history of fashion, to encourage students to view the changing characteristics of fashion from a range of viewpoints. It is an approach designed to open alternative discourses on change, as an inherent feature of fashion. Using these alternative perspectives, it becomes possible for today’s students to engage with the history of fashion in a more critical and reflexive manner, and better understand the interconnected and contingent nature of change in fashion, both, in the past and in the current context. Full article

To date, most work on computers in art has focused on the Algorists (1960s–) and on later cyber arts (1990s–). The use of microcomputers is an underexplored area, with the 1980s constituting a particular gap in the knowledge. This article considers the case of Polish-Australian artist, Stan Ostoja-Kotkowski (b. 1922, d. 1994), who after early exposure to computers at the Bell Labs (1967), returned to microcomputers late in his life. He was not a programmer yet used micros in his practice from the early 1980s, first a BBC in his BP Christmas Star commission, and later a 32-bit Archimedes. This he used from 1989 until his death to produce still images with a fractal generator and the ‘paintbox’ program, “Photodesk”. Drawing on archival research and interviews, we focus on three examples of how Ostoja deployed his micro, highlighting the convergence of art, maths, electronics, and a ‘hands-on’ tinkering ethic in his practice. We argue that when considering the history of creative microcomputing, it is imperative to go beyond the field of art itself. In this case, electronics and the hobbyist computing scenes provide crucial contexts. Full article

The paper presents a personal history of making machines as artworks. The particular kind of art machines that have been made since around 1970 are communication machines: ones that enable humans to interact with each other. However, they do not provide communication in the normal sense, but use a small bandwidth for relatively complex connections, making the experience of the interactions the art experience. The paper concludes by explaining how it later became possible to use computer networking and the Internet to make artworks that were more complex and, in part, autonomous generative machines whilst retaining the earlier communication machine functions. Full article

This paper considers some examples of creative glass practice and research at the ‘overlap’ of two distinct sectors of art and design—‘glassmaking’ and ‘printmaking’. The unique properties of glass mean that printed imagery can be applied on the glass surface, encapsulated within the glass form and can even be made of glass. Case studies are given relating to each of these areas. In particular, the article offers some reflections on the development of glass and print over the last twenty or so years. These reflections are based on the author’s perspectives as an artist, teacher, and researcher. Following a historical overview, case studies are given on the work of Kevin Petrie, Rachel Welford, Miyoung Jung, Jeffrey Sarmiento, and Kathryn Wightman. All of these makers are associated with the Glass and Ceramics Department of the University of Sunderland, UK, based in National Glass Centre, but all have made wider impacts beyond the UK. Full article

This article explores the use of ethnofiction, a technique emerging from the field of visual anthropology, which blends documentary and fiction filmmaking for ethnographic purposes. From Imamura Shōhei’s A Man Vanishes (Ningen jōhatsu, 1967) to Hou Hsiao Hsien’s Cafe Lumieré (Kōhi jikō, 2003), Japanese cinema, including Japan-set and Japan-associated cinema, has employed ethnofiction filmmaking techniques to alternately exploit and circumvent the structural barriers to filmmaking found in everyday life. Yet the dominant understanding in Japanese visual ethnography positions ethnofiction as an imported genre, reaching Japan through Jean Rouch and French cinema-verité. Blending visual analysis of Imamura and Hou’s ethnofiction films with an auto-ethnographic account of my own experience of four years of visual anthropology in Kansai, I interrogate the organizational barriers constructed around geographical perception and genre definition to argue for ethnofiction as a filmmaking technique that simultaneously emerged in French cinema-verité and Japanese feature filmmaking of the 1960s. Blurring the boundaries between Japanese, French, and East Asian co-production films, and between documentary and fiction genres, allows us to understand ethnofiction as a truly global innovation, with certain regional specificities. Full article

The Makers Marks Collaborative, an international team of glass artists, visual designers, composers, and engineers, embarked on a project together from 2015–2016 to use the glassmaking studio as a staging ground for interdisciplinary, collaborative making. The team aimed to capture and preserve the sounds of traditional studio glassmaking, and then to share them outside the workshop domain through digital technologies and glass art objects. The goal was also to fulfill a public engagement grant from the Royal Academy of Engineering to highlight the engineering through the art and the engineers’ vision within the art making. The team recorded and isolated the unique sounds of the glassblowing process and its studio environment, and then used the resulting digital sound collection as the foundation for developing artistic outputs: a virtual instrument library, a glass object-instrument of performance, a series of glass objects translating selected virtual instruments, and a music composition. They questioned the nature and materiality of glass through dialogue between media and conversation among team members, while exploring the practice-based research question: “How can we embed our recorded sounds of the glassmaking process back into the glass itself?” This paper focuses on the collaborative, interdisciplinary making process of the team, the project outputs, and the metaphorical language that was a key process facilitation tool. Full article

This paper introduces the author’s practice-based research and the developed pioneering methods of application of printing inclusions and metal inclusions in glass. It also describes and examines the problems occurring during the application of printing and metal inclusions in glass and presents methods for the selection of suitable materials and techniques. Full article

This paper examines the leading role played by the American mechanical performance group Survival Research Laboratories (SRL) within the field of machine art during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and as organized under the headings of (a) destruction/survival; (b) the cyborg as a symbol of human/machine interpenetration; and (c) biomechanical sexuality. As a manifestation of the era’s “industrial” culture, moreover, the work of SRL artists Mark Pauline and Eric Werner was often conceived in collaboration with industrial musicians like Monte Cazazza and Graeme Revell, and all of whom shared a common interest in the same influences. One such influence was the novel Crash by English author J. G. Ballard, and which in turn revealed the ultimate direction in which all of these artists sensed society to be heading: towards a world in which sex itself has fallen under the mechanical demiurge. Full article

This paper is a metaphorical extension of my practice of intertwining my conceptual/theoretical development with my personal history. Allowing the autobiographical narrative to become the driver of my practice has had a profound influence on my work. This has resulted in changes in the intention and scale of my work and new approaches to making, with a re-evaluation of the hierarchy of processes and materials. Written as a reflective case study, from a practice-led research perspective, the paper illustrates a realignment in creative methodology from a craft-based practitioner specialising in kiln-formed glass, to that of a mixed media sculptor. This transition was made in response to my desire to break free of my perceived confines as a craft practitioner, with a focus on technical excellence and the predominant language of glass, and place the concept at the forefront of my practice. This enabled me to explore the relationship of personal geographies of landscapes, to inform my prevailing concepts of corporeal vulnerabilities, in a more integral way. S-O-T Body Repairs was the title of a solo exhibition that sprang from this body of research and is discussed in this paper. Full article

This paper focuses on the characteristics and use of transparent homogenous coloured glass for cast glass sculpture. It provides an overview of glass colouring agents and their characteristics, and establishes factors that influence the appearance of colour in glass. Methods to visually evaluate appropriate colour density for a given form are discussed, as well as essential characteristics that a form must possess to achieve results within a density threshold area, where coloured glass changes in value and/or hue between thick and thin sections. Full article

Driven by the solidarity movements following the “refugee crisis” of 2015, the Brussels-based non-profit organization Muziekpublique, specialized in the promotion of so-called “world music”, initiated the Refugees for Refugees project. This album and performance tour featured traditional musicians who had found asylum in Belgium and had artistic, political, and social goals. In comparison to the other projects conducted by the organization, each step of the project benefited from exceptional coverage and financial support. At the same time, the association and the musicians were facing administrative, musical, and ethical problems they had never encountered before. Three years after its creation, the band Refugees for Refugees is still touring the Belgian and international scenes and is going to release a new album, following the will of all actors to go on with the project and demonstrating the important social mobilization it aroused. Through this case study, we aim at questioning the complexity of elaborating a project staging a common identity of “refugees” while valuing their diversity; understanding the reasons for the exceptional success the project has encountered; and determining to what extent and at what level it helped—or not—the musicians to rebuild their lives in Belgium. Full article

When discussing the correlation between technological progress and the development of modern architecture, case studies from the fine arts can be instructive. This article undertakes a close architectural analysis of Tomás Saraceno’s walkable art installation “In Orbit” (2013) by releasing previously unpublished technical specifications. A brief history of envisioned and constructed space architecture of the last hundred years—which can be divided into three phases—serves to locate the installation within the currents of predictive utopia, realized architecture and technological development. It becomes clear that Saraceno not only takes up pre-existing architectural techniques, but also develops them further. Full article

Calligraphic glass is one of the newer developments in contemporary glass art. The long-standing tradition of calligraphy is a rich source of inspiration for the glass artist, glass being a relatively new material for spontaneous mark-making. The investigation of the calligraphic quality of artworks ultimately leads to a discussion of human body movement, because mark-making is fundamentally a kinetic exercise. Often, the artist’s psychological and physical state is more important than the resultant marks. Building upon my doctoral research, which introduced the basic idea and techniques of ‘calligraphic lampworking’, this paper develops the discussion mainly regarding how the artist’s body movement may be manifested as spatial traces made from glass lines. Full article

This article explores the under-researched intertextual and intermedial connections between Leonora Carrington’s transdisciplinary practice and the medium of film. The analysis focuses on the artist’s cameo appearances in two 1960s Mexican productions—There Are No Thieves in This Village (Alberto Isaac 1964) and A Pure Soul (Juan Ibáñez 1965)—which mark her creative collaborations with Surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel and Magic Realists Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes. Carrington’s cameo roles are analyzed within a network of intertextual translations between her visual and literary works that often mix autobiographical and fictional motifs. Moreover, it is argued that Carrington’s cinematic mediations employ the recurring Surrealist tropes of anti-Catholic and anti-bourgeois satire. The article also investigates Carrington’s creative approach towards art directing and costume design, expressed in the Surrealist horror film The Mansion of Madness (Juan López Moctezuma 1973). The analysis examines the intermedial connections between Carrington’s practice of cinematic set design and her earlier experiments with theatrical scenography. Overall, this study aims to reveal undiscovered aspects of Leonora Carrington’s artistic identity and her transdisciplinary oeuvre. Full article