Arts — Open Access Journal

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

This paper describes research concerning the creation of a novel sheet glass forming system based on the Reconfigurable Pin Tooling (RPT) principle. The paper will initially outline some of the theoretical and technical background for the research. These contexts particularly concern tools and innovation environments as well as a brief overview of the history of the RPT concept. A description of the development of the tooling systems through practice-based research is then provided followed by coverage of creative explorations with this new glass-forming method. Based on the results of the research, the author argues that digital fabrication technologies can provide the key toolsets for individual creative practitioners to successfully innovate through their own toolmaking projects. This argument is evidenced by artefacts (glass bowls) produced by the author using the RPT systems developed during the research; these glass bowls have been widely exhibited and received both critical as well as commercial acclaim. The article concludes with observations from this research and reflections on the findings. Full article

Trauma theorists foreground the unrepresentability of trauma; however, with modern innovations in visual representation, such as the photograph and cinema, depictions of trauma have begun to circulate across different mediums for a variety of audiences. These images tend to problematically present the traumatic event rather than the effects of trauma, such as traumatic memory. Specifically, some contemporary Hollywood popular films and television series that include rape as their subject matter often include a rape scene that can evoke affects such as disgust or empathy, and while these affects can last the duration of the film, they fail to shift popular discourses about rape because affect is more productive when it focuses on effects instead of events. As trauma studies has shifted to memory studies in the Humanities, and rape has become more prominent in popular culture through the circulation of personal testimony on social media and memoir, depictions of rape in cinema have slowly started to change from presentations of rape scenes to representations of rape trauma that highlight different affects, such as shame. Using Monster (2003), Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), Room (2015), and the television series, 13 Reasons Why (2017) and Sharp Objects (2018) as case studies, this paper argues that, for an audiovisual depiction of rape to shift popular discourses about rape, it would have to function rhetorically to widen the cultural understanding of rape trauma beyond the event, and demonstrate that rape trauma should be understood as part of the personal, unconscious, cultural, and visual mediation of traumatic memory. Full article

This paper details and discusses Material Journey (2018), an art project by the author that was exhibited at the National Glass Centre in Sunderland (UK) from 9 June to 2 September 2018. This research project sought to interrogate the material impact of one art project made of glass by carefully considering the different stages of making—from design to production to the exhibition phase. The carbon footprint of an energy intensive material such as glass is often considered anathema to sustainable making practices in the field of applied arts. Whilst this paper makes the case that the material impact of individual art practices is negligible in the global context of carbon footprints, it nevertheless argues that the craft of ‘making’ has a critical role to play in the Anthropocene. Critically, this project is one of the first art projects in glass that critically examines the carbon footprint of a material practice. It is argued that this conversation is long overdue but makes the case that the tools for understanding and calculating the carbon footprint of a material practice are currently lacking and need more development. Full article

The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal started to receive born digital material in the late 1990s. Not knowing what to do with it, typically only the physical appearance was described. Since 2012, the CCA has seriously started to look into its born digital collections and actively started to acquire more. CCA was not very interested in how to overcome the technocratic question as to how to preserve and give access to born digital material, but wanted to understand how the digital technology has changed and shaped architecture. The curatorial approach and the investment in staff and expertise led to success: the CCA is now able to preserve its born digital collections, to describe it, to access nearly all files, to make it accessible for research, and to share this with the community. How? By just doing it, making mistakes, and learning by doing. Full article

This book review examines Ed Piskor’s Hip Hop Family Tree as compiled and packaged by Fantagraphics into two gift box sets featuring a total of four treasury editions of collected works. The basic premise of Hip Hop Family Tree focuses on a loose narrative detailing the historical development of hip-hop culture as depicted in a comic book format. The review begins with a brief summary of each treasury edition with a specific focus on selected vignettes detailing the role that visual art has played in hip-hop culture. The review closes with a discussion of the overall relevance of Piskor’s work to those working in art and visual culture education. Full article

During the last decade, smart materials and systems have increasingly impacted several niches, including ‘one-off/limited edition experimental fashion’. As the traditional boundaries between what is art and what was not supposed to be art are now turning into osmotic membranes, we will speculatively focus on how ‘smart material systems’ are highly contributing to outline a new creative landscape full of interesting and compelling issues. Introducing three different sub-niches of experimental fashion—multi-sensory dresses, empathic dresses, and bio-smart dresses—this article outlines the emergence of a new smart design scenario. Then, we critically discuss some of the implications of the developing research in terms of design thinking and design aesthetics. This paper aims to contribute to the topic of next design scenario, demonstrating how design research is increasingly affecting the extension of human perception, emotions, and the concept of ‘almost-living’ entities, projecting towards the redefinition of relationships with materials and objects. Full article