creating wonderland

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

thinking about Research Design..where to from here...

Going back to an earlier post...

Anna Dumitriu from The Centre for Research & Development Faculty of Arts, University of Brighton
http://artsresearch.brighton.ac.uk/research/student/dumitriu/abstract-research-questions
http://artsresearch.brighton.ac.uk/

so onto research design..how do I design this project..nailing down the aims might generate the question?
which can be my aim for next week..haha
read Marks confirmation doc, and revisit Design Research edited by Laurel.

Research Title..not the catchy one but the one that says what I'm investigating?
Practice Based Investigation into the Relationship of Normal Flora Microbiology to Philosophical Notions of the Sublime
Aims
This project will interrogate the possibilities of scientific imagery as art – its allegorical, expressive, and social character...

Research Question
Key question
How does the....
Questions arising as a result of the research:
italics from Anna Dumitriu

“Complex systems theory and evolutionary robotics for 7-11 year olds, with emergent outcomes.

Robot Sound Detectives Algorithm Dance. The project looked at how we experience the world and how particular areas of focus change our perception of experience.

Brighton and Hove City Council invited Anna Dumitriu to develop an artwork to mark “Walk To School Week” in collaboration with St Nicolas Junior School in Portslade. This year’s events had a national theme of “Sound Detectives” which in many ways focused on experience, the experience of walking to school, the senses being used, how the senses are focussed and what is noticed and what is left out. Through workshop sessions about robot sensor technology which included performance exercises the children learnt how robots are able to sense and interact with the world and change (or evolve) their behaviour appropriately. More deeply the project looked at how we experience the world and how particular areas of focus change our perception of experience. This relates strongly to ideas of mindfulness, and the notion that the sensation of consciousness may be the compound result of our senses acting together in the world. The project took many ideas from the evolutionary robotics discipline and in particular Francisco Varela’s work on The Embodied Mind. Children participated in performance exercises designed to her them experience the world (and their journey to school) in a new mindful way, sensing their environment and experiences through their interactions with it and building on those sensations to create a a more powerful sense of awareness.

http://web.mac.com/annadumitriu/AD/Algorithm_March.html

Sunday, May 22, 2011

Jayne Wallace-Digital Jewellery -practice-centred research

from her web page..

"I am an artist jeweller and researcher. My work explores the potential of digital jewellery within personal experience and human relationships.

My doctoral research was a practice-centred enquiry of digital jewellery and personal significance and from this point my work has focused on the creation of digital artefacts that invoke the human-relational richness of jewellery to resist our expectations of the digital and to offer fresh aesthetics and potentialities."

http://www.digitaljewellery.com/

looking at "practice-centred methodology rooted in craft practice that tests the appropriateness of contemporary jewellery practice as a creative strategy and research tool in the development of personal and emotionally significant digital jewellery".

Blossom from Jayne Wallace on Vimeo.

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Hero Worship

Anish Kapoor..

http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/10/view/14562/anish-kapoor-monumenta-2011-leviathan.html

interactive vs reactive a thought about systems

Particles from Ciriaco Castro on Vimeo.

The word “interactive” is found everywhere these days. It may be worthconsidering what “interactive” means and whether things presented to us as”interactive” actually are so, before moving on to consider why we might want our designed objects and spaces to be “interactive”. Interaction concerns transactions of information between two systems (for example between two people, between two machines, or between a person and a machine). The key however is that these transactions should be in some sense circular otherwise it is merely “reaction”
Usman Haque 2006 www.haque.co.uk

Anna Dumitriu from The Centre for Research & Development Faculty of Arts, University of Brighton

Phone Flora

Chair Flora

Wall Flora

Research Degree Title

A Practice Based Investigation into the Relationship of Normal Flora Microbiology to Philosophical Notions of the Sublime.

Aims

This project will interrogate the possibilities of scientific imagery as art – its allegorical, expressive, and social character. It will consist of a new body of laboratory-based scientific investigation (a study of the normal flora encountered in my everyday life), the creation of a multimedia installation which will fuse sculptural and craft-based techniques with digital media, and a critical, contextualising essay on the issues addressed by the studio-based work. The installation will engage artists, scientists and the public, raising awareness through an experiential artwork.

Abstract/ Research Questions

Scientific research in the field of Normal Flora bacteriology is negligible, as these microbes are rarely of commercial or medical interest. Ontologically and epistemologically, however, they have great relevance in understanding the world in which we live, and our perception of ourselves. Anna Dumitriu has now begun to investigate, through practice-based artistic research, the cultural and aesthetic implications of these microbes. Although individually these bacteria are tiny, they are vast in number: a single teaspoon of topsoil contains about a billion bacterial cells, about 120,000 fungal cells and some 25,000 algal cells. Incredibly beautiful, and the source of (mostly irrational) fears, they have been the objects of representational challenge for scientists since the beginnings of microscopy (Hook Micrographia (1662); Haeckel Art Forms in Nature (1904)). Now conjoined with the revelatory technologies and discoveries of other disciplines they have contributed to a contemporary fascination with the relation between art and science.

Key Question:
How does the microscopic world relate to the idea of the sublime?

Edmund Burke whose “Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful” was published in 1757 stated "The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature . . . is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other."

http://artsresearch.brighton.ac.uk/research/student/dumitriu/abstract-research-questions
http://artsresearch.brighton.ac.uk/

ok so what do I learn from this?

Research Degree Title

A Practice Based Investigation into the Relationship of Normal Flora Microbiology to Philosophical Notions of the Sublime

Aims

Key Question:

How does the microscopic world relate to the idea of the sublime?

Questions arising as a result of the research:

What critical relevance does the idea that many bacteria evolve and become extinct without us even noticing their existence?

What similarities and differences between science and art does this project, which is being proposed from an artistic point of view, specifically demonstrate?

What makes someone a Scientist? What criteria does one need to fulfil to be labelled as such? Why are there so many amateur artists and so few amateur scientists? This is a new development, which has occurred over the past two hundred years, why?

What relevance does this project have within the context of feminine art?

So... Can I separate my early stage research like this?

what is/are my
Research Title..not the catchy one but the one that says what I'm investigating?
Aims
This project will (interrogate....)

Research Question
How does the....