News & Events January 2009

RAE 08 Success

The Wales Institute for Research in Art & Design (WIRAD) is pleased to announce that in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise the Art & Design panel rated 95% of the research submission as international standard, with 70% rated as either Internationally Excellent or World Leading. Using Times Higher weightings this makes the submission 12th out of 70 in the UK and the best in Wales. This significant achievement by WIRAD's founding members, UWIC and Newport, demonstrates very clearly the international quality of WIRAD's research. It puts WIRAD in the best possible position to build on this achievement through our invitation to key research partners from across Wales to join in this success story.

International Film School Wales Symposium: Film Acting, Film Directing; education, teaching & training

Friday 23rd & Saturday 24th January 2009
University of Wales, Newport
Caerleon Campus

The Film Acting, Film Directing; education, teaching & training symposium will bring together internationally recognised practitioners, educators and academics to explore the history, currency and future trends of collaboration between film actor and director training. Speakers include:

• Professor Louis Scheeder - Associate Dean, NYU Tisch School of the Arts

• Stephen Bayly - Director, Trainer, ex-Head of the National Film & Television School (NFTS), London

• Witold Stok BSC - British Society of Cinematographers

• Danusia Stok - Editor; Kieslowski on Kieslowski, Faber & Faber, 1996

• Dr. Victoria Lowe - Manchester University

Newport Studio: Film Acting, Film Directing started at the International Film School Wales, Skillset Screen Academy Wales, in January 2005. Since then the Studio has seen collaboration and curriculum development between Film, Performance and Film & Video at Newport, bringing actors and directors together on 160 workshop shoots resulting in 80 short filmed scenes. Visiting professionals, including Ken Russell, Witold Stock BSC and Vladimir Bouchler, have worked with film and acting students on developing their skills and ideas on screen acting and directing.

The Symposium aims to further this work by identifying methods that offer the necessary skills and training to students of acting and directing for the screen and to offer models of best practice in the continuing exploration of how to approach the directing of actors for the camera.

For more information on the symposium or Newport Studio: Film Acting, Film Directing contact Nigel Orrillard.

To book at place at the symposium, contact Joan Fothergill.

Dr Cathy Treadaway Awarded Readership

Dr Cathy Treadaway was appointed as Reader in Creative Practice on December 1st 2008. The award of Reader was made following recommendation from 8 Professors external to UWIC and support from the Dean of CSAD.

Dr. Cathy Treadaway is a member of the DIGIT research group. Her PhD research investigated the ways in which digital imaging technology impacts upon the creative practice of textile artists and designers; the theme of digital technology and creativity is continued in her current research which focuses on the importance of touch, physicality and experience in perception and creative practice. Recent projects have included an AHRC funded collaboration with Charlotte Hodes (London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London), the results of which can be viewed here.

Dr. Cathy Treadaway is also Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Bath in the department of Computer Science.

Helen Sear in conversation at The Age of Electrobricollage. Transformation. Appropriation. Reprocessing.

Wednesday 21 January 2009, 6.30pm
Royal Academy Schools Forum, Geological Society Lecture Room, Burlington House, London

In the view of William J Mitchell the age of false innocence has passed. We can no longer look at images as causally generated truthful reports about things in the real world but rather as more traditionally crafted images, which seemed notoriously ambiguous and uncertain human constructions. This distrust is based on ever expanding possibilities of appropriation, transformation, reprocessing and recombination. Is this the age of Electrobricollage?

Dr. Matthew Fuller in conversation with artists Matt Collishaw, John Russell and Helen Sear (eCPR) will discuss the notions of electrobricollage in contemporary art practices and question are we living in the age of hallucination, as opposed to the age of imagination? What is the potential of digital manipulation for effecting new forms of hybridization? Can electrobricollage be regarded as a medium in its own right?

Helen Sear will also be exhibiting her work, Inside the View, at the Klompching Gallery in New York throughout January and February 2009. Inside The View is a collection of works that address the notion of the work, labour and processes of image making.

2008 DME Award book of winners

To commemorate the 2008 Design Management Europe Award held at the Wales Millennium Centre October 13th, PDR has produced the DME Award book of winners.

The book provides a unique insight into how the winning companies manage design within their organisation. Each case study is written and presented by the companies in their own poster format style and provides a broad reference to the range of different design strategies and practices.

Professor Robert Brown outlines the main purpose of the book in his foreword, "The production of this book of winners . . . will provide a powerful ‘educational' tool to illustrate the benefits of strategic use of design to a broad target audience that will include: managers, directors, designers, design support agents, public administrators, policy makers and researchers. In this book of winners we have deliberately avoided comment on the posters to allow readers to interpret the information for themselves to explore how these examples of best practice might be applied within their own organisations."

Designed by Lee Griffiths, PDR and with additional contributions from Reinhard Buscher, European Commission; Ger Peeters, City of Eindhoven; Darragh Murphy, PDR and photography by Glenn Edwards; the DME Book of winners is a collection of the winning thirty nine poster entries presented in a sleeved three volume edition.

Copies of the 2008 DME Award book of winners are available at the PDR by request.

PAIPR receives enterprise funding to develop research

The Programme for Advanced Interactive Prototype Research (PAIPR) is investigating methods for rapid design and development of computer embedded products such as mobile phones and PDAs. This has resulted in the development of the IE unit, a system to enable product designers to integrate computer programming with the design of mobile technologies, minimise the cost of prototyping and aid the development of user-centred design.

Case studies arising from series of field tests the group's latest IE System, most notably at Samsung Design Europe and Sony-Ericsson Smartphones, have concluded with a number of industry requirements for rapid design and development methodologies which are not currently met by other systems under development. These results will shortly be published in the Journal of Design Research.

The enterprise funding awarded by UWIC will enable PAIPR to develop and new version of the IE System, IE4, to finalised form and function and commercially exploit the applied research across key sectors in information technology, communication, medical and electronic devices.

Steve Gill, a member of the PAIPR group, has also recently been awarded a Teaching Fellowship to promote the delivery of this research to product design students.

Philippa Lawrence named Artist of the Month

Philippa Lawrence has been nominated Axis Artist of the Month by curator Steve Messam.

Messam selected Bound, a series of landscape interventions that started as a single dead tree wrapped in cloth for a National Gardens of Wales commission that developed into a nationwide work that aimed to mark the 13 original counties of Wales by connecting the dead trees with the landscape and community around them. He explains:

"For artist of the month I was keen to find an artist doing something interesting with the rural landscape. We are blessed in the UK with such a diversity of wide open spaces and I firmly believe this is an area considerably under-exploited by contemporary artists who, by and large, seem to confine themselves to the artificial constructs of white-walled galleries."

Lawrence's work consists of site-specific installations or collections of objects in response to place. Her work is informed by a desire to learn about and understand the material world, to meet people through her research and practice and to make a real and lasting connection to both people and place.

Lawrence is a member of the DIGIT research group and was named Welsh Artist of the Year 2008. For more information Philippa Lawrence.

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