News & Events

WIRAD Team Appointed

A small team has been tasked with moving the development plans for WIRAD forward. Gavin Cawood (PDR, UWIC), Jo Hare (PDR, UWIC) and David Smith (UWN) will work together over the next few months to identify institutions built on collaboration around the UK and arrange visits to understand in more detail the workings of the most successful similar models. With this insight a revised Expression of Interest for the application of Reconfiguration & Collaboration Funds will be developed and discussed with the wider partners in WIRAD.

Jon Clarkson on Constable

Dr Jonathan Clarkson's (CFAR) monograph on John Constable will be published by Phaidon in September 2010. The book is the result of many years of research on the artist and a close familiarity with the places he painted. Constable's candid portraits of disappearing scenery and a way of life, as well as his innovative experiments in painting that exploited contemporary advances in the natural sciences, had a revolutionary influence on Realist art. The book is an approachable yet inquiring new appraisal of Constable's art which presents all his well-known masterpieces with incisive commentary, and also includes lesser-known drawings, studies, oil sketches and portraits setting them in the context of the artist's life, his study and theories of art, and explaining them as part of the rapidly changing world of modernizing Britain.

Sally Grant: Reassessing the 1970s

Centre for Contemporary British History (CCBH), Institute for Historical Research, University of London, 7-9 July 2010

This major interdisciplinary conference hosted by CCBH looks to reassess crucial developments during the 1970s, a watershed moment in post-war British history with economic crises, political and social discord precipitating major social and culture changes, and placing them in the context of post-war British history as a whole.

Sally Grant's paper Synthesis and Nostalgia in Fashion Consumerism in London 1968 - 1977 seeks to develop recent ideas about the spatial context of fashion consumption that have been explored through a multidisciplinary approach by Urban and Cultural Geographers and apply it to the under researched area of 1970's London Fashion in the aftermath of ‘Swinging London'. The project has the central aim of providing a new critical account of the legacy of ‘Swinging London' and the development, in the aftermath/wake, of its economic and creative networks: the shifting balance between boutiques, chain-stores and the development of Boutique high street labels, the interface between vintage clothing markets and ideas of nostalgia taken up in the design process and the spatial proximity of the manufacturing and supply chains, connecting fashion to urban life in London.

Roger Wooster: Research Update

International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR)
25 - 31 July 2010, Munich

The IFTR 2010 World Congress "CULTURES OF MODERNITY" is the annual conference that brings together theatre researchers and practitioners, scholars and graduate students of various universities and institutions from all over the world. For the second year running, Wooster is giving a paper to the ‘translations and adaptations' working party.

The paper, "Deproblematising Shakespeare: Text and pretexts for changing subtext" looks at the manipulation of subtext in order to alter a play's content, taking as an example Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice; the inherent anti-Semitism in this play creates barriers between the plays' artistic attributes and a contemporary liberal Western audience. Whereas the universality of other Shakespearean plays lend themselves to adaptation and find easy resonance with this audience, this play can sit uneasily in the repertoire. This paper will consider using aspects of dramaturgy, particularly subtext and the appropriate moulding of objectives, to undermine those aspects of The Merchant, which we now find questionable or distasteful.

Journal of Applied Arts and Health

Wooster's article "Theatre in Education: more than just a health message" will be published in the Journal of Applied Arts and Health (Intellect) later in 2010. The article explores how the use of Theatre in Education (TIE) and drama has become increasingly popular over the last twenty years as a method of communicating messages about 'difficult' subjects in schools. Alcohol, drugs, smoking, religion and relationships frequently get the 'TIE treatment' from companies directly funded from outside education - helping teachers to fulfil their obligations under the National Curriculum and Government initiatives. This paper will argue that frequently these programmes are an exercise in 'box ticking' and that the real value that theatre - and especially participatory Theatre in Education - can bring to the learning process is being overlooked.

Emerging Landscapes

Emerging Landscapes Conference
25-27 June 201, University of Westminster

The Emerging Landscapes Conference, a joint venture between the School of Architecture and the Built Environment and the School of Media, Arts and Design at the University of Westminster, asked participants to reconsider the idea of landscape by interrogating the relationship between space and image and to explore the synergies that exist between landscape and representation.

Paul Cabuts' (eCPR) paper ‘Trees of the Third War: Forests, Photography and Wales' questions whether established narratives of landscape photography are tenable as global forces reshape notions of belonging, when memory is increasingly shaped by new media forms, and when photography has its own anxiety brought about by new technologies and developments in critical thinking. Consideration is given to the notion that fir trees and forests have become the ‘monuments and landscapes' of twenty-first century Wales.

Dr Rona Lee (CFAR) presented on art works made during a Leverhulme Artist in Residence at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton exploring methods of undersea survey. The deep seabed constitutes the largest, least known, or accessible, environment on the planet - an ‘extra geographic' space whose histories are geological rather than social, yet rapidly accelerating economic, political and ecological pressures mean it can be described as a truly emergent landscape. ‘Truthing the Gap' considered the extra visual character of the sub-maritime; the necessarily ‘insulated' nature of deep-sea investigation and the ‘disembodied' character of the analysis to which this gives rise; and the implications for knowledge production, objectivity and the scientific gaze, of ‘envisaging' environments remotely, which cannot be directly experienced.

Artists Re: Thinking Games

by Ruth Catlow (Editor), Marc Garrett (Editor), Corrado Morgana (Editor)

Published by FACT, Artists Re: Thinking Games looks at how a selection of leading artists, designers and commentators have challenged the norms and expectations of both game and art worlds. It explores themes adopted by the artist that thinks and rethinks games and includes essays, interviews and artists' projects from Jeremy Bailey, Ruth Catlow, Heather Corcoran, Daphne Dragona, Mary Flanagan, Mathius Fuchs, Alex Galloway, Marc Garrett, Corrado Morgana, Anne-Marie Schleiner, David Surman, Tale of Tales, Bill Viola, and Emma Westecott.

The publication is co-edited by Corrango Morgana (Synergy), who also authored the keynote essay contextualising the enquiry.

Researcher re-designs Hospital Gown

The traditional hospital gown design has not been modify in over fifty years and is out of sync with the technological advancements in modern medicine. It fails to provide a simple, efficient, and practical solution that affords the patient a high degree of personal privacy, but facilitates the requirements needed by the medical profession.

Irene Dee, Senior Lecturer at the University of Wales, Newport is prototyping a new gown at the Royal Gwent Hospital that marries the constraints of medical efficiently and low cost to the preservation of human dignity.

The new seamless body patient gown is constructed without body and sleeve seams to minimise body abrasion, bacteria build up and fluid stain-age, and does away with the traditional strings and ties that interfere medical wires or tubes. Designed to make it easier for medical examination, front side openings allow the gown to be removed from the patient without excessive discomfort or undignified removal. The easy side removal will reduce patient handling hence less contact with nurse's uniforms, to reduce cross-contamination.

KESS: "A quantitative and qualitative examination of the effectiveness of a new three dimensional graphical representation technique "

Professor Robert Pepperell (CFAR), an artist who studies visual perception and consciousness, and Dr Steve Gill (PAiPR) a leading product design researcher are collaborating to undertake research into Perceptual Technology, a novel way of representing visual experience. Perceptual Technology has been conceived by the artist-researcher John Jupe, and developed in cooperation with Chaos Trend, a coding and games development team based in Swansea, UK.

Perceptual Technology creates a novel way of representing visual experience using digital imaging processes. It discards the centuries-old convention of relying on geometric perspective or lens-based models of vision. Instead it simulates much more closely the actual phenomenal experience of seeing, using the relative disorder in peripheral vision to create depth cues. Commercial development of Perceptual Technology is already underway, with several real-world applications expected.

The team has secured European Knowledge Economy Skills Scholarship (KESS)
funding for a full-time research student to work with other members of the team to evaluate the user response to Perceptual Technology in its development phase. The deadline for applications is 20 August 2010. Further information is available from findaphd.com