The School of Digital, Technologies and Arts is again holding a series of seminars, chaired and curated by C3 member Becky Nunes, following a life-cycle of reserch: It will cover presentations by researchers about how projects start, how to work across teams, how to co-create research with external communities and in the second half of the season will moev to how research gets funded and reviwed.
Seminars are designed to be in person, but recordings will be available afterwards. Dates for the seminars are:
WED NOV 9TH 3.30-5.00P.M : CA204 – BEGINNINGS – How do projects start? What are the catalysts for interesting research projects? (Michael Day, Alke Groeppel-Wegener)
WED DEC 7TH 3.30-5.00P.M: CA204 : COLLABORATIONS – Working across teams, co-creating and other fruitful research partnerships (Neil Brownsword, Maria Martinez-Sanchez)
WED JAN 11TH 3.30-5.00P.M : CA204: : COLLABORATIONS – Working across teams, co-creating and other fruitful research partnerships (Islam Abohela)
The recording from the first session of ‘Rebellious Research’ (Arts/practice-based research seminar series) is now available to watch online: ‘Tentacular thinking’ in Creative Practice Research as a Radical Intellectual Gesture by Agnieszka Piotrowska.
‘Tentacular thinking’ in Creative Practice Research as a Radical Intellectual Gestureby
Agnieszka Piotrowska (Reader in Film, SODA, MMU & Professor, Film and Cultural Studies, The University of Gdańsk). Wednesday 26th October 2022, 15:30-17:00 (GMT)
In this talk, Agnieszka Piotrowska considere the notion of what ‘knowledge’ might be for a creative research practitioner and how ‘high theory’ might be of assistance in inspiring ideas and creative strategies. She will share her most recent experience of working across disciplines with the new experimental film Wash (2022). It is a hybrid documentary with element of animation and drama dealing with serious issues of development in Zimbabwe, a country in which she has done much work over the years. The piece of work has been funded by Strategic England Research 2021 and the University of Edinburgh.
This partnership, recorded on 19 May 2022, was co-devised by colleagues at Keele University, Staffordshire University and Age UK Oxfordshire, as part of the Age of Creativity Festival 2022 and Creative Later Life 2025.
The keynote presentations and panel discussions around creative aging and placemaking, is now avaiable from the link above.
C3 Centre’s Professor Carola Boehm gave a talk on #Culture30Walks: How Creative is your Place?
Speakers included:
Professor David Amigoni FEA- Director, Keele Institute for Social Inclusion (KISI), Keele Deal Culture & ArtsKeele (chair)
Carola Boehm– Professor of Arts and Higher Education, Staffordshire University
Rose Gilroy-Professor of Ageing Planning and Policy, Chair of Future Homes Alliance, School of Architecture Planning and Landscape
Steven Millington– Director/ Senior Fellow at The Institute of Place Management and Reader in Place Management at Manchester Metropolitan University
Jason Jones-Hall– Director of Development, Five10Twelve
Neil Johnson– Engagement Project Lead, Liverpool City Region
It covers topics and case studies exploring the following:
How does creativity/ culture contribute to ‘vibrant’ places for older people beyond local tourism?
What constitutes a creative/ cultural ‘asset’ to older communities experiencing inequality?
What ‘value’ do we give creativity/culture and older communities experiencing inequalities in rebranding places?
What role does place based leadership have in making places both ‘Creative/ Cultural’ and ‘Age Friendly’?
How can inequalities be tackled by ‘making’ in place and is this place leadership?
Following the and popular first round of the Art/Practice-based research seminar series (and a Special Issue on Recontextualising Practice-based Research which followed), the seminar series, hosted by C3 Centre Agata Lulkowska, returns with a new title and some truly exquisite guests. As always, free and open to all (all sessions run online via MS Teams), this initiative aims at widening support and understanding around practice research in a friendly and inclusive manner, with some top experts sharing their experience and advice.
As part of the London Craft Week 2022, the Korea Association of Art and Design returns for London Craft Week 2022 with a panel of experts in the area of ceramics, glass and crafts.
The virtual event will take place 9 May 2022, at 11:00 AM . Professor Brownsword will give a talk on:
Thinking through the Past for the Future: Neil Brownsword, Artist, Researcher, Professor, Department of Ceramics, Staffordshire University, UK
Throughout history, ceramics have played an important role in the phenomenon of cultural transfer. For centuries China, Korea and Japan have influenced each other’s aesthetics, practices and technologies. Subsequent trade with the West, and the imitation and assimilation of East Asian goods and styles in the late 17th and 18th centuries greatly influenced the development of new ceramic traditions in Europe that were to gain historical prominence.
Since 2015 artist Neil Brownsword has explored this historic cycle of knowledge exchange, via performances staged in South Korea and the UK which have addressed the cultural hierarchies and value systems aligned to their ceramic traditions.In his work Factory (2017) staged at Icheon World Ceramic Centre, Brownsword re-choreographed the indigenous ceramic practices of two ex-factory personnel from Stoke-on-Trent and four Korean artisans to question established hierarchies of cultural production and reassign value to people and practices displaced by global economics.
By reactivating obsolescence via non-commercialised production, Brownsword revealed a shared language of haptic intelligences developed through ethical modes of exchange between East and West.
Performing FACTORYin Korea enabled the actors of marginalised immaterial heritage to renegotiate their value in a context where similar embodiments of knowledge are culturally protected. Its tour to the British Ceramics Biennial 2017, furthered UK/Korea cultural exchange, strengthening Stoke-on-Trent’s regeneration ambition as a global centre for ceramics. This presentation examines the context and development of Brownsword’s collaborations and his exploration of heritage as a ‘living process’ that can be constantly reimagined for the future.
Neil Brownsword is an artist, researcher and educator who holds a professorial position in ceramics at Staffordshire University. Brownsword began his career in ceramics as an apprentice at the Wedgwood factory in the mid- 1980’s. His practice examines the legacy of globalisation in relation to Stoke-on-Trent’s ceramic manufacturing sector, and the impact this has had upon people, place and traditional skills. Using film and performative installation Brownsword deconstructs complex craft knowledge within industrial production to pose questions surrounding the value of inter-generational skill. His work is represented in public/private collections internationally, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, Korea Ceramic Foundation, Yingee Ceramic Museum Taiwan and Fu Le International Ceramic Art Museum China. In 2009 he was awarded the ‘One Off Award’ at the inaugural British Ceramic Biennial, and the Grand Prize at the Gyeonggi International Ceramic Biennale, South Korea in 2015, and Whitegold International Ceramic Prize in 2019.
Guest Speakers: Dr Jackie Reynolds and Colette Dobson who will talk about
This session focuses on research that leads to benefits beyond academia. It examines the challenges and opportunities for developing impact case studies based on practice-based research for the REF (Research Excellence Framework). Colette Dobson will discuss the impact of her collaborative research that addressed a need for better communication between patients and health care professionals about the sexual consequences of treatments for cancer. She will share her insights gained from the process of collecting impact evidence and developing a REF2021 impact case study.
Live Streamed from our APU partners in Malaysia, the International Women’s Day Edition of the ISUC Plaza Series presented three keynotes by women leaders, including C3 Centre’s Carola Boeh,.
Carola Boehm’s keynote, as part of the three keynotes presented, was titled:
Culture 3.0 saves the world: Sustainability & Diversity in an era of Co-creation
Abstract: Even before the pandemic, along with many other countries, the UK was beginning to see a shift in how we valued our engagement in cultural activities, culminating in the 2021 Arts Council England’s 10-year strategy of “Let’s Create” (ACE, 2021). For communities and individuals, it firmly focussed resources to support active participation in arts and culture. This represented a move of investment towards civil society engaging actively in cultural production, rather than merely being passive cultural consumers. In Luigi Sacco’s words, this is a cultural struggle between what he calls Culture 1.0 versus Culture 3.0.
In Sacco’s conceptualisation, Culture 1.0 is characterised by patronage, limited audiences, gate keepers, value absorption and limited structural markets (Sacco, 2013). Thus, Culture 1.0 is seen to be highly elitist and exclusionary, it has resulted in arts audiences and leadership of our European top cultural institutions to be predominantly white and upper middle class (ACE, 2019). And this is a problem, according to Sacco. With Europe being ‘hung up on Culture 1.0’, it is holding Europe back in its innovation and productivity potential (Sacco, 2011). The UK and the US has taken a slightly different path since the late 90s, influenced by its focus on the creative industries, with its emphasis on IP and copyright (BEIS, 2018; Flew, 2011; Cunningham, 2014). This is Culture 2.0, and I have written about how the UK and US are in turn hung up on Culture 2.0, supporting extractive and exploitative models that have inherent gatekeeping functions. This is in turn holding both the UK and the US back to allow its creative and cultural activities to benefit its societies in equitable, fair and diversity-supporting manner (Boehm, 2017, 2016). However, Culture 3.0 is fast becoming the dominant type of cultural engagement to make arts and culture more inclusive and more impactful. It is characterised by ‘everyday creativity’, co-creation, open platforms, ubiquitously available production tools and individuals constantly shifting and renegotiating their roles between producing and consuming content. This ‘doing away’ with gatekeepers supports access, diversity and is evidenced to simply make all our lives healthier, happier, more creative and more resilient.
Whereas having predominantly Culture 1.0 types of cultural engagement will result in elitism and exclusivity. Culture 2.0 creates a highly neo-liberal, worker-exploitative model. But Culture 3.0 has the promise of providing the balance and Sacco suggests the new power centres of this type of cultural engagement are emerging in Asia, and is characterised by mass production, unlimited reproducibility, large audiences, and significant turnover and profits. So in this presentation, using the lenses of Culture 1.0 to 3.0, I will explore solutions for shaping our creative sectors and industries in our creative cities towards becoming more sustainable, more fair and more diverse. (Boehm, 2022)
References
ACE (2019). Equality, Diversity and the Creative Case. A data report. ACE 2018 – 2019. [Online]. Manchester.
ACE (2021). Let’s Create: Our strategy 2020-2030 | Arts Council England. [Online]. Manchester, UK..
BEIS (2018). UK Creative Industries Sector Deal.
Boehm, C. (2016). Academia in Culture 3.0: a Crime story of Death and Rebirth (but also of Curation, Innovation and Sector Mash-ups). REPERTÓRIO: Teatro & Dança. 19 (27). p.pp. 37–48.
Boehm, C. (2022). Arts and Academia. Emerald Publishing. To be published in 2022.
Boehm, C. (2017). The end of a Golden Era of British Music? Exploration of educational gaps in the current UK creative industry strategy. In: R. Hepworth-Sawyer, J. Hodgson, J. Paterson, & R. Toulson (eds.). Innovation In Music: performance, production, technology and business. Taylor & Francis/Routledge.
Cunningham, S. (2014). ‘Hidden Innovation: Industry, Policy and the Creative Sector.’ Lanham MD: Lexington Books.
Flew, T. (2011). The Creative Industries: Culture and Policy. 1st edition. SAGE Publications Ltd.
Sacco, P.L. (2011). Web Page. Culture 3.0: A new perspective for the EU 2014 -2020 structural funding programming.
Sacco, P.L. (2013). Culture 3.0: The impact of culture on social and economic development, & how to measure it. Prepared for Scientific support for growth and jobs: Cultural and creative industries Conference. p.p. 21.
In this session, we consider existing strategies for cultural production that masquerade as avantgarde, while potentially in fact perpetuating an ideological status-quo. The role of the auteur is implicated in these strategies and examined in both presentations. The question is asked: what sort of art is really needed for our future societies?
In this session: Wednesday 2 March 2022, Room T101
Dr. Andrew Stubbs: Talent Managers and their Indie-Auteur Clients: Understanding the Conematization of Television
Becky Nunes: 15 Minutes of Fame. Andy Warhol, Facebooks and the Work of Luke Willlis Thomspn
Associate Professor and C3 Centre member Rob Marsden’s text ‘Inside the Rehearsal Room‘ is now out, published by Bloomsbury/ Methuen Drama.
Book launch at Wednesday 2nd March at 6.30 at the New Vic Theatre in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire. RSVP to r.j.marsden@staffs.ac.uk email
Inside the Rehearsal Roomis both an instructional and conceptual examination of the rehearsal process.
Drawing on professional practice and underpinned by theory, this book moves through each stage of rehearsals, considering the inter-connectivity between the actor, director, designers and the backstage team, and how the cumulative effect of the weeks in rehearsal influences the final production. The text also includes: – Auto-ethnographic and fully ethno-graphic case study approaches to different rehearsal rooms – Interviews with directors, actors, designers and actor trainers – A consideration of the ethics of the rehearsal room and material selected for production – Practical exercises on how to creatively read a text from an acting and directing perspective.
Informed by over 20 years of directing experience in the UK and Europe, Robert Marsden’s book offers a practical guide that ultimately demystifies the rehearsal process and challenges how the rehearsal room should be run in the 21st Century.
Interviews include with Rufus Norris, Kate Wasserberg, Kirstie Davis, Ivo van Hove, Roy Alexander Weise, Sir Alan Ayckbourn, Steven Boden, RC-Annie, Katrina Lindsay, Paule Constable, Stephen Mear and many more…
Guest Speaker: Dr Charlie Tweed With the traditional publications still defining many academic careers, it becomes a challenging task for researchers working with practice-based methods. Luckily, the emergence of alternative platforms for dissemination makes this task more attainable and relevant to various non-conventional outputs. This session explores the possibilities and challenges of practice-based focused online journals and other platforms focusing on alternative forms of research-based in creative methods.
