Creative Practice Showcase
Researchers and innovators present projects or art programs and initiatives. All presentations should be grounded in presenters' research experience. Promotional conversations are permissible, however, products or services may not be sold at the conference venue.
Meaningful Transformation: Using Art and Design in Legal Education
Creative Practice Showcase Jules Rochielle Sievert
Our project work and research allow us to build cross-disciplinary teams and community-based partnerships and our work draws upon the talents of artists and designers to identify and cultivate new approaches to transform legal education, the legal profession, and the delivery of legal services. Our goal is to use this type of pedagogy to co-create meaningful solutions that have the possibility of transforming the lives of the communities we partner with and work within. An example of this type of work can be found through an initiative called Stable Ground. This project addresses the complex relationship between chronic housing insecurity, its psychologically traumatic impact, and municipal housing policy through a participatory community-based art and culture program that is structured to inform the work of the City of Boston’s Office of Housing Stability. This project allowed us to create a residency program that embedded artists, legal designers, and trauma experts into community settings that contributed to local visual/performing arts exhibits and art-making events. These events have included facilitated conversations among artists, residents, activists, organizers, experts, and municipal leaders, all structured to inform existing OHS services and those in development. Another example is the Boston Desegregation Archive: Annotated Case Law and Digital Reference. This project represents an effort between Nulawlab, Northeastern University Archives, and the Boston Research Center and focused on exploring the social and historical materials at the center of major legal cases in Boston related to race equity and desegregation.
If Your House Caught Fire: Telling Life-stories Using Family Photographs as a Catalyst
Creative Practice Showcase Roddy MacInnes
Representation and social justice is segregated on many levels, including generationally. My project recognizes senior members of society by presenting the opportunity to share life stories using family photographs as the catalyst. The project celebrates the diversity of senior citizens inhabiting Denver, Colorado, whether living independently or in retirement communities. Providing a platform for senior citizens to represent who they are, further reveals what we have in common, rather than what separates us. The project’s principal goal is to reveal common humanistic themes preserved within the record of family photographs. I invite participation by asking, “if your house caught fire and you could only bring one photograph, which one would it be?” The photograph becomes a catalyst for telling life stories. Through a process of re-photographing old photographs held by their owner, with accompanying text, and exhibited in a group, what may previously have been regarded as a-snapshots, containing meaning for a few, is transformed into art with communal appeal. Art is the only intermediary able to visually articulate such powerful emotional correlations. Photography, because of its magical ability to freeze time and mirror reality is the ubiquitous visual medium, and therefor, the perfect vehicle to articulate such a project.
Turning an Object into an Extended Musical Instrument
Creative Practice Showcase Salil Sachdev
Every time an object is touched, it creates vibration. Mogees (a UK company) has introduced a technology that can recognize vibration to transform physical objects into touch-sensitive controllers. The Mogees sensor can detect vibrations from various materials such as wood, metal, plastic, and glass. It combines software and a vibration sensor to turn an object into an extended musical instrument. The presenter will demonstrate this on a musical instrument as well as on various objects.
The Elemental Materials of Endurance: From Ancient Rome to the High Arctic Archipelago
Creative Practice Showcase Bradley Borthwick
I recently embarked on an expedition to the High Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, Norway. From aboard the barquentine Antigua, I gained access to landscapes that tended toward the sublime. Not unlike the collections of toppled stone found throughout the sites that I study in ancient Rome, the sheer magnitude of watching a daily recurrence of glaciers crumbling into the sea brought the ancient past into immediate focus. It seemed that the equivalent of the whole of Rome’s Imperial Forum would be filled by no more than an hour’s worth of glacial calving. Furthermore, my time spent on remote Svalbard beaches involved many hours of picking up plastic flotsam deposited by ocean currents. The scale of consumption common to much of the industrialized world, represented by millions of plastic throwaways, was in some strange irony overlaying the arctic shorelines that themselves would dissolve under the effects of global warming. From this experience, 'The Elemental Materials of Endurance' recognizes climate change and explores the anthropocentric cycle upon which our current epoch is perched. I am preoccupied by whether or not we (humans) are able to acknowledge our whereabouts along the cyclical nature of civilization. My field research acknowledges the photographic account, where evidence found in the High Arctic may coalesce with a record of ancient Roman ruins to inform a new body of sculptural work. I wish to present my research and its impact on my studio practice, with the hope to change the way we think about materials, craft, and consumption.
