Creative Practice Showcases (Asynchronous)
Academic Community Engagement in the Arts: Combining Community Engagement in the Arts with Academic Instruction
Creative Practice Showcase Chuck Drumm
The Arts in Higher Education have a unique opportunity to support local communities. Studies have shown that people who feel they have easy access to the arts report a higher degree of community satisfaction and quality of life. There is a real need to promote academic community engagement in the arts. Artists are often thought of as solitary artisans, working to master their chosen discipline. Many student artists are not aware of the opportunities available to share their talents in a meaningful way with their local community. Compared to other disciples, avenues for academic community engaged projects may not be as obvious to fine arts instructors. However, these projects are valuable to both students and the community. This session will examine academic community engagement in dance, theater, music, and visual art. We will examine the research on positive association between community attachment and community capacity for the arts. Unique and creative examples of successful projects in fine arts academic community engagement will be presented. Examples will emphasize unexpected forms of engagement. Presentation attendees will leave this session with a greater understanding of the benefits of fine art students sharing their talents with the community. They will better understand how access to fine art creates happier, healthier communities. Participants will be encouraged to brainstorm ways their students can share their talents with the community.
The Woods: Cooperative Augmented Reality Game View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Kyoung Swearingen, Scott Swearingen
‘The Woods’ is a local multiplayer cooperative game that employs augmented reality (AR) and 4-channel audio spatialization panning to produce a shared experience that is both digital and physical. It is designed to promote social interaction and encourages players to collaborate. As players choreograph their movement in real-world space, they interact with birds, clouds, and other objects in online space. Together, players experience an immersive sonic narrative of rumbling storm clouds and desperate voices that weave together stories of reconciliation. ‘The Woods’ provides positive social impact by illuminating our own connections to one another while inspiring players to talk, to move, and to collaborate in pursuit of a shared goal.
The Mindful Dancer: Implementing Mindfulness, Healthy Rhythms, and Habits in the Technique Class View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Tamara Dyke Compton, Christopher Compton
With a mind toward setting our dancers up for success and longevity, we share the ways in which mindfulness practices in the technique class relate to the development of community, empathy, and support of their fellow students. As dancers, we are acutely aware of the need to be constantly improving, and advancing as artists, and human beings. So often in this drive, however, we allow ourselves to be broken down, and betrayed by the negative thoughts within our own brains. In this lowly state, growth becomes stunted, and this internalized negative focus prevents us from supporting our fellow artists in their development. In this movement and experiential workshop, we consider ways in which mindfulness can be integrated in a technique class. Methodologies include 3-minute meditations, setting intensions/class focus, compassionate listening, recommended outside readings, and journaling. Supported by educational research, this workshop will recount our experiences with university-level dance students, who have implemented these practices throughout our classes for the past two years. We will share the ways in which implementing mindfulness practices, building healthy habits and daily rhythms in the individual dancer have contributed to the creation of a healthy, supportive, and empathetic dance community.
The Lavish! Project: Cultivating an Ethos of Wilderness Conservation Through Art Practice and Art Education in the Highly Biodiverse and Climate Resilient Forests of Appalachia View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Zoé Strecker
Aesthetic engagement in communal space is a powerful way to connect with ecological issues that might otherwise be daunting and individually paralyzing – climate change, biodiversity loss, and, in my home region, severe environmental degradation caused by mountaintop removal coal mining and fracking. Lavish! is an immersive installation sculpture with a long-term social engagement element, that focuses on exceptionally biodiverse old growth forests in the Appalachian region of southeastern Kentucky. I work to cultivate reverence for wild places in several ways – by opening my creative process to include artists, students, and the general public as active collaborators; by sharing completed artwork (exhibitions, readings, performances, talks and guided walks) in diverse venues / locations; by making available a variety of documentation of the artwork and of the places that inspired it to people who cannot access remote natural sites, due to physical, geographic, or economic limitations; and by including essential scientific information about biodiversity and solutions to climate change in various engaging forms throughout the project. Additionally, I work with academic colleagues to teach interdisciplinary undergraduate courses with similar goals and I collaborate with a regional land trust partner organization to run retreats and group exhibitions that engage other artists in responding through their own practices. This presentation provides an overview of these projects and invites questions about improving and expanding this type of work.
Breath: Art in The Age of The Pandemic View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Saral Surakul
In the devastating time of the COVID outbreaks, the pandemic poses several challenges globally. The lockdown disrupts everyday lives, and people have experienced tremendous psychological impacts living in isolation and despair without seeing the light at the end tunnel. The recent global threats have inspired the author to create images expressing emotions during social isolation. The Breath series mirrors the inner mind when freedom is limited through the bright red elements of the COVID virus, contrasting the purity of the female figures dressed in white. The pictures are based on four themes: Respiration: COVID-19 causes respiratory distress syndrome, leading to lung failure. The image depicts glass lungs with a red glass trachea under the COVID attack while the two figures inside are breathing through a ventilator. Isolation: physical distancing and stay-at-home orders are the new parts of life. The triptych depicts a female trapped inside a house-like box in three stages before and after the outbreaks. Escape: when outdoor life can achieve only through imagination, people learn to appreciate it more. The author communicates the idea through a diptych in which the confinements disperse from the figures. The flying objects signify the desire to break free. Transmission: the COVID transmission spreads through close contact and respiratory droplets. The figures, bound between the red COVID tentacles, imply the rapid infection. The images are digitally created in advanced 3D software called 3dsMax and printed on backlit material. What will the world become after the pandemic? The answer is yet to be answered.
Co-creating a Community Opera: Developing a New Digital Tool View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase James Bingham, Alina Striner
Irish National Opera has been working closely with several communities in Ireland to produce what may be the world’s first virtual reality community opera, as part of Traction: an EU funded research project that explores opera co-creation as a pathway for social inclusion. The project consortium are developing new digital technology to facilitate co-creation between professionals and non-professional artists. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, all co-creation activity with communities has taken place online with challenges and opportunities. Alina Striner from Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica will present how community members have used a pilot co-creation tool to develop ideas in workshop sessions with professional artists. This tool, ‘Co-creation Space’, enables participants to upload creative material onto a central platform, view fellow participant’s work and provide feedback to one another. James Bingham from Irish National Opera will discuss the content of the workshops and their relationship to the Co-creation Space as well as how these workshops were conceived to work appropriately in an online context. The workshops themselves were led by Finola Merivale, composer of the virtual reality community opera, and focus on compositional processes. Participants contribute audio files at the end of each workshops and these are used, both directly and indirectly, in the composition of the final opera, which will tour Ireland in 2022. Participants are adults living in Tallaght, a district of south Dublin, young people from the rural midlands and Irish speakers in one of the Aran Islands.
What Is the Correlation between Sound and Color in RAW Digital Data Formats? View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Nick LeJeune
The ideas leading to my current body of work incorporate several concepts that I have been researching for a number of years. What is included in the gallery involves sound converted video. Individual video frames are converted to sound files and back through algorithmic code. This conversion process involves concepts such as abundance, collection, organization, reconfiguration, juxtaposition and aesthetic elevation. With regards to my installation work, video and sound are recorded and processed in real time within the space. This video processed with the result projected back onto the space. The resulting imagery is subject to change by viewer interaction and site specificity. Most recently, my research has lead into the study of how data is interpreted through my artistic process. A process where RAW data formats are used in ways that confuse the software packages that edit them. More specifically, raw sound files are imported into graphic editing programs. When raw sounds transition into raw image through this process, the resulting imagery is represented by a basic, 16 color palette. What dictates this allocation? What assigns these color values? How is/can this new data represented in the gallery? In this paper, I describe my process in depth, RAW data formats for both sound and image, the different variations and methods used in data import process and how color is translated from audio information.
STEAM-based Conceptual Learning: Contemplating Connections View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase John Charadia, Bronwen Wade-Leeuwen
This paper addresses the concern that students believe they do not have creative choice. Research (Wade-Leeuwen, 2016), shows that Australian schools are generally not valuing or acknowledging diverse forms of multi-literacies in the classroom. This STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) integrated curriculum program is underpinned by the philosophical position that diverse forms of expression can be simultaneously valued and beneficial for primary school learners. Arts in Society-Draft1-BW/JC- 22012021 Applying an integrated framework approach connects real-world concepts with deep learning. The study shows how this new pedagogical program nurtures learner’s creativity (Renzulli, Wade-Leeuwen) in senior primary school children (Years 4-6), further developing their sense of self-awareness and a deeper understanding of how conceptual learning assists when contemplating new connections. The research reveals that unless teachers are experienced in STEAM-based integration, the creative and artistic processes are less likely to occur. Advocating for schools to include STEAM-based frameworks in their programs means that teachers will be able to actively seek collaborative connections to heighten conceptual engagement, expand self-awareness, and increase levels of achievement in gifted and talented learners.
