Creative Practice Showcases (Asynchronous)
The Pandemic Is a Portal: Participatory Art as a Means to Explore Neoliberal Capitalism During COVID-19
Creative Practice Showcase Karike Ashworth, Caroline Austin
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the world’s focus and dependence on money into sharp focus. It has laid bare the structural inequalities of Neoliberal Capitalism where precarious bodies, and our fundamental connection to each other, are considered expendable. The practice-led research project '43 Minutes' unfolded at an experimental commercial gallery in Brisbane (Australia) when the reality of COVID-19 was taking hold. Participatory in design, it aimed to explore the major characteristics and effects of Neoliberal Capitalism. Employing signifiers of Capitalism, such as white paint and mass-produced building materials like plasterboard, ply, particleboard etc., The KACA Projects invited participants to paint a wall “1000 times” for an arbitrary 43 minutes. There are limitations to what local art projects such as this can achieve or change more broadly, however COVID-19 restrictions unquestionably opened up a space for contemplation—dedicated time to potentially conceive of an order where profits are not above people. In this “portal” moment, The KACA Projects were interested in what '43 Minutes' could reveal about tacit social and economic behaviours—and the emotional mindset—of Australians. The project has yielded outcomes which are both understandable and unsettling; disheartening, yet optimistic too. Ultimately, the project revealed many hopeful moments, as well as an understanding of the group’s complicity in Neoliberal Capitalism. Sadly, however, it also revealed the futility of the project’s (perhaps naïve) intentions. Those involved were challenged to comprehend a world without Neoliberal Capitalism, particularly when Australia was beginning to return to ‘business as usual’—to the problematic ‘new normal’.
Accessibility as Aesthetic: Cripping Podcast Production View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Anne Zbitnew, Jennifer Chatsick, Kim Collins, Chelsea Jones
The obligation to make broadcast media accessible is often taught as the last step in media production rather than as an opportunity for artistic development. This showcase features a seven-minute recording of a multimedia podcast project led by college students with intellectual disabilities at Humber College in Canada. Featuring transcribed audio clips, drawings, focus group data, and snippets of students’ writing, this presentation is grounded in disability art and justice research and covers the tensions involved in developing creative processes behind making accessibility a uniquely captivating, artful part of broadcast media production. Informed in the field of disability media studies, this work uncovers two key frictions around "cripping" a podcast: first, non-disabled facilitators conscious attempts to share power with disabled project leaders; second, silent podcast clips that teach us what it means to dismantle a method that traditionally relies on consistent verbal engagement. This study argues that while students are eager to develop an accessibility aesthetic by critically centering disability as a desirable arts-informed production feature (rather than as simply an “add-on”) this work relies on deep, collective reflection about accessible and artistic broadcast praxis with intellectually disabled people whose work complicates—and at times, "crips"—compliance-based checklists.
Online Inclusion: A Reflective Case Study on Online and Site-based Community Arts Collaborative View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Heidi Powell
This paper addresses a case study in connecting community arts between global sites, students, scholars, and arts practice in a hybrid model of on-site and online engagement. This case study uses the foundation of Culture Mapping and Immersive Experiences as a point of synchronous and asynchronous exploration for online and on-site collaborative global research and learning in art education. It is inclusive of community arts experiences (Powell, 2020) as well as researching local arts practice incorporating health and wellness and heritage memory (Powell, 2017). The paper discloses research, design and implementation as a place of online exchange for global arts research practice and learning through sound walks, social and culture mapping collaborations and creative arts practice. Aveling (2012) states that “we have to learn to conduct research in ways that meet the needs of Indigenous communities [all communities] and are non-exploitative, culturally appropriate and inclusive…” (p. 203). The online exchange format allows for others to engage in culturally immersive experiences (remote and on-site) as a collaborative endeavor while researching and learning where immersion and collaboration create meaningful ways of coming to know and understand global arts communities that researchers and participants are not traditionally a part of in an ethical way (Elliott, D. J., Silverman, M., & Bowman, W. D., 2016). This case study called “The Collabratory,” is supported through Arts-based Research (Blandy, D. & Bolin, P., 2003) and reveals the facets of the project as it relates to creative practice, arts learning, and engagement through collaborative technology.
ArcPrep: Architecture Preparatory Program in Collaboration with Detroit Public Schools View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Young Tack Oh
ArcPrep is a one semester college-level course guided by university faculty that introduces Detroit Public School students to architecture, urbanism, and design-related fields. The program aims to empower the next generation of Detroit leaders by offering rigorous design education in a studio environment, directly engaging students with inspiring artists and creative practitioners, and offering pathways to postsecondary education in professions related to the built environment. Since 2015, more than 300 Detroit Public School students have completed the program. By exposing students to complex scenarios in the city, connecting them to motivational professionals, and encouraging them to tackle the urban challenges that matter most, we’ve seen our young designers excel. Building on the energy and expertise of locally-rooted cultural organizations, students are encouraged to leverage the distinctive affordance of the city, to investigate the productive intersection of contemporary cultural production and design, to explore design’s capacity to engage diverse constituencies, and to consider how design can contribute to a more socially equitable world. The program aims to guide students through the college application process and promote continued education in varying disciplines. ArcPrep has collaborated with Kresge artists, designing pavilions in response to artists’ practices, explored arts-based strategies for equitable regeneration at the Oakland Avenue Urban Farm in Detroit’s North End, created exuberant proposals for socially inclusive interventions at the Detroit Institute of Art, and reimagined the Detroit Public Library as a place for the community.
We Are Market Makers View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Andrew Lee Mount
These are a series of banners, made using the heraldic language of the escutcheon to access meditation on debt. Debt exists in society as a very strong motivating force, but it also hides in plain sight. In this way, we can say that debt exists in society as a corollary of religion. The churches and creeds of religions reflect spaces of veneration and documentation of debt. Banks and annual reports are the public face of finance - the substructure of debt. The resonance between these social forces is not happenstance. Debt can mirror religion because it relies on the same principle of personal responsibility. These artworks are a lamination of symbolic forms that mimic the aesthetic norms of an heraldic symbolic arrangement. It is both a celebration and a warning. The visual heraldic forms of escutcheon, banners, and symbols amalgamate to produce a universally legible signifier of wealth. In these artworks, I am directly addressing the lineage and contemporary effects of debt and finance, the creation of obscene wealth, and concentrated power gained historically through violence that is celebrated through popular media and exists today in more insidious forms that no longer need to enact physical violence. Debt and finance can instead enforce a new type of violence through the seductive faces of mass consumption. The early usage of heraldic messaging and what it has meant has moved on so successfully from direct violence that we have necessarily become complicit in our own peony - often to meet our basic needs
"Próximo" - a Community-based Verbatim Theatre Play : The Importance of Theatre for the Sense of Belonging View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Susana C Gaspar
"Próximo" is an original theatre play directed by Susana C. Gaspar based on field research in three different Sintra's neighbourhoods (a rural area, a suburb, and the historical center). The impact that tourism has in Sintra (World Heritage Site), housing, racism, cultural diversity or loss of identity were themes identified within the community. The four actors wrote, interviewed people and talked to people on the streets, coffee shops, commerce, restaurants, associations and made three theatre interventions - one for each place. In April 2019, the play gathered the collected materials in a final script and premiered in Casa de Teatro de Sintra, in a production by Chão de Oliva - Companhia de Teatro de Sintra. In this showcase, there is a reflection on the research methods and how theory and practice interconnected, sharing the results after discussions with audience members, community participants, and publishing a book.
URock!: Lifting Student Depression in the Era of COVID-19
Creative Practice Showcase Peter Di Gennaro
Given student inertia and depressed capacities in the Era of COVID-19, this study tracks the rollout of an inter- and trans-disciplinary arts, culture, and business program specifically designed to bolster student and community health through work in an already historically challenged 9-12 school. Using an open architecture program format and critical pedagogy coupled to trauma recovery and resilience frameworks, the URock! Program synthesizes select elements from the fields of individual, social, and cultural psychology; arts education, production, and performance; and fundamental tenets, standards, and generative themes of International Human Rights and Peace Education, showing a clear homology between each. The program presents a synergized tool that identifies, addresses, engages, utilizes, and then supercedes diminished personal and social capacities. Core to our conversation will be the role of culture, the assertion that art-making is a universal human instinct, the role of trauma in life, and the natural, imperative interplay between the intrapsychic and intersocial in the resulting project process and production - preserving individual location and contribution - providing the key experiential touchstone event of inter-relationality, so necessary to the personal and public health.
The Nouvella - Story-based Strategies for Community Arts Training: Story-based Community Arts Training View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase William Cleveland
Professional development for artists and their community partners has been a core element of the Center’s work for the past 30 years. A central aspect of our curriculum has been the use of narrative fiction to introduce artists and their community partners to the often complex and ambiguous challenges they will face working together in communities and social institutions. The approach has been simple and effective, namely, making art to shine a light on what it takes to integrate arts-based tools and strategies to help heal and make change in these complicated environments. More specifically, we use stories about fictional neighborhoods and organizations to tell the real story of what it’s like to navigate them as creative change agents. In these narratives’ artists, and community members, administrators, and line staff explore the conundrums and contradictions, the heartaches and little victories that creative partners dance with every day in these “other places.” This showcase includes: Strategies for researching and developing authentic narratives for use in training; Examples of story-based curricular strategies and their uses; Engaging fictional characters and scenarios for learning and understanding community and institutional cultures; Using stories as a safe space for building cultural competency and trust; Using real-time unfolding narratives to practice and build partnership skills; Employing fiction-based strategies to help arts and non-arts partners find common ground and mutual self-interest.
Mooncalf: 'Unclean' Meat View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase WhiteFeather Hunter
The calamitous warnings of climate science have been latched onto by a growing roster of biotech start-up companies who propose to invent lab-grown meat alternatives to the ecologically disastrous livestock industry. They use solutionist hype to promote ‘sustainable,’, ‘eco-friendly,’ ‘cruelty-free,’ ‘clean meat’. This moralized marketing, however, masks a continued reliance on animal agriculture. The fact remains that mammalian cells and tissues are grown in vitro using fetal calf serum, a blood-derived nutrient. Is it really possible to grow meat without banking on the bodies of nonhuman others? Might there be more tasteful material? In Bioart Kitchen: Art, Feminism and Technoscience, Lindsay Kelley asks, ‘What do new technologies taste like?’ The work I will present proposes one answer to her prompt, centred on a technofeminist contextualization of the research-creation project, Mooncalf (2019-). Mooncalf is a series of wet lab experiments and artistic outputs that showcase the potential viability of human menstrual serum for culturing mammalian tissue. These experiments present a direct provocation that problematizes the cellular agriculture industry as it pertains to the production of ‘clean meat’ and instead works towards a proof-of-concept ‘unclean’ meat prototype. Mooncalf is a symbolic precursor or speculative promise meant to facilitate a cultural taste for feminist biotechnologies.
Promoting Through Empowerment - a Transformation of Communities at Risk of Exclusion: Three Experiences of Opera Co-creation in Europe View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Pilar Orero
Traction aims to promote, through their empowerment, a transformation of communities at risk of exclusion. To achieve that goal, we have established an effective collaborative and participatory production workflow for the co-creation and co-design of art representations, using a community-centric methodology. We have been conducting a community dialogue, while in parallel we are exploring novel audio-visual formats. A toolset will be designed and developed to foster democratisation of opera, using technology as a means to reach new audiences and to connect artists with audiences. This evidence-based presentation reports on the experience gathered through the use of new ideas of co-creation and participatory art to involve vulnerable groups of citizens in the creative process of opera. The aim is to empower people and communities in three trials: inner-city Barcelona, a youth prison in Leiria and rural communities in Ireland. The presentation also shows the new technologies we have developed to establish an effective participatory production workflow and to explore novel audio-visual art representation formats to provoke an impact on the relationship between opera and digital technology.
