Creative Practice Showcases
Asynchronous Session
Audio Description as an Aesthetic Innovation: Arts Access for People Who Are Blind View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Joel Snyder
Audio Description (AD) is a translation of images to words — the process makes visual images of the arts and media accessible for people who are blind or have low vision. Using words that are succinct, vivid, and imaginative, media describers convey the visual image from television and film content that is not fully accessible to a significant segment of the population (more than 31 million Americans experience significant vision loss - American Foundation for the Blind, 2019). AD also provides benefits for the sighted audience who may never fully realize all that can be perceived with the eyes—who see but who may not observe. While AD may benefit a wide audience, it is rarely considered from the beginning of the process. As a post-production activity (similar to other localization accommodations like subtitling or dubbing) many filmmakers have limited awareness of the existence of AD and even less understanding of the latest research which suggests how the access technique can be incorporated within the development of a film. The theory of inclusive design describes one common approach to accessibility. The main tenets are: 1) the designers consider as many different human abilities, limitations and needs as possible; and 2) these factors should be included from the beginning of the design process. When the inclusive design notion is applied to audio description it is no longer an “add-on” but an aesthetic innovation and an organic part of the work that can benefit all people.
The Fresh Winds of Changing Cultural Values Manifest in the Visual Arts and Architecture View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kim Thu Le
A change in cultural values is partly dependent on economic, science and technology developments. This article examines how the local cultural values of Italy (15th–18th), France (19th–20th) and the global world cultural values (20th–21st) centuries have left significant imprints on the transformation of traditional values in the visual arts and architecture. Employing Rokeach’s theory of human values (1972), Schwartz’s theory of basic human values (1992), using qualitative methods and an ethnographic approach, this research references artworks to argue that these three periods in history represent value changes among different social groups. In Italy, where natural philosophy and science clashed with religion, the bourgeois class determined cultural value transformation via educational institutions. In France, economic and political reforms resulted in new social classes, and the dominance of labour and social democracy led to changes in values. In the global local cultures of the 21st century, technologies are playing a vital part in changing local cultures, contributing to the changes in geopolitical alignments and leading to local social collective actions due to migration. In the context of globalisation, this article explains how global cultural values become part of national values and how cultural transmission establishes global cultural values.
Making Visible the Legacies of Slavery through Socially Engaged Art View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Lynn Sanders-Bustle
In the early 1960's, backed by the force of the US Housing Renewal Act, the thriving Black neighborhood of Linnentown in Athens, Georgia was demolished to make room for University of Georgia luxury student dorms. Just one of countless acts of state sponsored violence committed against Black communties in the wake of chattel slavery (Sharpe, 2017), it calls attention to the ways that the history of slavery has been ignored, covered up, and completely erased in the US. Yet, in the case of Linnentown, local activism spearheaded by Linnentown descendants gained traction with the local government, who created the Justice and Memory Project to explore avenues for atonement. The purpose of this study is to examine the role of public art in teaching about and making visible the legacies of slavery. We provide a brief history of Linnentown and describe an interdisciplinary graduate course that the authors taught centering the Linnentown Mosaic Project as a socially engaged public art project. Unlike modernist conceptions of public art designed and installed by commissioned artists, often from outside the community, the Linnentown Mosaic Project involves communities in all aspects of the work, from conceptualization to installation. We discuss the dialogue that happens around artmaking in our emergent process (brown 2017). We reflect on our work as transpedagogical, a blending of art and pedagogy (Helguera, 2011) aimed at making visible lessons of slavery through collaboration, dialogue, and making.
S(e)oul Expressions: A Transformative Experience for Korean Adoptees, Korean Adopted and Displaced Persons View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Kelsay Myers
As a Korean adoptee, I spent thirty years of my life feeling fragmented and broken; abandoned, rejected, yearning for love and belonging and searching for it in romantic entanglements with older women who mirrored back the original wounding of my adoption. Expressive arts provided a space for me to dialogue, embody, express, learn, transform and come back to feeling like a whole person again, with all of my multifaceted layers of identity. In studying integrative somatic trauma therapy modalities, a form of narrative therapy called dialogical self theory, and the healing arts, I’ve gained valuable tools and skills to guide others in embodying resources for transforming their lives through my coaching practice, Dialogical Persona Healing Arts, LLC. In January of 2022, I began a fieldwork study guiding 3 other Korean adoptees through the Tamalpa Institute Life/Art Process, an expressive arts approach for transformation that includes embodied movement/dance, art-making, writing, and performance-based ritual using the arts-based research method of A/R/Tography. The study includes 6 months of 1:1 coaching and monthly group workshops exploring the themes of solidarity, empowerment, and self expression to provide each participant with tools to integrate personal stories, identity politics, and psychological material through multi-modal arts practices engaging myself as an artist/researcher/teacher in relationship with the other participants and to my own life/art process. Although, my research study goes through the end of June 2022, I’m already discovering the personal metaphors and psychological process of each participant mirrors my own experiences in the life/art process in significant ways.
