Creative Practice Showcases
Asynchronous Session
Performance Art Looking at Identity and Technology View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Eveline Boudreau
Using performance art as intervention, I look at the relationship between humans and their technology. In this paper, I create a conceptual framework for interaction with a cross-section of people, raising related questions and ideas about identity and technology. I show that performance art can be used to encourage people to recognize the non-stop effects of evolving technology on human behaviour and relationships. My investigations involve aspects of art, sociology and psychology, including the phenomenological and existential perspective of Nietzsche. Methods of my inter-active performance art are qualitative, communicating via interviews and discussion, both face to face and through social media and e-mail. As a practising artist I strive to go beyond “Representation”. Measuring the effectiveness of my interactive performance is an integral part of the process. These performances are fruitful experiences for my participants. They are willing to interact with me about identity, human behaviour, and technology. Regarding the electronic media, many of them express a perfusion of inner paradoxes, a landscape of liminal space without distinctions. Can the Internet expand the heritage of performance art, positively, to a global audience?
Embodied Cognition and Its Entanglement with Ecology: An Interdisciplinary Approach View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Yingchuan Liu, Petra Johnson, Olga Merekina
Our case study describes a four-week intensive course held at China Academy of Art and devised to meet the Academy’s brief ‘Playshop’ (2021). Our aim was to create an environment for collaborative sense making with particular emphasis on movement as our first language. The objective was to place movement as a way of knowing the present side by side with voiced reflections on pre-teen encounters with nature and current artistic output, thus nudging a shift in perspective from externally applied forms and techniques to internally experienced realities. The space of risk was to guide visual art students into their moving body/bodies. Instead of focusing on a particular outcome, students were introduced to the process of sense making unfolding. We combined methodologies developed in Social Sculpture Practice, somatic movement practices; contemporary dance and physical theater. The schedule for this four-week intensive course initially allowed for three lectures, 14 practice sessions, and two intensive student-led sessions during which each student was required to present. Both, movement sessions and lecture sessions, adapted to students’ responses as well as the challenges posed by distance teaching. There was a great willingness to be flexible on all sides. The framework allowed for an on course teaching methodology to emerge around voicing. Groups of students devised five different movement pieces at the close of the course. These were presented together with research notes, drawings and voice recordings. There is potential to expand this course to deepen the explorative process.
Owning the Past through Collaborative Playwriting: Egyptian Students Develop the Usir/Osiris Myth for the Stage View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Jillian Campana
Students in the Theatre and Egyptology programs at the American University in Cairo collaboratively wrote an original play based on the ancient Egyptian birth, death and resurrection myth of Osiris and Isis (Usir and Aset) which was performed in Cairo at both theatre spaces and high schools. Using an ancient setting, but with contemporary characters and language, "Ancient History" tells the story of chaos and order, jealousy and healing and reminds audiences that different goals and perspectives do not have to be adversarial. Far predating ancient Greek theatre, annual performances of this myth in Abydos, Egypt began as early as 2500 BCE and continued until around 500 CE, constituting the first known theatrical performances in the world. By researching the myth and working with Egyptologists to retell the story from the Egyptian perspective, student authors connected to Egyptian history and legacy of the performance in their country.
The MISA Collaborative: What Happens When an HBCU and Private University Partner to Impact the Community and Their Students View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Joseph Hopkins, Bala Baptiste
Inspired by a poignant story of brave students collaborating to integrate the arts community in 1965, Miles College and Samford University are teaming together again to demonstrate how we can use the arts to shape our community. This session will use the case study of the MISA Collaborative to examine pathways for partnership between institutions seeking to enrich the community and build bridges of diversity. The MISA Collaborative has established a virtual arts festival, collaborative theatrical works, collaborative music events, and shared art exhibits. Each of these offerings connects to meaningful opportunities to deepen connection and arts opportunities for the community – especially the underserved. The Collaborative has been recognized with important grant support and by the leadership of our communities. Join us as we explore what it means to shape events out of historical context, engaging students as leaders in service learning, and using story and the arts to weave diversity into the souls of our institutions.
Organically Composing Microbial Art View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Grace Mc Intyre Willis
The object of this research is to experiment with organically composing the growth structures of several molds and bacterias in a petri dish with the intent of creating a visually appealing array of living textures, shapes, and colors that will be photographically documented. Through the cultivation of these organisms, the outcome of my research reveals the connection between what mankind considers “fine art” and biology. All forms of life on Earth bear a unique expression ranging from coloration to sound. Since biology is defined as the study of living organisms and art is defined as the study of expression, it only makes sense that living organisms can be considered art. Through continuous microbial sampling, Petri dish cultivation, and curation at my scientific and artistic discretion, I created a stimulating assemblage of compositional elements. This research falls into the category of bio-art, an art practice beginning in the twentieth century, where humans work with live tissues, bacteria, living organisms, and life processes to create art. Bio-artists use scientific processes for their artwork, such as genetic engineering, tissue culture, and cloning. Microbial artwork, a subgenre of bio-art, is the practice of culturing microorganisms in certain patterns. This research envelopes the idea of interdisciplinary connections because the results are indicative that living organisms can be viewed as a tool to create art when the proper knowledge is applied.
Building Resilience: The (New?) Politics of Grief and Mourning at the Time of the Pandemic in Contemporary Art Practises View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Vasileia Anaxagorou
When I started researching this paper, I added words (stay home, stay safe, wash your hands, wear a mask, social distance) to this list as new phrases were added to our lives. In semantic havoc, the connection of these phrases carried a common denominator that would best describe the pandemic and reveal one shared process: that of mourning and grief. This paper presents the intersection of contemporary artistic practice and theory on how fragility and precarity have long been defined when someone is ill and whether this has been the case amidst a global pandemic. As biopolitics penetrated levels of existence, including the body, the psychic, affectivity, and our genes, care has entered a new phase of morality. Isolation has become a new norm, and altered understandings of “care” affected our multiple relations between humans and nonhumans that support life. Care has become a personal burden and a neoliberal consumer ideal to the individual that constitutes the social body, becoming a fixed machine. As we have been asked to get back to work, function, and recover, we crave(d) normality, but how is this possible when one’s ability to mourn all these have been stripped away from a possible space for agency? Through the lens of the morality and care of the dominant discourse of the pandemic, this paper refers to my contemporary art practice that questions the new materialities of the body through art installations that work as biographical narrations of new modalities of grief and mourning.
The Medici - Audiovisual Fictions: From (Local) Fascism to (Global) Westernist Stereotype? View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sheyla Moroni
The TV series 'I Medici' (producers: Lux Vide of the Bernabei family and Frank Spotniz) aired for 3 seasons (2016-2019) and was a 'global' success. This product is positioned as a contemporary way of telling the story of the Renaissance family. Since 1918, films have been produced on the generations and illustrious personalities associated with the Florentine family. The contribution intends to compare this television series (also aired on the national public television network, RAI 1) with (in particular) the film 'Lorenzino de' Medici' shot in 1935 (director: Guido Brignone). The two products are very different but, above all, they 'celebrate' two different moments in life (especially politics) coeval with their accounts of the city. While the 1935 film celebrated a Florence subjugated to a 'mestizo' and also for this reason terrible Alessandro de' Medici (from whom it freed itself, thanks to the 'revolt' of the bourgeoisie, as in Fascism) and the Florence of the artisans and artists (which wanted to recall the Florence of the Fascist guilds of the secretary of the provincial federation of the Fascist Party, Alessandro Pavolini), in the 2000s, the stereotype of Florence as the 'founder of the republic' par excellence and at the centre of the model of what would become the West: finance, power struggle, power of beauty) is being retraced. A crowdfunding is already being prepared to make a film starring Alessandro (the villain of 1935), which is supposed to extol the alleged Afro-descent of one of the founders of the dynasty.
Blurred Borders - Intersecting Ideographic Language and Visual Design in an Exhibition Context: A Trans-cultural Art Pedagogy Opportunity View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jean Sebastien Mayrand
This study discloses a personal visual design point of view as experienced by the presenter, Canadian expatriate in Japan. The output, encompassing the themes of identity and sense of belonging, resulted in the exhibition “Black/Blank”. After defining context, concept and narrative from the show, the presentation aims to reveal a process, albeit foreign, that consists of using Japanese character (kanji) meaning/etymology as a tool to develop an ephemeral visual language. The audience will discover how a word/idea via kanji etymology turns into a plethora of visual design iterations. The implications of this creative inquiry through Japanese ideographic language (CIT-JIL) are two-fold. First, it can be approached, learned and taught for cultural, historical and visual acumen. Secondly, its roots in the representation of language make it possible to be utilized in any type of creative output. Could CIT-JIL perhaps enhance Western visual design, art education?
Arts Integration During Lockdowns And Isolation: One Professor's Success With Arts-based Discussion and Research Within an Online Context View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Brittany Harker Martin
This presentation shares how I transformed a typical, online discussion board for undergraduate students, into a creative space where they explored provocations and peer-posts through the arts (art, dance, drama and music). It also explores how I revised an arts-based research project, originally designed for in-person delivery, to become a digital exploration and collective creation shared online. I show examples of how students used technology to capture and submit digital versions of their creative work, while collectively pondering issues and topics related to the Covid-19 pandemic. Through this, they encountered an expressive outlet for managing the uncertainty and angst triggered by lockdowns and political turmoil. At the same time, they formed an unexpected community of support and shared experience, despite social isolation. With my students' permission, I am able to share images, video, and narratives that illustrate successful ways to integrate the arts into an online course. Through this, you can understand the profound effect this had on a group of individuals ranging in artistic experience from "extremely limited" to "professional," and witness the unique bond that formed through their shared, aesthetic encounters.
