Community Ties
Musical Memory, "Pathoscape,’"and Hawai‘i Puerto Rican Diasporic Identity View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ted Solis
I discuss the potency of constructed musical memory through an ethnomusicological examination of Hawai‘i Puerto Rican musical style and song texts. For this population, who largely descend from early 20th century immigrant sugar plantation laborers, music and dance have historically been both diversions and primary cultural anchors. Their physical and communication disconnection from Puerto Rico, very unlike the constant ebb and flow of Puerto Ricans between New York and the Caribbean, was profound throughout much of the 20th century. Themes of separation and longing strongly resonate for Hawaiʻi Puerto Ricans, even though very few of them have any personal experience of Puerto Rico. Instead of a physical and experienced memory of their original homeland, they nurture an imaginary memory in songs and dances. I maintain that in the face of a profound separation, Puerto Rico-identified music and dance have served for Hawaiʻi Puerto Ricans as what I call a “pathoscape”: an “emotional sound landscape.” For many, both young and old, poignantly aware of the broken link with Puerto Rico, recordings and music and dance practices have in a sense come to serve as surrogate ancestors. In coming to grips with a diasporic Puerto Rican identity both imagined and immediate, Hawaiʻi Puerto Ricans in the 20th century have repeatedly rationalized, renegotiated and reinterpreted the aesthetic criteria they consider appropriately culturally appropriate, and which nurture this emotional landscape.
Theatre and Writing Reduce the Stigma of Mental Health : Piece of Mind Ten-minute Plays View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jillian Campana, Jonathan Harvey
Playwriting, performing, and viewing theatre can instigate conversations around mental health and well-being issues. Particularly in communities where this issue remains stigmatized, having students write, perform and watch fictional accounts of mental health issues helps them to access and understand the subject and develop healthy coping strategies around the issue. This study details how the American University in Cairo created a university-wide Arts and Writing project connected to the university’s Mental Health and Well-being Initiative in which the community wrote original plays that were performed and seen by students and then unpacked in a core curriculum Rhetoric and Composition class.
Curatorial Activism: A Reflective Strategy for Audience Engagement in Ecological Art Projects in South India View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Shubhani Shubhani
This study examines the potential of curatorial activism as a reflective approach to advancing ecological thinking in India in the expanding field of practice-based research. The aim of the research is to understand and produce an understanding of the role of curators in growing audience engagement in various on-site and off-site events. This research applies Reilly’s curatorial activism to artistic projects addressing ecological issues to provide a realistic overview of institutional change and emphasize how the role of the curator can create a social impact and communicate climate change issues to a wider audience. This research follows a multimethodological drawing on art and curatorial research, with new museology studies methodologically being a qualitative multi-case study that endeavours to produce a rich, original, and practice-based inquiry by organizing an exhibition and a discursive event in collaboration with artists and institutions. The thematically curated event yields data to help the audience engage with activist artwork. The empirical investigation includes PCI interviews with experts as well as observation of visitor behaviour, mapping of visitor reactions, duration of visits, interaction, and movement patterns. This will provide in-depth insight into the effectiveness of curatorial strategies through dialogue on the development and future of curatorial activism and its ethical responsibility toward the ecological crisis. Using these techniques, it will be possible to determine existing patterns, the influence of activist movements on change, and the connection between institutional frameworks and art activism.
Cultivating Care in Art Museum Education : Examining Pedagogy View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jenna Green
This session suggests a pedagogical framework informed by research on care theory is useful for emerging and established art museum educators interested in addressing the social needs of museum visitors. I present a research paper that offers a range of theorists invested in an ethic of care within art education and provide examples of how a pedagogy of care can be applied to art museum education.
Symbiotic Objects: A Casestudy of "Cultivated" Algorithms View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Barbara Rauch
This paper presents a case study of "cultivated" algorithms, a body of work by german/canadian artist G. Muehleck. The artwork series 'Inked Kelpies' uses as its starting point of production various organic materials, here it is sea kelp/algae. In a synthetic digital environment the material undergoes an algorithmic transformation suggestive of some futuristic growth. Recent developments in chat GPT provide some astonishing knowledge creation, and it is in this light, that I discuss Muehleck's practice, as visual posthuman entanglement. The theoretical frameworks I draw from include New Materialism, Object Oriented Ontology, Affect Theory and Critical Posthumanism. I propose to provide visual creative practice as a model to further these theories. Creative visual practice can help us understand these complicated speculative utterances and in conclusion we will define some of the affordances of the new digital symbiotic and hybrid aesthetics.
Representation of Feminism in Indian Performing Arts and Theatre: A Perspective Study on the Portrayal of NAYIKA lakshanas in the Prehistoric Scriptures of India View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Soundarya Maddali
‘Feminism’ – a lot of questions arise in my mind as soon as I hear this word. Do we still need to discuss feminism in the 21st century? Would this be a never ending discussion in the Indian societal structure? Will this ever end? Well, my ideology elucidates that if we are discussing this today, probably it is still ‘the problem area’. A lot of Indian population (including women) hate everything allied to Feminism – protests, activists, reformers… as they do not see the need for this mutiny. Most of our grandmothers and mothers were very happy with the place the Indian society has given them why can’t we continue to be the same? We all come from families where we are loved, provided and protected what ‘else’ do we ever need as women? For people who come up with regular answers like independence and freedom, is what we need. So if we are educated and working, can we be considered content? What ‘extra’ did we always need? Well, if we do not have an answer it's high time we think about it.
The Witch in the Lab Coat: Doubling, Doubling, Toiling and Troubling the Narratives and Methodologies of Standard Scientific Research Practices View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session WhiteFeather Hunter
The Witch in the Lab Coat is a series of bioartistic and laboratory experiments that problematize the narratives and methodologies of standard scientific research practices; this is particularly salient where academic sciences alienate an embodied experience of knowledge through their several processes of depersonalization. The Witch in the Lab Coat is a PhD research project that incorporates biological art outputs with tissue culture and engineering, using an alternative body material: menstrual fluid. This taboo fluid, which is both under-researched and misunderstood in science and wider cultures, presents a rich, embodied, material basis for applying feminist critique to academic science fields such as biotechnology. This paper presents several final outputs from four years of biological art research and practice, which has taken place in various international facilities, towards a PhD. These outputs include: handcrafted laboratory aparatuses and other DIY objects; discussion of the scientifically relevant laboratory experiment results; and, personal experiences with implementing 're-personalization' strategies towards greater autonomy in laboratory research with unconventional approaches and biomaterials.
