Shifting Paths
Teaching Empathy Through Stories: The Power of Literature to Evoke Empathy in Healthcare Students View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Cavenaugh Kelly
The focus of my paper is the evidence-based teaching of empathy to healthcare students through the critical reading of literary narratives, or stories with qualities of literature. The study reviews the latest evidence on the need for empathy in healthcare, and the connection between clinicians who practice with greater empathy and improved health outcomes. Also reviewed is the latest research on the connection between reading literary narratives and empathy, teaching empathy to healthcare students, my ongoing research on teaching empathy to healthcare students through literary narratives, and a specific curriculum on how to teach empathy. This provides an understanding of 1) the power of empathy to improve healthcare, 2) the connection between reading literary narratives and empathy, and 3) an emerging curriculum demonstrated to improve empathic awareness in healthcare students. My recent study of a graduate level occupational therapy class demonstrates a statistically significant improvement in student empathy levels, comparing pre to post class levels. I also review stories read during the class, and the types of homework and class activities used with students in the class.
Lifeline: Reading Funambulism in a Social Arts Context View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jon Burtt
Lifeline was a large scale funambulism performance that involved participants from 15 countries including Ireland, Britain, Romania, Sweden, Norway and Italy which took place in July 2022. Over 140 performers crossed the fast flowing River Corrib in Galway Ireland on a highwire. The performance aimed to create a vision of hope and community to counter the widespread image of the river as a place of dread widely known locally for being the site of many suicides by drowning especially by young people. This paper examines how this social circus performance radically changed the aesthetics of funambulism through proposing an alternative to the aura of exceptionalism, individualism, and celebrity created historically by figures such as Blondin crossing the Niagara Gorge, and Philippe Petit crossing between the Twin Towers in New York. The social art focus presented a new image of safety through working with community even in extremis. This was shown by having up to eight funambulists walking on highwires at the same time. Each of these walkers used a harness attached by riggers in plain sight of the watching crowd, and each was supported by a support crew who could come onto the highwire to assist if a walker froze or slipped. In this way the Lifeline performance radically included the community of walkers, the community of riggers and support crew making them a part of the performance itself and profoundly changing the historical aesthetic of individualism and exceptionalism traditionally associated with funambulism performance.
“Private-Public Partnerships, Waterfront Revitalization, and Site-specific Arts View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Akiva Zamcheck
Since the late 1970’s, “waterfront revitalization” projects utilizing private-public partnerships have instrumentalized arts at moments of urban transformation. These partnerships, in which a private corporation embeds within a "public" entity, are a significant form amongst institutions that fund modern music. While the legal framework for such partnerships vary, they have played a crucial but overlooked role in sponsoring public performances. The private-public dialectic in property ownership is a subject of considerable discussion in legal history and philosophy. But dominant studies in urban sociology dealing with funding patterns for art, and its significance to gentrification have a primary focus on the art market, which leads to the treatment of spaces as static aesthetic objects. What can this dialectic offer in studies pertaining to music performance scenes? And are private-public partnerships audible? I study several venues in New York City as well as site-specific performances and installations associated with waterfront revitalization projects in other urban centers. The critical question I ask in this work is how can we determine what agency composers, performers, audiences (and sometimes academics) have when performance are curated by state actors working hand in hand with developers? Rather than impetuously pointing fingers, it is possible for scholars and activists to systematically evaluate contradictions at play in a variety of concert situations. This work is informed by data I amassed as co-founder and president of ensemble mise-en and mise-en place Brooklyn, a non-profit new music ensemble and performance space in Brooklyn, New York operating since 2012.
The Interplay between Aesthetics and Ethics in the Artistic Practice of Inventing a New Mode of Collective Subjectivity: Exploring the Role of Time in the Production of Creative and Processual Subjectivity in Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's Interactive Installation, Border Tuner View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Haeyoung Youn
This paper explores the interplay between aesthetics and ethics by analyzing Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s large-scale interactive installation, Border Tuner (2019). The work invites the public to communicate with each other at six stations along the US-Mexico border, creating “bridges of voice and light” across the border wall. The dialogues among the participants enable new connections between the two cities, El Paso, Texas, U.S., and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. Additionally, they highlight the pre-existing, complex relationships of the border residents that challenge the misleading rhetoric surrounding the border that has been perpetuated by the Trump administration and the mainstream media. In this context, the article focuses on the participants’ collective voice and characterizes their experience as “becoming a people yet to come.” The experience can be understood as the emergence of a new mode of collective subjectivity exercised through each participant’s power to act. In producing this creative and processual subjectivity, the different domains of aesthetics and ethics are interwoven through the participants’ choice of a new mode of existence and their performative expression concerning social and political issues. Furthermore, this article investigates time as the condition for ontological change and becoming, functioning as a theoretical foundation for the aesthetic experience of “becoming a people to come” through the production of subjectivity.
Internet Meme as Open Work: With a Cultural-semiotic Perspective View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Minhyoung Kim
Long after Dawkins (1976) first proposed the idea of memes as cultural units that can be transmitted through copying and imitation at a social level, the term 'Internet meme' is commonly applied today to describe various forms of digital texts created, circulated, modified, and shared by countless cultural participants over vast networks and collectives. They are multimodal objects that intertwine language, images, audio, video, hypertext, and more (Milner, 2016). While they may appear to be trivial and mundane artifacts, a growing number of digital culture scholars consider Internet memes to be ‘(post)modern folklore’ relevant to the analysis of contemporary culture born in the Web 2.0 era (Milner, 2016; Shifman, 2014). Multimodal representation, transformative reappropriation, and wide-ranging community-oriented dissemination via accessible applications and platforms are all parts of ‘memetic activities’ that play an essential role in the construction of collective norms and values in the contemporary digital culture landscape (Shifman, 2014). This study investigates the cultural-semiotic nature of the Internet meme as an 'open work,' in which the overall signification, as claimed by Eco (1962), may remain constant throughout the assembling and reassembling of both signifiers and signifieds among numerous sign users. As preliminary research, this study employs visual performativity as a core concept of Internet memes and constructs a conceptual diagram that includes appreciative, appropriative, resonant, and resistant memes. In particular, this study focuses on the emerging relationship between resistant memes and their DIY citizenship (Ratto and Boler, 2014).
Intermedial Connective Tissue: Theory and Praxis within Sound, Hybrid, and Installation Art View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jimmy Eadie
This paper examines the relationship between theories and terms pertaining to Sound Art, Intermediality, Hybrid and Installation Art. These concepts and categories will be examined from the perspective of a practising sound artist. The study looks at key artists and theories, to better understand how these terms emerged and how they have influenced the context of discourse between the academy, scholars, and practitioners. A primary concern of the paper is to contextualize the importance of the terminology in light of the increasingly nebulous identification and interpretation of works that use sound as their primary medium. This study is pertinent to the performative arts and digital media cultures, as it offers definitions, literature analyses, and concepts that are central to intermedial and interdisciplinary research and practice.
