Production and Consumption
Craftowne: Image and Text in the Gallery Setting
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Billy Simms
In this paper, I share Craftowne, a visual novel which is an interactive installation combining text and various media--printmaking, drawing, sculpture, crafts, found objects, and sound--to tell the narrative of a planned suburban community outside Washington, DC during the ‘70s and ‘80s. Craftowne exists as both a gallery installation and a limited-edition comic book. Craftowne is a comic book that the reader can walk into and participate in, a work situated at the intersection of visual art, literature, theatre, and storytelling. Craftowne is symbolic of America as a whole. It is loosely based on the actual town in Maryland where I grew up, and the impact that the town has had on me as a person and artist. The individual pieces in the Craftowne installation are interactive and require the viewer to actively engage with them either by reading text and/or physically manipulating the work. The goal of these pieces is to move the viewer from passive participant to active participant and to implicate the viewer in the work itself thus making the audience member a performer for other viewers in the gallery space. This paper discusses the use of the audience member as a performer in the gallery space, visual art as a forum to explore identity and place, text in gallery art, the traditional “white cube” of the gallery space as a book, hybrid works that exist in multiple forms, and written text as a form of drawing.
Active Spectators: Towards Performative Modes of Image Consumption as Creative Practice
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Cristobal Cea
This paper proposes the possibility of using computer vision, particularly the kind that is applied within the film and entertainment industry, not merely as a tool-set for content production, but as a habit that can contribute towards committed viewership from artists, implying that a context of image overexposure demands new habits of observation that may materialize in significant artistic project within the field of digital media. This thesis is presented alongside practice-based research developed during the past four years: projects such as "A Mother Grieves for Her Son," "Glorias," "Ghosts of Concordia," and "Followers of the Flood," which to a large extent embody and push forward the conceptual research that supports this paper. As a conclusion, the paper proposes possible relations between this mode of active observation as creative practice, with ancestral ways of recollecting and telling stories, such as the Navajo string games and the Inca Quipu, where image making and story telling are indeed acts of creative recollecting and not passive consumption. From this point, the paper suggests that the shift in content creation, particularly 3D graphics, towards real-time imaging, as seen in the entertainment industry and apps such as Apple's Animoji, might imply a shift towards the performative and therefore, towards new modes of image consumption and art making that aim to be radically active and present.
The Tridea Project: Leveraging Artificial Intelligence to Facilitate International, Collaborative, Image Production and Consumption
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lisa Winstanley
Contemplating perspectives of the image through the lens of human values invites us to expand our current frame of reference and to more profoundly engage with the world through the eyes of others. Current literature acknowledges the demand for connections that respond to, or build upon, complex human needs as part of contemporary creative practice; however, society is in a continual state of flux, with creatives required to seek out new and innovative tools, resources and methodologies in order to effectively respond to the changing needs of our civilisation; in essence, requiring a response to the unknown. Therefore, in order to begin to understand this dimension of image production and consumption we must develop systems, whereby we are able to not only navigate the optimisation of user’s needs but to also cultivate shared spaces within which to establish these socio-cultural needs, wants and desires. Accordingly, this paper introduces Tridea, a multifaceted creative project which provides a platform for international, collaborative practice as a means to promote inclusion and embrace diversity. The Tridea project calls artists and designers to participate in an online form of the Surrealist parlour game, the Exquisite Corpse. Tridea leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) to assign online teams based on geographic and cultural diversity, and to then aggregate individual contributions into one collaborative artefact, subsequently displaying them in an online gallery; thus, coalescing creative communities, building bridges and providing a conduit for international collaboration to encourage design-with-purpose as a synergic means of image making.
