sprint1
blogs.ed.ac.uk/…/https-miro-com-app-board-uxjvpumak1m
blogs.ed.ac.uk/…22/10/02/weird-assignment
blogs.ed.ac.uk/…/weird-anxiety-about-the-unknown
sprint2
blogs.ed.ac.uk/…/sprint-2-play-reflective-blog
blogs.ed.ac.uk/…1/2022/10/14/week-34-play
sprint3
blogs.ed.ac.uk/…/sprint-3-beyond-the-visual
blogs.ed.ac.uk/…/sprint3-beyond-the-visual-assignment
sprint4
blogs.ed.ac.uk/…2022/11/18/sprint4-common
blogs.ed.ac.uk/…/15/reflective-analysis-3
‘…consider how the arts and contemporary theory structure “the commons” anew: how the commons becomes both a goal and a trope in post-millennial art and cultural theory.’ (Amy J. Elias)
This blog mainly narrates from two aspects.The first aspect is my understanding of the cultural Commons, which is my contribution to the group assignment and the first part of the group speech. The second part is my outlook and expectation for the cultural Commons.
First and foremost, the scope of Commons is very broad, which is reflected in digital, economic, legal, political and other aspects. As De Angelis puts it, “Commons” can be expressed as a collection of natural and/or human resources, a community of people with reciprocal and sharing relationships and an act of common commitment to community reproduction. My group assignment is about cultural Commons. So what is the cultural Commons?“Cultural Commons refer to cultures located in time and space – either physical or virtual – and shared and expressed by a community. A Cultural Common is a system of intellectual resources available on a given geographical or virtual area. A Cultural Commons could be thought as the evolution of the more traditional concept of cultural district or cultural cluster.” (Enrico Bertacchini et al., 2012) In my opinion, cultural Commons is a space with real places or virtual scenes, where a certain culture or various cultural, art, music and other aspects gather together. At the same time, the cultural Commons has three dimensions, namely culture, space and community. So let me give you an example of what I think about the cultural Commons. instagram, for example, can be seen as a cultural Commons. With the rapid development of science and technology, Ins is a social sharing platform that uses the Internet to connect people. On this online platform, people from all over the world can share their thoughts on a certain subject, such as their views on contemporary art. Similarly, others can use the platform to see what other people think about contemporary art. This sharing of the same things also reflects that the cultural community is made up of information, which is not competitive in consumption. For example, a piece of music can be consumed and listened to without restriction. Thus, cultural Commons is a system of knowledge resources available within a specific geographic or virtual area and can be seen as an evolution of the concept of a traditional cultural district or cultural cluster. It is worth noting that some problems arise in the Cultural Commons, but this is understandable. Hess (2008) definition of the Commons: “A Commons is a resource shared by a group that is susceptible to enclosure, overuse, and social distress. Unlike public goods, it needs management and protection to sustain itself.” Hence, people need to pay attention to the use and protection of this shared resource to avoid its depletion.
Secondly, there is no denying that there are many public lands that provide disabled people with many ways to get in touch with things around them. On the one hand, some on-the-ground cultural Commons are providing suitable spatial ways for the unwell to learn about paintings, using multi-sensory and new technologies for the disabled in the cultural Commons. “Haptic technology allows museums to expand their collections of artifacts and information,” Hemsley, Cappellini, and Stanke(2017) note. For example, there is an exhibition in Madrid that allows blind or visually impaired people to touch artwork. The video below is about the Touch exhibition at the Museum of Madrid. “The surface properties of an artefact can be modeled so that a person using a tactile device can feel that it is a solid three-dimensional object with different textures, hardness or softness.” (Hemsley, Cappellini and Stanke, 2017) Therefore, touching the artwork can make visually impaired people feel the material of the picture, thus increasing the feeling of the artwork. And promote the number of vulnerable minority groups participating in the Commons.
There’s also a museum in the Netherlands with a new exhibition for the visually impaired. It’s called “Blind Spot” in the city of Utrecht. It represents the artwork, but adds extra dimensions, including sounds and smells to feel the artwork. So, to some extent, these multi-sensory exhibitions provide people with limited vision with access to art. Art doesn’t have to be seen to be felt.
The virtual cultural Commons offers more ways for people with disabilities to use it than in the past. Social media, such as instagram, provides visually impaired people with audio descriptions of entire photos. The video below details how the visually impaired use instagram.
In my opinion, the cultural Commons is the cultural Commons of the masses. We can not ignore the needs of the disabled for arts and culture.Although, there are a lot of examples of Commons to show that some of these Commons have become very convenient for people with limited vision, who can touch the artwork and listen to what’s going on in a painting. But these exhibitions, or events, do not make up a large proportion of all the Commons. Perhaps in the future, the Commons can provide more convenient and beneficial services to more people with disabilities. In addition, while visiting the field museums and galleries in England, I discovered a problem. Most of the brochures are in a single language, which means that most of the visitors need to take the brochures in English. The language of the official website is also a single language, which to some extent ignores the needs of international tourists. This may be one of the many limitations of the Commons.
The development of the Commons still needs people’s efforts to maintain. The tragedy of the Commons comes from human selfishness and is caused by the absence of long-term rules and compulsion. But there is no denying that more and more people are beginning to understand and maintain the Commons.
Reference list
Enrico Bertacchini, Giangiacomo Bravo, Massimo Marrelli, Santagata, W. and Hess, C. (2012). Cultural Commons. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Lankford, B. (2013). Resource Efficiency Complexity and the Commons. Routledge.
Hemsley, J., Cappellini, V. and Stanke, G. (2017). Digital Applications for Cultural and Heritage Institutions. Routledge.
This week’s sprint, I mainly focus on two questions to answer. The first question is whether works that focus on the senses other than vision ignore vision altogether. The second problem is the multi-sensory and gallery problem. After answering the first two questions, I’m going to talk a little bit about group work at the end and how I understand colonization and decolonization voices.
First and foremost, does the focus on sensory artworks other than the visual negate art altogether or do they still have a visual aesthetic? In my opinion, vision is an inevitable sensory element in art, and to some extent it will interfere with your understanding of art. The example I would like to give is an interactive exhibition in Calton Hill called The Seeing Hands. In the exhibition, people can use their own senses to experience. When I entered this exhibition for the first time, my visual preconceptions made me feel many bright colors, such as red and green. As vision takes over my brain’s perception, I forget that this is an interactive exhibition that can be touched, and I just think about why these colors are assigned to the objects in the exhibition and what these colors represent.When I went into the exhibition a second time and looked closely at the preface, I realized that I should amplify my sense of touch and faint sense of hearing in my touch. On the wall of the exhibition, you can see a lot of square objects of different materials, and the kinds of these objects are different and also produce different touch. When I touch the tile, I feel the cold and smooth touch. When I touch the cut surface of the tile, I need to pay attention to the sharp feeling of the tile, so as to prevent my hand from being cut by too much force. In the process of touch, I amplify my senses. Although each object brings me a different touch, I still can’t ignore the influence of vision. As you can see in the image below, these square objects have different colors and patterns. So, for me, artworks that focus on the other senses can’t completely ignore the visual, they still embody the visual aesthetics.
Figure1: The picture taken in The Seeing Hand exhibition
And then, the answer to the question of whether galleries need to be multi-sensory is yes. Multi-sensory has positive influence. “It makes museums more accessible to the visually impaired. It brings in visitors who may find the conventional formal visualism of museums disengaging or daunting.” (Classen, 2017) On the one hand, multi-sensory galleries can help visually impaired people to understand art and the world from different angles to some extent. Dodek (2012) notices that according to research, multi-sensory experiences can benefit many non-visual learners who prefer to use other sensory ways to create meaning in the world. At the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain, there is an exhibition called “Touch the Prado”, which allows people with visual impairment to feel the paintings in the exhibition through touch, and imagine the pictures through touch. This is a great way to help people who are good at using touch feel the artwork. The same, different senses bring different people into contact with art. So I think galleries need to be multi-sensory. Multi-sensory provides more people with access to and insight into artworks.
On the other hand, multiple senses can leave a deeper impression on people. For example, Van Gogh’s interactive experience exhibition makes use of multi-sensory technology and multimedia technology to bring visitors a different audio-visual feast. The multi-sensory experience allows visitors to delve into the gallery. From just looking at the artworks in the gallery with the eyes to the combination of audiovisual touch and even smell, the interaction between the gallery, the artworks and the audience can be increased, and this interaction can increase the understanding of the gallery and the artworks by visitors. I agree with that “Exhibits should invite visitors to participate and become intellectually involved, let visitors touch objects, manipulate machines, smell an environment and hear sounds…. The interaction between museum and visitor should not be limited to exhibits but should extend to the gift shop, food service, and all areas of the museum. ” (John Howard Falk and Lynn Diane Dierking, 2016b) Therefore, I think galleries need a multi-sensory approach, and museums also need it. In addition, I would like to add a point of my opinion about he multi-sensory exhibition. I’m not sure if my idea is correct, I think maybe in some relatively new exhibitions, curators tend to use multi-sensory and multimedia technology to plan an exhibition. This kind of exhibition has become one of the more popular exhibitions, of course, this is just my guess.
Last but not least, about this week’s group work, our group carried out according to four parts. The last part about reflection is completed by me. In the section of reflection, I want to discussed the topic of the voices of decolonization and decolonization and divided the topic into two positions. The first position is that the past human voice is colonial compared to the present human voice, and the second position is that the present human voice is still colonial compared to the natural voice. Both comparisons are made with the sound of people’s voices today. the final conclusion is that compared to the colonial sound of the past, the sound that people make today is non-colonial. But compared with the mountains, the land, the sea and so on, the voice of the people still seems to be a colonial presence. I looked at the link on decolonize listening in the handbook, but I’m not sure I fully understand what a decolonize listening is, what a colonizing sound is. It seems to me that human activity may be of a colonial nature. In the past, during periods of war or during periods of dispeace, such colonization may have been among human beings. But, but compared to nature and human society, nature was colonized to some extent. So, the decolonization listening maybe is the voice of nature, and the colonial listening is the voice of human.
Figure2: Our group’s powerpoint part4
⚠️As for the additional work, I’ve watched the readings, videos and audio for the first, second and third days. I really like artist Hanna Tuulikki’s artwork, especially her Deer dancer’s electronic album. That’s all for this week’s sprint blog, thanks for reading.
Reference list
Classen, C. (2017). The museum of the senses experiencing art and collections. London Oxford New York New Delhi Sydney Bloomsbury Academic, An Imprint Of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
Dodek, W.L. (2012). Bringing Art to Life through Multi-Sensory Tours. Journal of Museum Education, 37(1), pp.115–124. doi:10.1080/10598650.2012.11510723.
John Howard Falk and Lynn Diane Dierking (2016b). The museum experience revisited. London: Routledge.
References
www.fvu.co.uk. (n.d.). Image Abrasion. [online] Available at: https://www.fvu.co.uk/read/writing/image-abrasion [Accessed 24 Oct. 2022].
Here is my reflection on the past two weeks, which may be a little arbitrary and illogical. 🙈
In the first part, I want to talk about my understanding of RSVP. In the second part, I want to talk about the ambiguity of Play. In the third part, I will state my contribution to the team in this sprint. For the last part, I’ll use What? So what? Now what? IAD mode to reflect on my work in these two weeks.
First and foremost, the RSVP section. Hirsch (2011) points out that in order to respond to the public’s large demand for social and political participation, Halprin and his wife formulated the “RSVP cycle” in the 1960s to stimulate participatory environmental experience.In my understanding,“ R” stands for resources, including human and natural resources. “S” stands for scores, emphasizing the changeable development process of individuals or groups.“V ”stands for valuaction, the analysis part of the RSVP system. “Finally, “performance” means performance beyond the score.”（Hirsch，2011)）It is important to note that the Score can vary. In short, RSVP is a process of creation in the environment.
Secondly, the part about the ambiguity of play.Ambiguity is full of uncertainty, especially when defining Play. “Classical scholar Mi- hail Spariosu (1989) calls play “amphibolous,” which means it goes in two directions at once and is not clear.” (Sutton, 2021) Through reading, I learned that it is precisely because of the uncertainty of Play that there are many types of Play, such as Mind or subjective play, Solitary play, Playful behaviors and so on. And there are different groups of players, such as infants and adolescents. In addition, the Play equipment is also varied, from small to large including balls and the World Cup.These different categories, however, prove that Play represents a very diverse category of events, adapted to many things, such as art.
The third part is about my contribution in the group.I actively participated in the group discussion. During the discussion, I proposed to use cards as materials for this Play, which was recognized by the group members and ran the rules together with other members at least three times to ensure the smooth progress of Score. Finally, I edited a video of 8 minutes and 55 seconds to show the single and double play of score run by our team.Because the uploaded file of the video was too large, I took some photos of the video and uploaded them to my blog.
Figure: Here is a screenshot from score’s video
Finally, my reflection is divided into three parts: What, So what and Now What.
What part: Our group met difficulties in the first class.Because, after reading the English version of RSVP, we still don’t know what RSVP is. Later, the group read about the PSVP together again. So we know what an RSVP system is. But unfortunately, here comes the second problem. It’s a task that Jake gave our team, and it’s a task that involves multiple variables.We’ve been thinking about what A is, what B is, what C is, but at the end of the first class, we still haven’t given A, B, or C elements. The result was embarrassing because the other groups had already made some gains.
Figure: The first lesson is about materials
So What:However, in the face of these problems, our team members are united and we are all working actively to solve the difficulties we face. So much so that, in the later lessons, compared with the first day’s lessons, our group went smoothly. When we were designing the game segment, everyone had their own ideas about how to flesh out the game segment. Take poker as the theme, and then change some rules of the game, poker and metaphysics combined. We tried this process several times, from the first version of the game where we only drew one card at a time to two cards at a time.
Now What: As for the reading materials after class, I feel that I have a clearer understanding of RSVP mode and play through the reading materials. Before reading the material, I always thought that play was a limited mode, that play was only limited to cards or something similar to board games. However, reading the ambiguity of play, I came to realise that play has a very broad scope. Play can be restricted or unrestricted, can be real or not necessarily real. Play seems to be a transition between the two. In the process of reading, I also learned that there are various types of play, such as informal social play, vicarious audience play and others. After all, there are many types of play and players of different ages. equipment can range from small ball games to World Cup. So, the artist’s play is a different kind of play. Our group’s game is also a kind of play. However, in the preview before class, I felt that the material of this unit was difficult to understand. I seemed to understand some content but still didn’t quite understand it. At the end of the first day of class, I found that the focus of my reading was wrong. I didn’t read the main thing. I kept repeating what confused me. In the later courses, I need to improve my reading ability. 😳🧐
One point worth noting is the issue of intellectual property. Whether you’re using someone else’s work or publishing your own, you need to choose the right licensing format. This is something that needs to be taken seriously. When registering for our group’s score, we open it up to everyone. Our score can be mixed and changed but cannot be applied to business. Therefore, CC-BY-NC-SA was selected at last. It’s also a cautionary note to take when quoting, as not all data is unconditionally open. If used improperly, it may lead to serious infringement problems.🧠👀👂
All in all, this week made me feel like I really need to read more books. By reading a lot of materials, I can solve many difficult problems. I think I’ve made some progress this week and a lot of it has been helped by the team. At the end of the course, I still have some questions and uncertainties about the grade, which may require me to look at the books in the reading list to get answers. I can use the fifth week to read some books that I haven’t read before to enrich my knowledge and prepare for the sixth week. Finally, I would like to thank the team members and teachers for their help this week.
References
Hirsch, A.B. (2011). Scoring the Participatory City. Journal of Architectural Education, 64(2), pp.127–140. doi:10.1111/j.1531-314x.2010.01136.x.
Sutton-Smith, B. (2021) The Ambiguity of Play / Brian Sutton-Smith. [Online]. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,.
Weirdment means a scientific, exploratory, horrible, perverted and dramatic behavior, study or experiment.
The weird is all over the place to some extent，not just in scientific research, but in many different disciplines, such as conspiracy theories. I want to talk more about the weirdness of the experimental world. I think the world has some strange studies, like the twenty strangest experiments, which prove that there are experts in some fields of science who do things that are a little bit different from normal people. Weird means very strange and unusual, unexpected, or not natural. (2022)Weirdness is not a borderline thing for me right now. Weirdness, on the contrary, is a creative act that blurs the sense of boundaries. Come up with a weird idea from a weird perspective and take actions to create and implement the so-called idea. Maybe a lot of research starts with weirdness.
First and foremost, weird research exists, and it can be seen in scientific experiments. (Alder., Alder and Aboujieb., 2020) argues that, to some extent, fin-de-siècle science was not invented, but rather strange from the start. The so-called “science” is not a single discourse or a single set of methods, but a diversity of positions, knowledge and practice. In other words, “science” comes from strange positions and practices. For example, there are twenty well-known experiments that prove the existence of strange experiments. The top 20 most bizarre experiments in the world in 2007, mainly examining people and animals, include proving human nature and animal physiology. One of the weird experiments that really shocked me was the one-headed dog. The idea for this experiment comes from the history of human slaughter, which led some scientists to explore the practice of separating the head from the body. Specifically，a doctor from the Soviet Union, Sergei Brukhonenko, developed a primitive heart-lung machine he called an “autojector” and used it to successfully keep a severed dog’s head alive. (Boese, n.d.) The experiment proved that, to some extent, the head and the body could be separated. But whether a human head and body can be separated and survive has yet to be studied experimentally.
In addition to that, in 1963, Delgado did an experiment in which he implanted a chip in the brain of a bull that sent signals to the animal by pressing a remote control. In the bullring in Spain, the bull charged at Delgado, only to turn away not far from him, because of the chip in the bull’s brain. The chip can remotely manipulate different parts of the animal’s brain, and can also stimulate the animal to produce different states like anger. These proves, in a way, that strange research exists in science. Two of these experiments started with a weird point, and then they acted on animals and they came up with shocking results. To some extent, these scientific experiments prove the existence of strange research. Because the starting point of these strange experiments is to look for weird results.
There are also examples of studies of people. On the one hand, researchers have found that electricity stimulates pleasure and sexual desire in mice. The same applies to how people function. By inserting specific electrodes into the human brain to stimulate the diaphragm area in an attempt to generate sexual pleasure in gay men and increase the need for sexual desire in order to further shift gay men from being exclusively sexual to being heterosexual or bisexual. The study suggests that human sexual orientation can be changed through specific means. After reaching this conclusion, the researchers did not continue to scale up the experiment, choosing to respect the sexual orientation of humans themselves. On the other hand, study on the male and female psychology of sexual behavior also exists. There was a psychological study in 1978 that said: Will you sleep with me? The main purpose of the study was to investigate the differences between men’s and women’s attitudes towards sex. During the experiment, most women made excuses to refuse the request. But 75 percent of men are happy to enjoy it. Both experiments were related to human sexual behavior, and one was to see if electricity could change sexual orientation. Another study looked at how men and women view sexuality differently.It is worth affirming that people should respect different sexual orientations and ideas.❤️❤️
Last but not least, “Weird tales are sites of experiment, narrative laboratories in which alternative systems of knowledge and knowing can be imaginatively tested.” (Alder., Alder and Aboujieb., 2020) except for the scientific study of human sexuality and animals’ body. The existence of weird research is also shown by the content of physics, future, the secrets of the Universe and others. “The idea of energy lies behind the weird’s secular, anti-anthropocentric ontology—that the cosmos is powered by something beyond human ken and to which humans are irrelevant, and which might manifest in forms that can, at best, be only partially known on a normal sensory empirical level. ” (Alder., Alder and Aboujieb., 2020) This theory can be explained in several books, such as a Physical Invasion. Taking heat as a starting point, in this series of studies, heat is used as a weapon to fight off intruders, eventually reaching a point of equilibrium. This is also considered qualified thermodynamic optimism. So weird research exists, and it exists in different fields.
To sum up, weird research exists. It exists in science, physics, psychology, art, and other fields. Ross means “weird” in an entirely positive sense loosely tied to connotations, to indicate creative appropriation, wild deviation, mixing and matching. This also shows to some extent that weird research is composed of weird starting point and creative behavior. In the first two weeks of study, I seemed to start to understand what weird. was, but I didn’t quite understand what weird was. Maybe after I read all the books on weirdness and take all the classes, I will come up with my own understanding and cognition of weirdness. But there is no denying that weirdness is the source of many things and phenomena. These weird studies would have been more useful if most people focused on it.
Figure 1: A picture of the weird experiment that I presented on Miro in my group about the first sprint.
References
Alder, E. (n.d.) Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle. [Online]. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Boese, A., n.d. Elephants on acid and other bizarre experiments.
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