Airea: Arts and Interdisciplinary Research

Editorial

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This third issue of Airea presents a second round of articles in response to our call for contributions 'Revisiting interdisciplinarity within collaborative and participatory creative practice', announced in June 2019. Following the second issue that showcased contributions from sound-related areas, the present collection focuses on the breadth of practices in art and design. The contributions in this issue surface knowledge about the way interdisciplinary methodologies and approaches influence and shape spaces and bodies within collaborative and participatory works.

Things we hold dear

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This paper reflects on Common-places (2019), a project that was developed in Sheffield on the invitation of Site Gallery to participate in their ‘City of Ideas’ programme. Amidst the urban regeneration processes that are reshaping the city, this programme offered the opportunity to think about novel approaches that art and interdisciplinary practices could bring to processes of urban change. Common-places was proposed as a participatory workshop that engaged the local community, by inviting them to recognise the things they ‘hold dear’ about the areas in which they live or work. The premise was to identify forms of material and immaterial value that would reveal the ‘character’ of a place and its forms of use-value that are important to a local community. The intention was to develop a set of tools to highlight, map, commemorate and ultimately protect this intangible heritage in the context of urban regeneration in Sheffield. The project addressed some of the existing challenges of integrating an expanded notion of heritage in urban planning. Moveover, it reflects on the importance of identifying the use-value of intangible heritage and embraces a more integral and holistic approach to city planning.

Designing Collective Artist Residencies

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Starting with an argument for a humanistic approach to climate change, this paper discusses the concept of the ‘Collective Artist Residency’ as a practicable means for engaging with complex socio-ecological issues that require collective answers. Through our analysis of the research project ‘Imaginative Disruptions,’ we propose that there is a need for creative spaces that include artists and non-artists alike, and which engender aimless play, inquisitive making and dialogic contemplation in the face of issues which are too painful, overwhelming and complex to rationally comprehend. We further argue that such residencies can generate comfortable, and even light-hearted, spaces in which people can be uncomfortable together. In other words, environments that feel safe and caring but that also encourage us to challenge status quos and experiment with alternatives via emotional, aesthetic, cognitive, somatic and social processing. The paper closes with five (suggested) guiding principles for designing a Collective Art Residency that supports groups of people to co-reflect upon their fragility whilst re-imagining present and future possibilities for being in the world: deeply participatory, balanced between comfortable / uncomfortable emotions, highly experiential, cross-sectoral and intergenerational, place-based.

Lifelines

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There is an imbalance across design disciplines in how the user is theorised, represented and ultimately configured. It is suggested that normative user-centred design, as practiced in product design and human-computer interaction (HCI), can lead to a lack-based approach which, when applied in a health and wellbeing context, tends to align unreflexively with a medicalised view of the person. In contrast, the use of self in research is a concept well-developed in health care ethics and care professions, while the interpersonal relationship is valued and analysed in psychotherapy and counselling research and practice. Inspired by these, this article presents a discussion on the sometimes deeply relational nature of doing design with users when viewed through the lens of the Person-Centred Approach (PCA) (Rogers 1961/1967). A case study is used to illustrate an encounter of relational depth as experienced by students working directly with individuals to design prosthetics. Lifelines is a creative project brief developed by Jivan Astfalck (2008; 2011), which asks students to represent ten significant moments in their own lives through the creative use of materials and found objects. In this case, the brief was altered so that another person (the ‘user’) would be represented. The aim was that the student designers would experience moving beyond implicit conceptions of the user as defined by a need or perceived (dis)ability, and that the intimate and personal nature of identifying and representing significant moments would raise questions about expectations of objectivity in design and research. The case study demonstrates that working in this way can be experienced as profoundly moving, with powerful moments of personal transformation and interpersonal growth. In discussion, it is suggested that through such moments of encounter, it becomes possible to examine the qualities of the relational in action, and to analyse not only problematic processes of othering, but also their converse - meetings at relational depth. The Lifelines brief is proposed as a transformative way for designers to re-engage with the whole person, as both substantial (self-realising) and relational (in time, with others and the world), and as one creative exercise in a potential suite of tools for the strengthening of the “ethical reflex” necessary in Design and HCI (Vandenberghe and Slegers 2016, 514).

Concept Generation

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Concept Generation is an event where participants create new innovations from market led criteria and trade this intellectual property for beer and peanuts. This critical and comedic project engages participants with a design process appropriated from surrealist techniques, in order to glibly mine the depths of product and service niches, where creative industries have not yet ventured. This workshop investigates the spectrum between creative industries and aesthetic art practice and asks participants to form their own critical position. The social contract between the host and the participant is transparent – the event is free, but participants must create marketable ideas to pitch to the artist, in order to exchange their concept for a beer. The artist has sole right over the intellectual property. This exchange mirrors the exploitation of precarious creative workers, for whom work and lifestyle blend, where a workshop can also become a party. Concept Generation presents the mutability of work and leisure, of consumption and production, of art practice and creative industry, and of creative thinking and marketing. In a satire of ideation, participants are asked to sell their ridiculous idea, and many get carried away with the farce. Production is the only imperative, and the more ridiculous the ideas are, the more we believe they might actually succeed.

Building Teacherly Roles Together

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Given that learner agency in making meaning from subjective learning experiences is central to constructivism, how can teachers provide structure without diminishing that agency? This paper comprises an a/r/tographic analysis of a practice-based research project situated outside formal education, which shares the teacher’s role across a community learning group. This group collectively chose and researched a new topic for each session, sharing this research in session and discussing the lesson this made. This model not only provides the basis for a consensual education, but also offers opportunity for empowerment through collectively taking ownership of learning, demonstrating that as engaged learners we can shape the structures through which we build learning agency. As education and culture shape each other, so learners emerge as critical citizens able to re/form community and culture for mutual benefit, open in turn to being re/formed by them.

Understanding learning as a creative process, this paper juxtaposes Gert Biesta’s concept of creative practice as a dialogue with the world against the re-emergent concept of cultural democracy. Education re/produces cultural values; by not assuming control of learners’ education for them – by not inhabiting the role of teacher – we do not diminish the space for new, emergent structures to be realised. This paper seeks to show that by performing the teacher’s functions between us, we increase our intrinsic motivation for learning, also allowing for possibilities of new knowledge emerging. As will be shown, constructivism needs no singular teachers, only people to learn alongside and share the practice of learning with.

Slowness as a Strategy of the Contemporary through Films

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In Future Studies and the History of Technology accelerating change is a perceived increase in the rate of technological change throughout history. This may suggest faster and more profound change in the future and may or may not be accompanied by equally profound social and cultural change. Responding to the accelerating technological landscape and contemporary life, this paper researches how the concept of ‘time’ plays a significant role. The author, an experimental filmmaker, charts an experiential journey within several pivotal ‘dream films’, along with relevant artists’ moving images in relation to time and slowness in the moving image as critical media. As contemporary life has become more and more fast paced, and one year on the impact of COVID-19 is still being felt, the idea of stillness is beginning to become a more desirable commodity. The author explores ‘slow cinema’, acknowledging seminal directors Andrei Tarkovsky and Claire Denis, as well as art films which frequently emphasise long takes, offering minimalist aesthetics with little or no narrative. In an endeavour to portray different temporalities and reveal and allude to the invisibility of time, the author relates to Julia Kristeva’s notions of intertextuality, transposition and time, and Lutz Koepnik’s concept of slowness as a strategy of the contemporary. The author discusses four ‘dream films’, where painterly, poetic, non-linear narratives, and ‘in-between’ spaces are played out: FRIDA Travels to Ibiza, Cycle, Llafarganu Papagei and Frock.