VADS Fine Art Project Digital Capture Pilot Study: Case Study for the pragmatic direct digital capture of artworks from the Surrey Institute of Art and Design
"The VADS Fine Art Project aims to bring together, through a distributed digitisation model, artworks from across Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) that can serve to exemplify the history and achievement of fine art education and practice in this country since its inception in the 1850s.
In the initial stages of the project, a survey was sent out to all the Higher Education Institutions in the UK that taught fine art, in order to elicit whether or not student and staff work had been kept or documented. From this survey it was found that many colleges failed or had ceased to collect artworks due to the cost implications of purchasing, storing and insuring the works, leading to the output of many art colleges remaining undocumented.
As the Fine Art Project progressed, protocols for the digital capture, documentation and copyright clearance of work were established. These were then used to collect works from around the country to be included in the National Fine Art Education Digital Collection. However, given their inherent useable and easily applicable nature, it was thought the same protocols could be just as useful to digitally capture, document and rights-clear works within HEIs as and when they were being produced. This would make it far easier and affordable for colleges to capture and maintain collections of their present and past work, as well as offering additional benefits such as making them widely available on the Internet or for other publishing requirements."
(Ed Bremner, 1 September 2003 [last modified: 28th March 2006], Institute for Learning and Research Technology)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
AHDS Visual Arts
"AHDS Visual Arts is based at the Farnham Campus of The University College for the Creative Arts, at Canterbury, Epsom, Farnham, Maidstone and Rochester and is one of five Centres, which together with an Executive, make up the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS). The AHDS and AHDS Visual Arts are funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).
Mission: AHDS Visual Arts mission is to support research, learning and teaching, by providing visual arts digital resources through robust systems for Internet access and long term preservation; and to encourage, support and facilitate engagement with visual arts digital resources, through collaborative and creative endeavour, primarily within UK Higher and Further Education."
(AHDS Visual Arts, 2003)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Sonic City @ Future Applications Lab
"In order to determine how people might use Sonic City in everyday life, we have conducted a short-term user study with a variety of people using the prototype in their own familiar environments. Focusing on considerations of musical performance, embodied interaction as well as engagement and control, this study helped us to understand how people approach Sonic City and interact musically with the city, revealing emerging urban behaviours and music creation processes integrated into everyday life.
Process: the study took place during winter of 2003-04. It consisted of observing how a set of participants used the prototype in their own everyday environment during a limited period of time, and in collecting their feedback about it.
The study participants had various backgrounds, activities, ages, music tastes, and perceptions of the city of Göteborg.
In order to gain insight into their everyday environments, the type of path they would take, and their perception of them, we started by giving them cultural probes (individual self-contained small packages handed-out to users in order to gather information about their everyday life) prior to the testings. This also helped determining where the test sessions would be conducted, as they had to take place in the users' everyday environments. Participant were each given a cultural probe for a few days, with instructions to only open it and proceed when taking a path they would have taken anyway. The probes contained the assignment of documenting a single everyday path with a digital still camera, taking pictures of obstacles, resources and what would catch their attention. Then, they would write down answers to both clear and ambiguous questions about their path, draw their own map of it, put stickers where the pictures had been taken, and locate themselves on a larger city map (see user pages - links below user pictures in results' part).
Eventually, we let each participant use the prototype in the documented area. The users were told how the system worked but not where to walk or how to behave. Each user was video-filmed in action and the music produced recorded on a MiniDisc. This enabled a close study of paths and behaviours during use. Each session was completed with in-depth interviews about the experience.
We then synchronised the videos with corresponding sounds for analysis purposes. This allowed us to get a deeper understanding of the details of interactions by linking interactions with musical results, and repeating playbacks. The videos were first watched together with each user in order to collect their own comments and analysis of the sessions, and followed by complementary interviews. By synchronising these comments with the videos, we could compare the users' feedback with an objective analysis of their behaviours, while avoiding misunderstandings about their intentions.
Results: the study showed that mobility could indeed become a musical interaction between a user and her urban environment, enhancing her perception of and engagement with these everyday settings.
The study also opened the question of how to improvise and adapt one's musical interaction when confronted to a lack of control due to unpredictable and uncontrollable factors encountered in urban environments. The city was perceived to be more in control of this interaction than the user. However, she was able to actively influence how the music was created through different tactics and through situated interventions, all of them related to how the system was designed, what it highlighted and thus how it encouraged her to act.
In terms of interaction, the users were engaged on the level of the global path and of local interactions. Both levels were managed in an ad hoc, rather improvised way. Paths were most often planned in advance by the users but were sometimes randomly or intentionally modified during the course of a session in order to look for more interesting contexts and test how they would sound (e.g. a noisy construction site for [A.S.], a dark corner next to an electricity chamber for [D.R.]). Participants looked around themselves to seek local interactions opportunities, which they also found by accident (e.g. metallic objects). Some had favourite inputs, such as human voices for [M.K.] or noisy traffic for [F.M.].
On a local level, the users actively directed sensors with their body. In order to produce input, they often got closer to fixed artefacts at hand such as metal or walls. They also turned their body and thus the sensors towards or against diffused sources of input in order to amplify respectively shadow them, thus modulating the city's input. [D.R.] turned his back on traffic to reduce the impact of the sound level for example. Paths could thus be considered as a score articulated by ad hoc local bodily interactions."
(Future Applications Lab)
6). Gaye, Lalya, Mazé, Ramia, Holmquist, Lars Erik (2003). Sonic City: The Urban Environment as a Musical Interface. In Proceedings of the 2003 International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME-03). Montreal, Canada: 109-115 [http://www.ears.dmu.ac.uk/spip.php?page=artBiblio&id_article=1973].
Sonic City is a collaboration between Future Applications Lab (Viktoria Institute) and PLAY Studio (Interactive Institute), in Göteborg, Sweden. Project members include: Lalya Gaye (FAL) - engineering, electroacoustics, Ramia Mazé (PLAY) - interaction design, architecture, Margot Jacobs (PLAY) - product & interaction design, Daniel Skoglund (ex-8Tunnel2) - sound-art. Lalya's supervisor at Future Applications Lab: Lars Erik Holmquist. Participating Master's students (IT-University Göteborg): Magnus Johansson (HCI / interaction design) + Sara Lerén (cognitive science). This project is funded by the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research (SSF) through the Mobile Services project, by the European Union IST program through the Smart-Its project, and by VINNOVA through the IT+Textiles project.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Greeting is a film which pretends to be a painting
Bill "Viola's The Greeting is pretending to be a picture, hanging on the wall of the National Gallery, as part of 'The Passions' exhibition in 2003. The context of the gallery space and the badging of The Greeting as a picture give the work something different, making it more than just a film. The significance is in the context of where it is shown and the pretence occurring that this is a picture. Indeed, when walking downstairs in the National Gallery towards 'The Passions' exhibition, it is seeing it hanging on the wall that strikes immediately; I am being invited to believe that this animated film is pretending to be a picture. The analogy is of the picture becoming an actor, pretending to be something else. In terms of form, The Greeting is a film. Therefore, what is it that makes it now defined as an exhibition, a part of Viola's 'The Passions' in 2003? It is only the fact that it's part of a gallery that makes it an exhibition, although in reality it is also actors directed by a video artist into this film, slowed down and with no sound, which is pretending to be a painting. Therefore, it is conceptual art, in that what the artist is doing is not just making a painting, or having the idea for a painting, but having the idea of where it should be staged. The inscribed text of the space in which it is viewed makes a difference to what the viewer or spectator sees, and what is going on."
(Alison Oddey, 2007, p.70)
Fig.1 Bill Viola (1995). "The Greeting".
Fig.2 Jacopo Carucci da Pontormo "The Visitation".
3). Alison Oddey (2007). "Re-Framing". In: "Re-Framing the Theatrical", Palgrave Macmillan. 1-21.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Comica: London International Comics Festival
"Since 2003 the Comica Festival has been dedicated to showcasing the best of the comics medium through a series of comics-related events centered [sic] around the ICA and other London venues. The Comica Festival is held during the months of October and/or November each year."
(Comica, 2011)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
