Dorothy Iannone's Innocent and Aware
Dorothy Iannone, "Innocent and Aware", 8 March 2013 - 5 May 2013, Camden Arts Centre in London.
"Iannone's portrayals of male and female sexuality celebrate the joy of her most intimate relationships while subverting traditional gender stereotypes of dominance and control. Through graphic paintings, sculptures and video boxes her works depict partly-clothed and naked figures on bright psychedelic backgrounds of flora, mandalas and biomorphic patterns. Recalling classical Indian erotic art, Egyptian frescoes and Byzantine mosaics, Iannone's intricate work communicates a personal narrative, passionate love affairs and lifetime pursuit of 'ecstatic unity' through transcendence and spirituality."
(Camden Arts Centre, 2013)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Sita Sings the Blues: audience-distributed animated feature film
"I hereby give Sita Sings the Blues to you. Like all culture, it belongs to you already, but I am making it explicit with a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License. Please distribute, copy, share, archive, and show Sita Sings the Blues. From the shared culture it came, and back into the shared culture it goes.
You don't need my permission to copy, share, publish, archive, show, sell, broadcast, or remix Sita Sings the Blues. Conventional wisdom urges me to demand payment for every use of the film, but then how would people without money get to see it? How widely would the film be disseminated if it were limited by permission and fees? Control offers a false sense of security. The only real security I have is trusting you, trusting culture, and trusting freedom.
That said, my colleagues and I will enforce the Share Alike License. You are not free to copy-restrict ('copyright') or attach Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) to Sita Sings the Blues or its derivative works.
Some of the songs in Sita Sings the Blues are not free, and may never be; copyright law requires you to obey their respective licenses. This is not by my choice; please see our restrictions page for more.
There is the question of how I'll get money from all this. My personal experience confirms audiences are generous and want to support artists. Surely there's a way for this to happen without centrally controlling every transaction. The old business model of coercion and extortion is failing. New models are emerging, and I'm happy to be part of that. But we're still making this up as we go along. You are free to make money with the free content of Sita Sings the Blues, and you are free to share money with me. People have been making money in Free Software for years; it's time for Free Culture to follow. I look forward to your innovations."
(Nina Paley)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Fahrenheit 451: passive consumption through audience participation
"When the 'Family' (the television with its 'cousin' announcers and actors) presents an interactive play in which Linda believes she has a role, an actor (Donald Pickering) wearing glasses with thick, black rectangular frames, turns to the camera as it zooms in on him and says, 'What do you think, Linda?'"
(Tom Whalen, Gale Student Resources In Context)
Whalen, Tom. "The Consequences of Passivity: Re-evaluating Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451," in Literature-Film Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 3, July, 2007, pp. 181(10).
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Student experiences of disability social networks, in and around higher education
"For many young people social networks such as Facebook are an essential part of their student experience. Other web-based, interactive services like Wikipedia and YouTube are also an important facet of everyday student life. New technologies have always been scrutinized for their capacity to support education and, as social technologies become more pervasive, universities are under increasing pressure to appropriate them for teaching and learning. However, the educational impact of applying these Web 2.0 technologies is uncertain.
Using a Foucauldian perspective, my qualitative study explores the networked experiences of disabled students to examine how dis/ability difference is ascribed and negotiated within social networks. Data comprises 34 internet-enabled interviews with 18 participants from three English universities. Interviews incorporate the internet to expand opportunities for discussion, observation and analysis. Mobile broadband, a remote desktop viewer and screen capture have been flexibly applied together to ensure an accessible interview situation and recognise students' preferences and circumstances. Data is analysed using discourse analysis, with an attention to context framed by activity theory.
Disabled students' networked experiences are found to be complex and diverse. For a proportion, the network shifts the boundaries of disability, creating non-disabled subjectivities. For these students, the network represents the opportunity to mobilise new ways of being, building social capital and mitigating impairment.
Other participants experience the network as punitive and disabling. Disability is socio-technically ascribed by the social networking site and the networked public. Each inducts norms that constitute disability as a visible, deviant and deficit identity. In the highly normative conditions of the network, where every action is open to scrutiny, impairment is subjected to an unequal gaze that produces disabled subjectivities. For some students with unseen impairments, a social experience of disability is inducted for the first time.
As a result, students deploy diverse strategies to retain control and resist deviant status. Self-surveillance, self-discipline and self-advocacy are evoked, each involving numerous social, cognitive and technological tactics for self-determination, including disconnection. I conclude that networks function both as Technologies of the Self and as Technologies of Power. For some disabled students, the network supports 'normal' status. For others, it must be resisted as a form of social domination.
Importantly, in each instance, the network propels students towards disciplinary techniques that mask diversity, rendering disability and the possibility of disability invisible. Consequently, disability is both produced and suppressed by the network."
(Sarah Lewthwaite, Slewth Press)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
pedagogic discourse and practice: strong and weak classification
"The concept of classification is at the heart of Bernstein’s theory of pedagogic discourse and practice. Classification refers to ‘the degree of boundary maintenance between contents’ (Bernstein 1973a, p. 205; 1973b, p. 88) and is concerned with the insulation or boundaries between curricular categories (areas of knowledge and subjects). Strong classification refers to a curriculum that is highly differentiated and separated into traditional subjects; weak classification refers to a curriculum that is integrated and in which the boundaries between subjects are fragile."
(Alan R. Sadovnik, 2001)
Prospects: the quarterly review of comparative education (Paris, UNESCO: International Bureau of Education), vol. XXXI, no. 4, December 2001, p. 687-703. UNESCO: International Bureau of Education, 2001
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
