Constructing Models for Practitioner-Based Research

"This paper considers differing understandings about the role and praxis of practitioner-based research for the arts. Over more than a decade the nexus between theory and practice has been a point of debate within the contemporary arts school both in Australia and overseas. This paper attempts to reveal ways of approaching this issue from within and across the disciplines. Discussions with colleagues from the arts representing fields as diverse as music, visual arts, creative writing, women's studies, dance and theatre studies indicate that the research principles explored, albeit briefly, here have resonance for each of these disciplines. Consequently, in an attempt to be broadly relevant for these diverse fields I have chosen to position the model as practitioner-based. Within this widened context I will be exploring the different ways in which studio-based practitioners and academics conceptualise the processes and characteristics of research in the arts and professional practice. However, as this is still work in progress, my exemplars will largely reflect my own field of the visual arts. Further research will enable this model to expand.

Presented is a way to conceptualise and explain what we do as studio-based researchers in the arts. In so doing I am recognising that contemporary practices in the arts reflect a meridian era of evolution, which requires us to be articulate practitioners. This includes being able to analyse and write about our practice in sophisticated ways. I see practitioner-based research and the resultant exploration of personal praxis as a way to achieve this. What I propose is that as artists we open up a larger domain by recontextualizing and reinterpreting aspects of standard mainstream research processes, looking at the resemblances, the self-resemblances and the differences between traditional and practitioner-based research methods as a logic of necessity."

(Robyn Stewart, 2001)

TEXT Vol Vol 5 No 2 October 2001 [http://www.griffith.edu.au/school/art/text/]

第29届北京奥运会开幕式 (Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony)

Sky Arts Futures Fund: competitive arts funding to make it happen

Applications open on 25th September and close on 19th December 2012.

"Sky Arts also seeks to connect with culture on the ground, supporting and investing in the arts from leading organisations to emerging artists in the UK and Ireland through the Sky Arts Ignition Series. The Futures Fund is part of the Sky Arts Ignition Series and offers five artists each year £30,000 plus mentoring to help you develop your creative practice. ...

Whether you want to direct a piece of theatre, choreograph a new dance piece, write a play, record an album, create a sculpture, a live art performance or produce, Sky Arts will give you the time and money to make it happen.They'll also pair you with a mentor from Sky and the arts to help you develop your networks, skills and knowledge in the arts and the commercial sector.

We invite you to submit an application in one of five categories; Theatre, Writing and Performance; Music; Visual Art; Dance; Creative Producer."

(IdeasTap Ltd. UK)

onformative a studio for generative design: unnamed soundsculpture

"The basic idea of the project is built upon the consideration of creating a moving sound sculpture from the recorded motion data of a real person. For our work we asked a Laura Keil, a berlin based dancer to interpret a musical piece - Kreukeltape by Machinenfabriek - as closely as possible with the movement of her own body. She was recorded by three depth cameras (Kinect), in which the intersection of the images was later put together to a three-dimensional volume (3d point cloud), doing so we were able to use the collected data throughout the further process.

The three-dimensional image allowed us a completely free handling of the digital camera, without limitations of the perspective. The camera also reacts to the sound and supports the physical imitation of the musical piece by the performer. She moves to a noise field, where a simple modification of the random seed can consistently create new versions of the video, each offering a different composition of the recorded performance. The multi-dimensionality of the sound sculpture is already contained in every movement of the dancer, as the camera footage allows any imaginable perspective.

Similar to painting, a single point appears to be still very abstract, but the more points are connected to each other, the more complex and concrete the image seems. The more perfect and complex the 'alternative worlds' we project and the closer together their point elements, the more tangible they become. A digital body, consisting of 22 000 points, thus seems so real that it comes to life again.

Using 3 different microsoft kinect cameras the movement of the dancer was recorded into those 3d pointclouds that were synced and exported as one large dataset as Krakatoa particle files to be loaded into 3ds max for further rendering and creation of the 3d scene including the camera movement that is controlled by the audio as well."

(Cedric Kiefer and Julia Laub, onformative a studio for generative design)

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William Forsythe: choreography as a reflection of social spheres

"In his installation performances such as Human Writes or Heterotopia, to which Forsythe has dedicated an increasing amount of his time in recent years, choreography becomes a social practice. Forsythe's installations are controlled test arrangements in which all the participants can observe themselves, their bodies and their movements together. When a performance like Human Writes deals in substance with the difficulties surrounding universal human rights, it becomes clear where the potential of dance and movement can lie. After all, it's not abstract universal laws alone that guarantee our co-existence. It is much more our physical actions, our daily movements that create and shape the community. Herein lies the political meaning of Forsythe's notion of dance. He creates spaces where he places people in a new, unknown relationship to themselves so that they reflect differently on their (social) spheres and in so doing explore their own potential scope for action."

(Gerald Siegmund, May 2008, Goethe-Institut)

Fig.3 Dominik Mentzos, "Human Writes", performance-Installation by William Forsythe and Kendall Thomas [http://www.theforsythecompany.com/pressphotos/humanwrites/].

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