Seminars & Lectures
Lectures | Seminars | Exhibitions
Lectures
Dr. James Leach
Anthropologist. Research Fellow, King's College, University of Cambridge.
'Disciplinary specialisation and collaborative endeavour: some
challenges presented by sci-art projects.'
Venue: Dundee Contemporary Arts meeting room
Date: 18th of February 2004
Time: 7.30pm
Seminars
Modes of Becoming Research Seminar
Venue: Dundee Contemporary Arts meeting room
Date: 19th of February 2004
Time: 10am – 4pm
Lunch tba
Exhibitions
Fieldnotes and sketchbooks: challenging the boundaries between descriptions and processes of describing
Aberdeen Art Gallery, 6th April - 4th June 2005
Can learning be a way of doing research? Can practice be a way of doing theory? This exhibition addresses these questions through the disciplines of art, architecture and anthropology. It focuses on the interconnections between writing, imaging, drawing and reading, exploring the many ways in which media and notational systems can be used in contexts of learning to facilitate the translation of knowledge across the boundaries between the three disciplines, and seeking to bring them together on the level of exploratory practice.
This is not an exhibition of artistic, architectural or anthropological works. The aim is rather to reflect upon disciplinary ways of working, and of knowing. Every description of the world we inhabit, whether undertaken by an artist, an architect or an anthropologist, embodies certain practices of describing. Any practice that describes must involve some system of notation. These systems, however, are various, and by no means confined to the written word. Exhibitors are concerned with the potential of alternative notations, involving different media, to transcend the boundaries between ways of working and knowing specific to the disciplines of art, architecture and anthropology. The exhibition represents an ongoing dialogue, or conversation, among practitioners in these respective fields.
New works, including Untitled (X11) (Fluctuations) 1 by painter James Hugonin and Journey line by sculptor David Nash, are displayed, drawing attention to the relation between the artists' working processes and objects of practice. The film Wooden Boulder 1978-2004, also by David Nash, is on display. In addition, there are contributions from artists Alan Johnston, Arthur Watson and Norman Shaw, architects Simon Unwin, Ray Lucas and Oren Lieberman, and anthropologists Susanne Küchler, Elizabeth Hallam, Stephanie Bunn and Tim Ingold, all of which are intended to encourage visitors to think about their own ways of describing the everyday world they live in.
Also on display is a series of publications, edited by Wendy Gunn, on the theme of Creativity and Practice. The series brings together text, drawings, sound and image by artists, architects, anthropologists and generalists, allowing readers to explore the connections between imaging, writing, speech and gesture.
Research and development
The exhibition has been researched and developed by Wendy Gunn as part of the three-year research project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board, on Learning is understanding in practice: exploring the interrelations between perception, creativity and skill. The project involves a unique collaboration between the School of Fine Art, University of Dundee, and the Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen, and is looking specifically at the links between art, architecture and anthropology as ways of understanding, describing and shaping the world around us. The project aims to bring the disciplines together in order to forge an integrated approach. The fundamental premise of this approach is that knowing, along with perceiving, learning, remembering and imagining, is a social activity that goes on within the context of people's mutual involvement in a richly structured environment.
Gunn's research focuses on the practical interconnections between speech, gesture, drawing and writing, and the role of narrative and coupling of actions and perceptions in artists' working practices. She is addressing specific questions concerning the nature of artists' skills, how they are acquired, how artists' knowledge relates to anthropological and architectural knowledge traditions, and how this is affected by technological change. Building upon doctoral and post-doctoral research (1998-2005), and working with artists, architects, archaeologists, historians, system developers and philosophers, she asks if it is possible to develop a language capable of describing a dynamic creative process?
Funders
The exhibition and publication series are funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board, the School of Fine Art, University of Dundee, and the Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen.
Aberdeen Art Gallery contributed towards the financial costs of developing the exhibition and Aberdeen City Council hosted a civic reception to coincide with the Association of Social Anthropologists conference, Creativity and Cultural Improvisation, held at Aberdeen University, 4 th -7 th April 2005
(see http://www.theasa.org/asa05 for details).
Digital weavings and narratives of learning
16th April - 30th of May 2005
The Lighthouse, Scotland's Centre for Architecture, Design and the City, Glasgow
Level 4 Circulation space
Anthropology can contribute to an understanding of the everyday working practices of practitioners involved in place-making by situating both knowledge and skills within their social context. The working processes of practitioners responsible for making places should be understood not as a series of abstract actions, carried on in isolation from the social world, but rather as situated within a field of social relations. This challenges the assumptions that an interior process of thought controls action, and that thinking is separate from doing. In the comparison of knowledge traditions it is important to ask how skilled practitioners learn and how memory, like the body to which it belongs, is continually generated and regenerated in the contexts of an individual's life activities within an environment.
Taking as a starting point André Leroi Gourhan's notion that intelligence lies in human gesture itself, as a synergy of human being, tool and raw material, it becomes apparent that the interrelationships between perception, creativity and skill are fundamental in studying how a person undergoes growth and development within an environment that is continually changing. How an individual perceives the environment and how this perception informs a way of being in the world raises the questions: What does it mean to perceive an individual as moving and actively engaging within an unfolding environment? And within such a context what role might the artist, anthropologist, architect, or archaeologist play?
Background
The exhibition, publications and parallel research seminar, 'Knowledge places, place-making practices and technologies of making', has been developed by Wendy Gunn, as a result of receiving an Innovation award from The Lighthouse in 2002 to work in collaboration with Craig Dykers (Snøhetta Architecture and Landscape, Norway) and Tim Ingold (Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen) at the Scottish Sculpture Workshop in Lumsden, west Aberdeenshire. Research completed during the residency sought to establish a foundation for interdisciplinary dialogue across the four fields of art, architecture, anthropology and archaeology. The materials presented in the exhibition raise questions about the commonplaces and borders belonging to these differing knowledge traditions.
Getting lost in Tokyo
Raymond Lucas (PhD research student) Department of Anthropology, University
of Aberdeen.
Centrespace, Visual Research Centre, Dundee Contemporary Arts, 10 June – 24 June 2005
This exhibition of work by Ray Lucas explores the idea of notation and its relationship with other inscriptive practices, including diagrams, drawing, painting and photography. The fundamental research question asked here is: How is it ever possible to communicate with marks on a surface? What kind of social agreements and understandings must we enter into in order to be understood?
The work takes a starting point in a journey, and tells the same story of getting lost in the Tokyo subway in several different ways. This is similar to the way in which the same basic narrative can be expressed in a novel, a poem, a film or in the theatre. The story remains the same, but each treatment adds some value and emphasis.
Lucas notates his experience of getting lost in Shinjuku station rather than attempting to recreate the station through drawing. This idea of perception and spectatorship is crucial to the work, both in terms of his own perceptions as practitioner, and the interpretation brought by the audience. Translations of the experience continue to reconfigure the events into a new architectural space, a labyrinth which must be broken up in order to be understood. Finally, each episode is related to a place in Tokyo, distributing the experience back across the city and setting up correspondences, which are direct and metaphorical in nature, claiming that this episode is this place, not simply like it.
The aim of the exhibition is to explore the notion that a mark on paper, be it a drawing, a diagram, or a notation; is not the expression of a pre-formed idea. We do not draw an image already held in the 'mind's eye'- rather, we explore and develop the idea by drawing it, and do so in different ways with different kinds of drawing or inscription.
Getting Lost in Tokyo is also about the wanderer, the flâneur. This figure can be traced through the work of poet Charles Baudelaire, critical theorist Walter Benjamin, and the urban art movements of the 20th century including Dada, Surrealism and the Situationist International. The wanderings of the flâneur are architectural, and perceive urban spaces differently from the everyday commuter. This appropriation of space is a form of architectural creation in itself, simply by understanding the environment in novel ways, the flâneur may lay claim to ownership of a space.
Research Seminar
Venue: Centrespace Gallery, Visual Research Centre, DCA, Dundee
Date: Friday 17th June 2005
Time: 10.30 - 16.30
The exhibition shall be accompanied by a research seminar held at the Visual Research Centre. This seminar is distinctly cross-disciplinary in nature, bringing together academics and practitioners from (but not limited to) the fields of architecture, anthropology, divinity, fine art and art history. The research seminar shall explore the main themes of the exhibition, allowing others to respond to it from the perspective of their own research.
