Tuesday, 26 January

I am interested in examining the role that aesthetic dimensions can play in the handicraft process and in learning. Both students and teachers express that they find it difficult to communicate about aesthetic dimensions. How can aesthetic dimensions in handicraft be described? How does aesthetic dimensions of handicraft artefacts support student’s learning?

The project intends to investigate how teaching and learning conditions are affected when aesthetically oriented practices are transposed to distance education. The study is based on the assumption that the situation challenges the participation of both teachers and students as well as expectations, habits and the pedagogical approaches that we normally take for granted. I’m interested in making visible how teachers and students meet and interact when using online conference tools such as Zoom or Teams. Another possibility is to look closer at if, and in that case how subject content and aesthetic practices change under these new circumstances. The study intends to move within the framework of teacher education and with a focus on art, media and design education.

The ability to take risks in a creative process is seen as increasingly important and the prerequisite for innovation; herein lies the possibility to create new solutions for a sustainable future. As an art teacher, I have the benefit of teaching a subject where the creative process plays a big part. My drive and aspiration as an educator is to create a learning environment where the students are given the right conditions to develop ability, confidence and courage to take risks. How can artistic processes enable innovation? And what kind of support do the students need? My research aim is to create a safe arena for risk taking in the classroom.

This PhD project explores how to use illustration and storytelling as a method of communicating critical perspectives of image hierarchies and language. Framed by the graphic novel as a format, I am finding ways to work artistically and sensitively through the personal voice as a Korean adoptee and the experience of betweenship as a narrative compass. The project aims to have a strong focus on the craft and readability as well as steering and finding a pedagogical, accessible and open tone where heritage, race and class can be made visible and understood through multiple aspects.

The project's overall objective is to develop and explore new non-anthropocentric design workflows and aesthetics for digital fabrication which are specialised for the production of cohabitational multi-species / multi-entities ‘architectures’. Explorations of overlaps between the ‘scientific ideas’ of bioelectromagnetism and occulture-related concepts like animal magnetism, prana, fohat, Odic forces, Qi, etc., will form the basis for bottom-up, data-related design processes and interventions. Artificial Intelligence – as a metaphor and co-creator – will be included in the design and glitching processes of spaces, fragments, objects and (hopefully) shelters and houses. All explorations are created with the intention of creating benevolent hyperstitional feedback loops.

The discourses of craft in contemporary jewellery imply a body even when one is not present. Craft can provide knowledge from which to resist, transform, change and challenge how we consider a body, the body and collective bodies. In my research this is achieved by using and queering historical archives. Also, through collaborations within and outside of the material silos of craft. It is through this sharing that transgressive, parasitic and reparative pedagogical models create space for the thickening of histories. When craft is used as a tool to think with and through, it becomes invaluable in processes of decolonization, diversification and entanglement.

The starting point of the project revolves around the typographer Elizabeth Friedlander, born 1903, Berlin – and her typeface Elizabeth, released 1938. When she is 35, she plans to launch this typeface under the name of Friedlander-Antiqua. But she is forced to rebrand it using her first name, since her surname is not politically correct. Elizabeth Friedlander, at the time an upcoming name in typographic circles, is forbidden to practice her profession in Germany. She flees the country just before the outbreak of war. Based on Elizabeth Friedlander’s interrupted work and cancelled premise, my project has its beginning.
Elizabeth at All Times constitute an ongoing study of typography as visual language and graphic design craft, through exploring ways in which time and circumstance affect aesthetic hegemonies and practice. By historicising how technological, political, economic and socio-cultural currents intersect, intertwine and create conditions for Elizabeth Friedlander’s present, I seek to try out methods for aesthetic and mental shifts that can lead to other ways of perceiving and reanimating the past – setting other conditions and futures for my practice.

In my research project, Wild Place I have made an attempt to weave together two strands of 360^o storytelling. Firstly, the fictional presence of nature in designed living environments and the current policy informing sustainable urban development. Secondly, the historical panorama understood as an opportunistic medium employed as political weapon and pedagogical tool from early frescoes in Pompeii to Giulio Romano’s 16^th century illusionism and 19^th century touring cycloramas.
The explorations that have led me to the figure of the surrounding and the construction of immersion are motivated by the great expectations for a problem-solving confluence of architecture, fine art, form and design in urban planning and community building.
In my presentation, I will give a quick introduction to my research practice, the multiple failures it has resulted in and how I’ve come to approach the notion of study in artistic research with the help of Thelonious Monk’s The Transformer.

Environments, places and spaces are important concepts in art, design and architecture. These concepts are increasingly limited by the urban norm rooted in ideas of modernity which are linear trajectories, rather than relational and ecological. These postures dominate projections of human relations to nature, landscapes, territories and the planet. Designed environments are transformed into commercialized opportunities and cultivate a false idea of endless resources fostered in growing urban regions. Without questioning these relations, individuals can continue to live in a de-territorialized fantasy where the interdependence between the rural and urban, nature and non-human nature is obscured. Through a series of projects, conversations and communal collaborations, I address these series of postures and relations and references my first steps, focusing on other places than urban places, on other forms of life than the urban life and on other agents than only human.

In Textile Subtexts in an Augmented Reality, textile is used as path through history and a point of reference in thinking about materiality through digital and corporeal formulations. By creating parallels, connections and leaks between material-realistic formulations and digital materials, the research engages knowledge of textile realities from archives, collections and dissertations in order to develop methods to connect with history.
Our current digital experiences, both of making and using, changes how we understand materiality and making in a post-digital world. In order to unearth new knowledge on the current shift in understanding matter, the research uses established textile methods of relating, making and disseminating, such as patchwork, pattern making and sewing circles as principles for collective making and experiencing. Through several art works, the flatness of smartphone screens and cloth are put in dialogue and activated through the use of soft materials and software.

In the 18th century, Captain Cook set off to map the Transit of Venus in Tahiti. This was to lead onto international colonisation and the implementation of homophobic laws around the world. Working with the ethnographic collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, this project attempts to find the love, emotion and affect that these actions erased.