• 100% Design

      Shaw, Vicky (2001)
      Shaw was invited to develop a contemporary use of Jasper and to push the limits of the material while producing work with the potential for production. Shaw used her own specific finishing techniques of grinding and polishing to develop a collection of Jasperware that challenged both conceptual and aesthetic perceptions of traditional Jasperware by exploring the formal limits of the clay body, in relation to pattern and colour as well as perceptions of actual and metaphoric aspects of use.
    • 3D Archaeological Reconstruction and Visualisation: An Artificial Life Model for Determining Vegetation Dispersal Patterns in Ancient Landscapes

      Ch'ng, Eugene; Stone, Robert J. (IEEE, 2006)
      This paper describes a methodology and software engine for generating dynamic vegetation models for archaeological reconstruction and interactive visualisation, integrating the disciplines of Artificial Life (Alife) and Virtual Reality. The engine, based on the concept of emergence (a phenomenon in complex Alife systems), uses real botanical parameters, channelled through simple rules, in order to synthesise the dispersal patterns of natural vegetation communities as they grow, reproduce, and compete for resources. The foci for the development and evaluation of the Alife engine described relate to different scenarios in nature as may have existed during the Mesolithic period. Results from the study showed evidence of correlations between the artificial vegetation and their natural counterparts, demonstrating the feasibility of using such models in historical landscape reconstructions.
    • 66.86m

      Wood, John; Harrison, Paul (2004)
      “66.86 m”, is a single channel video documentation of a ‘drawing contraption’ of the artists’ devising, in which ropes are pulled through a box in order to produce a three-dimensional object, in this instance a chair. This is the first work Harrison & Wood produced without a figure present within the frame, and shows the making of a three-dimensional drawing of a generic chair. The continuous take from a fixed camera, together with the jerky movements of the rope and pulleys (used to produce the drawing) re-enforces the distance between the mechanical work and current digital technologies. The work examines the relationship between what is present within the frame and what is excluded. A very direct relationship is formed in that it is evident that what is onscreen is being directly activated by what is off screen, contrary to most film making where this relationship is hidden. The work also examines the relationship between the three dimensional space in which the activity is taking place, the activity itself, and the video.
    • A conceptual framework for the design and analysis of first-person shooter audio and its potential use for game engines

      Grimshaw, Mark; Schott, Gareth (Hindawi, 2008)
      We introduce and describe a new conceptual framework for the design and analysis of audio for immersive first-person shooter games, and discuss its potential implications for the development of the audio component of game engines. The framework was created in order to illustrate and acknowledge the direct role of in-game audio in shaping player-player interactions and in creating a sense of immersion in the game world. Furthermore, it is argued that the relationship between player and sound is best conceptualized theoretically as an acoustic ecology. Current game engines are capable of game world spatiality through acoustic shading, but the ideas presented here provide a framework to explore other immersive possibilities for game audio through real-time synthesis.
    • A Critical Minefield: the Haunting of the Welsh Working Class Novel

      Byrne, Aidan; Sheppard, Lisa; Goodridge, John; Keegan, Bridget (Cambridge University Press, 2016)
      A History of British Working-Class Literature examines the rich contributions of working-class writers in Great Britain from 1700 to the present. Since the early eighteenth century the phenomenon of working-class writing has been recognised, but almost invariably co-opted in some ultimately distorting manner, whether as examples of 'natural genius'; a Victorian self-improvement ethic; or as an aspect of the heroic workers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century radical culture. The present work contrastingly applies a wide variety of interpretive approaches to this literature. Essays on more familiar topics, such as the 'agrarian idyll' of John Clare, are mixed with entirely new areas in the field like working-class women's 'life-narratives'. This authoritative and comprehensive History explores a wide range of genres such as travel writing, the verse-epistle, the elegy and novels, while covering aspects of Welsh, Scottish, Ulster/Irish culture and transatlantic perspectives.
    • A Critical Minefield: the Haunting of the Welsh Working Class Novel

      Byrne, Aidan; Sheppard, Lisa; Goodridge, John; Keegan, Bridget (Cambridge University Press, 2017-05-30)
      A History of British Working-Class Literature examines the rich contributions of working-class writers in Great Britain from 1700 to the present. Since the early eighteenth century the phenomenon of working-class writing has been recognised, but almost invariably co-opted in some ultimately distorting manner, whether as examples of 'natural genius'; a Victorian self-improvement ethic; or as an aspect of the heroic workers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century radical culture. The present work contrastingly applies a wide variety of interpretive approaches to this literature. Essays on more familiar topics, such as the 'agrarian idyll' of John Clare, are mixed with entirely new areas in the field like working-class women's 'life-narratives'. This authoritative and comprehensive History explores a wide range of genres such as travel writing, the verse-epistle, the elegy and novels, while covering aspects of Welsh, Scottish, Ulster/Irish culture and transatlantic perspectives.
    • A Duality of Sorts

      Stewart, Max (Bruntnell-Astley Gallery, 2017-08)
      A glass sculpture detailing my research into pate de verre and metallic salts. An investigation into the precise nature of glass paints made by the kiln firing process with metallic salts.
    • A History of Glassforming

      Cummings, Keith (London: A & C Black, 2002)
      Cummings asks in what ways do the final forms of glass artefacts and products relate to the specific nature of glass and the methods invented over its history to shape it? The research involved an examination of the conventional taxonomic approaches in written accounts of glass artefacts; with the intent to expose the presumptions and gaps that prevent a fuller understanding of the material history. The work moves to expose the forces involved in the evolution of glass as a series of individual and collective creative decisions. The author examined the relationships between the unique material properties of glass, and the methods and processes used to shape it; with specific focus upon technology, tools, and equipment. The focus is upon the fact that glass becomes more and less liquid in relationship to temperature, furthermore glass acts as a universal solvent allowing artists to experiment with a range of materials that affect colour, transparency, opacity and the relationship between surface and body
    • A Man Out of Time: Joseph, Time and Space in the Marian Plays of the N-Town Manuscript

      Black, Daisy; Cox, Elizabeth; McAvoy, Liz Herbert; Magnani, Roberta (D. S. Brewer, 2015-05-31)
    • A Month in the Country

      Cornford, Matthew (2003)
      This commission called for a response to a historic photographic archive; we decided not to make new photographs but to hire existing ones, and appropriate them to focus attention on their ownership and control. Stock photography images may be understood as commodities in themselves, as signs produced in speculation of market demand. Such images are grouped in generic categories, which aim to ‘reflect current trends and aspirations’. The Corbis Corporation holds 70 million images, and is acknowledged as the world’s largest collection. Corbis is owned by the richest man in the world: Bill Gates, co-founder and chairman of Microsoft. We used our budget to hire images for one month, according to the conditions set by Corbis. Our picture search, ‘East Anglia Landscape’‚ yielded four images. Corbis permits its clients to produce prints of an image, whilst retaining ownership and control of the image’s appearance. After the contracted month, we kept the photographs on the gallery wall, but whitewashed over them. A Month in the Country trapped the image within the photograph, transforming the prints into abstract conceptual objects. During the Reformation, whitewash was used to obliterate paintings in Catholic churches, transforming them into austere places of worship. Today, a legacy of Modernism is the use of white painted walls as the defining visual statement of the art gallery. Within capitalism, whitewashing shop windows denotes bankruptcy. ‘A Month in the Country’ is the title of the novel by JL Carr, in which a young man attempts to recover from the trauma of the First World War. He spends his summer days in a mediaeval country church, meticulously revealing a biblical scene of damnation painted on the wall, which had been hidden by whitewash.
    • “A Music Video is Simply a Promo for a Song”: Music Video as Documentary

      Halligan, Benjamin; Heinze, Carsten; Niebling, Laura (Springer, 2015-10)
    • A philosophical memoir: notes on Bhaskar, realism and cultural theory

      Roberts, John (Taylor and Francis, 2016-04-04)
      In this philosophical memoir I trace out the part that Roy Bhaskar's philosophy of science played in the development of a non-reductive account of realism in art and cultural theory in the 1970s and 1980s in the UK, and the part his Dialectic (1993) played in the theorization of the concept of the philistine developed by myself and Dave Beech between 1996 and 1998. Our de-positivization of the concept as a symptomatic negation of the bourgeois ‘aesthete’ drew extensively on Bhaskar's notion of absence (in this instance of cultural skill and sensitivity) as a real absence. This in turn, allowed us to bring Bhaskar's realism and Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory into alignment, where the philistine plays a similar, if undeveloped and untheorized role. Overall, the article marks a recognition of the continuing possibilities of Dialectic for a theory of negation in contemporary art and cultural theory.
    • A-Wakening

      Foster, Christopher; Mills, Joanne; University of Wolverhampton (University of Wolverhampton, 2017-11)
      Installation: A-Wakening November 2017 Arena Theatre, Wolverhampton. A-Wakening: a multi-sensory environmental installation created to respond to the active and immersive relationship between audience and artwork. A collaboration between artist and PhD student Joanne Mills and Dr Chris Foster of the University of Wolverhampton, a dark space is filled with haze, visuals and a ‘dream-like’ soundscape to be experienced and explored.
    • Abject Spaces in The Bridge and The Killing: The Post-9/11 City of Scandinavian Noir’

      Pheasant-Kelly, Frances; Wilhite, Keith (Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2016-05)
      This chapter is from a book which analyzes post-9/11 literature, film, and television through an interdisciplinary lens, taking into account contemporary debates about spatial practices, gentrification, cosmopolitanism, memory and history, nostalgia, the uncanny and the abject, postmodern virtuality, the politics of realism, and the economic and social life of cities. Featuring an international group of scholars, the volume theorizes how literary and visual representations expose the persistent conflicts that arise as cities rebuild in the shadow of past ruins.
    • Abject visions: Powers of horror in art and visual culture

      Arya, Rina; Chare, Nicholas (Manchester University Press, 2016-05)
    • Acoustic heritage and audio creativity: the creative application of sound in the representation, understanding and experience of past environments

      Murphy, Damian; Shelley, Simon; Foteinou, Aglaia; Brereton, Jude; Daffern, Helena (Council for British Archaeology, 2017-06-05)
      Acoustic Heritage is one aspect of archaeoacoustics, and refers more specifically to the quantifiable acoustic properties of buildings, sites and landscapes from our architectural and archaeological past, forming an important aspect of our intangible cultural heritage. Auralisation, the audio equivalent of 3D visualization, enables these acoustic properties, captured via the process of measurement and survey, or computer based modelling, to form the basis of an audio reconstruction and presentation of the studied space. This paper examines the application of auralisation and audio creativity as a means to explore our acoustic heritage, thereby diversifying and enhancing the toolset available to the digital heritage or humanities researcher. The Open Acoustic Impulse Response (OpenAIR) library is an online repository for acoustic impulse response and auralisation data, with a significant part having been gathered from a broad range of heritage sites. The methodology used to gather this acoustic data is discussed, together with the processes used in generating and calibrating a comparable computer model, and how the data generated might be analysed and presented. The creative use of this acoustic data is also considered, in the context of music production, mixed media artwork and audio for gaming. More specifically to digital heritage is how these data can be used to create new experiences of past environments, as information, interpretation, guide or artwork and ultimately help to articulate new research questions and explorations of our acoustic heritage.
    • Afterword: Confidence in art evidence

      Prior, Ross W.; Rowe, Nick; Reason, Matthew; Balfour, Michael; Preston, Sheila (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2017)
      In pointing to the fact that there are no fixed prescriptions for what constitutes evidence and impact in applied arts, art (meaning all art forms) is offered as a way of providing those answers. Personal embodied ways of knowing are of interest to researchers and values the importance of knowledge that is incrementally gained through the act of doing and being. Art is empirical – art and art processes are observable. Art is a way of knowing and as such provides researchers with a rich vehicle for research that does not need to be scientific or rely on the social sciences. Whilst mixed methods research may be useful, applied arts researchers can and should have full confidence in using an art based research method. This should also extend to a confidence in artistic outcomes, offering us clear understandings of both evidence and impact.