Contemporary Arts

At the Toronto Film Festival in 2007, two Canadian feature films with similar titles were shown, two days apart -one in a conventional cinema, the other in a packed screening room with a VJ running the action. Together they present a fascinating contrast in the current debate around interactive narrative, though neither is fully interactive in itself. The Tracey Fragments has a predetermined structure, yet its use of split-screen imagery amounts to a kind of proto-interactivity. Late Fragments consists of three loosely related subplots over which the DVD-viewer has some control by clicking on a mouse.

It is a truism that film and television genres both reflect and affect the values of the cultures that produce them. Some scholars frame genre as a means of ideological repression and containment imposed on viewers through stereotypes that endorse conservative social and political imperatives such as marriage, consumerism, and parenthood (Moine 74). Others argue that our attachment to the ritualized repetition of genre values derives from our more fundamental needs to address unconscious or unarticulated fears and desires. Jim Leach writes that "popular genres can…be interpreted as symptoms of collective dreams and nightmares, whether these are seen as determined by the human condition or by specific cultural environments" (Leach, 50). Wherever our genre attachments originate, film studios are in the profitable business of tapping into unconscious desires and anxieties and temporarily resolving them.

In this paper, we describe an interactive audiovisual installation In a thousand drops... refracted glances. The work creates a dynamic cinematic environment encompassing multiple screens and audio channels that work to present fragments of the bodies of humans in hybrid relations to them, thereby creating a sense of the fragility of experience. A motion sensing system tracks and maps participants' movement flows and locations onto a set of generative video animations and musical processes.

The CMEA/Acme has launched a Research to Practice blog website to provide a forum for promoting dialogue between teachers, students, practitioners and researchers in music education. In this article, we provide some background, instructions, and ideas for contributing to this new online participatory culture at

As new forms of musical learning have arisen in the 21st century, researchers, educators, and the wider community are seeking ways to describe how youth are learning and engaging with music in a technologically evolving digital age. This exploratory research aims to provide a framework for understanding innovative learners engaged in musical activities that can inform both research and practice in music education. First, a framework for understanding innovative learners is proposed based on three broad and interrelated areas: connecting, self-directed learning, and multimodal meaning making. These three areas align with current Canadian perspectives on 21st century learning and innovation and were derived through a review of relevant theoretical and empirical literature. Next, an interview study was conducted with 93 participants aged 11 to 18 years (females = 35; males = 58) attending elementary, middle, and secondary schools in the Greater Vancouver area of British Columbia, Canada. The participants' perspectives on their engagement with musical activities (initiators, sustainers, benefits) was explored and considered in relation to personal, social, and systemic factors. A content analysis was used to identify the prevalence of innovative learners using the proposed framework. Finally, 11 case studies involving rich and detailed descriptive vignettes explored further how participants who were identified in the interview study as innovative learners were engaging in musical activities within their digitally infused musical lives. The findings indicate that while many of the participants exhibited at least one or some of the three broad and interrelated areas associated with 21st century learning and innovation, the 11 participants who were identified as innovative learners were situated in all three areas of the proposed innovative music learner framework in diverse ways. These innovative learners' transformative music engagement was deeply immersive, fluid, and interconnected, and unlike previous generations of music learners. Young people's involvement with these evolving technologies and digital devices suggests a new landscape for how they navigate and describe their musical learning within today's digitally infused musical landscapes.

Catalogue Essay for “Who Thinks The Future?”
a Peer Sessions group exhibition featuring Josh Bilton, Darren Harvey-Regan, Jenny Moore, David Mabb, Steven Ounanian, Kate Pickering and Charlotte Warne Thomas
curated by Tom Trevatt
Lewisham Arthouse, London
25 September – 5 October, 2014

Catalogue essay for Necrospective, a traveling exhibition curated by Thomas Johnson
featuring work by Motohiko Odani, Takeshi Murata, Thomas Johnson, Alexis Milne and Craig Fisher
Danielle Arnaud Contemporary, London; Grand Union, Birmingham; Catalyst Arts, Belfast
2012

Vertical Farming and the Future of Food Conference
FACT, Liverpool, 2014

Thorstein Veblen once argued for a strong separation between the concepts of industry and business. While industry is productivity as such, business practices prey upon that productivity, corralling and controlling it to ensure that only certain players profit. What is the future of vertical farming, given that it is poised to expand into a much larger-scale industry, and thus to invite the predations of big business? Will vertical farming continue to offer viable alternative methods for small-scale growers, or will these practices become heavily centralized until they are saddled with corporate control to the same extent as, say Monsanto currently exercises in farming? To open this question, I briefly contextualize vertical farming practices within a range of broader discussions. I compare the use of advanced data analytics in vertical farming with Monsanto's use of big data (for instance, in the remote spectral analysis of crops). Under what circumstances are such technologies used in service of extending corporate control, as opposed to optimizing yields? I examine vertical farming with respect to geopolitical questions about the prevalence of food deserts (large areas in which it is impossible to find cheap, healthy food) across the U.S. and elsewhere. In what corporate climates could vertical farming aid in the equitable distribution of good food? Finally, I look to small-scale farming practices that promote education and social justice, such as the urban farm at the now closed Catherine Ferguson Academy, a high school for pregnant girls and teen mothers in Detroit. Under what circumstances could vertical farming contribute to such social justice efforts? In order to maintain good future prospects for vertical farming in these directions, I argue, it is imperative to view agriculture at a distance from business practices, to view it, instead, as part of cultural practices more broadly - as deeply linked to the arts, education and embodied experience.

More information on the conference can be found here: http://verticalfuture.tumblr.com/

Full recordings of all lectures can be found here: https://soundcloud.com/vertical-futures

Kinetica, now in its sixth year, is London's technical innovation art fair, featuring a wide range of art, design and curatorial new media projects. The promotional material on its website claims that many works at Kinetica "exemplify universal concepts, heighten consciousness and advance human potential;" 1 but, as with many art fairs, the scale and similarity of the booths, paradoxically, both allow the works a new audience and, at the same time, threaten to engulf them in an indiscriminate sea of sensors, motors, holograms, flashing lights and moving parts, which can do little to speak to the press material's grandiose intentions. The fair's promoters rely on the well-worn tropes of new media rhetoric, which would seem to all-too-readily equate audience interactivity with audience creativity, and increased gadgetry with advances in "human potential" (without seeming to want to acknowledge either, on the one hand, the possibility that some of these works might suggest non-anthropocentric understandings of potential; or, on the other hand, the fact that interactive gadgetry can descend into techno-fetishistic, pacifying spectacle much more easily, perhaps, than it can produce new forms of potential). In spite of its inflated, aspirational rhetoric, what I would hope to find at an art fair such as Kinetica is precisely something that is not universal -something that might pose a problem or critical question for new media: put it at odds with itself, out its antagonisms or reveal something of its limits.