Wednesday 3 December 2014

We Are Northern Lights: University of Sussex seminar

3rd December, 4-6pm in Fulton 201, University of Sussex
MFM Research seminar series

Professor Nick Higgins
We are Northern Lights
Chair: Joanna Callaghan


Screening of film 2pm in Fulton 213
ALL WELCOME

Assembling Scottish Identity: The Northern Lights Documentary Project

The Northern Lights project was a mass participation documentary film project that invited members of the public to submit footage about 'their' Scotland as a means to create a unique national self-portrait. Fifty-five filmmaking workshops were held with groups whom traditionally might not engage with large scale arts and media projects. The result was 1500 individual submissions that in turn generated over 300 hours of video footage that became a 98 minute documentary portrait of Scots at a time when the very politicalfuture of the nation is in question. The final film was the first ever Scottish documentary to be released in a commercial cinema chain.

Prof Nick Higgins, the producer and director of the project, will present clips from the feature film and explore the relationship between user-generated footage and the construction of Scottish identity in the context of the Independence referendum.

www.wearenorthernlights.com


Nick Higgins is Professor of Media Practice and Director of the Creative Media Academy at the University of the West of Scotland. He is also the producer and director ofseveral award winning documentaries; including Hidden Gifts: The Mystery of Angus MacPhee, A Massacre Foretold and The New Ten Commandments. His films have been broadcast internationally on channels including German, Swedish, Dutch and Finnish television and his most recent film, We Are Northern Lights, a crowd sourced exploration of Scottish identity, was the first ever Scottish documentary to be released in the cinema multiplex chain, Cineworld.

Thursday 30 October 2014

The Uprising at Video Vortex 10

Video Vortex is a travelling conference series concerned with online video. Established in 2007 by the Amsterdam based Institute for Network Cultures, the conference since then took place in Brussels, Amsterdam, Ankara, Split, Yogyakarta and Lüneburg. This year it is in Istanbul & Ankara and focuses on art, activism and archives. 

Lecturer in Filmmaking Peter Snowdon is screening his film The Uprising in Istanbul on 31st October. The Uprising shows us the Arab revolutions from the inside. It is a multi-camera, first-person account of that fragile, irreplaceable moment when life ceases to be a prison, and everything becomes possible again.

This feature-length documentary is composed entirely of videos made by citizens and long-term residents of Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Syria and Yemen. The film uses this footage, not to recount the actual chronology of events or analyse their causes, but to create an imaginary pan-Arab uprising that exists (for the moment) only on the screen.

Thursday 23 October 2014

Hanging Out in Teacher Education: Walking, Drawing and Extending Sites for Learning


Key Words:
Critical Pedagogy, Social Pedagogy, Collaboration, Partnerships, Walking, Drawing, Hanging Out, Transdisciplinarity, Integration, Extending Sites for Learning

Presenters:
Graham Jeffery, School of Media, Culture and Society, University of the West of Scotland
Diarmuid McAuliffe, School of Education, University of the West of Scotland  

presenting at the IJADE/NSEAD annual conference, Collaborative Practices in Arts Education, Tate Liverpool, 24th - 25th October 2014

This paper will report on how a year-long collaborative research project, funded by Creative Scotland, involving staff and students from several university departments, as well as staff from three local authorities, a museum, a contemporary art gallery and a socially engaged community studio helped to address several recurring problems in education, such as knowledge fragmentation and learning in isolation.

The methodologies of drawing, walking, extending sites for learning and simply hanging out were used extensively as heuristic tools amongst the project participants and the project strived to make visible learning in Mathematics, Science, Modern Foreign Languages and English Language. The project has drawn on grounded theory to report its findings.

Monday 13 October 2014

Incubating Soup? Elicitation, distillation and communication in/for research


IT’S LIKE INCUBATING SOUP’: ELICITATION, DISTILLATION AND COMMUNICATION IN/FOR RESEARCH Research Workshop hosted by Alison Bell5 November 2014, 10am-1pmArt Studio 1 @ Ayr campus 
A hands-on workshop on how to use collage as an innovative way of thinking through making – for researchers and anyone wanting to start research.
 
 As a bridge between research and researcher, collage can be seen as a path towards deepening understanding of subjective experience. One of the advantages is that collage can seem like an intuitive way of temporarily stopping time by pinning thoughts to paper: capturing a specific moment and framing it within a given context. Visual thoughts can then be repositioned, where they interconnect with reflection and within these spaces, and an intricate web of evolving experience is created and clarity emerges.

Keywords: Visual thinking, reflexivity, collage, research 
Alison F Bell is an artist and UWS PhD candidate currently exploring methods of enquiry through creative practice, that seamlessly merge the making and the textual. Her research topic is ‘Transition, identity and gender: An auto-ethnographic study through creative practice.  She is exploring a woman’s embodied subjectivity of ageing and the inherent problems of how the self as artist and subject is to be represented.

Places can be booked by emailing claire.paton@uws.ac.uk

Tuesday 26 August 2014

How To Choose?



Written and performed Davey Anderson and Gary McNair
Try to visualise each of the steps which have brought you to this moment. The squirms of regret at making the wrong turn. The waves of smugness at getting it right. All of the life choices, and the imperceptible instinctive decisions, that brought you here, to this web page.
This is the story of a man who takes logical thinking too far by investing in a machine that can make his choices for him. This September as the nation is faced with a momentous decision as part of the Scottish Independence Referendum, we dig a little deeper into the question of how we choose. Can we ever know what the right decision is?

Tour Dates:
MacRobert Arts Centre
9 September 7.30pm
University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA
01786 466666
Druimfin Lodge
11 September 8pm
Tobermory, Isle of Mull PA75 6QB
01688 302211
Platform
14 September 4pm
The Bridge, Easterhouse Glasgow G34 9JW
0141 276 9696
The Gaiety
15 September 7.30pm
Carrick St, Ayr KA7 1NU
01292 288235
Traverse Theatre
16 September 2.30pm
10 Cambridge St, Edinburgh EH1 2ED
0131 228 1404
The Arches
17 September 9pm
253 Argyle St, Glasgow G2 8DL
0141 565 1000
Produced by Trigger in partnership with University of the West of Scotland
In association with University of Glasgow
Supported by Creative Scotland

Saturday 14 June 2014

CauseWay: the story of the Alloway Suffragettes

Robert Burns Birthplace Museum, Alloway, Ayr

Saturday 14th and Sunday 15th June
2pm, 3.15pm and 4.30pm


Part play and part guided tour, Causeway tells the story of two suffragettes 
who cycled from Glasgow to Alloway in 1914 intent on blowing up Burns 
Cottage. Weaving the words of Robert Burns with performance, 
storytelling and live music, the performance questions the links 
between the work of Burns and the suffragettes' cause.

This is a piece of walked theatre; performances will take place in 
and outdoors and will move between the museum and the cottage.

Written by Victoria Bianchi and directed by David Overend

Tickets £5

Friday 9 May 2014

Rhythmic Routes: Developing a nomadic performance practice for the daily commute

The Whittaker Library at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland warmly invites you to the first event in our new series of free lunchtime talks and displays:

On THURSDAY 22nd MAY at 1pm
Dr Laura Bissell (Royal Conservatoire of Scotland) &
Dr David Overend (University of the West of Scotland)
will share their research into
COMMUTING AS A PERFORMATIVE PRACTICE.
A short talk, in an informal setting, with coffee and cake. FREE. All welcome.


Documentation and library materials relating to the talk will soon be on display in the Whittaker Library.


Rhythmic Routes: Developing a nomadic performance practice for the daily commute


How can the contemporary theatre practitioner maintain a deterritorialised, nomadic existence within the regulated systems of twenty-first century mobile life? Elliott and Urry (2010) argue that ‘life “on the move” appears to unfold faster and faster in the early days of the twenty-first century, as people become more reliant upon interdependent, digitised systems’. In contrast, the nomad is an aspirational figure, ‘cut free of roots, bonds and fixed identities’ (Pearson, 2010). Responding to the increasingly globalised context of mobilities and Braidottis (2011) notion of ‘becoming-nomad’, this paper asks whether nomadism can offer a credible alternative to the systemisation and repetition of everyday journeys.


The paper introduces and reflects on an ongoing collaborative research project by David Overend and Laura Bissell. Focussing on the everyday rhythms of commuting, this practice-based enquiry explores time and space together through ‘rhythmanalysis’ (Lefebvre 1992) to understand the commute as a space of creative resistance and possibility. Rejecting conventional narratives of the ‘weary and dystopian commuter’ (Edensor 2011), Overend and Bissell aim to develop a series of performative interventions that reimagine commuting as a creative and productive ‘mobile practice’ with the potential for ‘nomadic disruptions’ to the routines and rhythms of our everyday journeys.



Followers