Creative Practitioners Research Articles

Towards a photographic representation of the experience of seeing: Synthetic views via neural radiance fields

This article looks at the emerging technology of the neural radiance field (NeRF) and suggests that this means of digital image production, when used by a creative practitioner, produces an emergent aesthetic – a result of the affordances inherent in the digital materiality of the NeRF and its processes. The use of this machine-learning technology as a material for creating images can lead to an entirely new way of creating photographic representations that provide us with a way of seeing and recording how we phenomenologically experience seeing. The processes and the emergent aesthetic are explored with examples drawn from the author’s own practice.

“Awe, Masekinders!”: Kullid Identities from Eden Park, Johannesburg in the Work of Bougaard

ABSTRACT Bougaard, an emerging South African creative practitioner, examines games from her “Coloured” childhood community in Eden Park, Johannesburg, and how these games may offer a window into a reframed Kullid identity. She considers the rhymes used in these games and the role of language—specifically Afrikaaps—in identity formation, and explores through papermaking and art installations the social contexts and meanings embedded in these games. In this article, the authors analyse Bougaard’s use of sculpture, papermaking and printmaking techniques both to mediate and to subvert conventionalised tropes and stereotypes of “Coloured” communities as well as to empower a sense of her familial and community-based identity through an emergent Kullidness. The authors focus on selected paper works and on three mixed media installations (2021–2022). The authors complicate any reading of these works as uncritically affirmative of a declamatory and essentialist identity position by proposing Bougaard’s visual strategies as premised upon mediation, ambivalence, indexicality, and refuting iconicity. The authors identify Bougaard as deploying elements of strategic essentialism in her desire for community visibility and visual sovereignty, and the authors therefore critique the benefits and the limitations of this approach, concluding that Bougaard’s choice of mediating strategies avoids a simplistic narrative of community life.

Factors influencing value co-creation in cultural and creative enterprises: An empirical study

The empirical validation of the relationship among the capabilities of cultural and creative enterprises (CCE), customer co-creation value, and enterprise value remains insufficient. Therefore, clarifying the essential capabilities for increasing enterprise and customer value is essential. This study explores the factors that influence value co-creation in cultural and creative enterprises and examines how this influences enterprise and customer value. To measure this, a structured questionnaire was distributed to cultural and creative practitioners in Shanghai, China, and AMOS 24.0 was used for structural equation modelling of the obtained survey data. The results confirm the positive impacts of cooperative innovation capability, customer-linking, and service capability on creating enterprise and customer value. Additionally, the results indicate an interactive relationship between enterprise value creation and customer co-creation value in this context. This study provides management insights for product innovation and to enhance customer service and competitive advantage.

Preemptive listening: a roundtable discussion about sirens

ABSTRACT Nested within the crisis of our attention economy, the siren is undergoing a profound transformation, prompted by our ongoing alarm fatigue and noise pollution, as well as the near-obsolescence and inefficiency of public sound system broadcasts. Employing an interdisciplinary approach from specialists in the field of sound studies, behavioural psychology, policy advisors and creative practitioners, this roundtable article aims to unpack the critical potential of reimagining sirens, extending physically beyond ear-centred listening, conceptually beyond immediate timeframes, and opening up to new collaborative methodologies across academia, industry, artistic networks and more, to tackle today’s urgent need to recalibrate emergency signals for the immediate and the distant future.

The Impact of Fast-Food Video Advertisements Through The Eyes of Young Creative Industry Practitioners

Video advertising has become a crucial marketing strategy for fast-food restaurants. While previous studies have identified factors influencing video advertisement effectiveness, these factors have yet to be investigated in light of current market preferences. In bridging this gap, it is crucial to consider the perspectives of young industry creative practitioners, who, with their dual roles as professionals and members of the target market, offer fresh insights into the factors influencing video advertisement effectiveness in alignment. Therefore, this study was conducted to investigate the fast-food video advertisements effectiveness in today’s market, specifically through the eyes of young creative industry practitioners. This study examines the effectiveness of fast-food video advertisements, focusing on content engagement, emotional arousal, information trustworthiness, and visual characteristics. Informant interview was utilized in the study, with data saturation achieved after collected insights from six interviewees who fulfilled the sampling criteria. The collected data underwent analysis using NVivo, involving coding and thematic analysis. The findings have substantiated strong relationships between visual attractiveness, content engagement, and the fast-food video advertisements effectiveness. However, it was determined that emotional arousal and information trustworthiness do not have a significant relationship with the fast-food advertisements effectiveness. Overall, this study contributes valuable insights for advertising agencies and offers a theoretical enhancement to existing models. Keywords: Fast-food restaurants, video advertisement, young creative industry practitioners, advertising effectiveness, advertisement content.

Embodied Creative Practice as a method for cultural recovery.

We exist in the marriage of physical and spiritual remembrance. It is in these spaces that we identify with our physical and imagined bodies.’” (Saye, 2017, p. 42).” This paper weaves through my artistic journey, and my adoption of an embodied practice, as a methodology of recovering my voice and self, as a creative practitioner. This paper examines the photograph as an immortal object that transcends time and space, and highlights its capabilities in producing non-linear narratives, challenging fixed notions of time which underpinned the western colonial project. Through my analysis of works of the British Gambian Photographer Khadija Saye, and my photo project ‘Orí Inú’, I showcase the ritualistic process of photography, as a liberatory force of sustaining life, as well as its capabilities in carving a space of solidarity for the photographer and viewer. By focusing on Ìṣẹ̀ṣe (Yoruba Spirituality) and Spiritualist Photography, I demonstrate the power of photography in imagining speculative possibilities, that go beyond the normative understandings of marginalized bodies, and the rethinking of our vulnerable world.

Entering Into a Sonic Intra-Active Quantum Relation with Plant Life

Abstract In the speculative research of plant bioacoustics, one enters into a sonic intra-active relation, by humans with non-human beings (plant life), activated through acoustic wave signals emitted by plants to create electronic patterns of sounds composed by humans and emitted by machines. Plants emit sound waves at relatively low frequencies of 50–120 Hz. Experimenting with patching and modulation by tracking these sonic lines of data can indeed lead to unique sonic experiences that tap into the universe’s musicology. It is fascinating how we can interact with sounds on such a deep level to create acoustic energy. We are and have always been attached to the universe in a relational processual way. We are all interconnected with plant life vibrating at different internal frequencies. This article focuses on a symbiotic relation between humans and plant life as an acoustic shimmering ecology – to communicate a posthuman, symbiotic understanding of vegetal matter as a morphological force that (re)shapes, (re)affirms our sonic intra-relations to the natural world. This proposition is molecular and metaphysical, as sound matter is of a qualitative multiplicity in the quantum field of listening. By acknowledging ontologically that cosmopolitics brings into relation different practices, practitioners, and the non-human (they assemble in a field of forces and intensities), I argue that there is no sovereign power under which all modes of existence can be organized, and there is no meta-language through which one can master the diversity of all discursive or material practices; but there are intra-relations in which one can get lost in a quantum field of sonic matter by moving into the cracks of the sensorium and the plant biosphere, which includes Indigenous voices. The alterity of plant life is daunting from an eco-feminist materialist position in that relationships are the default state of existence and sonic experiences uncover alternative or additional explanations in a (post)phenomenological world – which is embedded in the stuff of acoustics in the many ways humans hear the world. Thus, to communicate a posthuman, symbiotic understanding of vegetal matter necessitates understanding how sound matter intra-performs through a sonic language – where intra-relations with plant life have complex boundaries for humans. As a creative practitioner, how does one define the mutually beneficial engagement in plant communication with creative musical encounters? Entanglement is messy and a becoming with the universe as a philosophical sonic meditation and worlding. This entails expanding on plants as cosmogonic beings, world builders, and we, perhaps, are the by-products of the lives of our vegetal others.

Navigating the Labyrinthine

This paper presents research undertaken which explored the experience of creative practice by creative practitioners. I was particularly interested to gain some understanding of how people engaged with the space of creative practice, identified as ‘the studio’, and within the project articulated as the labyrinth. A key outcome of the research was the discovery that the space of the studio could be articulated as practised place (de Certeau, 1984) and that engaging with this is a process of navigating the labyrinthine.

“Ideas are really…” – supporting collaborative dialogues and community of practice for innovation via CO:RE cards

AbstractThe study explores the affordances of CO:RE Cards in prompting collaborative dialogues surrounding R&D and innovation among creative industry practitioners. The use of CO:RE Cards was evaluated in three sessions within a collaborative dialogue environment. It was analysed that they have prompted the building of a collective language and understanding among creative practitioners through collaborative knowledge construction and mutual learning. We discuss the potentially significant role of CO:RE Cards in nurturing a Community of Practice (CoP) for innovation in the creative industries.

Emergent Gameplay, Emergent Essaying

Within our current post-internet landscape of Web 2.0, in which we exist as intermedial beings, I propose Emergent Essaying as a connective term, merging the milieu of game design with hybrid creative writing approaches. Emergent Gameplay is ‘a game design term that refers to video game mechanics that change according to the player’s actions’. Emergent Essaying utilises gameplay techniques to invite more open, playful, and changeable modes of thinking, encouraging multiplicity and fluidity over fixed thought. Expanding upon creative theorists Lisa Robertson and Anne Carson’s approach to the verb ‘essaying’ as an act of trying, in this digital context I conceive of Emergent Essaying as an act of playful reimagining from both writer/designer and reader/player, in which the essay is more narrative based. I combine game design techniques with the approaches to digital work adopted by indie writers to inform my own practice as a cross-form, cross-genre writer, as reflected both in this paper, and via a link to a digital-born, creative iteration of this work, enacting Emergent Essaying. In this updated version of the paper from 2021, I address the benefits of understanding Emergent Essaying through the lens of performance, and interrogate how this feeds into pedagogical approaches for creative practitioners.

Stepping outside my perspective: An autoethnographic review of Indigenous literature in Walyalup/Fremantle, Western Australia

Autoethnographic processes are valuable for creative practitioners and researchers as they allow for an intensive analysis not only of the practice-led approach being undertaken, but of the practitioner’s own personal and cultural impact on the artefact developed. I, as a white woman of migrant heritage, have undertaken a reflexive autoethnographic process during a review of Indigenous literature of the Walyalup/Fremantle area of Western Australia. This process required a deep, personal autoethnographic review of my own sociocultural context and biases, which resulted in key “epiphanies” (Ellis et al., 2011, p. 276) that have informed the ongoing approach to my geocritical research and creative writing practices. The process of autoethnographic notetaking aided in the identification of epiphanies around the importance of language, the emotional response as a researcher, and the limitations of locational boundaries and available sources around the privileging of hegemonic perspectives. This article explores how an autoethnographic reflexive process strengthens place-based research, specifically in interactions with Indigenous texts as a non-Indigenous researcher.

Introduction to the Special Issue: Cities as Playgrounds/Playgrounds as Cities: Rethinking Urban Play, Civic Engagement, and Socio-spatiality

Cities have long been key sites for play. Play scholars, urban theorists, designers, and creative practitioners have explored and discussed the important role of city play and urban playgrounds. As organized locations of play, playgrounds stand as an important role in representing cultural and social mores, reflecting the relational, political, and psychological dimensions of the city. They expose how a city and its society views childhood, surveillance, control, leisure, freedom, design, and space. However, play in cities has a complex and uneven history.

Creative arts and resilient communities

This editorial serves to outline key themes emerging through the articles presented in this volume. As we all navigate conflicts and challenges of various proportions, the question of resilience-building is of particular interest to socially engaged creative practitioners. Working in diverse geographical and virtual locations across the fields of theatre, textile craft, curatorial practices and cultural leadership, authors here explore these themes through their work with communities: art as a practice of cultural leadership points us towards social cohesion; engagement with art strengthens attachment to place uprooted by ecological disaster; imaginative and creative practices, whether material or performative, force us to consider marginalized forms of knowledge and expertise.

Mentoring as affective practice

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the potential contributions that an arts mentoring program can make to the support of artists and creative practitioners contending with the challenges of the post-pandemic creative sector. In so doing, it also considers possible criticisms of the efficacy of arts mentoring, given the uncertainty and precariousness that characterise careers in the cultural sector. To explore these ideas, the paper presents an analysis of interview data from research on a recent arts mentoring program in Australia. Utilising the concept of ‘affective practice’ from critical discursive psychology, the paper argues that the benefits of mentoring go beyond practical contributions like skills guidance or ‘gate opening’ by mentors. Additionally, a mentoring program can function as a site in which the ‘feeling experiences’ that derive from the cultural and personal associations of a creative or artistic practice can be reinforced, through the program itself and through the relationship between mentor and mentee, potentially strengthening artistic and creative activities and their practitioners, and thereby perpetuating the survival and growth of contemporary art worlds.

Navigating in the multiverse: Possibilities and limitations of creative practices in online environments

Currently, and especially since the breakout of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an increase of online concerts, talks and even artist residencies. There has also been a development of webstreaming sound studios and online interactive platforms that accommodate art works. Moreover, museums and galleries offer virtual tours to their exhibitions. All this is part of a promise of widening access to cultural, educational and creative opportunities and a suggestion to escape from the limitations and boundaries of time and physical distance. Nonetheless, creative practitioners, curators and art aficionados are urgently compelled to critically analyse, doubt and challenge this promise of limitless possibilities that the online world is offering. In this era of digital information, what expectations does a virtual artwork raise? What is its utilitarian purpose and social value? How do the disembodiment and technological displacement of human beings shape and affect their cultural and communal bonding? To find some answers or, rather, to extend these questions, I will reflect on my artistic practice and experience of creating works that are available on online platforms and controlled with the use of digital interactive tools. A primary analytical tool will be the phenomenological concept of the lived body as well as socio-anthropological arguments about time and materiality. My aim is not to create a fixed and dogmatic theory but to negotiate what role, if any, artistic practice can have in the virtual world.

Exploring the Application of Multiple Contradictory Space Elements and Principles of M.C. Escher

M.C. Escher, a renowned graphic artist, merged art and science to produce seemingly ‘unreasonable’ contradictory spaces that expand our vision into an infinite loop. Numerous designs have been influenced by his works. However, findings from the literature reveal that most adapt only a single contradictory space element or principle, while few explore more intriguing visual effects by incorporating multiple elements and principles. This study aims to explore the application of multiple Escher’s contradictory space elements through creative practice. A two-phase practice-based research approach was used. A graphic illustration was created in the first phase and was used as a stimulus in the second phase for semi-structured interviews with five conveniently selected individuals to assess their views on works integrating contradictory spatial elements and principles. The findings revealed contrasting opinions: while visitors found the work stimulating, triggering associations with the depicted subjects’ symbolic meanings and producing exciting spatial effects, they also perceived a lack of compositional order. While the creative practice and outcome could provide valuable references for other creative practitioners, the qualitative findings may inspire future research in related areas.

Introduction: MoHoA guest editorial

AbstractThis special edition of Curator on Modern Heritage in the Anthropocene draws on the 2nd International MoHoA conference of the same title held from October 26 to 28, 2022, at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UK), in partnership with the University of Liverpool's School of Architecture. As a global collaborative established in 2020, MoHoA is concerned with decentring the theory and practice of modern heritage and joins the wider global effort to decolonize institutional practices that engage with the research, collection, valorization, or transformation of material culture associated with our collective recent past—from museum curators and creative practitioners to academics, and the built environment professions. Founded on the fact that our precarious present reflects an inequitable past and a perilous future, MoHoA asserts that modern heritage—inextricably bound as it is to Western notions of progress, modernization, and modernity—conceptually, practically, and as artifact, uniquely and disproportionately privileges western, invariably white, experiences and values. Unlike other kinds or classifications of heritage, modern heritage also reflects the existential paradox central to MoHoA whereby the cultural legacies of our recent past are simultaneously of modernity and yet threatened by its consequences. Through its workshops, conferences, publications, and website, MoHoA provides a platform for sharing knowledge, methods, and approaches that challenge the modernist canon and support the construction of new epistemologies centered not on race, color, or ethnicity but on humankind and our self‐inflicted precarious position on this planet. This epistemic and canonical reconfiguration has important implications for museums and heritage practice globally as the reconstitution of modern heritage and its associated modes of knowledge production and registers will direct the composition of collections, lists, and archives away from mythologizing hegemonic Western epistemic traditions, to reflect instead decentred planetary experiences, whether human or non‐human. An important outcome of this collective and restitutive endeavor is the publication of The Cape Town Document on Modern Heritage, an equitable and decentering policy proposal presented to UNESCO and its advisory bodies in 2023.

Adapting Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘curious’ poetry: approaches to musical narrativization in my recent composition ‘The Land of Nod’

Abstract In this article, I present and critically examine the ways in which I conceived my recent musical composition, ‘The Land of Nod’ (from At Night for clarinet quintet), as an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem of the same name, with close reference to Marie-Laure Ryan’s theoretical frameworks for the analysis of transmedia narratology and ‘storyworlds’, and Byron Almén’s A Theory of Musical Narrative. As a relatively rare example of scholarship that intersects the fields of adaptation, music theory, and practice (as) research, I situate this work within its wider disciplinary context, and consider the possible benefits that such interdisciplinarity and methodological eclecticism can offer, especially for creative practitioners in music.

Betwixt and between creativity and heritage: remaking a traditional festival and creating festivals to remake traditions in a historic neighbourhood in Taiwan

ABSTRACT This article endeavours to advance scholarship on the relationship among festivals, cultural heritage, sustainable development, and the connection between cultural heritage and creativity. The article positions festivals as sites to negotiate creativity and traditions and recognises that festivals are constantly evolving and transforming. Through studying three smaller-scale community-initiated festivals in the Taiwanese historic neighbourhood of Twatutia (Dadaocheng), the article demonstrates: (1) how ‘traditions’ can be remade and revitalised to adapt to a changing society through creative intervention and active collaboration with the cultural and creative industries; and (2) how local communities can create festivals as creative means to showcase, revitalise, and remake local traditions. Provided that (1) there is mutual trust and long-term collaboration between cultural and creative practitioners and preservers of cultural heritage and traditional traders and practitioners; and (2) the autonomy of creative practitioners is respected, the article argues that creative interventions, such as festivals, can contribute to revitalising, rejuvenating, and remaking local traditions and support organic and sustainable development of local cultures without rejecting external influences.

Editorial

This editorial is a brief summary of the articles, interviews and reviews contained in issue Volume 13, Issue 2 of Book 2.0 (BTWO), an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal primarily concerned with book creation and publication, including writing, illustration and design and the theoretical and practical study of books, literature, creative writing, storytelling, languages and cultures. Contents for this issue include articles, interviews and reviews mainly focusing on collaboration and cooperation between creative practitioners, scholars and in publishing.