Creative Scene Research Articles

Laissez-Faire or Sensitive Policymaking: The Legacy of Creative Clusters on Brownfield Sites in Berlin

With his saying “Berlin—poor, but sexy!,” former Governing Mayor Klaus Wowereit framed the motto for a decade of transition in which the German capital became a Mecca for artists, media industries, and creative people from all over the world. Building on a longstanding tradition of tolerating diversity and as a centre of high culture and bohemians, the city developed a new cultural-political identity from a deep transformation crisis after German unification and the extensive loss of its industrial base. In conjunction with a blossoming of temporary uses in a wide variety of vacant properties, often abandoned production, infrastructure, or storage areas, an intense creative scene unfolded. Since the 2010s, this scene has been massively threatened by displacement due to the changed real estate market situation. Over the years, the city has tried to counteract this situation through cultural policy initiatives and niche projects for bottom-up initiatives, with limited success. Against the backdrop of accelerated development of former brownfield sites and funding cuts in urban cultural policy, the question currently arises as to what place subculture can occupy in urban policy in the future. Based on official documents, books, scholarly articles, project websites, newspaper articles, and own observations, this article attempts to evaluate the respective policies in the city over time, to place them in the context of approaches to a more land-security-oriented policy, and to make clear what role the re-used spaces and buildings from the industrial age play in this.

“The name is Blacula!”: Identity and Palimpsest in William Marshall’s Vampire Diptych

Abstract: In the early 1970s, a new cinematic genre, the Blaxploitation film, emerged from a creative scene which saw Black actors, writers, and directors enabled to produce their own original works for the first time. Often accused of trafficking in unsavory racial tropes, Blaxploitation films nevertheless displayed aspects of America’s racial problems and subtly complicated Black stereotypes while capitalizing on them to entertain both Black and White audiences. Films such as Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (dir. Melvin Van Peebles, 1971) and Shaft (dir. Gordon Parks, 1971) may be most recalled as having catapulted this genre to fame, but an often-overlooked subgenre—the Blaxploitation horror film—also offered its unique brand of cultural insight. William Crain’s seminal Blaxploitation horror film, Blacula (1972), and its fast-tracked sequel, Scream Blacula Scream (dir. Bob Kelljan, 1973), demonstrate the power of the Blaxploitation framework to transcend its harmful stereotypes and to expose oppressive cultural practices. Our analysis of this pair of Blaxploitation horror films focuses upon two aspects of their position as representatives of their subgenre: first, their influence upon the wider cinematic culture, particularly the culture of horror cinema; second, the ability of Blacula and its sequel to play with and against their racial stereotypes.

Private art museums and their local creative communities: A case study of Mona

This case study is concerned with the arrival and impact of private art museum Mona in Tasmania, examining how the local creative community perceives its impact and how it influences the broader cultural landscape. The museum represents a larger trend where affluent individuals establish prestigious private museums with significant global reach. This study has found Mona to be a highly personal endeavour, providing influential networks in support of the owner's personal and business objectives. It highlights the perception that the museum has had a transformative impact on Tasmania, particularly in adding a sophisticated dimension to the state's cultural visage and a new vibrancy that is thought to resonate strongly with tourists. Previous scholarship has shown that private museums operate in a different context and play by different rules to their public counterparts and this study has shown this to be true in identifying problems with how to govern Mona and the local creative scene trying to negotiate a place within this changing context. Mona has brought credibility to the arts, but set high expectations for the local arts scene, creating entry barriers for young artists and challenging arts institutions with more limited resources.

Jamming to map creative scenes and practices

ABSTRACT In this paper I detail my experiences undertaking an ICT4D project that aimed to better understand how under-resourced visual creatives used mobile technologies to participate in creative ‘scenes’ in Cape Town, South Africa. The project was focused on developing novel digital applications to better support localized practices. From a post-qualitative perspective, I could map the scenes of ‘jamming’ together with participants. In describing these scenes, a better understanding is formed of how technologies could be re-designed to support situated creative activities as constellations of creative practices, social imaginaries and materialities. I offer provocations for the future of Digital Development within the creative and cultural industries, namely that creative scenes are about social imaginary and the imminent participations of people; That creative participation is about more than just economic participation; That doing inquiry is about imagining different material realities together with participants; And that ‘development’ implies dynamic change.

Creative digipreneurs: Artistic entrepreneurial practices in platform-mediated space

Digital platforms play an increasingly important role in the everyday work practices of creative entrepreneurs and contribute to how their ventures take shape. Taking this observation as a starting point, this paper aims to explore the entanglement of entrepreneurial, artistic, and creative practices and processes with digital platforms. Drawing on interviews and online observations, the study traces the work practices of two creative producers, a textile designer in Berlin, Germany, and a filmmaker in Bengaluru, India, who both extensively use the social media platform Instagram for their work. Based on the two in-depth case studies, we advance the term creative digipreneurs to reflect the close relationship between the platform, the entrepreneur, and the artistic venture. Creative digipreneurs represent a novel hybrid role that includes the work practices of independent cultural producers, artists, independent entrepreneurs, and creators. This novel perspective allows us to 1) analyse how creative digipreneurs build up a creative venture while relating to people, the local creative scene in the respective cities, and to digital technologies such as Instagram. The platform-mediated situation of the creative digipreneurs allows us to reflect on the entanglement of online and offline spaces in the entrepreneurial artistic process. 2) We demonstrate that while Instagram presents an important opportunity for the creative development, marketing, and sales of the creative product; it also introduces novel constraints.

Cinema and city placement of Porto: from Manoel de Oliveira to Gabe Klinger

The adoption by local governments of neoliberal theories and strategic planning, which promotes the use of competitiveness scales and business marketing criteria in urban management, generated a series of changes in cities with the aim of reversing the closure of factories and shops and attracting new businesses, residents and tourists. In this context, the cinema became a media platform to project the image that wanted to promote of the city as a tourist destination and an innovative and creative scene, mainly through the action of the Film Commissions. This article analyses the relationship between cinema and the city of Porto, from the first film episodes to the co-financing by the local Film Commission of the film Porto, by Brazilian-born filmmaker Gabe Klinger. The study contrasts the way in which local director Manoel de Oliveira projected the city of Porto in his works, with the objective and qualitative analysis of Gabe Klinger’s film. Among the conclusions, we can mention how the cinema shows over time the functional changes of the modern city and that the projected image must have a clear relationship with the sense of place of the filmed city.

The Role of Human Nature and Morality in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

This paper has examined how human nature and morals play a role in humanity’s obsession with (post-) apocalyptic literature. Especially, it has analyzed The Road (2006) in light of Literary Darwinism, often known as Evolutionary Literary Study, which has evolutionary psychology as its theoretical foundation. This paper investigates The Road in the context of models of human nature and behavior by adopting a literary Darwinist approach and apocalyptic thought. It is demonstrated that (post-) apocalyptic authors examine human nature and morality when survival is at stake by exploiting both created (cultural) concerns and universal (natural) worries in their dystopian settings. Additionally, it has revealed how vitally evolved aspects of the human mind are to (post-)apocalyptic fiction. Since the creative scenes in these kinds of novels are works of human imagination, they ought to be able to tell us something about the brains behind them, as well as their ethos and motivations. The basic elements of human nature that McCarthy explores are also assessed in terms of how they align with or conflict with fundamental ideas about human nature and morality, though in ways that are constrained and channeled by the author's cultural context, personal needs, and the motivation behind writing about such a post-apocalyptic world. McCarthy’s ethics and ideals as well as the effect McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic world has on readers are examined. Based on the analysis presented in this paper, by emphasizing human nature and the cultural context of the time, as well as by drawing a distinction between culture and nature through the lens of Literary Darwinism, this paper has found that McCarthy’s The Road is profoundly influenced by moral characteristics, human nature, and universal human fears and needs.

비언어적 무용극 창작을 위한 연출적 특성 - 매튜 본의 <호두까기 인형!>을 중심으로

This study focuses on the importance and value of directing within the contexts of the dance theatre as a total art by exploring the directing style and method of Matthew Bourne through examining his < Nutcracker! >. The specific directing features from the analysis are the following. First, he wrote a realistic scenario to achieve a dramatization by using subtext from reinterpreting the original novel and ballet. Second, he attempted to maximize the dramatic expression of non-verbal performance by using logical plot and creative scenes. Third, to convey some continuities from the original, he transformed the original characters into completely different modernized personals having unexpected humor. Fourth, he used original Tchaikovsky''s music as a motif that becomes the center of his dissolution and re-creation. Fifth, he used various style movements such as folk ballet, gymnastics, pair skating, headbanging, Spanish dance, fashion model movements, and the 60s’ social dance along with contemporary dance movement vocabularies. Sixth, he pursued popularity by employing homages and parodies throughout the work by adapting stylistic elements inspired by other performing arts fields such as theater, movies, and musicals. Seventh, he and his stage-art designer, Anthony Ward, create several visual metaphors symbolizing the duality and illusion that crosses reality and fantasy.

A survey on multimodal-guided visual content synthesis

With the increasing interest in various creative scenes such as social media, film production, and intelligence courses, people expect to be able to compile rich visual content according to their subjective ideas and actual needs. In this context, visual content synthesis technique based on multimodal data has attracted much attention in recent years. Compared to traditional generative methods, multimodal data offer more flexible and concrete clues that provide an interactive and controllable way to generate the desired visual content. In this survey, we comprehensively summarize the improvements in multimodal-guided visual content synthesis. We first formulate the taxonomy of visual content synthesis and divide it into four different subfields depending on the input modality, including visual-guided visual content synthesis, text-guided visual content synthesis, audio-guided visual content synthesis, and visual content synthesis guided by other modalities. In each subfield, we describe the paradigm of different modality-guided visual content synthesis, and also discuss the signature methods mainly based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Next, we present commonly used benchmark datasets and metrics for evaluating models, as well as detailed comparisons between different methods. Finally, we provide insight into current research challenges and possible future research directions.

Behind the Skyscrapers: An Assessment of Dubai’s Cultural and Creative Scene

Dubai has witnessed an upsurge of creative and cultural initiatives within the years of 2020 and 2021 with strong plans and strategies of becoming the hub of creative economy in the coming years. This research traces the arts, culture, and creativity within the city to produce a comprehensive timeline and an assessment of the repository of its physical manifestations in the city. Focusing on three main districts: Dubai Historical District, Al Serkal Avenue, and Dubai Design District, the narrative of arts and gentrification are explored in relation to governance, urban development, and social life. The findings reflect on the path of culture and creativity in Dubai’s urban fabric and explores the resilience of its network in relation to factors such as community engagement, financial risks, tourist activity, and global changes to assess best practices and envisage a plan of action for the new strategies put forth.

Expression and Application of Watercolor Art in Computer 3D Animation Design System

Watercolour takes water as the medium to convey the emotion and thought of the work through different materials, colours, textures and textures. With the more and more extensive application of computer technology in 3D animation, people have higher and higher requirements for colour. Therefore, this paper mainly studies the performance of watercolour art in computer software aided design and 3D scene rendering. Firstly, this paper introduces the definition and style characteristics of watercolour art, then expounds the application of watercolour art in computer 3D animation design system, then studies the application of 3D animation technology, designs the frame diagram of computer 3D animation design system based on this, and investigates the application scene of watercolour art in 3D animation design. Finally, the survey results show that most people believe that the most application scene of watercolour art in computer 3D animation is three creative scenes, namely, artistic conception creation, virtual reality combination creation and space level sense creation. This is because watercolour has the characteristics of transparency, nature and obscurity. In animation creation, its unique language forms and techniques can be used to express the artistic form and atmosphere needed in the scene.

“Wagner Festival Ravello” as a Sociocultural Phenomenon of the Festival Process in Italy

The relevance of the issue is due to the need to consider Italian music festivals as a component of national culture, to summarize their experience, which is important for musical life in general and for Ukraine in particular.The purpose of the article is to identify the prerequisites for the origin, the development process, as well as the modern vector of functioning of one of the most authoritative festivals in the south of Italy “Wagner Festival Ravello”, the 68th season of which took place in 2020.The scientific novelty lies in the fact that for the first time in Ukrainian art history, Italian music festivals are considered as an organic, artistic and economic component of the national culture, their traditional and innovative features are noted, and prospects for further development in the musical life of modern Italy. A detailed analysis of the Wagner Festival in Ravello will contribute to the dissemination of Italian experience for the organization and conduct of musical projects in Ukraine.The research methodology is based on the use of the inductive method, which, to characterize the festival process in the cultural life of Italy, involves the study of individual festival projects and provides for the use of a set of complementary research methods — historical-analytical, empirical and sociocultural. The historical-analytical method contributed to the understanding of the logic of the formation and development of the festival, the appeal to empirical and sociocultural methods made it possible to consider the features of the organization of the festival in the context of social relations in the system of musical life in modern Italy.Main results and conclusions. “Wagner Festival Ravello” is developing and constantly improving its capabilities. The high professional level of the international festival has been maintained for many years, and this is done thanks to the coordinated management of everyone involved in the organizational process. It should be noted that there is significant support from public authorities, as well as investments from the business sector. Within the framework of a modern project, there are creative scenes created using innovative technologies, orchestra of the Teatro San Carlo, the recording studio, the festival magazine — all these components of systemic activity are interconnected and aimed at ensuring an impeccable result. The Ravello Foundation has been leading and constantly developing the project for almost 20 years in order to represent the city of Ravello internationally as one of the cultural centers of the Campania region. Further creative life and the success of the festival require cooperation of cultural, financial, state institutions, constant technological renewal — everything that will allow the world to demonstrate the historical and artistic monuments of the City of Music and preserve the Wagner Festival of Ravello for future generations as an Italian cultural brand. Prospects for further research in this direction are: first, in a thorough study of the specifics of the functioning of music festivals in modern Italy and coverage of various aspects of the organization of this process; secondly, in the analysis of cooperation between the cultural, financial, tourism sectors, which affects the high level of organization and long-term creative life of festival events; thirdly, in considering the control system by the state, which should always be focused on professional support and represent the most important component of the functioning of art projects. All of the above will help domestic musicians learn about the specifics of organizing music festivals in Italy, as well as adopt and use it in the practice of musical life in modern Ukraine

Mapping the creative sprawl: the design sector in Western Sydney

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the findings of a longitudinal case study of the design sector in Western Sydney, a vast region of Sydney, Australia. Recurring discussions about Sydney’s creative scene tend to reinforce a stereotype, conceptualising creativity as a bohemian, inner city phenomenon with limited consideration given to creative industries situated in the apparently “uncool”, “outer” suburbs. However, through geolocational mapping of data collected over a 6-year period, this paper shows that there is a burgeoning design sector stretched across Western Sydney, coining the term “creative sprawl” to describe a distinct geography that challenges inner-city precincts as the loci of creativity. The aim of this paper is to augment Australian scholarship on creative industries and contribute to international discourse on creative geographies, arguing for the need to develop urban policy that responds to the creative potential of areas beyond urban centres.

The power of local networking: Bologna’s music scene as a creative community, 1978–1992

ABSTRACT Musicians have always established a symbiotic relationship with the urban environments in which they live and work, with a tendency to aggregate into place-based relational networks. Bologna provides a clear example of this phenomenon to the point that the evolution of its musical scene can be characterized in terms of its relational dynamics. We study a network of artists whose main common trait has been the deliberate choice of coming or returning to live and work in Bologna, locally producing their records in the period 1978–1992, a sort of “creative golden age” in the recent musical history of the city. We use Social Network Analysis to reconstruct the structure of the relationships that have bound together the Bologna’s singers-songwriters scene in its relationship with the urban context. Making use of the Newman Community Detection algorithm, we find a dense, vital and collaborative scene, organized around four different, musician-centered communities, that are permeable to collaborations with each other. This vital system of related creative communities has been the driving force of Bologna’s salience in the national musical scene in the 1980s and early 1990s, and its analysis provides insights for the design of cultural policies aimed at leveraging the potential of urban creative scenes.

Five months under COVID-19 in the cultural sector: a German perspective

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the impact of COVID-19 on the cultural and creative sectors (CCSs) in Germany from March to the end of July 2020. It reviews the responses by Germany (federal, state and city level), grouped into three phases. The country has made explicit reference to the importance of arts and culture in the crisis. Germany has a high level of arts and culture funding, but in the last years the cultural and creative scene has changed. The article looks at these changes and reviews state responses as well as new initiatives from the cultural sector itself. Against this background, some tentative conclusions, with an eye on the near future, are made.

Ouvidos atentos: as vozes plurais de Itamar Assumpção

Este trabalho apresenta uma leitura da canção “Prezadíssimos ouvintes”, de Itamar Assumpção e Domingos Pellegrini, gravada originalmente em 1985, no disco Sampa midnight — isso não vai ficar assim, de Itamar Assumpção — um dos nomes mais representativos da “Vanguarda Paulista” — cena musical bastante irreverente e criativa, que despontou inicialmente nos limites do pequeno teatro Lira Paulistana — também um selo de música independente, no qual Itamar Assumpção gravou seu primeiro LP, o Beleléu leléu eu, em 1981. O objetivo deste estudo é mostrar que, entre as diferentes estratégias utilizadas por Itamar ao longo de sua carreira, está um modelo composicional que privilegia a multiplicidade de vozes e de gêneros, estabelecendo, assim, diálogos com sua memória cultural e/ou afetiva, como veremos na canção abordada. A análise tem como base, sobretudo, as noções de voz e oralidade, de Paul Zumthor (2010); de “vozes plurais”, de Adriana Cavarero (2011); e canção e entoação, de Luiz Tatit, (2002).

Art Creations of Pramila Giri

During the 60s and 70s, various new concepts and trends of European modern arts were slowly and nobly emerging in Nepali Art. Traditional Paubha artists and some senior artists such as Chandraman Singh Maskey, Tej Bahadur Chitrakar were following the conventional grammar, characteristics and themes in their art creations.&#x0D; There were virtually no women artists in the creative art scene. Later Pramila Giri and Shilu Payri along with some other female artists appeared on the art stage with new ideas and concepts of modernity. Artist Giri in her early stage, was also following the conventional approaches, but later she began to experiment and present her new art forms with mythical figures and themes.&#x0D; Her analytical thoughts and search led her to use the various forms, images and symbols of religious and mythical figures of BHAIRAV in her art creations. Thus, she started in presenting the figures and forms plus sculptures on her large size canvas. It was completely a noble approach and presentation.&#x0D; BHAIRAV, a gigantic demonic figure but with all the divine powers is regarded as the incarnation of Lord Shiva. Red, white, blue, black colors are used to represent a chosen incarnation of the Lord.&#x0D; Thus, if the viewers are familiar with the mythical figures of Lord BHAIRAV, it will be easier to understand the use of colours and the presentations of the figures in her art creations.

Irrational Economics and Regional Cultural Life

Irrational Economics and Regional Cultural Life

The Functions of Social Interaction in the Knowledge-Creative Economy: Between Co-Presence and ICT-Mediated Social Relations

This article investigates the role and functions of interaction among knowledge-creative workers in Milan. While a large body of literature supports the relevance of co-presence for the building of social capital in creative scenes, a growing body of empirical and theoretical research shows in fact that, under certain circumstances, social relations mediated by digital tools are equally important. The extent to which professionals in these industries are embedded in “spaces” which are physical as well as digital, and how these have come to be so, remains nevertheless an under-explored research question. Building on findings from two distinct qualitative researches on knowledge-creative workers in Milan, undertaken in 2008 and 2011-13, it is here argued that knowledge-creative professionals are embedded in a wider “space” of relations where exchanges mediated via ICTs productively intertwine with face-to-face interaction to determine new ways of searching for jobs and practicing work. The paper highlights what changes when proximity becomes physical and digital as a mixture of face-to-face and ICT-mediated interaction, and discusses contradictions and implications of their blending, showing the necessity to overcome the rigid distinction between face-to-face and digital interaction that still characterises the empirical study of knowledge-creative economies.

Neighborhood Diversity and the Rise of Artist Hotspots: Exploring the Creative Class Thesis through a Neighborhood Change Lens.

The diversity of the U.S. urban population has increased dramatically in recent decades, yet the processes through which population diversity may be driving neighborhood change remain insufficiently understood. Building on Claude Fischer's subcultural theory of urbanism and other classic sociological insights, this article makes the case that population diversity shapes the character of place and drives the spatial clustering of artists and art organizations. Contributing to recent debates on Richard Florida's “creative class” thesis, the paper proposes a reorientation of the conceptual and analytical focus from the predominant metropolitan area level to the neighborhood level. Analyses map and examine population and organizational data from over 850 neighborhoods in Chicago over two decades and spatially model neighborhood change. The results indicate that neighborhood diversity predicts over time an intensification of the creative scene, as reflected in rising hotspots of artists and nonprofit art organizations.