Site-specific Practice Research Articles

Hemispheric Conversations: Exploring Links between Past and Present, Industrial and Post-Industrial through Site-Specific Graffitti Practice at the Carrie Furnaces

In this article, I briefly discuss a project I co-organized this year in collaboration with Oreen Cohen, Shane Pilster, Rivers of Steel, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Partners in the Arts, and the American Studies Association. Named “Hemispheric Conversations: Urban Art Project” we used international collaboration between artists in Chicago, Pittsburgh, and León Guanajuato Mexico as a platform for conversation about how to reimagine our shared urban spaces. In a political moment that might be a cause for despair, collaborative art practice in urban space can serve as one vehicle to reignite our shared sense of possibility and energy.

Creating with timbre

Unfolding processes of timbre and memory in improvisational piano performance This exposition is an introduction to my research and practice as a pianist, in which I unfold processes of timbre and memory in improvised music from a performer’s perspective. Timbre is often understood as a purely sonic perceptual phenomenon. However, this is not in accordance with a site-specific improvisational practice with changing spatial circumstances impacting the listening experience, nor does it take into account the agency of the instrument and objects used or the performer’s movements and gestures. In my practice, I have found a concept as part of the creating process in improvised music which has compelling potential: Timbre orchestration. My research takes the many and complex aspects of a performance environment into account and offers an extended understanding of timbre, which embraces spatial, material and bodily aspects of sound in improvised music performance. The investigative projects described in this exposition offer a methodology to explore timbral improvisational processes integrated into my practice, which is further extended through collaborations with sound engineers, an instrument builder and a choreographer: -experiments in amplification and recording, resulting in Memory piece, a series of works for amplified piano and multichannel playback - Piano mapping, a performance approach, with a custom-built device for live spatialization as means to expand and deepen spatio-timbral relationships; - Accretion, a project with choreographer Toby Kassell for three grand pianos and a pianist, where gestural approaches are used to activate and compose timbre in space. Together, the projects explore memory as a structural, reflective and performative tool and the creation of performing and listening modes as integrated parts of timbre orchestration. Orchestration and choreography of timbre turn into an open and hybrid compositional approach, which can be applied to various contexts, engaging with dynamic relationships and re-configuring them.

The Unnaming of ‘Aliass’

As a durational, site-specific performance practice that involves both nomadic journeys and daily acts of ‘barnyard ontological choreography’ with a special domestic donkey (a member of the species Equus asinus, and also a registered American Spotted Ass), the Unnaming of Aliass wrangles with linguistic authority shot through with conflicted desires: How can one name an inscrutable ass, or any other individual, with respect for her unfathomable depths? How do names ascribe or disavow intimate connections, supposed to be captured in arbitrary attachments of words to bodies? Over nearly two decades, the project has engaged various species and ecologies in an ongoing ‘assthetic’ and ontological adventure, a performance-research practice wherein ‘Aliass’ also stands for something harder to grasp than the body of one lovely little spotted ass: protagonist, setting, and even narrative turn inside-out inside this ‘name-that-ain't’, making room for unwritten tales and lacunae found across meshes of myriad lives in any environment. The project explores new strategies to evade certain dangers of names and taxonomies in the making of multispecies stories. Toward radically altered sensibilities of who, where, and how human tongues are entangled within earthly places, how can we crack open habits of naming (and their oft-hidden hierarchies and narrative structures) so that all kinds of bodies might inscribe their tales, in their own specific ways and idioms, into the mapping of time-places?

Should Primary Care Nurse Practitioners be Permitted to Work in Acute Care Settings?

Should Primary Care Nurse Practitioners be Permitted to Work in Acute Care Settings?

Farmer’s Perception on Soil Erosion and Land Degradation Problems and Management Practices in the Beressa Watershed of Ethiopia

In Ethiopia erosion and land degradation on the livelihood resource had become a key issue, resulted for food insecurity and difficult to break through the poverty gap using subsistence farming. Previously implemented soil and water conservation practice were not halted the threat, because it was mass mobilization without detailed study of real situation and without convicting farmers. Over sighting the past experience, community based watershed management practice was recommended as a possible option against the ongoing problem. Therefore, this paper analyzed farmer’s perception on soil erosion and degradation problems and their management practice. From 92 randomly selected households using survey, formal and informal discussion with farmers and field observation were employed to generate the data. The result indicated that farmers were acknowledged the prevalence of soil erosion and land degradation in their watershed (93.5%) and affecting their livelihoods. However, mostly they noticed erosion and degradation when it forms gullies. They identified many prominent causes for natural resource degradation such as improper conservation practice, traditional farming practice, continuous cultivation without fallow periods, deforestation and over population. To tackle the ongoing problems, many ranges of conservation technologies were used by farmers. Following the intervention and rehabilitation practice, the rate of erosion and degradation overtime moderately reduced (58.7%). Though the practice was not demand driven and site specific management practice. Finally, this study concluded important points which needs immediate consideration for community based watershed management practice effort not only for the study area but also for the country at large are: Identifying and integrating technical as well as efficiency of indigenous and site specific and demand driven technology help to cope erosion and degradation hazard –hence increase short and long term benefit obtained from the practice.

Mobile Sound and Locative Practice

The author discusses her work in relation to site-specific practice, embodied interaction and the practice of walking.

Pianos: Playing, Value, and Augmentation

Pianos: Playing, Value, and Augmentation

Expanded Architecture 01-06

The exposition of practice-based research is focused on using moving image installation to reflect upon our relationship to architecture. Through a site-specific practice, existing architectural elements are re-framed, re-focused and projected back onto themselves — either through the content of the moving image, or the construction of the installation. The exposition considers what this series of works have revealed about the use of moving image installation to reflect upon our relationship to architecture; particularly the possibility of creating tension between the architecture and the image, as well as the self in space.

The National Comprehensive Cancer Center Network (NCCN) guidelines on the management of venous thromboembolism in cancer patients

The National Comprehensive Cancer Center Network (NCCN) is a consortium of twenty one of the leading academic cancer institutes in the United States. In 2008, NCCN member institutions provided cancer care to over 160,000 new patients. To meet the consortium’s goal of providing continuously improving evidencebased cancer care, the NCCN has organized multidisciplinary committees to develop and annually update treatment guidelines for each individual cancer site as well as for important supportive care issues faced by cancer patients. Since its inception, the NCCN has developed 42 cancer site-specific practice guidelines and 10 supportive care guidelines. In October, 2005, the NCCN convened a multidisciplinary panel from its member institutions chaired by Dr. Lawrence Wagman to develop an evidence-based guideline outlining the recommended management of venous thromboembolism (VTE) in the cancer patient. Prior to the committee’s first meeting, NCCN network staff performed a comprehensive search of the English language literature for studies investigating the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of VTE that was provided to panel members prior to the first consensus conference for their review. Panel members were encouraged to supplement the literature review with additional publications or data they deemed necessary for the committee to consider during the guideline development process. During the consensus conference, the evidence on each VTE management topic was reviewed by panel members and a draft guideline was developed. Guideline recommendations were graded according to the amount of available evidence to support the recommendation and the degree of consensus among panel

Art as Cultural System: Towards a New Genre of Artist-in-Residence

This paper discusses the ”new genre of artist-in-residence” in the West and in Taiwan, as it has opened wider horizons beyond more narrowing traditional views. In this new genre, the process of art making plays a role in the construction of history, helping thus people to contemplate their memory and identity by retuning to grassroots culture. In addition, the space of the artist-in-residence becomes a potential field for site-specific art practice. Moreover, the increase of spaces devoted to artistic events could benefit to nearby areas. They are not just attractive to artists; they also bring in customers and investments. Therefore, the space of the artist-in-residence becomes a vigorous force in urban regeneration. If the collaboration of artists with people from different professions can be common practice, the one between artists and architects is all the more challenging and often has to be dealt with in current residency programs. What makes successful collaboration is that artists and architects may free each other from institutional modes of thinking related to their own profession. They may learn from each other and rediscover the existing gaps between art and science. In this way, such practices undertaken by artists, architects or other professionals can contribute to constructing the social landscape that surrounds us and that exists from one generation to the next.

Unnatural fact: the fictions of Robert Smithson

Robert Smithson is an influential figure in the history of contemporary writing in creative practice. Indebted as his work is to Lewis Carroll, Edgar Allan Poe, Vladimir Nabakov and Antonin Artaud this paper will argue for a distinctly literary examination of Robert Smithson's art. Smithson is best known for his earth-works such as The Spiral Jetty (1972) and Asphalt Rundown (1969) in which he offsets cultural and natural forms of production. Yet Smithson's site-specific practice must be situated in terms of his textual approach. By focusing on aspects of Smithson's writing which call into question mediation, representation, mimesis and documentary, the paper will demonstrate how, throughout Smithson's approach, writing is a means of unsettling the cultural and the textual space of art production. Texts such as A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art (1968), The Spiral Jetty (1969) and A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic (1967) are written in correspondence with artworks as a means of relocating the place of production with the reader. The Spiral Jetty essay, for instance, which combines aspects of photography, documentary and film-making stages the Jetty's production by drawing attention to its form as a textual, cultural and factual production. The paper will argue, as indeed Smithson's obsessively essayistic reportage seems to acknowledge, that The Spiral Jetty is a matter of writing. Emblematic of Smithson's work with site-specificity more broadly, the paper will argue that the earthwork exists most fully in the correspondence between writing and fact.

Away From Home The curious domain of passage

This article is co-authored by Whalley and Miller, who have collaborated consistently on performances and published writings for several years. The text focuses on four contemporary practitioners, each of whose work derives from actions performed in multiple locations, and illustrates a dynamic set of relations between the multiple sites of ‘home’ and ‘away’. Interdisciplinary performance maker Fiona Templeton’s ‘YOU – The City’ (1988), collaborative artists Alison Hanney and Adam Dade’s ‘Stacked Hotel Room’ (1998-2002), and Graham Gussin’s conjoined pieces ‘Remote Viewer’ (2002) and ‘Doppelganger’ (2003), are considered in relation to the shifting geography of the journey, and its attendant conceptual framings. The authors’ choice to consider the importance of their understanding of ‘home’ in relation to the work of each of the practitioners discussed, forces a more playfully embodied response to the work – particularly as all of the pieces were engaged with through mediated frames, rather than through the ‘real’/embodied engagement of the haptic usually expected of audiences in site-specific practice. This ludic, performative approach to the written style of the article foregrounds those shared concerns about the need for some form of (albeit temporary) fixity in a shifting geographical landscape. Each practitioner creates work that moves away from a particular fixed notion: ‘home’ is the explicit point of departure in the work of Dade and Hanney, the ‘self’ is the fixed point from which Gussin moves away in each of the pieces discussed, and Templeton’s work appears to propose a shift from a monocular response towards the multiplicity of readings available to the traveller exploring the city (New York). The article suggests that, although each piece is separated geographically and temporally, they all require some form of openness or ‘surrender’ to fixity in order that the viewer might embrace the more unsettled aspects of their construction.

Design and pilot evaluation of a system to develop computer-based site-specific practice guidelines from decision models.

Local tailoring of clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) requires experts in medicine and evidence synthesis unavailable in many practice settings. The authors' computer-based system enables developers and users to create, disseminate, and tailor CPGs, using normative decision models (DMs). ALCHEMIST, a web-based system, analyzes a DM, creates a CPG in the form of an annotated algorithm, and displays for the guideline user the optimal strategy. ALCHEMIST'S interface enables remote users to tailor the guideline by changing underlying input variables and observing the new annotated algorithm that is developed automatically. In a pilot evaluation of the system, a DM was used to evaluate strategies for staging non-small-cell lung cancer. Subjects (n = 15) compared the automatically created CPG with published guidelines for this staging and critiqued both using a previously developed instrument to rate the CPGs' usability, accountability, and accuracy on a scale of 0 (worst) to 2 (best), with higher scores reflecting higher quality. The mean overall score for the ALCHEMIST CPG was 1.502, compared with the published-CPG score of 0.987 (p = 0.002). The ALCHEMIST CPG scores for usability, accountability, and accuracy were 1.683, 1.393, and 1.430, respectively; the published CPG scores were 1.192, 0.941, and 0.830 (each comparison p < 0.05). On a scale of 1 (worst) to 5 (best), users' mean ratings of ALCHEMIST'S ease of use, usefulness of content, and presentation format were 4.76, 3.98, and 4.64, respectively. The results demonstrate the feasibility of a web-based system that automatically analyzes a DM and creates a CPG as an annotated algorithm, enabling remote users to develop site-specific CPGs. In the pilot evaluation, the ALCHEMIST guidelines met established criteria for quality and compared favorably with national CPGs. The high usability and usefulness ratings suggest that such systems can be a good tool for guideline development.

Evaluating a technique used to measure environmental performance within agriculture-case studies

A methodology has been developed which can be used to assess the environmental performance of a farm. The computer-based system, known as EMA, utilizes a checklist auditing process based on both quantitative and qualitative data and looks, holistically, at the farm assessing a wide range of farming activities including crop production, crop protection, resource and waste management, livestock husbandry and conservation. The system relies on the use of eco-ratings which are activity based performance indices derived by comparing actual farm practices with what is perceived to be site specific best practice. The system utilizes a similar approach to that used in standard environmental management systems, such as ISO 14001, by providing a scale for performance measurement to allow monitoring of improvements and progress, and to permit performance highs and lows to be identified. The system has recently undergone piloting and evaluation in house, on farm and in collaboration with a major UK retailer, Safeway Stores plc. This paper describes this process and presents the findings in the form of case studies. A brief description of the system is included for completeness. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.