Sky Arts Research Articles

Commissioning and Producing Public-Service Content: British Arts Television

This article analyzes the commissioning and production of arts television in the United Kingdom. It identifies the drivers that shape output, including regulatory and economic forces, linking professional practices to the form and content of the programs that emerge. The research uses interviews with senior staff within the major broadcasters (BBC, Channel 4, and Sky Arts), the independent production sector, and arts organizations to critically interrogate changes in production practices. In particular, the research focuses on the decline in specialist independent producers and the ongoing emphasis on partnerships to reveal a genre ecology at a moment of crisis that necessitates complex modes of competition, codependence, and negotiation. The precariousness of the genre has implications for all public-service genres that are “at risk” of disappearing from our screens. Therefore, in what is a period of profound change, this article extends and deepens our understanding of professional practices within the contemporary television industry.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Formula: Algorithmic Composition for Musical Theater

Algorithmic composition methods must prove themselves within real-world musical contexts to more firmly solidify their adoption in musical practice. The present project is an automatic composing program trained on a corpus of songs from musical theater to create novel material, directly generating a scored lead sheet of vocal melody and chords. The program can also produce output based upon phonetic analysis of user-provided lyrics. The chance to undertake the research arose from a television documentary funded by Sky Arts that considered the question of whether current-generation, computationally creative methods could devise a new work of musical theater (the research described here provides but one strand within that project). Allied with the documentary, the resultant musical had a two-week West End run in London and was itself broadcast in full. Evaluation of the project included both design feedback from a musical theater composer team, and critical feedback from audiences and media coverage. The research challenges of the real-world context are discussed, with respect to the compromises necessary to get such a project to the stage.

Situating The South Bank Show: Continuity and Transition in British Arts Television

This article examines aspects of The South Bank Show (SBS), the UK's long-running and successful series over 35 years, closely associated with its editor and presenter Melvyn Bragg and since 2010 broadcast on the channel Sky Arts 1 rather than on its previous home, the ITV network. After placing this series in the broader history of arts television, the article examines aspects of programme design and address, the diversity of topics treated, and the way in which it has reflected some of the changes at work in the social positioning and evaluation of the arts in Britain. It explores questions about the documentary methods and forms used, the relationship of programme design to different kinds of artistic practice, the way in which artists themselves figure in expositions of their work and the forms of engagement both with the high/popular divide and the playoff between the established and the new. The series is seen to be defined not only by its attempts to be ‘accessible’ but also by its ‘sociability’, often grounded in the settings, informality and tone of the interview exchanges. The article pays attention to the continuation of SBS on Sky Arts 1, including the SBS Specials, before concluding with some more general observations on arts coverage within a changing television economy and an increasingly diverse cultural landscape.

The Night Sky, Psychological Projection, and Ancient Rock Art

Sexuality, hunger, and aggression have long been held as foundational concepts in psychoanalytic thinking. This paper addresses these themes vis-à-vis a certain type of Native American rock art known as the “Star Ceiling.” By examining aspects of the psychic function of projection, the author makes a theoretical connection between projective activity and its probable relationship with ancient rock art, night sky mythology, and the drives for food, sex, and security.

Interview with David Quantick: Chance meetings, mutual connections…a writer's tale

ABSTRACTDavid Quantick is a comedy writer, a music journalist, an author and a broadcaster. He claims to have written for over 60 publications: ‘most of them just once’. He reflects on his career as if it has been a complicated sequence of chance meetings, mutual connections and plain old fate. A degree of modesty might be at play, but there certainly has not been a Grand Plan in operation since he wrote to NME editor Neil Spencer in 1983 telling him his music paper was crap, only to be invited in to see if he could do any better. Quantick's list of collaborators suggests that his success is not down to good fortune alone. His CV includes writing for The Day Today, On The Hour, Brass Eye Jam and The Thick Of It. He was part of the writing team behind Harry Hill's TV Burp for over a decade. In 2013, his adaptation of Ian R. MacLeod's short story Snodgrass, in which John Lennon is found alive and well and living in Birmingham, was broadcast as part of the Sky Arts Playhouse series. He also self-published the novel Sparks on Kindle. Quantick is writing for the 2014 series of acclaimed HBO series Veep, created by Armando Iannucci and starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus. He was born in 1961, in a mother-and-baby home in Wortley, Yorkshire. His mother lived in the Midlands and went to stay with an aunt In Derbyshire to conceal the fact she was pregnant. He was adopted by a family, who were living in Sheffield at the time and then moved to Plymouth. He recalls one of his first memories seeing his father walking towards him and feeling really happy.

The Aesthetics of Emptiness: Sky Art

The sky and celestial phenomena surround us everywhere, all the time. However, they have not received due attention in philosophical discourses dealing with the environment, or in our daily experience. I explore some examples of recent art projects that facilitate our aesthetic experience of the sky and celestial events. These art pieces are analyzed in terms of the different ways in which they embody the notion of ‘emptiness’, a Buddhist term for reality that is written with the Chinese character for sky.

"So what will you do on the plinth?”: A Personal Experience of Disclosure during Antony Gormley’s "One & Other" Project

"So what will you do on the plinth?”: A Personal Experience of Disclosure during Antony Gormley’s "One & Other" Project

Sky, Scale and Technology in Art

Otto Piene discusses his projects with new media as well as the history and tradition of techological art. Topics range from archaic megalithic structures to large-scale, outdoor contemporary works articulated and enhanced by electronic forms of expression. Piene discusses his concept of ‘sky art’ and examines his attempts to expand the physical proportions of art and to communicate publicly with a large audience. Other issues raised include the beneficial effects of integrating art and science, the need to reevaluate and update art education and the importance of developing new forms of technological art that will improve communication and more effectively express human concerns.

Art-and-Technology: Recent Efforts in Materials and Media

To avoid misinterpretation, the term “art-and-technology” should be hyphenated because we are looking at an integrated art form which developed, roughly, during the past 70 years (since Naum Gabo's virtual volume, Kinetic Construction, Berlin, 1920). Art-and-technology results from “incorporated” contributions of art, science, and technology or, better, from artists, scientists, and engineers (plus industry, business, government, etc.). Although art-and-technology has frequently been bad-mouthed or even pronouned “dead” by advocates and practitioners of pure art as well as science and technology, it is alive and well and enjoying more vitality, variety, and expansion than ever before. It is currently the only expanding field in the arts; it feeds vitally into technology and industry—most visibly in entertainment but it also provides stimulus beyond fun to areas of science and engineering where “art applications” have abounded since the advent of photography and its vast consequent uses in science.We can claim an eloquent tradition for art-and-technology in ancient historic, cultural manifestations such as the Egyptian pyramids and their “environmental” scale or the Greek theater with its elaborate stage machines. We are aware of elements of that tradition when we observe contemporary art-and-technology such as sky and space art (Figures 1 and 2), computer-generated virtual reality, performance with medical inquiry and medical apparatus, and art concepts inspired by molecular biology (Figure 3). Emphasis of search—whether artistic/expressive, conceptual/philosophical, or inquisitive/scientific—depends on taste and motivation. However, Leonardo is an undisputed idol to both artists and scientists.

"Desert Sun/Desert Moon" and the SKY ART Manifesto

Desert Sun/Desert Moon and the SKY ART Manifesto embody environmental sky art and future sky art projections as interpreted by the SKY ART Conferences, a series of four international conferences spanning a 5-year period from 1981 to 1986. Each SKY ART Conference brought together artists as well as scientists, engineers and public officials from many countries and included exhibitions, lectures, panels, events, installations and a catalogue. These efforts constituted a determined attempt to document the emerging field of sky art and to discover and project forms of art in space. Desert Sun/Desert Moon was a series of temporary events and installations utilizing the temporal landscape of sky and space to evoke at the same time mythic and immaterial dimensions of that sky and space. Complementing these events, the SKY ART Manifesto is a working document drafted at the ’86 SKY ART Conference. It offers artistic commitment to the future of art in space as an integral part of international exploration. The author describes Desert Sun/Desert Moon as it has emerged from the SKY ART Conferences and then presents the text of the SKY ART Manifesto. She comments on the importance of each regarding the practice and potential of sky art.

Art and Nature in the Technology of Flight

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1979. Through use of projected light and a series of slides, the Cloister was altered almost beyond recognition and then allowed to return slowly to its original appearance. 8. Some of his credits include Close Encounters, Star Trek (Part 1) and The Rising Sun. 9. Friedrich St. Florian is currently Dean of Architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design. 10. Otto Piene is Director of M.I.T.'s Center for Advanced Visual Studies. 11. A discussion of Otto Piene's sky art as well as illustrations of these two heliumfilled inflatable sculptures can be found in Leonardo 19, No. 3 (1986).