Birmingham City University: Faculty of Arts, Design and Media
About this portal
This portal brings together practice research in creative disciplines produced at Birmingham City University Faculty of ADM, comprising:
RAAD – the Centre for Research in Art, Architecture and Design;
BCMCR - Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research;
Royal Birmingham Conservatoire – Music and Performing Arts.
url:
https://www.bcu.ac.uk/arts-design-and-media
Recent Issues
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1. Doctoral Research
Doctoral research undertaken in the Faculty of Arts, Design and Media at Birmingham City University.
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1. Music and Performing Arts 2020
A selection of research in music and the performing arts, submitted to REF 2021.
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1. Art and Design 2020
A selection of research in art and design, submitted to REF 2021.
Recent Activities
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Catalogue d'Emojis
(2020)
author(s): Paul Norman, Michael Wolters
published in: Research Catalogue, Birmingham City University: Faculty of Arts, Design and Media
Catalogue d'Emojis is a Live Performance and CD release of a new work for two performers and two pianists by Dr Paul Norman and Dr Michael Wolters (who together work under the name 'Difficult Listening').
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Necessary Amendments
(2020)
author(s): Stuart Whipps
published in: Research Catalogue, Birmingham City University: Faculty of Arts, Design and Media
During the passing of the New Towns bill in 1946 the minister for Town and Country planning invoked Moore’s Utopia only to be dismissed, ridiculed and lampooned by opposition politicians in the UK parliament. Whipps’ artistic research takes this moment's crude dichotomy as a starting point to investigate the places that were built and the people who live in them 70 years later. The outcomes (films, exhibitions and publication) allow for the different reading of historical materials from the perspective of memory and community. Whipps’ creates a change to the way we remember and think of ‘new towns’ today by both; representing the stories of people who lived and live in those ‘new’ places and by reflecting upon what happens when idealism and optimism is confronted by bureaucracy and the status quo.
This research utilises historical and archival materials from Milton Keynes City Discover Centre and vintage educational videos from The Open University that were presented alongside newly created photographs, films and personal testimonies. Whipps developed a new body of work that centres around a series of films ‘Necessary Amendments’ (2014 - 2020) supported by community engagement events (e.g “Cycle Tour” around Milton Keynes public art displays, 2018), new photographic and film material from the sculpture garden created by a Harlow New Town architect Sir Fredrick Gibberd, and commissioned writing by Dr Honor Gavin (The University of Manchester).
His findings in a form of films, contemporary art exhibitions, public talks and publications were supported by MK Gallery, The Open University and the University of Hertfordshire. The project was exhibited nationally in MK Gallery, and internationally in CURRENT Athens. “Necessary Amendments: Homes for the People” film was commissioned and exhibited as part of New Geographies (funded by ACE). Whipps published a peer-reviewed paper in ‘Art & the Public Sphere’ journal (2017).
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Composition as Devised Collaboration
(2020)
author(s): Seán Clancy, Andy Ingamells
published in: Research Catalogue, Birmingham City University: Faculty of Arts, Design and Media
The aim of this research was to explore devised collaboration between Seán Clancy and Andy Ingamells as a compositional process through the creation of two works that use collaborative creative strategies in different ways:
1. in This is About, by devising all material through the act of doing, considering all material in a given process to be collaborative.
2. in Antonio Guillem, by collaboratively constructing and performing a piece remotely over the internet, intended as a creative response to the pandemic by exploring technology in a novel way.
This exposition provides contextual information to support the two creative outcomes.
Both works borrow aspects from other areas of Clancy's practice research, such as intervention and translation (available here). Both were devised through discussion, creating material by moving back and forth between doing and reflecting. We explored the collaborative process through a kind of visual musique concrète arising from the images of performance situations. In both works the compositional process was scrutinised, reviewed by funding bodies and festival directors, and disseminated internationally by BBC Radio 3, Twitch and YouTube.
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Tick Tack Tick Tack Tick
(2020)
author(s): Stuart Whipps
published in: Research Catalogue, Birmingham City University: Faculty of Arts, Design and Media
TTTTT research by Whipps focuses on the persistent dichotomy between art and science with the aim of disrupting it. He has opened up his art practice to inputs from the disciplines of geology, horticulture and dance, combining them in contemporary art settings to create nuanced readings. The resulting productions (artefacts, exhibitions and publications) allow for the emergence of a new sort of puzzle, which materialises through poesis in these different and often unrelated fields.
Whipps developed a co-working methodology that drew on expertise from Dr Andrew Rees (geology), University of Birmingham, Tom Brown, Head Gardener, West Dean Gardens and William Bracewell, First Soloist, Royal Ballet. This methodology was applied referencing a series of seemingly disconnected artistic nodal points, including: photographs taken at a surrealist sculpture garden in Mexico, archival material of the Scottish oil industry, stories of stolen flowers from a garden in North Wales. Using these nodes, plus others, Whipps elicited responses from the experts to inform his findings, which in turn were utilised in the production and presentation of new projections, prints and structural installation. They provided an accessible and common ground between these fields of knowledge, inviting visitors to meditate on the relationships that those fields can create when they collide in the new ways afforded by Whipps’s work.
This research has been enacted through a series of national solo art exhibitions at Spike Island, Bristol, DCA, Dundee; plus international group shows: CAPC, France, and the Irish Architecture Association, Ireland. Whipps’s research has also been disseminated in monograph publications: ‘Feeling With Fingers That See’ and ‘White Ashes Fell’ as well as in a group publication, ‘Le Musée Se Met Au Vert!’ published by Musée Des Beaux-Arts Bordeaux.
The research has been supported through two Arts Council England project grants and the Henry Moore Institute.
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Kipper and the corpse
(2020)
author(s): Stuart Whipps
published in: Research Catalogue, Birmingham City University: Faculty of Arts, Design and Media
‘The Kipper and the Corpse’ (TK&C) borrows its title from an episode (March 1979) of the sit-com Fawlty Towers. Whipps’s TK&C research draws attention to both the social changes wrought by Thatcherism and prevailing media attitudes of the time. 1979 was pivotal for UK manufacturing as the then conservative government sought to undermine labour unions. Against this historical backdrop, the project raises questions about how the living memory of the pre-neoliberal world can be accessed and re-engaged with to bring about a collaborative understanding of present-day discourses around the politics and economics of labour. TK&C also offers a novel approach for paticipative creative activity, inverting the more normal artist-led working method.
TK&C is a unique community-based art project that included the restoration of a 1275GT Mini made in Longbridge in 1979. Through the process of restoring the car, Whipps worked with several Longbridge ex-employees with car production and engineering expertise, social historians, sociologists, and anthropologists. These participants brought specialist knowledge and vocational skills to bear, positioning the artist/researcher, Whipps, as the novice. This reversal of roles destabilised the standard researcher - participant relationship allowing for the emergence of more participative forms of knowledge production and transfer. This form of collaboration encouraged multiple audiences, from beyond the art world, to engage with the underlying context used by the project.
The practical outcomes of TK&C were augmented by information gathered from records at Warwick University, British Motor Museum archives, oral histories, media representations of British Leyland (sitcoms, political cartoons, tabloid newspapers) and photographic documentation.
The project has been supported by Longbridge Public Art Project (LPAP) and featured in contemporary art exhibitions, including touring venues such as the British Art Show 8 (2015-2017), the IKON Gallery (2019), and internationally at Fabra i Coats: Contemporary Art Centre of Barcelona (2020).
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Translation as a Compositional Strategy
(2020)
author(s): Seán Clancy
published in: Research Catalogue, Birmingham City University: Faculty of Arts, Design and Media
The aim of this body of work is to explore translation, the act of communicating the meaning of one phenomenon (the source) to another phenomenon (the target) through musical composition. This is illustrated by three related works that translate different events/objects into musical experiences:
1. Fourteen Minutes of Music on the Subject of Greeting Cards
2. Forty-Five Minutes of Music on the Subject of Football
3. ireland england
The intention is to create interesting structures through innovative compositional techniques that may be taken up by others. The act of translation imbues the musical work with meaning relating to our lived experiences. As a result, composition as lived experience becomes the overarching narrative, highlighting a departure from more abstract concerns to hyper-personal ones.