Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

• 1. Doctoral Research Doctoral research undertaken in the Faculty of Arts, Design and Media at Birmingham City University.

• 
  Tick Tack Tick Tack Tick (2020) author(s): Stuart Whipps published in: Research Catalogue, Birmingham City University
  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.
  open exposition comments (0)
• 
  Kipper and the corpse (2020) author(s): Stuart Whipps published in: Research Catalogue, Birmingham City University
  ‘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).
  open exposition comments (0)
• 
  Translation as a Compositional Strategy (2020) author(s): Seán Clancy published in: Research Catalogue, Birmingham City University
  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.
  open exposition comments (0)
• 
  Venice 1629: Exposition of Research (2020) author(s): Jamie Savan published in: Research Catalogue, Birmingham City University
  This exposition takes the form of a portfolio of materials documenting the research questions, methods and processes underpinning the CD production 'Venice 1629' (performers: The Gonzaga Band, dir. Jamie Savan, released on the Resonus Classics label in July 2018). It includes 10 new performing editions, discussion of performance practice issues including rhythmic proportions, ornamentation and instrumentation, alongside the full recording in streamable MP3 format and a fully referenced version of the booklet essay.
  open exposition comments (0)
• 
  Composition as Commentary: Voice and Poetry in Electroacoustic Music (2020) author(s): Edmund Hunt published in: Journal for Artistic Research, Birmingham City University
  What is the role of a spoken or sung text in an electroacoustic composition? Does it represent anachronism, assigning the role of communication to the voice and thereby depriving more abstract electroacoustic material of its rhetorical force? Does the disembodied, electroacoustic voice distance the audience from the communicative power of the words that are heard? Although Simon Emmerson argued that the disembodied human voice in acousmatic music can often seem frustrating, this sense of disembodiment might be turned to the composer’s advantage, as the basis of a methodology for creative practice. In the process of developing a methodology to address questions of text, language, voice, and electroacoustic technology, I created two musical compositions. Both works used the untranslated words of an enigmatic Old English poem, ‘Wulf and Eadwacer’. At first glance, the idea of using a text in an obscure or ancient language that carries little or no semantic meaning for the listeners might raise further questions. Is this a deliberate attempt at obfuscation, hiding the paucity of the composer’s ideas behind a veneer of archaism or even naive exoticism? As my investigation progressed, I began to envisage the process of electroacoustic composition as a type of non-linguistic commentary on a text. Rather than hindering the listener’s understanding of a composition inspired by literature, the electroacoustic voice might help to reveal different interpretations of a text, allowing multiple ideas and identities to be heard.
  open exposition comments (0)
• 
  From culture to nature and back. A personal journey through the soundscapes of Colombia (2020) author(s): Lamberto Coccioli published in: Journal of Sonic Studies, Birmingham City University
  The purpose of this essay is twofold: to celebrate the astonishing richness and diversity of Colombia’s natural and human soundscapes, and to reconstruct the process through which my direct experience of those soundscapes has influenced my own creative work as a composer. Reflecting on a long personal and intellectual journey of discovery that plays out on many levels – musical, anthropological, aesthetical – helps bring to the fore important questions on music composition as the locus of cultural appropriation and reinterpretation. How far can the belief system of a distant culture travel before it loses its meaning? From a post-colonial perspective, can a European composer justify the use and repurposing of ideas, sounds and songs from marginalised indigenous communities? In trying to give an answer to these questions through the lens of my own experience I keep unravelling layer upon layer of complexity, in a fascinating game of mirrors where my own identity as a "Western" composer starts crumbling away.
  open exposition comments (0)