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Media release: LASALLE College of the Arts celebrates 40 years of creative excellence

LASALLE College of the Arts (LASALLE) celebrated four decades of commitment to arts education and creative excellence on 8 November 2024 at the LASALLE40 Gala Night, with Guest of Honour, President of the Republic of Singapore, Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam, his spouse Ms Jane Ittogi, and around 300 guests in attendance.
 

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Cultural Connections Vol 9: Collective Prosperity: Artificial Intelligence and Arts Education in an Age of Global Transformation

In this essay for Cultural Connections Volume 9, Dr Venka Purushothaman, Deputy President & Provost, LASALLE College of the Arts, considers the complex transformations of culture around the world as humanity confronts artificial intelligence, demographic changes and a need for a new social contract.

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Art and AI: Educators must find ways to ease students’ fears

By Dr Wolfgang Muench

Ask ChatGPT, “Should arts students be concerned about artificial intelligence (AI)?” and the response is, “Yes, arts students should be concerned about AI.”

Some reasons for concern, ChatGPT goes on to elaborate, include how AI will change creative processes, its impact on job markets, and ethical and philosophical questions around its usage.

‘Tari Silat’ is commonly known as part of a martial art. Every gesture and step bounce a signal language that represents a meaning while pertaining to the politeness of the movements. Tari Silat is taught in one of the syllabuses at the Faculty of Film Theatre and Animation UiTM Puncak Perdana under the Centre of Theatre. The current pandemic situation has affected the world of the education system widely and requires a new paradigm. Many issues have arisen especially in the field of performing arts education since this discipline is about being on stage to see the output.

The Singapore government has long harnessed arts and culture for national-ideological purposes, including projecting a vision of unity in a multiculturalism rooted in what many scholars have criticised as essentialised 'CMIO' categories. Artists, on the other hand, seek to express everyday multiculturalism and identity formation as lived and experienced by people at home, work, and social settings.

ISSUE Arrhythmia: Special Volume

ISSUE is an international art journal focused on exploring issues in contemporary art. With an emphasis on Asia and Singapore, this annual publication is an inter and trans-disciplinary journal that curates research articles, essays, interviews and creative expressions on a range of disciplines from contemporary art, film, music to theatre.
Citation:
Purushothaman, Venka, et al., editors. ISSUE Arrhythmia: Special Volume. Singapore, LASALLE College of the Arts, 2022.

cellF: Embodying Neural Networks with Musical Bodies

The ‘extended body’ defines a growing body of work in the realm of biological art that uses biological material towards the creation of art. The cellF project is one example that uses in-vitro human neurons as the engine to drive a custom-made analogue modular synthesiser. cellF exists on the peripheries of art, science, music and design to create a semi-living musical instrument. It points the way to future scenarios of autonomous music-making entities that are driven by intelligence born from living cells and tissue. 

Culture and Context in Mental Health

Ronald Lay has spent the last ten years working as an art therapy educator, and he shares his observations of the local mental health scene in the last decade. Notably, there are significant cultural differences between the East and the West, and while some stigmas are rooted in cultural prejudices, there are some Eastern values that also support the mental health of the community in Singapore.
Citation:

Research into arts-based interventions is complex as art cannot be directly translated into words. Increasingly, there has been a global incessant call for research into using the arts in a range of mental health disciplines. Ongoing debates over methodology, primarily quantitative and qualitative, persist and this just may affect one's decision to engage in research.