Journal & Book Publications

Through observational studies, qualitative insights and participatory design methods, this research examines the challenges faced by the rural women of 'Gudiya Village' in Indore, India, where design skills are tested to promote sustainable development through use of natural building materials, resources and techniques. The main focus of the research expands on the role of co-creative practice in disrupting the hegemonic position of design, leading towards and promoting the fluidity in knowledge transfer and exchange. This paper provides a discussion of how design practice and knowledge are influenced by cultural traditions while, in turn, informing new perspectives for cultural production through the symbiotic relationship between designers and communities of practice. The role of design, to educate and empower, is presented as a framework for future designers, researchers and co-creators to embed cultural and sustainable practices as part of shifting resilience into robustness. 

Citation:
Chon, Harah, and Batul Pitha Wala . ''Social Innovation and Co-Creation through Design: Utilising Natural Resources to Facilitate Sustainable Development.'' Proceedings of Cumulus Rovaniemi: Around the Campfire, Resilience and Intelligence, University of Lapland 05/2019, edited by Jonna Häkkilä, et al., 2nd ed., Cumulus, 2019, ISBN / ISSN: 978-952-337-199.

His fragmented and largely neglected theoretical and artistic sketches mark a radical departure from common theoretical positions related to the 1960s emerging discourse on Environmental Design. Boutourline's conceptual approach reverberated central ideas of Whitehead's process philosophy, Wiener's Cybernetics, Bertalanffy's General System Theory, and McLuhan's media theory. It emerged out of his ground-breaking 1962 research on audience behaviour in public spaces. It took inspiration from his professional practice and collaboration in artistic projects informed by Schlemmer and Moholy-Nagy's concepts of modernist theatre, Alwin Nikolais’ late-modernist abstract dance performances, and the 1960s countercultural avant-gardist experiments with media technology and human-machine communication in artistic practice. However, despite Boutourline's acquaintance to key figures in the 1960s discourse on technological media, artistic practice, and the academic field of Environmental Psychology, there is hardly any reference to Boutourline in the critical discourse concerned with the development of art and media in the 1960s. This paper re-introduces Boutourline's signal oriented conceptual framework and technological device within the context of the 1960s countercultural avant- gardist experiments with human-machine communication. It further discusses the conceptual influence of theories and practices in dance and theatre developed at the Bauhaus on the emerging avant-gardist performative and interactive art scene during the1960s in New York.

Citation:
Muench, Wolfgang. ''Signals in Time and Space: A Submerged Media Avant-gardist Attempt on Environmental Design.'' Proceedings of Impact! From Bauhaus to IKEA, Sydney 9/2019, edited by Brejzek, Thea, et al, IKEA x UTS Future Living Lab, 2019.

Fitzmaurice Voicework was inspired by yoga, shiatsu, and bioenergetic psychotherapy, and its methods include releasing patterns of habitual holding within the viscera causing an autonomic response known as a tremor. Training in Kalaripayattu, an ancient South Indian martial art, is a preparatory tool for the body to develop a kinesthetic awareness: an organic ability to be in the optimal state of readiness. In the process of defining our research findings, we created a systematic methodology that consisted of four stages: 1) Studio training combining Kalaripayattu and Fitzmaurice Voicework; 2) Training with Kalaripayattu masters in Kerala, India; 3) Experimentation and exploration of the two forms of collaborative training; and 4) Analysis and dissemination of findings at a conference of the Voice and Speech Trainers Association London Conference. This systematic approach provided us with the framework to answer our research questions: 1) Can combining techniques from Kalaripayattu and Fitzmaurice Voicework lead to an effective new cross-cultural methodology for professional actor training? 2) What kinds of psychophysical and somatic affect can arise from the combination of these two forms?

Citation:
Roza, Elizabeth de and Budi Miller. "The Lion and the Breath: Combining Kalaripayattu and Fitzmaurice Voicework Techniques Towards a New Cross- Cultural Methodology for Actor Training." Journal of Embodied Research, vol. 1, no. 1, 2018, doi:10.16995/jer.6.

Through this incredible archive, Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up gives readers a unique window into Kahlo's life. It will focus on the personal, combining her prosthetics, jewellery, and clothes with self-portraits, diary entries, and letters to build an intimate portrait of the artist through her possessions, setting this in the context of her political and social beliefs.

Citation:
Wilcox, Claire and Circe Henestrosa, editors. Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up. V & A Publishing, 2018.

Thai Cinema: The Complete Guide is the first English-language book to be devoted solely to the topic of Thai cinema, which has revived and gained new world-wide recognition since the late 1990s.
Citation:
Knee, Adam. Entries on 3 Thai Films. Thai Cinema: The Complete Guide, edited by Mary J. Ainslie and Katarzyna Ancuta, I.B.Tauris, 2018.

While the phonetic resonances between Sur and its English counterpart 'surrealism' might suggest European origination, Apinan's framework hinged on the nationalist premise of the uniqueness of Sur within the Thai context. By way of contrast, one may point to the dismissal by the French surrealist André Breton (1896-1966) of the limitations of language and cultural difference as an impediment to his internationalist goal of promoting surrealist practices in 'the four corners of the earth [as] a fairly extensive scheme of resistance and experiment'. In fact, this distinction between Breton's and Apinan's frameworks points to a central problematic of Southeast Asian modern art history: determining the particularities of relationships between exogenous and endogenous artistic discourses and the ideological weight of prioritising one over the other. In this chapter I offer another entry point, one that accounts for the deployment of photographic techniques associated with surrealism in the work of Thai photographers, without deferring to nationalist narratives of cultural exceptionalism or Eurocentric frameworks of belatedness and provincialism. Instead, I am concerned with locating the specific points where Thai Sur and European surrealism intersect and diverge, found here in the resonances between photography and notions of realism. Against the apparent incommensurability between the ease with which Thai artistic institutions accepted Sur and the avant-garde fervour of European surrealism, this approach maintains the relevance of conceptual linkages between the two while also reaffirming their distinctiveness. In doing so, the aim of this enquiry is transformed from an evaluation of how faithfully Sur photographic practices adopted European surrealist techniques and principles, to what the 'sur-real' connoted in a context where the relationship between photography, truth and reality was something quite different. For photography, this is revealed through a discussion of two major functions of Sur. First, as a means to overcome the medium's exclusion from discourses of fine art, and second as a replication of the dharmic vision encountered in photographic icons of highly regarded monks and monarchs.

Citation:
Veal, Clare Elisabeth. "Beyond Reality: Locating the Sur-Real in Thai Photography." Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art, 1945-1990, edited by Stephen H. Whiteman et al., Power Publications & National Gallery Singapore, 2018. 

In all these works, the defilement, the disgust, and the horror are intentional, strategic - even ideological. But what of the unintentional, even decidedly unwanted, yet ceaselessly produced abjection? With its beautiful gardens, highly aesthetised yet functional architecture, and exceptionally rich occupational content, the Bethlem Royal Hospital, London, is the epitome of applied ("ethical") aesthetics. The politics of egalitarianism is here inscribed in all regulations, daily routines, and the individually tailored approaches to psychiatric care. And yet, this (utopian) construct is corroded by the greasy fingerprints on the glass separating the nursing station from the ward; deep cuts in armchairs and sofas; and dents in the woodwork that act as reminders of the more violent attacks, as do, indeed, bruises on patients' faces, necks, and arms. Fusing Nagatomo's notion of the body as an actional-humoural process with Kristeva's abjectness and Rozin's theories of disgust, this essay queries the relation between applied aesthetics, politicised sociality, and (covert) stigmatisation. It argues that stigmatisation occurs behind the scenes, in looped somaesthetic processes, as a byproduct of sensorial, behavioural, and environmental ugliness. In acknowledging this state of affairs, the essay also articulates the relationship between the (vulnerable) somatic body and the vulnerability of the (neoliberal) institutions of care.

Citation:
Lushetich, Natasha. "Stigma Stains: The Somaesthetics of Institutional Abjection." On the Politics of Ugliness, edited by Sara Rodrigues and Ela Przybylo, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

Through a close study of key moments, the chapter establishes the relationship between state enterprise and cultural rootedness, and social access and political agency as key engines of artistic development in postcolonial Singapore.
Citation:
Purushothaman, Venka. "Presenting Culture and Nationhood: The Singapore Arts Festival.” The State and the Arts in Singapore, edited by Terence Chong, World Scientific, 2018, pp. 67-107.