Journal & Book Publications

Art-based methodology supports the reflexive stance of this preliminary investigation and documents this initial phase of a larger research initiative. This article serves to highlight an overview of a cross-border, cross-cultural collaboration that led to a two-part digital experiential workshop between a Bali-based artist and an artist/art therapist, involving his postgraduate art therapy students from LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore. The art in art therapy is championed with a focus on integrating technologies with one’s art practice, one’s artist identity, and one’s art therapy practice.

Citation:
Lay, Ronald P.M.H.. ''Championing art in art therapy training: A multidimensional art collaboration in Southeast Asia.'' Canadian Journal of Art Therapy: Research, Practice and Issues, vol. 33, no. 2, 2020, pp. 80-88, doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/26907240.2020.1844437.

Although the performance received reviews from renowned critics in prominent New York newspapers and magazines, it disappeared from the historical records almost entirely. The article provides a critical evaluation of the artists' conceptual and technical approaches towards the deployment of analogue media technology for creating an early example of audience participation and human-machine interaction in mediated artworks. This analysis is complemented by an evaluation of contemporary reviews of the performance to illustrate to what degree the critical reception at the time was prepared to appraise the concept of technology-based interactivity through a human-machine interface in artworks appropriately. 

Citation:
Muench, Wolfgang. ''An Evening at the Ballroom: Whatever Happened to Televanilla?'', ScienceOpen. RE:SOUND 2019: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Media Art, Science, and Technology, Aalborg, Denmark 08/2019, edited by Søndergaard, Morten, et al, 2020, pp. 258-267, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.39.

The meaning stays within the animation itself, rather than branching out through merchandising or fan activity. Takahata contested the way viewers often engage with the animation medium in a popular context. He went beyond the light-hearted genre framework to produce narratives that do not lead to happy, emotionally satisfying endings. Neither did he glorify the enchanted transformative potential of the animatic image. To address his aesthetic qualities in context and examine his construction of character and their worlds, this paper analyzes his works, including Heidi, Girl of the Alps (1974), The Tale of Princess Kaguya (2013), Grave of the Fireflies (1988), and Only Yesterday (1991). Through close examination of selected sequences, Takahata’s challenge to the norms of anime structure and aesthetics are shown to be a part of his creative production process that resulted in the distinctive impact of his work.

Citation:
Gan, Sheuo Hui . ''Stimulating Thoughts Rather Than Appetite: On TAKAHATA Isao's Animation Aesthetics.'' The Japanese Journal of Animation Studies, vol. 21, no. 1, 2020, pp. 111-125, ISBN / ISSN: 1347-300X.

This article surfaces one artist/art therapist’s art-making through a visual exposé of his perspective on containment of circumstances that are essentially beyond his control. Art-making and self-reflection are championed as effective resources to sustain community even during periods of mandated isolation and distancing.

Citation:
Lay, Ronald P.M.H.. ''Consolidating containment: A visual exposé.'' JoCAT: Journal of the Creative Arts Therapies, vol. 15, no. 1, 2020, pp. 17-22, ISBN / ISSN: 2652-9459.

The tendency to describe synthetic scales with proper nouns is becoming less frequent for one reason: a name like Hungarian or Jewish scale does not convey any musical information. A proper noun becomes useless if the scale is not written in standard music notation, letter notation, or if a formula does not accompany it. The trend that has lately gained relevance relates to the altered modal terminology started by George Russell in 1953 in his book Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization. Ron Miller deepened that concept in 1996 in Modal Jazz Composition & Harmony and Gary Keller did the same in 2006 in The Jazz Chord/Scale Handbook. This article reviews all the major literature in relation to jazz scale theory and examines its evolution in terms of nomenclature. Furthermore, it traces the jazz scale nomenclature tendency, where a critical mass of jazz education seems to be heading.

Citation:
Celi, Diego. ''Heptatonic Synthetic Scales Nomenclature and Their Teaching in Jazz Theory.'' Jazz Education in Research and Practice, vol. 1, no. 1, 2020, pp. 135-154, doi: DOI 10.2979/jazzeducrese.1.1.10.

This paper examines the practices of existing social enterprise models and the complexities involved in implementing new structures for community involvement through co-creation, co-design and facilitation. Cybernetics, as a way of looking at and engaging with systems, is discussed to position the role of the designer. Using mapping as a visualisation tool and conversational activity, case-studies are evaluated to provide a broad framework of bottom-up systems thinking through participatory methods to enhance social and cultural values.

Citation:
Chon, Harah. ''Systems Thinking for Bottom-Up Social Innovation: An Examination of Social Practices.'' Strategic Design Research Journal, vol. 13, no. 2, 2020, pp. 137-149.

Our argument deploys the creative potential of several concepts that we develop within this framework: the idea of the planetary classroom, the digital companion, and the multipolar performance prompt. We develop these concepts in relation to a series of experiments conducted by the authors using mobile technologies and video-conferencing platforms in performance pedagogy and training settings, connecting across different continents (North America, Australia, and Asia) with a focus of activity around a Practice Research class at LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore. In using asynchronous communication over Telegram text and video messages, collaborative Google Docs, and multimodal performative lectures over Zoom, our research questions have taken on an even more urgent dimension as the COVID-19 pandemic has radically transformed the delivery of higher education, as well as our wider awareness of the economic and material flows of globalisation. But we argue that the experiential and somatic values of performance might find new manifestations in a technologically distributed teaching practice, complicating the binary model of face-to-face versus anonymous multi-user, and instead creating hybrid and multi-bodied ways of moving through and engaging with the world and its pedagogical and technological inequalities. 

Citation:
Cervera, Felipe, et al. ''Towards planetary performance pedagogy: digital companions in multipolar classrooms.'' Theatre, Dance, & Performance Training, vol. 12, no. 1, 2020, pp. 20-39, doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/19443927.2020.1829694.

The situation was uncanny to the extent that only comparisons were suitable as a way to fathom the experience. And yet, comparisons failed. The pandemic’s interruption messed with the global plot in unseen ways, and as we live through it and start to forecast where the next scene will take us, it is crucial that we reflect on where we came from and what is the destiny that awaits us. Who owns that future? Who is making it? This piece will consider the current global situation by engaging with Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt (V-Effekt) and epic theatre as a lens to foresee what theatre criticism in the age of social distancing and digital assemblies could mean. What if the pandemic were a Verfremdungseffekt that sheds a new light to a global social crisis that is been going far longer and is rooted somewhere else? What if the cascade of digital performance we have witnessed in the last few months was a musical interlude announcing the greater forces that are coming into play? What if the muted shout of the quarantine is the gestus that the new digital capitalism will afford us?

Citation:
Cervera, Felipe, and Azadeh Sharifi. ''Pandemic V-Effect: The Plague as Theatre Criticism.'' Critical Stages / Scènes Critiques, no. 22, 2020.