Séminaire de recherche
Date: 11 décembre
Lieu : Université de Surrey (RU)
www.surrey.ac.uk/files/pdf/campusmap.pdf
University of Surrey
School of Arts Research Seminar
with Johan Petri and Kirk Woolford
Weds 11th December, 12-3pm
SEEDpod, Nodus Building (1st floor)
Stag Hill Campus
www.surrey.ac.uk/files/pdf/campusmap.pdf
12-1pm
Visiting PhD student presentation by Johan Petri (Gothenburg University, Sweden)
“John and the Mushrooms”
In this presentation Johan will introduce his theatre work, “John and the Mushrooms” (2011): a piece created around the music and text of the American composer and artist, John Cage, designed to work for audiences from ages five years and up. During his presentation, Johan will reflect on questions including actor practice, music in relation to text, Cage and multilayered expressions, improvisation amongst others. After almost twenty-five years working as an artist, first as musician/composer, then dramaturge and theater director, since 2010, Johan has been doing a practice-based PhD at University of Gothenburg.
1-1.30pm lunch break
1.30-3pm
Staff presentation by Kirk Woolford (Digital Media Arts, Surrey)
"Motions in Place"
The careful examination of physical evidence, contexts and provenance allows us to make informed hypotheses about the physical construction and location of past structures, but is it possible to inform our understandings of how people moved around and through these structures? Is there any manner in which we can use the same physical evidence to infer how these structures were used? Can we apply understandings of how human perception informed past people about the meanings of environmental objects? Can we apply elements of Experimental Archaeology in an attempt to replicate past processes? Can we borrow from J. J. Gibson’s theories of affordance or direct-perception to aid our understanding of Past Places? Do ecological approaches to embodiment and cognition help us to understand relationships between past peoples, their tools, their environments, and how all of these elements function together as a system? If human movements, or moving humans, are added to heritage reconstructions without consideration of how environment, artifact, perception, and action are linked, they become aesthetic adornments. However, if movement is captured and applied with rigour similar to that applied to the materials used in reconstruction, virtual humans become more than sculptures and can more usefully reflect the activities and behaviours conjectured to have taken place.
Kirk Woolford will present a number of explorations of these questions including photographic expeditions with dancers, performance writers, and soil scientists in Scotland’s Cairngorm plateau, and examine how this creative practice led to the AHRC funded Motion in Place Platform project developing portable motion capture systems as tools for quantifying the impact of place on human movement.