Lindsay's blog

ARGO

Lindsay — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 08:15:11 +0000

English

‘ARGO (part of the integrated global observation strategy) is a global array of 3,000 free-drifting profiling floats that measures the temperature and salinity of the upper 2000 m of the ocean. This allows, for the first time, continuous monitoring of the temperature, salinity, and velocity of the upper ocean, with all data being relayed and made publicly available within hours after collection.’

The buoys are pre-programmed and move to depth by increasing and decreasing the amount of water in the structure. This visualisation shows the locations of the ARGO buoy array over time. When the bouys are above water, the lines are brighter; when the buoys are under water, the lines are fainter.

The buoys can also be tracked using Google Earth at this link, and by clicking on the green floats the most recent data can be viewed. The information also includes the country of origin of the buoy.

Image courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

A Gathering of Artistic Research: From New Science to Nameless Science

Lindsay — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 08:57:12 +0000

English

Art and Research
Volume 2. No. 2. Spring 2009

Editorial:

This issue of Art & Research represents a ‘gathering’ of issues and experiences in artistic research as manifest in papers and artworks presented on the ‘occasion’ of significant international conferences and symposia dedicated to artistic research held between May and December 2008: Arts Research: The State of Play, Gradcam, Dublin ,8-9 May, an interdisciplinary conference, Who is Afraid of Artistic Research?, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (DJCAD), Dundee, 22 May; Artistic Research, The Iceland Art Academy (LHI), Reykjavik, 3-4 October; Talkin´ Loud & Sayin´ Something - Four Perspectives of Artistic Research, a symposium organized by Johan Öberg (University of Gothenburg) as part of the 10th ELIA Biennial Conference, Gothenburg, 29 October - 1 November; Nameless Science, Cooper Union, New York, 12 December 2008. The symposium at Cooper Union was held on the occasion of the Nameless Science exhibition at Apexart (10 December 2008 31 January 2009) curated by Henk Slager, Dean, Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design and co-editor of MaHKUzine: Journal of Artistic Research. The texts here are simultaneously published in a printed version in MaHKUzine, Journal of Artistic Research # 7, Summer 2009 The publication of this project is supported in part by the Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

This issue is also published in collaboration with Art Monitor: The Swedish Journal for Artistic Research, in the reprinting of the essay ‘Catch Me If You Can Chances and Challenges of Artistic Research’ by Mika Hannula and his interview with Jacqueline Donachie which first appeared Art Monitor 4, 2008, which accompanied the exhibition Talkin´ Loud & Sayin´ Something - Four Perspectives of Artistic Research, at Göteborg Museum of Art (24 September – 16 November). Also included in this issue is a research project report by Erik Andersson investigating the parallels between artistic and scientific research methodologies in a collaborative exhibition context, a revised translation of ‘Artistic Research and the Poetics of Knowledge’ by Kathrin Busch (originally published in A Portrait of the Artist as a Researcher, AS Mediatijdschrift, No. 179 2007) and the artwork Crash and Burn a series of questions, statements and provocations by Peter McCaughey.

The international collaborations with Art Monitor (Gothenburg) and MaHKUzine (Utrecht) marks an exciting new development for Art & Research and future collaborative publications and projects are planned with both Art Monitor and MaHKUzine as well as with brumaria, Madrid and The Institute for Contemporary Arts Research (IFCAR), Zurich.

Art & Research would like to thank the contributors and Annette W. Balkema, Lindsay Brown, David Harding, Jennifer Nolan, Johan Öberg, Elaine Sissons, Henk Slager and Cornelia Sollfrank.

This issue of Art & Research is dedicated to the memory of Claude Schumacher (1936-2009), Emeritus Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Glasgow and former editor of Theatre Research International.

Other links: Upcoming event information, abstracts and biographies for Who's Afraid of Artistic Research? on Friday 8th May 2009. Speakers include Prof. Tom Holert (Vienna), Prof. Hinrich Sachs (Stockholm), Dr Sofia LyCouris (Edinburgh and Prof. Gavin Renwick (Dundee).

Archives: Dieter Lesage (Brussels), Simon Sheik (Berlin), Nigel Johnson (Dundee) and Laurence Rassel (Barcelona) here

Armin Medosch (London/Vienna) and Lorens Holm (Dundee) here.

Handrail at 28 Metres

Lindsay — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 03:50:40 +0000

English

This is an image of a handrail on the Royal Archer, a shipwreck in the Firth of Forth. This is another of the WW2 wrecks that litter the floor of this busy shipping area and was a steamer that hit a mine laid by an U-boat. This is the deepest dive I have done so far, and at this depth there is no infra-red light, which is why the image looks so green. However, now that can reach these depths it is only a matter of time before I can see the object of all this training, HMS Saucy wich lies at 23 metres but can only be accessed exactly at slack water because of the tidal current.

Art and Research

Lindsay — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 20:24:14 +0000

English

Art and Research is an online journal for ideas, contexts and methods. It provides a resource of downloadable finished papers, interviews and conference notes that are considered important and current to the discourse that surrounds artistic research. The journal is international and peer-reviewed with an editorial board, one of the main editors being Ross Birrell an artist researcher and staff member at Glasgow School of Art. As well as being an interesting artist, Ross is also an interesting writer and his editorial paper Jacques Ranciere and The (Re) Distribution of the Sensible provides ‘Five Lessons in Artistic Research’ that condenses and links ideas such Rancier’s notion of the ‘distribution of territories’, a commentary on the value of certain disciplines over others, to Mika Hannula (and others) notion of the ‘democracy of experience’ which is ‘the precondition of a non-hierarchical research environment’.

The new issue of Art and Research is due to be published in the very near future and will contain free downloadable access to all of the presentation papers from the initial Who is Afraid of Artistic Research? international seminar that took place on the 23rd May 2008.

Who is Afraid of Artistic Research? (3)

Lindsay — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 08:38:00 +0000

English

Who is Afraid of Artistic Research?(3)

On Friday, 8th May 2009, the PhD Forum at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee will host another one- day symposium about the context and methodologies of Artistic Research. The event is a follow-up to the two previous events held on 22 May 2008 and 23 October 2008. Like its predecessors, the symposium will again bring together an international group of leading theoreticians and reflective practitioners in the field of “practice- based research in art and design”.

While in Europe the discussion is comparatively young and has evolved in recent years mainly as an outcome of the Bologna reforms, practice- based art and design research in the UK has more than a decade of experience. It is one aim of the symposium to interlink these different backgrounds. Another aim is to map the terrain of the diverse approaches to practice-based research and discuss the varying philosophical and art theoretical backgrounds which inform the different models.

What is the difference between research-based art and art-based research? Why would an artist want to become a researcher? Does the artist researcher conflict with the notion of artistic autonomy? What does the epistemological shift from art production to knowledge production imply for the actors involved in the field? What are the specificities and styles of artistic knowledge production? How can they become the topics of a research practice that can be regarded as both scientifically and artistically based? What are the goals of such research? What is the desired outcome? These are just some of the questions which will be explored at this event.

The framework of the “practice-based research in art and design” is still very open and integrative. It allows the artist researcher to develop his/her own methodology within a research process which is highly individual and dependent on the specific subject matter. Entering the arena of ongoing discussion, negotiation and re-adjustment and engaging in the discourse about epistemology and methodology essentially contributes to constituting this freedom.

Location: Dundee Contemporary Arts · Nethergate 152 · Dundee DD1 4DX · Meeting Room

The event is free, but advance booking is required: 01382-909900

For further information visit the website of the PhD Forum: http://www.vrc.dundee.ac.uk/Research/PhD_Forum.html

Titanic

Lindsay — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 15:15:37 +0000

English

Titanic from artist1066 on Vimeo.

This is a short clip of a cloth serviette sinking downward into the sea, and to me is just an idea for a larger piece of work. Again the imagery has a number of layers such as the separation of social classes; the richness, wealth and progress that the Titanic symbolised, contrasted against the hopes of the working class held below decks looking for a New World beginning. The cloth is a traditional embroidered serviette, the silk thread and white of the cotton reflecting the light quite dramatically until the sinking object is quite far under the water. The audio is a separate recording of the tide coming in under a small local pier, it is therefore quiet and understated.

Electric Chair

Lindsay — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 12:06:29 +0000

English

Electric Chair from artist1066 on Vimeo.

This is a movie clip of a radio antennae, which is a chair covered in copper wire. This started life as an exploration into testing methodologies for my PhD, but the concept is multi layered taking in references from religious witch-hunts, gendered science, electromagnetic ghosts and Scottish offshore life. The audio is a separate recording of electromagnetic noise that in some parts sounds like water.

This clip is a precursor of a larger documentary-style film with a working title of Radio Woman, which follows a woman's quest to pick up a radio signal. The film will be based in isolated North-West Scotland and take for its influences films such as Breaking the Waves and The Wicker Man.

Eye Mouth

Lindsay — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 11:17:34 +0000

English

Immersion in salt water does strange things to skin, making it appear more lined, pasty and pallid. The eye squashed into the pressure of the mask looks years older than it would in its normal above-water state. The mouth is strained and lined with breathing through a valve. These reactions of the body to technological adaption and its environment, become more apparent when the photography is in black and white which removes the neutralising blue glow of the light-restrictive water. The thinness and fragile qualities of the skin, represented in tonal gradations, thus becomes far more apparent.

An Email from Variant

Lindsay — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 07:27:36 +0000

English

THE FUTURE OF THE ARTS IN SCOTLAND

CREATIVE SCOTLAND : An artists' briefing paper

There is much confusion over the formation of Creative Scotland and its remit, responsibilities and functions. What the proposed changes will mean for artists is being still further confused in what appears to be inter-agency horse trading. In the absence of transparency, the need for "confidence" in the "process" is much invoked. Here is what we think is actually going on...

The Scottish National Party (SNP) form the minority government of the Scottish parliament. Like the Labour Party before, the SNP have pledged a streamlining of the numerous Enterprise Agencies that are "responsible for implementing the economic development strategy of the government". This Network was to be streamlined to remove "wasteful duplication and overlap".

The current remit of Scottish Enterprise includes support of creative enterprises, some of which is delivered through its funding of the Cultural Enterprise Office, which provides a "Business Development Service for creative and cultural practitioners and micro businesses". Other creative industry pushers in Scotland include Highlands and Islands Enterprise, HI-Arts, the local authorities, NESTA (The National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts), Creative & Cultural Skills, Demos, Creative Industries Forum, Arts & Business, Scottish Cultural Enterprise, The Creative Entrepreneurs Club, Voluntary Arts Scotland, Scotland's Futures Forum, The British Council, and a plethora of training/advice/development agencies/companies all of whom will directly or indirectly receive public funding, which is not to begin to map agencies explicitly involved in the music scene, audience development, tourism, and think wonkery...

Creative Scotland has been proposed as the abolition of the Scottish Arts Council (SAC) and Scottish Screen. If the Scottish government get their way, having previously failed to get the Bill passed, these two Non-Departmental Public Bodies (NDPB) are to be superseded by a single body, Creative Scotland.

We are now told Creative Scotland will firstly take the form of a "publicly owned limited company" -- Creative Scotland was registered as a company at Companies House on 20 January 2006 -- after which it will be established as a statutory NDPB through the Public Services Reform Bill in early 2009 (which will deliver a 25% cut in Scottish public bodies and scrutiny bodies by 2011 if it is passed). This we believe is the same set up as Scottish Screen -- the Scottish Arts Council differs in that it is incorporated via Royal Charter, which we understand provides it additional protection (Scottish Screen has an in-house legal team).

EXPANDED REMIT

'Creative industries' is the central new feature in the remit for Creative Scotland. This remit is substantially expanded on previous roles to now include: "advertising; architecture; crafts; design; designer fashion; film; interactive leisure software; music; performing arts; publishing; TV and radio; and visual arts". The grant in aid from the Scottish government will not be increased to meet the increased remit.

The Culture Minister, Linda Fabiani, has stated Creative Scotland will "evolve complementary specialist advice and information services for creative enterprises. [...] In order for it to do that, I can confirm today that the resources that are devoted to that purpose by Scottish Enterprise will, from the beginning of the next financial year, transfer to creative Scotland." And the 'Public Support for Creative Industries Report', which the government has accepted, states Creative Scotland "will be the lead agency for the arts and creative enterprises in Scotland".

But the Minister has also stated, "It is not proposed that creative Scotland will take on the role or activities of the business gateway or Scottish Enterprise. That would just muddy the landscape".

And therein lies much of the confusion.

DUPLICATION

The Minister has stated, "we also propose that creative Scotland will build on and evolve existing good practice -- in the cultural enterprise office, for example -- in providing complementary tailored services for creative entrepreneurs in the first stages of business development", and elsewhere that Creative Scotland, "will be the national development body for the arts and culture, working in partnership with other organisations to support the creative industries."

Apparently, Scottish Enterprise's £50 million cultural budget will not be transfered to Creative Scotland. The administrative funding of £100,000 is being transferred from Scottish Enterprise to Creative Scotland for the Cultural Enterprise Office.

Just what is meant by "resources" and just what is or isn't being discussed regarding Scottish Enterprise and Creative Scotland all depends on which conflicting account you read.

Whether Creative Scotland or Scottish Enterprise should be the lead strategic body that receives the public funding for support of creative industries has via the "creative industries working group" (stacked with Enterprise Agencies) now been passed on to the creation of a "creative industries forum, which will include all such agencies [and now also believed to include COSLA] and answer the question about who takes which decisions."

CONSULTANCIES

The Cultural Commission, established in 2004 to gather "views and opinions from the people of Scotland on where and how culture in Scotland should be supported", cost us around £500,000. What is the justification and expense of the plethora of policy-based consultancies from 'A National Cultural Strategy for Scotland', by Bonnar Keenlyside, in 2000 right up to today, simply to end up at this juncture?

Anne Bonnar is today the Transition Director of Creative Scotland, for which the public pays her £10,000 a month. She was appointed in November 2007, 13 months ago. To date, a further nine consultancy firms at the cost of up to an additional £200,000 have been involved in the transition, including: John Knell, Intelligence Agency; Tom Fleming, Creative Consultany; Lesley Thomson, Liddell Thomson management consultancy; Lettoch Associates; Miles Harrison; David Teasdale; Deloitte Touche; Mike Kidd Associates; The Hayes Group. (£100,000-plus Creative Scotland consultancy cost under fire, The Herald, November 27 2008)

The Scottish Artists Union has established 82% of visual artists earned £5,000 per year (gross) or less from their artistic activity, and 29% earned nothing at all from making art.

CUTS

Initial transition costs for Creative Scotland were given at £700,000 in its Financial Memorandum, they were then raised to £1.4 million, and now they are speculated as being anything from £2m to £7m. These costs are expected to come out of Creative Scotland's grant in aid budget. The parliamentary Finance Committee is reported having said the transition costs were "not sufficiently detailed and had not taken consideration of issues such as the potential cost of redundancies (particularly regarding senior staff), pension issues, senior staff recruitment or office relocation. The estimate also contained no margin of uncertainty and gave no details on the assumptions upon which it had been based."

We are told Creative Scotland will inherit the £50 million grant in aid of the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen. It will also receive an increase of £5m, effectively a stand still in line with inflation over the first 2 years. Whereas the Sunday Herald has reported that the combined budgets amount to nearly £70m today (Creative crisis: the arts world in revolt, December 09, 2008), which would amount to a £20m cut in provision before we even start.

Section 99. of the 'Stage 1 Report on the Creative Scotland Bill' is worth quoting in full regarding Creative Scotland's budget:
"The Finance Committee noted that the new body will have the same grant in aid that would have been provided to the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen despite Creative Scotland having 'new and wider functions than its antecedent bodies'. The Finance Committee received written evidence from the PCS and Unite trades unions, which represent staff at the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen. The unions expressed concerns regarding the possible effects that an increase in remit without an increase in budget could have on the workforce, stating that it could put 'considerable pressure on the budget for staff and workloads' and that it would be 'left to an increasingly demoralised workforce to create something new and radical'.”

DISPLACING FUNDING

Given what will be, if not initially then quite quickly, a shortfall, Fabiani has stated: “If formed, Creative Scotland will add to the range of funding sources available to artists and creative practitioners. As well as grants, it will develop a wider portfolio of funding methods including loans and investments." This is reinforced further in the same Sunday Herald article: "A spokeswoman from the Creative Scotland transition team said: 'Creative Scotland will be looking at a range of alternative investment models, with the aim of finding and increasing sources of funding.' Tax incentives, venture capital, loans and corporate investment are all potential models previously mentioned by the transition team."

This is a fundamental ideological shift.

The SAC has now put out yet another consultancy tender, for "21st Century financing for the arts and creative industries in Scotland Study" to report back within 6 months, which "should include an examination of taxation policies, and other fiscal measures" for both "the arts and creative industries in Scotland". This leads to question exactly what the SNP's evidence-base was in Scotland for promising 'artists' reduced income tax liability, coupled with a funding model which is to incorporate attracting resources from philanthropists, venture capitalists and corporate sponsorship?

INEQUALITIES

Before the credit crunch and the property bubble bursting, there was a received notion (via Richard Florida) that there is such a thing as a 'creative class' intensely interested in cultural goods of many kinds, which in turn gave rise to the idea that cities must 'invest' in and through culture; supposedly-benign terms such as 'creative cities' and 'creative clusters' have become increasingly prevalent as a way of describing culture-led regeneration strategies that appropriate the 'moral prestige' of the creative artist.

An abstract rhetoric of creativity has also become increasingly important to the fueling of labour markets marked by irregular, insecure and unprotected work; this argument in turn has had much wider implications in that it has pushed education policy much more strongly in the direction of a discourse of skills, on the basis that future national prosperity depends upon making-up for a supposed lack of creative, innovative workers. But Creative Industries policy, while seeming to offer a certain freedom of creative autonomy and self-realisation for workers, is in fact explicitly bound up in finding new articulations of existing power relations -- the way in which notions of passion for, and pleasure in, work serve as disciplinary devices, enabling very high levels of (self-) exploitation, noting the extremely low levels of union organisation in most cultural industries.

This unqualified policy and theory using the term Creative Industries tends to be based on arguments which all too often come close to accommodating, if not explicitly endorsing, rising inequality and a considerable degree of exploitation associated with contemporary neoliberalism -- and now its failure. With 'Creative Industries' policy there is a lack of attention to the way capitalist markets repeatedly work with other processes to produce inequalities of access and outcome in the domain of culture, as in many other aspects of society. Ultimately, the limits of the discourse appear to serve policies that reinforce both economic and cultural inequalities in our societies and diminish real social freedoms which remain enshrined in UNESCO universal declarations. Something the formation of Creative Scotland has no choice but to address, at some level.

EXTRACTING THE VALUE

We believe that Creative Scotland will look to generate income streams (for itself) through the exploitation of cultural institutions and cultural workers, particularly through increasing the burden of debt. Increasingly, they will be treated as the consumer base for a new financialised system of commercial 'creative' exploitation -- indebting artists and organisations whilst exploiting retention of Intellectual Property Rights.

NESTA was the outcome of such an exploration of copyright- and profit-orientated approaches to ‘investment’ -- “set up with Lottery funding to help people turn bright ideas into products, services or techniques with social and commercial benefit”. NESTA advocates its retention of patent rights for intellectual property resulting from publicly funded work and the wider state exploitation of IPR. This is a significant shift from previous public sector models of support (however partial and problematic they continue to be with regard to elite power and their exercise of cultural taste) to a commercial model of exploitation still ultimately based on monopoly power.

" [T]he cultural industries are seen as complex value chains where profit is extracted at key nodes in the chain through control of production investment and distribution and the key “creative” labour is exploited not, as in the classic Marxist analysis of surplus value, through the wage bargain, but through contracts determining the distribution of profits to various rights holders negotiated between parties with highly unequal power (Caves 2000). [For example, through the exploitation of Intellectual Property Right, as NESTA advocates & promotes] ... [T]he political economy approach placed its major emphasis on the technologies of distribution, on the ways in which key economic and regulatory debates were to be seen as struggles over access to distribution under shifting technological conditions without any necessary effect on either the nature of the product being distributed or the relation with the audience. In particular, this analysis stressed the ways in which the profits of the whole process were returned to controllers of technological distribution systems rather than to the original producers of the cultural products or services."
('From Cultural to Creative Industries: An analysis of the implications of the “creative industries” approach to arts and media policy making in the United Kingdom', Nicholas Garnham, International Journal of Cultural Policy Vol 11, No. 1 2005)

Liberal Democrat MSP Jeremy Purvis challenged Fabiani over the "provision to provide loans for business enterprise, although we still do not know how that will be delivered, or, indeed, what priority the new organisation will give to business support -- as opposed to acting as a grant-making organisation for arts bodies -- as there must be some form of financial assistance and there will be a cost in creative Scotland providing such services." Indeed, a significant aspect of the financial crisis has been "financial institutions that aren't banks from a regulatory point of view but nonetheless perform banking functions." (Guardian Weekend, Dec 6 2008) It is doubtful a coincidence that Ewan Brown, an ex-banker complicit in 'greed is good' demutualisation and deregulation of financial services, has been placed in charge of overseeing Creative Scotland Ltd and its metamorphosis.

CRUNCH

If Creative Scotland mirrors other European models, and given what the Culture Minister has said to date, the likelihood is that in Scotland, too, there will be significant financial pressure to replace grants with a system of credit or loans for both artists and organisations. Adopting an exploitative commercial model for 'creative' production would immediately place Creative Scotland at ideological odds with cultural organisations and services in Scotland established as not-for-profit. Furthermore, given the economic climate is predicted to worsen, such a move is sure to be ruinous for the organisations and infrastructure reliant on grant funding. There is evidence. A credit/loans system for arts organisation has only recently been tried and tested in Europe, before the height of the credit crunch. It failed. The Catalan Department of Creative Industries is currently under investigation for their calamity.

As the state seeks to reorganise and in part withdraw its already limited forms of public sector support and economically mobilise culture, cultural institutions are being given the task of attracting inward investment and contributing to cultural tourism and urban regeneration. We are, then, caught in the midst of various forms of neoliberal enclosure and restructuring, which is seen by competing individuals, networks and agencies to offer openings for a range of agendas seeking to gain purchase on institutional structures/bureaucracies. It is precisely this meshing of market interests that effaces any significant debate of the underlying economic antagonisms in Scotland.

So what of the 'creatives' that are to be the consumer base for any new financialised system of commercial 'creative' development? A study by Push.co.uk, the student guide, in August 2008 expects undergraduate students to be more than £21,500 in debt by the time most graduate in 2011. The normally Labour-loyal NUS has said: "It is clear that many students are sleepwalking into financial crisis. As the credit crunch kicks in, and with food and fuel costs set to rise even further, we can expect more and more students to get into serious financial difficulty, with many having to resort to taking out [additional] commercial loans..." The Council of Mortgage Lenders reported in October that 45,000 homes in the UK are expected to be repossessed by the end of this year.

It is widely accepted that a cause of the current financial crisis was the rampant free-market exploitation of debt/credit and the introduction of speculation and risk into an otherwise marginally more stable affair. With regard to Creative Scotland, we can detect no acknowledgement of this global tectonic shift and the deepening international financial crisis, and how it will affect artists in Scotland.

http://www.creativescotland.blogspot.com

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http://www.creativescotland.blogspot.com

Creative Scotland is the proposed merger of the public bodies the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen. Culture Minister, Linda Fabiani, recently insisted of Creative Scotland: “We all want to get this up and running.” In truth, this apparent urgency conceals a major ideological fault line between public and private provision in Scotland.

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Interface

Lindsay — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 07:28:13 +0000

English

Professor Kerstin Mey from the School of Art and Design at the University of Ulster will be giving a talk the Interface: Research in Technologies and Design project that she convenes (see http://interface.rehabstudio.co.uk/ ). The title of her talk is , `Art, Archives and Publics. INTERFACE explores two key processes that underlie innovative research practice in art and design. One is the investigation and redefinition of inherited categories of value and the other is the impact of digital media and new technologies on the production, distribution and mediation of art and design. Both areas are examined in the context of the wider social/economic/political arena of Northern Ireland and in the wider world http://interface.rehabstudio.co.uk/.

Professor Mey's research focuses on the situatedness of contemporary cultural practices and is concerned with gendered and multi- and interdisciplinary perspectives. She has published 20th Century and current art, aesthetics cultural policy and she is series editor of transcript books on contemporary visual culture, published by the School of Fine Art, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee, in association with Manchester University Press, including Sculpsit. Contemporary Artists on Sculpture and Beyond (2001) and (ed. with Simon Yuill), Crosswired - Communication, Interface, Locality (2004). Her book Art and Obscenity was published in 2005. Her curatorial activities include Duel: Tracy Mackenna and Karla Sachse, Henry Moore Institute 1996; Bodies of Substance: Margaret Hunter, Azade Koker, Ping Qiu, Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh, February/March 2002 and Gakerie M, Berlin, April 2003.

Professor Mey's talk and workshop is the last in the Royal Society of Edinburgh sponsored series of conferences and workshops in the project, Investigating the Archives http://www.investigatingthearchive.org/ and takes place at Dundee University Tower Building at 2pm, Friday 12 December 2008.