Sporton Abstracts

The Sporton Inaugural Lecture

2011-10-27T19:17:00.002Z

Tuesday, November 1st 2011, at 7.15pmGregory Sporton is the new Professor of Digital Creativity at the School of Art, BIAD. As Director of the Visualisation Research Unit, he has been involved with the development of new technologies and their application in the Visual and Performing Arts for some years and has long-standing creative links with the Birmingham Conservatoire. His research interests

The Watertower: Gaming for Heritage

2011-01-22T21:26:00.000Z

In September 2009 the Visualisation Research Unit at the School of Art, Birmingham City University were approached by the Selly Oak Hospital Trust with a view to developing a project for the decommissioning of the Hospital and the subsequent move to the new Queen Elizabeth II facility. Selly Oak was no ordinary hospital: commissioned during the Second World War, it had continued to treat war

Dance at the Interface: Issues and Solutions for Performing in the Techno-space

2010-03-30T17:45:00.002Z

At first glance the potential relationship between dance and technology is not obvious.From the apparent simplicity of human movement in an expressive range on the one hand to the brutal logic of the technological processes on the other, the sympathy and connection is not immediately obvious. Technological development in the dance space is about assessing the challenges posed by the data produced

Creative Identity Theft: Issues for Artists in Collaborative Online Environments.

2010-01-10T21:57:00.001Z

One of the most significant challenges to the development of a 'new media art' has been the question of ownership and its relationship to authority and authorship in online environments. Whilst this has been broadly true in relation to all areas of what we have come to call the 'cultural industries', the argument here is about how this differs and goes far more directly to the heart of the fine

Visualisation for the dancer: image-based technologies as support to dancer training

2009-06-30T13:29:00.001Z

Imagery in dance training has generally been a relationship between the teacher's suggestion and the dancer's imagination. With the development of technology-enabled visualisation techniques, dancers can acquire a more objective view of the movements and position of their bodies, without being distracted by extraneous information. Visualisation technologies have become accepted and standardised

Putting Your Foot Down: the Aesthetics of Latency

2008-12-15T19:58:00.000Z

Paper presentation proposal, Dr. Gregory Sporton & Tychonas Michailidis, Visualisation Research Unit, Department of Art, Birmingham City University.Traditionally, latency is considered as a problem in performance contexts, and nowhere has this been more apparent than in the use of the Internet for networked-based performance. The absence of latency in stand-alone computers contrasts with the

Writing with Her Body: Transference of Movement, Spectacle and Meaning through Technology

2008-06-11T21:05:00.000Z

Writing with Her Body: Transference of Movement, Spectacle and Meaning through TechnologyWhen the American dancer Loie Fuller first appeared in Paris, she created a sensation. Her performances combined her graceful physical presence with the latest in stage technology, including lighting devices and gel colours (for which she often owned patents), augmented by prosthetics and vast quantities of

In the Service of the State: Art and Politics in the Soviet Union

2008-02-08T14:54:00.000Z

A presentation on the impact and influence of the political changes in the Soviet Union on the Arts community from 1917-1940.When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917 they inspired a generation of young Russian artists. These artists were looking for practical ways to contribute to the new polity that would eventually become the Soviet Union, and to express the radical ideas of the revolution

Science of Dance Presentation

2008-02-05T18:27:00.000Z

2007-08-23T15:22:00.000Z

Visualising and Reality'Visualisation' (or 'visualization') is, it seems, a difficult and problematic word. It is worth clarifying the meanings that have developed in various research contexts because of the potential for confusion in its application, and also to note a distinction in how this word is applied differently in different research environments. This is important because of the

2007-07-25T08:20:00.000Z

Transcirpt of Presentation at VizNet event, Birmingham 19th June, 2007 Gregory Sporton Ok I guess most of you will already have seen the presentation I gave last time at Loughborough, and I thought today I would just have a look at one or two things. One issue that for me seems to come out fairly regularly, as people know my background is, I work here in the department of art, and I thought

And, With & Through; The technologies of performance

2007-05-22T12:34:00.000Z

And, With & Through; The technologies of performance Working with digital technology in the context of performance has now diversified significantly to allow us to develop taxonomies about application and production. This presentation looks at categories of emerging practice in

The 'e' Prefix: e-Science, e-Art & the New Creativity

2007-04-19T16:24:00.000Z

The 'e' Prefix: e-Science, e-Art & the New CreativityThe division of labour that has kept the sciences and the arts apart for the past two hundred years is collapsing with the development of the 'e' prefix. As the craft practices of both areas proceed in their own directions, the 'e' component of both the sciences and the arts have created communities of interest that suspect they hold the key

The Networked Multi-disciplinary Performance Environment

2007-03-19T16:39:00.000Z

For performance artists, the development of stable, networked performance environments has relied heavily on the importation of models of the ‘social’ inter-personal communication type. Given that such communication responds to merely an aspect of the needs of artists, in practice this proves to be an imperfect and incomplete tool. In response to the challenge of producing a more rounded

The New Passive: Opportunities for Spectators in Interactive Performance

2007-03-19T11:30:00.000Z

Distributed digital media has produced a new space for performance that has much in common with old spaces: opportunities for spectator anonymity and passivity in particular. The shady interactions of the lurker are difficult to identify and often lead to misapprehensions about the success or failure of online performance. The web statistics rarely count how quickly the back button was pressed.