Author Archives: Helinä Kuusela

Conference: Northern Light – Landscape Photography and Evocations of the North

Department of Media Arts and Communication, Sheffield Hallam University/ 4th & 5th July 2016

 

CONFERENCE REGISTRATION NOW OPEN

 

This conference, and related exhibition, will explore the ways in which photographic images address notions of a Northern landscape. We aim to further our understanding of current image making from across northern Europe, the Nordic regions, the Arctic and Canada through bringing together scholars and practitioners to discuss a wide range of lens based practices and critical approaches, from both contemporary and historical perspectives.
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

 

Liz Wells, Professor in Photographic Culture School of Art and Media (Faculty of Arts & Humanities) Plymouth University and visiting professor, Belfast School of Art, University of Ulster ‘Nordic light, lands and landscape: Photographic Modes of Investigation’
Simon Roberts, award winning photographer; visiting lecturer on the European Master of Fine Art course at IED Madrid at and an Honorary Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Nottingham On photographic work made in Russia during 2004/5 – published and exhibited as ‘Motherland’ and ‘Polyarnye Nochi (Polar Nights)’
THEMES

 

THE ARCTIC NORTH: AT THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION THE NORTHERN LANDSCAPE AND PHOTOGRAPHY IN AN EXPANDED FIELD
SCOTLAND: LANDSCAPES OF LIVED EXPERIENCE NORTHERN ENGLAND: BETWEEN GENRE AND INDETERMINACY THE SUBLIME: UNSTABLE AND CONTESTED THE NORTHERN LANDSCAPE: CONCEIVED, ENCOUNTERED, IMAGINED THE ANIMATED LANDSCAPE

 

ASSOCIATED EXHIBITION IN THE SIA GALLERY (4 –31 JULY)
Full two day conference – £60; Day tickets – £30; Students – £20 for full conference, £10 for one day; Senior Citizens – £20 for full conference, £10 for one day; Unwaged rate – £10 for the full conference

 

TWITTER – @2016northlight

Call for Participation: Open Fields Conference and RIXC Festival Exhibition

Call for Participation: Open Fields Conference and RIXC Festival Exhibition

Call for Open Fields Conference abstracts and Exhibition proposals

DEADLINE Extended: June 20, 2016

FgVtCiHz6ocd1PeOAPPLY NOW!
http://festivalconf.rixc.lv

OPEN FIELDS Conference and Exhibition
in the framework of RIXC Art Science Festival 2016
Riga, September 29 – October 1, 2016
Venue:The National Library of Latvia

Open Fields is the title of this year’s international conference taking place in the framework of the annual RIXC Art Science festival in Riga. It brings together international scholars and artists, working at the intersection of arts, humanities and science. Open Fields will focus on artistic research, the changing role of arts, its transformative potential, and relation to the sciences. This call for participation invites contributions and conference paper proposals by scholars, artists, artists-researchers, art and media theorists, data designers and critical engineers, as well as doctoral students, and scientists from different Fields – biology, ecology, environment, digital technologies, renewable energy, etc., who are engaged in experiencing the transformative potential of arts.

For the exhibition and conference, we are looking for research that is located in the contested territory between academic knowledge production and independent creative practices. Open Fields will be investigating the use of data visualizations and other mappings of the contemporary. It will look into areas such as open commons, the future of social interaction, data representation and visualisation, critical design, sustainable infrastructures, eco-aesthetics, techno-ecologies, bio-hacking and other techniques of a transformative potential. No Field is excluded, yet there should always be a connection with art; it is highly likely that art works and conference papers will touch on several Fields, not one. It is such an enhanced understanding of transdisciplinarity that drives this undertaking.

Research Questions: How art and other creative practices can meaningfully contribute to the environmental, technological and scientific challenges of our time? What kind of new knowledge can be created through artistic practice that collaborates with science, technology and other disciplines? And how to deal with contemporary aesthetics, which has undergone dramatic changes during the past decades and keeps changing again as influenced by current post-media situation, data visualization and other contemporary conditions?

The Conference also will feature “Playing Fields” session on contemporary taxonomy, maintaining a connection between the exhibition and the conference. It also will include “Open Fields – Book Review” (PechaKucha) session, providing an opportunity for the speakers to present their new books for other participants and the audience.

* Conference keynote speakers:

Christiane PAUL / New School / Whitney Museum / New York
Jussi PARIKKA / Winchester School of Art / University of Southampton / UK
and others – tbc.

* Exhibition: The Open Fields conference will be complemented by the exhibition taking place in the new Exhibition Hall of the National Library of Latvia. Partly curated, partly peer-reviewed, the Exhibition will represent works by artists, artists-researchers and data designers, who are challenging the notion of art and contemporary aesthetics by moving across, bringing together and converging different knowledge, various media and diverse Fields, as well as using scientific, cultural and social data as new artistic medium, and interpreting them in a new and meaningful ways.
The Exhibition will be open from September 29 – November 6, 2016.

* Proceeding: The papers will be published in conference proceeding, which will come out in the Acoustic Space, peer-reviewed journal & book series. The call for full paper submissions will be announced during the conference.
http://acousticspacejournal.com

Conference Chair: Dr. Rasa SMITE / RIXC / Art Research Lab, Liepaja University, Latvia
Festival and Exhibition curators: Dr. Raitis SMITS, Ainars KAMOLINS, Dr. Rasa SMITE
Playing Fields session will be organized and moderated by Armin MEDOSCH / Austria

DEADLINE FOR CONFERENCE ABSTRACTS:

June 20, 2016

We welcome proposals by scholars, artists, artists-scholars, designers, PhD researchers, curators, media theorists, art historians, science philosophers, cultural innovators, bio-hackers, critical engineers and data designers, as well as scientists from different Fields – biology, ecology, environment, digital technologies, renewable energy, and others, who are engaged in the transformative potential of arts.

Conference themes include:
* investigating contemporaneity, its representation and experience in and through artistic practice and art-science research
* data visualization, and its impact on art, science and contemporary aesthetics
* art and science – challenging new ways of knowledge creation and its representation
* changing weathers – networked responses to geophysical and geopolitical shifts across Europe and the globe
* eco-aesthetics – from sustainable architecture and critical design to techno-ecological art practices

Conference proposal should consist of:
* title and abstract (250 words),
* 5–6 keywords,
* and short author’s biography (160 words).

Please submit your proposals online:
http://festivalconf.rixc.lv

Notifications: June 22, 2016

DEADLINE FOR EXHIBITION PROPOSALS:

June 20, 2016

Partly curated, partly peer-reviewed, the Festival Exhibition welcomes proposals by artists, artists-researchers, artists-engineers, data designers, as well as practice-based doctoral students, who are challenging the notion of art and contemporary aesthetics by moving across, bringing together and converging different knowledge, various media and diverse Fields, as well as by those, who are using scientific, cultural and social data as new artistic medium, interpreting them in a new and meaningful ways.

Artwork submissions should include:
* description of idea and technical requirements (1–2 pages),
* short biography and/or portfolio,
* additional material (photos/video/links/etc.)

Please submit your artwork proposal via e-mail to the address:
rixc (at) rixc.org

Additional material, if the files are larger than 5MB, should be sent via wetransfer.com.

Notifications: June 30, 2016

* About Open Fields Conference

Following the last year’s successful launch of Renewable Futures (renewablefutures.net – the biannual travelling conference series) – this year RIXC with its European partners from Changing Weathers project, and other collaborating institutions and universities from the Baltic Sea region and Europe, are introducing Open Fields, aiming to develop it towards an annual Riga based gathering for the discussion on artistic reseach, the changing role of arts in societies, art’s transformative potential, and relations to sciences.

http://rixc.org/en/festival/

* The International Conference  Scientific Organizational board:
Dr. Lev MANOVICH / Software Studies Initiative / The Graduate Center, City University of New York, US
Dr. Armin MEDOSCH / Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University, Belgrade, Serbia / Initiator of the Technopolitics working group in Vienna, Austria
PhD. Jussi PARIKKA / Winchester School of Art / University of Southampton / UK
PhD. Geoff COX / School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark
Prof. Kristin BERGAUST / Oslo and Akershus University, Norway
Asoc. prof. Laura BELOFF / IT University in Copenhagen, Denmark / Finnish Bioart Society, Helsinki, Finland
Dr. Lily DIAZ-KOMMONEN / Head of Research Department of Media, Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Helsinki, Finland
Dr. Ursula Damm / Bauhaus University Weimar, Germany – tbc.
Dr. Andris TEIKMANIS / Vice-rector, the Art Academy of Latvia, Riga
Dr. Vytautas MICHELKEVICIUS / Nida Art Colony, Vilnius Academy of Arts, Lithuania
PhD. Margrét Elísabet Ólafsdóttir / Art Education at the University of Akureyri, Iceland
Andrew Gryf PATERSON / Pixelache Helsinki / SERDE / Aalto University ARTS Media department, Helsinki, Finland
Regine DEBATTY / we-make-money-not-art.com, London, UK – tbc.
Dr. Piibe PIIRMA / Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn, Estonia
Dr. Janis KLEPERIS / Hydrogen Laboratory, Solid State Physics Institute, Latvian University, Riga, Latvia
and others – tbc.

* The venue of the conference and exhibition: the new building of the National Library of Latvia (http://www.lnb.lv/en/about-library/nll-building).

* Organizer: RIXC Center for New Media Culture.

* Partners: Conference and Exhibition is organized by RIXC in collaboration with the Art Research Lab of Liepaja University, the Art Academy of Latvia and Changing Weathers – Creative Europe’s project partners (http://www.changingweathers.net/)

* Exhibition partner: the National Library of Latvia

* Contact: rixc (at) rixc.org,

Address: RIXC, Maskavas iela 4, Riga, LV-1050, Latvia

Phone: +371 67228478 (office), +371 26546776 (Rasa Smite)

* Support: EU Program Creative Europe, the State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia, Riga City Council, the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia, and others.

Narrating the Marginal – Seminar: Call for short notes on Experiential Knowledge and Empowerment in Artistic Research

Rovaniemi, Finland. December 2016

Narrating the Marginal

Seminar: Call for short notes on Experiential Knowledge and Empowerment in Artistic Research

https://margintomargin.com/seminar/

9.12.2016: Asko ja Esko – sali, University of Lapland, Rovaniemi

Artists and makers negotiate and sustain their identities and existences through their practices in spite of the challenges they face. These narratives reveal how the qualities of life and work environments impact their art practices. Just as art-making offers ways to ‘work through’ particular life challenges, narratives offer ways to make sense of difficult circumstances. Narratives of empowerment and care come about through art practices, making and storytelling, offering women ways to cope with their realities and come to terms with the marginalities that they encounter.

Art is a medium that enables the shaping of identities of marginalised women, while it also serves as a tool to process relationships within the communities they live in. Female artists may move from one role to another, be it spouse, mother, researcher, professional, teacher, artist, maker or friend. As a result, they are continuously navigating identities and marginalities as a means to cope within their communities. This seminar will discuss how art and narratives function in social realms and what role stories play in socially sustaining artists and their making practices.

The seminar themes explore the uses of practice-based research, art process and their outcomes. Nimkulrat discusses the importance of documentation and reflection in practice-based research (2007). Practice-based, or practice-led research, is a widely used research approach in art, based on the idea that practice uniquely contributes information to research in ways that are not possible through other investigative approaches. Multiple concerns are raised around practice-based research, such as the process being predominantly dependent on subjective frameworks, thus not contributing to the generation of new knowledge (Koskinen, 2009). Yet, practice-based research has established its own path in design and the arts. A number of methodological enquiries have been published, bolstering the validity of practice-based research (Mäkelä and Routarinne, 2006; Nimkulrat and O’Riley, 2009; Mäkelä and Nimkulrat, 2011).

This seminar enquires:

  1. How do women artists define the marginal? What are their art-related coping mechanisms?
  2. How do women cope with fluid identities and how can they benefit from identity shaping processes in marginal conditions? How do they transfer themselves from one role to another? How do women artists visualise and communicate their identities within marginal conditions? Can new technologies and media enable the shaping of identities in marginal conditions?
  3. How do women artists discuss their roles within communities using art processes? Can art and its related processes empower communities? How does art contribute to interventions within communities?

The seminar presents keynote lectures from Professor Nithikul Nimkulrat from the Estonian Academy of Arts, Professor Jaana Erkkilä and Professor Eija Timonen from the University of Lapland.

Submission: Short notes of a maximum of 2000 words excluding references will be double blind reviewed and published digitally as part of the seminar proceedings. Email your short note to junior researcher Daria Akimenko (daria.s.akimenko@gmail.com) by August, 15, 2016.

***

Artistic workshop and Exhibition: Call for participation

5.-8.12.2016: University of Lapland | 21.12.2016 – 12.2.2017: ARKTIKUM, KATVE 1 and 2

The seminar will go along with an artistic workshop that will take place 5 – 8 December 2016 at the University of Lapland. (Although the 6th of December is Finnish Independence Day and a public holiday, participants are welcome to continue their contributions.)  The workshop will engage local female artists and makers of different disciplines in interventions, collaborative work and installations. The working themes and questions of the workshop are similar to those of the seminar.

The artistic outcomes will be exhibited at Arktikum, galleries Katve 1 and 2, as well as in selected public locations.

Preliminary timeline:

5.12.2016 9.00-16.00 Welcome, short introductions of projects and people, constructing projects

6.12.2016 Public holiday, participants may continue working

7.12.2016 9.00-16.00 Work on the projects

8.12. 2016 9.00-16.00 Work on the projects, general sharing, planing the exhibition

Participation: If you are interested in joining the workshop you are invited to submit your CV and an abstract of not more than 500 words outlining your project proposal and artistic media. The organising committee is looking for creative and inventive projects with no restrictions on project formulations. Email your CV and abstract to junior researcher Daria Akimenko (daria.s.akimenko@gmail.com) by August,15, 2016.

Interpretation, Narrative and Identity -Towards a framework for interpretation and reflection on cultural heritage in the digital age

 

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Whether it is in relation to an activity, an event, or an item of knowledge regarding a particular subject matter, interpretation refers to our capacity to understand and reflect about something. As more and more of our every day life and activities shift to the virtual dimension, there is a need for critical dialogue and reflection about our material and cultural environments in order to understand how the ‘digital turn’ is altering our sense-making capabilities. In this two-day seminar organized by the Department of Media (Media Lab) at Aalto University we present a range of methods and tools that can be used to analyze narratives resulting from the research process, including first-person accounts. We also explore how narrative analysis can be used to support activities such as the reading and authoring of new narratives as well as the uncovering of meaning not explicit in the text. Additionally we present the notion of semiosphere as a framework to envision how the cultural heritage narratives resulting from such interpretative processes intermingle in particular digital ecosystems in order to reveal important aspects about collective identities and cultural dynamics.

Place: Miestentie 3, Room 414, Otaniemi
Dates: 26-27 May, 2016
Credits: For doctoral candidates it is possible to receive 3 credits. For information and registration: helina.kuusela@aalto.fi

 

SCHEDULE OF ACTIVITIES

Bringing both the personal and the meta-level narratives into research
Prof. Lily Díaz-Kommonen
26 May, 2016

9:00 – 10:00 Presentation and discussion
10:00–10:30 Coffee break
10:30–12:00 Hands on session. Participants work in groups.

Our current human modes of action are related to identities, social roles, and context (in space and time) that, as modes of action, become externalized and made present in the tangible and intangible artefacts of our making. These cultural forms however, not only exist diachronically but also emerge dynamically and synchronically as simultaneities from within the relationships of all the system’s elements. One of the challenges that a researcher faces is that of unfolding all the concurrent processes with their respective articulations and interpretations (viewpoints or perspectives) while maintaining such forms beyond the data- gathering process.

The session will present an experimental method that combines first person viewpoint ethnography (auto-ethnography and duo-ethnography) with artefact analysis to support interpretation and narrative creation. The objective is to go beyond traditional approaches where narratives with pre-configured roles are presented to passive audiences for consumption. Instead we seek to enable opportunities for active, dynamic, remediation of user-generated content.

Narrative analysis

Dr. Paul Mulholland, PhD.

13:00 – 14:00 Presentation and discussion
14:00–14:30 Coffee break
14:30–16:00 Hands on group session. Participants work in groups.

Narratives, such as those produced when interpreting a cultural artefact, can be analysed in a number of ways. Narrative analysis can help to reveal additional meaning that may not be explicit in the narrative itself. This could help a reader to understand the narrative in greater depth or assist an author in extending the narrative in new ways. Narrative analysis can also identify common structures that can be found across a number of narratives. These can help to reveal what makes a good story as well as similarities and differences in how we share and understand stories.

This session will introduce a number of ways in which narratives can analysed. This will include consideration of the following: (i) the events of the story, who is involved and when and where the events take place; (ii) the coherence of the narrative and the extent to which the events contribute to an overall story; (iii) the plot or overall structure of the narrative; (iv) the emotional content of the narrative and the emotional response it elicits in the reader; (v) the themes or intended meaning of the narrative, (vi) the timing of events and their position in the overall narrative.

The session will also introduce some of the technologies that can be used to support narrative analysis, for example, tools for identifying entities (such as people, places, objects) from the text and the conceptual relationships between them, and tools for identifying the emotion or sentiment associated with the whole narrative or its parts.

Summary session

Discussion and planning of work for next day. 26 May 2016
16:00 – 17:00

Narrative in the digital semiosphere

Professor Luis Emilio Bruni
27 May 2016

9:00 – 10:00 Presentation and discussion
10:00–10:30 Coffee break
10:30–12:00 Hands on session. Participants work in groups.

Ubiquitous, immersive and interactive multimodal media can be seen as a central element in the evolving character and construction of new Identities – or more precisely narratives of identities. Accelerated by technology, this process has become a multidimensional and multilayer phenomenon which spans through a web of emerging intertwined spheres and domains, encompassing inseparably the individual, the social and the cultural; in domains that go from private to public, from family to work, from local to national to regional to global, touching the many nuances of interest groups and stakeholders co-existing heterarchically in a globalized civil society. In this context, how can the interpretations of cultural heritage objects and processes – represented and mediated in digital culture – contribute to the establishment of new identities and novel narratives of the past? How can these processes influence the ways we interpret our time and imagine the future?

Inspired in Juri Lotman’s Semiotic Theory of Culture, in this session we suggest a framework to investigate what the emerging narratives could be revealing about identity, creativity, innovation, knowledge, and imagination (of the future). Therefore, we cross the discussion of individual and collective narratives of identity with Lotman’s complex diachronic dynamics of meaning making and negotiation in the semiotic cultural space of the semiosphere, with its central notions of boundary and frontier, center and periphery, “us” and “them”, ins and outs, otherness and marginality. Concomitantly, we present the notion of technosphere as the interface between cognition and culture, and suggest empirical avenues to investigate narrative cognition and multimodal narratives in digital culture.

Synthesis

27 May 2016
13:00 – 15:00 Participants work together on their projects. 15:30 – 15:30 Coffee break
15:30 – 17:00 Summary presentations.

Tutors

Luis Emilio Bruni is Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology, Aalborg University, an a recognized expert in bio-cognitive semiotics with expertise in interactive narratives, communication science, cognitive modeling and psychophysiological methods. He received a multidisciplinary international training (B. Sc in Environmental Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University; M. Sc in International and Global relations at Universidad Central de Venezuela; PhD in Molecular Biology and Biosemiotics at the University of Copenhagen), and has an extensive interdisciplinary scientific production and didactic experience. Currently, he directs the Augmented Cognition Lab at AD:MT-AAU, which is dedicated to the study of perception, cognition, affective states and aesthetic experience when interacting with complex stimuli and narrative content provided through immersive and representational interactive displays. He is the elected President of the Nordic Association for Semiotic Studies and is board member in the International Society of Biosemiotic Studies and in the International Society for Information Studies.

Lily Díaz-Kommonen is Professor of New Media at Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture. Her research interests include the combined use of anthropology and new media to promote human-centered Her experience as principal investigator is in research and development projects in digital media and cultural heritage. She works primarily with qualitative methods, including design research and has written over 70 publications in areas related to art, design, heritage and new media. Ubiquitous Computing, Complexity and Culture an anthology published by Routledge in 2015 and co-edited with Ulrik Ekman, Jay David Bolter, Martin Søndegaard and Maria Engberg, is her latest result as an author.

Paul Mulholland is a Research Fellow in the Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK. He has been an investigator on a number of UK and international research projects related to technology enhanced learning, cultural heritage and digital archives. Previous work has included the research and development of: innovative applications for use by museum staff and visitors; mobile applications for formal and informal learning; automated narrative generation tools for education and entertainment; and semantic and knowledge technologies for learning in organisations. He has a first degree in psychology, a Masters degree in computing and PhD in cognitive science. He has published over 100 journal papers, conference articles and book chapters. He is Deputy Editor of the International Journal of Human Computer Studies.

Spring Steam 2016 19 – 22 May @ Kellohalli

Spring Steam 2016 brings together design-minded people to Kellohalli, Teurastamo on 19–22 May.

The field of Visual Communication steams ahead in the four-day exhibition “I Used to Be a Graphic Designer” where the past meets the future. The exhibition celebrates Aalto University’s Visual Communication Design Programme’s (formerly the Graphic Design Programme) 90th anniversary.

During the weekend you can participate in workshops and enjoy shopping at the Graphic Design Spring Sales, organised in collaboration with Grafia and Kuvittajat. See you at Kellohalli!

Follow us on Facebook for the latest information: www.facebook.com/springsteam2016

Aalto Festival 16-31 May 2016

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24.5.2016 Hosana Celeste Oliveira: Digital and physical assistive interfaces for arts – From the diffusion to the inclusion

Dear all,

Mlab / Crucinble Studio visiting researcher Hosana Ceseste Oliveira will present her research group project Digital and physical assistive interfaces for arts: From the diffusion to the inclusion

on Tuesday the 24th May 2016 1-2 pm at Miestentie 3, room 429. Warmest welcome!

Digital and physical assistive interfaces for arts: From the diffusion to the inclusion

Hosana Celeste Oliveira

Visiting researcher at the Department of Media  / Crucible Studio and PhD Candidate at São Paulo State University, São Paulo, Brazil

In this presentation I introduce the activities carried out in my research group GIIP (São Paulo State University, Brazil), focusing on the project “Digital and physical assistive interfaces for arts: From the diffusion to the inclusion”. I will show some partial results and comment how my work at Crucible Studio/Media Lab contributes to the project. The project brings together the efforts of several researchers from Brazil and Spain, including myself as a PhD student. It aims to create low cost and free access assistive interfaces to teach and make art. For this purpose we are investigating communication solutions for cases of quadriplegia that are associated with speech disability. We foresee, however, that the interfaces will be scalable and applicable to other types of disabilities or even different uses purposes. The creation process of these interfaces is inspired by the case study of Dr. Ana Amália Tavares Barbosa, as well as her teaching method in art education. Dr. Barbosa is artist, art educator and postdoctoral researcher at GIIP and became the first quadriplegic to obtain a doctorate degree in Brazil.

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Mlab Doctor of Arts seminar Thu 12 May 2016

Mlab DA seminar Thu 12 May in room 429, Miestentie 3B, 5-7pm: 

Heidi Hirsto

Yrjö Tuunanen: Panoramic News Narration – Constructive financial discourse skills for the news media and critical media audience

Pirkka Åman: Musical Serendipity – Designing Contextual Music Recommendation and Discovery

Welcome! 

Hirsto300pxHeidi Hirsto, DSc(Econ), is post-doctoral researcher at Aalto University School of Business, Department of Management Studies, Unit of Organizational Communication. Her research interests lie in critical, discursive, and cultural approaches to organizational phenomena and business-society relations, and in the workings of economic rhetoric in different genres and social contexts. Her current research focuses on the role of emotion discourse in institutional work, and on mediated practices of economic citizenship in online environments. Her work has appeared in several edited books as well as scholarly publications, including Organization Studies; Consumption, Markets & Culture; and Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal. She is currently visiting at Vienna University of Economics and Business, Institute for Organization Studies.

YT_pic_bw.jpg_300Yrjö Tuunanen: Panoramic News Narration – Constructive financial discourse skills for the news media and critical media audience

This dissertation focuses on further developing financial news discourse skills of media audience as well as media professionals by researching narrative structures and elements within multimodal news dissemination online. This study maps and analyzes existing practices of multimodal financial news discourse, guided by the main research question: What kinds of narrative features and capacities are there in the digital domain for extending financial discourse skills for the news media and for the critical media audience? In other words, the study aims to identify and develop constructive narrative practices and multimodal solutions to be applied for financial news dissemination, as well as develop skills and tools for critical financial news literacy.

The research questions related to the research material, audiovisual news narratives on Greek debt crisis in the mainstream media, are: How do the narrative structures and elements of the video reports and captioned stock photo slide shows create meanings of and facilitate civic voice and participation in financial discourses? How do the episodic and thematic approaches (Iyengar, 1991) and narrative components of the news texts reinforce or challenge the mainstream discursive coherence and the simplified binary constructions in the Greek debt crisis talk, and where and how do the citizens as characters stand in these settings? Through these more concrete secondary questions, the thesis answers the main research question, and identifies applicable, constructive narrative practices and multimodal solutions for financial news dissemination as well as develop knowledge and skills for critical financial news literacy.

The research builds on the literature on narration (Abbott 2008; Herman 2007; Ryan, 2007, 2014), journalism and media studies (Baudrillard 1994; Bock 2012; Broersma 2010; Chouliaraki 2008; de Goede 2015; Jones 2009; Johnson-Cartee 2005, Karlsson 2010; Kovach and Rosenthiel 2014; Schudson 2001; Stephens 2014) and theories of multimodality and multimodal narration (Matthiessen 2006; O ́Halloran 2006, 2008, 2011; Page 2010). Moreover, the thesis draws on sociological (Somers & Gibson 1994) and psychological (Bruner 1986, 1990, 1991) perspectives on narrative, Iyengar ́s (1991) notions on episodic and thematic framing of news texts, and the literature on civic voice and participation (Couldry 2010; Dahlgren, 2000, 2011). Building on this theoretical framework, the study suggests a set of narrative features and principles for advancing narrative transparency and “panoramic”, financial news reporting, as well as constructive news discourse skills in the web-based media.

The outcome of the thesis is twofold. It creates new knowledge on emerging practices for digital journalism, contributing to theoretical discourses on online journalism and media studies. Second, it develops and suggests concrete, innovative news text types, genres and narrative structures for online news media, aiming for further developing comprehensive and perceptive news narration and critical financial news discourse skills of the news audience.

Keywords: Financial news discourse skills, economic citizenship, online news media, multimodality, constructive news narratives, narrative transparency, panoramic news narration.

References:

Abbott, H. Porter 2008. Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Cambridge University Press.

Baudrillard, Jean 1994. Simulacra and Simulation, The University of Michigan. Bock, Mary A. 2012. Newspaper journalism and video: Motion, sound, and new narratives», New Media & Society, 14(4): 600-616.

Broersma, Marcel 2010. The Unbearable Limitations of Journalism – On Press Critique and Journalism’s Claim to Truth. The International Communication Gazette, 1748-0485; Vol. 72(1): 21–33.

Bruner, Jerome 1986. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Harvard University Press, Boston

Bruner, Jerome 1990. Acts of Meaning, Harward University Press, Boston.
Bruner, Jerome 1991. The Narrative Construction of Reality. Critical Inquiry, vol 18, no 1 pp. 1-21.

Chouliaraki, Lilie 2008. The media as moral education: Mediation and action. Media, Culture & Society, 30(6), 831-852.

Couldry, Nick 2010. Why Voice Matters, Culture and Politics After Neoliberalism. Sage.

Dahlgren, Peter 2000. The Internet and the Democratization of Civic Culture, Political Communication, 17:4, 335-340.

Dahlgren, Peter 2011. Young Citizens and Political Participation: Online Media and Civic Cultures. Taiwan Journal of Democracy, 7(2): 11-25.

de Goede, Marieke 2015. Documenting financial assemblances and the visualization of responsibility. In Rens Van Munster & Casper Sylvest (eds) Documenting World Politics: A Critical Companion to IR and Non-Fiction Film. Routledge. 58-77.

Herman, David (ed) 2007. The Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Cambridge University Press.

Iyengar, Shanto 1991. Is Anyone Responsible? University of Chicago Press.

Johnson-Cartee, Karen S. 2005. News Narratives and News Framing: Constructing Political Reality. Series: Communication, Media, and Politics.. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Jones, Alex S. 2009. Losing the News: The Future of the News that Feeds democracy. Oxford University, Oxford/New York.

Karlsson, Michael 2010. Rituals of Transparency. Journalism Studies 11(4), pp. 535- 45.

Kovach, Bill and Tom Rosenstiel 2014. The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect. Three Rivers Press.

Matthiessen, Christian 2006. The multimodal page: a systemic functional exploration. In Bowcher Wendy and Terry Royce (eds.), New Directions in Multimodal Discourse Analysis. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1-62.

O’Halloran, Kay L. 2011. Multimodal Discourse Analysis. In Hyland, Ken, and Brian Paltridge (eds.). Continuum Companion to Discourse. London; New York. Continuum. 120-137.

O’Halloran, Kay L. 2006. Multimodal Discourse Analysis: Systemic-Functional Perspectives. Continuum.

O’Halloran, Kay L. 2008. Systemic functional-multimodal discourse analysis (SF- MDA): constructing ideational meaning using language and visual imagery. Visual Communication 2008/7. Sage 7(4): 443–475.

Page Ruth (ed) 2010. Perspectives on Narrative and Multimodality, Routledge.

Ryan, Marie-Laure 2014. Narration in Various Media. In Hühn, Peter et al. (eds.) The Living Handbook of Narratology. Hamburg: Hamburg University. URL = http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/narration-various-media

Ryan, Marie-Laure 2007. Toward a Definition of Narrative. In D. Herman (ed). The Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 22–35.

Schudson Michael 2001. The Objectivity Norm in American Journalism. Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism 2(2), pp. 149-70.

Somers, Margaret R. and Gloria D. Gibson 1994. ‘Reclaiming the Epistemological “Other”: Narrative and the Social Constitution of Identity’, in Craig Calhoun (ed) Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, Oxford UK & Cambridge USA: Blackwell, 37-99.

Stephens, Mitchell 2014. Beyond news: the future of journalism. New York Columbia University Press.

 

pirkka poro.jpgPirkka Åman: 

Musical Serendipity – Designing Contextual Music Recommendation and Discovery

During the last decade, the promises of networked digital media have started to realize. Time and location independent production, distribution and consumption of media content, together with social media participation are now reality for everyone with a computing device and an Internet connection. This socio-technological revolution has also made possible highly personalized and context-aware media services. My thesis focuses on designing and researching interactions that aim to provide new kinds of user experiences for contextual music recommendation and discovery through service concepts and prototypes.

The main research objective is how to design enjoyable and rewarding music recommendation and discovery services that utilize contextual information from the interaction point of view? The underlying assumption of the study is that contextual information does matter and it is important to take this information into account when designing user experiences for music discovery and recommendation.

One of the key concepts of the work is personalization, i.e. tailoring media content according to user’s preferences. Recommendation systems are a form of personalization, implemented in applications such as online dating and travel systems either by gathering information from the user automatically, or by user input. Another key concept, serendipity, i.e. making positive discoveries by chance is often enabled by well-designed recommendation services adopting personalization techniques. By music interactions I refer to the human-technology interactions with recorded music content.

The concept of context refers to a certain frame within which something exists or happens. The importance of the concept is highlighted by the ability of modern mobile phones to adapt to and offer services tailored for the user situation. Location-awareness, achieved by global positioning system (GPS), wireless local area networks (WLAN), or radio signal measurement plays an important role in context-aware computing since it enables an accurate geographical positioning of mobile devices and their users. Indeed, positioning technologies embedded in the modern mobile devices enabled the first context-aware computing applications. Ubiquitous media can be used everywhere; the term became widespread with the adoption of mobile media and communication devices.

The main motivation for developing and researching contextual music interactions stems from the fact that people have a wide variety of psychological and social uses and functions for music across a wide variety of situations. Given that people listen to different music in different situations lays a foundation for the argument that context factors really matter in designing interactive music services.

With ubiquitous streaming services such as YouTube and Spotify, we have entered an era of second generation of digital music services where music tracks do not need to be downloaded but they can be consumed as a stream over the Internet. In most music consumption situations, physical discs or local music files are no longer needed. Today, when music is a truly ubiquitous commodity, it can be listened to in almost any situation, increasingly stressing the importance of context factors.

Call for papers: The Swedish Research Council’s symposium on artistic research 2016

The Swedish Research Council invites artistic researchers to submit abstracts or proposals for workshops/events at this year’s symposium on artistic research. The symposium takes place on November 29-30 at Linnaeus University’s faculty of humanities and art in Växjö. The theme of the symposium is Research Ethics and Artistic Freedom in Artistic Research.

For more information about the symposium and how to submit abstracts or proposals please visit our website:

http://www.vr.se/inenglish/newspress/newsarchive/news2016/callforpaperstheswedishresearchcouncilssymposiumonartisticresearch2016.5.689dca821542b90e69b8ad0f.html

Call for articles – Helsinki Photomedia publication

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Call for articles – Helsinki Photomedia publication

As announced at the conference, we will make a peer-reviewed anthology that documents the key aspects of the conference theme Photographic Agencies and Materialities in the form of high-quality articles. The publication will be an open-access electronic publication consisting of a selection of approximately 10 –15 articles. The editors are professor Merja Salo, lecturer Hanna Weselius and doctoral student Marko Karo (Aalto ARTS), professor Mika Elo (University of the Arts Helsinki), Janne Seppänen and Asko Lehmuskallio (University of Tampere).

The publisher of the anthology is Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture. The anthology will be available in the Aaltodoc publication archive: https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi and in the Aalto ARTS Books web bookshop: https://shop.aalto.fi.

The deadline for the articles is 5 June 2016.

Selection criteria:

  • scholarly quality
  • originality
  • relevance to the theme

We will only consider completed articles for publication. Abstracts and drafts will not be passed to peer-review.

The author is responsible for the copyrights concerning the image materials used in the article.

Submission guidelines:

Optimal length: 6000 words.

File format: .doc or .docx for the text, pdf for the images

(NOTE: please collect all images in a separate pdf files and mark the placing of the images in the text with [Image 1], [Image 2], etc.). Maximum file size is 3 M.

Referencing system: Oxford System (known also as the Documentary/ Note system), see below.

Please attach a short bio (approximately 50 words) to your article.

The submissions should be sent to Helinä Kuusela helina.kuusela@aalto.fi prior to 5 June 2016.

Pdf: HPM2016 call for articles

Guide to the referencing system:

Footnotes

The First Note for a Source

In the text:

Note identifiers should be placed at the end of a sentence, and follow any punctuation marks (but precede a dash). If you use a long quotation (more than three lines of text), the note identifier should be placed at the end of the quotation.

Lake points out that a division began in the latter half of the nineteenth century with the doctrine of ‘separate spheres’.1

At the foot of the page:

When you reference a source for the first time, you must provide all the necessary information to enable the reader to locate the source.

  1. You should provide bibliographic information (information about the source). This includes:
  • author(s) initial(s) and surname(s)
  • name of the article, book or journal
  • editors (if applicable)
  • publisher name and location
  • year published
  1. You should give exact page numbers if your reference is a direct quotation, a paraphrase, an idea, or is otherwise directly drawn from the source.

1 M Lake, ‘Intimate strangers’ in Making a Life: a People’s History of Australia Since 1788, V. Burgman and J. Lee (eds), Penguin, Victoria, 1988, p. 155.

Note Formatting

  • Titles of publications should be italicised.
  • Use minimal capitalisation for publication titles and for journal or book article titles.
  • Article titles should be enclosed between single quotation marks.
  • Use commas to separate each item of the citation and end with a full stop.

Second & Subsequent Notes

Second and subsequent references to the same source don’t need to be as detailed as the first note—they just need the minimum information to clearly indicate which text is being referred to.

With a single author provide all the necessary information in the first note. If you want to refer to the same source again, a simple method is to give the author’s name, the year of publication and the page number. For example:

1 I Reid, Higher Education or Education for Hire? Language and Values in Australian Universities, CQU Press, Rockhampton, 1996, p. 87.

2 …

3 Reid, p. 98.

If two or more works by the same author are referred to in the text, include the title:

1 E Gaskell, North and South, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1970, p. 228.

2 E Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1975, p. 53.

3 Gaskell, North and South, p. 222.

Subsequent references to articles are done in a similar way:

17 M Doyle, ‘Captain Mbaye Diagne’, Granta, vol. 48, August 1994, pp. 99-103.

18 …

19 Doyle, Granta, p. 101.

Citing Different Sources

List information in the following order:

Book

  1. author(s) initial(s) and surname(s)
  2. title of book (italicised)
  3. publisher
  4. place of publication
  5. year of publication
  6. page number(s)

1 M Henninger, Don’t Just Surf: Effective Research Strategies for the Net, UNSW Press, Sydney, 1997, p. 91.

Article/Chapter in a Book Collection

  1. author(s) initial(s) and surname(s)
  2. title of article (single quotation marks)
  3. title of book (italicised)
  4. editor of book
  5. publisher
  6. place of publication
  7. year of publication
  8. page number(s)

2 M Blaxter, ‘Social class and health inequalities’ in Equalities and Inequalities in Health,

C Carter & J Peel (eds), Academic Press, London, 1976, pp. 6-7.

Journal Article

  1. author(s) initial(s) and surname(s)
  2. title of article (single quotation marks)
  3. title of journal (italicised)
  4. volume number
  5. issue number
  6. month of publication
  7. year of publication
  8. page number(s)

3 M. Doyle, ‘Captain Mbaye Diagne’, Granta, vol. 48, August 1994, pp. 99-103.

Electronic Source

A Website

  1. author
  2. name & place of sponsor of site
  3. date site was created or updated
  4. date of viewing
  5. URL

Electronic Mail Lists, Usenet Groups & Bulletin Boards

  1. author
  2. author’s identifying details (eg.email address)
  3. description of posting
  4. name of list owner
  5. date of posting
  6. date of viewing
  7. URL

A Document within a website

  1. author/editor
  2. title
  3. name of sponsor of site
  4. last date site updated
  5. date of viewing
  6. URL

Emails

These are cited the same as for personal communications

4 N Curthoys, ‘Future directions for rhetoric – invention and ethos in public critique’, in Australian Humanities Review. March-April 2001, viewed on 11 April 2001, <htttp://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-April- 2001/curthoys.html>.

Bibliography

Book

Reid, I Higher Education or Education for Hire? Language and Values in Australian Universities. CQUPress, Rockhampton, 1996.

Journal Article

Doyle, M ‘Captain Mbaye Diagne’. Granta, vol. 48, August 1994, pp. 99-103.

Web Document

Curthoys, N, ‘Future directions for rhetoric – invention and ethos in public critique’, in Australian Humanities Review, March-April 2001, viewed on 11 April 2001 <htttp://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-April-2001/curthoys.html>.

 

Mlab Doctor of Arts seminar Thu 21 April 2016

Mlab DA seminar this Thu 21.4.2016 in room 429, Miestentie 3B, 5-7pm, welcome! 

Rasmus Vuori: Generative Storytelling

Merja Salonen: Noisy knowledge – the role of provocative art in business value creation

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Rasmus Vuori: Generative Storytelling

In this presentation I will propose a set of components for a hierarchical metadata model for generative media system. The framework will be based on the original ontospatial model used in our previous Enactive Cinema-research, but expanded for more generalized use where context awareness, variable state change behavior and narrative inertia is required. Some key components in the model are, in addition to the metadata representation of meaning i.e ontospatial data, the addition of quantified valence variables (attraction and aversion) and parametric triggers that can initiate state changes. A few experimental changes to the original model of annotation with fuzzy data will also suggested, like the addition of a fuzzy void dimension in the onto space.

The development of this framework has been largely motivated as a toolset for authors of generative systems, but also looking into issues that many developers of mimicking AI systems have stumbled acress. In the proposed metadata framework a generative system can not only learn what to do, but also what to avoid.

At this stage the proposed framework is the latest addition of my research hypothesis regarding computational inertia in generative narratives, which initially will be tested on cinematic material but as a more generalized model could be applicable in much wider context, from computer games to automated chat bot applications.

 

Merja S.jpg

Merja Salonen: Noisy knowledge – the role of provocative art in business value creation

The presentation focuses on discussing my research plan. The study concentrates on exploring art-activism against corporations from the artist’s perspective questioning the motive, intention and definition of success. In order to indicate the value of art-activism to corporations, the impact of social media discussions along corporations’ reactions must be investigated.

Previous research in arts on business context indicates that deploying arts in business enhances the organization’s competence in corporate value creation. Arts and artistic capabilities are regarded as consultative skills in business development focusing on goal-orientated interaction between the artist and the business in question. Art-activism against corporations has been excluded from earlier academic research from business perspective.  Therefore, this study explores the relations and reflexions of art-activism which is targeted to corporations and presented in digital media. The qualitative research consists of 2 – 4 case studies in the field of contemporary art and documentary film. The study investigates the motives, intentions and reception of art-activism. The data collection consists of semi-structured interviews with artists and representatives at the corporations. Online survey complemented with netnography and online depth interviews are conducted with participants in social media.  The study aims to show the knowledge potential of the relationships between art-activism and social media participators in the context of customer understanding in corporations.

 

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