Introduction to guest-edited edition of 'Journal of Visual Arts Practice' Vol 7.3 on 'Critique' - consisting of articles by: Yve Lomax, Michael Schwab, Malcolm Quinn, Mary Anne Francis, Marina Vishmidt, John Roberts, and Suhail Malik.

This keynote as curatorial performance brings the heard and its audition into the sphere of things rather than into the context of their name and function. It joins a current debate on new materialism by developing via sound and listening the idea of materialism as a materialism of transformation that reconsiders an anthropocentric worldview without bestowing objects with mythical self-determination; and that accounts for the object’s autonomous agency rather than placing it in a mathematical frame. Thus, it involves an unperforming (...) of the lexicon and of numbers, and practices a listening to the invisible by its intensity, expanse and duration, to hear echoes of responsibility and the vibrations of flesh in animate and inanimate things. Listening to the soundscape, the voice and sonic works, this curatorial performance rethinks current ideas of speculative realism and new materialism via the in-between of things. It suggests that while a ‘masculine new materialism’ insists on the absence of the human to get to the unthought, and thus ultimately proposes the end of philosophy in its own mathematical probability, a ‘sonico-feminine new materialism’ brings us through the creative performance of matter and language to the seemingly unthinkable, to reperform it not in words but on the body and on things: doing, digging, gardening as a revocalization and rephysicalization of theory through its interbeing with things. (shrink)

Generative deep learning systems offer powerful tools for artefact generation, given their ability to model distributions of data and generate high-fidelity results. In the context of computational creativity, however, a major shortcoming is that they are unable to explicitly diverge from the training data in creative ways and are limited to fitting the target data distribution. To address these limitations, there have been a growing number of approaches for optimising, hacking and rewriting these models in order to actively diverge from (...) the training data. We present a taxonomy and comprehensive survey of the state of the art of active divergence techniques, highlighting the potential for computational creativity researchers to advance these methods and use deep generative models in truly creative systems. (shrink)

Why do the arts and culture matter? What difference do they make and how do we know what difference they make? This report presents the outcomes of the AHRC’s Cultural Value Project which looked at how we think about the value of the arts and culture to individuals and to society.

This article is prompted by the observation that many accounts of the value of the arts and culture have failed to engage first-order, empirical data and to take full account of the experiences of those directly involved in cultural activities and practices. This neglect is the result of a complex path dependency. The more obvious explanation is that the current situation is caused by too much humanism in the field of cultural studies, that is, the tendency to think of cultural (...) value as an “‘ineffable’ human moment which somehow lies outside this purview of representational method”. This may well be true in some cases but it is not the main reason why empirical and experiential data have been lacking. The absence of the phenomenological dimension is, to the contrary, best explained by not enough humanism in cultural studies. The reluctance to embrace the first-person perspective was motivated by an anxiety that this would make cultural theorists and sociologists complicit with the “dubious” theories of subjecthood originating in idealism. The default outcome of this has been the preponderance of structuralism in cultural studies which led to anti-empiricism and “theoretical heavy breathing”. I argue that to overcome the current impasse, cultural theorists and the theorists of cultural value specifically must revisit this self-incurred suspicion of first-order constructs and address their unease with the category of experience by actively engaging first-person data. In short, the remedy I prescribe is to embrace elements of empirical, phenomenological sociology as part of the methodological framework. Looking at three projects funded by the AHRC Cultural Value Project, I show how this can be practically achieved. I conclude with some reflections on how the considerations presented here might have broader implications for the future research into cultural value, sociological inquiry and cultural policy. (shrink)

An invited paper on the way in which critical theory has been mobilised both within art schools and art institutions.

An article about Slavoj Zizek's critique of contemporary ethics.