A Lived Practice examines the reciprocal relationship of art and life: Artist-practitioners are shaped by their experiences, and they in turn create and enhance the experience of others. Based on a symposium held at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014, this volume is intended to spur new thinking in the field of socially engaged art practice. Contributors, including Lewis Hyde, Ernesto Pujol, Crispin Sartwell, and Wolfgang Zumdick, address essential questions about what is art and who is the artist, and also explore how artists can lead meaningful lives.
"A fascinating collection that graphically demonstrates how participants become subtle theologians of 'lived religion' in America, from (Mrs. Cowman's STREAMS IN THE DESERT to) Ojibway hymn-singing to rustic homesteading and the 'Women's Aglow' movement".--John Butler, Yale University.
This book analyzes social practice art that has a political agenda. Contributing scholars define this practice, provide historical context, and consider contemporary social practice art that addresses the current volatile political context.
In Living Spirit, Living Practice, the well-known cultural studies scholar Ruth Frankenberg turns her attention to the remarkably diverse nature of religious practice within the United States today. Frankenberg provides a nuanced consideration of the making and living of religious lives as well as the mystery and poetry of spiritual practice. She undertakes a subtle sociocultural analysis of compelling in-depth interviews with fifty women and men, diverse in race, ethnicity, national origin, class, age, and sexuality. Tracing the complex interweaving of sacred and secular languages in the way interviewees make sense of the everyday and the extraordinary, Frankenberg explores modes of communication with the Divine, the role of the body, the importance of geography, work for progressive social change, and the relation of sex to spirituality. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and other practitioners come together here, speaking in terms both familiar and surprising. Whether discussing an Episcopalian deacon, a former Zen Buddhist who is now a rabbi, a Chicano monastic, an immigrant Muslim woman, a Japanese American Tibetan Buddhist, or a gay African American practicing in the Hindu tradition, Frankenberg illuminates the most intimate, local, and singular aspects of individual lives while situating them within the broad, dynamic canvas of the U.S. religious landscape.
This volume surveys the key histories, theories and practice of artists, musicians, filmmakers, designers, architects and technologists that have worked and continue to work with visual material in real time. Covering a wide historical period from Pythagoras’s mathematics of music and colour in ancient Greece, to Castel’s ocular harpsichord in the 18th century, to the visual music of the mid-20th century, to the liquid light shows of the 1960s and finally to the virtual reality and projection mapping of the present moment, Live Visuals is both an overarching history of real-time visuals and audio-visual art and a crucial source for understanding the various theories about audio-visual synchronization. With the inclusion of an overview of various forms of contemporary practice in Live Visuals culture – from VJing to immersive environments, architecture to design – Live Visuals also presents the key ideas of practitioners who work with the visual in a live context. This book will appeal to a wide range of scholars, students, artists, designers and enthusiasts. It will particularly interest VJs, DJs, electronic musicians, filmmakers, interaction designers and technologists.
Situated at the crossroads of performance practice, museology, and cultural studies, live arts curation has grown in recent years to become a vibrant interdisciplinary project and a genuine global phenomenon. Curating Live Arts brings together bold and innovative essays from an international group of theorist-practitioners to pose vital questions, propose future visions, and survey the landscape of this rapidly evolving discipline. Reflecting the field’s characteristic eclecticism, the writings assembled here offer practical and insightful investigations into the curation of theatre, dance, sound art, music, and other performance forms—not only in museums, but in community, site-specific, and time-based contexts, placing it at the forefront of contemporary dialogue and discourse.
This book aims to enlarge understandings of educational action research. Drawing from complexity theory, deep ecology, Eastern philosophy, hermeneutics, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, postmodernism, and literary theory, the essays in this collection show how participation in educational action research practices requires more of the researcher than the application of research methods. Each essay demonstrates how action research is a lived practice that asks the researcher to not only investigate the subject at hand but, as well, to provide some account of the way in which the investigation both shapes and is shaped by the investigator.
Referential Practice is an anthropological study of language use in a contemporary Maya community. It examines the routine conversational practices in which Maya speakers make reference to themselves and to each other, to their immediate contexts, and to their world. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Oxkutzcab, Yucatán, William F. Hanks develops a sociocultural approach to reference in natural languages. The core of this approach lies in treating speech as a social engagement and reference as a practice through which actors orient themselves in the world. The conceptual framework derives from cultural anthropology, linguistic pragmatics, interpretive sociology, and cognitive semantics. As his central case, Hanks undertakes a comprehensive analysis of deixis—linguistic forms that fix reference in context, such as English I, you, this, that, here, and there. He shows that Maya deixis is a basic cultural construct linking language with body space, domestic space, agricultural and ritual practices, and other fields of social activity. Using this as a guide to ethnographic description, he discovers striking regularities in person reference and modes of participation, the role of perception in reference, and varieties of spatial orientation, including locative deixis. Traditionally considered a marginal area in linguistics and virtually untouched in the ethnographic literature, the study of referential deixis becomes in Hanks's treatment an innovative and revealing methodology. Referential Practice is the first full-length study of actual deictic use in a non-Western language, the first in-depth study of speech practice in Yucatec Maya culture, and the first detailed account of the relation between routine conversation, embodiment, and ritual discourse.
This book draws upon cognitive and affect theory to examine applications of contemporary performance practices in educational, social and community contexts. The writing is situated in the spaces between making and performance, exploring the processes of creating work defined variously as collaborative, participatory and socially engaged.
