Category Archives: research

creative events, fine art, music, news, research

School of Music & Fine Art – PhD Scholarships for September 2014 entry

School of Music and Fine Art are celebrating our inaugural year and are delighted to announce up to THREE fee waiver PhD scholarships (Home/EU rate) for PhD students.

NEW phd scholarships kent

The Scholarships are available to UK, EU and overseas students and will cover tuition fees (at the home/EU rate). They are offered for one year in the first instance, renewable for a maximum of three years subject to satisfactory academic performance.

Criteria

In order to be eligible for these scholarships, applicants should apply for, and subsequently receive an offer of, a place at the University of Kent for one of the following PhD courses for September 2014 entry.

  • Fine Art (Practice as Research)
  • Music and Technology*

* Please note that new PhDs in Music (Research, Composition or Performance) are in the final stages of approval within the University and applicants for these areas are encouraged to apply for PhD Music and Technology with the understanding that they can then transfer onto the new PhDs upon arrival (subject to approval) where appropriate.

The scholarship competition is open to all doctoral research applicants who have applied or are applying to the School of Music and Fine Art for entry in the academic year starting September 2014. Please visit Kent’s postgraduate pages for comprehensive information about how to apply for postgraduate research study.  These Scholarships are only open to applicants whose proposed first supervisor is in the School of Music and Fine Art. Please see SMFA staff pages for further information on potential supervisors.

Please note that all of these Scholarships will be based at the University of Kent’s Medway campus.

How to apply

In addition to their application for study, all new doctoral research applicants wishing to be considered for these scholarships must:

  • Complete a scholarship application form [Word docx, 55KB]
  • Provide a copy of their CV
  • Write a covering letter. Each applicant should supply the names, addresses, telephone numbers and emails of two referees.

Deadline

The deadline for receipt of applications is 11 August 2014. Shortlisted applicants will be invited to a panel-led interview in early September 2014 with study to commence later that month.

Scholarships application forms, CVs and covering letters (including referee details) should be sent by post or by email to:

Email: MFAadmissions@kent.ac.uk
Post: Research Scholarship Applications,
c/o Recruitment & Admissions Administrator,
School of Music & Fine Art,
The Old Surgery,
The Historic Dockyard,
Chatham Maritime,
Kent ME4 4TE

Further enquiries about these scholarships should be directed to:
Kathryn Sansom, Recruitment and Admissions Administrator, School of Music and Fine Art MFAadmissions@kent.ac.uk, 01634 202962 / 01634 888980

creative events, fine art, music, news, research

The Future of Film and Storytelling – Sarah Turner talks at EMERGE, June 19

Step into the future of film, as The East End Film Festival explores the convergence of film, digital and storytelling at EMERGE.

Sarah Turner will be speaking on June 19, about her work and methods in relation to a new project – Public House. The Barbican, London will be hosting the day of talks, discussions and networking, featuring radical thinkers, digital pioneers and innovators in film and video.

Sarah Turner Emerge Barbican

Public House fuses fact and fiction in a multi layered exploration of memory, community and social reinvention. Activated in response to the community takeover of the Ivy House pub, London, SE15, this feature length work for cinemas is a shape shifting genre hybrid that moves from observational document to minimalist opera. Interweaving testament, performance poetry and an innovative soundscape that fuses acousmatic composition and verbatim librettos, the film explores individual and cultural memory and its resonance in shaping social spaces.

Book here

EMERGE- THE CONVERGENCE OF FILM, DIGITAL AND STORYTELLING
9am / The Future of Film and Storytelling
The Barbican
19 June 2014
09:00-17.30
We take a glimpse forward to the year 2024 as we predict, speculate and debate how the creative process of filmmaking and audience experiences will evolve over the next 10 years.

The day is divided across 3 areas:

  1. Experiments in Moving Image
  2. The Future of the Film Industry
  3. Interactive Storytelling

We will also explore the impact our fast changing digital society will have on the world of film, with exclusive filmed contributions from sociologists, filmmakers and experts in the world of convergent technology.

Speakers on the day include:
• Sheffield Doc/Fest and Crossover
• Sarah Turner – Artist, Writer and Filmmaker (Perestroika)
• Anna Higgs – Head of Digital, Film4
• Martin Percy – Interactive Director (Lifesaver)
• Ed Cookson – Project Director (Sarner / The Sancho Plan)
• Evan Boehm – Director and Coder (Nexus, The Carp and The Seagull)
• Stephen Follows – Producer, Catsnake Film
• Sarah Tierney – Founder, We Are Colony
• Fernando R Gutierrez De Jesus – Director (Create Your Own Documentary)

For more information or to book this event click Barbican Theatre and Dance Event Details

Useful links:
EMERGE
Sarah Turner

creative events, fine art, news, research

Shona Illingworth presents at Central St Martins Symposium

Anxious Places: Angst, environment and affective contamination

Central St Martins College, London,
26th June, 2014
10.15 – 17.30

“Commentators claim that contemporary culture is dominated by anxiety. From individual uncertainties to global economic, social and political insecurities, anxiety pervades our lives and affects our interactions with people and places. Anxious Places examines the ways in which anxiety ‘contaminates’ urban, social, and natural environments and asks how histories are implicated in making it a cultural script. Artists and scholars
discuss contemporary angst from a range of cross-disciplinary perspectives and artistic mediums.”

Speakers: Jill Bennett, Frank Furedi, Avery Gordon, Andrew Hoskins, Shona Illingworth, Uriel Orlow, Jeremy Till, David Toop, and John Tulloch
Organised by Dr Caterina Albano

The symposum is part of UAL collaboration to the London Festival of Anxiety and Mental Health.

Download the Symposium PDF Anxiety symposium 1 9
Book this event

creative events, fine art, music, news, research

TONE Festival – Too Prolix: A Tour Out Of Time

Steve Klee performs ‘Too Prolix: A Tour Out Of Time’ as part of the TONE Festival on Sat 21st June 6-7pm.

This performance is accompanied by an exhibition of artefacts and research material.
Tuesday 10th – Sunday 15th June at POP Space, 64-66 High Street, Chatham, ME44DS

Private View: Tuesday 10th June, 4-6pm
Artist Talk: Sunday 15th June 2-3pm

Steve Klee_Tone

To check out details and join us in many more exciting events visit www.tonefestival.com [2] and follow us @tonefestival to hear the latest news!

School of Music and Fine Art – TONE Festival

Purchase a ticket and register: http://www.tonefestival.com/buy-tickets/
For more information: https://www.facebook.com/events/670856142987250/

If you are interested in attending the PV of research material at POP on the 10th, please email s.klee@kent.ac.uk.

Special thanks to Mark Bills, Gainsborough’s House, Suffolk for the loan of ‘Rudiments of Genteel Behaviour’ (1737) by Francois Nivelon

Photo credit: Morgan Hill-Murphy

 

 

fine art, news, research

New Research Grant Award from Arts Council England

Arts Council England Grant for Arts for School of Music and Fine Art’s Shona Illingworth

Shona Illingworth, Fine Art Lecturer at the School of Music and Fine Art has been awarded an Arts Council England Grant for the Arts award for her ongoing art project developed in collaboration with John Tulloch, survivor of the 7/7 London Bombing (2005).

The project explores how an ‘embodied experience’ of the attack and the affects of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder intersect with one of the powerful and insidious affects of the bombings on the complex and multiple imaginings of the city: the mapping of a new topography of latent threat and fear onto space.

216 Westbound is produced by Animate Projects and the first exhibitions of work will take place at CGP Gallery London in July 2014 and at Phoenix Leicester in September 2014.

Shona will discuss the project with Professor John Tulloch and Professor Andrew Hoskins, at the forthcoming symposium Anxious Places: angst, environments and affective contamination, on 26th June 2014 at Central Saint Martins’ College, University of the Arts. London.

ACEForthcoming events include a symposium at the School of Music and Fine Art, University of Kent and a forum and screening at LV21, Gillingham, further details will be available in September 2014.

creative events, fine art, news, research

‘Imagine Sheppey’ art project in Kent

A series of art workshops on the Isle of Sheppey is providing an opportunity for young people to present their own vision of their lives – past, present and future.

Sheppey

University sociologists team up with art group to provide art workshops for young people on Sheppey. The workshops, at various locations on Sheppey, will enable the young people to imagine their futures by making use of a variety of simple art techniques. The workshops are part of an ongoing research project, titled Imagine Sheppey  that has already seen many of the Isle’s young people describe their hopes and ambitions for the future in a collection of essays.

A team from Kent’s School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research is working with art collective ‘Tea’  and Sheppey’s Blue Town Heritage Centre  during May to stage the workshops, which are taking place in locations representing residential, leisure, work and public space. The young people taking part are working with the artists to imagine their futures and use the art techniques to transform the well-known places into something new. The results will be photographed and videoed to form a new vision of Sheppey and its future.

Head of the Creative Events programme at the School of Music and Fine Art, Peter Hatton, also a member of ‘Tea’, said:
‘This project will provide an opportunity for the young people of Sheppey to use multimedia methodologies to present a new vision of their community and future lives.

The identity of any place is very much the result of the interweaving of people’s lives with their physical environment, and Imagine Sheppey will provide a fascinating documentary insight into the way young people think about their lives.’

The Imagine Sheppey project is part of a five-year research programme titled Connected Communities, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. This national project, running from 2013 to 2017, brings together a range of different research projects involving universities and their communities.

Dr Dawn Lyon, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University, said: ‘Imagine Sheppey is a research project about how young people – 16 and 17 years old and on the brink of their adult lives – imagine their futures.‘We want to explore young people’s ideas about the future, working with them in selected places, and also perhaps provide them with the opportunity and scope to think differently about things they may have taken for granted.’

 

music, news, research

‘Hear the City’ App produced at the Dockyard, will be heard in Brussels.

Hear the CityFollowing her visit to the NEM Summit in France last October, Kate Halsall, Lecturer in Music Performance and Audio Arts has begun a research project and has just finished recording an App in the Foundry (@Foundry) at the School of Music and Fine Art, called ‘Hear the City’.

This is part of an Artist in Residency programme with Stromatolite, a partner in the ICT and Art Connect project, funded by the European Commission FP7 Programme, for the purpose of fostering collaboration between ICT and Art. Hear the City takes random snapshots of social activity from specific localities through the conversion of Twitter feeds into musical notation, creating a reflection on both the endless invisible streams of metadata and the visible comments we throw out into the world.

Incorporating projections showing the origins of the Tweets and feeds, real time Instagram pictures and synthesised text to note sounds, the installation is accompanied by a live recital of the translated incoming texts by concert pianist Kate Halsall. Shifting effortlessly between the poignant and the humourous, this unique combination of analogue and digital, live performance and generative music, shines a compelling spotlight onto our social world.

This project begun at the NEM Summit in 2013 and the results will be premiered on 12th May at the Sigma Orionis event, The ICT and Art Connect at the European Commission in Brussels, May11-12.

Further Reading…

Connecting Art and Technology: European trends and forward looking
A FET-ART panel will present the major findings of the project, delivering recommendations to the European Commission and outlining new research venues and best practices. The panel is made of: Marta Arniani (Sigma Orionis); Camille Baker (Brunel University); Lucas Evers (Waag Society); Svetlana Kondakova (Black Cube Collective); Michela Magas (Stromatolite). The session is moderated by Roger Torrenti. 

ICT & Art Connect
Stromatolite
Sigma Orionis

creative events, fine art, music, news, research

TONE Festival – calling for volunteers!

TONE Festival are looking for Student volunteers

We are looking for enthusiastic volunteers to assist with Töne Festival of sonic and visual arts that explores the spaces, forms and durations that exist within and between these two overlapping fields.

We need volunteers both in the pre-festival activities (9-19 June 2014) and the festival itself (20-22 June 2014) in Chatham.TONE image

What we can offer you:

  • Volunteering can count towards your employability status (please contact us for specific values)
  • A free ticket to an event
  • Reference from Töne
  • Per diem of £10 per day

 

To become a Töne supporter, please contact us at tonefestival@outlook.com.

Find out more>

creative events, fine art, music, news, research

Research Seminar – Presents Jean Martin

Tonights Research Seminar we present Jean Martin.
Contemporary art music in the context of film and moving image.

Bridge Wardens College, Lecture Theatre
6-8pm
Tuesday, 25th March, 2014

Jean Martin will present some ideas from his recent book ‘Filmgeräusch  – Wahrnehmungsfelder eines Mediums (co-authored with Frieder Butzmann).

“Much of  music composed in history related to specific activities in the world: It  supported religious practice, dance, dramatic opera, funerals, military or  stately events. Only occasionally music was purely self-referential as in the  scholasticism of late Renaissance music, or the experimentations of New music  in the 20th Century. I want to look at the specific case of film music and  sound design and music for media. Composing music and sound design for films  poses specific challenges. The raison d’etre for any music and sound design, in  fact for the soundtrack as a whole is the narrative and the image track of the  film. This poses constraints for the timebased art of music. Film music can  never follow its own logic freely developing themes or sound textures as long  as it takes. It is limited by the duration of a scene which it supports or  comments. In my analyses of films I observed that film composers adopt two  fundamental musical approaches: on the one hand the thematic concept of music  using thematic Leitmotifs and harmonic tonality. On the other hand composers  practice a timbral or spectral aesthetic which expresses itself through complex  textures and drones.

It is closely linked to sound design, which emerged from the  electro-acoustic music tradition and the 20th Century aesthetic of  musicalising environmental, indeed any recorded sound or noise.”

This event is FREE to attend and open to Staff and Students.
Please bring your University ID to access the Dockyard.

View our Research Seminar webpage
View the Events Calendar

creative events, fine art, news, research

‘Balnakiel’ screening at the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow – Sun 23rd March

CCA Symposium Uncertain Ground: Landscape, Memory and Theatres of Conflict, featuring film screening of Shona Illingworth’s film ‘Balnakiel’.

CCA Glasgow_Balnakiel Screening

Sunday, 23rd March, 2014
2-5pm
Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) Glasgow.

  • Entry: Free to attend but tickets required. Book here.

The CCA Symposium, programmed in association with Film and Video Umbrella, as part of 25 Frames, celebrating 25 years with their 25 selected films and with thanks to the Wellcome Trust, School of Music and Fine Art lecturer, Shona Illingworth will be attending the CCA Glasgow on Sunday 23rd March for the screening of her film Balnakiel.

“Shona Illingworth’s moving-image and sound work engages with the complexities of memory, and explores the intersections and instabilities between memory, history, subjectivity and place as they evolve over time.  Set in the far north of Sutherland, in a place marked by the tectonic forces of military/cultural history, her film Balnakiel provides the stimulus for a symposium on the Scottish landscape and its historical and contemporary aesthetic and political resonance.”

The event runs from 2-5pm, with Balnakiel screening at 2.10pm, followed ‘in conversation’ afterwards with Shona Illingworth and Head of Psychology at City University.

“Cognitive neuropsychologist Martin A. Conway, one of the foremost international experts in the field of Autobiographical Memory, and a close collaborator in Illingworth’s work; Hebridean psychologist Catriona Morrison, Head of Psychology at Heriot Watt University, who is known for her work on memory and language; Issie MacPhail, a cultural geographer, focused on culture and development in north west Sutherland, and a Research Fellow at the UHI Centre for Rural Health and Honorary Research Fellow at The School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow, and Andrew Hoskins, Media Sociologist at the University of Glasgow whose work explores the intersections between media, war and memory. Chaired by Steven Bode, Director of Film and Video Umbrella.”

Film and Video Umbrella: 25 Frames
CCA Glasgow