Alice C Bell
My artistic practice-based research explores notions of intimacy, identity and communication. Interactive technologies connect video, performance and sculptural artworks in specific locations; navigating through mediated, actual and imagined landscapes. The work assumes a dialogical space, positioning the audience, artist and artworks as both participants and observers, poised somewhere between immersion and a more self-conscious, knowing states. Such embodiments seek to understand individuals’ lived experiences and offer a space for conversation, contemplation and connection.
I am an Higher Education Lecturer in Fine Art, University of Lincoln with a doctorate in Multimodal Arts and Participatory Practice-Based Research. My education was at De Montfort University, PhD, MA Creative Technologies, Distinction (2015) , The Slade School of Fine Art, BA Fine Art (Media) First Class (1997), Goldsmiths College (1991) and in Art Psychotherapy (2003), Drama (2013) and Education (2004) and also from television production for the BBC, Sky, CNN and Discovery. I was Co-Founder and Director of Youniverse Digital www.youniverse.co.uk producing design for the Publishing, Entertainment and Arts sectors and a freelance Media Production Manager managing projects for various range of high profile contemporary artists.
Keywords: maternal, storytelling, film, performance, presence, engagement, dialogue, interaction, feminine, embodiment, connection, transformation, technology, touch.
Supervisors: Prof. Craig Vear. DMU., Prof. Sophy Smith. DMU., and Dr. Alissa Clarke. DMU.
I am an Higher Education Lecturer in Fine Art, University of Lincoln with a doctorate in Multimodal Arts and Participatory Practice-Based Research. My education was at De Montfort University, PhD, MA Creative Technologies, Distinction (2015) , The Slade School of Fine Art, BA Fine Art (Media) First Class (1997), Goldsmiths College (1991) and in Art Psychotherapy (2003), Drama (2013) and Education (2004) and also from television production for the BBC, Sky, CNN and Discovery. I was Co-Founder and Director of Youniverse Digital www.youniverse.co.uk producing design for the Publishing, Entertainment and Arts sectors and a freelance Media Production Manager managing projects for various range of high profile contemporary artists.
Keywords: maternal, storytelling, film, performance, presence, engagement, dialogue, interaction, feminine, embodiment, connection, transformation, technology, touch.
Supervisors: Prof. Craig Vear. DMU., Prof. Sophy Smith. DMU., and Dr. Alissa Clarke. DMU.
less
Related Authors
InterestsView All (42)
Uploads
Books by Alice C Bell
Key to the originality of my thesis is the deliberate embodiment of a maternal experience. Feminist Lise Haller-Ross’ proposes that there is a ‘mother shaped hole in the art world’ and that, ‘as with the essence of the doughnut – we don’t need another hole for the doughnut, we need a whole new recipe’ (conference address, 2015). Indeed, her assertion encapsulates a need for different types of artistic and relational ingredients to be found. I propose these can be
discovered within particular forms of maternal love; nurture; caring, and through conceptual relational states of courtship; intercourse; gestation, and birth. Furthermore, my maternal emphasis builds on: feminist, artist, and psychotherapist Bracha Ettinger’s (2006; 2015) notions of maternal, cohabitation and carrying; architect and phenomenologist Juhani Pallasmaa’s (2012) views on sensing and feeling; child psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s (1971) thoughts on transitional phenomena and perceptions of holding. Such psychotherapeutic and phenomenological theories are imbricated in-action within my multimodal arts processes. Additionally, by deliberately not privileging the ocular, I engage all my project participants senses and distil their multimodal data through an extended form of somatic and artistic Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), (Smith, Flowers, and Larkin, 2009). IPA usefully focuses on the importance of the thematic and idiographic in terms of new knowledge generation, with an analytical focus on lived experience. Indeed, whilst the specifics of the participants in my minor and major projects are unique, my research activates and makes valid, findings that are collectively beneficial to the disciplines of applied and interdisciplinary arts; the field of practice-based research, and beyond.
My original contribution to new knowledge as argued by this thesis, comprises both this text exposition and my practice. This sees the final generation of a new multimodal arts Participatory Practice-Based Framework (PartPb). Through this framework, the researcher-practitioner is seen to adopt a maternal role to gently guide project participants through four phases of co-created multimodal
artwork generation. The four participatory ‘Phases’ are: Phase 1: Courtship – Digital Dialogues; Phase 2: Intercourse – Performative Encounters; Phase 3: Gestation – Screen Narratives; Phase 4: Birth – Relational Artworks. The framework also contains six researcher-only ‘Stages’: Stage 1: Participant Selection; Stage 2: Checking Distilled Themes; Stage 3: Location and Object Planning; Stage 4: Noticing, Logging, Sourcing; Stage 5: Collaboration and Construction; Stage 6: Releasing, Gifting, Recruiting. This new PartPb framework, is realised within a series of five practice-based (Pb) artworks called, ‘Minor Projects 1-5’, (2015-16) and Final Major Project, ‘Transformational Encounters: Touch, Traction, Transform’ (TETTT), (2018). These projects are likewise shaped through action-research processes of iterative testing, as developed from Candy and Edmonds (2010) Practice-based Research (PbR) trajectory. In my new PartPb framework, Candy, and Edmonds’ PbR processes are originally combined with a form of Fritz and Laura Perl’s Gestalt Experience Cycle (1947). This innovative fusion I come to term as a form of ‘Feeling Architecture,’ which is procedurally proven to hold and carry both researcher and participants alike, safely, ethically, and creatively through all Phases and Stages of artefact generation.
Specifically, my new multimodal PartPb framework offers new knowledge to the field of Practice-Based Research (PbR) and practitioners working in multimodal arts and applied performance contexts. Due to its participatory focus, I develop on the term Practice-Based Research, (Candy and Edmonds, 2010) to coin the term Participatory Practice-Based Research, (PartPbR). The unique
combination of multimodal arts and social-psychological methodologies underpinning my framework also has the potential to contribute to broader Arts, Well-Being, and Creative Health agendas, such as the UK government’s Social Prescribing and Arts and Health initiatives. My original framework offers future researchers’ opportunities to further develop, enhance and enrich individual and community well-being through its application to their own projects, and, in doing so, also starts to challenge unhelpful art binaries that still position community arts practices as somehow lesser to higher art disciplines.
This presentation examines the outcomes from my recent practice-based project, ‘Point. forty’. The piece portrayed the memories, reflections and dreams, of four female participants at the pivotal midlife transition of the forties. In the 'live', the artwork re-staged participant stories to positive affect, through an engagement with twelve co-authored short films, screened on four doors, situated at a distance to four co- responding tables. On each table, personal ‘objects’ were placed, perhaps an old key, a dry starfish, a displaced teacup, or a pair of child’s red shoes. As audiences entered the space, four could choose to sit as ‘explorers’, embodying the intimate space of a participant’s own chair, illuminated by a single lamp, enclosed within an auditory world of a personal headset. Others stood, ‘watchers’, their bodies casting shadows into the surrounding darkness and silence. The objects on the explorer’s tables invited tactile exploration. When an object was moved, tilted or rattled, a corresponding film came ‘alive’ and a voice was heard within the headsets. The piece functioned to draw the audience into momentarily ‘touching’ the participant’s life, whilst simultaneously offering a physical and conceptual space for self-reflection. My research set out to investigate how the power of re-staging individual stories, through immersive and performative technologies, could generate new qualities of reflective space. Enabling individual and collective conversation, contemplation and connection. My working methodologies drew on social, technological and artistic approaches from human computer interaction, social science and performance studies. Specifically methods of Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis, (Smith, Flowers & Larkin, 2009), and Mark Granovetter’s seminal concept, ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’ (1973), were extended through attentive listening and video editing approaches. This unique practitioner framework, (Candy and Edmonds, 2011, p.190) was a transformative and iterative dialogue that moved between participants, the audience, artwork and myself. Generative findings were then distilled from this in-vivo experimentation. All components, to include MAX MSP software, Arduino hardware and the physicality of cables and wires, acted as networked co-creators within an environment that crossed virtual, conceptual and physical spaces. The qualitative outcomes, gained through an analysis of participant’s and audience responses, revealed that the immersive quality of the experience was both restorative and transformative to people’s lives. Of intrigue was the relatively long duration of time audience members stayed within this digital artwork, between 40-60 minutes. As an early career researcher, this piece has attracted fulltime funding for my PhD in ‘Digital Performance and the feminine: transformative encounters’. I am now further developing my
53
LHBN Conference 5-8 March 2015 Stories that make a difference/Histoires qui font une différence
findings by inviting other adult ‘groupings’ into participatory interactivity. By encouraging the narration and performance of individual lived experience through interdisciplinary methods, I wish to create new forms of artistic agency that can transcend boundaries and enrich communities. It is anticipated that my findings will contribute to initiatives such as the SWAN charter, Audience Engagement Council, NEF and UK Well Being Agenda an add to the emergent field of transdisciplinary research.
This presentation examines the outcomes from my recent practice-based project, ‘Point. forty’. The piece portrayed the memories, reflections and dreams, of four female participants at the pivotal midlife transition of the forties. In the 'live', the artwork re-staged participant stories to positive affect, through an engagement with twelve co-authored short films, screened on four doors, situated at a distance to four co- responding tables. On each table, personal ‘objects’ were placed, perhaps an old key, a dry starfish, a displaced teacup, or a pair of child’s red shoes. As audiences entered the space, four could choose to sit as ‘explorers’, embodying the intimate space of a participant’s own chair, illuminated by a single lamp, enclosed within an auditory world of a personal headset. Others stood, ‘watchers’, their bodies casting shadows into the surrounding darkness and silence. The objects on the explorer’s tables invited tactile exploration. When an object was moved, tilted or rattled, a corresponding film came ‘alive’ and a voice was heard within the headsets. The piece functioned to draw the audience into momentarily ‘touching’ the participant’s life, whilst simultaneously offering a physical and conceptual space for self-reflection. My research set out to investigate how the power of re-staging individual stories, through immersive and performative technologies, could generate new qualities of reflective space. Enabling individual and collective conversation, contemplation and connection. My working methodologies drew on social, technological and artistic approaches from human computer interaction, social science and performance studies. Specifically methods of Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis, (Smith, Flowers & Larkin, 2009), and Mark Granovetter’s seminal concept, ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’ (1973), were extended through attentive listening and video editing approaches. This unique practitioner framework, (Candy and Edmonds, 2011, p.190) was a transformative and iterative dialogue that moved between participants, the audience, artwork and myself. Generative findings were then distilled from this in-vivo experimentation. All components, to include MAX MSP software, Arduino hardware and the physicality of cables and wires, acted as networked co-creators within an environment that crossed virtual, conceptual and physical spaces. The qualitative outcomes, gained through an analysis of participant’s and audience responses, revealed that the immersive quality of the experience was both restorative and transformative to people’s lives. Of intrigue was the relatively long duration of time audience members stayed within this digital artwork, between 40-60 minutes. As an early career researcher, this piece has attracted fulltime funding for my PhD in ‘Digital Performance and the feminine: transformative encounters’. I am now further developing my
53
LHBN Conference 5-8 March 2015 Stories that make a difference/Histoires qui font une différence
findings by inviting other adult ‘groupings’ into participatory interactivity. By encouraging the narration and performance of individual lived experience through interdisciplinary methods, I wish to create new forms of artistic agency that can transcend boundaries and enrich communities. It is anticipated that my findings will contribute to initiatives such as the SWAN charter, Audience Engagement Council, NEF and UK Well Being Agenda an add to the emergent field of transdisciplinary research.
Papers by Alice C Bell
Conference Presentations by Alice C Bell
April 27th - May 12 The Gallery, Mill Lane, De Montfort University, Leicester, LE1 9BH, United Kingdom
Normal Gallery Hours 12 noon to 5pm Monday to Saturday or by appointment
Please see:
https://www.alicetuppencorps.com/new-transformational-encounters
Drafts by Alice C Bell
Key to the originality of my thesis is the deliberate embodiment of a maternal experience. Feminist Lise Haller-Ross’ proposes that there is a ‘mother shaped hole in the art world’ and that, ‘as with the essence of the doughnut – we don’t need another hole for the doughnut, we need a whole new recipe’ (conference address, 2015). Indeed, her assertion encapsulates a need for different types of artistic and relational ingredients to be found. I propose these can be
discovered within particular forms of maternal love; nurture; caring, and through conceptual relational states of courtship; intercourse; gestation, and birth. Furthermore, my maternal emphasis builds on: feminist, artist, and psychotherapist Bracha Ettinger’s (2006; 2015) notions of maternal, cohabitation and carrying; architect and phenomenologist Juhani Pallasmaa’s (2012) views on sensing and feeling; child psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s (1971) thoughts on transitional phenomena and perceptions of holding. Such psychotherapeutic and phenomenological theories are imbricated in-action within my multimodal arts processes. Additionally, by deliberately not privileging the ocular, I engage all my project participants senses and distil their multimodal data through an extended form of somatic and artistic Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), (Smith, Flowers, and Larkin, 2009). IPA usefully focuses on the importance of the thematic and idiographic in terms of new knowledge generation, with an analytical focus on lived experience. Indeed, whilst the specifics of the participants in my minor and major projects are unique, my research activates and makes valid, findings that are collectively beneficial to the disciplines of applied and interdisciplinary arts; the field of practice-based research, and beyond.
My original contribution to new knowledge as argued by this thesis, comprises both this text exposition and my practice. This sees the final generation of a new multimodal arts Participatory Practice-Based Framework (PartPb). Through this framework, the researcher-practitioner is seen to adopt a maternal role to gently guide project participants through four phases of co-created multimodal
artwork generation. The four participatory ‘Phases’ are: Phase 1: Courtship – Digital Dialogues; Phase 2: Intercourse – Performative Encounters; Phase 3: Gestation – Screen Narratives; Phase 4: Birth – Relational Artworks. The framework also contains six researcher-only ‘Stages’: Stage 1: Participant Selection; Stage 2: Checking Distilled Themes; Stage 3: Location and Object Planning; Stage 4: Noticing, Logging, Sourcing; Stage 5: Collaboration and Construction; Stage 6: Releasing, Gifting, Recruiting. This new PartPb framework, is realised within a series of five practice-based (Pb) artworks called, ‘Minor Projects 1-5’, (2015-16) and Final Major Project, ‘Transformational Encounters: Touch, Traction, Transform’ (TETTT), (2018). These projects are likewise shaped through action-research processes of iterative testing, as developed from Candy and Edmonds (2010) Practice-based Research (PbR) trajectory. In my new PartPb framework, Candy, and Edmonds’ PbR processes are originally combined with a form of Fritz and Laura Perl’s Gestalt Experience Cycle (1947). This innovative fusion I come to term as a form of ‘Feeling Architecture,’ which is procedurally proven to hold and carry both researcher and participants alike, safely, ethically, and creatively through all Phases and Stages of artefact generation.
Specifically, my new multimodal PartPb framework offers new knowledge to the field of Practice-Based Research (PbR) and practitioners working in multimodal arts and applied performance contexts. Due to its participatory focus, I develop on the term Practice-Based Research, (Candy and Edmonds, 2010) to coin the term Participatory Practice-Based Research, (PartPbR). The unique
combination of multimodal arts and social-psychological methodologies underpinning my framework also has the potential to contribute to broader Arts, Well-Being, and Creative Health agendas, such as the UK government’s Social Prescribing and Arts and Health initiatives. My original framework offers future researchers’ opportunities to further develop, enhance and enrich individual and community well-being through its application to their own projects, and, in doing so, also starts to challenge unhelpful art binaries that still position community arts practices as somehow lesser to higher art disciplines.
This presentation examines the outcomes from my recent practice-based project, ‘Point. forty’. The piece portrayed the memories, reflections and dreams, of four female participants at the pivotal midlife transition of the forties. In the 'live', the artwork re-staged participant stories to positive affect, through an engagement with twelve co-authored short films, screened on four doors, situated at a distance to four co- responding tables. On each table, personal ‘objects’ were placed, perhaps an old key, a dry starfish, a displaced teacup, or a pair of child’s red shoes. As audiences entered the space, four could choose to sit as ‘explorers’, embodying the intimate space of a participant’s own chair, illuminated by a single lamp, enclosed within an auditory world of a personal headset. Others stood, ‘watchers’, their bodies casting shadows into the surrounding darkness and silence. The objects on the explorer’s tables invited tactile exploration. When an object was moved, tilted or rattled, a corresponding film came ‘alive’ and a voice was heard within the headsets. The piece functioned to draw the audience into momentarily ‘touching’ the participant’s life, whilst simultaneously offering a physical and conceptual space for self-reflection. My research set out to investigate how the power of re-staging individual stories, through immersive and performative technologies, could generate new qualities of reflective space. Enabling individual and collective conversation, contemplation and connection. My working methodologies drew on social, technological and artistic approaches from human computer interaction, social science and performance studies. Specifically methods of Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis, (Smith, Flowers & Larkin, 2009), and Mark Granovetter’s seminal concept, ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’ (1973), were extended through attentive listening and video editing approaches. This unique practitioner framework, (Candy and Edmonds, 2011, p.190) was a transformative and iterative dialogue that moved between participants, the audience, artwork and myself. Generative findings were then distilled from this in-vivo experimentation. All components, to include MAX MSP software, Arduino hardware and the physicality of cables and wires, acted as networked co-creators within an environment that crossed virtual, conceptual and physical spaces. The qualitative outcomes, gained through an analysis of participant’s and audience responses, revealed that the immersive quality of the experience was both restorative and transformative to people’s lives. Of intrigue was the relatively long duration of time audience members stayed within this digital artwork, between 40-60 minutes. As an early career researcher, this piece has attracted fulltime funding for my PhD in ‘Digital Performance and the feminine: transformative encounters’. I am now further developing my
53
LHBN Conference 5-8 March 2015 Stories that make a difference/Histoires qui font une différence
findings by inviting other adult ‘groupings’ into participatory interactivity. By encouraging the narration and performance of individual lived experience through interdisciplinary methods, I wish to create new forms of artistic agency that can transcend boundaries and enrich communities. It is anticipated that my findings will contribute to initiatives such as the SWAN charter, Audience Engagement Council, NEF and UK Well Being Agenda an add to the emergent field of transdisciplinary research.
This presentation examines the outcomes from my recent practice-based project, ‘Point. forty’. The piece portrayed the memories, reflections and dreams, of four female participants at the pivotal midlife transition of the forties. In the 'live', the artwork re-staged participant stories to positive affect, through an engagement with twelve co-authored short films, screened on four doors, situated at a distance to four co- responding tables. On each table, personal ‘objects’ were placed, perhaps an old key, a dry starfish, a displaced teacup, or a pair of child’s red shoes. As audiences entered the space, four could choose to sit as ‘explorers’, embodying the intimate space of a participant’s own chair, illuminated by a single lamp, enclosed within an auditory world of a personal headset. Others stood, ‘watchers’, their bodies casting shadows into the surrounding darkness and silence. The objects on the explorer’s tables invited tactile exploration. When an object was moved, tilted or rattled, a corresponding film came ‘alive’ and a voice was heard within the headsets. The piece functioned to draw the audience into momentarily ‘touching’ the participant’s life, whilst simultaneously offering a physical and conceptual space for self-reflection. My research set out to investigate how the power of re-staging individual stories, through immersive and performative technologies, could generate new qualities of reflective space. Enabling individual and collective conversation, contemplation and connection. My working methodologies drew on social, technological and artistic approaches from human computer interaction, social science and performance studies. Specifically methods of Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis, (Smith, Flowers & Larkin, 2009), and Mark Granovetter’s seminal concept, ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’ (1973), were extended through attentive listening and video editing approaches. This unique practitioner framework, (Candy and Edmonds, 2011, p.190) was a transformative and iterative dialogue that moved between participants, the audience, artwork and myself. Generative findings were then distilled from this in-vivo experimentation. All components, to include MAX MSP software, Arduino hardware and the physicality of cables and wires, acted as networked co-creators within an environment that crossed virtual, conceptual and physical spaces. The qualitative outcomes, gained through an analysis of participant’s and audience responses, revealed that the immersive quality of the experience was both restorative and transformative to people’s lives. Of intrigue was the relatively long duration of time audience members stayed within this digital artwork, between 40-60 minutes. As an early career researcher, this piece has attracted fulltime funding for my PhD in ‘Digital Performance and the feminine: transformative encounters’. I am now further developing my
53
LHBN Conference 5-8 March 2015 Stories that make a difference/Histoires qui font une différence
findings by inviting other adult ‘groupings’ into participatory interactivity. By encouraging the narration and performance of individual lived experience through interdisciplinary methods, I wish to create new forms of artistic agency that can transcend boundaries and enrich communities. It is anticipated that my findings will contribute to initiatives such as the SWAN charter, Audience Engagement Council, NEF and UK Well Being Agenda an add to the emergent field of transdisciplinary research.
April 27th - May 12 The Gallery, Mill Lane, De Montfort University, Leicester, LE1 9BH, United Kingdom
Normal Gallery Hours 12 noon to 5pm Monday to Saturday or by appointment
Please see:
https://www.alicetuppencorps.com/new-transformational-encounters