School of Art and Design - Te Kura Toi a Hoahoa

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Research within the School of Art and Design brings together visual artists, spatial designers, fashion designers, filmmakers, curators, entrepreneurs, graphic designers, digital designers, product designers and other cultural practitioners from New Zealand and around the world to work on expanded notions of art and design through creative-led research. Their research disciplines and study areas include: Visual Arts, Graphic Design, Spatial Design, Product Design, Digital Design, Fashion and Textile Design, and across disciplines.

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Now showing 1 - 5 of 333
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    Carnival Land: An Creative Consideration of Sequential Storytelling to Discuss Cultural Dislocation
    (School of Art and Design, AUT, 2023-12-21) Tavares, Tatiana
    This presentation will outline the practice-led research project Carnival Land, a picture book that weaves together sequential storytelling and illustration to discuss cultural dislocation. Based on my experiences as an immigrant from Brazil to New Zealand, it provides a narrative in metaphors and a creative orchestration of photomontage, bilinguality, and theatricised multi-page spreads. The story tells of the trials and eventual transformation of a young girl in a foreign land, where aspirations appear as costumes in an annual Carnival parade. Several theoretical frameworks significantly influenced Carnival Land. These were notions of transgression, carnality, and Carnival (Bakhtin, 1968); structure and discourse surrounding bricolage (Strauss, 1962); and writings relating to journey both as a rite of passage (Gennep, 1960; Turner, 1979); and as a process of immigration. Carnival has served as a primary metaphor, underpinning both the story and conceptual aspects of the work. Traditionally, people in Carnival parades participate in a symbolic ritual of identity change and re-negotiation of social and cultural contexts. They do this by assuming (in costume and behaviour) an alternative self. This transformative aspect of Carnival may be seen as a form of symbolical reversal, a brief moment of liminality that allows people to imagine new meanings and values in a ritual of performance. It is through this process that the performative nature of Carnival becomes a transformative process of being. The carnal (bodily) nature of Carnival enables specific linkages between the transformation of the self and the nature of immigration as a transitional physical/social/personal experience. Methodologically, the project emanates from an artistic research paradigm (Klein, 2010) that supports a heuristic approach (Douglass and Moustakas, 1985) to the discovery and refinement of ideas. The project employed autoethnography as a research design intended to facilitate the strategic accessing of personal experience and synthesised it into a fictional work. Thus, the research draws upon both tacit and explicit knowledge in developing the narrative, its structure, and stylistic treatments.
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    The Animator’s Sensorium: The Impact of Acting and Animation Experience on Creating Reference Performances
    (Intellect, 2022-09-30) Kennedy, Jason
    This research provides an initial investigation into strategies for creating reference performances for animation. The term reference performance has various meanings in animation production; in this article, I use it to refer to a recording of a person performing physical and emotional cues, from which performance elements of an animated character may be derived. Beginning with Max Fleischer’s invention of the rotoscope process in 1915, animation studios began to record actors as a means to inject greater believability – that is, a “[reconciliation of] realism within the animated form” (Pallant 2011: 41) – into the movements and expressions of animated characters. While various methods exist today to capture reference performances, it remains axiomatic that the utility of the reference is only as good as a performer’s ability to produce the desired performance. While seasoned actors would seem ideally suited to the task, large-scale animation studios frequently require animators to film their own reference performances, even though the animators may have limited (or non-existent) acting experience. By comparison, smaller studios and independent productions may not have the time or ability for each animator to self-produce reference; instead, they may opt for an animation director/supervisor to record reference for every character, to work from clips available through online video sites (e.g.: YouTube), or to forgo video reference altogether. This research examines the potential for acting experience to enhance reference performances, and specifically explores three different preconditions of experience when producing animation reference: an actor with no animation experience; an animator with no acting experience; and an academic with both acting and animation experience. As an additional site of inquiry, this research explores the use of head-mounted cameras (HMCs) in the production of animation reference as a means to more fully and reliably capture the research participants’ expressive range. This research engages with ethnographic and autoethnographic research models to compare the creative choices of each participant and their ability to produce meaningful expressions, gestures, and body movements as reference performance for a short, auteur 3D animated film in a predominantly realistic style. From these analyses, the maximal performance utility of each participant is gauged. By extension, this limited data provides an initial suggestion that acting experience is an essential precondition when producing useful reference performances for the type and style of animation explored in this study. Furthermore, this article relates the acting strategies of its participants to the acting theory of Ivana Chubbuck (2004) and the theory of emotional effector patterns as described by Bloch et al. (1987). This research suggests that these practice-informed performance theories may prove useful to animator when producing their own reference, regardless of performance experience.
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    Point/Cloud: Diffusive Spatial Imaginaries
    (The Interior Design - Interior Architecture Educators Association, 2023-12-29) Douglas, Carl
    Laser scanning holds out the possibility of extreme certainty. Digital scanning has become deeply integrated in contemporary archaeological surveying, and in architectural heritage and preservation contexts digital scans are now common. Certainty in this text-based essay is understood as an affect, an experiential quality rather than an absolute measure. It does not question the possibility or usefulness of precise measurement (although it does question the rhetorical use of exactitude and precision), but explores the imaginative role of exactitude in this form of digital imaging. It makes readings of a series of moving-image works that use point clouds generated by laser scanning. Rhetorically, the term ‘point cloud’ is suspended between the apparent certainty and exactitude of the mathematical point, and the vague ungraspability of vapour. Rather than expressing exactitude and objectivity, the works discussed here highlight ambiguities of human perception, and seek to see from nonhuman perspectives (the driverless car, the kāhu/hawk, and an oak forest). It concludes by suggesting that such works in particular, and point cloud imagery in general, can be understood in terms of a diffusive material imaginary.
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    Re-imagining Student Success: Integrating Strategy and Action Through an Indigenous Lens
    (Intellect, 2023-11-28) Peterson, J Fiona; Ka'ai, T; Smith, V; McPherson, K
    Enhancing student success has been increasingly a focus for universities. But the context has changed, with complex challenges including a global pandemic, rapid digital transitions and greater diversity with related inclusion needs. Creative thinking is essential to address what student success could (and arguably should) look like and be. In this article we utilize Appreciative Inquiry to rethink current knowledge and practice. We refer specifically to our context in Aotearoa New Zealand, where data shows that a change in approach is needed particularly for Māori students, Pacific students and other ‘new’ learners. We explore a different way of working and learning – ‘mahitahi’ – and argue that improving outcomes requires more than incremental or tactical shifts in action. We propose a re-imag­ining of diversity, inclusion and success for sustained transformation. Integrating Indigenous approaches to knowledge into innovative frameworks, adapting future-focused curriculum and creative practice pedagogy in the process, could benefit all students across disciplines.
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    Prioritized Strategies to Improve Diagnosis and Early Management of Cerebral Palsy for Both Māori and Non-Māori Families
    (Wiley, 2024-01-18) Williams, Sian A; Nakarada-Kordic, Ivana; Mackey, Anna H; Reay, Stephen; Stott, N Susan
    AIM: To identify prioritized strategies to support improvements in early health service delivery around the diagnosis and management of cerebral palsy (CP) for both Māori and non-Māori individuals. METHOD: Using a participatory approach, health care professionals and the parents of children with CP attended co-design workshops on the topic of early diagnosis and management of CP. Health design researchers facilitated two 'discovery' (sharing experiences and ideas) and two 'prototyping' (solution-focused) workshops in Aotearoa, New Zealand. A Māori health service worker co-facilitated workshops for Māori families. RESULTS: Between 7 and 13 participants (14 health care professionals, 12 parents of children with CP across all functional levels) attended each workshop. The discovery workshops revealed powerful stories about early experiences and needs within clinician-family communication and service provision. The prototyping workshops revealed priorities around communication, and when, what, and how information is provided to families; recommendations were co-created around what should be prioritized within a resource to aid health care navigation. INTERPRETATION: There is a critical need for improved communication, support, and guidance, as well as education, for families navigating their child with CP through the health care system. Further input from families and health care professionals partnering together will continue to guide strategies to improve health care service delivery using experiences as a mechanism for change.
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