Méiyǒu shālù, without killing. Performed in collaboration with Gao Rongrong on 24 Nov 2023 at "Great Sounds Seek Silence Exhibition," Confucius Institute for Dance and Performance, London (24 Nov 2023 - 30 Nov 2023).

"Méiyǒu shālù" is an acousmatic composition that aim to encapsulate the essence of the Great Sounds Seek Silence Exhibition theme, which explores the intricate interplay between sound and silence inspired by Taoist philosophy.
At its core, this composition utilizes Chinese characters, specifically "without killing" [沒有殺戮], as a graphic score, merging the realms of visual art and sound in a profound and thought-provoking manner. This graphic score, instead of traditional musical notation, serves as a powerful representation of the message of pacifism and non-violence.
"Méiyǒu shālù" serves as a vehicle for conveying my pacifist message. It invites viewers and listeners to contemplate the profound impact of non-violence and the absence of conflict, suggesting that true power lies not in the noise of battle but in the serene stillness of peace.

This composition represents a fusion of my diverse interests and beliefs, drawing upon the rich tapestry of Chinese culture and the philosophical underpinnings of Taoism.
The title, "Méiyǒu shālù," directly translates to "without killing." Here, I reinterpret these ancient words as a graphic score for my composition. Each Chinese character, with its unique visual shape, becomes an integral part of the sonic landscape I aim to create.This choice of words as the graphic score is not coincidental but rather serves as a reflection of my unwavering commitment to pacifism. It embodies my belief in the power of non-violence, as inspired by the teachings of great peacemakers throughout history.
The composition itself is an acusmatic journey that explores the delicate interplay between sound and silence, form and invisibility. It invites the audience to immerse themselves in the soundscape created by these Chinese characters, transcending linguistic boundaries to evoke a deep sense of contemplation and reflection.
My work seeks to challenge conventional perspectives, encouraging viewers and listeners to explore the intricate relationship between sound and silence, form and invisibility, and the enduring influence of Chinese culture on contemporary art and philosophy. I hope that this composition offers a unique and thought-provoking experience for all who encounter it.​​

At all levels, top-down support was strictly necessary and priceless, but how often have we been approached the process of adapting to uncertainty with cooperative design together with the students?
My paper addresses the experience of addressing uncertainty with a cooperative eye, where students participate actively in the decision making around new hybrid learning experience which had to be fluid, adaptable, inclusive and remain innovative, playful, engaging.
We applied an iterative co-inquiry strategy that involves all students and Representatives to model their language and shift towards a non-judgmental environment where all voices are heard. This forged a new level of resilience both for staff and students which shows how embracing uncertainty as an opportunity and not as a challenge has scope for community growth. Collaborating with the students bought the development of an adapted pedagogy model, assessment adjustments, inclusive practices and renewed engagement.

​Improving students’ condition of life and contributing to economic and social development are key aspects HE should include in its priorities during and after a pandemic.
Student agency refers to the quality of engagement of students with their environment. This involves concepts of power and will, and of course “possibilities” and “aims”. Embedding mechanisms to support students’ agency constitutes a win-win opportunity. The benefits of supporting students’ agency touch areas of great interest for HE in the UK: engagement, attainment, wellbeing, graduate outcomes, employability and inclusivity.
The areas students engage the most at university have a common denominator: improving themselves and their condition of life. Through their agency, they can also contribute to the development of others and more broadly also economic and social development (Klemencic, 2015). As students are likely to seek to deploy some influence on their educational trajectories, their future lives and their immediate and larger social surroundings, it would be very valuable considering a more collaborative approach to model the learning environments through students’ support. With this specific aim in mind, during the pandemic, we have adopted a communication framework called Non-Violent Communication (Marshall, 2015) at the BSc Creative Computing, which led to a student-led flipped class pedagogy model adapted to their needs. We measured the improvement of the quality of learning/teaching environment, engagement and wellbeing for both tutors and students. 

​The lockdown in London took us out of our houses to get focus, remain on track, exercise, be where kids would have not got our attention. For many academics it also comes with changes in our workplaces and work practice, travel restrictions, but also funding cuts for projects already running. On 11 March, UKRI communicated to partners that it would need to review its ODA funding in light of the significant reduction in UKRI’s ODA allocation from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. 

One of the main focuses during my walks around my neighbourhood was definitely my project Coaast (AHRC/GCRF funded), which remained suspended due to covid. My walking with no specific destination and the reason for not progressing on my funded project with the community in Bamburi Beach in Kenya had a common denominator: the pandemic. With lockdowns and travel restrictions in place I experienced a sense of loss for the people I was working with in Kenya. Our project aimed to create awareness of climate change and environment issues due to foreign developments. We collected the memories and intangible cultural practices of a coastal community, but we explored the present as well through fieldworks conducted with members of the community which were recorded too. 

The real connection between the place where I live and work with the remote area in Kenya where I was developing a project with a community has increased day by day by the memories rising during my local walks. The audiopiece will bridge my walks in Southwest London with an eye on my step count and the government mandated 60’ exercise limit with my memories and audio archive collected in Kenya.

For reference CoaAst website and part of the aural archive are available at this link: http://coaast.info/

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(AHRC/GCRF). The project aims at the creation of a media archive which, presented in a form of an interactive installation, collects and preserves the memories and intangible cultural practices of a small coastal community near Mombasa, Kenya. The driving assumption is that “the organisation of space is a cultural representation—and it is through this representation that the individual constructs both herself/himself and her/his image of the world” (Moore, 1986:120). Therefore, this archive will help to develop a role for the creative analysis of data as an aid to understanding how the community could shape policy development and environmental decision-making. The main research method is a community-based participatory research which will refer to cooperative inquiry methods (Co-inquiry). ​

CoaAST (Coastal Aural archive of Spaces & Time) is a project funded by “Rising From the Depths” It draws on ideas of co-inquiry (Heron & Reason, 2006), defined as research with people rather than research on people. Knowledge gained through a participatory approach explore local knowledge and perception, enhance the research aims aligning them with what the community perceive as goal (Israel at al. 2001), empowers the community by considering them as agents who can investigate and make actions regardless their own local reality (Webb, 1990). Using participatory methods, we are working with educators and children to seek out evidence of what the community core values are and how these are connected to their environment. CoaAST will involve two local schools, and will resonate with the local community as a ludic-critical practice. ​

"How will this help me catch more fish?": Interfacing intangible cultural heritage in an off-grid environment
Anna Troisi (School of Design, Greenwich University)
Gauti Sigthorsson (Dept. of Media, Culture and Language, U. of Roehampton)

In this presentation we ask whether Augmented Reality (AR), anchored in physical environments, can go beyond simply enhancing a specific location, drawing in temporal and emotional features connected to communities and intangible heritage. AR has been used in numerous projects relating to cultural heritage management: It works as a digital "layer" on top of physical reality which enables the user to see, hear and feel "more" of the environment where s/he is located. In this way, AR can be used to map buildings and features on to geospatial coordinates, but it can also locate memories, traditions and practices associated with intangible cultural heritage. 
First, how to "augment" something when it’s not know in advance, when the researcher comes from outside the community and only has broad preliminary knowledge about what constitutes intangible cultural heritage for its members: The main research method explored here is a community-based cooperative inquiry, which draws on ideas of co-inquiry (Heron & Reason, 2006), defined as research with people rather than research on people.
Secondly, is digital compulsory? As a brief look at the literature will show, AR requires internet access. But what if you're working in contexts where connectivity is limited, unreliable or absent? This is consequential for research on intangible cultural heritage, for example when it's under threat from the displacement of people or rapid, large-scale development - circumstances in which digital resources can make an enormous difference to the volume and detail of the archive (Eoin, Owens, and King 2013). Our specific example is CoaAST (Coastal Aural archive of Spaces & Time), now underway in Mombasa, Kenya. The aim of CoaAST is to investigate the impact that changes in the environmental and economic conditions along the coastal areas of Mombasa have had upon the communities that live there, and on their cultural practices. These changes are sometimes unwelcome, as the title question illustrates, asked by a fisherman from Bamburi Beach.
The area in which the fieldwork takes place raised an immediate question when we first arrived in Mombasa: How to engage local people in discussions of cultural heritage when it's not a priority for them? Furthermore, what do you do in the absence of a digital infrastructure, if your aim is to collaborate on creating an overlay of documentation and memory atop the immediate physical environment? CoaAST serves as a starting point for thinking about "immersion" from the low-tech end.

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I'm very pleased that I was invited to contribute to The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication. This will be an important scholarly publication consituting the latest project in the ICA series of Sub-Disciplinary Encyclopaedias of Communication.
And YES, sometimes we write without the REF in mind, because actually writing is fun and can be done for the pleasure of doing it. No shame.

I'm Principal Investigator of the project CoaAst which has received a ARHC/CGFR grant.

CoaAst is a project which involves a small community (Bamburi Beach) located in the coastal area in Kenya close to Mombasa. The project foresees children from two local schools creating an archive of aural memories which will be accessible to the public. Children, coordinated by their teachers, will be equipped with audio recorders and they will hunt for memories in the village, to the shore, at their homeplaces. The final outcome of this project is an interactive work which will enable users to have access to the archive in a playful way. The archive will be visualised as a map and accessible both online on a web platform but also exhibited in the Fort Jesus National Museum of Kenya in Mombasa in the form of an interactive installation which will be artistic and informative at the same time. We believe that involving the children and the community to create an archive of memories will help the policymakers to better understand how the community perceives landscape, cultural, environmental and economic changes in the area and how those changes affect their everyday life. We believe that the process itself can help the community to better engage with matters which are important for them. The idea of connecting generations towards a process of self-understanding and understanding of the coastal Marine Cultural Heritage (MCH) will stimulate social cohesion around themes like economic growth and conservation.

Norm contaminated, a soundscape as result of a fieldwork at the Perenco Oil Farm. Arts Catalyst Gallery from 22/03/2018 to 12/05/2018
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Norm contaminated is a sound piece commissioned by Arts Catalyst for the Exhibition “Brownsea: an imaginary island (an island of the imaginary)” 22/03/2018 to 12/05/2018 - Arts Catalyst, 74-76 Cromer Street, King's Cross, London.

https://www.artscatalyst.org/brownsea-imaginary-island-island-imaginary
​​Norm Contaminated is part of a series of artists’ projects, curatorial interventions, and transdisciplinary research Test Sites: Poole whi​ch is curated and produced by Arts Catalyst and it is the result of a field work taken place the 22nd of February 2018 around the Perenco Oil Farm, Poole, Dorset. The commission for the exhibition and co-inquiry aimed to respond to the issue to involve the local community to respond collectively to social and environmental challenges in the local area of the Poole harbour. This piece is part of a project called Test Sites, a longitudinal environmental project with a range of partner institutions (The Forestry Commission, The National Trust, and Canals and Rivers Trust). The long-term goal is to engage the public in a discussion of ethical and social implications of environmental politics, and to address key issues of sustainability for agencies and local socially engaged groups, clubs and societies.

FUTURE LOVE at the Futurefest 17-18 september 2016

The next decade will bring a diversity of love partners for us to choose from – lovebots with intelligent skin, cyborgs with sensory implants, tele-dildonic connected avatars, through to empathetic personal carers loving you day and night. There will be intense debate on the ethical issues that emerge.
As human cyborgs appear more often in our communities, as our friends bring robot lovers to dinner, as touch, caress and gaze technology converge, we will see virtual reality, augmented reality and holograms deepening and intensifying our virtual-physical immersive experiences.
This expert panel will debate this looping of our senses and emotions with these ‘non-human humans’.
Chair: Luke Robert Mason, Director, Virtual Futures
Panelists:
Trudy Barber, Senior Lecturer and Course Leader, Faculty of Creative and Cultural Industries at the University of Portsmouth
Marco Donnarumma, Marco Donnarumma, performance artist and research fellow, Universität der Künste Berlin
Anna Troisi, Digital artist and researcher
Text from http://www.futurefest.org/speaker/synthetic-emotions
http://www.futurefest.org/

I'll move together with Rob Smith the huge hypersculpture now sleeping at Wysing arts centre at Cambridge. Glad to be able to exhibit this work we did together with Neal White for Office of Experiments and EMERGE.

http://o-o-e.org/
EMERGE