ISSUE #12 "FRAMING THE FUTURE":

This is a general issue with the theme of 'framing the future'. Given all the changes that we are experiencing at the moment with the decline of industry in the UK and the trend towards global manufacture, the growth of the internet, cultural pluralism and rising ecological concerns, how are these going to impact on art and design? What evidence is there of these issues being addressed through emerging practices in the various art, design and craft disciplines. What is there to excite, rather than depress, us about looking forward to the future?

Contents:

DEFYING CONVENTION: EMERGENT PRINT PRACTICES IN DIGITAL PRINTMAKING
Naren Barfield, Raz Barfield, George Whale

The current emphasis on technological advancements in digital print has tended to obscure a grass roots diversification of activity. Recent work by artists worldwide provides compelling evidence that computer technologies are spawning new kinds of "digital craft".
These practices are arising in several different ways: firstly, from "hybridizations" of digital output technologies with traditional print media; secondly from imaginative adaptations of hardware and software; thirdly, from the construction of original software.
The authors argue that unconventional practices are often manifestations of a concept-led approach to the making of art, where technical solutions emerge from the specific problems or questions addressed by the artist; this is contrasted with a technology-led approach, where hardware and software (and conventions associated with their usage) may delimit conceptualization.

DECOY BY JANE PROPHET Slideshow images (refresh every 20 seconds)
Simon Willmoth

Jane Prophet's recent artwork Decoy is a screen-based installation in which animated digital landscapes are displayed on two 42-inch plasma screens. There are six sequences in the piece, each of which starts with a contemporary photographic image of a National Trust landscape garden. This landscape, which is read as natural, metamorphoses into a digital landscape in which lakes become woodland, houses are obscured by earthworks and fractal trees grow in the place of organic trees. In this way Decoy simulates the work of 18th century landscape designers, such as Launcelot 'Capability' Brown and Humphry Repton, but it compresses 100 years of organic growth into 100 seconds. The artificial, accelerated speed of these changes serves to deconstruct the 'natural' parkland landscape as ordered according to 18th century theorisation of beauty and the qualities of the picturesque. Decoy also disrupts the privileged viewing position, which was a key element in the Landscape Movement. Decoy's fractally generated trees are modelled to simulate English oak and beech trees, using custom written software designed by the graphics programmer Gordon Selley; and are a development of Prophet's digital photographic work The Landscape Room (2000).

HUMAN DIGNITY AND HUMAN RIGHTS: THOUGHTS ON THE PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN-CENTRED DESIGN
Richard Buchanan

The implications of the idea that design is grounded in human dignity and human rights are enormous, and they deserve careful exploration. I believe they will help us to better understand aspects of design that are otherwise obscured in the flood of poor or mediocre products that we find everywhere in the world. We should consider what we mean by human dignity and how all of the products that we make either succeed or fail to support and advance human dignity. And we should think carefully about the nature of human rights-the spectrum of civil and political, economic and social, and cultural rights-and how these rights are directly affected by our work. The issues surrounding human dignity and human rights provide a new perspective for exploring the many moral and ethical problems that lie at the core of the design professions.

TEN THOUSAND LI
Leung Wing-fai

The future of art practice and research must take into account the cultural diversity of today's post modern, post colonial, global reality. This essay explores the issues of cultural identities of the Chinese diasporic communities in Britain and how these may be reflected in the visual research of contemporary artists of Chinese descent.
Though influenced by traces of Chinese culture, there are differences and diversities within the identities of the Chinese diaspora in Britain that are generated by the ruptures of experiences. Chinese artists who choose to explore issues of their cultural being have to assert their non-eurocentric perspectives in order to challenge the narrow western definitions of Others.
The essay examines the concepts and artwork of four artists of a forthcoming national touring exhibition Ten Thousand Li. The exhibition aims to show the visual research of contemporary culture, lifestyles and social reality of the Chinese diaspora in Britain via lens-based media.

BEYOND SITE: TOWARDS A DEFINITION OF PLACE-SPECIFICITY
Gabriela Vaz-Pinheiro
Alongside the advent of a new sense for the word 'place' which, under the new streams of critical geography, reformulates the prevalent concept of space as a geometrical site by mustering the realms of memory and experience, streams of 'place sensitive' art practice have also developed. The discourse of site-specificity, contriving the post-modern turn from the museum and gallery walls' purity to the idiosyncrasies of site, does not contemplate those emergent forms of art practice. This paper reflects upon the conditions under which art practices debating the realms of social and lived action arise, and elaborates on the proposal of the term 'place-specificity'.

OPPORTUNITIES FOR AND INFLUENCE ON POSTGRADUATE EDUCATION IN ART AND DESIGN
Elaine Thomas, Rachel Cooper

The creation and evolution of the Arts and Humanities Research Board has been both recent and relatively rapid, ant it is worth pausing and considering its history and progress in relation to Art and Design as we participate in its current review of post- graduate provision.
This paper is in two parts. In the first, Professor Elaine Thomas, previous convenor of the postgraduate panel for Visual Arts and Media, has outlined her own involvement with the Arts and Humanities Research Board and its predecessor body, the Humanities Research Board. She offers a perspective to place these issues in a broader context, to provide some insights regarding the position of Art and Design in relation to other disciplines. She stresses the importance of academic colleagues in Art and Design continuing to contribute to the debate in order to influence and shape the future development of the AHRB.
Professor Rachel Cooper, current convenor of the postgraduate panel for Visual Arts and Media, then raises the key issues for Art and Design in that debate by describing the current review of AHRB postgraduate provision and the potential implications it may have on art and design postgraduate provision.