Portraying the change – evaluating 14 years’s work
How can you describe a cultural programme that has extended over 14 years, 9 countries and 3,000 projects? How do you account for its outcomes, the change it may have contributed to, and the effects on culture or society?
Portraying the change. Fascinating in depth report prepared by Francois Matarasso on the Swiss Cultural Programme in South Eastern Europe focused on participants, rather than organisers.
ESRC Arts, Health & Wellbeing Research
Highlighted through the London Arts in Health Forum‘s newsletter:
Welcome to the Arts, Health & Wellbeing programme. We are a thematic, multidisciplinary programme funded by the Economic and Social Research Council aiming to develop understandings of how the arts may contribute to health and wellbeing.
We also aim to facilitate a UK network of academics, service users and practitioners to help develop research projects of the highest quality and of national and international significance.
Project Ginsberg
Project Ginsberg highlighted in the Alt-w mailing from New Media Scotland
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness
Howl Part 1, Allen Ginsberg 1956
Project Ginsberg’s vision is a future where every Scottish citizen who experiences common mental health problems has a wide range of interventions available to them.
People with common mental health problems may look like they are coping – they walk the dog, look after their children, go to work – but the reality is that for those with common mental health problems the experience is chronic; resulting in months and years of feeling like they aren’t coping with life.
Project Ginsberg is about helping to define, design and prototype the vision of a range of effective interventions for the people of Scotland, with a focus on exploring the role of everyday web and mobile technology, and alternatives to the traditional patient-clinician model.
We think there is a huge opportunity to improve people’s life experience through rethinking our approach to common mental health problems, especially by using technology in ways that fit around people’s everyday lives.
The work is driven by Scottish Government’s Mental Health Strategy 2012-2015, which commits to developing a Scotland-wide approach to improving mental health through new technology in collaboration with NHS 24.
What art have I seen?
Schwitters in Britain at the Tate Britain.
Schwitters after Duchamp yesterday evoked a further set of relationships. Fascinating to see these two masters of the 20th Century, one sometimes derided and the other not well known. The Duchamp exhibition, well described here, is explicitly about influence. The Schwitters exhibition is a more traditional historical narrative shaped by geography and war. It has two contemporary responses Laure Prouvost and Adam Chodzko attached at the end. There are also interesting similarities in the exhibition design, though the Barbican is perhaps more compelling.
Peter McCaughey reminded me, Schwitters’ interest was achieving the smallest, shortest, gap between idea and realisation (“Merz art strives for immediate expression by shortening the path from intuition to visual manifestation of the artwork” Merz Painting, 1919 http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kurt_Schwitters). What is the relationship between Schwitters and Latham? One second drawings?
Brian Eno’s new work for a hospital
Beautiful piece on Radio 4’s Today programme Friday 19th April talking about Brian Eno’s new work for a hospital in Hove. It absolutely captured all the thoughts about our experiences of hospitals. It was also reported in the Independent here.
What art have I seen?
They saved the hill. But can they save forgotten Scotland?
Dalmellington is one of a series of villages and small towns including Cumnock and New Cumnock, Auchinleck, Beith, Kilbirnie, Glengarnock, Drongen, Muirkirk, perhaps Patna and Tarbolton, certainly South as far as Dailly, which are part of a post industrial rural landscape which is distinctive in Scotland. It runs across Central Scotland and up into Fife.
Kenneth Roy’s short comment on the demise of Scottish Coal Ltd, just put up on the Scottish Review, highlights the undoubted determination of the people living in these towns: they value their places and fight for them.
Glasgow may be onto its fourth major international event next year, but the whole discourse of regeneration and creative cities has pretty much bypassed the issues of the post-industrial rural landscape. The development of Dumfries House and the associated new settlement of Knockroon are perhaps an element of a rural story, as are Booktowns, though as Roy notes Dalmellington was meant to be Scotland’s before Wigtown grabbed the mantle.
If Creative Scotland has a challenge today, it’s to develop a Place Strategy that speaks to this set of challenges.
CHRIS FREMANTLE 
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