Doctoral Training Partnerships: a range of postgraduate training is funded by the Research Councils. For information on current funding routes, see the common terminology at https://www.ukri.org/apply-for-funding/how-we-fund-studentships/. Training grants may be to one organisation or to a consortia of research organisations. This portal will show the lead organisation only.

Basketry has been practised for millennia and is one of the oldest human technologies. Its immediate importance lies in the provision of mats, containers, traps and barriers, all of which have been central to culture, whether nomadic or sedentary and whether based on an economy of hunting and gathering or herding and cultivation. Beyond its practical uses, basketry has arguably been even more influential on our lives, since it relies on the relationship of number, pattern and structure. It thus provides a paradigm for disciplines such as mathematics and engineering and for the organisation of social and political life.\n\nThe research explores the development of basketry in human culture over ten thousand years, and focuses on various parts of the world both in the past but particularly on the anthropological records relating to recent and current production in Amazonia, Central Africa and Papua New Guinea. The aim is to identify both the mechanical traditions of making and the ways in which basketry is implicated in wider patterns of understanding: such things as order and metaphor.\n\nThe main output of the research will be an exhibition and accompanying book. The exhibition will include ancient material recovered by excavation as well as more recent examples of basketry from around the world. It will also show the impact of woven forms on other media, such as pottery, painting, and stone sculpture and architecture. The mode of display is crucial, as it will enable people to experience basketry directly. More than most materials, complex woven forms are difficult to understand in photographs or diagrams. Qualities such as their scale, texture and colour are critical to the ways we respond to them and how we understand their structure and tactile implications. Given the range of uses of basketry: mats for sitting on or providing partitions in houses, cradles for babies, traps for catching fish or game, hurdles for penning animals or for land reclamation, the associations of the technology are very varied. Some are aggressive, others protective, some help create social hierarchies others are recreational. This variety is best experienced at first hand.\n\nA wide range of research methods will be employed: reviewing the existing literature, studying museum collections and their often unpublished documentation, new anthropological fieldwork including filming the making and use of basketry, documenting and analysing newly commissioned work, particularly woven installations, and involvement in practice-based workshops both professional and lay.

Picasso's politics mattered because he was an important artist. The last taboo in the study of Picasso is his membership of the Communist Party from 1944 until his death. French/Swiss art dealers sold his pictures to American galleries and collectors. Picasso was able to maintain his millionaire's life style and his PCF integrity.\n\nPicasso's Dove of Peace became the emblem of the Peace Congresses in Wroclaw, Paris, Stockholm, Sheffield and Rome. In 1950 Picasso arrived at Victoria Station in London for the Sheffield Peace Congress. He was detained for twelve hours by Immigration before Penrose secured his release. Picasso never visited England again, not even for Penrose's exhibition of his work at Tate 1960. Also in 1950 Picasso applied for a visa to visit the USA as one of the Partisans for Peace to present the Stockholm Peace Appeal Against Atomic Weapons to the US Congress. His request was refused and he never visited the USA but he became the symbol of the freedom of the artist in the West.\n\nPicasso made a series of History Paintings in the post war period; The Charnel House 1944, Massacre in Korea 1950, War and Peace 1951. War shows the god of war releasing giant bacteria, a reference to the US use of germ warfare in Korea. These murals were criticised in the West as Picasso's least successful paintings. In the East he was criticised for his refusal to take the Cp line on Socialist Realism. \n\nPicasso was a controversial figure in the USSR. Ehrenburg wrote an essay in L'Unita in 1953 on the eve of Picasso's Rome/Milan retrospective in defence of Picasso's artistic freedom Ehrenburg was a cultural ambassador to Western Europe for the USSR. He wrote the novel The Thaw. In November 1956, Picasso signed a letter to the PCF expressing profound anxiety about the suppression of the Hungarian workers' revolt by Russian tanks. Picasso's decision to remain in the PCF after 1956 was divisive. He was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1961. Ehrenburg organised two exhibitions of Picasso's work in Moscow in 1956 and 1963. Ehrenburg's papers are now in the Yad Vashem, 'Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance' Archive in Jerusalem\n\nThis exhibition will create a framework of the central figures, the critic's and curator's who wrote about Picasso in those years, whose ideas reflected not only the times in which they lived but also the ideology and politics of their culture. As cultural contacts between artists and art historians in Eastern and Western European have increased in recent years, this study sets out to understand the pressures that have distorted cultures both East and West, during the Cold War 1944 to 1989. Art Historians from North America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the Russian Federation will record the discussions around Picasso within their own cultures - including the contradictions. It is with the contradictions that we will increase understanding.\n\nThe Battle for Picasso's Mind, is a quote from Tom Braden in 1994. Braden was the CIA Officer who put together the International Organizations Division, the organisation at the centre of America's cultural Cold War. (Stoner Saunders Who Paid the Piper p.438). The dominant image of the Cold War remains militaristic confrontation between USA and USSR personified by James Bond.\n\nPicasso was also a controversial figure in the USSR. Ehrenburg wrote an essay in L'Unita in 1953 on the eve of Picasso's Rome/Milan retrospective in defence of Picasso's artistic freedom from Socialist Realism. Ehrenburg organised two exhibitions of Picasso's work in Moscow in 1956 and 1963. Ehrenburg wrote the novel The Thaw, which gave its name to an improvement in relations between USA and USSR after Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin. In November 1956, Picasso signed a letter to the PCF expressing profound anxiety about the suppression of the Hungarian workers' revolt by Russian tanks. Picasso series Rape of the Sabines was painted during the Cuba Missile Crisis 1961.

Utilising the virtuality of digital imagery this project tests and evaluates the critical and aesthetic implications of the 'picturing' or 'visualisation' of philosophical and political ideas as art. Further to this the project explores, through practice-led research, the possibility that the synthesis (or combining) of these visualisations might produce new images-of-ideas and assesses the status and performance of these as both 'ideas' and as 'art'?\n\nA series of three digital images will be produced 'picturing' or 'visualising' three philosophical ideas derived from the writings of the philosopher Giles Deleuze. The ideas are remodellings of pre-existing philosophical ideas, as follows: Leibniz/Aristotle's notion of the Monad, Karl Marx's theory of commodity fetishism and Nietzsche's eternal return. The visualisations of these ideas will be developed through dialogues and consultation with specialists in the fields from which the ideas are drawn, as well as artists and theorists concerned with ideas of 'mental imagery' and visualisation. A final image will be produced as a synthesis (or combination) of these images. This will be presented at the prestigious EAST 09 exhibition at Norwich Gallery (including a public talk) and evaluation of the research presented as a paper at ISEA 09 (International Symposium on Electronic Art) at the University of Ulster. The research will also be disseminated through a website. Gilles Deleuze is used as the focus for this research because of the figurative (visual) nature of his writing and his experimentation with the synthesis of pre-existing philosophical models in the creation of new 'concepts'.\n\nThe intention is to research new formats of art production and reception which challenge the preset binaries of the 'visual' and the 'linguistic', which continue to dominate the discourses of contemporary art. As the philosopher Michel Foucault describes this: '...the oldest oppositions of our alphabetic civilization: to show and to name; to shape and to say; to reproduce and to articulate; to imitate and to signify; to look and to read.' This also relates to debates within the fields of philosophy, cognitive science and psychology examining the visual potential of ideas and the role 'imagery' plays in thought processes, whether it provides the semantic grounding for language or whether the idea of mental imagery, or 'seeing with the mind's eye' is merely habit-formed assumption. The intention is to explore the possibility of the cross-articulation between text and image and the bridging or synthesising potential of the visual affect of ideas. \n\nThe outputs of this project will directly engage and be of interest to a wide range of audiences, including scholars/researchers across the arts and humanities engaged in practice-based and interdisciplinary theoretical work (in particular in the fields of contemporary art and art theory and those working on the integration of art and theory/philosophy/psychology) but also the wider audience for contemporary art. EastO9 is a high profile exhibition - publicised in national and international press, with an audience of between 9-12,000 visitors and active in the Norfolk and Norwich Festival. Within this context the research will be widely disseminated including a free public talk at the Norwich Gallery.

This proposal builds upon four related research projects: Norwich University of the Arts Impact Case Study, Public engagement with the Norfolk Broads, enhancing public understanding and engagement with nature conservation (2019); Visualisations of space debris (Off Earth. NIXON. 2021); Building Platform Technologies for Symbiotic Creativity in Hong Kong (NIXON Et al, 2021) and Future Cinema Systems (NIXON Et al, 2022). Working in close partnership with the Broads Authority and using archive material and maps contained in the Strategic Flood Risk Assessment report 2018 (a detailed study of the impacts of rising sea levels and effects of Climate Change), using 3D modelling, and volumetric video, I will create realistic and immersive visualisations, which reimagine past, present, and future landscapes accurately, depicting the Broads and East Anglia coastal areas under threat from rising sea levels. Practice-based research will be presented in visually aesthetic and immersive form within a specialist visualisation system, where viewers can experience the East Anglia and Broads landscape by moving through a virtual world, viewing realistic representations which will be augmented with flood risk visualisations, enabling audiences and stakeholders to experience, explore and consider the effects of flooding upon the Broads and East Anglia coastline. The specialised screen and sound system will provide the viewer with enhanced immersion, creating a greater sense of embodiment, and presence. This research combines latest volumetric capture and advanced 360-degree screen and surround sound technologies to create a platform for immersive content development and viewing. Through the integration of these technologies and powered by artificial intelligence, deep learning, virtual reality, augmented reality, interactive narrative and generative aesthetics, the system will deliver innovation. Working together they will create a new interactive and immersive architecture for participant spectators. The system will be a vital resource for practice-based research and experimentation to explore archive content, aesthetic, and cultural domains, generate digital assets for training and education in health, sport and architecture and areas where the accurate simulation of real-life situations is applicable. The system will enable audiences to explore the landscapes of the past, present, and future with greater immersion measured by considering image quality, 3D vision, field of view, tracking level, sound quality, user perspective and resolution. The system contains highly immersive characteristics, thus providing greater sensations of embodiment, and through viewing autonomy will provide the viewer with enhanced sensations of presence, in virtual environments, presence is understood as place illusion-the qualia of being located inside the virtual word (Slater, 2009). To achieve the goal of introducing new artistic expression and content through the system I will focus on leveraging important developments on machine learning, and generative models, providing a platform for artists and designers working with Generative Adversarial Networks and Creative Adversarial Networks. The project will facilitate greater collaboration between creative practitioners, and the technology sector.The outcomes will include new creative media practice, and immersive and interactive image experiences which can be exploited by the scientific, creative, and cultural industries and provide innovative ways of engaging in global challenges.