Ground
Works

Puhlkari by Kira Bhumber. Photographer: Andrew Howell. Used with permission

Ground Works is a platform for exemplary arts-inclusive research projects and reflection on the processes that drive interdisciplinary collaboration.

Latest Collection

Creating Knowledge in Common

Editors: Shannon Criss, Kevin Hamilton, and Mary Pat McGuire

Universities and communities are partnering together to more fully support needs across society. Art and design practices engaged within these partnerships substantively deepen the impact of this collective work through expression, visualization, representation, and exhibition, converging multiple viewpoints into broader re-imaginings and tangible new creations with both rational and emotional force. This special collection shares stories of such partnerships and their extraordinary outcomes in areas including community health, community arts, placekeeping, climate adaptation design, food production and distribution, abolition, student learning and engagement and more.

November 2024 · 10.48807/2024.2.0002 · CC-BY-NC-ND

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Announcements

Ground Works Pilots CRediT-FAIR Framework for Non-Authorial Contributions

December 2, 2024

Ground Works staff has adapted the NISO (National Information Standards Organization) Contributor Roles Taxonomy, known as CRediT.

CRediT has gained traction in sc...

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Featured Articles

Side by Side: Navigating the Messy Work of Staying Relational in University-Community Partnerships

Ann Holt and Cindy Maguire

This article describes community/university partnerships with ArtsAction Group’s work (AAG) situated in Kosovo, Western Sahara, and Sri Lanka and higher education partners in the US and UK. AAG is an international community-based arts collective (artsaction.org) that includes professional and student volunteer arts educators, art therapists, teaching artists, and educators. Our focus is with children and youth in conflict-affected environments impacted by trauma, violence, and/or efforts at cultural erasure. AAG centers arts and healing, to foster capabilities (Deneulin, 2009; Nussbaum, 2011; Maguire & McCallum, 2019) critical to functioning and healthy societies and to emphasize relationality (ethics and responsibility towards each other) and impact (self cultivation and responsibility together). AAG involves artful coalitions (Kay & Wolf, 2017) of people from different geographic, cultural, and social positioning. In this article, we share insights on the messiness of transnational, transdisciplinary collaborations. We discuss knowledge generated from experiences navigating the complexities existing in arts and cultural partnerships including the multiple egos, traditions, rules, bureaucracy, expectations, and roles that are entangled in the work– and impossible to avoid. We acknowledge these encounters as necessary pedagogic processes of learning, trust-building, letting go of control, teamwork, and community-building. We resist normative hierarchical community/university partnerships and practices that are ‘conflict averse.’ Staying with the trouble in solidarity forces one to work in unexpected collaborations and combinations which can spark creative solutions and new ways of approaching equitable, community-centered, research projects.

November 2024 · 10.48807/2024.0.0140 · CC-BY-NC-ND

Green Light SONATA: Improvisation at the Intersection of Art and Science

Montasir Abbas, Charles Nichols, Anne Elise Thomas, and Qichao Wang

The Green Light SONATA project originated with a hunch in the engineering domain, but could only materialize through true collaboration of researchers working across disciplines. The project tested the hypothesis that translating simulated traffic information into music could lead to musical resolution of persistent traffic congestion. Our team—consisting of civil engineers, a composer/performer/computer music researcher, and an ethnomusicologist—proceeded to construct a model of an intersection in which each direction of traffic flow was assigned a musical pitch. Hearing these pitches as cues, musicians could interact with the sonified traffic to allow vehicles to proceed through the intersection. The result was a musical “gamification” of traffic flow in which the goal was to minimize the vehicles’ idle time. The next stage of this project will include public demonstration and testing sessions, involving students and additional musicians, to assess the concept’s viability, refine our methods, and gather further data. The team’s multidisciplinary dialogue takes us on productive tangents translating between different domains of musical and technical expertise. Moving forward, we plan to test additional methods of data sonification, manipulating additional musical variables (including pulse and rhythm, sequence, scales, ornaments, and other musical elements) and scaling up to model multiple consecutive intersections.

October 2020 · 10.48807/2020.0054

In a Time of Change: A Nested Ecosystem of Environmental Arts, Humanities, and Science Collaboration

Mary Beth Leigh and Lissy Goralnik

The integration of environmental science with arts and humanities (eSAH) has the potential to advance public understanding of science while inspiring emotional responses and attitude shifts that lead to pro-environmental behavior. The In a Time of Change (ITOC) program, an eSAH incubator in Alaska, uses place as a boundary object to bridge relationships between artists, writers, and scientists. Participants co-investigate a place-based environmental theme over the course of a year, then present their work at a public exhibit. At these exhibitions, the art and writing about place become boundary objects themselves around which broader publics gather to engage with ideas and landscapes. In this article, we describe the ITOC program and the broader ecosystems of eSAH work in which it is nested, including the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) network, where most sites host some kind of eSAH inquiry. We then use the case study of a recent ITOC project, Microbial Worlds, to demonstrate the ways relationships between artists, writers, and scientists are transmitted to audiences through eSAH collaborative exhibits, resulting in impacts to audience knowledge and attitudes about the natural world and broad support for eSAH approaches to environmental problem solving.

August 2022 · 10.48807/2022.0.0074 · CC-BY-NC

Featured Commentaries

Reviewer commentary on Choreografish: an arts-based, virtual reality, anxiety intervention for autism

Last Word on Reviewing “Choreografish” for Ground Works

Veronica Stanich

Delight, because Ground Works is so young, and so many risks have been taken but not all of them have proven fruitful (yet), and it’s very satisfying to see confirmed our hunch that reviewing together could be a generative thing.

July 2021 · 10.48807/2022.1.0008

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Invited commentary on Vibrant Ecologies of Research

Cripping Media Art Ecologies

Lindsey D. Felt and Vanessa Chang

By remaking the creative design cycle through an accessibility and disability justice lens, Leonardo CripTech Incubator scaffolds new forms of artistic access. Bringing a disability justice lens to art-and-technology research practice and to this incubator’s design, we position ourselves as facilitators in this vibrant ecology, calling up other critical voices in this process.

August 2022 · 10.48807/2022.1.0011 · CC-BY-NC-SA

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