Ground Works is a platform for exemplary arts-inclusive research projects and reflection on the processes that drive interdisciplinary collaboration.
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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.
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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...
MoreFeatured Articles
Forms of Freedom: The Art and Design of Black and Indigenous Creative Collectives
"Forms of Freedom" was a two-year participatory research project that explored how Black and Indigenous creative collectives evolve to sustain themselves over time. To explore this question, we invited members of three collectives to assemble for visitation, reflection, skill, and idea exchange sessions over a nine-month period, and over Zoom, due to the global pandemic. These collectives were Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths, Fire in Little Africa/The Space Program, and The Aadizookaan. Months later as the pandemic receded, we reassembled these collectives for a People's Sound Studio collaboration in New York City. The People’s Sound Studio was an opportunity to create together in person, practicing in public how we move, sound, organize, and collectivize in the now.
Our assembly was held by care and familiarity among us as convenors and among our collaborators, sharing genuine desire to strengthen existing connections, deepen the love, and expand solidarities across new relations. We understood this assembly as a minor experiment in Black study (Harney & Moten, 2013), one that emphasized aesthetic performance. This exploration generated a shared archive of materials from participants and ourselves as artist-organizers: ritual performance scripts, sound compositions, conversation recordings, voice memos, video montages, in situ practices, photographs, and beadwork. We assembled these creations into an ensemble, an apparatus of movements suspended in time by digital space (www.formsoffreedom.com). This ensemble provides multivocal, incommensurable performances propelled from the initial research question.
Green Light SONATA: Improvisation at the Intersection of Art and Science
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.
Judaica: An Embodied Laboratory for Songwork
“Judaica: An Embodied Laboratory for Songwork” was a two-year research project that explored the construction of identity through the act of singing. The heart of the project was a six-month laboratory period in which the three of us worked closely together, on a full-time basis, as skilled performance practitioners investigating the cultural and epistemic potential of songs. In response to critical work in the humanities and social sciences calling for greater recognition of embodied knowledge and practice in emerging research paradigms, the Judaica project implemented a new type of laboratory, in which interactions of technique, identity, and place gave rise to new forms of knowledge. Drawing on critical theories of identity, as well as studies of laboratory research in the sciences, the project offers a model for the post-technoscientific laboratory as a “place of making” in which bodies, songs, actions, objects, and concepts come together in unexpected and generative ways. Among the key discoveries of the project was a new method for sustained, experimental, embodied practice, grounded in critical theories of gender and racial identity, as well as a new approach to the editing and co-authorship of video works generated through this process. These video materials are both data for cultural researchers and research outcomes in their own right.
Featured Commentaries
Reviewer commentary on Choreografish: an arts-based, virtual reality, anxiety intervention for autism
Reviewing “Choreografish” for Ground Works
When Ground Works Advisor Cheryl Ball suggested that peer review doesn’t
need to be a solitary, purely evaluative process, we got excited about
the possibility of a conversation among reviewers. This commentary is a conversation about that conversation.
Ground Works is a project of a2ru
Community commentary on Creating Knowledge in Common
Beyond Authorship: Crediting Contributors to Arts-Integrated Research with CRediT-FAIR
Leann Andrews, Daragh Byrne, Kevin Hamilton, and Mohammad Hosseini
*Ground Works* Technical Director Daragh Byrne developed CRediT-FAIR, an adaptation of [NISO's](https://niso.org/) [CRediT](https://credit.niso.org/), as a means to recognize non-authorial contributions to arts-integrated research. He and other panelists discussed the system's origins, uses, and implementations in [an a2ru webinar in December, 2024](https://vimeo.com/1036884647/1bef6db14e?share=copy). That webinar discussion is the basis for this commentary.
December 2025 · 10.48807/2025.1.0012 · CC-BY-NC-ND
View Commentary