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Artist, Geographer, Ethnographer

[philipjnicholson]

SOUNDING SPACES SYMPOSIUM

In November 2013, I collaborated with sonic artist Bethan Kelleogh to organise a symposium at the University of Glasgow. The aim of the symposium was to bring together artists and researchers interested in sound and space. The sysmposuim took place over two days. The first day was discussion focused, and each of the eight attendees had an opportunity to tell us about their practice. On the second day we took more an experimental approach, taking time to play with sound equipment and demonstrate sonic artworks.

[philipjnicholson]

ONLY HUMAN? FESTIVAL: THE UNIVERSE’S UNDISCOVERED WINDOW

For the 2014 Only Human? festival of the humanities at the University of Glasgow I was invited to contribute my art work. For the festival, I created a three-channel immersive video installation using video and audio footage repurposed from my Touching Space-Time project. The work was installed in the gothic revival cloisters of the Gilbert Scott building so that sonified gravitation wave signals echoed across the quadrangles of the University of Glasgow.

[philipjnicholson]

GEOHUMANITIES JOURNAL ONLINE ART EXHIBITION

In my capacity as the editorial assistant of the AAG Journal GeoHumanities, I created an obline exhbition of the work of artists who have contributed to the journal. This involved contacting artists that had contributed to the journal and then publishing their work on a Wordpress website that I had created.

http://geohumanities.net

[philipjnicholson]

TOUCHING SPACE-TIME: GRAVITATIONAL WAVES ART EXHIBITION

In 2013 I curated an exhbition of artworks created in response to the work of scientists researching Gravitational Waves at the University of Glasgow. I collaborated with a sound artist, a writer, and a voice actor to exhibit three artworks installed across the university. The works were, a multi-channel sound installation created by Bethan Kellough using field recordings taken in the labs of the Institute for Gravitiational Research, another sound installation produced by myself including the spoken word of voice actor Gerard Fletcher and a short story written by Tristam Adams, and a short video documenting my time talking with the scientists and visiting their labs and offices.

https://youtu.be/4RHWMS5zXeg

[philipjnicholson]

CREATIVE GIS TOTE BAGS @TEDX GLASGOW

In June 2016, I was invited by my college to participate in the TedX Glasgow event. My college invited Glasgow based open access makerspace, MAKLAB, to help their researchers produce merchandise promoting their research. For the event I designed a vinyl print to be pressed onto tote bags at the TEDX event. Over the course of one day I produced approximatley 50 bags and gave them out for free to those who had attended the event. This was a great opportunity to talk to members of the public about my PhD project.

[philipjnicholson]

Impact Activities: Imagineering Human Futures @University of Glasgow

In June 2016, scholars from across the University of Glasgow gathered to share ideas on the future of humanity. 18 self-selected speakers gave 15-minute presentations from their own disciplinary perspective. The programme of talks was diverse, including ideas as far-flung as the French Revolution and Fossils, Dyson Spheres, Prosthetics and Geoengineering. The main objective of the event was to facilitate disciplinary discussion away from the everyday demands of academic life. My colleague, Rachel Hunt, and I were asked to document the event. To do this we interviewed participants to camera, set up a twitter hashtag, designed post cards to collect feedback, and installed a tree branch in the seminar room where participants could attached paper leaves with old ideas written on brown leaves and newe ideas on green. Following the event we produced a three-page report on the event and a short video with extracted from the interviews.

https://vimeo.com/175297650

[philipjnicholson]

Network Visualisation using Gephi

Following a digital humanities workshop at the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities Summer School, I used a series of software applications to analyse the transcripts of my interviews with GIS practitioners. I used freely available software such as AntTag and Gephi to create visualisations of the objects and actions that my participants spoke about during semi-structured interviews. This process involved first, importing my interview transcripts into the TagAnt app, which attached tags to each individual word according to its type (e.g. adjective, noun, verb). I then used an advanced txt file editor to make it readable by microsoft Excel. In Excel, I built a spreadsheet that allowed me to filter out word types, sort them by frequency of use, link them to a specific participant, and export a table for Gephi to visualise. The result was two visualisations, each visualised either the actions (verbs) or objects (nouns) referred to by each participant (each representing a particular skillset or specific area of expertise), but also tied them to other participants who shared a relationship with that word.

[philipjnicholson]

CREATIVE GEO-VISUALISATION WORKSHOP

At the end of May 2017, myself and colleagues from the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences (GES) at the University of Glasgow, Deborah Dixon, Brian Barrett, and Hazel Long were joined by Boyson Moyo from Malawi, and Deepa Pullanikkatil from South Africa. In GES, we spent three days, collaborating, sharing research, and discussing methodologies, working on a creative geovisualisation project on the theme of environmental sustainability in Malawi. For the project we focused on two sites in Malawi, the Tikondwe Freedom Gardens, an organic farm, and the Likengala River. In preparation for the meeting, participants collected and shared various kinds of data sets for those sites relevant to their own expertise. As a result, the first day involved discussions around the nature of the data, i.e. how it was acquired, what methods were used to capture it, why was it captured, who owns it, and so on. The following two days were focused on a collaborative effort to bring these different types of data together into a narrative structure using the storymap format as model. This project is a key component of the SFC Grant Building Sustainable Futures in Africa: Using Capacity-Strengthening Activities to Design and Pilot Methods for Cross-Disciplinary Research.

[philipjnicholson]

Zine Workshop

I organised and facilitated a zine making workshop for my colleagues in the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences at the University of Glasgow. Here, geographers were invited to produce their own zine-like booklet to illustrate an element of their research. During the workshop I provided guidance on creative processes and advice on graphic design. The workshop was preceeded by a talk by graphic designer, independent publisher, and expert on artist books, Matthew Walkerdine. He introduced attendees to the zine format and provided examples from his book shop, Good Press. The talk and the workshop were designed to supplement a work package on the subject of creative geo-visualisation. This project looked to explore different approaches to the dissemination of geographical research and to broaden visual literacy.

[philipjnicholson]

PhD Creative Experimentation

For part of my PhD research I spent a period of two using the materials of GIS – including hard and software, peripherals, office infrastructure, muscles, skin and thought - to create a series of artworks. Here, data collected from interviews and participant observation served as a creative reservoir for the creation of these art works. I was able to draw upon what I had noticed about the time and effort spent managing and processing large amounts of data, and video footage from my observational study of GIS learning, served as material for experimentation and exploration of alternative readings. I rearranged my office space into a kind of makeshift art studio cum archive of GIS materials. This involved repositioning the furniture in my office, collating my fieldwork data, and bringing in various other pieces of equipment to facilitate the creation of artworks. This period of creative practice was intentionally short so as to encourage a charrette-like approach to the production of ideas and works. That is, my plan was to create a different piece of work at least once a day and to foster an environment where I could work intensively and rapidly.

https://vimeo.com/214376279

[philipjnicholson]

Sustainable Futures in Africa

SUSTAINABLE FUTURES IN AFRICA STRATEGIC NETWORK PORTAL

[philipjnicholson]

Join the web’s most supportive community of creators and get high-quality tools for hosting, sharing, and streaming videos in gorgeous HD with no ads.

[philipjnicholson]

Online Exhibition of Artists Featured in Geohumanities Journal

[philipjnicholson]

Research Scrapbook for PhD Project attempting to define GIS practice and explore the possibility of...

[philipjnicholson]

Review of Sea Change Exhibition at Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh

[philipjnicholson]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4Cvz9-6yzM)

[geospatial-aesthetics]

My 3 channel video installation Reality’s Undiscovered Window as part of @onlyhumanglas at @glasgowuni @GESUofG