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Models of human dimensions of fisheries are important to understanding and predicting how fishing industries respond to changes in marine ecosystems and management institutions. Advances in computation have made it possible to construct agent-based models (ABMs)—which explicitly describe the behaviour of individual people, firms, or vessels in order to understand and predict their aggregate behaviours. ABMs are widely used for both academic and applied purposes in many settings including finance, urban planning, and the military, but are not yet mainstream in fisheries science and management, despite a growing literature. ABMs are well suited to understanding emergent consequences of fisher interactions, heterogeneity, and bounded rationality, especially in complex ecological, social, and institutional contexts. For these reasons, we argue that ABMs of human behaviour can contribute significantly to human dimensions of fisheries in three areas: 1) understanding interactions between multiple management institutions; 2) incorporating cognitive and behavioural sciences into fisheries science and practice; and 3) understanding and projecting the social consequences of management institutions. We provide simple examples illustrating the potential for ABMs in each of these areas, using conceptual (‘toy’) versions of the POSEIDON model. We argue that salient strategic advances in these areas could pave the way for increased tactical use of ABMs in fishery management settings. We review common ABM development and application challenges, with the aim of providing guidance to beginning ABM developers and users studying human dimensions of fisheries.

With creative practices things go wrong, work is ruined, and projects remain unfinished. Paradoxically, since failure is a matter of enhanced appreciation in the arts (e.g. Samuel Beckett’s ‘fail better’), neither ‘wrongness’, ‘ruination’ nor ‘unfinishedness’ means what it says. Building on the topographical encounters of fine art studio teaching, this article explores the intersection of ruined work, incomplete creativity and disarticulating sensations. While Jason Rhoades’ messy installation art in a public gallery can evoke (like a 2005 account of abandoned factories by Tim Edensor) a problematic romanticization of unfinished and ruined work, I argue that other less recognized forces are in play. In the privacy of art school studios, monitoring ‘health and safety’ procedures challenges all evocations of aesthetic spectacle and poetic vision. This amounts to an alternative topology of ruination that relates to Caitlin DeSilvey’s 2006 descriptions of agricultural decay. Because a creative struggle is more like daSilvey’s material confusion than Edensor’s romanticized disorder, my article considers four further theoretical ideas in order to place studio ruins at the service of practice-based research in art schools—the muddle of ‘mingled senses’; the complicit character of ‘criticality’; the ‘stupefying’ consequences of study, and the tactical defeat of ‘decreation’.

Today creativity is considered as a necessity in all aspects of management. This working paper mirrors the artistic and managerial conceptions of creativity. Although there are shared points in both applications, however deep-seated and radically opposed traits account for the divergence between the two fields. This exploratory analysis opens up new research questions and insights into practices.

In this keynote address Crisp explores the role that visualisation and imagination might play in the cultural assimilation of advances in Fundamental Science through reference to her installation 'Negative Capability' shown at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art as part of the exhibition 'Extraordinary Renditions: The Cultural Negotiation of Science' during the British Science Festival 2013.

What is the strongest sense of ‘place’ an artist can conceive of? What makes this word more complicated, mutable and fluid than terms such as space, site, location, or even landscape? These two highly reflective questions have guided my practice-based research as I explored the recent attempts of cultural geographers to encapsulate their multi-layered and thoroughly interdisciplinary experience of place with the methodological term ‘deep mapping’.\ud \ud Framed by an unsettlingly powerful childhood encounter with the abandoned Riccarton Junction Station, remote in the Scottish Borders, (which I have defined as an unknowable ‘experience X’) my project has examined the ways in which an artist can accommodate and move beyond deep mapping. My studio practice, which involves a quest to trigger X-like experiences, centres upon the distantly remembered and imagined sense of place that is deepened by manipulating paper maps. Alongside my practical work, my thesis offers a critical assessment of other artists whose practices might function as deep maps. I also use my father's (a geologist) archival engagement with the dereliction of Riccarton Junction as a case study, in which alternative forms of representing a fully temporal experience of place are evaluated.\ud \ud By combining studio experiments with the theory of deep mapping I have sought to demonstrate that the erasure of topographical knowledge, particularly cartographic data, generates a profoundly unstable strength of feeling that is closer to experience X than the socio-cultural enrichments promoted by geographic theorists. Consequently, the outcome of my research provides a platform for expanding the definition of deep mapping in order to encourage further participation by the visual arts community, whose diverse approaches have significant potential to reframe wider understandings of both the perception and interpretation of that complicated term ‘place’.

There are many motives for making art, but economic drivers are often acknowledged as key attributes of artistic success. In particular, they figure in discussions about the strategic orientation of successful artist’s careers. However, in the literature on which this thesis is based, commercial factors are seen as important but limited, in relation to the actual range of values driving creative output. Hans Abbing (2002, p.59) notes, for instance, that other value concepts (such as social values) also have a strategic role alongside financial considerations. The practice-led inquiry asks what key concerns influence the day-to-day decision-making processes of artists and what information would be needed to be able to critically ‘think through what being and artist means to you’ (Butler, 1988, p. 7). In order to obtain access to the motives and value concepts of a practitioner, the author of this thesis has invented a ‘strategic studio framework’, a tool by which to access and assess day-to-day decision-making in practice, thereby gathering the information needed to make informed professional decisions. The thesis argues a continuous flux in the values a practitioner may assign to the key concerns in the Framework at different points in time- and stresses the importance of self-conceptions and personal aspirations in this process. The degree by which these insights would aid judgement of the relative success of the decision-making process, is also discussed. As a result, this thesis provides a better understanding of the way artists make decisions, and of what would be needed to improve or stimulate such practices on their own merits. The thesis will be primarily of interest to artists and art school lecturers looking to find new ways of critical self-inquiry, reflection and discourse. Secondly, it could be of interest to theorists who deal with visual artists and to those involved in supporting organisations within the cultural sector.

Acknowledging a rise in the use of synthetic biology in art practice, this doctoral project draws from vital materialist discourse on biotechnology and biological materials in the works of Donna Haraway, Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti and Marietta Radomska to consider the liveliness of molecular biological material through art research and practice. In doing so, it reframes DNA and the micro-organism through anthropomorphic performative practice that draws on myth and metaphor to allow readings of material that account for liveliness rather than use as resource. As such it contributes to environmental and ecological art practices that question our cultural entanglement with material and performative art practice that considers the nonhuman by artists such as Eduardo Kac, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, Špela Petrič and Maja Smrekar.\ud \ud The thesis does not recount a bioart practice, but a fine art practice that uses performative strategies to think with the act of using life as material. Amid the highly technical, accelerated pace of synthetic biology, the research slowly reconsiders methods and materials over an extended timeframe where liveliness, rather than use of the organism, takes precedent. By specifically acting as performative vector situated within synthetic biology practice, the relationship between meaning and materiality is brought under close scrutiny in attempts to infectiously transmit knowledge rather than generate lively commodities. As such, the thesis questions existing histories of scientific knowledge and proposes alternative stories that reframe aspects of laboratory practice through an aesthetics of care.\ud \ud The core of the research resides in artistic practice situated within the Institute of Genetic Medicine at Newcastle University, where I store my thought physically within the body of the living organism, Escherichia coli. The work follows a close reading of scientific protocols whilst exploring the affect of working with laboratory life as medium. This leads to the development of anthropomorphic performative works and sculptural works that draw on myth and ritual to reframe genetic material as lively material. Further, practice-based aspects of the research sit within and contribute to the expanded field of sound and sonic art, including artists such as Alvin Lucier and Chris Watson, to develop technologically embodied approaches for listening to laboratory life (audification of Atomic Force Microscopy data, sonification of DNA through synthetic speech neural networks) and for experiencing life at the nano-scale within the context of immersive audio-visual installations.

Computer simulations (CS) profoundly alter many aspects of our lives yet exhibit an ontological recalcitrance that impede our understanding of what they are and how they function. The dominant theoretical framework for understanding computer simulation (CS) related artworks is rooted in postmodern ideas that proliferate ‘immaterial readings, consequently hiding the making processes of the artwork, and making it difficult to discuss the material points of contact between the physical and virtual world. There is limited literature that focuses specifically on CS-related contemporary art. This thesis draws together the most pertinent history, theory and practice for artists and curators working with CS-related artworks. This study employs a reflective practice methodology to explore the changing modes of materiality ascribed to computer simulation-related artworks. The research consists of three phases of practice, theoretical analysis and reflection. Five artworks were created for three exhibitions, that elucidated how space, time and behaviour are constructed within game engines, and how this can inform the understanding of existing and future CS artworks. A parametric time system was developed: a new visual scripting logic for real-time artworks that allows them to be exhibited for different durations without altering the content or recompiling code. Characteristics of CS were established in relation to existing art practices. Postmodern and new materialist theories were analysed and discussed with a view to better understanding CS within art contexts. In relation to my own practice, assemblage theory, media ecology and media geology were found to be the most appropriate theoretical frameworks in which to understand CS artworks. The final chapter expands on these ideas in relation to the recalcitrant temporal aspects of the CS assemblage. For artists working especially with computer simulated artworks, this thesis provides a set of practical and theoretical examples of the contexts that real-time computer simulations, specifically with ecological and environmental concerns, can be discussed within. The comparison and analysis of postmodernist and new materialist theories provides a way of considering computer simulations within a contemporary philosophical context.

This research project explores how the concept of noise in medical visualisations is perceived through an analogue visual arts practice. Noise – which is the informational opposite to signal in science – is an unknown and visually ambiguous aspect of medical visualisations. \ud \ud A residency in a medical imaging institution was undertaken to investigate scientists’ perceptions of noise and to identify its key attributes. Conversations with contemporary artists and an examination of their work, explored how noise attributes are used as a strategy in their practices. Theories from art history and the neuropsychology of vision were used to interrogate how noise is implicated in visual perception. Critically, my on-going drawing exploration using instruments of vision, biosensor technologies and responding to unknown stimuli was a primary method of investigation used to understand how an analogue drawing practice perceives noise.\ud \ud My research identified that unknown movements and interactions are deeply implicated in the generation of noise and that the distinction between signal and noise is unstable. My practice-based investigations revealed that all my sensory perceptions become heightened in response to noise, so that vision becomes inseparable from them. This was an important difference between scientists’ and artists’ perceptions of noise, for scientists do not recognise the full sensorium in their practice. The writings of Jean-Luc Nancy and Michel Serres were used to elucidate this process.\ud \ud This research demonstrates the differences between artistic and scientific perceptual responses to ambiguity, the unknown and to noise. It evidences that artistic responses to noise can be a catalyst for change, generating new ways of perceiving, working and making. It contributes to an under-represented area of research: how an analogue arts practice perceives the digital concept of noise. Furthermore, my project indicates that analogue drawing could be used as a method in scientific training to explore visual ambiguity.

My practice-based fine art research is shaped and informed by my transdisciplinary background and specifically my experience of ecology, geography and data visualisation. As a result I draw on the concepts of the 'ecosystem' and the 'information system' to consider how an artwork can be understood in ecological and informational terms, especially in relation to my own engagement with 'Systems Art', a mode of practice which shares a systems thinking foundation with these concepts.\ud \ud This research identifies three periods of systems thinking influencing culture, and this understanding has helped structure the thesis. Firstly, the holistic ecology movements of the mid-1960s which generated expanded expectations of the term ‘system’, secondly, the shift towards the ‘informational’ inherent in the critiques of linguistic and institutional systems of the 1980s, finally, our current ‘post-systems’ condition in which the pervading and infinitely complex nature of socio-environmental systems and their simulation is acknowledged.\ud \ud This three-fold journey is marked by incremental modifications to the definition of a system as the idea takes on greater extension through Latour's Actor-Network Theory and Deleuze and Guattari's Assemblage Theory. Later, the incomprehensibility of complex systems is conjured through references to Timothy Morton's concept of the Hyperobject and Object-Oriented Ontology's notion of ‘withdrawal'.\ud \ud The practical component of my research is a body of artwork, which is a product of my engagement with systems thinking, the natural environment, complex information, image processing and painting. Within the material production of two and three-dimensional artworks, the perspective I have gained is that of a researcher exploring the analogical potential of an extensively ‘distributed ecosystem'. If this perspective is persuasive, then artists interested in systems should be encouraged to not only map more expansive and complex boundaries for their work, but also articulate the unknowability of these complex systems as a knowable dimension of the distributed meaning of ‘Systems Art’.

This work explores “Grief” and “Orphanhood”. It does so via the use of a practice based artistic exploration of these unfathomable and ongoing dimensions and describes the impact of them on the authors life, in both personal and shared public contexts.\ud It does this by drawing attention to many complicated facets of both phenomena in order to capture, in whatever way possible, the authorial experience of negotiating the difficult presence of each within their life. The only appropriate term for this concept is that of ‘complicated grief’. A term used by psychologists such as Robert Neimeyer in attempts to understand grief as a greater function.\ud The thesis includes reflections touching upon therapeutically-inclined models of the grieving process stretching from Sigmund Freud to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and Lois Tonkin. Philosophical thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, and Roland Barthes also greatly influenced the author. These intellectual worlds are then reflected back onto the creative practices of the artists whose work accompanied the author throughout the PhD project: Uta Barth, Jordan Baseman, John Cage, David Dye, Mark Rothko, and Michael Wesely.\ud The narrative progressively explores concepts that complicate one’s experience of grief. Moving through other widely used descriptors and coining the original notion of ‘absent-presence’ it explores the underlying distinction between two other authorial concepts: ‘aloneness’ and ‘non-aloneness’. These terms carry huge import and greatly influence the author’s ability to ultimately accommodate their understanding of grief.\ud Appropriately then, this practice-based PhD project takes the form of a sustained photographic project involving the physical complications of Polaroid technology, allied with a ‘stream of consciousness’ narrative that produced a chapterless thesis through which the authorial intent to reflect an actual ebb and flow in the complications that constitute their grieving and orphanhood is realised in the reader.\ud The thesis cannot be considered separately from the exhibitions, nor the creative journey that underpinned the creation of each, for they are one, separate yet intrinsically linked and indivisible. However, the “absence” of the photographs in their entirety is the point, the authorial intent in including limited Polaroids being to once again use the process of the readers journey through the narrative about their creation as a physical metaphor that invokes the frustrations felt in being forced to rely on incomplete memories that constitute fragments of a presence now absent.

My doctoral project, researched between 2006 And 2011, asks if the rapidly expanding art movement known as Stuckism has an approach that can be related to Punk ‘attitude’ in the late 1970s. Theorists of youth-based subcultures have extensively explored the notion of generational attitude\ud (Hebdige 1979, Sabin, 1999) and the ambition of this PhD has been, from the start, to describe the development of Stuckism in terms associated with the rise of Punk within my own generation. As an active member of the original\ud Stuckist group I have had to engage with the same sense of iconoclastic hostility that played such an important role during my time as a Punk musician from 1977 to the present. Thus the research I discuss in this thesis has been\ud shaped by a set of aims and objectives that, firstly, address the similarities and parallels between two distinct historical moments and, secondly, embrace the fact that I am undertaking my research from within the subject group as it\ud coheres into a viable force in the international arts scene.\ud \ud The parallel between Punk and Stuckism may not be immediately obvious for historians or critics. Both are separated in time as distinct episodes in our current cultural story (Bech Poulson, 2005; Evans, 2000) and both are associated with different art forms that address contrasting socio-cultural audiences. Whilst Punk operated, first and foremost, in the context of popular music, Stuckism is a creature of the visual arts, a response to dominant trends amongst gallery and museum directors rather than an appeal to radicalized, media-oriented youth. However, I am not able to examine this contrast from a retrospective point of view and so have built my\ud methodological approach on the hope that the ‘narrative turn’ in contemporary social studies and cultural anthropology (Marcus & Fischer, 1984) offers me a\ud persuasive mechanism for capturing the ongoing development of my practice as a painter with Stuckist and Punk affiliations. As my creative activities have contributed to the idea of Stuckism I have explored how the narratives of\ud identity I associate with Punk attitude have helped form the identity of the group. Here my initial model was research on the narrative construction of identity in professional or social domains described by Czarniawska (2004). However, as I accumulated and published accounts of Stuckism using my\ud growing archive of interviews with other artists in the group (Lynn, 2006) I began to use methodological procedures suggested by Ochs & Capps (2001) to develop a system of interpretation that drew out, I felt, many commonalities\ud with the Punk movement.\ud \ud As a result, my thesis both describes and debates the relevance of Stuckist practice within contemporary art. At the time of writing, the movement, although prominent within media circles, is barely represented in terms of serious and considered debate, whereas Punk is, in many ways, over\ud represented. My ultimate ambition has been to address this situation.

In my home country there has been an assumption that innovative art is entirely an urban affair. As a result, Thai artists treat the city of Bangkok as a point of cultural focus modelled on Western art capitals such as New York and London. However, in the UK there is a thriving non-metropolitan art culture in which progressive and experimental practices are promoted in rural areas. Given that many Thai artists grow up in agricultural villages (and often explore rural topics in their art) it seems strange that Thailand has no viable alternative to the metropolitan model. My research project has developed new forms of creative practice for rural- based art in Thailand using practical and philosophical approaches derived from Western art. The methodology I have applied to this challenge has involved the dis-location of my practice in both urban and rural areas. During my doctoral project I have produced artworks on the City Campus at Northumbria University and in Banpao, my home village in northeast Thailand where I have pioneered one of the first rural art centres in my country. The body of practical work documented in this thesis is a synthesis of the processes of painting and agricultural work. The images are digitally manipulated photographic collages printed on the kind of canvas support I used when I began my career as a painter in Bangkok. Alongside this practical submission, my thesis begins by describing the contemporary urban/rural divide that allows us to continue to define an area of arts practice as 'rural-based'. I then move on to examine the homesickness and nostalgia that is conventionally said to motivate ruralism. I explore the desire to retreat from the problems of city life in relation to British art and, following a section on present-day life in my home village, the artists working in Bangkok who most epitomise the problems of making rural art in Thailand today. The conclusion to the thesis is reached through an engagement with Proustian reverie, Theravada Buddhism, environmental aesthetics and the philosophy of John Dewey. This leads me to speculate on the aspects of ruralism that make the British version so forward-looking and experimental. As a result, I am able to describe how nostalgia-driven forms of expression do not automatically produce sentimental artworks and propose an approach to rural art that could still carry a great deal of creative resonance for contemporary Thai artists.

This thesis explores the impact of meditation on art practice. Its basic hypothesis is that Buddhist meditation can expand creative capacity by enabling the practitioner to transcend the limits of everyday sense experience and consciousness. Artists engaging in meditation develop a closer, more aware relationship with their emptiness mind (kongxin), freeing them from preconceptions and contexts that limit their artistic creation. Because this practice-led research focuses on how to expand one‘s freedom as an artist, I use two models to explore studio practice, then compare and contrast them with my own prior approach. A year-by-year methodology is followed, as artistic practice develops over time. The first model is studio practice in the UK, the second is Buddhist meditation before artistic activity. The research took place over three years, each representing a distinct area. Accordingly, in area 1 (the first year), I compared studio art practice in the UK with post-meditation art practice; in area 2 (the second year), I compared studio art practice in the UK with prostration practice at Bodh-gaya, India plus meditation before act activity; in area 3 (the third year), I compared studio art practice in the UK with entering a month-long meditation retreat in Taiwan before practicing art. By Buddhist meditation I refer more specifically to insight meditation, which K. Sri Dhammananda has described as follows: Buddha offers four objects of meditation for consideration: body, feeling, thoughts, and mental states. The basis of the Satipatthana (P?li, refers to a ?foundation? for a ?presence? of mindfulness) practice is to use these four objects for the development of concentration, mindfulness, and insight or understanding of our-self and the world around you. Satipatthana offers the most simple, direct, and effective method for training the mind to meet daily tasks and problems and to achieve the highest aim: liberation. (K. Sri II Dhammananda 1987:59) In my own current meditation practice before art practice, I sit in a lotus position and focus on breathing in and breathing out, so that my mind achieves a state of emptiness and calm and my body becomes relaxed yet fully energized and free. When embarking on artistic activity after meditation, the practice of art then emerges automatically from this enhanced body/mind awareness. For an artist from an Eastern culture, this post-meditation art seems to differ from the practices of Western art, even those that seek to eliminate intention (e.g. Pollock), in that the artist‘s action seem to genuinely escape cogito: that is, break free of the rational dimensions of creating art. In my training and development as a studio artist, I applied cogito all the time, but this frequently generated body/mind conflict, which became most apparent after leaving the studio at the end of the day: I always felt exhausted, and what was worse, the art that I created was somehow limited. However, my experience was that Buddhist meditation, when applied before undertaking art practice, establishes body/mind harmony and empties the mind. For this artist at least, this discovery seemed to free my art as it emerged from emptiness through the agency of my energized hand. It was this, admittedly highly personal, experience that led me to undertake the research that informs this thesis.

Contemporary art is seen as an effective way of communicating complicated science to a range of lay audiences, particularly in the context of medical research. This is the premise of ‘sciart’. However this rationale can limit the cultural significance of artworks by overstating their illustrative capacity, an outcome that severely reduces the creative endeavour of the artist.\ud \ud Based on the first-hand experience of an artist whose career has engaged with the opportunities afforded by ‘sciart’, this study seeks to address the illustration problem by exploring new methods of working across art and science that challenge representations of the inherited neuromuscular disorder myotonic dystrophy, a condition which affects one in 8000 adults in the UK. Hazel, a film made by the artist with the participation of eleven women affected by the condition, is placed at the centre of this as a case study. Pioneering work with the UK Myotonic Dystrophy Patient Registry facilitated recruitment, and it is this process that forms the unique contribution to knowledge of the research.\ud \ud By illuminating the multiple loss experienced by families struggling with physical and social decline, this research offers a practical and theoretical image of the capacity contemporary artists have to shape research into myotonic dystrophy. The study will argue that this capacity is more ambitious than illustration, more extensive than the communication of family insights. Thus it can embrace a much-needed form of research leadership that is built upon an artist’s scope to say powerful things by withholding information. In addition, the employment of feminist literature on ageing and appearance, and sociological research into the decline and isolation of affected families, helps define the particular form of leadership that can arise through extreme personal circumstances.\ud \ud As pressures on services increase, cross-sector influence becomes increasingly important and this thesis and body of practical work explores the future impact of contemporary artists taking a lead in shaping research agendas in the genetic sciences.

This practice-led study poses the question ‘What can a close analysis of conservation methods, treatments and theories with its temporal implications contribute to drawing practices that primarily employ the use of pre-existing artwork?’ Through the lens and action of art practice this study challenges certain understandings of both drawing and conservation as temporally possessing linear chronological properties. \ud \ud Employing an emergent, qualitative practice-led methodology each chapter charts a discrete terrain that identifies and discusses key comparative issues and problems that affect both drawing and conservation. These include: the difficulties of definitions and terminology in both contingent fields and the space this opens for interpretative responses, a critique of positivistic claims made by scientific conservation in identifying artist’s intention using an anachronic analysis of the detail. The fluctuating values of the authorial and substitutional presence of the indexical mark and trace in restoration and representational drawing is examined, and an evaluation of formats and strategies in drawing that position themselves relevant to a depiction and representation of anachronic states of transience is investigated. To focus the range of discourses within conservation this work concentrates on the paintings of Johannes Vermeer. Specifically, on the conservation activities and diagnostic imagery that have informed treatments to these works. This study is further supported by documented conversations with key restorers of Vermeer’s work, and artists who also employ representational drawing strategies in response to pre-existing works. \ud \ud This research concludes its findings by arguing for the conditions and ontologies of drawing and conservation to be understood temporally as anachronic activities. Whereby, as each can respond to pre-existing works, their relationship to time is non-chronological, durational and plural. This work is intended to contribute to the fields of drawing practice and research, anachronic art historical studies, contemporary conservation theory, and to practice-led epistemologies.