School of Art, Design and Media (ADM)

I am Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design / Design for Interactive Media.  My first degree was in Fine Art and English Literature and my MA is in Computing in Design. My approach to Art and Design practice integrates my varied past as an educational practitioner, cultural theorist, installation artist and commercial web designer.

Current Research ^{[Back to top]}

Denham, A. (In progress). The Genealogy of Aesthetic Changes: an empirical study.
The trial’s main objective is to monitor and record how ‘culture’ (in its broadest sense), in an era of unprecedented technological and social change (a digital global connectedness with and in everything), inscribes or sculpts itself on the neural networks in the brain. An attempt to tentatively answer or possibly not answer, what are consequences for our creativity, cognition (reasoning, judgment, intuition, problem solving), perception, visual language, aesthetic processing and social behavioural patterns. The evolution of the higher-order cognitive processes in the brain’s neural networks that has far reaching ramifications for ways of working and / or seeing, our creative process, knowledge acquisition and usage, information processing, aesthetic processing and social interaction or responses.

Possibly further down the line: What are the consequences for the creative process in art and design practice for experiential learning, researching, evaluating, responding, mediating, editing, making, interpreting information patterns / signage - synthesised into innovative practice / artifacts (solutions that communicate socio-cultural or technological inflected messages).
Intended trial dates are September 2010 and Spring 2011.

Call for participants entitled: ‘Do you think about how your social behaviour, experienced through mediating simultaneous distributed information in networked cyberspace, may affect how you respond to, interact with and interpret the incoming stimuli?’

Articles ^{[Back to top]}

Denham, A. (Submitted for consideration). Does the brain reconfigure itself, through its neuronal plasticity, in a Darwinian attempt to engage or cope with a new level of transience in the experiential info-sphere, and in the process generate an evolved aesthetic relations and visual language? Submitted to Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA).

Publications

Poster Sessions ^{[Back to top]}

Denham, A. (2009). An attempt to define a Twenty-first century hybridised Neuroaesthetics via experiential study of the arising praxis of multiplex consciousness. At The Copenhagen Neuroaesthetics Conference, Copenhagen Denmark. Poster session abstracts (no. 2).

Book Chapters ^{[Back to top]}

Denham, A. (2004). ‘What software did you use?’ or play to create. In Davies, A. (Ed.), Enhancing Curricular: towards the scholarship of teaching art, design and communication in Higher Education (pp. 478-495). London: CLTAD.

Joint Exhibitions ^{[Back to top]}

Denham, A. (1996). Straightjacket. Exhibited at Incarceration.Nottingham: Arts Festival and Control Shift Escape. London: The Tannery.

An interactive environment based on the restriction of body and mind within a hermetic space. The piece plays on the emotions of anxiety and claustrophobia. The work evokes questions about one’s perception of self within a specific milieu, for example the feeling of being enclosed and how one responds to, interacts with and interprets dynamic multi-sensory stimuli. The system behaviour is programmed in ‘C’ language.