Victorian College of the Arts - Theses
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ItemEthics, Agency and Disruption: Toward a rights-based practice of working with children in contemporary performance( 2019)This thesis, comprising 50% written dissertation and 50% creative work, argues for a new ethical model of working with children and young people in contemporary performance. Through analysis of Youth Arts pedagogies, inclusive theatre practice, models of participation, the symbolic potential of the child in performance and the work of contemporary Australian practitioners making work with children for adult audiences, this thesis explores an innovative ‘rights-based’ model of contemporary performance practice relevant to working with children and young people. This model, framed by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), challenges the idea of children as vulnerable and in need of protection and argues for the recognition of the child’s voice and champions the creativity of children in performance. The combined practical and written outcomes of this thesis offer a new, nuanced understanding of children as cultural agents, raising the prospect of a creative process that foregrounds deeper considerations of the strengths and capacities of children.
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ItemIdentifying and Developing the Personal Voice in Improvised Music Performance( 2017)This study documents a phenomenological and philosophical enquiry into the nature and dimension of the personal voice (McMillan 1996) in improvised music performance. Utilising heuristic research (Moustakas 1990), a practice-based research methodology adapted for the purpose of this enquiry, this study examines my artistic practice as a musician, composer and soprano saxophonist. This practice is observed through the differentiated stages of the development of musical syntax within improvisation. Works by J. S. Bach and John Coltrane are examined as potential sources of new material for improvised works. Arguably, music history appears to be an additive process whereby each new generation of composers, performers and improvisers add new layers to an existing core of practice. However, when contrasting a relatively new performance practice, such as John Coltrane’s improvisations in the ‘Hard Bop’ genre, against the performance practice from the Baroque era by Bach, the performer may discover that the two music practices, chosen for the purposes of the source materials, share elements and processes. This could contribute to informing new musical language through the process of generative or improvised music performance. This study is significant because, observably, within elite music training institutions and the concert activity of major metropolitan cities there appears to be a rigid demarcation of performance practice. A music practitioner may prioritise interpretive music performance over improvised music or vice versa. While the notion of composer/performer is well understood in contemporary music practice, what possibilities exist for the notion of generative interpretation and the development of the personal voice (McMillan 1996) and individual expression in improvisation? This thesis examines source materials from diverse styles by J. S. Bach and John Coltrane to consider the process and context of the creative process in improvised music and the development of the personal voice (McMillan 1996). This practice-based research project (Barrett and Bolt 2012) is examined via musical practice, assimilation and interpretation, where the elements of music and musical language derived from the source materials are examined, practised, recorded and considered as containing the potential for informing spontaneously improvised outcomes. Musical syntax arising through the process of improvisation is demonstrated via transcription and analysis to understand personal idiosyncratic qualities in the form of musical gestures within spontaneously improvised music. The development and identification of creative and musical influences are examined through the cultivation of an in-depth understanding and assimilation of the source materials. To ascertain the extent of musical influences on spontaneous improvisation, more broadly in terms of implicit style and interpretation, or explicitly in terms of how specific and measurable musical elements such melodic, harmonic and rhythmic material are examined via transcription and analysis (Mulholland and Hojnacki 2013) informing the creative outcomes and the extent and nature of influence that can be measured, within the spontaneous solo improvisations in the context of this study.
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ItemOverlooked performances: mobile computing, site-responsive arts practice and the spectral dramaturgy of vanitas( 2019)This practice-led research project uses observations from the creation of Vanitas, an ‘artwork for smartphones and cemeteries’, to establish a critical framework for discussing the impact of mobile computing on site-responsive arts practices, and by extension, everyday experiences of outdoor locations. This is achieved through the examination of overlooked performances which extend from the performance ontology of computation to human practices perpetuating seamlessness in mixed-reality artworks. By investigating how performances are created and experienced when live-action events within a site-responsive performance are combined with smartphones (mobile computing devices) and electronic messaging (email, telephony, SMS, and in-app messaging controlled by transmedia networked communication systems), the research addresses in microcosm the complex impact of mobile computing on what David Berry terms a “softwarized society”. The three parts of this thesis, and the artwork Vanitas, employ contrasting approaches to overlooked performances in mobile computing and site-responsive performance. Part One takes a high-level systems approach to key reference artworks and presents ways to identify their common features and contrast them with Vanitas. Part Two takes a ‘low-level’ immanent approach to the history of smartphone technology to identify the ‘overlooked performance ontology of computation’ and applies this to the ‘illuminated podcast’ mode of Vanitas Chapter One. Part Three employs an exegetical method of ‘spectral dramaturgical writing’ to incorporate the complex range of voices present in the walk through Melbourne General Cemetery with Vanitas Chapter Two. By employing a hybrid practice-led research methodology that combines the realisation of Vanitas (30%) with a written thesis (70%) this PhD provides a positive contribution to the growing creative and critical response to the impact of mobile computing on performance practice, digital media and death. It proposes a number of critical concepts such as ‘overlooked performances’, the ‘ideology of seamlessness’, ‘spectral dramaturgy’ and via the ‘overlooked performance ontology of computation’ provides a way reconsider digital data, media, software and interface from within an immanent performance paradigm.
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ItemBreaking Objects: Activating Artworks Toward New Modes of Thought( 2019)This research has emerged from the intersection between two ongoing preoccupations: how to exhibit spatiotemporal art practices in such a way that the artwork remains active as opposed to static or on display; and, an engagement with the knowledge that reductive thinking about things in the world—from complex and interrelated to simplified and separated out—is part of the human condition. In order to better understand these oppositional factors and how they operate both theoretically and practically, I have come to define a number of key terms that I use to describe different modes of thinking alongside our capacity to flip or switch between them. These terms—Object, broken Object, and an oscillation in thinking—also describe the research methodology I have used in my practice-based research. I have developed this methodology across my literature research and dissertation by looking closely at what factors contribute to a mode of perception where things in the world appear to be active, in motion or complex. I have reviewed how this mode of perception might relate to and operate within spatiotemporal artworks and exhibition contexts by considering the physiological, psychological and philosophical factors that contribute to how we perceive the world, and what we think is going on. However, I have also considered factors that influence a more abstract mode of thinking about the world; one whereby we reduce, condense or separate-out complex and interdependent phenomena. This abstract mode of thinking has philosophical, sociological and political as well as physiological bases; all of which influence the way we perceive the world around us. I have considered one particular mode of thinking, Object-Thinking as being dominant in the West, and throughout my dissertation I reflect upon the possible socio-political consequences of this. In my creative, practice-based research I have applied the methodology of making and breaking Objects as well as proposing methods that might facilitate an oscillation in thinking across several research outcomes including: Chair in Cooperation with Orange (Extended) (2015), The Possibility of Performance (2015), Work (in Progress) (2016), Cross-Section (2017), Tool-Things (2017), Set Elements (2019). My final practice-based outcome, No Single Thing (2019) was exhibited at the Margaret Lawrence Gallery between the 26th February and the 1st of March 2019.
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ItemPerforming algorithms: Automation and accident( 2019)"Performing Algorithms: Automation and Accident" investigates how artists might stage encounters with the algorithms driving our post-industrial, big-data-based, automatic society. Several important theories of this contemporary condition are discussed, including control societies, post-industrial societies, the automatic society, the cybernetic hypothesis, and algorithmic governmentality. These concepts are interwoven with histories of labour and automation, recent developments in machine learning and neural networks, and my own past work. Through a series of expanded lecture performances that describe our algorithmic condition while setting it into motion, this research seeks to discover ways in which to advance new critical positions within a totalizing technical apparatus whose very design preempts it. The included creative works have been performed, exhibited, and published between 2014 and 2018. They are made available online through an artificially intelligent chatbot, a frequent figure in the research, which here extends the concerns of that research through to how the work is framed and presented. The thesis focuses on both generative art and the lecture performance, which converge in performing algorithms but are generally not discussed in connection with one another. They emerged in parallel as artistic methods, however, at a time when management and computation were taking root in the workplace in the 1960s. Furthermore, as the Internet became widespread from the 1990s, generative art and the lecture performance each found renewed prominence. With human language and gesture increasingly modelling itself on the language of computation and work constantly reshaped by the innovations of capital, this project identifies “not working” both in terms of the technological breakdown and also as a condition of labour under automation. A discussion of the first fatal accident involving a self-driving vehicle illustrates this dual condition. Shifting from glitch art’s preoccupation with provoking errors to a consideration of not working, this research proposes artistic strategies that learn to occupy rather than display the accident.
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ItemEmbodying Entanglement( 2019)Embodying Entanglement is a practice-based research project investigating how material engagements with the body can examine personal histories of sexual assault and racism. It presents embodied trauma as processual, wherein videos, handmade books, and live performances work with various organic materials cyclically filtered through the body. This project reframes depictions of trauma in art, focusing on metaphorical evocations of the ongoing experiential impact of trauma, rather than the graphic reperformance of traumatic events. Embodying Entanglement attunes to how performative process and material entanglement expand artistic depictions of rape and racism, to decolonise trauma in performative arts practices. In this research, my experiences of the aftermath of rape are considered through the influence of my diasporic identity. The two are entangled as my management of the aftereffects of rape are impacted by my own cultural influences. The project uncovers how the way I have learnt to move through the aftermath of rape and perpetual experiences of racism has been a process of reorienting myself in my body through layers of silence. From table manners gone awry to items evocative of childhood nostalgia—such as flip books and secret diaries—the imagery and methods used throughout this project allude to the deeply personal ways in which my trauma is embodied. My mouth masticates eggshells and pulverises pomegranates and my body drags itself through flour, curry, and chili powder. Hair emerges and accumulates at the back of my throat and my family’s hands repetitively spoon sugar into tea cups until they overflow. Thread punctures the page and replaces words in a book, and imprints of areolas move hypnotically across flipped pages. These cyclical and processual rituals piece together a narrative of my body being put back together after having been fragmented through racism and rape. In this practice-based research—the artwork and the writing and thinking through the practice in this thesis—I find agency in my body and my voice, inviting others to affectively engage with this agency.
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ItemThe movement of the aside( 2019)Using the aside itself as a syncretic research methodology to identify the field of study, this project considers the transposition of the rhetorical figure of the aside as a poetic strategy in art. Tracking the aside across diverse articulations, the research identifies specific instances in which the movement of the aside is from a type of framing of the work to being the work. With this shift, the convention dissolves and what emerges are autonomous poetic forms. Rarely indexed in books on stagecraft or marked in written scripts, the aside has not been extensively theorised, only gestured to. Beginning as convention with a meta-linguistic point, the aside is a technique that an author uses to convey to the listener or reader a meaning, with the goal of persuading them towards considering a topic from a different perspective. Situating itself in the space of commentary, drawing attention to and incorporating the periphery of what is shown, the aside introduces new material that rebounds on the aside itself. When the aside usurps its secondary status in relation to a main text, it opens a way into something that wasn’t accessible before. This movement can include any kind of materialisation. This research draws the wide movement of the aside to poetics. The major shift is from the incidental to the important. Each moment/ movement/ instancing of the aside breaks the poetics down into details. Identifying instances in which the aside is significant, uncontained, or perhaps unrecognised for how it comes to visibility, the research considers how specific works articulate these movements and how these activating structures create meaning. Existing structures are elaborated on in the writing and studio work. Contingent methodologies are developed in and through specific works in a dialogical mode. An asiding across texts, the written work is part of the creative work. The research focuses on language and the meta-linguistic aspect of making in which the consciousness of that language is articulated in the work itself, dropping out the main text and holding in the annotation.
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ItemHabitation procedures: adjusted dwelling space and sculpture practice in situ( 2019)This research project enquires into relations between sculpture practice, adjustments of space by inhabitants of dwellings and the siting of artworks as installation and intervention. It examines how acts of dwelling and making correspond as habitation procedures; as everyday processes of amending space and objects. Understood as a female will-to-identity they suggest new ways of constructing the experience of encountered sculpture and the passage of the domestic into public discourse. The research takes place through domestic sites and related exhibition activity, embodying experiences that overlay places of living and working, home and studio, residency and gallery. These include a Caravan mobile home in Narooma, NSW; a 1960s mud-brick residence, Birrarung House in Eltham, Victoria and a gallery residency in Bendigo, Victoria. Habitation procedures are practices of the dialogical; an interchange of voices that constitute new and compound meanings (Mikhail Bakhtin,1982), of in-betweeness and dialectical experience (Jane Rendell, 2006), of change through the experience of time and space (Massey, 2005) and of mediation. The communities of practice informing the project include the Womanhouse Project (1971), Lygia Clark, Andrea Zittel and Heide Bucher.
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ItemSonic recipes from a public kitchen: participatory Feminist performance art( 2019)This research proposes to explore and transform the kitchen as a sonic performative work and public site for art and social practice. A Public Kitchen is formed by recreating the private and domestic space of a kitchen into a public space through a sonic performance artwork as a series of creative propositions. The kitchen table is a platform for exploring, repositioning and amplifying kitchen tools through electronic and manual manipulation. In my research practice, this platform becomes a collaborative social space, where I investigate the somatic movement and sensory, sonic power of the repositioned kitchen tools. Through engaging the participants in deep listening methods for sonic awareness and in feminist participatory practices, I form a relational, resonant and communicative site, where new sonic techniques of existence are created and experiences shared. This thesis is built on a relational architecture of iterative sound performances that position the art historical, the sociopolitical, transforming disciplinary interpretations of the body and technology as something that is not specifically exclusively human but post-human. The thesis speaks through a creative practice that unfolds as a sharing of experiences through these propositions. I am also channeling the intra-personal; through the entanglement of my own personal cultural experience and diverse background, where language, meaning and subjectivity is relational to what it means to be human and to what is felt from the social, what has informed me from a multi-cultural nomadic existence and perspective. Through the medium of sound, I am investigating, emphasizing entities, ethics, social class and social political intervention in the process. This subjectivity illuminates how we move through the world, react to surroundings and respond to everything. It also proposes how the normative and hierarchical relations amongst human groups based on race, sexuality, social class and ability are always intimately entangled with the broader political economies/ecologies of which we are a part. The performance work establishes a scaffold for thinking about a range of ideas of what is felt through encounters with philosophy, sonic arts, feminist thought. It highlights labored bodies entangled with posthuman contingencies of food preparation, family and social history, ritual, tradition, social geography, local politics and women’s oppression. The human and non-human relation to machines and machine learning is enacted through intra-active entanglement; it represents an active pedagogy practice for organising and responding collectively to, the local. A noisy kitchen is felt as a musical sounding in the everyday rhythm of lived intensities. Agency is conjured through the doing-cooking of the kitchen to create a sonic recipe as the becoming of the human-machine relationship to uncover the paradigms that shape-shift performance, cross-fertilizing with technology and futurities of social robotics by finding ways forward in untangling the discourse surrounding robotic machines, humanoids and AI. This thesis focuses on an unpacking of a creative practice where resonating with agency and amplifying where the experiential is intensely experienced. A Public Kitchen is embedded in socio-cultural research where the artwork allows for human slippages, failures that form part of the work. A sonic recipe is a creative act that actively works as a strategy to cut across pre-established dichotomies and transverse hierarchies of power relations that organize diverse forms of life. In particular, it considers how feminist new materialism can be “put to work”, creating daring dissonant narratives that feed posthuman ethical practices and feminist genealogies. This research reveals what matters—a feminist struggle invaluable in highlighting and responding collectively to the local with a systemic understanding material phenomena in an immersive sonic performative installation. This research practice proposes to ignite and transform our social imagination and deactivate pervasive and dominating patriarchal ethico-politics.
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ItemAustralian piano music 1980-2010 from a pianist's perspective: a presentation of two performance events( 2011)The interpretation and performance of new Australian solo piano music 1980-2010 are both under-researched. The ten representative solo piano works upon which this thesis is based were written by two distinct generations of composers between 1980 and 1994, and 1994 and 2010 respectively. These two periods contain a wealth of compositions that range across numerous genres, styles, compositional methods, idioms and musical languages which, as I shall argue below, nevertheless constitute a degree of consistency in style and approach in each case. Due to a number of key historical, socio-cultural and professional factors, examination of the two periods reveals a multi-faceted shift in compositional style between the first and second generations. These factors include the composer’s professional development; the impact of Australianism, modernism, post-modernism and polystylism; the extraordinary growth of emphasis on pianistic virtuosity resulting from the commissioning of new works; and the reduction in the emphasis on national identity as expressed in references to the Australian landscape and Indigenous Australian music. External factors such as the support of commissions by the Australian Council for new works also play a role. This dissertation delineates the role of the pianist in the interpretation of the selected works and formulates a theory of performance that may be applied more generally to this oeuvre. I based my interpretations of this mostly atonal literature on a new model of dynamic form, derived from my assessment of the composers’ compositional methods, including the form or ‘shape’ of the dynamic markings throughout the score. In interpreting the styles, idioms and character, I examined the implications in the scores for the pianist’s gestures and approach to dynamic markings and sonic qualities. My theory of dynamic form is based on the notion that the dynamic markings throughout the score – referred to as ‘dynamic scheme’ – provide a general indication of dynamic intensity throughout a work. As the interpretative process progresses, the resulting ‘sketch’ of the dynamic form is tempered, or at times significantly altered, as other factors that influence variations in the dynamic intensity are taken into account. Traditional models of dynamic form, which tend to assume the inevitability of links between such musical elements as tempo, rhythmic vigour and harmony, run the risk of ignoring surprising new musical relationships that are continually presented by composers of new music. From the performer’s perspective, this methodology also has the benefit of ensuring that every facet of the music has been rigorously examined.