Victorian College of the Arts - Theses
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ItemQueer nightlife and the potentiality of heterotopic space( 2022)Over the past decade an explicitly queer nightlife culture has established itself around the globe. Drawing on a mixture of academic theory, political activism, club hedonism and experimental art, these fervent sites have arisen in opposition to the broader assimilative trends that have come to define queer cultural life. In Naarm, a city renowned for its arts scene and progressive values, the queer nightlife ecology is both vibrant and volatile: it is defined as much by its radical political vision as its many failures to achieve it, and its disparate communities are often riven by conflict, disagreements, and harm. Despite nightlife’s promise of liberation and transformation, utopic analyses fixated on the radical fail to account for these sites’ complex relations to power. My research proposes heterotopia as a method for encapsulating this contradictory nature. Informed by interviews with nightlife creators, performance analysis, field observation, and participation as a performer, event producer, and DJ, I outline the varied political, social, and cultural visions that arise in the wake of Naarm’s queer nightlife. I find that the spatial experiments of nightlife—and heterotopia—are unstable performative zones generative of different modes of being. The ideological contestations and discoveries that define these sites are not confined to the time-space of the event, but surge beyond their bounds: they alter the everyday world, the lives of nightlife participants, and redefine the domains of ‘queerness’ alongside its nightlife territories. This provides a further evidentiary basis for the contention that it is within heterotopic sites that our political and cultural models are tested in-micro. Besides testing the established core principles of heterotopia, however, applying the heterotopic model to a community-culture that unfolds in real time allows a unique interrogation of heterotopia’s relational and performative qualities. This project finds that heterotopia, as a lens of ambivalence, is a fruitful method for capturing the complex reality of queer spaces. Further, it marks an original contribution to the field of heterotopic theory through its reliance on interview and co-performative witnessing. This method highlights that heterotopia must be understood in relation to other heterotopic sites, including those in the near or distant past, and not only through its relationship to the dominant or hegemonic culture it is situated in. It also provides a model for the exploration of heterotopias’ impacts on the individuals that pass through them, mapping the affectual landscapes and intimate revolutions of everyday life that may result from heterotopic participation.
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ItemThree Act Plays( 2021)Three Act Plays is a practice-led Master of Fine Arts (Visual Art) research project that considers how sculpture and performance combine to act as metaphor for audience/viewer relations. The research explores what it might mean to subjectivise or flatten these relationships within an interdisciplinary practice, and incorporates analysis of works that use cross disciplinary moments to further interrogate the discussion. Through sculptural and performance video works created throughout the research, the project seeks to elaborate upon definitions of the ‘backstage’, the ‘prop’, the ‘rehearsal’, and ‘the audience’ as a way to explore a space of inter-subjectivity. The dissertation addresses these tropes via a re-reading of Michael Fried’s influential 1967 essay ‘Art and Objecthood’, prompting a critical re-evaluation of the relationships between sculpture and performance.
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ItemLightning in the middle( 2021)Lightning In The Middle (LIM) Methods of Creative Practice Bon Mott acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of the ancient land named Australia by Matthew Flinders from 1804 and the peoples of the Kulin Nation where Bon Mott lives and works. Bon Mott acknowledges that the land, sea, and sky were never ceded and pays deep respect to First Nations people past, present, and emerging. Lightning in the Middle (LIM) draws from transdisciplinary transformative mixed method (TTMM) research methods from a neurodiverse perspective. The creative outputs of LIM are driven by transdisciplinary processes that focus on installation activated by performance (IAP) informed by sculpture, choreography, industrial design, and performance art. Emphasis is placed on this as marginalised or misunderstood experts are integral to this research. LIM’s process driven IAP is achieved through developing and utilising transdisciplinary, transformative mixed methods (TTMM) research to produce creative outcomes. Lightning in the Middle (LIM) IAP examines gender identity by bringing together concepts from Indigenous Knowledge, astrophysics, and feminist philosophies to consider the beneficial impact of nonbinary identity on contemporary society. AC/DC songwriter Bon Scott was aware the band’s name also meant ‘bisexual’, and when a journalist asked Bon if they were the AC or the DC, Bon replied, “Neither, I’m the lightning flash in the middle.” Bon Scott embodied the role of the trickster, an archetype common in First Nations traditions of the world. To the Lakota (Lakhota Lakhota), Teton Sioux (Thithunwan) people of the northern Turtle Island (North America), the trickster is called Heyokha, a person in the community who connects with the science of lightning that engages in unconventional and contrarian behaviour. Artist Bon Mott embodies this concept through their artistic practice by departing from the normative binary approach to gender by identifying as neither man nor woman, but as lightning. The name Intergalactic Plasma comes from emerging scientific research that shows the plasma/energy we call lightning is powered by cosmic rays. Originating from supernovae (dying stars) explosions in intergalactic space, cosmic rays enter the Earth’s atmosphere and produce a runaway breakdown of quantum particles that create a pathway for lightning. As feminist philosopher and physicist Karen Barad and writer and performance artist Amrou Al-Kadhi argue, the quantum world is one filled with contradictions and non-binary states of being. LIM concluded with Intergalactic Plasma: a way back to go forward: a photographic collaboration of artists who are immersed in the performance and creation of lightning to challenge exclusive gender norms and promote inclusive social and artistic practices. Bon Mott’s collaborative portraits of these artists are featured on high-quality silk, which performs like plasma when activated by choreography and movement. By looking back to the ancient knowledge systems of Indigenous people, collaborating with queer and Indigenous communities, and researching modern astrophysics, we may consider expansive and inclusive states of being to find our own quantum pathway forward.
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ItemCancerous dramaturgy: using biology as a dramaturgical template in writing for performance( 2021)This practice-based research investigates the concept of a biological dramaturgy, and is structured as a dissertation (60%) and accompanying creative works (40%). Working with cancer as a dramaturgical template, the research proposes that a creative writing practice which models itself on the biological processes which drive cancer will foster a dramaturgy that is essentially cancerous in nature. This proposition is tested through three creative experiments which use cancer biology (experiments A and C) and evolutionary-developmental biology (experiment B) as illustrative systems for the generation of writing for performance. The thesis employs a critical framework which synthesises Critical Literary Geography and Systems Biology to allow for a phenomenological account of the creative process. This synthesis enables the articulation of a textual system, one which encapsulates the dwelling within and shaping of imaginative spaces that come through the act of writing, as well as the notion of a dynamic creative system that is generated by concurrent environmental, structural (text-driven) and organisational (author-driven) forces. Through this combined practical and theoretical inquiry – and building on discourse concerning the relationship between form and content in the science play, as well as dramaturgical theories and practices that accentuate process, intertextuality, the organic and the viral – the thesis concludes that the deployment of cancerous processes has the potential to seed and nurture new performance texts that are cancerous in nature. Further, this approach to dramatic composition can be applied to biological processes more broadly, the results of the experiments revealing how a biological organism’s ‘evolution from within’ might be modelled in the dramaturgy of a performance text. The research establishes that working towards a biological dramaturgy requires the nurturing of an embodied sense of the relevant biological processes and a biological sensibility, such that the balance between the environmental, structural and organisational elements of the work might best be negotiated and the author-God resisted. It is also suggested that biologically driven dramaturgies might potentially facilitate a reconfiguration that pushes dramatic form beyond the postdramatic. The practice outcomes of the thesis are demonstrated by three performance texts: Blood & Shadow, Variation for Three Voices on a Letter to Nature and Self Portrait / In Cross-Sections / With Bird.
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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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ItemBegotten, not made: availing and performed sites for a poetics of being( 2013)This research has taken a practice-led form. The questions and issues are those arising in and through the practice of an artist working in live performance and were formed in and through personal, practical experience. The researching artist has undertaken a period of time- approximately two years- during which heuristic and creative data has been allowed to ascribe itself on various media and on the artist’s attending perceptions and responses. Seemingly disparate drawings, vocal and physical scores, text fragments and audio atmospheres were assembled and presented as a live creative work. The thesis presents an exegetical overview of the practices engaged and investigates the pathways common to arising and intentionality; their capacity to affirm and deny in the receiving artist’s experience and their capacity to conjoin the self with their intentions to abreact synergistic phenomena involved in the formation of imagined and actual poetic sites for their realisation.