Centre for Ideas - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 3 of 3
-
Item(K)rap(p): voice as gaze in the mundane( 2015)(K)rap(p): Voice as Gaze in the Mundane examines ekphrasis - the “telling of vision” - in contemporary art. Between the scenario of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape; unorthodox voice recordings by Konstantin Raudive, recorded interviews and archived material relating to my deceased parents’ involvement in the Communist Party of Australia during the 1950s; a type of proletarianisation of the gaze, an ekphrastic dematerialisation and re-materialisation of vision is interrogated into political and uncanny dimensions. The ekphrastic relation to art is that of viewing and articulating, visually rendering an articulation as an inversion of ekphrasis. The sonorous act of verbalizing becomes visual representation, therefore art. Paradoxically the notion of what constitutes art is complicated by its own description. The research begins with the examination of art and voice in relation to ekphrasis, hypothesising whether ekphrasis might be made visible as art through its inversion and concludes with voice in relation to the spectral, invisible in both social and political terms, made visible through the unification of sound (voice recordings) and image (archival and artefact), in which selected audio and visual material are manipulated to form artwork. The exhibition created for this project was an accumulation of these manipulations, found and fabricated artworks in the form of photography, voice recordings and collated archival material including original documents regarding the Communist Party between 1948 and 1960. The selected material was presented with archaic voice recording equipment as part of the Installation project exhibited at the Margret Lawrence Gallery in February 2015. The exhibition was not just a product of research into the Communist Party of Australia, but of voice in the broader sense. Voice has been examined from multiple facets, in its many incarnations and it is through Samuel Beckett’s work and Raudive recordings that voice as a subject of the gaze has highlighted the uncanny potential of voice as gaze.
-
ItemThe responsibility of the media: occupation in East Timor and Western Sahara( 2015)The military occupations of East Timor and Western Sahara almost mirror each other, but they are small and insignificant according to the rules of traditional realpolitik. The thesis asks: What was the responsibility of the media in the occupation of East Timor and the continuing occupation in Western Sahara? In Chapter 1 – “Letting East Timor Speak and Breaking Indonesia’s Information Blockade 1975-1978” - the Indonesian military’s bloody invasion of East Timor and its campaign of “encirclement and annihilation” was broadcast by Radio Maubere, an illegal and underground radio network, to an increasingly disturbed and alarmed group of Australians led by Denis Freney. While the broadcast was heroic, Radio Maubere was ultimately flawed. In Chapter 2 - “The Responsibility of Filmmakers: Before and After the Santa Cruz Massacre” - I discuss Noam Chomsky’s argument that the American media were responsible for the genocide in East Timor. However, in 1991, Max Stahl’s film footage of the Santa Cruz Massacre helped in turning around years of international indifference and apathy. In Chapter 3 – “Scenes From An Occupation: East Timor 1999” - I return to my documentary film, Scenes From An Occupation, which I filmed in 1999, during the last six months of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. In order to re-examine my own responsibility as a video-journalist and filmmaker, I interrogate documentary filmmaker Pamela Yates’ statement that “sometimes a story told long ago will speak to you in the present”. In Chapter 4 – “Who Speaks For Fetim Salam?” - and Chapter 5 - “Western Sahara: How To Stop A National Liberation Movement” - I explore the irresponsibility of filmmakers via a discussion of the controversial and discredited Australian documentary Stolen (2009). This film, which was publicised heavily online and shown repeatedly at international film festivals, alleges that the black-skinned Saharawis are slaves in the Polisario-run camps in Algeria. As such, after almost four decades of media neglect of Western Sahara, Stolen managed to combine both mendacity and sloppy documentary practices. In these two chapters I deconstruct both the film and its critical reception, taking Carlos González’ film, Robbed of Truth: The Western Sahara Conflict and the Ethics of Documentary Filmmaking, as a starting point. In Appendix 1: As part of the practice-based component of this thesis I write a feature length script, based on my previous research on East Timor called The American Brother. In Appendix 1 – “Notes to The American Brother” - I examine the relationship between history, character and the responsibility of the media.
-
ItemBeautiful little dead things: empathy, witnessing, trauma and animals' suffering( 2015)This sculptural practice-led research investigates empathy, trauma and witnessing and the role of testimony in visual arts practice. The thesis argues that Edith Stein’s phenomenological account of empathy articulates an empathic encounter that recognizes the alterity of the other. Stein’s account, I argue, can be drawn out to include encounters with nonhuman animals and sculptural objects that resemble embodied forms. Responding to developments in my sculptural practice the research examined the possibility of visual art practices to bear witness to the ongoing suffering of animals: marking out the possibility for sculptural objects to perform as testimonial objects. As testimonial objects they attest to the trauma of the one who witnesses for the other. Ethical considerations in relation to materiality, representation and the position of one who testifies for, or on behalf of, the other are examined.