Victorian College of the Arts - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 10 of 123
-
ItemNo Preview AvailableConversations on Migration: The Power of Collective Voice( 2023-11)This research project is situated within the expanded context of socially engaged art, film, and politics. Rooted in the discourse of contemporary migration, the project examines how practicing art as an everyday doing in the world with others might contribute to articulating the political, particularly from the point of contextual, subjective experiences, and how it might facilitate and encourage dialogues that transcend borders, both literally and metaphorically. Honouring relationality and plurality, the project brings together a group of women from different parts of the world—Chile, Greece, Iran, Kenya, and Vietnam—who migrated to Australia. The project employs a methodology grounded in gathering and dialoguing as a form of creative political praxis, opening up a space for building relationships and providing a platform for articulating and conceptualising the commonalities and differences between their diverse migratory experiences. In doing so, the project intends to contribute to generating a body politic in a dialectical dynamic with the social and political present, strengthening the capacity for struggle against dominant structures of power and control produced and reproduced by capitalism and militarism. Grappling with ideas of responsibility in relation to unlearning imperial modes of representation, one of the public forms this project takes is the film, Civic Chorus, 2023 and its installation. This film presents scenes of dialogues among the participants of the group, which unfolded over a period of two days in Naarm/Melbourne. Resisting simplistic and comprehensive narratives of identity, these dialogues explore complexities of belonging, ideas of community, processes of racialisation, classification, borderisation, and assimilation, among others, offering nuanced perspectives on experiences of migration.
-
ItemPoetic Datacosmics: Subjective Relationships To Digital Technologies Through Artistic Practice( 2023-11)This research proposes a poetic method, which I call DataCosmics, as a framework for better understanding subjective relationships to digital technologies. In the context of my research, “poetic” is understood to constitute a self-generated network of data relationships, which are in turn explored through a contemplative artistic practice. Specifically, DataCosmics considers how art can function as a tool for emphasising more intimate, familial and speculative bonds between humans and digital technologies. By extension, this research then also interrogates the mutually responsive interplay of the technological imagination on perceived understandings of new technologies. In a spirit of gentle resistance to passive alienation, I trace emergent, situated networks of material and metaphorical connections between humans and technology through contemporary art and culture. Drawing upon American science fiction author, Ursula Le Guin’s, 1986 essay, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, I consider the cultural container as a possible metaphor for rethinking relationships to digital technology. Through an accompanying series of artistic investigations, I utilise various methods of digital re-materialisation; including 3D printing, data weaving, and ceramic coding. By extrapolating upon the metaphorical capacity of the data container and the externalisation of memory, I use both traditional craft techniques and digital storage techniques. DataCosmics is informed by practical and speculative experiments in digital storage and cataloguing structures. Finally, the research offers a retronymic re-consideration of the value of material processes and new ways to creatively engage with computing by strengthening implicit connections between craft and digital technologies. I use the term retronymic to suggest a backwards glance at material and manual processes, which, through my experience of the digital realm might also bring a renewed understanding to them. Utilising and reflecting upon this approach, this project seeks to better understand the technological imaginary and emphasises the poetic value of subjective, private and implied emotional bonds between devices, personal data and emergent human-technology relations.
-
ItemBeing [insert role] in The Thursday Group: Addressing Power Dynamics in a Theatre Group( 2023-10)Considering the question of how to vary my pedagogical and directorial practice for greater collectivity in our psychophysical theatre ensemble The Thursday Group, this thesis investigates the nuanced positions of singular vision and collectivity, the overlap of my roles, the strategies I enacted and the responses of group members. Following our 2019 production of The Intriguing Case of the Silent Forest, I felt a cognitive dissonance concerning my practice whereby I hoped for group collectivity but sensed an imbalance of power. So, I proposed that we transform group practice to collectivity and concurrently analysed that transformation in a practice-as-research process. Materially, these considerations and enactments followed the co-authoring of practice etudes and co-devising performance that arose from Lev Vygotsky’s notion that inner thought is completed by its social expression. Following Estelle Barrett’s 'dispersed selves' framework, an autoethnographic methodology is employed whereby data are examined from different practice and research viewpoints. Pedagogical and sociological frames informed my strategies to encourage agency in our ensemble and inform my analysis. These frames are Anna Pauliina Rainio’s ways for understanding agency, Peter Smagorinsky’s discussion on classroom culture and Jacques Ranciere’s storied theory on the intellectual emancipation of learners. In addition, reading Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s conception of ‘machinic assemblage’, I chart our group’s fields of meeting in a non-hierarchical organisation. In positioning univocity against multivocity, and riffing Paul Carter’s term ‘material thinking’ as ‘manifold material thinking’, I argue that dialogic praxis can relocate conceptions of identity, purpose, practice-as-research, and artistic expression for more representative and shared meaning-making. I believe the exegesis will be useful for theatre and drama school practitioners who find that agentive actors who self-author meaning are better equipped to share meaning-making with audiences.
-
Itemfor a conversation, now, sometimes, oops- oh no... sorry, i mean, somewhere… for a conversation, somewhere( 2023-11)This practice-led research asks: is it possible to hold a conversation in space forever? It suggests we can find and hold the materialisation of a conversation once it’s left the people that have had it. Over the course of this research, an important strategy became attempting to think not in time, but rather, in space. Thinking in space allowed the ability to wonder not when something was but where it is. In this project conversation has been utilised as inspiration, methodology and material. The exhibition at the Fiona and Sidney Myer Gallery builds a space for a conversation to happen and a space where the remains of those conversations can stay. The project focuses on divine conversation, where the content and outcomes are not important, what is important is that two people share the desire to talk to each other. The space holds two performative representations of conversations. They are: (i) a continuous conversation, where over 50 participants take part to help hold a constant conversation over the duration of the exhibition. (ii) what you are doing, where two actors sporadically perform a scripted dialogue of the narration of their conversation, told through the other. Being inspired by thinking in space - the gallery turns into a piazza consisting of several elements holding these conversations: performance furniture which are structures for the performers and participants to engage with, being designed around places where the vibrations of a conversation might linger, like a horizon or a corner constructed from steel, paint and plywood. Object/Sculpture Characters, which are two operated neon lights, simulating day and night, and a water fountain constructed from steel concrete and water flowing help hold the particles of saliva from the conversations spoken. The dissertation shifts through poetry, comparisons to other artists and theorists, personal accounts and stories. It discusses the process of making this artwork, from its muses to the conversations had during the two years it took to realise the project and the materials used. The writing brings the artwork into conversation with: theorist Carlo Rovelli; writer bell hooks; playwright Caryl Churchill; artists Sophie Calle, Ragnar Kjartansson, Lisa Radford, Damiano Bertoli, and Gian Lorenzo Bernini; choreographers Simone Forti and Pina Bausch; performances by Forced Entertainment, Tino Seghal, Aphids, and Back to Back Theatre company; comedians Andy Kaufmam, Kurt Braunohler, and Kristen Schaal; and poet-artist Madeline Ginns and artist- architect Arakawa.
-
ItemAcross the lineaments of figuration: posthuman subjectivities and boundary work with art( 2023-09)Abstract The twenty-first century heralds significant transformations in matters of collective, existential concern for human and nonhuman subjects. These include the processes of accelerating technological mediation, the climate crisis, social and ecological disparity, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Posthumanism, in discourse with these conditions, emerges as a heterogeneous field of transdisciplinary inquiry that includes an intersection with artistic research and practice, with a corresponding diversity in how the confluence is studied, practiced, and ultimately understood. Conducted between 2016 and 2023, this thesis-only PhD project responds to this critical and creative juncture. Its primary aim is to investigate the performative process of how art works across boundaries of knowledge and across multiple modalities of practice. As part of this investigation, I seek to contribute new accounts, concepts, processes, and creations that challenge paradigms of human-centred subjectivity. To achieve this aim, I propose and then apply an overarching methodology of boundary work with art for my transdisciplinary and multimodal research. In Part I, I provide a scholarly and artistic context for this undertaking, establishing key discourses that lead the research through the field of posthumanism, the worlding work of art, posthuman subjectivity, and the thesis’s methodological framework. Two contextual chapters cover my readings of these literatures in order to arrive at the project’s aims. In Chapter 1, I address Rosi Braidotti's call to account for the specificity of art practices at a posthuman interface. I consider this through Barbara Bolt’s framework for a material performativity of art, which proposes to open creative practice to knowledges, processes and worldings beyond representationalism and the art world. I then propose my methodology in Chapter 2. This methodology of boundary work with art contextualises and defines three ethical accountabilities for performing the research and practice: first, the situating of working boundaries within transdisciplinary and partial perspectives; second, attending to posthuman subject-matters; and third, the contribution of affirmative responses. In Part II, I present the outcomes, discussion, and findings generated by applying this methodology in three key studies. Study 1: Boundary work in a posthuman virtuality explores critical concepts of virtuality, and reveals the processes by which contemporary conditions of technological mediation shape boundary work with art, which are reiterated in the following two studies. This discussion includes my analysis of the networked assembly of co-production, the enduring cyborg figure in my contributing paper "The Cyborg Endures: Towards Posthuman Figuration of Virtual Subjectivities", and a rising algorithmic subjectivity as conceptualised in my speculative fiction "Apocope in the Suture Zone.” Study 2: Artwork with avians and a multispecies invitation builds my case for an ethics of multispecies invitation; it is accompanied by the published account of multispecies artwork "Unseeing Elegy of the Tetrachromats" and attendant art-science collaborations. Study 2 reveals how the research methodology may challenge human-centred subjectivity without necessarily seeking consensus between disciplinary perspectives. Study 3: Virtual nature and posthuman wellbeing(s) consolidates my arguments for the significance of virtuality in the work of art’s world, demonstrated by propositions for biophilic design beyond human-centred understandings of both wellbeing and nature, which are mobilised in the speculative fiction "No Longer (..) Not Yet" and my art-health collaboration as documented in the paper "Virtual Nature, Inner Forest: Prospects for Immersive Virtual Nature Art and Well-Being". The figurations (outcomes) that emerge from each study expand, challenge, and enrich both scholarly knowledges and practices at an intersection of posthumanism and art. The thesis thus advances understandings on the performative process of how art works as a worlding practice, with my boundary-led methodology revealing and attending to the present epoch of collective, transformative and imperative significances of ‘the human’ in a planetary ecology of relational becoming.
-
ItemPainting the Restless Space( 2023-11)Painting the Restless Space is a material examination of the unstable nature of embodiment. Sitting under the studio work are two ‘shocking’ events of ‘carnage’ that instilled in me a personal concern for the precarious condition of bodies. Instability has become the subject and the method of the work, reinforced in the way that distinct materials behave and relate to one another. Moving from flesh (the referent) to paint and text (the signifiers) the hope for replication fades in the fluidity of paint and the potential of ‘wandering’ words. My attempts can only approximate flesh, as stand-ins, prostheses, and failures. Unpicking the illusory nature of boundaries that demarcate the self, I am asking “What can bodies do?” What are their limits and entanglements? What can we know and feel about our bodies through the ways that we relate to objects? How can a creative practice engage with processes of bodily reconfiguration, recontextualisation, and reinterpretation, exploring subjectivity as porous, entangled, and contingent? As a painter, I seek to find painterly ways to respond to these questions and to enliven the possibilities for knowledges rooted in the uncertainty and messiness of embodiment. Through this research, I articulate how my studio practice draws on a range of personal experiences, theoretical fields, and artistic practices to consider how painting can help us discover new ways of unsettling existing modes of looking and thinking about bodies.
-
ItemThe function of music in narrative cinema(University of Melbourne, 1996)
-
ItemAnton Webern : variationen fur klavier, OP.27 : an analysis(University of Melbourne, 2002)
-
ItemSibell Mary, Countess Grosvenor by Jules Dalou and its forgotten history(University of Melbourne, 1999)
-
ItemThe semper eadem : salting flesh shoreline project(University of Melbourne, 2007)