Minerva Elements Records
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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 Credibility( 2018)Theatre practitioners have displayed an increasing interest in staging Refugee narratives, with approaches undertaking a number of methodologies. This thesis intends to look at a larger pattern of socio-political power relations, rather than a case by case analysis. The focus is on frame and thus primarily theoretical. Essentially this research looks at how Refugee theatre reproduces colonial terms of enunciation that restrict, limit, prescribe and demand how Refugees must perform to particular characters and narratives—both on and off stage. The research asserts that the performative demands of Refugee as a socio-political identity- exists before the theatrical site- extending to the performance demands of Refugee Theatre. I suggest that Refugee Theatre primarily relies on truth claims not because they are the most effective of all forms; but because it remains problematically tied to expectations to prove truth, authenticity and innocence. Refugee is continually asked to speak to these, as a Performance of Credibility. This has severe implications who gets seen and how they get seen. I argue that Performing Credibility is silencing rather than self determining. Thus it argues that that Refugee theatre as Performances of Credibility, function as an extension of the geospatial border in that they are just as oppressive, violent and silencing in its performative demands. The thesis offers two performative interventions that frame ‘Refugeeness’ in ways that resist these colonial narratives, as a form of anti-Performing Credibility dramaturgy. Drawing upon Latin American decolonial scholarship, the thesis argues for a conception of Refugeeness as ongoing and navigational, displacing borders and evading nationalist frameworks. The thesis explores how Refugeeness might be a useful re-frame to ensure Refugee challenges borders, rather than be assaulted within them; Refugeeness as a generative, creative site towards re-emergence and a step away from the burden of continuously Performing Credibility.
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ItemOn the precipice of some space else: an ecology of being through (with) improvisational performance process( 2020)All performance events, and particularly those of General Assembly of Interested Parties (GAIP), that I have participated in from 2014 until 2019, constitute the work upon which I have based reports, extrapolations and interpretations in text, resulting in this dissertation. The original works, in varying physical modes and carried out in wide-ranging contexts, were undertaken for their own sake, as creative imperatives. That work has come and gone across time. Documentation from this activity is a new work and experience in itself (in the making or witnessing) even though its existence stems from the original event, it is freed of obligation to simply record what happened. Writing, directly referencing or stimulated by these performative events, exists as an improvisation upon and around memory of the original work. Much, but not all, of the vast quantity and array of original work was documented, to some extent. The format of documentation exists as video, still image, audio file and physical object. As the reader will discover, the digital file containing the dissertation text also contains digital images, external video links, and is a ‘designed space’ that takes notice of the aesthetic experience of reading text in combination with textual meaning. This approach is in keeping for an examination of an holistic creative practice. There are three audio files, using source material from each year of data gathering (2014-16), and one video that together with all linked media and text, constitute the creative project. External links for the three audio files and video file can be found on pages 153 and 154 of this document.
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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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ItemLearning Britten's Violin Concerto: a reflexive & collaborative approach to interpretation( 2019)Performance manuals are seemingly divided into two approaches: those that provide the reader technical instruction on the execution of a work or works and those that adopt a more self-reflective investigation into personal performance practice. Using a critical, reflexive approach, this thesis examines the development of a highly-personal interpretive methodology that aims to create personal authenticity in my interpretation of Britten’s Violin Concerto through the cultivation of a combined composer-performer perspective that stimulates my technical decisions, thus developing a framework I can freely apply to a variety of contexts within my broader performance-practice. Through a detailed investigation, Part One analyses significant events and experiences that shaped Britten’s early life, developing a lens to inform my interpretation of the score. Part Two demonstrates how my interpretation of Britten’s compositional craft and the specific technical decisions I arrived at in my practice supports the narrative uncovered in Part One. This study aims to provide an example to performers looking to apply a methodology to their own practice to assist in creating highly personal interpretations that attempt to honour the intentions of both composer and performer.
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ItemTowards a model that explains knowledge sharing behaviour for complex tasks( 2018)In organisations, knowledge sharing has been studied in many different contexts and settings, as it is an integral part of knowledge creation. This thesis presents and tests a model that explains motivations for knowledge sharing behaviour for complex tasks. The foundation of the research is a number of key organisational and motivational theories including social cognitive theory. Existing research in this area is focussed in 3 domains – the enabling and supportive role of technology; the organisation and its characteristics; and the individual and his/her attitudes and intentions to knowledge sharing. Scant research has considered the task at hand, the task about which individuals perform knowledge sharing and the impact of this task on the individual’s knowledge sharing behaviour. This research is centred on this task, from here on, referred to as ‘the task’ in this thesis. Since the focus of this research is on knowledge sharing behaviour related to complex tasks - it is the characteristic of complexity that forms the basis of the models that are tested in this research. In order to establish the task as the key factor in the performance of knowledge sharing behaviour, the research proposes 3 different models, each with a different variable as the key influencer in the performance of knowledge sharing behaviour. These variables are: i) the task about which knowledge is being shared, ii) the technology used for sharing knowledge, and iii) the actual task of performing knowledge sharing behaviour. These three behavioural models were tested empirically using an experimental research design involving 76 individuals performing a complex task. Data collected through surveys was analysed statistically using analysis of variance and process analysis to assess individual performance associated with knowledge sharing behaviour. Findings confirm that task self-efficacy and knowledge sharing self-efficacy indirectly influence the relationship between task complexity and the quality of knowledge shared. Findings also confirm that commitment to both the task itself and the knowledge sharing, in addition to self-efficacy, indirectly influence the relationship between task complexity and the understandability of knowledge shared. Finally, findings demonstrate that feedback on knowledge shared positively influences the choice of knowledge transfer mechanisms. In addition, qualitative analysis of the codified knowledge and the answers to the open-ended questions validated the study’s findings and provided richer insights into the empirical results. This research contributes to our understanding of the importance of a task and its influence on the quality and understandability of an individual’s knowledge sharing behaviour performance. Furthermore, it contributes to and extends the current literature on complex tasks. Outcomes of this research offer a new perspective on the importance of the role of the task at hand in knowledge sharing. Corresponding to this, there are important implications for the design of supporting technology and potential interventions for human resource management. In addition, this research has important implications for the organisation as it often relies on individual expertise associated with a complex task. This expertise may not be accessible, as it exists in geographically diverse locations. This may impact the execution of the complex task. In order to delve further into the relationship between a complex task and the performance of knowledge sharing behaviour, there is a clear need to consider other characteristics of the task about which knowledge is being shared, as this forms the basis for the individual’s choice of knowledge transfer mechanisms. Future studies should also consider feedback and how to integrate feedback into existing knowledge transfer mechanisms to optimise the sharing of knowledge as this feedback is a tool that can be useful in influencing the preference for knowledge transfer mechanisms.
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ItemLetters to my father: Yan Wanyoo Peepayan( 2018)Yan Wanyoo Peepayan, Letters to my Father, is the written component of Australia’s inaugural Doctorate of Visual and Performing Arts. The dissertation and its accompanying huge collection of creative works narrate Associate Professor Richard Frankland’s deeply personal and poetic story of a life long journey that performs and documents the complexities of First Nations ways of knowing, being and doing. Frankland, a significant holder of Gunditjmara knowledge, is renowned as an artist-warrior: a community leader and educator, songman, musician, filmmaker, poet, playwright and novelist who uses any medium to tell his stories of the painful past, an optimistic present and hopeful tomorrows. This collection showcases both his voice through art and the ways he facilitates the voices of hidden Australia through art, acts that inspire and energise reconciliation and social change. His contributions aim to revitalise First Nations cultural practices and language and combat the ‘poverty of spirit’ that is the legacy of colonisation. His collection of hundreds and poems and songs sing of what was, what is and what can be. The films and plays such as No Way to Forget (1996), Conversations with the Dead (20002) and Walking into the Bigness (2014), stitch a new cultural tapestry for the nation. His stories strive to shape a new national identity, insisting the past is a foundation for all hope. The collection is a statement that art is a tool for cultural capacity building not only for the First Peoples, but for others, for all. It is a dissertation and collection that addresses the dominant culture front on. The shape of the dissertation is original and non-traditional, it does not look like the customary thesis. Like other First Nations scholars around the world, Frankland has insisted on his own unique shape to facilitate his voice, embracing his culture’s oral and performed knowledge systems that are deeply connected to Country. Readers from the dominant culture engaging with this form of First Nations Storywork will find themselves in the contact zone, the space between the coloniser and the colonised, the First People and the settlers. Frankland treads lightly in the space, without apportioning guilt and blame, acknowledging a shared legacy with an invitation over the cultural abyss to places of possibility and hope. Yan Wanyoo Peepayan, is a series of fascinating and generous access points for the non-Indigenous and First Nations readers alike. He uses his art and voice to assist in both navigating the dominant culture and also in assisting the dominant culture to find a place within Australia by embracing First Nations culture.
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