Victorian College of the Arts - Research Publications
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ItemNo Preview AvailableDy(e)ing is Not-Dying: Nova Paul’s experimental colour film polemic(Routledge - Taylor & Francis, 2017)Abstract Paul’s This is Not Dying (2010) is a twenty-minute film utilising three-colour separation to liberate hue from the form in which it inheres. With a soundtrack by the late Māori steel guitar legend Ben Tawhiti, Paul’s film celebrates a day in the life of her hapu or tribal sub-group in the North of the North Island of New Zealand. Under Whatitiri Mountain, near Whangarei, the cluster of houses that Māori would designate as a marae, is the site of simple communal living: card playing, swimming in the creek, fixing motorbikes and eating together.
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ItemFrom Underdog to Overview(Antennae, 2017)This paper examines four experimental short films by the multi-disciplinary artist Camille Henrot. Film Spatial (2007) is a textural exploration of haptic visuality and perspectivism from the p.o.v. of Balkis the dog. Attention to the singular Balkis becomes a concern with dogs in general in Cynopolis (2009), and snake symbolism in The Strife of Love in a Dream (2011). Finally Grosse Fatigue (2013) parodises both creationism and taxonomic organisation, in an anarchival gesture. The cinemal , like Derrida’s animot, becomes a disruptive force which re-animates the dying animal, breathing life back into the cinema, the archive, and human-animal relations. The full title of this essay is: 'Perspectivism, Symbolism and Taxonomies in the films of Camille Henrot'.
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ItemParticularity: Swarms, Storms, and other Matter(Art and Australia Pty Ltd, 2017)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableSonic Disturbance and Chromatic Dissolution: The Cantrills Remake Melbourne(Senses of Cinema Inc., 2017)This paper examines the work of Australian experimental film legends, Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, who, over a fifty-year period, perfected a range of avant garde cinematic techniques including experiments with colour separation, repetition, exposure, and layered soundtracks. This ‘making wild’ or ‘becoming animal’ of the filmic medium is here given the term cinemal, whereby, in rearranging the viewer’s sensorium, the Cantrills’ re-enchant everyday life. Three aspects of their diverse oeuvre will be examined, as their disruptive techniques call for a re-figuring of the way we conceive of the Australian landscape, as well as cityscapes, in particular, the city of Melbourne, and finally, of the domestic sphere.
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ItemDaily Demons and Fabulous Animals(World Crafts Council - Australia, 2018)Tessa Laird’s Quarterly Essay is a quest to find the maker of the marvellous alebrija that she bought last time in Mexico. These alebrijas are elaborately carved animals that reflect the Indigenous belief in the nahual, or animal spirit. Laird has just published a book on bats for the Reaction series. Her interest in the fluid relationship between humans and animals finds so much to share in the rich crafts and beliefs of southern Mexico.
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ItemSpores from Space: Becoming the Alien(Punctum Books, 2018-09-11)The masterpiece of pseudo-science, The Secret Life of Plants (1973) features a chapter on plants’ communication with space. Over a decade ago, the artist Frances Stark penned a love letter to this book in Art / Text, but, she drew the line at this chapter, unable to assimilate the idea that plants, who predate human beings on this planet by hundreds of millions of years, might have developed technologies more sophisticated than those we have managed to create within the last 100 years. This paper proposes that, not only might plants be communicating with space, but that we too might be communing with extraterrestrial life forms via the arcane networked technologies of our chlorophiliac friends, if only we knew it. If neither of these proposals can be conclusively proven, tropes in art, literature, and above all popular culture, frequently feature plants as analogies for alien others. This paper proposes three ways in which we think with plants (and, to be fair, plants think with us): inversion, hybridity, and contagion. Fabulated vegetal worlds feature radically inverted colours and scales; hybrid creatures embody and flout anxieties about racial and species boundaries; contagious plants infect their human hosts with alchemical arsenals, leading to death, or ecstasy, or both. Science fictions of plant sentience and human-plant hybridity divest anthropocentric control, imagining worlds where senses are heightened and interconnectivities flourish. Focusing on an episode of original series Star Trek “This Side of Paradise”, featuring alien flowers which spray the Enterprise’s crew with psychedelic spores, I wish to examine the role of plants and science fiction as mutually compatible vehicles for altered consciousness. Cross-pollinating the spore-infected writings of magic mushroom guru Terence McKenna and anthropologist Anna Tsing this paper propounds vegetalismo (curing with psychoactive plants) in order to “become the alien”.
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ItemAperture, Apparition, Apparatus: An Incantation for Ghostly Machines(Discipline, 2019)This article proposes that photographic and film apparatus enable a more-than-human vision which includes potential communion with the spirit world. The photographic work of Joyce Campbell and Natalie Robertson is discussed, along with references to experimental film including those by Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, Nova Paul, and Carolina Saquel and Camila Marambio.
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ItemCrystal Phallus: The Brutal Truth About Zardoz(Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, 2019)In response to the special issue on "Brutalism", this article reflects on John Boorman's 1974 cult classic film Zardoz, a dystopian science fiction which uses the term "Brutals" for its underclass. Focussing on the preponderance of crystal imagery in the film, it is read through the lens of Gilles Deleuze's theory of the "crystal image" in his book Cinema 2. While these philosophical musings may seem highbrow, the article engages in humour and "low theory", following Jack Halberstam's Queer Art of Failure. What is brutal about Zardoz, it turns out, is its denial of a utopian future, and its return to a patriarchal "business as usual".
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ItemIn the beginning there was the worm: Animal voices beyond the verbal(Artlink Australia, 2018)Four humanimals creep, crawl, sniff and moan their way through a seated audience, towards an empty performance area which awaits their presence. Snorting and snuffling is audible as the liminal creatures rub themselves against giggling audience members, rolling across laps and crawling under chairs. Their faces are painted with dark bands across the eyes-like a species of bird, bandit, or warrior. When they reach the performance area, they crouch in a circle, continuing their muffled cries as one of them stands.