Victorian College of the Arts - Research Publications
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ItemMegacosm(https://project8.gallery/exhibition/11-11-24-12-22/, 2022)In a world where technology, spectacle and excess can sometimes eclipse quieter contemplation of the interconnectedness of nature and culture, how do we reconcile our position as a virus in clothes that makes cities and internets of ineffable complexity? Has nature been assimilated into the artifice of culture? Or is culture simply of form of nature that humans produce? What role can art play in negotiating and mediating understandings and anxieties related to our place in the world? For this exhibition, art is implicated within the natures of phenomena and as an extension from that which we think of as nature itself. Welcome to the megacosm. As a recurring sensibility in contemporary art, the inseparability of nature and culture might be considered across a broad range of very different materials and modalities. From beholding celestial infinitudes in the sky at night to serendipitous encounters with tiny creatures in urban environments, the aesthetics and poetics of this mutually entangled interconnectedness has long offered rich subject matter for artists. Notwithstanding the urgencies of our present moment, this exhibition seeks to resist didactic instrumentalisation and instead consider art and nature together as part of the labyrinthian continuum of reality. Nature has returned with force as an artistic subject in recent years—largely in response to growing anxieties and precarities related to a changing world. Consequently, many artists are reassessing one of the oldest themes in art through new conceptual lenses and material means. In the twenty-first century, some forms of aesthetic speculation largely rejected by past generations have returned through new modes of material and poetic innovation. Although definitions and understandings of nature remain highly contested, the artists in this exhibition all variously explore what might be possible through mutually informing layers of material and imaginary complexity. Echoing interconnectivities that intrinsically underscore the organic microcosm of human experience, some forms of art seem to implicitly resonate with patterns of difference and similarity across the universe. Presented through range of uncanny otherworldly verisimilitudes, this exhibition draws from a continuum that exists not only in cosmic nature, but also through registrations of human responses to the megacosm.
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ItemSounds of Unridden Waves and the Contemporary Sublime(The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022-05-01)This article offers a speculative model intended to demonstrate that the sublime remains a viable construct in contemporary artworld contexts. Specifically, it proposes that sublimity and its neglected Other “profundity”—conceptualized as an irreducible pair—are well-suited to thinking about how to take seriously the still vital legacies bequeathed by postmodernism, while attempting to move beyond its more debilitating nihilistic and relativistic tendencies. First, somewhat neglected aspects of the Late Classical rhetorical heritage of the sublime are reviewed. Second, a model is progressively developed, building upon a formulation of human discourse articulated by Paul Ricoeur, and then introducing ideas relating to irresolvable self-contradiction and dialogical processes, as found in the thought of Western philosophers, such as Hegel, and in a number of Eastern philosophies, particularly Daoism. Finally, this model is applied to a brief discussion of an original moving image artwork by the authors, Sounds of Unridden Waves, published in a previous issue of the Journal of Asia-Pacific Popular Culture (2021).
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ItemNo Preview AvailableSounds of Unridden Waves(Project8. Level 2, 417 Collins, Melbourne, 2022)Sounds of Unridden Waves is a major new work developed over a three-year period by the Ghosts of Nothing in collaboration with leading artists and filmmakers. The scope of this project is unusually wide-ranging. The exhibition consists of an immersive video installation, presented together with a constellation of paintings, photographs, scholarly texts, original musical works and related objects. This dynamic artistic model is located at the blurry borders between content origination, composition, collaboration, remix culture and curatorship. Such an approach, although widespread in popular music, is still largely uncharted in visual art. Sounds of Unridden Waves is a heavily collaborative project, with an inclusivity and openness rarely seen in art film contexts. The central video and original soundtrack components were conceived and produced by the Ghosts of Nothing, who also edited, animated or ‘remixed’ all other visual elements. The source footage used in the film was captured by principal cinematographers Greg Huglin and Simone Douglas, with additional contributions from Albert (Albe) Falzon, Ashley Beer, Ishka Folkwell, Jon Frank, Phillip George, Nathan Henshaw, Nathan Oldfield and Monty Webber. The accompanying exhibition of images and objects has been developed by the Ghosts of Nothing in close collaboration with New York-based Australian artist Simone Douglas. It also features works that are remixes of images contributed by renowned filmmaker Albert Falzon (director of Morning of the Earth) and Sydney artist Phillip George. Sounds of Unridden Waves is, at its core, the first feature length surf film not to have any human surfers. The film component was shot on location in Australia, Bali, Fiji, Hawaii, Iceland, Ireland, Portugal and Tahiti. The source footage was then radically reimagined and set to an epic original soundtrack by the Ghosts of Nothing.
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ItemWhere is Art? Space, Time, and Location in Contemporary Art(Routledge, 2022-06-30)Featuring chapters by a diverse range of leading international artists and theorists, this book suggests that contemporary art is increasingly characterized by the problem of where and when it is situated. While much advanced artistic speculation of the twentieth-century was aligned with the question “what is art?,” a key question for many artists and thinkers in the twenty-first century has become “where is art?” Contributors explore the challenge of meaningfully identifying and evaluating works located across multiple versions and locations in space and time. In doing so, they also seek to find appropriate language and criteria for evaluating forms of art that often straddle other realms of knowledge and activity.
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Item168° 58’ 37” W: A Cold War Memorial(Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, 2018)This text is a material conduit, or vehicular medium, through which to imagine a work of art located on a stretch of intermittently frozen sea ice in the Bering Strait, at 168° 58’ 37” W. This ‘work’ is offered as a memor- ialisation of the consequences of collectively imagined fear—in this case the Cold War. Its ephemeral material existence—somewhere between this page and an expanse of sea ice located elsewhere in space and time— also seeks to perform something of the mutual insufficiency of material and contextual elements in artistic expression more generally.
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ItemAnywhere and Elsewhere (2018): Art At The Outermost Limits of Location-Specificity(Parsons Fine Arts, School of Art, Media and Technology, Parsons The New School for Design; Project Anywhere; and University of Melbourne, 2018)This biennial conference event features presentations from artists that have successfully navigated blind peer evaluation as part of Project Anywhere's Global Exhibition Program (2017-2018), together with a series of invited presentations from established artists, designers, scholars, curators and writers actively engaged with practices outside traditional circuits. Today, an increasing number of artists and creative practitioners are working across spaces, places and temporalities well-beyond the limits of established exhibition formats. Accordingly, much contemporary creative activity is more concerned with events, actions, sites, relations and processes than with discrete outcomes. Artistic research can be represented in multiple ways as it moves between modes of conception, production and dissemination. This free two-day conference will explore questions associated with presenting, experiencing, discussing and evaluating art located anywhere and elsewhere in space and time. ISBN 978-1-692-06323-1. https://issuu.com/projectanywhere/docs/anywhere_elsewhere_2018_lores
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ItemNo Preview AvailableSounds of Unridden Waves - Dark Eden version(CoVA, 2021)Is it possible to make a surf-film without humans? Sounds of Unridden Waves is the world’s first feature length surf film without any human surfers. Its accompanying original soundtrack is produced by The Ghosts of Nothing— a fictional rock band formed in 2014 as a conceptual vehicle through which a diverse range of objects and activities can be produced. Taken together, these different objects and activities are understood to collectively point to, yet do not constitute, the work itself. This new work was developed as a collaboration between The Ghosts of Nothing (aka Sean Lowry and Ilmar Taimre) and over a dozen renowned surf film makers. It also includes contributions from over a dozen renowned surf film makers. The result, we argue, provides an example of contemporary post-conceptual art. Significantly, some forms of post-conceptual art do not manifest as a singular materialisation. Instead, they might be accessed in numerous ways or as an aggregate of medial elements. Presented as an unfolding series of speculative and immersive journeys across time and space, Sounds of Unridden Waves seeks to revive romantic ambitions historically associated with the so-called “total work of art”. Although fragmentary glimpses of recognizable surf breaks are occasionally apparent, the specific time and place at which Sounds of Unridden Waves is located is deliberately fluid. Far more than a straightforward moving image experience, its Dionysian omnivorousness occasionally veers towards the outermost limits of unbounded maximalism and conceptual chaos. In this respect, it is partly reminiscent of the content-saturated psychotropic dream states of early Surrealism, 1960s psychedelia, 1970s surf iconography, together with some recent examples of romantic conceptualism and neo-Baroque currents in contemporary art.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableThe Ghosts of Nothing: Sounds of Unridden Waves: Ambient Mixes(Perfect Pitch, 2021)
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ItemProject Anywhere: Problems of Representation and Evaluation(Society of Artistic Research, 2017)Artistic research, like the world of a work of art, is presented in multiple ways in its often-uneven passage from conception through production to dissemination. And like a work of art, it can manifest across a complex distribution of materialisations. This complexity invariably presents challenges. Given the indeterminate nature and material manifestations that might constitute a single project, it can be particularly difficult to determine how and when it is best represented. This state of affairs can invite the question: are there more or less appropriate moments in the passage from conception to “realisation” in which to evaluate and represent artistic research? Although most established models tend to focus upon evaluating a project at its perceived point of realisation or conclusion (documentation/experience), Project Anywhere’s focus is instead directed toward the task of evaluating and representing artistic research at the proposal stage (speculation). Significantly, Project Anywhere regards a project’s potential produce new knowledge as something that might indeed. exist in its imagined or hypothetical potential rather than any tangible or measurable outcome. Moreover, by removing direct aesthetic experience as an evaluative mode, a very different sense of a new knowledge capacity is potentially introduced.
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ItemThe Ghosts Of Nothing: The World of a Work Of Performance-Framed-as-Art(Power Publications, 2018)The Ghosts of Nothing, a collaboration between Australian artists Sean Lowry and Ilmar Taimre, recently generated a series of imagined and mime-based performances within the conceptual architecture of a ‘world tour of abandoned music venues’. This ‘tour’ formed part of an ongoing project titled In Memory of Johnny B. Goode (2014– ). Through mimed street performances and other performative iterations such as a radio play, The Ghosts of Nothing have continually and radically re-medialised the original ‘rock opera’ that launched the project to form an unpredictably ‘open’ work, to use Umberto Eco’s well-known label. From a literal viewpoint, the ‘work’ In Memory of Johnny B. Goode exists nowhere at all. But that is not the same as suggesting that it might exist everywhere all at once. On the contrary, The Ghosts of Nothing seek to articulate a ‘work’ that is both highly individuated and unfolding over unspecified spans of time and space. To be sure, the ‘work’ is performative, as we elaborate below. If it exists anywhere at all, it is located—if that is the right term—within the differentiated cognitive worlds of individually idiosyncratic interpretations, memories and meanings as embodied in members of its audience.