Victorian College of the Arts - Research Publications
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 10 of 35
-
ItemPink Data: Tiamaterialism and the Female Gnosis of Desire(re.press, 2016)
-
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.
-
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”.
-
ItemPlaying an Instrument(Oxford University Press, 2016)Learning to play a musical instrument is one of the most widespread musical activities for children. While much research in the past century has focused on the assessment of musical abilities and the content of their lessons, more recent research has focused on children’s interactions with their social environments and how these interactions impact their ongoing ability and motivation to learn and play music. This chapter explores these social and cognitive developments starting with how children and their parents select an instrument and negotiate the commencement of formal music learning, through to the task related cognitive strategies children use to overcome the difficulties associated with learning and practice, and the ways they may eventually become able to integrate an identity as a musician with their own sense of self. Aspects of self-regulation and self-determination theory are discussed.
-
ItemNo Preview AvailableThe last avant garde?(Routledge, 2019)This chapter explores 'disability aesthetics' not as a set of specific techniques, themes, or politics, but in order to position disability at the centre of 'future conceptions of what art is' and what it can be. It draws contributions from the Research in Action workshop and the research team to explore the idea of the last avant garde and artists' views on how disability intersects with creative innovation. The chapter seeks to engage in a reflexive and ongoing conversation in which artists with disability are invited to reflect upon their own views on aesthetic value and performance practice. It also implies that recognition of disability arts is like the 'last remaining' piece of a puzzle, the pinnacle of a longer social struggle for rights and acceptance. For a company composed of artists with and without disability, of which Rawcus is but one prominent Australian example, the notion of disability aesthetics and the last avant garde is particularly complicated.
-
ItemNo Preview AvailableSound Design: A Phenomenology(Springer International Publishing, 2019)Phenomenologies of sound are, in general, phenomenologies of listening or performing—that is, they privilege the moment of sound’s making or the moment of its hearing. This chapter broadens this to include the process of the sound designer, integrating the experience of the audience in an account of the complex temporalities and intentionalities of the full experience of sound in performance, rooted in our intersubjective understanding of other beings in our world. It argues that sound design and other design disciplines within performance are an integral part of the performance, not an afterthought. Further, the work of design is figured as a work of phenomenology itself, as an intersubjective transcendence of designer, actor, director, audience as individual hearers—a coming-into-being of ‘listener’ and ‘listened-to’ in the time of a work’s creation as well as its presence on stage. In the work of sound design for performance, the designer must be open and turned towards an audience that does not yet exist—the designer must render the thinkable imaginary of design as the knowable of performance. The philosophies of Badiou, Heidegger and Nancy are brought together with leading theorists of sound to address notions of truth and the temporality of performance in the role of the designer in theatre, exploring the movement of meaning between listener and listened-to, and positing that the rules and conventions that are shaped in the rehearsal and performance process are unique systems of meaning which imagine an intersubjective audience for an other.
-
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.
-
ItemField Work: Locating Site is Set(Field Theory, 2019)
-
ItemNo Preview AvailableStories of freedom: A reflexive account of collaboration and ethics in documentary filmmaking(Routledge - Taylor & Francis, 2019)This chapter is concerned with the ethics of making films with and about real people in which they will be publicly and openly identified. It springs from my desire to develop a model of collaboration (or co-creation) that can significantly even up the asymmetric power relationship between filmmaker and participants, which favours the former, and provide ethical transparency not just in the documentary-making process but within the filmic product itself. The ultimate aim is to produce a more empathic filmmaking result by working with participants who are simultaneously the subjects and the raison d’être of the endeavour – a result that doesn’t necessarily make greater claims to truth but is perhaps more honest.
-
ItemTrace Time to Measure Space(Domus Argenia, 2019)This paper discusses my personal trajectory and development in the act of generating art. The desire to create art works through a generative process came about through a need to extend my personal creative, aesthetic, philosophical, and knowledge boundaries. Through doing so a sense and experience of interconnectedness arose that may seem incongruous with the idea of computer-generated art as being in some way soulless and lacking in ‘human’ sensibilities. This possibly came about through the understanding that computer-based systems perceive the world with absolutely equality, every object is considered through numbers and through relationships of and between numbers. With this in mind, based systems and procedures, when set in motion, offered a unique perspective for the creative artist. One in which a colour, a movement, an articulated idea, the motion of air and its interpretation (sound), the physiological responses, the behaviour of flora and fauna, and so on, can be integrated, adjusted, influenced by and influential on, the creation of something that while generated from the sum of its parts far exceeds the sum of those parts