School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemLiquid Polis and Ambient Aesthetics of Communicative Cities: An Afterword(Peter Lang, 2022)
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ItemGoing Out: Rights to the City and the Cosmos(Peter Lang, 2022)
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Item‘Meeting differently’: Indian Independence Day celebrations in the digital diaspora(Elsevier, 2023-09-01)Highly programmed, digitally-enabled outdoor public spaces for social gathering and cultural performance are now common features of urban environments. These spaces are popular because of their low barriers to entry, and because they facilitate casual, serendipitous encounters between a range of different publics. Entering one of these spaces is to inhabit an ‘ambient’ participatory mode: multi-centred, mobile and multi-sensory, conforming neither to the formal viewing experience of ‘the audience’, nor to the casual, distracted disposition of ‘the street’. Their success in terms of widening public engagement and stimulating urban vitality has informed major policy shifts in creativity-led urban regeneration and creative place-making. However, a deeper understanding of the kind of cultural participation they shape eludes prevailing critical and evaluative frameworks. This article is based around a large-scale event celebrating India's 70th year of Independence held at Melbourne's Federation Square. We use ambience as a conceptual tool to expand common notions of cultural participation, revealing the complex socio-spatial relationships that coalesce through the event. Capturing ‘ambient participation’ reveals, in Paul Carter's (2005) terms, the potential of these networked spaces to ‘model a different kind of political community, to open up a place of meeting differently’ that exceeds the celebratory rhetoric around global mass culture, normative frameworks of multiculturalism, and romantic notions of community.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableDe la ciudad como Cosmopolis a los espacios cosmopolitas(Universidad de los Andes, 2021-01-01)The early boom in biennales coincided with the post-1989 malaise of internationalism and a tentative burst in cosmopolitan thinking. It was also caught in a massive rebranding of cities as attractors of global capital and hubs for creative economies. Between the hype and massive investment in arts infrastructure there has been a spectacular growth in contemporary art as an event. Both contemporary art and the biennale phenomenon have had an uneasy relationship to nations and regions. The topography of cities and the will to globality have been seen as more congruent with the postnational or transnational context of contemporary art. Hence, artists have aligned themselves with specific cities, or else they have sought to situate themselves in the coupling of cities and aspired to be part of a new cosmopolitan networking of urban centres. Since 1989 the status of the city has assumed a new significance that includes an often unspoken relationship between symbolic and financial capital. Let us take this moment to look again at the relationship between art and cities, and reflect on the need to imagine new spaces for cosmopolitanism.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableWorlding Art(Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2021)Whether we are looking up, across, or down, we are, as Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth-century philosopher and scientist, noted, “suspended between two infinities. The further out we look, the bigger the horizon. The closer in we reflect, the more complex the detail. In both directions, there is the experience of the boundless. The horizon is awesome; it holds both the dread of the void and the delight in other possibilities. Inside the translucence of a tiny seashell twirls another kind of wonder.
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ItemCosmos and nomos: cosmopolitanism in art and political philosophy(Taylor & Francis, 2021-01-01)In this article I address the tensions between normative political philosophy and aesthetic cosmopolitanism. Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida have been two of the most influential philosophers to engage with the political and ethical questions of cosmopolitanism. Habermas has drawn on the foundations established by Immanuel Kant and set out to define an institutional framework that could secure the rights of people in an age of mobility. Derrida’s emphasis is more heavily slanted to ethical relations rather than geo-political structures. He reversed Kant’s starting point, by placing the exposure to the other and the necessity of hospitality as the basis of freedom and truth. While both Habermas and Derrida have developed their political philosophy by working in close touch with Kant, the transcendental aspects of his thinking is now totally absent in the contemporary debates. As a general rule political philosophy has averted its gaze from the cosmos, and more generally it has to be noted that it has bracketed the founding philosophical concepts of aesthetics and physis. The focus is mostly on the terrain of anthropos, polis and the nomos. In short, the discussion begins and ends within the normative parameters of cosmopolitanism. By contrast, artists from the pioneering modernists like Malevich to contemporary figures such as Saraceno have never abandoned the quest for cosmogony. The ethical orientation of aesthetic cosmopolitanism appears to co-exist with a wider claim of belonging to the cosmos. In this article I contrast the orientation and scope of thinking between normative and aesthetic cosmopolitanism in order to reframe the spheres of connections in contemporary thought.
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ItemIn the Time of Refuge: A Collection of Writings and Reflections on Art, Disaster and Communities(RUPC, 2021)This timely book offers an expanded understanding of the importance of the arts and communication in dealing with disasters. It is based on Refuge a pioneering program of artist-led events held at Arts House (Melbourne) from 2016-2021 concerned with the intersection of climate change, emergency services and community. Even before the COVID pandemic the financial cost of extreme weather events alone was projected to exceed $39 AUD billion per year in 2050 (Deloitte 2017; Glasser 2019). Imagining a disaster is recognized as a key part in developing responses and mitigating consequences. But building such an imaginary is challenging: communities need to be able to “imagine the unimaginable” in order to prepare for disasters (Fraser et al 2019). Experts in emergency services also recognize that in complex multicultural societies conventional communication strategies are ridden with distortion effects. In the Time of Refuge addresses the imminent urban challenges arising from climate change by focusing on the events and actors involved in Refuge but also by ruminating on the wider changes in the political landscape and the different philosophical ways for approaching the question of time.
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ItemAmbient Images(The Nordic Society for Aesthetics, 2021)
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ItemUncertainty(Routledge, 2024-01-30)