School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemNo Preview Available‘Past, Present, Future Perfect: Paradigms of History in Medievalism Studies’, Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 25.2 (2008): 58-79.(ANZAMEMS (Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies), 2008)
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ItemFrom Neo-Baroque to Neo-Baroques?(Canadian Association of Hispanists, 2008)El presente artículo argumenta que el "barroco" puede ser entendido como un estado transhistórico que se extiende más allá del siglo XVII enfocándose no solo en escritores e intelectuales que asi lo han entendido, sino tomando ejemplos provenientes del campo de la literatura, la pintura, la arquitectura o el cine, tales como zoótropos y linternas mágicas, el arte de la revolución vanguardista de inicios del siglo XX, el estilo barroco presente en los inicios de la industria de Hollywood o la abierta aplicación política y crítica de estrategias barrocas adoptadas por escritores españoles y latinoamericanos. El artículo culmina en nuestro propio tiempo, sosteniendo que el contexto urbano y de entretenimiento contemporáneo combina lo visual, lo audible y lo textual en formas que se asemejan al dinamismo de las formas barrocas del siglo XVII, pero expresadas de manera tecnológica y culturalmente diferente que, ya sean a través de películas o series de televisión, exposiciones o movimientos musicales, son resultudo de trasformaciones culturales y sistémicas asociadas con la posmodernidad.
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ItemObservations on the history and uses of animation occasioned by the exhibition Eyes Lies and Illusions selected from works in the Werner Nekes Collection( 2008)The exhibition Eyes, Lies and Illusions held at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne and the Hayward gallery in London was a selection from the 20,000 optical toys, scientific instruments, antiquarian books and visual entertainments in the collection of Werner Nekes, the German experimental film maker. This essay begins with a consideration of the historical trajectory of belief in the afterlife in relation to ‘animation’, the imputation of a soul to anything that appeared to move itself. The second section suggests that animation techniques bear witness to the persistence of atavistic beliefs in modernity. The third addresses the proximity of technology and magic in animation, and proposes a more extended use of the term ‘animation’.
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ItemSecret lives of Asian Australian cinema: offshore labour in transnational film industries( 2008)This article examines some of the material dimensions of Asian Australian cinema through an analysis of selected regional production and post-production flows since 1980, and the debates surrounding them. It begins with a theoretical discussion of the role of labour within the global film industry, before moving on to consider controversies around the offshoring of film production to lower-cost destinations. Specific examples of production relays between Asia and Australia are analysed in the context of models of cultural labour offered by Toby Miller et al. and Ben Goldsmith. The author proposes a definition of Asian Australian cinema that seeks to attend to cross-border collaboration at a variety of levels and to render visible 'below-the-line' Asian Australian interfaces that do not necessarily register on screen.
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ItemFor a history of black( 2008)In 'For a History of Black' Sean Cubitt investigates the physiological, technological and cultural problems associated with the (non-) colour black. As the complete absence of colour, black is an ideal that is never actualised, says Cubitt. The representation of black operates differently in different media. In many contexts, such as low-light cinema, early television and new media art, artists have made creative use of the limitations and artefacts of how production technologies handle black. Cubitt's detailed media history connects questions of aesthetics with the physiology of perception and industrial changes.
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ItemCrimes against urbanity: the concrete soul of Michael Mann(Taylor and Francis, 2008)This article examines the contemporary crime film's reimagination of urban space. Through a case study of selected films by Michael Mann, it argues that the extreme stylisation of certain postmodern crime texts functions to aestheticise the industrial infrastructure of late capitalism, and that the genre offers a visual training through which generic sites of commerce, transit and industry (non-place) may be personalised, rendered habitable, and potentially reclaimed.
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ItemMinds, bodies, machines: essays in the cultural and intellectual history of technologies( 2008)In 1989 Rodney Brooks, Director of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory at MIT, predicted that America would soon be able to conduct inter-planetary exploration and colonisation with millions of tiny robots. Asserting that ‘biology and evolution were good models to follow’, Brooks designed his ‘gnat robots’ as insects, each with sensor-whiskers, six legs, and a sophisticated microchip. In terms of risk management and optimisation of resources, the superiority of ‘swarms’ of mass-produced, cheap and autonomous robots over a single large and expensive ground-controlled robot was obvious. In conclusion Brooks argued that, just as exploration of the Earth had ‘proceeded by many small spontaneous sorties into the unknown’, so ‘with imagination and verve we can invade the whole solar system’. Futuristic as this may sound, there is nothing new in the MIT Lab’s imaginative blurring of the boundaries between the organic (the insect) and the mechanical (the robot). In the seventeenth century, inspired by the new science of magnification, observers noted the startlingly close resemblance between insects and ‘Engines’. Insect interiors were, Richard Leigh declared, ‘Like living Watches, each of these conceals / A thousand Springs of Life, and moving Wheels’. For another observer, the ‘pretty Engines’ of ‘Insectile Automata’ housed ‘all the perfections of the largest Animals’, including the human machine.
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ItemThe injuries of time: Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Speght, and Wade’s boat( 2008)The State Library at Melbourne holds a wonderful collection of early Chaucer editions: two leaves from William Caxton’s editions of The Canterbury Tales (from 1478 and 1483), and a more substantial group of relatively rare sixteenth- and seventeenth-century editions. Starting with this impressive group, it is possible to use the Melbourne collection to track the major stages in the long history of editing and printing Chaucer, through John Urry’s lavish but inaccurate edition of 1721, the more scholarly text of Thomas Tyrwhitt in five volumes (1775-78), the numerous texts of various works produced by Frederick J. Furnivall for the Chaucer Society in the late nineteenth century, and the beautiful Kelmscott Chaucer of 1896, printed by William Morris and incorporating wood-cuts designed by Edward Burne-Jones, through to the scholarly and student editions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These editions often differ considerably from each other. Not only have critical opinions varied substantially over the centuries as to the best manuscripts and the best methods of presenting Chaucer’s work, but the audience and the use anticipated for each edition (for different generations of general readers, scholars or students) also affects the nature of the prefatory material and the commentaries, notes and glossaries that surround the text.
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ItemWhen historic time meets Julia Kristeva’s women’s time: the reception of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party in Australia( 2008)One of the first visual arts events of the 1988 bicentennial year was the staging of The Dinner Party (1979), a monumental artwork by the North American artist Judy Chicago at the Melbourne Exhibition Buildings. Completed in 1979, The Dinner Party has become emblematic of a particular form of feminist art practice: namely that which makes visible the body of women in both a literal and metaphoric sense. An enormous installation, The Dinner Party is a triangular table setting at which places are laid for the women that are missing from conventional historic narratives. The place settings include elaborate crockery with each plate adopting vaginal imagery that evokes particular characteristics of each woman's historic contribution.While attracting extremely high visitor numbers whenever the work is exhibited, the artwork itself has been widely criticised. The Melbourne exhibition of this work was no exception. However on this occasion there was an added dimension to the criticism: a parochial resistance to the importation of a foreign artwork. In this paper I explore this specific instance of border crossing in feminist art practice, and the claims made by many Australian art critics that superior work was being produced by local women artists. These arguments involved assertions that The Dinner Party’s visual aesthetic was dated, that Australian artists had adopted a similar imagery prior to Chicago and that whatever impact the work might have had in 1979, by 1988 it could only be regarded as a relic.