School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemNo Preview AvailableOnline Matchmaking(Springer, 2007-03-14)Brian H. Spitzberg and William R. Cupach Online technologies, such as online matchmaking services, are increasingly becoming a normal and normative medium through which relationships are initiated, developed, maintained, and ended.
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ItemMornings with Radio 774: can John Howard’s medium of choice enhance public sphere activity?( 2007)This paper addresses the necessity for program-specific analysis in radio research by focussing on Jon Faine’s Morning Program on ABC Radio 774 (Melbourne). After establishing the present Prime Minister’s preference for radio appearances over all other types of media, I examine the extent to which Faine’s particular iteration of talkback has the capacity to enhance public sphere activity, given the view that this medium is being strategically utilised by politicians to gain virtually uncontested access to listeners. My examination occurs principally through a morning’s observation of Faine’s program, supported by information from recordings of a constructed week of the program from the previous two months. My findings suggest that while a certain amount of ‘top-down’ flow of information is unavoidable, some contestation of ideas often occurs, mitigating politicians’ exploitation of at least this particular program. Faine’s program does, moreover, seem to give the impression of an acceptance of listeners calls on topics that affect their daily lives, even though only a small number of ‘ordinary’ callers are featured each day. My observations suggest this program does offer processes that enhance public sphere activity, although with some qualifications.
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ItemImmersion, reflexivity and distraction: spatial strategies for digital cities( 2007)This essay focuses on the ways that cinema and the city have mutually constituted new immersive experiences of urban perception.
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ItemRelatively benign corruption? Critical discourse analysis for media students( 2007)Don Watson, in his book Death Sentence, claims that the way in which the media disseminate information and the way politicians manipulate this process have resulted in a kind of corruption. Assuming this is the case, I suggest in this paper that it is therefore useful to equip students in media courses with the skills of critical discourse analysis. A useful starting point for teaching these skills to undergraduates, I have found, is a newspaper article by Alexander Downer, excerpted from one of his speeches about the 'war on terror'. Such a mediated political linguistic act as this will of course inherently involve power or resistance to power, and will contribute to the formation of a specific discourse community via strategies of coercion, resistance, opposition or protest, and dissimulation/de-legitimisation. This necessarily results in relations of struggle that are played out at the lexicogrammatical level, on which I invite students to focus. Such media texts, which represent and foreground starkly opposing ideologies, can be useful vehicles for teaching the concept of discourse communities, as well as the reading strategies of critical discourse analysis.
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ItemAra Irititja: adding more value to Aboriginal art through education( 2007)The Ara Irititja project enables the Anangu (Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people) of Central Australia to re-engage with their own history through digitized archives. Specialized software, housed in purpose-built work stations called niri-niri, named after a similar looking beetle, protect the computers in a dust-, dirt- and bug-proof case. The project makes the wealth of recordings, images and written material that has accumulated in collections over time, available to Anangu in their own communities via computer. Through the active re-engagement with this material, Anangu people in central, southern and western Australia relearn, refine and re-engage with their own social history. This article argues that there is scope to apply this program to the recording of the history of Aboriginal art. An open access version of the entire history of Aboriginal art could help curb the over-emphasis on the monetary value of Aboriginal art.
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ItemArt and mental illness: an art historical perspective(Neami Splash Art, 2007)Mental illness has for centuries been closely associated in the popular imagination with exceptional creativity and great works of art. I will argue today that it is important not to be complacent about this association, as it has led to some grave misconceptions about the nature of mental illness. The persistence of such misconceptions in the media demonstrates that there is a pressing need for ongoing analysis and debate about appropriate and ethical ways in which to discuss, exhibit and interpret the art work of people who experience mental illness. Coming from an art historical perspective, I hope to suggest ways to make progress in this debate. For the purpose of today’s talk, in speaking of ‘art,’ I will be referring not only to those works judged to provide evidence of exceptional creativity but rather any created visual product in any medium. Mental illness will be defined as clinically significant, psychological syndromes associated with distress, disability or loss of freedom.
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ItemLove as Ontology: Psychoanalysis against Philosophy(Leuven University Press, 2007)
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ItemI’ve written my talk: blogging, writing and temporality( 2007)Between the poles of speaking and writing, where do we place a published version of a written talk given about blogging? I find, as I write this up, that I can’t keep a straight writerly face. I’m unable to render the layers of past and present into a seamless tense, a smooth representation of speaking about writing, or writing about speaking. Mostly, we know how to read and write the conventions for ‘writing up a talk’, but the subject of blogging seems to call forth a different kind of reflection. Or does it?
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ItemProjection: Vanishing and Becoming(MIT Press, 2007)
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ItemThe ice-age(Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, 2007)Lee Bul’s Mon grand récit: because everything … 2005 is a table-top miniature world. One of a pair of major sculptures sharing the same title and mapping the same mysterious topography, the Govett-Brewster’s Mon grand récit: because everything’s alter ego, Mon grand récit: weep into stones… 2005 was shown at the Basel Art Fair in 2005. The two works are very similar, though the Govett-Brewster version is slightly larger and is dominated by a glossy, sprawling, white base resembling a vast glacier, whereas the same forms in Weep into stones… are suspended in space, like a huge train-set on scaffolding. Both works are composed of images of the wreckage of modern history’s mass utopias, of the twentieth century visions of crazy perfection that were shared by capitalism, fascism and communism. These visions have now disintegrated. First, this essay looks at Mon grand récit: because everything… as a work of art that represents the duration of modern history and its entropic end. It does this by translating duration into metonymic images, into images that represent the twentieth century’s failed utopias by architectural models of never-completed modernist monuments in construction: a hanging, bent wood freeway hovering above a snowy abyss; a mountainous central tower encrusted with miniature crystal models; a tiny scale model of Vladimir Tatlin’s never-constructed Monument to the Third International 1920 perched on a glacial waste. Second, the essay shows that because Lee Bul presents modern history as both personal and shared, the instructional diorama represents her quite strategic and very conscious argument against contemporary art criticism’s hermeneutics of nationality, in favour of a determinedly global perspective.