School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications

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    Locating Buzz and Liveness: The Role of Geoblocking and Co-presence in Virtual Film Festivals
    Burgess, D ; Stevens, K ; de Valck, M ; Damiens, A (Springer International Publishing, 2023)
    The sudden and near-complete move of festivals into the online space in 2020 complicated our understanding of the “there” and “then” involved in film festival participation. Experiencing festivals in lockdown (often from domestic spaces), “taking part” in these virtual events had the potential to dramatically expand the points of access. Although this approach was taken early with the YouTube-based We Are One global film festival, for the vast majority of single-festival-run online events access was limited to specific geographic areas through geoblocking technology. This chapter examines the function of geofenced access in virtual and hybrid virtual/real-world film festivals. It poses the question: what are the benefits for festivals in enforcing territoriality and place-boundedness in the de-territorialized world of online media? Looking to the importance of embodied co-presence and networked publics in existing understandings of liveness, buzz, and value creation at festivals, we interrogate the role of “place” in defining festival prestige and influence. We ask, if the mechanisms of value creation linked to the physical spectacle and viral spread of buzz at festivals are disrupted, will the film festival experience still be seen as valuable? And what might that mean for the future of festivals and their study?
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    The Point is the Circle and the Circle is the Point
    Roberts, C ; Aitken, A (Buxton Contemporary, The University of Melbourne, 2023-04-14)
    Artist monograph
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    Exporting the Baroque
    Martin, M ; Beaven, L ; Marshall, D (Hamilton Gallery, 2023)
    By the late seventeenth century, it is not unreasonable to speak of the baroque as a global visual idiom. European dynastic ambition, trade and missionary fervour saw baroque art carried across Asia and the Americas, where not only new markets for such art were created, but also important production centres, with non-European artists adapting European designs to indigenous materials and techniques, creating new and dynamic expressions of the baroque.
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    Unsettled Objects: Books, Cultural Politics, and the Case of Reading the Country
    Davis, M ; MORRISSEY, P ; Healy, C (UTS ePress, 2018)
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    Surrealism's Anti-Bildungsroman
    Lusty, N ; Watz, A (Cambridge University Press, 2023)
    This essay traces the anti-Bildungsroman tradition under the influence of surrealism, in Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye (1928) and Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations (1982). While Acker inherits Bataille’s fascination with violence and transgression, these themes are formally developed through the prism of punk and feminist conceptual art and performance. The recent resurgence of critical interest in Acker’s work prompts us to further consider her relationship to surrealism and the modernist avant-garde. While Acker’s homage to Bataille in the early novels signals a brazen ’theft’ of the male avant-garde tradition for feminist subversive ends, Great Expectations experiments with form and language in order to evacuate the Bildungsroman of its bourgeois (gendered) claims to moral authority and insight. While extreme experience in Bataille’s literary work holds out the promise of an affirmation of sorts, the excoriating emotional masochism of Acker’s characters tilts towards nihilism. And yet both Bataille and Acker draw on the Bildungsroman even as they decondition the humanist subject that lies at its very core, straining at the limits of language to represent the vertiginous intensity of affective life and the dissolution of desire into abjection.
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    The Politics of Mestizaje in Contemporary Latin American Art
    Escobar Duenas, C ; Keys, M (Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2023)
    This richly illustrated 120-page hardcover publication accompanies the stunning exhibition at Heide, showcasing a selection of significant works by contemporary Latin American and Australian artists. Featuring a curatorial overview by senior curator Melissa Keys, an essay by Dr Cristóbal Escobar Duenas, Lecturer in Screen Studies at The University of Melbourne, plus stunning installation views and a behind the scenes look into many of the artist’s studios, the publication explores the ways that art can take our imaginations beyond the limitations of the known world and the veil of visual appearances.
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    Capturing ambient participation: Indian Independence Day at Federation Square
    Wyatt, D ; Papastergiadis, N ; Weber, M ; McQuire, S ; WEI, S (Routledge, 2020)
    This chapter uses the concept of ambience as an analytical tool to explore the qualities of cultural participation in the outdoor public spaces of contemporary cultural precincts, and as a metaphor that speaks to a wider process of cultural transformation in communicative cities. Media-rich cultural precincts are now a common feature of urban developments and inform the major policy shifts in creativity-led urban regeneration. The ambient experiences afforded by outdoor cultural precincts resonate with significant shifts in artistic practice. Ambient participation is particularly difficult to account for in the instrumental frameworks and methods routinely used by cultural funders and stakeholders to evaluate the impact of cultural infrastructure. Frameworks designed to measure visitation numbers at a museum, the satisfaction surveys of audiences, or the segmentation and brand recognition indicators tested by market research frame cultural participation as an aggregation of individual experiences. Media-saturated environments make qualitative changes to the experience of being-together-in-public.
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    Architecture, media and spaces of urban communication
    McQuire, S ; McQuire, S ; Sun, W (Routledge, 2020)
    This chapter provides with buildings and material urban structures as symbolic resources that themselves “communicate” certain values, or about urban space as a “space of appearance” in which fundamental communicative processes of speaking and acting in public take place. The location of key buildings and their relation to each other gave material form to political hierarchy and social relations. The capacity for particular urban structures and material settings to endure over time has served to anchor social practices and political processes across generations, underpinning the assertion by architect Aldo Rossi that the built environment is a critical dimension of a society’s collective memory. The rise of urban planning as a profession, alongside the blunt force of developments in infrastructure engineering, transport and communication technologies, and, above all, the gravitational pull of profit-based urban development settings, all worked to reduce the capacity of architects to shape the modern city in practice.
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    Spaces of Communication
    McQuire, S ; Sun, W ; McQuire, S ; Sun, W (Routledge, 2020)
    This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores theoretical grounds of the “communicative city”. Gumpert and Drucker reconsider their formative definition and raise a series of questions and provocations concerning future research directions and approaches. The book focuses on the growing implication of digital media in contemporary practices of placemaking. Sun Wei explores the entanglement of embodiment and mediation in her account of the redevelopment of Sinan Mansions, while Christiane Brosius reflects on the complex urban ecology of Delhi through the work of two contemporary artists. The book focuses specifically on the communicative possibilities of a distinctive aspect of the contemporary media city, namely large video screens situated in urban public spaces. It also focuses more directly on the different ways that digital media platforms have become a new infrastructure shaping the contemporary communicative city.