School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemNo Preview AvailableRococo Film Aesthetics( 2021)This thesis conceives of film design as an art of surface that is rococo in nature. I analyse the films of Sofia Coppola as decorative rococo spaces that present emotional topographies. I then further argue that the surface of film design sparks the imagination, and its moving forms activate perceptual journeys.
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ItemArt Forms in Nature: Writing Stones, Dancing Tigers, & Other Depictions of More-than-Human Artfulness in the Twentieth Century( 2021)In the eye of the beholder, there are many forms emerging out of nature that have the appearance of art, including the elaborate performances of avian courtship display, the delicate deceptions of insect mimicry and camouflage, and the whimsical impressions of figures and landscapes that are observed within clouds or mineral formations. Furthermore, such perceptions of nature’s artfulness are reflected within artworks produced by humans, across many cultures. These comprise a cross-cultural archive of texts that depict, incorporate or otherwise gesture towards an artfulness beyond the human. Within western cultures, there is a tradition of considering the forms of nature as illustrations of the Creator’s wisdom: part of the Book of Nature. But the idea that nature is God’s creative handiwork has also been widely challenged, particularly since the beginning of the twentieth century. During this time, the physical and biological sciences have developed an understanding of the material universe and living nature (including the human species) as emergent, self-creating and self-organising. Concurrently, the arts have opened up to encompass the abstract, the accidental, the found, and the natural, encouraging the idea that art could derive, at least partly, from the eye of the beholder. Taking these scientific and artistic developments as its rationale, this study examines literary and visual depictions of more-than-human artfulness in the twentieth century, including works by Vladimir Nabokov, Roger Caillois, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Angela Carter, as well as the continued legacy of two nineteenth-century figures, Ernst Haeckel and Anna Atkins. In a series of readings, this study surveys the concepts of the human, concepts of nature, and concepts of art that are mobilised when nature is depicted as artistic, and explores the worlds and universes, the cosmologies, that are generated by these concepts. These readings are largely informed by Elizabeth Grosz’s theory of more-than-human artfulness in synthesis with a broad theoretical framework drawn from biosemiotics, evolutionary biology, phenomenology and reader response theory. Through building this framework of ideas and reading this selection of texts, this study presents a conception of the human species as both connected to the rest of nature and also somewhat distinct from it, a conception of nature as suffused with the interplay of emergence and entropy, creation and destruction, and a conception of art as the interweaving of creativity and attentiveness, within both the artist and the observer. In developing these concepts, this study builds on discussions within the environmental humanities around ideas of ecocentrism, entanglement and agency. This study recognises that the human species is not special or separate, that living and non-living forms of matter are entangled and co-constitutive, and that many different entities are imbued with agency. But instead of reinforcing arguments that have already been developed, this study attempts to build on these arguments by shifting attention to the ways that humans are somewhat unique, the ways that life does diverge from non-life, and the ways that entities do not exert agency but accept, accommodate and attend to the agencies around them.