Arts Collected Works - Research Publications
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ItemFalling Man – The Virtualization of the Violent Body(Art Association of Australia and New Zealand, 2015-11-25)Paul Virilio has noted the lowering of the horizon line in contemporary culture as the vision machine steps into the breach scouting the skies for suspicious vectors and surveying the Earth’s crust for glacial imperfections. At the same time our animal eyes turn away from the skies. We recoil at the violence of the heavens and bend our heads toward the safe glowing virtuality of the black mirror. As the millennium ticks over we are caught in an image loop defined by the vague outlines of the future. It was always a fabricated space, this technological promise, where the image of the body was defined by clean pale fabrics, glistening walls of chrome and pine amidst luminous trails of data. Always on the ground, always safe in the glass vestibule of progress. Our common shared reality is far different however, here the human form is rendered in a more vulnerable state of flux. On the mediated horizon line between the Earth and the atmosphere exists the figure of the falling man. The victim of our romance with vertiginous space and with our technological rush to colonize the air. This redrawing of the human form as an anonymous accomplice of the historical narrative is burnt into the infrastructure of the global network whose very survival is dependent on the repetition and repatriation of the image. This paper seeks to assess the virtualization of this networked body in violent repose – in flight, in space and in descent. Images such as Robert Drew’s photograph of the Falling Man on the morning of September 11 2001, of Commander Stone in Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity and Warhol’s Death and Disaster series which, while fixated with death, also wears the markers of mankind’s doomed quest for verticality. It is indeed as Donna Haraway has observed, a cyborg of convergent renderings, but not as she intended. Rather it is a rerouting of the body in digital form into something that does in fact return to dust – bent and contorted by the bloody mess of machine intervention. The most despairing of images, weary with the weight of Virilio’s accident of technology, is almost imperceptible now behind a shroud of pixels. This magic trick, this cyber-friendly blurring of the machine’s interpretation of the body is now a familiar mode of visual discourse. A deliberate act of obscurification – to protect us, to shield us, to remind us of unspeakable things to push back against the glare of that ominous shimmer on the horizon.
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ItemThe Liquid Electric(ASU Herberger Institute, 2015-03-28)The representation of a life sustaining force, either of technological or natural means, has a deep and evocative history in some of our most elaborate cultural fantasies. Embedded in the fictitious dreamscapes of cinema, advertising and media art are the foundational principles of an emergent digital aesthetics of liquid. The art direction is often blue and luminous in tone, it is always found at the core of the film’s novum, and it often takes on a kinetic electrical form. It is as if these cultural artifacts - reaching back to the earliest uses of CGI, such as Disney’s 1982 film Tron and on to more recent Hollywood parables such as A.I. and Avatar – recognize the very Gothic anxiety we hold for our environment in the twilight years of industrialization. Appearing in all manner of image constructions, the liquid electric is presented as the source code - the host, the conductor, the origin – of our very human struggle with technology and evolving notions of artificiality. It has emerged from a place of darkness, this liquid energy, stylized as a predominately luminous surface texture contrasted most commonly against a narrative setting of loss and foreboding. Very much like the anxiety we feel for the contemporary perils of creeping urbanization, of resource exploitation and climate instability, the liquid electric operates in a contested space where the usual laws of physics, logic and nature have become unstable. This light-on-dark aesthetic has a somewhat deeper history. It is a technique once used by the Italian Futurists and the imagineers such as Thomas Edison and Norman Bel Geddes to promote the wonders of technology and electrification – sometimes with troubling and unwanted consequences. However, it is now being exploited by a new breed of digital artisans to foreground the perils of resource scarcity, to question the ubiquity of virtual networks and to interrogate the rise of the machine in a fragile imbalanced ecosystem. Indeed there is a discernible influence of machine vision at work here, and theorists such as Foucault, and, more presently, Paul Virilio and Zygmunt Bauman, have noted its ubiquitous rise. Most certainly it is strongly felt in the data visualizations emerging from the ATLAS observer at CERN, in the animations of NASA and in the marketing iconography of device technology and software, but there is something else at work here too. It is as if this liquid – this essence of life – is speaking, indeed screaming, through our mediated cultural artifacts. Perhaps through our fictions can we truly grasp the gravity of our most dire realities? It would seem that the liquid electric is not just an aesthetic turn or a narrative device but an explicit visual sign – nature’s digital avatar – reminding the audience of the precarity of existence in both the realms of the virtual and the real.
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ItemScreen Flow: Cultural Mirroring Through Movement and Ambience(Melbourne Screen Studies Group, 2017-02-22)Part visual essay part performance text, Screen Dance will explore the intervention of the screen – the mobile screen / the televised event/ the corner store TV/ the mobile app – in the public life of the city. Yarra Yarra, a Kulin nation meeting place pre-contact; now the site of this metropolis called Melbourne, a grid overlaid on the landscape, is a vertical convergence of glass and steel and glittering light. As a newbie, from the West but mostly from the North, to explore the meandering grid of this urban space is to conduct the rather colonial act of mapping: through a screen. Marking the screen, meeting via the screen and ultimately documenting via the screen. The screen is a now a feature of the cityscape – public, private, commercial. Screens punch holes in the night. Life accompanied by screens, life lived through screens. A merry dance is underway. Through the rain pelted window the glow of the television calls to arms the excited pack – it’s game time! The pearls of contrasting colour speak to history, to territory and to the drama of an evolving mythology brokered by the screen. There’s a stir in the playground tonight, just behind the monkey bars, beneath the crisp clear sky tilted faces glow with electric blue luminance as screens drift and sway in eerie silence. This is not your typical social gathering this is an augmented space. The battle for the King of the Hill is a subdued affair albeit facilitated by a poke, a swipe and a deft flick. They warned me about the 86, the Smith Street trundler has a history they said; well yes, it is certainly a lively affair especially on the fringes of daylight. Yet it is also a carriage of traveling screens of football highlights, of sexting, of LOLs, of earthquakes, of suicide bombings, of bleaching coral, of gum trees, of craft beer recipes and of GIF cats. This is their story as much as it is mine. This city/ this screen/ this blue planet.
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ItemTin Can Blues: Moonage, Earthrise & Bowie(The University of Melbourne and Deakin University with the support of the Naomi Milgrom Foundation, 2015-07-18)David Bowie emerged during a period of intense space dreaming, the late 1960s. His multiple personas and genre hopping musical constructions at times took this on directly. His lyrical observation that “planet Earth is blue and there is nothing that I can do” and the NASA Earthrise image were iconic cultural objects of the early environmental movement. This sense of beauty and fragility and helplessness is something we still feel today as the Earth as cultural icon becomes a virtual icon of network culture. In recent years however, our relationship with space has changed, as indeed has our relationship with Bowie. Both have been elusive and curious for some time – Bowie it would seem disappeared along with the Space Shuttle. Today however, the romance has re-emerged as we chase asteroids in slickly produced NASA animations and put robots on Mars. The virtuality of contemporary space exploration mirrors the virtuality of Bowie. Both exist most predominately online, both fulfill a strong nostalgic turn and now Bowie and Apollo and Endeavour are finding a new type of cultural immortality in the exhibition space.
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ItemMineral Machine Music: An Interdisciplinary Collaboration(IEEE - Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, 2016-10-28)An audio visual collaboration between geologist Clement Fay and media artist Mitch Goodwin. Mineral Machine Music is a collaborative exploration of the fabric of the earth as seen from the stage of a microscope and the lens of the industrialized city. The work juxtaposes the man made structural textures of the New York cityscape with the geological mineral formations from the South Australian outback. Blending cityscape with substrate Fay & Goodwin compliment the imagery with layers of sonic noise – musical representations of tectonic activity, echoes of the universe from deep space and the groans of the restless earth all juxtaposed against the industrial machine ambiance of a New York City subway.
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ItemA Punch in the Spleen: The Paradox of Cinematic Virtuality(Screen Studies Association of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, 2018-11-21)Cinema is at a technological crossroads - as a medium as an experience and as a language. While industry luminaries such as Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese advocate for celluloid’s continued use as a viable – albeit niche format – other challenges are presented by an evolving digital ecology of image making and display. In one sense, we are moving towards an enhanced cinematic experience that is inherently virtual: the 360 degree image as “immersive storytelling”, the fourth wall punctuated by 3D flourishes and waves of Dolby Atmos - sound that moves. While these embellishments to cinema’s more traditional narrative techniques represent a new will to virtuality, they have also blurred the lines between the technology of production and the mode of display. Made possible by algorithmic renderings of space, sound and image, the digital has provided a gateway to more exotic and paradoxically, more tactile experiences. Are we now seeing a return to the more theatrical – almost carnivalesque – origins of cinema in which place and setting become explicit accompaniments to the telling of the tale? From a 4DX viewing of Annihilation in Times Square to the unsettling beauty of Notes on Blindness at MIFF to the Ready Player One VR arcade at SXSW in Texas, this paper attempts to map this strange new cinematic territory.
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ItemThe Liquid Electric: tracing nature’s machine code(RIXC Publisher, Riga, Latvia, 2017-10-19)Representations of techno-ecologies have a deep and evocative history embedded as they are within our most elaborate cultural fantasies and our most extreme scientific simulations. These digital media dreamscapes constitute the foundation principles of an emergent data aesthetics of liquid. Hollywood has codified this through an art director’s pallet that is often blue and luminous in tone, is found at the core of a film’s novum and often takes on a kinetic electrical form. A gothic anxiety underpins this ‘liquid modernity’, bracketed as it is by the twilight years of industrialization and an emergent century of automation and augmentation. Appearing in all manner of image constructions nature’s liquid electric turn makes its most urgent call via the machine. Indeed, there is a discernible influence of machine vision at work here, and theorists such as Foucault and more presently Paul Virilio and Zygmunt Bauman have noted its ubiquitous rise. This liquid electric operates as the source code - the host, the conductor, the origin material – of the human/machine interface. But there is something else at work here too; it is as if this liquid data – this coded luminance – is articulating a symbolic warning of a great global unravelling.
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ItemTowards a New Media Literacy: Resisting the urban space as a 404 page(The Centre of Excellence in Media Innovation and Digital Culture, 2017-10-16)The intervention of media content in the public life of the city comes in many guises – the mobile screen / the corner store TV / the street projection / the media façade / the laneway love letter / the street art augmentation / the VR breakout space. Supported by commercial, cultural and civic media infrastructure the city is increasingly playing host to new forms of media content at various levels of complexity - from discrete media objects to temporary works of media art to components of a larger transmedia narrative. These projects are often built upon the convergence of personal, civic and corporate data generated from an individual’s online persona. This interplay – previously private, mostly invisible – is morphing however, from screen space to public space, from surface representation to spatial replication. This transformation is so compelling and perceptually seductive that it can become something that we simply “fall into” (Turkle 2009) unawares of the exploitation occurring beneath the “subface” (Nake 2016). Willing or not, as we move and interact in the urban publics we are participating in new forms of cultural and economic seduction. The sustainability of the industries which manufacture and embed the media that facilitate this engagement however will increasingly rely on new forms of media literacy if they are to produce genuine ongoing cultural and commercial value. Just as higher education is fragmenting into new sites of learning and new modes of interaction (Mackness, Bell et al. 2016) so too is our experience of media content in the urban space. (McQuire 2016) And yet, while the proliferation of technology has been near ubiquitous and the launch of solutions and platforms relentless, change has been slow. Both the city and the university in the 21st Century are plagued with usability issues and both have limitations in terms of our perception of their traditional function and the permanence of their physical design. As media innovates so too must its audience. We must see the value of creativity and cultural production beyond simple economics and only a media literate community can provide such an assessment and by way of participation reciprocal benefits to the media producer.
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ItemThe Writing on the Wall: Our Liquid Ambient Future(SXSW, LLC, 2015-03-14)See like a camera / listen like a microphone / track like a satellite. Big beautiful data is everywhere. The sound is constant. The image bank immense. The network sends and receives everything. We remix our environment by just being present in it. We capture, post, follow, share and archive. Data becomes us. This new aesthetic of machine ambiance is at once an embodiment of our private present selves but also an ambient beautification of what lies in our wake. The machine sees the machine knows but the mechanics are invisible. How will artists, designers and film makers depict A.I. in the crowded vision streams of the future? The notion of the liquid electric is embedded in our popular cultural fictions and scientific explorations. It operates at the foundation of our interpretation of the farthermost reaches of space and the inner most structures of matter. But it also colors the wider vistas of our future networked selves and the imaginings of content designers and artists alike.
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ItemThe Ambience of Automation: Big Data, A.I. and Drone Culture(Australian Anthropological Society, 2015-12-01)See like a camera / listen like a microphone / track like a satellite. Big beautiful data is everywhere. The sound is constant. The image bank immense. And yet the end game of complete machine autonomy is ambiguous. The notion of the vision machine is embedded in our popular cultural fictions and scientific explorations. It operates at the foundation of our interpretation of the farthermost reaches of space and the inner most structures of matter. The machine sees the machine knows but the mechanics are invisible. Concepts such as military futurism, meta-data, kill lists, terra-forming and drones are riddled with ethical conundrums that are rarely discussed in mainstream media discourse yet haunt the background atmosphere of contemporary technoculture. How do artists, designers and film makers working in the epicentre of the Hollywood dream machine and at the further most extremities of media arts practice depict notions of A.I. and machine ambience? What meaningful opportunities exist for informed open debate about their moral implications in the crowded vision streams of contemporary screen culture?