School of Art - Theses
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ItemContingent meanings: reframing appropriation in contemporary video installation( 2017)This thesis, which comprises this dissertation together with accompanying creative work, addresses the implications of video and installation on the framing of contemporary appropriation-based artistic practices. This framework utilises a central concept of contingency that is distinguished from discourses of chance in order to focus on questions of meaning and the creative potential of ambiguity. My approach repositions appropriation practice away from gestures of critique and towards more nuanced strategies that extend ambiguity into practicable artistic methods. Accordingly, contingency is positioned as a network of potential from which meaning forms precarious alignments and is accelerated through contemporary conditions of digital exchange. This research identifies instances of contingency in existing video material and further accelerates this contingency through appropriation, reconfiguration and recombination. Digital video offers a vast range of material and potential configurations, presenting the contemporary practitioner with ever-increasing creative opportunities, coupled with increasing pressures of choice and gesture. The contemporary ubiquity of copying and appropriation in digital practice alters the role of these cultural strategies, detracting from their implied gestural quality and positioning the appropriation in a framework of increasingly ambiguous meaning. My approach to this contemporary condition involves positioning my own appropriation practice towards strategies that acknowledge and embrace an inherent uncertainty, and away from previous models that emphasise the importance of criticism and reference. Following this cultural positioning, contingency is presented as the potential for meaning to emerge from situations of uncertainty and the potential of unforeseen occurrences. Within the construction of video works, my strategies of obscuring and removal of reference reduces the emphasis on the act of appropriation itself, instead emphasising the contingencies of assemblage and arrangement. I argue that digital video is an expansive network of media relationships and contingencies of circulation and exchange. Accelerating these processes produces new video works that combine pre-existing video and shape an elusive intentionality and loose association of material. The ambiguities and uncertainties of this contingency approach are given a stable expression through the installation, which differentiates my video assemblages from the flux of their emergence through contemporary circulation. I argue that the experiential capacity of the installation then provides the conditions for meaning to be generated in the context of its encounter. While this establishes the creative potential and relevance of contingency, I also argue that contingency can present potential risks and inherent difficulties of differentiating ambiguity from meaninglessness. My approach balances these conditions through rigorous and reflexive engagement with the materiality of digital video and its installation in which contingency can emerge as meaning. Video documentation of examined exhibition Decomposing Contingencies (2017) is available at https://vimeo.com/230541522 and available as video file.
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ItemPulse, chance, flux: the energetic image( 2015)Pulse, chance, flux: the energetic image is a practice-led research project which investigates the possibilities for extending analogue film and digital video projection beyond mere image reproduction, to become a transmission of embodied energy. The project is broken down into three key areas of investigation: pulse (vibration; frequency), chance (indeterminacy; synchronicity) and flux (the flow and transduction of energy). This project argues for the existence of a fundamental pulse to the world, or rather for millions of pulses, overlapping each other. From the addition of a multitude of pulses of information arises interference: the complexity of the world. Key works of vibration by Alvin Lucier, Tony Conrad and Bridget Riley are discussed. Artistic strategies of chance are investigated as a means to imbue works with the complex- ity of interference and to question how deeply relation really goes. Key time-based works by John Cage and David Tudor are compared for their strategic attempts to model the indeterminacy of the world in their very form. Flux is articulated as being the flow of energy. Douglas Kahn’s concept of the Aelectrosonic (the always-moving electromagnetic) is discussed and an argument is raised for its extension from sonic practices to include the luminous. In thinking about Kahn’s idea of transduction as the ‘locating moment’ of energy, a fundamental technical difficulty in working with light energy versus sound can be accounted for by abandoning literal transductions, instead turning to allusions. Three projection installation works, Modulations (2012–2015), Black Noise (2012) and Dark Matter (2015), were created, each comprising arrangements of projection devices, objects and images in relation. Flicker was used as a tactic to transmit an apparent embodied energy via the projection to the visitor. Decentralisation and dislocation were used strategically to continually shift attention from object to image to space to experience. The marriage of these theories and tactics is intended to create an energetic ‘noise’ in the space, in the projection machines and in the neurophysical of the viewer.
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ItemMatter & spirit: the syncretic drawing( 2015)Afloat comprises a series of drawings, installation and video that explore the correlative ideas of the body as the medium of incarnation and drawing as the medium to articulate existence. The research is a collection of poetic rules for the action of being in the studio. Afloat is constructed according to these rules which then investigates general principles for the poetics of the artwork. The poetics are thought of in this case articulated through what I have termed operational systems. The most significant operational system involves the individual Spirit-Body relationship and the way spirit and body operate syncretically. The research investigates the striving for a harmonious equilibrium within these operational systems when taken into the studio and therefore explores how the systems translate into the process of production and the art objects. A syncretic process of production explores and reflects the same kind of interdependent relationship that exists between matter and spirit. The language resulting from the impulse to equilibrium found in the interaction between the operational system spirit and matter raises the question of truth in art. What makes for creation of, what IS, a truthful artwork? The correlation that this research intends to establish between art and existence is translated by the metaphorical sensation of being afloat, which is also where the work finds its title. It is through this psychological and physical state that the parallel will be understood, using the specific studio scenario of the space of drawing and its extensions as it unfolds into other mediums in its syncretic ekstasis
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ItemObjects that generate performance and performance that generates objects( 2014)Unfolding from a series of succinct studio experiments that use objects as scores for action, this thesis addresses the use value of objects and the effects of brevity as an artistic strategy. The written component grounds this practice — which has a background in experimental music — in a field of practices that are directly and indirectly indebted to John Cage treating them as a shared body of knowledge between art and music. Cage’s written score for 4’33”, his silent work, is explored in the writing as a direct influence on the development of the Fluxus ‘event score’ – a short written instruction for creating artworks – and it is this type of score that is the starting point for my own studio experiments. The Works<30s is a diaristic series of short videos that explores simple, succinct actions allowing them to exist as discrete, singular events. As with the ‘event score’, the series imposes a simple constraint on its subject matter (a 30 second time limit) that rather than restricting the outcome results in a variety of effects on content, structure and narrative. The Works<30s series proved pivotal to the development of other works particularly through the evolution of my thinking on the object as score and the elaboration of strategies that hold coalescence at bay – two concepts shared by the works explored in this research thesis. The two other main works detailed in this thesis are Species of Spaces a five-channel audio/video work and Things That Fit Together a sculptural installation, developing from the Works<30s series they document small simple actions, but collate them into larger collections. These works attempt to allow their elements to remain discrete in order to emphasize the relationship between each object and the performance it generates. This written component reflects the concerns of the studio-based research in its form and structure and is comprised of observations that move back and forth between historical and material research.
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ItemI thought you were her sister...I thought you were your sister( 2010)'I thought you were her sister…I thought you were your sister' is an art-based research investigation into my biological identity as a twin. I undertook this method of examination to explore twin idiosyncrasies, shared thoughts and experiences, blurred memories and uncertainties relative to the twinned appearance of sameness that ultimately produces difference. Creative strategies of mechanical twinning and observations of biological twinning were applied as techniques of re-editing and manipulating found family footage, of my twin and I, to conceptualise twin identity as abstract visual forms that are then spatially installed to construct an environment relative to the viewer’s experience of twins.