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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ItemEach copy may perish individually( 2013)Today when the digital image is but an instance existing in multiple versions, the aim in this paper is to investigate how each instance may differentiate. In the research that follows it is suggested that it may not be possible to fully gauge the implications of a digital image at the moment of its production or through the sharing of its popularity in transmission – this may in fact only emerge some time later. This measure may be introduced as a material durability, yet a central issue arises in that it is only by assumption that this can be known, given that the digital age is relatively recent. In the absence of any substantial digital history, we can only postulate what digital duration may be. It is to this end that my work and research is focused. The final body of creative work in the graduate exhibition has been produced in a manner that oscillates from screen to print and back again, across a range of objects using artistic and commercial services. A digital painting is printed in multiple outcomes, stratified across a host of surfaces and sites. It is with humor that a game situation is invoked, where each instance must silently compete against the others through time. The game is not just about which one lasts longest, but most beautifully, faithfully, or poorly. A website has been established to document the digitized versions of the work. It is hoped that this exhibition may go some way to exploring the ways in which an image belongs to a network.
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ItemPainting in a digital landscape( 2011)This thesis, titled Painting in a Digital Landscape, encompasses research conducted in 2010 and 2011 in the Victorian College of the Arts Masters of Fine Arts Course. The research explores the ways in which the form, process and materials of painting have been affected by new digital media screen technology, particularly through the Internet. The studio practice is based mostly around painting that floats between abstraction and realism. There is also an element of the studio practice that is focuses on the use of digital technology and experimentation with digital print encompassing immersive installation. This serves to amalgamate the virtual experience of digital technology with the tangible experience of walking into an actual gallery space. The supporting exegesis looks at the artists, processes and concepts that influence the studio practice, and follows the history of changes in technology and consequent changes of certain periods in painting.