Fine Arts and Music Collected Works - Theses

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    Developing transnational networks, conduits, overlaps and intersections of heterogeneous histories – of culture, sub-culture and geopolitics – through five collaborative intermedial projects engaging visual form, musical performance and theatrical events
    Kesminas, Danius Vladas ( 2021)
    This research considers and enacts “transnationality”, “intermediality” and “networks” to rethink concepts of globalisation and regional/cultural-specifity through appropriate models of art production. This project asks what it means to collaborate on a transnational scale in a world of shifting geo-political, cultural and social realities. The various projects are developed from the complex sets of interrelations traversing these realities, the respective histories of art, music, architecture together with a commitment to engage both specialist and non-specialist audiences.
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    How Does Collaboration and Joint Authorship Support Young Artists in Building Artistic Agency and Status?
    Bishop, Tiffaney ( 2021)
    This research-creation sits at the intersection of youth arts, socially engaged art and informal arts pedagogy. It investigates the impact a collaborative arts and joint authorship practice has on the development of young artists between the ages of twelve and twenty-something, specifically examining how a united front approach to making and presenting art supports young artists in building artistic agency and status. The site of this investigation is a thirteen-year-old youth-driven, adult and peer mentored artist-run initiative called tbC, based in suburban Melbourne, Australia. I am a founding member of tbC, and this investigation is based on my embedded observations of group methods and practices. Four case study artworks demonstrate how a united front approach to making and presenting art supports young creatives in building artistic agency and status. They include: a publication called Hoodie Mag, a public art project called The Blacksmiths Way Graffiti and Street Art Project, a digital artwork called The Art of Conversation, and a gallery project also called The Art of Conversation. Discussion around the fact that tbC is itself a collaborative artwork is included in this investigation. The data arising from this artistic research is mapped as an ecology of practice and inquiry via a dissertation and companion website. The companion website is this research’s creative output. Hyperlinks facilitate a connection between the two sites of knowledge. Together, they provide a fuller understanding of how a collaborative arts and joint authorship practice supports young artists in building artistic agency and status. Scholarship around relational art, authorship and the rhizome further support the theorising around this communal model of arts practice and the design of this multimodal submission. While there is substantial research around programs that engage and support young people, there are fewer examples of research, especially longitudinal, around the practices of young artists and how they can be supported. This investigation addresses this gap and is relevant to self-identifying young artists and those working with them. The significance of this study can be found in how a collaborative arts and joint authorship practice positions the young artist as practitioner and the agency and status this positioning builds.
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    Dramaturgies of valuing in three unpaid-led theatre-producing companies in Victoria, Australia
    Loewendahl, Anna Claudia ( 2021)
    Unpaid-led theatre has been cast in a myriad of roles by academics, policy writers, and in popular culture. From being characterised as a vanguard of cultural change to being stigmatised for unprofessional practice, unpaid-led theatre has also been variously co-opted to make claims about value in artistic, socio-cultural, political and economic debates. Yet, how unpaid-led theatre companies in Australia practice with values and how valuing can be understood dramaturgically has not been well understood. This thesis responds to this gap and examines how values are expressed in unpaid-led theatre-producing companies in Victoria, Australia. The identification of an unpaid-led theatre provides an unusual categorical framework for considering three theatres from various lineages, including amateur, independent theatre, and professionalised community arts led by people who are unremunerated. This inquiry was made through practice-led case studies with the aim of developing empirically based dramaturgical theories. If dramaturgy is defined broadly as both a creative logic (Barba 2010) and a practice (Romanska 2014) involving the enactment of values that shape meaning, then the specific interest of this study is to scrutinise how those values are expressed in theatre company practice. To do this, dramaturgy is deployed as the mechanism for researching, and the subject and frame of analysis. Accordingly, this thesis develops three dramaturgies of valuing: The Godot Effect, Polycultural Dramaturgy and Collective Institutional Dramaturgy. Each describes and analyses valuing in unpaid-led theatre practices, and contributes the novel theoretical convergence of unpaid-led theatre, valuing and dramaturgy.
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    From Tomb to Womb: How a Sensory Ethnographic Methodology can be Developed to Engage with Regional Communities and their Archives
    Olmi, Leanora ( 2020)
    This research creates a working methodology to engage with archives and communities in regional areas. Discussions on a community’s experience of their environment can be initiated through a sharing of personal archives and storytelling, touching on notions of memory, imaginings and change. My methodology is situated in a sensory ethnographic discipline. Through participation with communities, and my own photographic practice, I devise an applicable methodology for artists in regional environments. The research is developed through emplacement and community engagement, beginning with the Bring Your Own Archive event, and developing into an embedded approach that foregrounds listening and attention. It also expands upon discussions on the use and enquiry into the value of non-digital film material in a contemporary practice and as archival object, and considers what an archive image can tell us with regard to memory, histories and personal stories. Connecting to the notion of non-digital film, my own analogue practice explores place and history in Australian regional towns and this is developed as part of the research and the artwork. This research aims to show how an artist can participate in an active and honourable collaboration with regional towns, and engage in a re-imagination of their archives to create an interactive and lasting work that becomes an archive for the future. It also seeks to create a reflective space for the experiential histories in regional towns and a space for discussion on their future. The outcome of my research is entitled Glory Box. It is an interactive digital artwork that collages a series of archival reinterpretations into a new alternative archive of life in regional areas. It reimagines regional archives for future audiences. It connects my own experiential and dialogical methodology with my fine art photographic practice, commenting on the nature of film photography and on the position of the artist. The research proposes a progressive and experimental approach to archives through a sensory collecting of material, and a knowing or mindful handling of these tangible and intangible histories. A multiplicity of voices through a reauthoring of archive images manifests a contemplation of rituals and customs held within small regional towns today: a visual study on the local, unfolding into a wider reflection on the universal. It also uncovers delicate and indefinite contributions to a community’s connection to its archives that can reveal a deeply felt attachment.
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    Trance-Forming Dance: the practice of trance from traditional communities to contemporary dance
    Yap, Ding Chai ( 2021)
    This PhD thesis presents the work and research of a practice-led investigation into trance and its application to the performative arts – in particular, dance aesthetics. While the project is the culmination of my performative practice over the past three decades, the intention has been to look at traditional trance practices, particularly in the South East Asia region, to answer the overarching question: How can trance be translated from its original traditional cultural context for practical application to a contemporary dance context? In this way, the research intersects three main investigations: i) Asian traditional trance practices; ii) Western and non-Western contemporary ideas and sensibilities; and iii) a new platform for theatre and performance. As such, the study can be framed by three main trajectories: trance, dance and transformation. These three themes will emerge repeatedly throughout each aspect of this study. In locating the research thus it is important to acknowledge how my own practice as dancer, choreographer and trainer has been strongly informed by a hybrid South East Asian heritage borne of Dao shamanism and local Malay animism. This cultural upbringing has long infused my work, enabling me to develop an idiosyncratic dance language and to provide a descriptive richness in the particular realms of trance and possession that extends beyond a largely Western framework of understanding trance within a contemporary dance/theatre practice.
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    Making and sharing space: experiments with body, clothing and architecture
    Karaicic, Danica ( 2020)
    Making and Sharing Space: Experiments with Body, Clothing and Architecture investigates spatial situations generated by installations that test the optical relationship between the three ‘skins’: the body, clothes and architecture. As practice-led research, the resulting creations of the artistic practice are treated as experiments and consequently called ‘art-experiments’. The base of the art-experiments are participatory spatial installations that focus on the dressed, sensing body in movement. In the experimental set-up, the bodies, clothes and architecture are used as constructive elements to explore the three-skin relationship. The findings are the result of a collaboration between the researcher, the participants who visited the work, and the artworks themselves. The researcher is considered here as both an active participant and as an observer of the processes enabled by the art installations. Through their engagement with the art-experiments—as clothing and architecture—visitors also participate in the (re)making of the artwork and the architectural space. Each of the art-experiments propose procedures for three-skin exploration and ask questions about space-making and experience-making. Each of the four art-experiments asks a ‘what if’ question. The first art-experiment, Take Away Space, questions the three-skin relationship by asking the question: “What if architectural space is transformed into a wearable accessory?” In the second art-experiment, Clothed Paintings, the question is: “What if the clothed body becomes an architectural element?” The third experiment, [In]Corporeal Architecture, challenges the relationship even further by asking the question: “What if we can experience someone else’s personal space(s)?” Finally, the last experiment, in the form of a student workshop, shares the interest in ‘wearing space’ with the first art-experiment but asks the more precise question: “What if we use corporeal experience of an architectural space to make a wearable object?” Using a combination of critical reflection on my personal experiences of the art-experiments and the analysis of exhibition documentation and visitors’ response, the research explores how the clothed body participates in space-making processes. The methodology of the art-experiment has shaped the theoretical framework of the research, which includes theories and concepts that have contrasting viewpoints of the body and its multiple relationships with the immediate environment. Ideas of phenomenologists Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Juhani Pallasmaa on the sensorial relations of the body and its surroundings were adequate theoretical bases for the analyses of the corporeal experience as a starting point of each art-experiment. The spatial events generated by the experiments highlighted intricate and dynamic relationships between the human and nonhuman participants (clothes and architecture). To address these complexities, it was appropriate to expand the framework to include theories on the agency of nonhuman by Bruno Latour, Jane Bennet, Tim Ingold and Ian Hodder and the process philosophy of Madeline Gins and Shusaku Arakawa, Erin Manning and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The art-experiments could be described as a probing polygon for the disruption of a default three-skin relationship. The art-experiments resulted in the creation of a new body–clothes–architectural assemblages where skins continuously transform and absorb each other. Instead of providing answers to the ‘what if’ questions, the experiments revealed essential ‘cross-sections’ of the spatial situations resulting from the experiments: body-clothes, space-making, wearing space and sharing space.
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    Healing through art: My practice
    Riches, Ngardarb Francine ( 2020)
    Many issues affect the health and wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia. For more than a decade we have experienced many strategies implemented by governments to address the disparities experienced in our health and wellbeing. It has been recognised that new approaches are required because Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities are seeking culturally appropriate services. New approaches are required because Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities are sick of culturally inappropriate services. We have had enough. This thesis describes my healing journey and the journeys of the people I have worked with as a visual artist focused on healing. It is a story of resilience, of strength and of drawing from our culture and kinship structures to interrupt the intergenerational trauma that continues to impact on my people. I use my art to describe my journey as I write this thesis, as art is the way I best express my thoughts, my feelings and my own journey of healing. This research demonstrates the importance of applying an Indigenous lens in developing different approaches to healing through the intergenerational trauma experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. It explores the questions: What is meant by healing through arts practices within an Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander context? What are the foundations of my healing through art practices? How does my art bring together the expression of my culture and my strong Christian beliefs? How does my artwork and my art teaching heal in my community? What can others learn from my art practice and its relationship to healing?
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    A Miniature City Between Things + The Interhuman Apparatus
    Byass, Pablo ( 2020)
    A Miniature City Between Things + The Interhuman Apparatus Architectural-documentation is deployed within the discipline of architecture as a highly constrained and conventionalised system. This project seeks to unbind, re-appraise and re-locate this system to an interdisciplinary space, in order to test its possibilities. Through an examination of its histories, techniques, technologies and outputs, architectural-documentation is revealed as able to respond to complex heterogeneous topographies beyond the physical. The essay Useless Suffering by Emmanuel Levinas is utilised as an experimental space for the development of an apparatic composition. The text is considered as a site, upon and through which, a creative response is composed.
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    The Identification of Production Methods Exploring Cell-based Repetition and Development in Techno Music and Audio-Visual Display.
    Courtney, Tristan James ( 2020)
    The Identification of Production Methods Exploring Cell-based Repetition and Development in Techno Music and Audio-Visual Display. In 2020, accessibility to the tools of electronic music production have become near ubiquitous to anyone with access to modestly powered computing equipment. The use of musical, cell-based repetition as a musical device is straightforward to achieve using these tools, however further production methods are available to augment and enhance this process. This research investigates production methods exploring cell-based repetition in techno music, whilst exploring the representation of these concepts in visual media to create synchronous audio-visual work. A practice-based research methodology has led to the creation of this folio of eleven productions of techno music with accompanying audio-visual display. Additionally, this folio is accompanied by a 20,000-word dissertation, exploring the production methods and processes adopted and explored throughout the creative work. The dissertation also contains the compilation of a relevant field of practitioners and audio, that has served as a source of reference for analysis. Throughout this research, an exploration of temporal time perceptions and plateau-type experiences has served as a guiding aesthetic reference for working with the cellular repetition and exploring methods for creating development over time. In this dissertation, six areas of study are examined: Investigation into suitable construction methods for the creation of repeating cells; the use of polyrhythmic devices; the use of phasing LFO processes to create gradual yet constant, cyclical interactions of timbral variation; improvisation through real-time spontaneous interactive processes and the use of gradual, incremental automation to instrument parameters, exploring non-cyclical, unidirectional change. Lastly, the application of these audio production concepts is explored in the use of repeating visual cells in the creation of the synchronised audio-visual work.
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    The Creative Approaches of Sound-making to Spoken-word Narrative in a Multimedia Environment
    Gilmour, Jordan James ( 2020)
    This research paper will examine the creative approaches of sound-making to a spoken-word narrative in a multimedia environment through practise-led research in the form of a body of audiovisual works. It will explore how certain electroacoustic compositional techniques on sampled sound can be used to convey a spoken narrative and enhance how the listener/viewer experiences it in conjunction with visual media. It will investigate this through the analysis of work from other iconic composers and discuss how and why their techniques have been used in my own work. It will then document my own creative processes in using spoken stories and poems as the source material through making a new body of work to understand the creative approaches of sound-making in giving a sonic identity to the voice and environmental sounds and analyse what informs my making process in a narrative-driven multimedia work.