From 100 days in search of the Ramones to bury the hatchet

Drawing ideas from film and music has been the basis of my art practice over the last 9 years. The nature of this work examined through installation describes an intense subjectivity inherent within seemingly banal relationships. Bringing together elements of everyday life through experienced and observed events and mixing it up with a fan-like zest for storytelling

From 100 days in search of the Ramones to bury the hatchet

Drawing ideas from film and music has been the basis of my art practice over the last 9 years. The nature of this work examined through installation describes an intense subjectivity inherent within seemingly banal relationships. Bringing together elements of everyday life through experienced and observed events and mixing it up with a fan-like zest for storytelling

Cytoarchitecture: digital dismembering and remembering in cyberspace

Between 2012 and 2017, a contributor to Mumsnet, a popular parenting forum online, began recording a third-person account under the pseudonym IamtheZombie, covering first her divorce and then her experience of cancer. In January 2017, IamtheZombie died. Preserved by MumsnetHQ, the threads form a tissue of posts: a text-culture that explores para-sociality between the living and the dead. Building on existing scholarship on digital life writing, on the afterlives of digital footprints and on recent work in the fields of memory studies, computing and neurobiology, this essay offers a new interdisciplinary framework for describing relationality in life writing on illness, dying and death: cytoarchitecture

Unruly Bodies: Monstrous Readings of Biotechnology

This thesis deploys the popular culture figure, the zombie, as a metaphor to examine the intersection of biotechnology and the production of knowledge about the body. Through reference to the HeLa cell line and BioArt project The Anarchy Cell Line, I show how the zombie metaphor helps to analyse and potentially undo Biology’s inflexible binary classification system, allowing a more inclusive and less reductive reading of those who are subject to Biology's system of knowledge

Gutless Bitch Camouflage : Post-Postmodern Barbarism and Shifting Gender Performativity in AMC\u27s The Walking Dead

AMC’s The Walking Dead is part of Robert Kirkman’s franchised juggernaut, The Walking Dead. Within this world, humans struggle to survive as they band together in groups to fight against the zombie hoard and monstrous elements of humanity. As survival is their main priority, established roles from pre-fall society no longer function as all genders, races, ages, and classes of people actively fight to live. Using Judith Butler’s gender performance theory and Julia Kristeva’s description of the abject, this thesis questions how and if gender functions when culture is destroyed and civilization breaks down. Gender markers of femininity are lost as women embrace masculinity and become stronger. There is no time for luxuries or girly things when life centers on food, water, shelter, and safety. Women can no longer function as mothers because if they do, either they or their children die. Instead, women become friends to children and others. The wild barbarity of an apocalyptic world tilts masculine and men are better prepared to survive, but women are right with them and learn quickly. In addition, women are allowed more room to function on the gender spectrum and when they are most shrewd, they can use assumptions about their gender, feminine weakness and fear, to manipulate and disarm their adversaries. It remains to be seen if the flexibility of movement on the spectrum is lasting or if the psychological damage peeking through the storyline are the result of women taking on and preforming extreme masculinity. This thesis argues that the extremes of gender performance are damaging, death for extreme femininity and insanity for extreme masculinity, as people move towards preforming as a humanity within a more neutral presentation of gender. Feminist goals of gender equality seem possible after the destruction of the culture that perpetuates repressive femininity. Without pop culture, media, and big culture, small groups of people can find more similarity in the ability of people without the labels and stereotypes, allowing great feats of teamwork, survival, and action to occur

"Born in death": media and identity in post-war American and global fictions of the undead

Existing scholarship has largely overlooked that the undead are, famously, ‘us’. They are beings born from our deaths. Accordingly, their existence complicates the limits and value of our own. In this dissertation, I therefore argue that fictions of the undead reflect on questions of identity, meditating on the ways in which identities are created, distorted or otherwise reformed by the media to which their most important texts draw insistent attention. Analysing landmark texts from Post-War American contexts, this dissertation expands its hypothesis through three case studies, reading the texts in each as their own exercise in ontological thought. In each case study, I show that fictions of the undead reflect on the interactions between media and identity. However, there is no repeating model through which the themes of media, identity and undeath are repeatedly engaged. Each text’s formulation of these interacting themes is distinct to the other’s, suggesting that the significance of the undead and their respective tradition is not in the resounding ontological ‘answers’ that they and their texts inspire, but the questions that their problematic existential state asks

An Investigation of Intersections Between Reanimation Practice and Queer Theory in a Moving Image Work

This practice-informed research establishes points of intersection between reanimative practices within moving image work and queer theoretical positions. It frames this within autoethnographic understandings of memories pertaining to my adolescent experience of gay acculturation via textual sources. A bricolage methodology deriving from the work of Kincheloe and Berry (2004) is used. Multiple methods of investigation are employed including alternative archive creation, moving image tests and prototypes, processes of reading and re-reading and autoethnographic, reflective and academic writing practices. Analysis and evaluation are informed by selected queer theoretical concepts which correspond to the broad structural phases of reanimation. Research outputs deriving from these processes are i) moving image tests, ii) autoethnographic vignettes, iii) a moving image piece entitled Unbounded and iv) a written thesis. The research aims to build on current understandings of the term “reanimation” (Cholodenko, 1991, 2004, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c, 2009; Skoller, 2013; Wells, 1998; Wells & Hardstaff, 2008), particularly within moving image practices using “found” material, and to articulate these within a queer perspective. A contextual review assesses previous work on reanimation in research, scholarship and queer-related animation. A series of moving image tests establish a relationship between animation, deanimation and reanimation which, I propose, constitutes the reanimative process. I consider this practice-informed understanding in relation to analogous patterns and motifs in queer theoretical literature. Finally, evaluation of the evidence from my practice tests and the terminal piece, Unbounded, corroborate a proposed set of intersections. The conclusion offers a conceptualisation of the process of reanimation in my moving image practice and establishes that the reanimated outcome attests to its reanimated status through the “temporal composite” (Skoller, 2013). I build on work concerning queer forms of evidence (Muñoz, 1996, 2009), alternative archive creation (Cvetkovich, 2003), queer temporality (Freeman, 2010; Rohy, 2009; Stockton, 2009) and futurity (Bansel, 2012; Edelman, 2004; Muñoz, 2009) to demonstrate that this reanimative principle is reflective of contemporary queer concerns with historicity. This practice-informed research contributes to knowledge by extending a modest body of animation literature addressing sexuality (de Beer, 2014, 2015, January 21; Griffin, 1994; Halberstam, 2011; Padva, 2008; Pilling, 2012b; Takahashi, 2014; Wells, 1998; Wood, 2008) through its focus on the formal aspects of reanimation and interconnections with the queer, as opposed to the more frequently addressed issue of queer representation

Avion 2005-12-06

https://commons.erau.edu/avion/2015/thumbnail.jp