Documentary polyptychs: multi-screen documentary on a theme of climate change

This MFA explores how the problematic phenomenology of climate change might be approached by revisiting an ancient visual art form, the Early Renaissance polyptych. I posit the polyptych as a proleptic form of installation art, providing a historical overview and analysis of multi-channel forms up to contemporary expanded cinema, before narrowing my focus to documentary film and video installations. I propose that principles of dialectical montage apply between spatialised screens and that, as a richly affective form, the relationship between screens coexisting within a single field of view might productively be considered using Deleuze’s notion of the time-image crystal. Furthermore that the visitor, in becoming an ‘editor’ via bodily movement, might be positioned in a lineage to Vertov’s kino-eye, thus becoming a kinaesthetic eye. I use Mark Boulos’ All That is Solid Melts Into Air (2008) and Isaac Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves (2010), two- & nine-channel works respectively, to discuss these ideas. The ‘unseen’ nature of anthropogenic climate change poses particular challenges both for a culture that emphasises ‘seeing is believing’ and for documentary forms traditionally reliant on visible evidence. My creative work focuses on the phenomenon of sea level rise, and is presented in the form of a documentary polyptych with which the viewer physically engages. Without delivering a climate change polemic, the work explores crucial dissociations — of cause from effect, of today’s action from tomorrow’s result, of behaviour here from outcome there — through an open, affective form that replaces documentary’s traditionally temporal strategies with spatialised montage. More generally I position the form amidst both the veritable renaissance of multi-channel video art and the proliferation of multiple screen devices in contemporary society. How might documentary’s potential for creating meaning — and perhaps inspiring agency — change when it moves to multiple screens

Documentary polyptychs: multi-screen documentary on a theme of climate change

This MFA explores how the problematic phenomenology of climate change might be approached by revisiting an ancient visual art form, the Early Renaissance polyptych. I posit the polyptych as a proleptic form of installation art, providing a historical overview and analysis of multi-channel forms up to contemporary expanded cinema, before narrowing my focus to documentary film and video installations. I propose that principles of dialectical montage apply between spatialised screens and that, as a richly affective form, the relationship between screens coexisting within a single field of view might productively be considered using Deleuze’s notion of the time-image crystal. Furthermore that the visitor, in becoming an ‘editor’ via bodily movement, might be positioned in a lineage to Vertov’s kino-eye, thus becoming a kinaesthetic eye. I use Mark Boulos’ All That is Solid Melts Into Air (2008) and Isaac Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves (2010), two- & nine-channel works respectively, to discuss these ideas. The ‘unseen’ nature of anthropogenic climate change poses particular challenges both for a culture that emphasises ‘seeing is believing’ and for documentary forms traditionally reliant on visible evidence. My creative work focuses on the phenomenon of sea level rise, and is presented in the form of a documentary polyptych with which the viewer physically engages. Without delivering a climate change polemic, the work explores crucial dissociations — of cause from effect, of today’s action from tomorrow’s result, of behaviour here from outcome there — through an open, affective form that replaces documentary’s traditionally temporal strategies with spatialised montage. More generally I position the form amidst both the veritable renaissance of multi-channel video art and the proliferation of multiple screen devices in contemporary society. How might documentary’s potential for creating meaning — and perhaps inspiring agency — change when it moves to multiple screens

Editing and Reading Blake

Co-edited by Wayne C. Ripley and Justin Van Kleeck, Editing Blake looks at the profound challenges William Blake poses to both editors and readers. Despite the promises of the current multi-modal environment, the effort to represent Blake's works as he intended them to be read is increasingly being recognized as an editorial fantasy. All editorial work necessitates mediation and misrepresentation. Yet editorial work also illuminates much in Blake's corpus, and more remains to be done. The essays in this volume grapple with past, present, and future attempts at editing Blake's idiosyncratic verbal and visual work for a wide variety of audiences who will read Blake using numerous forms of media.</p

Interdisciplining Digital Humanities: Boundary Work in an Emerging Field

The first book to test the claim that the emerging field of Digital Humanities is interdisciplinary and also examines the boundary work of establishing and sustaining a new field of stud

In Summaries and Diagrams: Teaching Prayer and Poetry in Lancelot Andrewes and Edmund Spenser

This thesis is concerned with intersections between poetry and prayer, in printed texts attributed to Edmund Spenser and Lancelot Andrewes. It takes as a starting point the pervasiveness of Ramism at Pembroke College Cambridge during these two writers’ overlapping years spent there as undergraduates, proposing that Ramist ideologies of the short and efficient, the organised, the hierarchical, the one-size-fits-all diagrammatic text, offer new ways of understanding the pedagogical aspirations—and the formal mechanisms—of Andrewes’s literary homiletics and Spenser’s religious allegories. I will be preoccupied above all by poetic economies of page space and prayer time: in representations of large in small, or the extraordinary in the ordinary, and the anxieties and humilities involved in such inadequate accommodated ‘insteads’. Chapter one examines printed English versions of Andrewes’s Preces Privatae, reading its mise-en-page as reminiscent of Ramist logic books, and beginning to establish an early modern context of instrumental ‘diagrammatic reading’ by taking a particular interest in the work of curly braces as a ‘didactic technology’ which both performs and instructs prayer on the printed page. Chapter two considers Spenser’s Fowre Hymnes as devotional poems. Read diagrammatically, by their complicated poetic hierarchies and chronologies these self-sacred parodies enact a thinking-through of the theological cruxes of the Incarnation and its meditative contemplation in the broken gift-cycle of prayerful thanksgiving. Chapter three uses grammatical anaphors and abridgements in Andrewes’s Passion sermons and the Pattern of Catechistical Doctrine to derive a theory of accommodated reading based on metaphorical sizes and imaginary dimensions. My final chapter reads the ballad-stanza ‘Arguments’ with which Spenser prolepsises and summarises every Canto in The Faerie Queene as recognisably generic paratexts with analogies in the Geneva Bible, Thomas Speght’s 1598 collected Chaucer, printed plays, and the Sternhold-Hopkins psalter. Short, simple, and economical, the four-line Arguments seem at first a very different poetical space from the Spenserian stanza—but on closer reading, they demand an investment in the dimensions of printed language and the spaces and syntax of its storytelling which fits persuasively with the wider poetics of The Faerie Queene and with its narrative structures.This research was funded by a PhD studentship awarded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) Doctoral Training Partnership, and a Hogwood Scholarship at Jesus College

ReDreaming Dharawal: A transcultural and multi-disciplined approach to the Aboriginal art and landscapes of southern Sydney

This study addresses post-contact Aboriginal art practices of the southern Sydney region; traditional lands of the Dharawal-speaking peoples. Given that a conventional Western art history has found the pluralistic nature of such work problematic, this study seeks to understand how it might be valued and understood in a wider art-world context. Through extensive field work which included the first survey and analysis of the large body of public art produced in association with Aboriginal people since the Bicentennial, this thesis finds that engagement with non-Aboriginal Australians is an important tactic of Aboriginal people in achieving agency in the modern world; and that, in contrast to assumptions still made about Aboriginal artists working in urban areas, re-establishing and reaffirming relationships with Country remains a core concern. I argue that a multi-disciplined methodology that employs ideas from anthropology, archaeology and human geography offers the best means of comprehending the sensitive, transcultural nature of the art practices and art histories of Dharawal country

Binding Autobiographies: Torah Binders Revisited

The thesis investigates contemporary textile practice and its links to traditional forms of textile art. It focuses on the 19th century German circumcision binders (“Jewishing cloths”), ceremonial Torah scroll wrappings, which documented male births. The case study examines images on the seams of a 1836 binder, showing that the seams acted as a transitional territory, where the embroiderer consciously played around with traditional images, transposing the concern with birth and fertility into a concern with a cultural identity formation during the Jewish emancipation in Germany. The contemporary museal staging of the binder is criticised as a nostalgic vision of Judaism, refusing to recognize the binder's contemporaneous position, ignoring its singularity as a contradictory repository of modern Jewish identity hi/stories. On this critique the practical part of the thesis is based, developing as an appropriation or a “re-actualisation” of a traditional textile format in the contemporary textile practice. Such “re-actualisation” is positioned in the relevant textile art context and reflected through my textile practice and an “autobiographical” account of it. Through its practice-based and written components the thesis reflects upon and makes way for creation of works, where my autobiographical female stories of Jewishness in Israel are staged as a fictional binder. The shifting position of cloth in between the historical and the contemporary accounts, in between autobiography, practice and research, is addressed through the concept of subjectile by J. Derrida. The practice investigated “hands on” the particularities of the 1836 binder, exploring its letters, images, materials and techniques, appropriating and reshaping them. This practical exploration modified the research, shifting its emphasis towards the embodied and performative reading of the binder and related rituals. The thesis proposes a general design for a research-based practice. Alongside its contribution to the history of Jewish textiles and contemporary textile practice, it unfolds interrelated “biographies” of research and textile practice

Iliad ad Nihilum: Psychê, Conscience, Wonder

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