Exercise: Les Noces translation as a mode of performative postproduction and the historical dialogue between dance and visual art

This research proposes ‘translation,’ as opposed to other appropriating strategies, as a theory and practice which invites the possibility of performative postproduction throughout the making, performing and attending of dance. Translation theory is proposed as a model for reading dance works as well as a choreographing tool for making postproduction works which use historical citation and/ or are hybrid choreographic projects between forms and mediums. In this thesis, translation theory is used to discuss Bronislava Nijinska’s Les Noces (1923) as a modernist choreographic work which renews notions of dance and movement through consideration of the project of the Russian avant-garde. Subsequently, translation theory forms the choreographic method through which I am able to translate Les Noces into Exercise: Les Noces (2017). Exercise: Les Noces is not just a historical project, and thus, it is not a reconstruction, revival or reworking of the original ballet. Exercise: Les Noces is not a gallery installation either which adapts a ballet work to a visual art platform. This thesis proposes Exercise: Les Noces as a ‘choreographic site’; as the site where different authorial voices, different temporalities, different mediums and texts are invited to co-exist in the tension between two extremes: their total presence and total absence and as such to negotiate and possibly change their form and meaning. Thus, translation is proposed as a transhistorical and interdisciplinary choreographic theory, method and practice which works towards the expansion of the mediums involved with a view to engaging them in a new cultural and historical milieu

Marcel Duchamp and New Zealand Art, 1965 – 2007 By Means of Duchamp’s Peripheral Vision: Case Studies in a History of Reception

This thesis examines the reception to Marcel Duchamp in New Zealand from 1965 to 2007. It takes as its subject two exceptional occasions when Duchamp’s work arrived in New Zealand and the various ways in which select New Zealand artists have responded to his work since that date. In doing so, this thesis acknowledges the shifting ideologies that underpin the reception of Duchamp which are characteristic of each decade. Thus it reads Duchamp’s reception through the conceptual and ‘linguistic turn’ in post-formalist practices in the late 1960s and 1970s; the neo-avantgarde strategies of the late 1970s and 1980s; a third-wave response to the readymade in the 1990s − which leads to an expanded notion of art as installation practice in the mid- to late 1990s. Finally, it offers a take on the readymade paradigm after post-modernism, as seen in a return to artisanal craft. This historical account of artistic practice in New Zealand is woven around two remarkable events that entailed Duchamp’s works actually coming to New Zealand, which I reconstruct for the first time. These are: Marcel Duchamp 78 Works: The Mary Sisler Collection (1904–1963), the exhibition that toured Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch in 1967; and the bequest of Judge Julius Isaacs and Betty Isaacs to the National Art Gallery in 1982 which included three works by Duchamp. The first took place in the 1960s during the first wave of exhibitions that brought Duchamp to a global audience. Here I argue that, rather than a belated response, this was contemporaneous with other events, proving that New Zealand was an active participant in the initial global reception of Duchamp. The second concerns the process by which Duchamp’s works entered a public collection. Here, I offer an account that reveals the uniqueness of Duchamp’s gifting of artworks to friends, and argues for the special importance of this gift, given the scarcity of Duchamp’s work, due to his limited output. This thesis also reads Duchamp through the lens provided by New Zealand’s situation on the periphery. Thus it offers an analysis of Duchamp’s life and work that, while acknowledging his centrality in twentieth-century art, takes from his example those components of his practice deemed relevant to the situation of art and artists here in New Zealand. By this means I locate those elements of Duchamp’s life story, his work and legacy that tell us something new about how to diffuse the power of the centre. Drawing on the consequences of the processes of decentralisation that have reshaped the landscape of global culture, this account reveals new relationships between margin and centre that provide new ways to connect Duchamp with subsequent generations of New Zealand artists. The aim here is to defy the assumed separation of New Zealand from international trends, rethink our subservient ties to England, to offer a new version of a local art history that knits our artists into a global mainstream without rendering them beholden to a master narrative that derives from elsewhere

Exploring Perspectives on the Impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Creativity of Knowledge Work: Beyond Mechanised Plagiarism and Stochastic Parrots

Artificial Intelligence (AI), and in particular generative models, are transformative tools for knowledge work. They problematise notions of creativity, originality, plagiarism, the attribution of credit, and copyright ownership. Critics of generative models emphasise the reliance on large amounts of training data, and view the output of these models as no more than randomised plagiarism, remix, or collage of the source data. On these grounds, many have argued for stronger regulations on the deployment, use, and attribution of the output of these models. However, these issues are not new or unique to artificial intelligence. In this position paper, using examples from literary criticism, the history of art, and copyright law, I show how creativity and originality resist definition as a notatable or information-theoretic property of an object, and instead can be seen as the property of a process, an author, or a viewer. Further alternative views hold that all creative work is essentially reuse (mostly without attribution), or that randomness itself can be creative. I suggest that creativity is ultimately defined by communities of creators and receivers, and the deemed sources of creativity in a workflow often depend on which parts of the workflow can be automated. Using examples from recent studies of AI in creative knowledge work, I suggest that AI shifts knowledge work from material production to critical integration. This position paper aims to begin a conversation around a more nuanced approach to the problems of creativity and credit assignment for generative models, one which more fully recognises the importance of the creative and curatorial voice of the users of these models and moves away from simpler notational or information-theoretic views.Comment: Advait Sarkar. 2023. Exploring Perspectives on the Impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Creativity of Knowledge Work Beyond Mechanised Plagiarism and Stochastic Parrots. In Annual Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction for Work 2023 (CHIWORK 2023), June 13-16, 2023, Oldenburg, Germany. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 17 page

The South Sydney project: interaction and archive aesthetics

This practice-based thesis questions how interactive media artworks affect the way audiences engage with the past. It considers contemporary art’s ‘impulse’ towards archives within the context of the age of Big Data. At a time when society is generating more information than ever before, this thesis explores how artists working with interactive databases can contribute novel systems and aesthetic experiences in order to carve new ways into and through archives. This thesis brings into dialogue practical and theoretical discoveries made along the journey of reimagining an oral history archive through the system of an immersive responsive installation. It argues that interactive artworks can allow for an embodied, exploratory and generative engagement with archival material. Further, it suggests that such processual and emergent accounts of the past are appropriate ways of modelling the world and its archived traces in a digital era characterised by swathes of stored data and fluctuating information flows. As critically interdisciplinary work across the fields of new media art and history, this research also suggests the value of such experimental methodologies for rethinking traditional approaches to archives with a view to generating aesthetic and affective, rather than factual and textual, engagements with the past

The authenticity of ambiguity: Dada and existentialism

Dada is often dismissed as an anti-art movement that engaged with a limited and merely destructive theoretical impetus. French Existentialism is often condemned for its perceived quietist implications. However, closer analysis reveals a preoccupation with philosophy in the former and with art in the latter. Neither was nonsensical or meaningless, but both reveal a rich individualist ethics aimed at the amelioration of the individual and society. It is through their combined analysis that we can view and productively utilise their alignment. Offering new critical aesthetic and philosophical approaches to Dada as a quintessential part of the European Avant-Garde, this thesis performs a reassessment of the movement as a form of (proto-)Existentialist philosophy. The thesis represents the first major comparative study of Dada and Existentialism, contributing a new perspective on Dada as a movement, a historical legacy, and a philosophical field of study. The five chapters analyse a range of Dada work through a lens of Existentialist literary and theoretical works across the themes of choice, alienation, responsibility, freedom and truth. These themes contribute to the overarching claim of the thesis that Dada and Existentialism both advocate the creation of a self that aims for authenticity through ambiguity

A Simultaneous World

What if we could experience and see more than meets the eye? What if we could envision a multitude of existing realities being unveiled to us simultaneously? What if we could float in and out through different temporal representations inside the expanded field of our consciousness and retain everything together into one single continuum? What would this multiplicity look like to us? My artistic practice, a hybrid of video, image and object making, investigates the phenomenon of perception and the constraints and boundaries between the senses and knowing. This supporting paper maps out the creative influences and experiments behind the four installation pieces presented in my thesis exhibition Simultaneous World show at the Gales gallery, York University

Signals and noise: art, literature and the avant-garde

One of the most consistent features of the diverse artistic movements that have flourished throughout the twentieth century has been their willingness to experiment in diverse genres and across alternative art forms. Avant-gardes such as Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism, Futurism, Fluxus and Pop were composed not only of painters but also dramatists, musicians, actors, singers, dancers, sculptors, poets and architects. Their works represent a dramatic process of crossfertilization between the arts, resulting in an array of hybrid forms that defy conventional categorisation. This thesis investigates implications of this cross-disciplinary impulse and aims by doing so to open out a site in which to reassess both the manner in which the avant-gardes have been theorised and the impact their theorisation has had on contemporary aesthetics. In the first part of this study, I revisit the work of the most influential theorists of the avant-garde in order to ask what the term “avant-garde” has come to signify. I look at how different theories of the avant-garde and of modernism relate to one another as well as asking what effect these theories have had on attempts to evaluate the legacies of the avant-gardes. The work of Theodor Adorno provides a connective tissue throughout the thesis. In Chapter One, I use it to complicate Peter Bürger’s notion of the avant-garde as “anti-art” and to argue that the most pressing challenge that the avant-gardes announce is to think through the cross-disciplinarity that marks their work. In Chapter Two, I trace how painting has come to be considered as the paradigmatic modernist art form and how, as a result, the avant-garde has been read as a secondary, “literary” phenomenon to be grasped through its relation to painting. I argue that this constitutes a systematic devaluation of literature and has resulted in an “art historical” model of the avant-gardes which represses both their real radicality and implications of their work for these kinds of disciplinary structures. In the second part of this thesis, I explore works which examine and question the aesthetic hierarchies and notions of aesthetic autonomy that the theories of modernism and the avant-garde explored in the first part set up. In Chapter Three, I approach by way of two cross-disciplinary works which employ literature and visual art: Marcel Duchamp’s Green Box (1934) and Andy Warhol’s a; a novel (1968). Works such as these, which slip through the gaps between literary and art history, have, I argue, important implications for literary and visual aesthetics but are often overlooked in disciplinary histories. In my final chapter, I return to the theory of the avant-garde as it emerges in the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard. I examine how his work reconfigures Adorno’s aesthetics by performing the cross-disciplinary movement that it argues is characteristic of avant-garde art works. Tracing his “post-aesthetic” response to Duchamp and Warhol, I explore how Lyotard articulates a mode of practice that moves beyond the dichotomy of “art” and “antiart” and opens out a site in which the importance of the twentieth century avant-gardes is made visible. I conclude by briefly considering the implications of the avant-garde, as I have presented it in this thesis, for contemporary debates on the twenty-first century “digital avant-gardes” and recent writing on aesthetics

Amateur Craft as a Differential Practice

This doctoral dissertation provides a theoretical examination of amateur craft as a differential practice. Concepts drawn from an inter-disciplinary source base are used to define, characterise and elucidate features of amateur craft practice that have long been presumed superfluous and opposite to valorised ‘professional’ practice. I investigate the attraction, motivation and complexities that lie behind this widespread, yet largely understudied, phenomenon of modern culture. Studies of everyday life, social history, aesthetics, material culture, art criticism and craft theory help conceptualise the position of the amateur, and case studies from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – including the paint-by-number mania in 1950s USA, suburban chicken keeping, and amateur railway modelling – serve to substantiate the theoretical claims made. The thesis is not comprehensive in its coverage of either a specific craft medium or a particular chronology or geography. Instead the thesis is divided into three thematic chapters: amateur surface intervention, amateur space, and amateur time. These chapters reveal some of the unexpected consequences of subjecting amateur practice to serious study. The examples demonstrate how amateur craft practice is differential within capitalism,dependant on its structures while simultaneously stretching, refracting, and quietly subverting them. As a reprieve or a supplement to an individual’s primary occupation, the constrained freedom of amateur craft practice fulfils an essential role within modern life, providing a temporary moment of autonomous control over labour-power in which the world can be shaped anew

Exploring the Potential of Concept Associations for the Creative Generation of Linguistic Artifacts: A Case Study With Riddles and Rhetorical Figures

Automatic generation of linguistic artifacts is a problem that has been sporadically tackled over the years. The main goal of this paper is to explore how concept associations can be useful from a computational creativity point of view to generate some of these artifacts. We present an approach where finding associations between concepts that would not usually be considered as related (for example life and politics or diamond and concrete) could be the seed for the generation of creative and surprising linguistic artifacts such as rhetorical figures (life is like politics) and riddles (what is as hard as concrete?). Human volunteers evaluated the quality and appropriateness of the generated figures and riddles, and the results show that the concept associations obtained are useful for producing these kinds of creative artifacts

The foundation for a definition: an analytic analysis of the framework of practice in which art is made

The thesis provides an analysis of what any definition of 'art' that hopes to be extensionally adequate must include within its scope. The presumption throughout is that extension of art at any one time is that which is to be explained so that its intension should be discovered from its extension. The analysis proceeds through analysing how agents make artworks and what sorts of entities artworks are, in order to provide a framework within which any proffered definition, or objection to a definitional project, must operate. Thus, the point is not to critically examine the range of definitions already on offer but to set out those features of artistic practice that require inclusion within any definitional project. This project begins through demonstrating the inadequacy of empirical theories, through thought experiments using the method of indiscemibles drawn from the writings of Arthur Danto. This, in a modified form, is used throughout the thesis. There then follows an attempt to discover the most extreme cases with which a definition will need to contend through an investigation into the minimal limits of how artworks can be made and what things can be artworks. The result is that artworks have to be made so that they are identifiable as a distinct entity within a determinate category of art. A new form of'post-empirical minimalism' that will provide classificatory limit for post-empirical definitions in terms of artistic and other relational properties is identified and defended. The thesis closes with a proposal for simple ontology of art, consistent with the framework of making set out in the preceding chapters and which can be applied to many different definitional projects and which places the ontology of even the most avant-garde parts of artistic practice within the same basic categories of artwork ascanonical artworks