The externalisation of the object: A critical study of object categories in the work of Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler, Jason Rhoades and Ryan Trecartin from 1974 to 2010

This PhD critically examines the relations between objects in a selection of installations, videos and video installations by affiliated artists with a shared historical and geographical lineage in Los Angeles, including Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler, Jason Rhoades and Ryan Trecartin. The timeframe of this research begins in the 1970s and continues into 2010. The title of this thesis is influenced by David Cronenberg’s film Videodrome, and its memorable rendering of the idea of the externalisation of objects from screens (both physically and metaphorically). Following an Introduction on the methodology of the thesis, the first chapter, titled ‘Horror Vacui’, proposes that the formation of what we can now see - through the work of Jason Rhoades and, an introduction to the work of Ryan Trecartin - as a new configuration of video installation was directly impacted by the transition of works/objects that are presented in the core chapters. The body of the PhD is presented in four core chapters, each focusing on a particular ‘type’ of object, each of which has been ‘invented’ by the author through their sustained historical/theoretical research, and which is examined in the artists’ works. They are: The Craft Object, The Gloopy Object, The Prop Object and The Suburban Object. In addition to engaging with art history, historiography, and the history of exhibitions, this PhD considers the methodologies and theories of Critical Race Studies, Feminist New Materialisms and Object-Oriented Philosophies/Ontologies in order to examine and mould new applications for these approaches within an art theory/art historical framework. Each chapter discusses these methods of analysis alongside an analysis of how the type of object (The Craft Object, The Gloopy Object, The Prop Object and The Suburban Object) is constituted and externalised, and how it functions. A new approach to considering the work of Kelly, McCarthy, Oursler, Rhoades and Trecartin is offered alongside a contribution to the expanding field of objectoriented research. This thesis forms a framework that can be used to speculate on a future trajectory for video installation and the physical, metaphysical and metaphorical relationship between the screen, the video and the object

Creation, Resistance, and Refacement: Postfuturist Storytelling, Cultural Flows, and the Remix

Constitutive of my dissertation is an exploration of contemporary literature and culture. Vital to my research is the notion and practice of the remix. Originating in music, it is perceived and deployed as a hybrid expressive mode combining textual, audio, and visual components. The text of the dissertation, accompanying photographs, and supplementary video files demonstrate this principal aspect. Focusing on the fusion of quest narratives and social activism, the dissertation looks at critical and creative vernaculars as forms of peaceful/peaceable resistance against multiple oppression. Reflecting some of the permeating modernist and postmodernist concerns, it emphasizes an understanding of postfuturist storytelling as cultural exchange in the intersection of the time axes. Reading the works of Stewart Home, Jeff Noon, and Kathy Acker, alongside critical insights of Terry Eagleton, Richard Rorty, Fredric Jameson, and McKenzie Wark, contextualizes contemporary idiosyncrasies historically, thereby rendering tradition remixable, rather than radically abandoning it. The remix investigates alternating cycles of noise and silence in the communication channel as a basis for the disambiguation of the misconception about the totality of discourse. The approach delineates vision of refacement: rebirth through subtonic solidarity of selfless, yet reindividualized, fellow humans engaged in enduring the hindrances to patient, persistent creation of a free culture based on love and trust

Digital Media and Textuality: From Creation to Archiving

Due to computers' ability to combine different semiotic modes, texts are no longer exclusively comprised of static images and mute words. How have digital media changed the way we write and read? What methods of textual and data analysis have emerged? How do we rescue digital artifacts from obsolescence? And how can digital media be used or taught inside classrooms? These and other questions are addressed in this volume that assembles contributions by artists, writers, scholars and editors. They offer a multiperspectival view on the way digital media have changed our notion of textuality

Digital Media and Textuality

Due to computers' ability to combine different semiotic modes, texts are no longer exclusively comprised of static images and mute words. How have digital media changed the way we write and read? What methods of textual and data analysis have emerged? How do we rescue digital artifacts from obsolescence? And how can digital media be used or taught inside classrooms? These and other questions are addressed in this volume that assembles contributions by artists, writers, scholars and editors such as Dene Grigar, Sandy Baldwin, Carlos Reis, and Frieder Nake. They offer a multiperspectival view on the way digital media have changed our notion of textuality

Digital Media and Textuality

Due to computers' ability to combine different semiotic modes, texts are no longer exclusively comprised of static images and mute words. How have digital media changed the way we write and read? What methods of textual and data analysis have emerged? How do we rescue digital artifacts from obsolescence? And how can digital media be used or taught inside classrooms? These and other questions are addressed in this volume that assembles contributions by artists, writers, scholars and editors such as Dene Grigar, Sandy Baldwin, Carlos Reis, and Frieder Nake. They offer a multiperspectival view on the way digital media have changed our notion of textuality

Surfing the interzones: posthuman geographies in twentieth century literature and film

This dissertation presents an analysis of posthuman texts through a discussion of posthuman landscapes, bodies, and communities in literature and film. In the introduction, I explore and situate the relatively recent term posthuman in relation to definitions proposed by other theorists, including N. Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, Hans Moravec, Max More, and Francis Fukuyama. I position the posthuman as being primarily celebratory about the collapse of restrictive human boundaries such as gender and race, yet also containing within it more disturbing elements of the uncanny and apocalyptic. My project deals primarily with hybrid texts, in which the posthuman intersects and overlaps with other posts, including postmodernism and postcolonialism. In the first chapter, I examine the novels comprising J.G. Ballard's disaster series, and apply Bakhtin's theories of hybridization, and Deleuze and Guattari's notions of voyagings, becomings, and bodies without organs to delineate the elements that constitute a posthuman landscape. In the second chapter, I address Andy Warhol, Valerie Solanas, and Werner Herzog in terms of issues of identity, mechanization, and replication with regards to the posthuman. In chapter three, I turn to posthuman cinema, and apply the notion of the cyborg to the work of David Lynch, as well as delineate the elements that constitute a posthuman film through a discussion of the Danish Dogme 95 film movement. In chapter four, I extend my discussion of modified bodies to address texts by Iain Banks and Angela Carter in terms of gender disruptions and new myths for the posthuman age. The final chapter, Second Life vs. The Mole People, examines both the optimism that the posthuman provides and also th tangible, social cost of the posthuman, through a juxtaposition of the elite metaverse of Second Life with the homeless subway tunnel dwellers in New York City, termed the mole people

Damien Hirst and the legacy of the sublime in contemporary art and culture

Research Questions: • How can we understand the legacies of the eighteenth-century sublime in contemporary culture – including commercialised and commodified forms? • What are the insistent reiterations of tropes, affects and themes of the sublime doing in contemporary art and culture? • How are the aesthetic forms of the sublime bound in to economic, social and political histories? • What happens when we read Hirst in terms of the histories of the sublime? And the sublime through Hirst? • The work also more generally sets out to examine the cultural forms of our own global-capitalist moment, and to think this within the longer histories of capital. Research Context • Hirst is a highly successful artist but there is a dearth of serious critical writing about him. Most extant work on the yBas was produced in the 90s, as part of a critical polemic around the work. My own work starts from the historical distance which is now opening up between then and now to read Hirst as srt history. • The work also positions itself with regard to a currently burgeoning body of literature around the sublime. I draw on the different approaches of aesthetics, criticism and cultural history to read the relation between past and present forms of the sublime. • My work focuses on the intertwinement of the sublime (from its earliest histories) with commodified culture, rather than just high culture. Research Methods • Hirst is treated as a cultural symptom. • The work investigates forms of historical repetition (Nachträglichkeit, Nachleben, figurality, hauntology, etc.) • Hirst is a focal point for a wider exploration of a wide-ranging cultural history. Other objects of inquiry include: Alexander Pope and the Scriblerians, Bertolt Brecht, John Singleton Copley, James Thomson, Bruegel the Elder, Piranesi, Wordsworth, Steven Spielberg, Mary Shelley and Emile Zola. • My approach is broadly Marxian, but I also critically interrogate Marx, and draw on other approaches including those of Freud, Lyotard, Derrida and Braudel. • Particular attention is given to the early eighteenth century. Findings: • The strength of Hirst’s best work stems from its condensation of social contradiction into complex, haunting images – images which are in turn haunted by the histories of sublimity, an aesthetic formed in, and which also serves to help form, capital’s imaginary. Hirst and the sublime are bound in to a representational logic of an imperialism common to our own moment and that of early modernity. Such links to the imperialist imaginary belie the use of the sublime by contemporary leftist theorists (such as Lyotard) to valorize the sublime

Embodied politics and extreme disgust: an investigation into the meanings of bodily order and bodily disorder, with particular reference to the work of William Burroughs and David Cronenberg

This thesis is an analysis of the ways in which images of bodily disgust function in social conflicts. It considers the necessary embodiment of political struggle: that is, the ways in which inequalities are sustained and contested through the material forms taken by human bodies and the meanings attached to bodily states. In chapter one I map out the theoretical grounding for an inquiry into embodiment, by showing how the physical forms taken by bodies are produced by social practices. I argue that ‘the body’ should be seen as a biological product, a ‘body project’, regulated and transformed by its environment. This in turn leads me to a consideration of how such body-shapings sustain regimes of power through constructing for subjects physical forms which are designed to maintain existing systems of inequality. Through a reading of Michel Foucault’s work, I show how such bodies are also able to resist power by making use of the material and discursive structures which seek, but fail, to render them wholly submissive. In chapter two I look at the ways in which the body acts as a map of the psyche, producing a subject which understands itself in terms of its experience of its body parts. I also consider how the body acts as a social symbol, encoding anxieties about the society that it inhabits. By considering both psychoanalytic accounts, and the work of Mary Douglas, I interrogate how concepts of order, form, and integrity become central to embodied subjectivity. In chapter three I consider how, in the Naked Lunch Quartet, William Burroughs represents the body as under threat from repulsive external substances, and how his depiction of such substances in fact relies on a notion of body matter itself as repulsive. I will show how this results from his conceptualization of bodily materiality as antithetical to freedom, and I argue that by demonstrating the impossibility of escaping from acts of invasion and possession, Burroughs's texts in fact undermine the libertarian position that he adopts. In chapter four I develop this argument through a comparison with Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection. I suggest that his representation of abject bodies enables Burroughs to critique the invasive mechanisms of authority, but requires that he collude with the stigmatizing discourses of authority in order to adopt such a position. In particular I consider how this affects his representation of gender. In chapter five I show how David Cronenberg's Shivers may be read as a film that both sustains and critiques the notion of innate bodily disorder. I argue that this is derived from his reliance upon notions of a hierarchy of bodies derived from inequalities of race and class. In chapter six I develop this critique with a reading of Cronenberg's The Fly. I suggest that this film is much more explicit about the fact that bodily chaos is in fact a state experienced by the socially excluded. It offers a critique of the processes by which we are made to feel disgust at our bodies, suggesting that disgust inaugurates a logic of paranoid purification, which in fact impedes the possibilities of the acceptance of those bodies which fall outside certain social limits. Finally, in my conclusion, I look at how Cronenberg's Rabid might be seen as a compendium of the issues of embodied politics, and use this to suggest possible directions in which the work of this thesis might be extended

Dossier LANY 2001-2008

Landscape Agency New York was founded by Gavin Keeney, c.1997, and encompassed a wide array of activities and effects – e.g., research, writing, design, consulting, and teaching. /S/OMA (Syntactical Operations Metaphorical Affects) was the mobile, and sometimes global design and teaching module within LANY, focusing primarily on entirely hypothetical and/or irreal projects, many becoming the foundation for lectures and courses delivered at institutions in the US, Canada, Australia, and Europe, from 2003 to 2007. Lastly, the LANY Archive-Grotto was established following publication of On the Nature of Things: Contemporary American Landscape Architecture (Birkhauser, 2001), primarily as a means of escaping the then-formulaic production of texts common to Landscape Architecture and Architecture