The Machine as Art/ The Machine as Artist

The articles collected in this volume from the two companion Arts Special Issues, “The Machine as Art (in the 20th Century)” and “The Machine as Artist (in the 21st Century)”, represent a unique scholarly resource: analyses by artists, scientists, and engineers, as well as art historians, covering not only the current (and astounding) rapprochement between art and technology but also the vital post-World War II period that has led up to it; this collection is also distinguished by several of the contributors being prominent individuals within their own fields, or as artists who have actually participated in the still unfolding events with which it is concerne

'Bere in thy mynde': Phantasms, Parchment and Late Medieval Visual Culture

This thesis considers the visual and material culture of medieval phantasms (phantasmata), sensory perceptions impressed on the mind in the form of mental images. Although medieval scholars asserted that ‘thinking’ necessitates phantasms, a form of images, in modern scholarship they have been widely eschewed by art historians and historians of medieval visual culture. The thesis provides a detailed analysis of the vernacular perception of phantasms as well as how this informed viewers’ attitudes towards objects, specifically illuminated manuscripts. Traditionally, scholars have approached phantasms from a philosophical and scholastic point of view. The thesis argues that scholars need to go beyond these post-Aristotelian considerations of phantasms and take visual and material culture into account. Phantasms frame the thesis: their defining characteristics offer interpretative perspectives grounded in the bodily incorporation of images into phantasms. Focusing on notions of (in)visibility, the project considers the representational strategies used to convey mental images. In focusing on the similarities between parchment and skin in fifteenth-century English prayer rolls and the fourteenth-century French treatise Livre de vie, the dissertation further explores questions of likeness and potentiality. Finally, phantasms are impressed on the mind. Examining devotional rolls containing the O Vernicle prayer, the thesis draws on medical and devotional conceptions of skin and flesh to conceptualise the ‘imprint’ function of corporeal yet invisible phantasms and to apprehend them as membrane-like images. Considering devotional, lay, anatomical, theological and philosophical illuminated manuscripts, this thesis argues that visible images and mental phantasms form a single entity, existing through the different levels of the visuality spectrum. As well as opening up a series of theoretical considerations on phantasms, it produces an object-based methodology to critically apprehend phantasms as a worthy object of study for historians of visual culture

Reading Dorothy Hewett as boundary writer

This thesis locates the writings of Dorothy Hewett in a firm relationship with postmodern thought. The argument focuses on evidence that the dominant aesthetic of Hewett\u27s writing is the feminine sublime which comprises a commitment to uncertainty. In this modality, reason does not foreclose on the action of the imagination in the sublime moment. The revised dynamic is explored with an emphasis on the radical nature of the doubt in question. It reflects a deliberate resistance to certainty, and fol1ows from Hewett\u27s early experience with communism. At a formal level, in Hewett\u27s texts, the commitment to uncertainty is not least apparent in layered operations of the sublime aesthetic within the writing. The feminine sublime also operates in the orientations of Hewett\u27s subject construction, in which a complex sense of identity as processual and divided is clear. It is evident in thematic and political aspects of the writing which are inflected towards uncertainty in various ways and conform to this mode of the sublime. In this regard, the thesis illustrates, Hewett\u27s engagements with the themes of death and the maternal and her admissions of the irrational are exemplary. Such inflections produce moments of ethical tension, contradictions, ambivalences and accommodations of incommensurability, some of which are examined here. Hewett\u27s diverse and wide-ranging engagements with genre provide another instance of the commitment to uncertainty, and this governs the selection of texts addressed in the thesis. The emphasis is on Hewett\u27s prose writings. Their aesthetic diversity is produced, in part, by literary precedents and multiple discourses, which feed into the writing as inclusiveness, both of thought and artistry. The thesis addresses some of these and argues that, combined, these factors position Hewett as a writer with a postmodern sensibility

Paintingphotogdigital: From Hybridity to Synthesis in the Age of Medium Equivalence

This thesis questions whether it is possible to synthesise material-based painting, photography, and digitally created and manipulated imagery in single artworks. To answer this question, a practice-based research of experiments explores physically conjoining painting with photography and the digital in picture-making. The investigation tests painting in its relationship with the other mediums, which adds to the current debates around painting’s position in contemporary art practices including “painting in the expanded field.” Painting has always had a contested relationship with photography, with the older discipline adopting the newer medium’s visual languages whilst freeing itself from the constraints of representation. For nearly two hundred years, painting’s repositioning in relation to photography has constantly redefined the traditional medium’s meaning and ensured its validity as a practice is re-asserted. As new data-based technologies expand into the aesthetic consciousness, painting also now locates itself against the digital to continue this self-renewal. However, whilst painters site their medium against either photography or the digital, there is little in the current art discourse that engages material-based painting with photography and the digital in direct combination as a means of further interrogating two-dimensional image-making. It is surprising that in a post-medium age, where artists undertake heterogeneous modes of art-making, such practice is under-explored. Conjoining material-based painting with photography and the digital in artworks provides a means of testing painting against new technologies; foregrounding painting in this conjunction adds to understandings of that medium’s role in a digitally media-saturated age. Initial practice of creating hybrid painted-on-photographs leads to the question of whether it is possible to synthesise these mediums in single pictures. This raises further questions as to how synthesis might be achieved, what attempting synthesis reveals about painting’s nature, and why attempting synthesis is important to the contemporary visual arts dialogue? To answer these questions, practical research attempts to conjoin the mediums visually, physically, and methodologically. Jerrold Levinson’s and Joseph Yasser’s theories of hybridity and synthesis of art forms conceptually inform the practical application of physically combining the mediums in two-dimensional artworks. Richard Wollheim’s theory of “seeing-in” paintings and Ernst H. Gombrich’s theory of differentiated viewing of pictures are drawn on to analyse hybridised and synthesised viewing experiences of the conjoined pictures. Concepts of erasure in art are employed to critically inform the deconstruction of hierarchical oppositions of the mediums, set within a dialectical materialist framework. Relevant contemporary art practices that investigate relationships between painting, photography, and the digital are surveyed to contextualise the practice. The research begins to fill the gap in practices and the literature around investigations into the relationship of the three mediums together, which contributes to understanding painting’s ontological nature in the digital age

Planetary Praxes: Performing Humanity under Ecological Emergency

“Planetary Praxes” theorizes new forms of human/nonhuman relationships developing in response to the rapidly increasing disruption of known and lived environmental norms. Through the interdisciplinary lens of performance, I theorize the planetary as a rubric for analyzing this shift, as it emphasizes the nonhuman and the earth’s inherent alterity. This intervention derives from two conceptual shifts: the material conditions of the ecological emergency which foreground the connections among humans and planetary others, and the theorization of the Anthropocene, which emphasizes the geological power of the human species. Both produce “planetary imaginaries” best rendered through performance. Further, I argue that the ecological changes under the label “climate change” demands considerations of the planetary in order to imagine alternative environmental futures. I examine a variety of practices—political protest, museum exhibition, and artistic production—which I argue have become sites for negotiating ecological relationships. I ask how these relationships form under the conditions of planetary emergency, including global warming, environmental racism, ocean acidification, the inequities of global capitalism, and biodiversity loss. These rapidly shifting ecological (and political) circumstances rework an extensive history of articulating humanity in relation (or in opposition) to nature. Ultimately, I argue that identifying and understanding these emerging ways of being, which I call planetary praxes, are imperative to forge a future of ecological justice. I show how a range of planetary praxes—ways of being human—are developing during this current time of environmental upheaval. These include practices that uphold Eurocentric ways of being that perpetuate human exceptionalism and the instrumentalization of nature, as well as performance practices that can enable new ways of living by creating new relations between humans and nonhumans, displacing the centrality of humanity, and imagining new relationships to nature. This project demonstrates the significance of performance as a lens to understand how we move through the world. By attending to the ways humanity is a praxis—a doing, a performance—we might move toward those forms which are less violent and more just