Migratory projects: pragmatics and new co-efficiencies in contemporary art

The thesis aims to examine, document and prove that the core strategies underlying and inherent within contemporary relational art practices stem not only from pragmatic philosophy but also from a number of key artists previously unaddressed within the context of these ideas. This thesis will provide a critical reference and document that previously has not yet existed in any clear form, locating existing literature, ideas and forms of art in linked sequences that collate and cohesively align the recent history, origins and definitions of this type of work.The thesis will demonstrate that co-efficient and relational art, are indeed the forerunners to contemporary pragmatic art forms, but crucially theses above definitions are in fact the constituent subcategories of the broader aspirational form of egalitarian pragmatic art that we are seeing today.The primary lines of enquiry are to show that American Pragmatism is an essential aspect of relational aesthetics that Nicolas Bourriaud has not examined in his key text. I also wish to prove that American Pragmatism was a major cultural and sociological influence leading to relational aesthetics that Bourriaud neglected to identify.This thesis intends not only to prove the veracity of the above observations but by extension the intentions of this document are also to function as an essential genealogy of the type of artwork that I am discussing, examining and revealing

The Climate Domesday Book

The Climate Domesday Book includes contributions from climate-conscious writers, artists, research scientists, designers and activists from Australia and the UK. The book is a speculative design, intended to provoke public thought and action on the climate emergency and to explore new ways of communicating through design and technology. It demonstrates how design research can bring together diverse disciplinary perspectives, to re-present and amplify a plurality of voices from across temporal and geographic zones. As a speculative design with multi-modal forms of communication (writing, talking, reading, listening, watching), its final manifestation is intended to show the power of human ingenuity and common cause. It is a book as a curated event; as a programme; as a protest; as a survey of ideas. It owes its coming into being to 1960’s counterculture, to the grand ideas of R.Buckminster Fuller and to the electric information age books of Marshall McLuhan, Jerome Agel and Quentin Fiore. In the creation of an experimental hybrid print-digital book on a topic as essential as the future of energy and the planet, design research becomes more than assembling and packaging (a ‘first order’ concern) but an uncertain, collaborative, and activist mode of knowledge-making (a ‘fourth order’).1 It attempts to make sense of a complex challenge (saving planetary species from extinction), invites dialogue between readers and writers and – eventually – stimulate action. It is a speculative design that provides space for contemplation, for inspiration, for engaging the pragmatic and the imaginary. “But it’s just a book. How can a book make a difference?” To which we would respond: “What world-changing events in the world have not been book-inspired?” We want it to be the first book of many: for others to take our technology, our designs and our ideas and make their own Climate Domesday Book in their city. Our Book-of-the-Future is a book, podcast, music video, poem, a window onto ground-breaking science, a manifesto-in-the-making, a clarion call, a gallery-within-a-gallery, a cultural census, a design of possibilities. It is more than a work of art. It is a design with purpose