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(2021)ThesisThe heart has long been a recurrent motif in paintings, drawings and sculptures, yet its actual physiological functioning is rarely represented. Heartbeats (the contractions of the heart) and the pulse (the force of blood flow through the arteries) are signs that show the work it does rather than depict the heart per se. Technoscientific advances in monitoring heartbeats and pulses in the nineteenth century—such as René Laennec’s stethoscope, Étienne-Jules Marey’s sphygmograph and chronophotograph, and Willem Einthoven’s electrocardiograph—transformed the movements of the heart into audible and visual representations and in turn, transformed humans into technological entities. Artists would later recognize in the language of these scientific technologies a way of mingling the inner with the outer, the physical with the technological, and data with flesh. Artworks using heartbeats were most importantly manifested in media arts, conceptual art, works in music and sound, installations and performances starting in the late 1950s, with an increasing frequency to the present. Scientific and medical instrumentation combined with time-based media and events (texts, durational performances, film, video, audio, digital technologies, etc.) in important works by Yoko Ono, Mark Boyle, Joan Hills, Heinz Mack, Brian O’Doherty, Allan Kaprow, Éliane Radigue, Jean Dupuy, Linda Montano and Teresa Burga incorporated heartbeats and pulses, a legacy continued by Catherine Richards, Mona Hatoum, Sasaki, Christian Boltanski, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, among other artists. These works reveal the heartbeat as a catalyst for complex entanglements between technology, corporeality, and ontology that demolish binary thinking. Despite the abundance of artistic activity and the centrality of heartbeats as our most vital sign, Heartbeats in the Arts is the first historical study of ‘heartbeat artworks’ over that last half-century. Using archival research, interviews and correspondence, the thesis describes works in detail, discusses their contexts and development, and examines the larger classes and contours of this neglected area of artistic activity.
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(2022)ThesisThis research explores a novel approach to the visual enhancement of orchestral performance through interdisciplinary creative practice. The dissertation and practice-based research argue that current visual enhancements of orchestral performance fail to meaningfully engage audiences with the musical performance, due to an overreliance on extrinsic imagery and use of imagery shaped by an excessive emphasis on the score and the composer, known as the work-concept. It has been widely documented that contemporary audiences for classical music are declining, and the engagement of new audiences has thus become a priority for symphony orchestras and researchers internationally. In response to these observations, the research identifies musical gesture as an underexplored design material in the visual enhancement of orchestral performance. Musical gesture is central to the practice of musicians and, furthermore, has been found to enhance the engagement and musical perception of audiences new to classical music. The research therefore employs a practice-based methodology to explore the visual augmentation of musical gesture in performance through virtual reality technology. Social anthropologist Tim Ingold’s theories of the meshwork and making are employed to reframe and explain orchestral performance as a performance meshwork for the purposes of visually communicating the creative, collaborative, relational and processual nature of music performance through musical gesture. The research also examines and expands on Ingold’s idea of the meshwork as a framework for the interdisciplinary research in design and music. The practice-based research explores the communicative potential of musical gesture within the performance meshwork through a specific study of conducting gesture, proposing that the traces created by the movement of the conductor generate a performance annotation. The research develops gestural tracing as an interdisciplinary method for creating performance annotations that emphasise and redefine the conductor in performance as simultaneously a musician and a visual communicator. By integrating the performance annotation into the audience’s line of sight through new technologies, the research reimagines the traditional notion of the visual listening guide as a novel and dynamic form. Ultimately, this research examines augmented musical gesture as a visual description of orchestral performance and proposes this as an engagement strategy for new audiences. In so doing, the research remakes orchestral performance as a visual experience augmented with imagery generated from within the making of the performance itself to achieve this.
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(2022)ThesisCancer persists as a major public health concern with poor survival rates for aggressive tumours. Nanotechnology offers opportunities to develop delivery vehicles (nanoparticles) which can improve drug efficacy in cancer cells while reducing collateral toxicity caused by many current therapies. A key challenge in the clinical translation of therapeutic nanoparticles stems from the complexities of drug delivery; namely a need for greater understanding of how the biophysical characteristics of nanoparticles affects their tumour penetration and cell uptake. This thesis sought to address this challenge, developing advanced imaging and analysis methodologies to evaluate nanoparticle uptake and efficacy in quantitative cell models. We initially investigated the capability of rapid fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy to measure nanoparticle cellular uptake. Results showcased the ability of this emerging quantitative imaging approach to track and quantify changes in nanoparticle dynamics on a second time scale, localising significant changes in nanoparticle lifetime with uptake across extracellular and nuclear boundaries in live cells. Broadening our study into tumour models which recapitulate key elements of the tumour microenvironment, glioblastoma, neuroblastoma and non-small cell lung cancer cells were grown as 3D spheroids and used to study the penetration kinetics of nanoparticles with confocal microscopy. The development of rigorous analysis methods enabled direct evaluation of nanoparticle kinetics. Subsequent study by lightsheet microscopy and real-time force imaging cytometry identified that nanoparticle uptake was influenced not only by nanoparticle size but also the stiffness and density of the cell model. Applying these analyses to functionalised nanoparticles for brain cancer delivery, we identified that lactoferrin coated nanoparticles (Lf-NP) had enhanced penetration kinetics. Low-density lipoprotein receptor (LRP1), for which lactoferrin is a key ligand, was shown to be highly expressed on the blood-brain barrier (BBB) and in glioblastoma. Following, in vitro models identified that Lf-NP could cross the BBB, and drug-loaded iterations of these nanoparticles were revealed to have elevated efficacy against glioblastoma cells. Collectively, these findings showcase methods to systematically visualise and quantify nanoparticle tumour cell uptake and highlight functionalised drug-loaded nanoparticles for further investigation in brain cancer.
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(2021)ThesisThis thesis is concerned with the nexus between curating and historiography in museums of contemporary art. Curatorial practice in this context is inflected by the limits and hierarchies of collections. But it is also uniquely placed to reconfigure their archival operation along more inclusive and reflexive lines. This is not only a matter of embracing new art historical lineages, or mobilising collections to present fresh perspectives on the past. Rather, the task demands a more fundamental troubling of the museum’s possessive logic, without abandoning its historical mandate. In this thesis, I argue that contemporary artistic practice offers productive and meaningful provocations for this undertaking. More specifically, I focus on artworks borne of the Australian context where I live and work, which address the settler-colonial complex in ways that bring histories, places and bodies into dialogue. Through case studies, I build my argument around a series of devices central to the methodology of three artists: continuity for Dale Harding, contingency for Tom Nicholson, and counter-narratives for Richard Bell. Additionally, the chapter on my own method extrapolates on Bianca Hester’s approach to context. Because they are fundamentally constituted in ways that cannot be fully possessed by institutions, the artworks I address foreshadow a future in which the historiographic role of collections might become disentangled from the Western concept of property. In its place, a less transactional, less hierarchical and more relational model of custodianship could emerge. My research suggests the nascent contours of this paradigm, which reorients the role of the curator away from archiving objects as a relatively static representation of the past and towards sustaining artistic processes as a means of actualising cultural history in the ongoing present. Australia offers a particularly rich place for exploring this subject, but it is a subject no less pertinent globally. In other settler-colonial contexts and beyond, museums are being called upon to address their ideological inheritance as a product of the Western Enlightenment. Reckoning with their innately hegemonic foundations and flexing to meet other cultural epistemologies in meaningful ways will be critical to ensuring that they remain distinct and relevant in the twenty-first century.
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(2023)ThesisWater is constantly transforming between bodies and social structures; yet it is also increasingly politicised and threatened by the current climate crisis. In response to both its transformative ubiquity and the urgency of its plight, a new wave of contemporary artists is creating distinctive ways to engage with this most fundamental of elements. Throughout this thesis I argue for the centrality of water to art made in the context of the climate crisis and the development of a field of water-based thinkers and makers that I name the Hydrocene. This wet ontological turn within eco-aesthetics names, connects and elevates artistic practices that think with water and redefine current anthropocentric and environmentally destructive ways of relating to water. The Hydrocene is proposed both as a disruptive epoch and as a curatorial theory that examines and centres the tide of art going into the blue. Across five interweaving case studies of Swamp, River, Ocean, Fog and Ice, the hydrological cycle is reimagined, and I explicate distinct hydro-artistic methods these artists engage in. The thesis builds a new chapter of eco-aesthetics that binds ‘Watery Makers’ such as artists Latai Taumoepeau, Signe Johannessen, Gabriella Hirst, Badger Bates, Anja Örn and Leanne Tobin in contemporary art with ‘Watery Thinkers’ in feminist environmental humanities such as Astrida Neimanis, Cecilia Åsberg, Cecilia Chen and Stefanie Hessler. The thesis addresses the need for reimagined perspectives on the water crisis through hydrofeminist, care-based, planetary thinking and by learning from the knowledge and agency of water itself. The Hydrocene presents an urgent and timely perspective on eco-visionary artists’ power to transform human–water relations. By rethinking the potential of the curatorial, the Hydrocene as both a disruptive epoch and curatorial theory is a confluence of the distinct waters of contemporary art and curatorial practice, ecological and climate concerns, environmental humanities and watery theory. The Hydrocene enriches all these disciplines and underpins the role of art in challenging dominant and destructive anthropocentric human–water relations.
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Tuning Sensory Terroir : Mapping correspondences between sound and wine in a crossmodal art practice(2020)ThesisThis practice-led thesis is a creative exploration of crossmodal correspondences, the systematic association of sensory features from different modalities. It identifies correspondences between elements of gustation and audition that originate from this universal trait of perception, as distinct from neurological synesthesia. How these correspondences might be applied in the creation of crossmodal art is investigated, a category proposed as more appropriate for art that uses these shared correspondences. These inquiries are framed within the notion of sensory terroir, a metaphor harvested from the French concept of terroir; the symbiotic environmental and human factors that combine to create the distinctive character of a wine from a specific place. Sensory terroir was conceived to evoke the complex intersecting conceptual, affective, personal, and cultural systems linked through the senses in aesthetic experience. Wine is the gustatory focus, while the sounds employed – pure tones, musical features, and experimental sound works – extend the scope of prior research in this area from conventional musical genres to the wider field of creative experimental sound practice. Potential correspondences were suggested through reflective sensory and creative practices that draw on a professional background in both sound, and wine tasting and writing. This process was informed by crossmodal science and embodied theories of cognition and linguistics. Correspondences were investigated through the making of and responses to creative works produced throughout the project, as well as empirical studies using the methodologies of sensory science and experimental psychology. Novel methods were developed to attend to and tune audio-gustatory correspondences in creative contexts. These include sensory and temporal oenosthetic mapping systems to assist in making connections between a wine’s sensory characters and sonic/musical properties, and the synchronisation of their spatiotemporal unfolding. Contemplative deep sensing practices were explored to promote expanded multisensory awareness conducive to engaging with correspondences in art practice and reception. Understandings are applied to the concluding project, Sensory Terroir. An embodiment of the concept of sensory terroir, it illustrates how such works of crossmodal art might encourage and exercise the multisensory imagination, thereby offering access into a shared extrasensual world that could otherwise remain overlooked.
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(2023)ThesisThis practice-based research project generates artistic practices that critically engage with machine learning to enact and enable process-oriented modes of creative coding. It offers a creative coding practice that encounters the complex relations and temporalities of code’s processuality, where everything – data, algorithms, subroutines, code modules, models, coders and more – are actively co-composing and continuously generating. The movement toward creative machine learning presents a significant shift in the ways artists and designers conceive and practise creative code. However, many contemporary machine learning- driven artworks, including critical examples, fail to contemplate a new range of concerns, forces and contingencies that processually eventuate within these changed conditions of coding. Instead, my research contributes to newer artistic approaches that deal with the contingencies, events and burgeoning sensibilities of machine learning-based creative coding. Throughout this dissertation, I draw on a range of process-based thinking to articulate a process-oriented creative coding, from Adrian Mackenzie and Luciana Parisi, who specifically address computation, through to Erin Manning and Brian Massumi’s work on process and (creative) practice. Through generating a series of experimental algorithmic ‘books’ via coding, I developed a coding practice and understanding of code as a part of an active architecture of relation, itself mobile through processual relationality. These algorithmic books materialised as book-objects. These experiments led to the creation of two artworks, Conversation Theory and Infinite Descriptor, where I began to investigate a processuality of and for machine learning architectures. I diagram how machine learning individuates across a myriad of diverse elements, observations, accumulations and processes that are ongoing and partial elaborations. As an investigation of machine learning’s processuality, this research contributes another sensibility, which I term an ongoingness, of and for creative machine learning. Ongoingness regards the conditions for coding as iteratively and collectively shaped, re-patterning in ambulatory non-representational movements. Ongoingness gestures toward both a creative coding practice that works with indeterminacies of code within encounters and facilitates experiences with creative machine learning in which indeterminacies linger.
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(2023)ThesisThe intersection of decolonial theory and media archaeology points to a framing of the stereoscopic as not just a technology, but a metaphor for an aesthetic process or methodology. However, the mechanics of a stereoscopic worldview are underexplored within decolonial aesthetics and assumed decoloniality in the deployment of the metaphor is often extended to practice and analysis of other 3D work. Given the coloniality of UNESCO's World Heritage system and historical stereography and increasing academic and popular interest in more advanced 3D imaging of heritage sites, it is necessary to interrogate the relationships among these systems, sites, methods, and outputs. The stereoscopic as methodology is a process of aligning ‘homologous rays’ between disparate epistemologies and utilising ‘parallax’ to ‘bring into relief’ areas for attention in decolonising research processes. In Stereo explores the implications of such an approach for visual heritage research, framed by the medium of the stereographic library to enable clear conceptualisation of ‘stereo’ as both metonym and concrete expression of de/coloniality. Analysis of the Keystone View Company’s Tour of the World explicates the form’s coloniality and de/colonising potential, implemented in practice-led research utilising stereography and the Latin American testimonio, situating the latter as a more precisely de/colonising methodology for oral histories. ‘Homologous rays’ are traced and ‘parallax’ identified between the stereographic library and the World Heritage system, along with the method and medium of testimonio, and between sites classified by UNESCO as ‘in danger’ – Potosi in Bolivia, and Bethlehem/Battir in Palestine. Heritage is central to these sites' contemporary decolonial political and aesthetic strategies, located within distinct cultural, temporal, and strategic contexts, while stereography and testimonio offer relevant parallel tensions and contradictions regarding reality and mediation, presence and absence, revelation and concealment, and fact and fiction. The ‘image’ brought into view by these convergences and divergences has guided methodological, aesthetic, and curatorial decision-making. As such, In Stereo addresses both the effects of decolonial aesthetics on the production and exhibition of 3D visualisation, of and in contested heritage contexts, as well as the broader potential for a ‘stereo’ approach to de/colonising aesthetic praxis as a form of virtual reality.
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(2023)ThesisThis practice-led research project explores how sparkle and shine function in global capitalist consumer environments and how they can be mobilised in a contemporary art practice that uses handmade and labour-intensive processes. The alluring aesthetic qualities of sparkle and shine are frequently used in consumer environments to create promises of fulfilment that distract from the reality of mundane daily life and the inner workings of global capitalism. From an artistic perspective, the excessive employment of sparkle and shine in consumer environments provides abundant opportunity for striking aesthetic possibilities to be explored. However, despite their ubiquity in consumer contexts, sparkle and shine have been under-explored in aesthetic philosophy and scarcely explored materially in visual art practices over the past century. Artists such as Rebecca Baumann and Mickalene Thomas offer examples of how contemporary artists can incorporate sparkly materials in their work to engage with the human relationship with shiny consumer items and artifice. In order to communicate the power of sparkle and shine in global capitalism, this project aims to offer new insights into specific artistic strategies that exploit lightreflective materials from the consumer world and embrace processes that signal to the human handmade object to re-signify and aestheticise consumer environments.