Textual and presentational work for MA Contemporary Art Theory
Diagnostic essay, November 2011
Conflicts and Negotiations as Spatial Practices (special subject), April 2012
Dissonant Images and Questions of Evidence (special subject), April 2012
Dissertation symposium, June 2012
Dissertation, September 2012
Goldsmiths College, University of London
Programs:
Word, PowerPoint, Photoshop, InDesign, iMovie, Final Cut Pro.
Skills:
University Masters level knowledge of artistic, aesthetic and cultural theory including practical theories of audience reception. Graphics. Presenting ideas in informal and formal settings in an effective oral and visual manner. Communication of ideas to the public. Academic research and analysis.
Diagnostic essay, November 2011 (3,000 words)
BODY/WEAPON: TELESCOPED(?)
The primacy of perception and the representation of performative acts in art practice.
A comparison of two representations of one major event: Lieven De Boeck, Fireworks 11. Le Bleu du Ciel. 11.09.01 (2002) and Gerhard Richter, September (2005).
"The artistic representation of a terrorist event produces a chaotic and rupturing lamination. It is a telescoping act filtering the lamination through the lenses of the artist’s gaze. The viewer, looking upon this representation, performs their own violent and personal delamination. The fragments of the performance are uncovered, minus the heat and the noise. The effect is chilling.
"Painting, photography, drawing and sculpture as representational devices render the act still and silent. The act was never meant to be still and silent. Often in the aftermaths of explosive acts witnesses comment on how still and silent they remember it being (perhaps this is relative to the preceding chaos). Representation perpetuates this stunned moment, the still contemplative silence, frozen in time."
Diagnostic essay submission
Diagnostic essay submission
Conflicts and Negotiations as Spatial Practices (special subject), April 2012 (8,000 words)
Law - Conflict - Space as Becoming
Law - Conflict - Space as Becoming
The law and the rupture: the city and the multiple.
Moments of conflict, or violence, in cities that expose the paradigms (or apparatuses) operating within that city. Read through the architectures of: 1957 Algiers, 1968 Paris, 1975 Belfast, 1989 Bucharest, 1993 Sarajevo, 2004 Buenos Aires and 2011 London.
"Being political is no longer an option but a consequence of inhabiting space. How you inhabit the urban
influences the outcome of your actions...
"Architecture and the production of the urban form a permanent record of the aspirations of governments. The new visual grammar easily recognises a betrayal of trust. So architecture must transcend its limitations to respond to the desire of people for space as Becoming in the exercise of their freedom. [1] Therefore architecture ethically understood must provide the opportunity for space as Becoming to enable effective states of exception."
[1] Michel Foucault and Paul Rabinow “Space, Knowledge, Power”, p.355.
Conflicts and Negotiations essay submission
Conflicts and Negotiations essay submission
Dissonant Images and Questions of Evidence (special subject), April 2012
Individual project - essay (6,000 words plus accompanying film including cuts from films mentioned in essay, with author notes)
Viewing the Violent
The media’s role in the production and capture of violent events.
Witness and responsibility, focusing on Sarajevo, Bosnia Herzegovina 1992-1996.
"How do you make an audience react? Why would an audience not react? Do you need to screen or select an audience in order to provoke action?"
"Every image has a negative and positive mode: there is no neutral image and images always demand interpretation. Therefore there is no such thing as the simple image. Images are here and now, there and then... The fact that images can miss-fire challenges the idea that the public arena is always a sphere of reason and self-evidence. [1] One cannot count on the ethical obviousness of an image. Information is not enough: it is a question of empathy for the Other. We must learn to see here in order to see elsewhere to break the inevitable cycle of violence. [2]"
[1] Thomas Keenan “Publicity and Indifference: media, surveillance, ‘humanitarian intervention”, p.10.
[2] Ici et Ailleurs, 1975. [Film, feature] Directed by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville.
Group project - film (alongside essay, content not connected)
Bodies: 2012
Short film (19:36) presenting thoughts on the London 2012 Olympic Games. Film not available online due to copyright restrictions.
"The athlete's body, or Olympic body, becomes a strange site of over-signification, a repository in which fantasies of national pride and universalist idealism are deposited. We wanted to explode the fallacy of Olympic semiology and make explicit the proximity of recreational spectacle to sovereign modes of policing the social body."
Dissonant Images essay submission
Dissonant Images essay submission
Stills from Bodies:2012
Dissertation symposium, June 2012 (20 minutes for presentation, 10 minutes for questions)
FORUM - gaze, reportage, violence, betrayal
The role of gaze and its representation in the production and regime(s) of forums, being space, identity, humanity and revolution.
An opportunity to present progress in dissertation research/writing and to receive feedback from peers and different tutors. The discussion evolving from this symposium influences the next stages in the dissertation.
"The image is a space as Becoming and I want to know how you control it."
Dissertation symposium slides (selection)
Dissertation symposium handout
Dissertation, September 2012 (15,000 words plus accompanying film including cuts from films mentioned in essay, with author notes)
Representation - politics, authority and the image
Representation - politics, authority and the image
Agency in the iconography of truth
“It is the function, however, of all action, as distinguished from mere behaviour, to interrupt what otherwise would have proceeded automatically and therefore predictably.” (Hannah Arendt) [1]
[1] Hannah Arendt, On Violence. Florida, USA: Harcourt Books, 1969, p.30-31.
"Ultimately the image that becomes an image-forum and therefore a space of Becoming is the image that exists in that in-between space of responsibility: we are at once acting-in and acted-upon by the political domain and it is the same in the visual domain. The image must both change us and allow us to change it in return. The image is a forum and we must act in it."
Dissertation submission
Dissertation submission
