Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Recalling Walden: Thoreau's Embodied Aesthetics And Australian Writings On Place, John Charles Ryan

Research outputs 2011

This essay argues that the works of the nineteenth-century American philosopher, poet, and naturalist Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) have moulded Australian place writings of the last one hundred years. Beginning with the foundational work into Australian literature done by the American critics C. Hartley Grattan (1902-1980), A. Grove Day (1904-1994), and Joseph Jones (1908-1999), the article goes on to contextualize the discussion in the contemporary transhemispherical scholarship of Australian literary historian Harry Heseltine and American ecocritic Robert Zeller. Both syncretic and embodied, Thoreau’s literary approach to place draws from a fusion of multi-sensory experience, ethnographic inquiry, and bodily participation in …

The Evaluation Of Nonlinear Musical Structures, Lindsay Vickery

Research outputs 2011

No abstract provided.

The Opening And The Ending Of Paul Valéry's "Fragments Of The 'Narcissus'": A Case Study For Translators, David Elder

Research outputs 2011

This paper will concentrate on what I recently called the formal content of the text for translators. Translation is an incomparable school of writing, and poetry in particular requires the development of specific linguistic skills in an essentially bicultural framework. A brief introduction to Valéry’s poetics will be followed by a study of the complex interactions between form and meaning in the opening and closing lines of his “Fragments of the “Narcissus’” with special reference to certain pages from his notebooks and other manuscripts. The objective here is to highlight some of his key aesthetic preoccupations before embarking on the …

Screen Scores: New Media Music Manuscripts, Cat Hope, Lindsay Vickery

Research outputs 2011

This paper examines the screening of music notations and the impact of this configuration in a live music performance situation. Before the development of graphical computing, Traditional music notation, was rarely shared with the anyone other than other musicians, composers and analysts; let alone displayed during the performance. However, some composers experiment with scores and their visual presence in performance by employing automated ‘score-players’ or actual films specifically developed to be interpreted by musicians. This paper raises some questions and possibilities for this new way of sharing musical qualities of composition and performance.

The Possibilities Of Novel Formal Structures Through Computer Controlled Live Performance, Lindsay Vickery

Research outputs 2011

Computer controlled performance opens a range of novel structural possibilities. This paper explores the mechanisms and ramifications of this approach, and its potential to expand the repertoire of formal structures available to the composer. Traditional and computer coordinated performance models are compared. Modes of computer control, permutation, transformation and generation are discussed and their implications are evaluated. The range of implications of this approach to the performance environment are given together with illustrations from the author’s own work.

Visualising The Score: Screening Scores In Realtime Performance, Cat Hope, Lindsay Vickery

Research outputs 2011

This paper examines the screening of music notations and the impact of this configuration in a live music performance situation. Before the development of graphical computing, Traditional music notation, was rarely shared with the anyone other than other musicians, composers and analysts; let alone displayed during the performance. However, some composers experiment with scores and their visual presence in performance by employing automated ‗score-players‘ or actual films specifically developed to be interpreted by musicians. This paper raises some questions and possibilities for this new way of sharing musical qualities of composition and performance.

Spatialising Threads/Hallucinations: Closing The Gap Between Installation And Performance, Catherine A. Hope, Kynan Tan

Research outputs 2011

Threads/Hallucinations is a musical work that combines sound installation and live performance using an eight-speaker array. The work uses spatialisation as a means to control the performance, provide an immersive listening experience and extend musical composition parameters. The work draws on spatial and electronic music composition techniques, sound art installation and site-specific sounds. This paper will outline some key influences on the creation of this work as well as outlining concepts and methodologies for incorporating spatial techniques within the field of electronic music.

Organicism In Live Experimental Electroacoustic Music, Mark Mcmahon

Research outputs 2011

This paper explores the potential for an organicist or relational holistic approach to experimental electroacoustic music composition that is indeterminate with respect to performance. It follows a phenomenological interpretation of the musical work as the product of dynamic, temporal or relational processes involving the performers, their instruments, the sounds themselves, the whole acoustic space and the audience. An analysis of an electroacoustic composition and Decibel ensemble performance is offered for which organic indeterminacy is described in terms of a performative openness towards the creation of experimental music.

What's In A Name? Is The Term "Third Stream Music" Truly Representative Of The Music It Is Supposed To Describe? Would The Term "Jazzical" Be Just As Appropriate?, Matthew Styles

Research outputs 2011

No abstract provided.

Complications, Vahri G. Mckenzie

Research outputs 2011

Background: Complications is a short story published in literary magazine dotdotdash and explores the expression of identity. Arguably no genre of creative production can investigate identity like fiction can, with its privileged access to interiority and psychology that is akin to thought. Fiction that directly engages with mistaken identity offers a way to deepen this investigation. 'Complications' plays with the several meanings of the word to investigate unstable identity in the modern subject: a medical complication leads to an untimely death; complicated family dealings put a young person in an untenable situation.

Contribution: First person point of view is used …

Busselton Jetty Sculpture Walk Signage, Donna J. Mazza Dr

Research outputs 2011

Research Background: Sculptures were commissioned for Jetty from Safehaven Studio who provided a professional workshop to local writers in order to commission writing. I was invited to attend. Workshops included a marine biologist specialising in Geographe Bay and local historian, internationally renowned nature writer Mark Tredinnick and facilitator Donna Ward from Indigo Journal. Research involved site visits and discussions with these local experts with the intention of producing well considered literary works. This poem was produced in 2011 for the jetty installation and considers the question of permanence and change in the life of the jetty, which is subject to …

New Possibilities For Electroacoustic Music Performance, Cat Hope

Research outputs 2011

Western Australian new music ensemble Decibel has an ongoing research project dedicated to performing music that combines acoustic and electronic instruments. In the process of revitalising pieces that have been considered un-performable due to limitations in technology at the time of composition, or certain technologies becoming obsolete, Decibel has developed a unique approach to new music performance involving electronic and acoustic instruments. This has also involved the reworking of electronic pieces not intended to be performed live, works that have previously proved difficult to perform, and the ‘electroacoustification’ of acoustic works. The ensemble combines old technologies such as reel-toreel tape …

Plants As Objects: Challenges For An Aesthetics Of Flora, John Charles Ryan

Research outputs 2011

This paper presents the conceptual challenges to an aesthetic model of living plants based in embodied interaction with flora through smell, taste, touch, sound and sight. I argue that the science of aesthetics is deterministically visual. Drawing from theories of landscape aesthetics put forth by Carlson and Berleant, I outline four primary obstacles to an embodied aesthetics: plants as objects of sight, plants as objects of art, plants as objects of disinterestedness and plants as objects of scientific discourse. A multi-sensorial aesthetics of flora requires auto-centric proximity and degrees of intersubjectivity between the appreciator and the appreciated plant that raise …

Anthoethnography: Emerging Research Into The Culture Of Flora, Aesthetic Experience Of Plants, And The Wildflower Tourism Of The Future, John C. Ryan

Research outputs 2011

How does anthoethnography contribute to the development of understandings of aesthetic experiences of wild plants and wildflower tourism? As exemplified by the quintessentially aesthetic industry of wildflower tourism, the culture of flora represents diverse engagements between people and plants. Such complex engagements offer further avenues for research. The critical methodology of anthoethnography has been one such approach to circumscribing the values, practices and rhetoric of wildflower tourism. Interviews have revealed perceptual phenomena such as the orchid and everlasting effects as two counterpoised examples of the differences between visual aesthetic values occurring in the region. For appreciators such as Tinker, botanical …

Cultural Botany: Toward A Model Of Transdisciplinary, Embodied, And Poetic Research Into Plants, John C. Ryan

Research outputs 2011

Since the eighteenth century, the study of plants has reflected an increasingly mechanized and technological view of the natural world that divides the humanities and the natual sciences. In broad terms, this article proposes a context for research into flora through an interrogation of existing literature addressing a rapprochement between ways to knowledge. The natureculture dichotomy, and more specifically the plant-to-human sensory disjunction, follows a parallel course of resolution to the schism between objective (technical, scientific, reductionistic, visual) and subjective (emotive, artistic, relational, multi-sensory) forms of knowledge. The foundations of taxonomic botany, as well as the allied fields of environmental …

From Bondi To Bude: Allan Kennedy And The Exportation Of Australian Surf Lifesaving To Britain In The 1950s, Ed Jaggard

Research outputs 2011

Prior to 1953 Surf Life Saving Australia, the governing body of the Australian surf lifesaving movement, had limited success in winning international support for its methods and competition. The breakthrough occurred when Allan Kennedy, a public servant working at Australia House in London, spent consecutive summer vacations successfully instructing a team of surf lifesavers at Bude, north Cornwall. An Australian-style surf lifesaving club was formed, followed by others elsewhere, and then in 1955 the Surf Life Saving Association of Great Britain was established. A man of great energy and vision, as well as being a dynamic instructor, Kennedy convincingly demonstrated …

Multidimensional Data Sets: Traversing Sound Synthesis, Sound Sculpture, And Scored Composition, Stuart James, Catherine Hope

Research outputs 2011

This article documents some of the conceptual developments of some various approaches to using multidimensional data sets as a means of propagating sound, manipulating and sculpting sound, and generating compositional scores. This is not only achieved through a methodology that is reminiscent of some of the systematic matrix procedures employed by composer Peter Maxwell Davies, but also through a generative signal path method conventionally termed Wave Terrain Synthesis. Both methodologies follow in essence the same kind of paradigm - the notion of extracting information through a process of traversing multidimensional topography. In this article we look at four documented examples. …

Plants, Processes, Places: Sensory Intimacy And Poetic Enquiry, John Ryan

Research outputs 2011

As an arts-based research approach, poetic enquiry has been theorised and applied recently in the social sciences and in education. In this article, I extend its usage to eco-critical studies of Australian flora and fauna. The Southwest corner of Western Australia affords opportunities to deploy arts-based methodologies, including field poetry, for celebrating the natural heritage of a region of distinguished biodiversity. I suggest that lyric practices in places such as Lesueur National Park and Anstey-Keane Damplands in southern Perth can catalyse embodied engagements with flora. The outcome of these practices is the invocation of the multiple senses— including the proximities …

An Unlikely Marriage: Theorizing The Corporeality Of Language At The Crossroads Of Thoreau, Heidegger And The Botanical World, John Charles Ryan

Research outputs 2011

This paper examines the relationship between language, particularly language that expresses aesthetic experiences of plant life, and corporeality. The theorisation of language is a keystone towards conceptualising participatory relationships between people and the botanical world. A comparative reading of the works of Henry David Thoreau and Martin Heidegger provides a framework for approaching language as embodied participation. Despite political differences, Thoreau and Heidegger shared a mutual conviction about the generative powers of language. Thoreau’s literary practice partly involved immersion in places such as swamps and forests. Fittingly, Heidegger’s explication of Rilke’s concept of “the Open” mirrors the participatory aesthetics of …

Agent Provocateur, Vahri G. Mckenzie

Research outputs 2011

Background: ‘Agent Provocateur’ is the major textual work to document Felix Ruckert’s 2011 Australian visit in which he offered workshops for Xplore Festival (Sydney) and Strutdance (Perth). Ruckert is a Berlin-based dancer and choreographic artist whose work explores the edges of dance by demanding that audiences be complicit in risky performances. The article investigates Ruckert’s work as it relates to contact improvisation and questions of sexual overtones that trouble that performance form. As a dancer and researcher I use archival and field research and self-reflection to ask: does physical and emotional risk in a workshop lead to better performance outcomes? …

Processes In Composition And Performance Leading To Performance, Catherine Hope

Research outputs 2011

This paper contemplates different processes and results developed by ‘programming composers’ as compared to composers who use programmers to facilitate or realise compositional components of their works. Different models for the relationship between music composition and computer programming are examined, as are the outcomes for composers and performers. For music programmers the compositional process varies according to the composer and the work they wish to create. Complex musical configurations involving sound synthesis, processing, aleatoric and improvisational approaches may be guided by conceptual ideas that do not always originate with programming skills, and can be outsourced within differing levels of collaboration. …

Manifesting Meaning From A Performance Of Cruelty: Parallels In The Musical Experimentalism Of Antonin Artaud And Sub Ordnance, Cat Hope, Sam Gillies

Research outputs 2011

No abstract provided.

A Stabbing In Chawton, Jane Austen, And Emma, Jill Durey

Research outputs 2011

The article discusses a stabbing that is mentioned in a letter by the novelist Jane Austen. The event took place in Chawton, England in March 1814 and involved Stephen Mersh (b. 1796), who was allegedly stabbed by James Baigen, who was later acquitted of the crime. Details about Mersh's life are presented. Information is also included about Sir Thomas Miller, who represented Chawton in Parliament from 1806-1816 and the Honorouble William Wickham, who was an acquaintance of Austen's brother. Baigen, it is noted, committed suicide in 1851 after the death of his father forced the family to move away from …

Healing Through Belief, Biography, And Social Connection, Anomie

Research outputs 2011

No abstract provided.

Musical Parameter Manipulation Possibilities Of A Homemade Reactable, James Herrington, Lindsay Vickery

Research outputs 2011

Musical parameter control is an important part of live interactive electronic computer music. Due to the increasing availability and affordability of music technology, including powerful computer software, advances in this area are being made to enable easier and more effective parameter control. The purpose of this paper is to investigate and discuss the musical parameter manipulation possibilities of a homemade instrument with a tangible tabletop interface based on the technology of the reacTable. The design and construction of the instrument is documented, including the physical build as well as the software component of the system, which incorporates the computer software …