Massey Documents by Type
Permanent URI for this communityhttps://mro.massey.ac.nz/handle/10179/294
Browse
15 results
Search Results
Item Inside Arcadia : an immersive, virtual phantasmagoria : an exegesis written in partial completion of a PhD degree in Creative Practice at Massey University, College of Creative Arts(Massey University, 2022) Doidge, MalcolmThis research explores Mātiu/Somes Island’s colonial past in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. The exhibition project, Inside Arcadia, is a hybrid of sculptural installation, performance design and an immersive virtual reality; the latter a 360˚ digital scenography of Mātiu/Somes Island’s historic quarantine and defence sites. These features are experienced interconnectedly while wearing a stereoscopic Head Mounted Display (HMD). The research underpinning Inside Arcadia’s three exhibitions focuses on technological spectralities – the phantom experience of virtual disembodiment wearing the HMD. This discussion relates to defining how these VR digital scenographies comprise a ‘quarantine gothic’. The work of noted academics specialising in video game studies ontology is considered, including Espin Aarseth’s notion of virtual space as an allegory of space and Grant Tavinor’s discussion of IVR as a novel medium. European cultural contexts identify allegory as simply describing one thing by pointing to another, related thing, e.g., Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey’s deployment of allegory referencing Walter Benjamin’s notions of history and ruin. Inside Arcadia recontextualises this in Aotearoa/New Zealand as a gothic mode – a site-specific, digitally layered 360˚ mediation of historic animal and human quarantine and defence sites. Inside Arcadia also references a quarantine gothic, acknowledging the historic exclusion of Taranaki Whānui from cultural and ecological relations with Mātiu/Somes Island. Terry Castle’s interpretation of allegory as phantasmagoria or exhibiting ghosts in public is identified as having a key role conceptually and technologically in linking this past with the COVID-19 pandemic. This context is critical to understanding the role of Inside Arcadia’s HMD technology mediating a ghostly digital avatar whilst leaving a material trace of footprints on the chalk-floor installation. My argument above is demonstrated through Inside Arcadia’s three exhibitions. To help contextualise the field, this research references the works of Lisa Reihana (Ngāpuhi - Ngāti Hine, Ngāi Tu-Te Auru), Brett Graham (Ngāti Koroki Kahukura, Tainui), Sven Mehzoud and Stuart Foster regarding the historical European colonising gaze toward Aotearoa/New Zealand. The installation of my work at separate local sites contributes to understanding spatial porosity and spatial layering wearing the HMD, an action performing a ghostly avatar. These distinctions are demonstrated through extended analysis in the final section to this exegesis. As sustained throughout my creative research, wearing the HMD mediates Inside Arcadia’s layers of virtual space within its physical installation. When considered part of this site-specific palimpsest, Inside Arcadia emerges as an allegory of Mātiu/Somes Island’s colonial past, the haunting echo of a quarantine gothic returned amidst the Covid-19 pandemic.Item Living with the unassimilable : a creative arts thesis, supported by a written component, in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Arts, Whiti o Rehua School of Art, College of Creative Arts, Massey University, Wellington(Massey University, 2021) Cui, LiangLiving with the Unassimilable is a creative practice PhD research project initiated in response to a haptic experience – a violent encounter with the surface of a framed canvas – which triggered a repressed trauma within me. I interpreted the trauma as a consequence of my mother’s transmission to me of her experience of the Chinese government’s gender policies in her youth during the Cultural Revolution. The purpose of this research was to realise a new art language to express and release the repressed trauma in order to achieve catharsis. Despite the challenging cultural and psychological distancing of being voluntarily ‘displaced’ in New Zealand from China (the land of my birth and upbringing), a sense of freedom gradually developed without the previous constraints experienced in my homeland. A series of explorations engaging with diverse materials and modes of display was conducted to arrive at an appropriate and original art expression to reflect upon the significance of past memories, relevant historical and cultural backgrounds, and to communicate the traumatic and cathartic experiences. The creative investigation was undertaken in parallel to pertinent theoretical analysis. From Sigmund Freud theories, I interpreted the experience with my mother as a trauma and Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection contributed to deciphering the sensations experienced in the traumatic event and haptic experience, and confirmed my related artistic articulation. Representing something far wider than a personal experience, a reflection on China’s patriarchal system led to Michel Foucault’s theory of power in order to unpack the government’s regulation of people’s sexuality, and to Judith Butler in relation to the performance of gender and identity. ‘Touch’ and ‘surface’ were rendered significant by the haptic encounter and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s body schema and Erin Manning’s politics of touch offered theoretical perspectives that advanced my creative practice. Jill Bennett’s notion that trauma-related art directly engages with viewers by embodied sensations to register the repressed memory, coincided with establishing the appropriate means of artistic expression for this research: a hybrid sculpture/video installation. Through the orchestration of elements, in particular, the combination of static sculpture and moving imagery, and diverse material qualities and media, the final installation ‘transformed’ an inner, individual, and psychological experience into a visual and material art language. In the embodied sensations, it uttered the otherwise unspeakable trauma, thus becoming an expression of living with the unassimilable. The hybrid practice is not the only contribution the research makes to the field of trauma/catharsis-related installation art and to contemporary Chinese art. Situated in a globalised world and positioned in relation to relevant contemporary Chinese and Western art and theory, this creative practice assimilates my heritage – including Chinese language and philosophy in relation to gender power politics – thus presenting hitherto unexplored perspectives.Item Between elsewhere and away : small acts of cohabitation : an exegesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD Fine Arts at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand(Massey University, 2021) Sorensen, JillThis creative research thesis proposes, develops and examines the efficacy of an embodied participatory research methodology to elicit experiential and imaginative encounters within suburban human-nonhuman cohabitation. Grounded in a home and garden in suburban Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland, it engages practical and imaginative strategies to reframe the mundane interactions of suburban life as a site of complex human-nonhuman interrelationship and radical entanglement. This enquiry is grounded, physically and philosophically, in the experimental research project of transitioning my suburban home into a multi-species domestic hub. From this site of interaction, the following research guidelines coalesce: to consciously suspend my accultured anthropocentric ways of knowing in my research activities and interactions; to engage with active and responsive care and acknowledge the agency of others, human, animal, vegetal and mineral; to wait attentively for possible modes of human-nonhuman attunement to emerge. These terms of engagement underpin creative research that attends, slowly and with care to multi-entity interactions and agentic interplays, interweaving domestic cohabitation, immersive video installation, participatory dwelling-spaces and dialogic events, and engaging with domestic space, gallery, conference and festival. This research is in equal measure philosophical, practical, and located within art practice. Consequently, this thesis selectively draws on aspects of philosophical posthumanism (Latour, Haraway), New Materialism (Barad; Bennett), Object-Oriented Ontology (Harman, Morton), Affective Ecology (Greyson) and social aesthetics (Born et al). It proposes modes for working-with things across a spectrum of activities and small gestures (Hannula), from gallery-based installations to interventions within the suburban home and garden. These research strands are brought into conversation with historical and contemporary participatory and experiential art practices (Bishop, Kwon, Weintraub) to bring into focus a multimodal and multi-entity research enquiry located within Aotearoa, New Zealand.Item Entanglement : an investigation into the effective union of contemporary art and science communication : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Fine Arts at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand(Massey University, 2019) Hughes, Claire I.Virtual reality (VR) technology is increasingly providing opportunities for new contemporary art experiences. This creative practice research has been developed to provide one such contribution. It offers innovative employment of the immersive capabilities of VR to engage with and convey complex scientific theories, and to stimulate changes in mental processes to unlock these concepts. The research highlights empirical similarities between art and science to propose that creative aspects of art can be considered proximate to the creative qualities required to understand quantum theories. In order to reveal this, the body of research engaged specifically with quantum entanglement, because of its well documented existence¹ combined with the more challenging considerations of how ‘communication’ can occur at a quantum level. By providing metaphoric immersive experiences of quantum entanglement, a contribution of ‘scientific communication’ is made as defined by the evocation of awareness, enjoyment, and interest, questioning of opinions and providing new perspectives of understanding.² This research posits that there is a fertile, effective terrain to explore in the union of the fields of contemporary art and science communication. Considerations of constructivist theories of knowledge and the concept of paradigm shifts³ are used whereby new insights into knowledge processes can be experienced through VR art. Here, simulacra, cognitive dissonance and the technological sublime afford a framework to create experiences of conflicting realities. It is due to the immersive strengths of VR which are exploited and subverted through my designs that these experiences can be facilitated for the viewer. The culmination of this research is Entangled, a VR art installation which provides interplays between virtual and physical spaces while also offering entry-points to contemplate and understand quantum theories. Critical analysis of this project is supported by focus group and questionnaire responses. These findings prove how viewers perceived the project as an aesthetic art work and that by recognising scientific underpinnings, an effective engagement and participation in elements of scientific communication occurred at varying levels. The work provided new perspectives on the properties of quantum entanglement. This facilitated cognitive and experiential awareness providing opportunities for viewers to encounter conflicting knowledge systems. The challenge in this creative practice research was to create aesthetic experiences that contravene common sense reasoning and provide insights into the type of thought processes and experiential perception that is required to deepen and expand our understanding of our physical reality. In the present era of an evolution of super- technologies, now past its nascent stage, Entangled offers exposure to the types of interfaces that this thesis asserts will increasingly be encountered when comprehending our reality in the 21st century and beyond.⁴ ¹ References to the proven existence of quantum entanglement are provided in section 1.6. ² This definition of scientific communication is expanded in section 1.1. ³ Paradigm shifts are times when the familiar framework has to be profoundly changed. This is discussed in detail in section 1.3. ⁴ Quantum entanglement is only one possible area that will cause our experience of reality to change radically. For example biotechnologies, nanotechnologies, artificial intelligence (AI) and human/AI interfaces to name some.Item Matter of time : an exegesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts at Massey University Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand(Massey University, 2018) Airisniemi, EssiMatter of time sets out to examine the temporal and physical conditions of prospective mining sites in Finland and Aotearoa New Zealand to question natural resource use in the context of contemporary landscapes and changing ecologies. Photographic records of the two sites map out microcosms of natural matter in its temporal and physical state of flux, suggesting an intimacy that is not grounded in the traditional representations of a landscape. Photography and its position in contemporary image culture is investigated in this exegesis through physicality and materiality of the photo object. While seeking analogies between the physical environment and its photographic presence, matter of time attempts to challenge the cultural construct that a landscape photograph constitutes through challenging the surface of a photographic print. The objects and installation methodologies continue to question the finality of a photograph and the conditions of its physical presence in installation space by presenting a site that suggests impermanence and navigation through a terrain with multiple trajectories.Item This domestic sublime : an exegesis in partial fulfilment of a Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Arts, College of Creative Arts, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand(Massey University, 2019) Lundy, Alison‘My sculptural work starts with the materials, with a moment when matter, materials, objects or ‘things’, present a discrepancy, a paradox that contradicts my assumptions of truth or knowledge. In this case my work is a sculptural response to death, an interrogation of the forceful affect of the debris found at home, after my mother died.’ ‘This Domestic Sublime’, is a research project that is presented in two parts: a creative body of work, that is an installation consisting of 200 sculptural elements and a supporting thesis. The creative body of work conveys through material paradox an apprehension of mortality. In so doing, the installation contributes to the discussion of the sublime in art. The sculptural elements included in the body of work are made from debris found on a semi-rural site in Pohangina, New Zealand. These elements range in size from small egg shapes to the size of a garbage bin. The materials are preserved in resin, thus heightening the textural and visual qualities and the affects of attraction and repulsion of the sculptural elements. The final installation of the sculptural work invites a visceral engagement with the materials and mortality. The work is apprised through a theoretical lens that balances the concept of the sublime with a contemporary understanding of materiality and the domestic space, a space that is aligned with feminine experience. Mortality is framed by the material research, processes and experiments and is presented by the poetic contradictions of debris and matter that made a connection with my mother, who had passed away. This creative practice and theoretical exploration contributes to the discussion of the sublime in art, by addressing the unique poetic and material paradoxes of ‘this domestic sublime’.Item Where memories sleep : an exploration into human-centred design and visual storytelling to persuade and educate : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for a Master in Design at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand(Massey University, 2019) O'Hara, William JasonWhere Memories Sleep is an immersive cinedance installation designed to introduce new audiences to Antarctica and the science undertaken at Scott Base. The research explores using human-centred design methodologies to develop the communication strategy and visual narrative that inform the project’s creative direction. Tailored to appeal to millennials while remaining inclusive of all age groups, it primarily focuses on engaging and informing audiences about the existence and relevance of the science rather than expecting action toward Antarctica or climate change. Sitting at the confluence of three narrative disciplines; documentary, persuasion, and entertainment, the research project investigates the interaction and integration of these worlds when combined into a single immersive experience. Central to the project is a two-part narrative structure; a metaphoric imagined ‘legend’ that functions as a ‘Trojan Horse’ to engage the audience, and a supporting documentary making implicit the links to real science. The project narrative is inspired by the rich history of Antarctic exploration and draws on traditional and contemporary oral, visual and theatrical storytelling techniques. The storyline follows a familiar ‘hero’s journey’ structure beneath which runs a non-fiction aspect representing the current scientific activity in Antarctica. Where Memories Sleep is conceived as a long-term initiative and therefore adopts a flexible, modular approach to the narrative and scenographic elements. It is proposed to work across a variety of installation locations and media opportunities, such as a single-channel online video, to full live dance performance/installation.Item [r{e]volving} apparatus : the [r]evolution of a bodily, technological, spatio-temporal practice : an exegesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Fine Arts at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand(Massey University, 2018) Lewis, JoshuaThis text is one of many apparatuses, produced whilst in motion of turning - a particularly acute turn of which has reconfigured my performance and writing practice indefinitely. The performing apparatus, in ever [r]evolving configuration, forms the foundation for a selection of personal artistic works spanning live spatio-temporal performances, ‘live’ installations, and discursive experimentations. Within this, the presence of human and non-human bodies - in virtual, mechanical and fleshy form - activate, enact, comprise, and pass through these apparatuses. The evolution of three major works guide the research through several interpretations of Karen Barad’s theory of Agential Realism. Through these turns the practice of apparatus transforms from technical means, to the locus of performance, and finally to a means of performatively entangling with the world. The culmination of this thesis has encode in myself and my practice a commitment to [r]evolving or perpetual falling. This momentum signals towards a future practice which is resistant to certainty or definitive conclusion, seeking ground only momentarily before continuing to [r]evolve.Item Only fools, said the sparse ribbed rock, are ever lonely : multiplicity of voice and materiality in a contemporary art practice : an exegesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand(Massey University, 2018) Iti, AnaThis exegesis explores the trajectory of my artistic practice between 2017-2018. It begins with a primer discussing my previous work in relation to notions of 'history’ and ‘truth’, in order to unpack and interrogate these contexts further. From this foundation, I discuss how my current work engages with histories and texts, in order to open up more subjective experiences and feeling—exploring what form ‘a multiplicity of voice’ might take in a contemporary art practice. Beginning with the text and audio-based works Cast measurement aside 2018 and Does the brick recall Pukeahu 2017, Chapter one explores time and the resonance of material within my recent work. It considers the role of audio and text-based works within a sculptural practice. In chapter two, I locate my artistic practice within a local contemporary conversation about decolonial and indigenous art practices. I discuss this in relation to my online work Time is now measured in damage, 2018, which takes a family taonga as a starting point to weave together different narratives and kinds of knowledge. Chapter three focuses on the development and context of my large-scale sculptural work Only fools are lonely, 2018. This includes an in-depth engagement with Shona Rapira-Davies’ public sculpture Te Waimapihi or what is commonly known as Te Aro Park, 1988-1993. This discussion opens up an expansive field of enquiry within my practice, suggesting further areas of development and exploration.Item The assembly of liquid : against an excess of order : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand(Massey University, 2018) May, CameronThe Assembly of Liquid is a creative exploration of systems in a prolonged state of irresolution. Using sculpture, electronics and installation, I am creatively investigating notions of how technological processes can remain open ended through the connection of multiple dynamic components. Using commonplace industrial objects, I attempt to fabricate a synthetic but dispersed organism. Sensors, code and electricity form connections, making objects porous. This installation exists in a state of sustained self-modification, as much artwork as ongoing construction site. This experimental installation explores technological frameworks to evoke more liquid and multi-sensory phenomena.