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Item From dough to wheat : a posthuman performance practice with companion species : an exegesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, College of Creative Arts, Toi Rauwharangi, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand(Massey University, 2022) Trigg, MadaleineThis creative-practice-led doctoral research follows a question: What is it to practice Posthumanism? (Or, “what can Posthumanism do?”) The research joins a recent wave of enthusiasm, curiosity and speculation on Posthumanism, which finds contemporary scholarship traversing feminist studies, social and political sciences, and the humanities both informing and being informed by the arts. As such I follow, and am beholden to, figures such as Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Astrida Neimanis, Stephanie Springgay and Tarsh Bates. Building upon my experience and training across performance, theatre, costume, movement studies and photography, I use an iterative and process-oriented mode of inquiry centred on learning in the making and critical reflection upon one experimental work to shape and score the next one. A series of performances framed as contact improvisations has assisted my realisation of the expansive agency of yeast as it exerts itself in alternative methods of mixing, kneading, rising and baking processes. These range from cultivating seeds, wearing and cooking dough, and preparing bread for consumption. In this context, the physical, social and chemical boundaries of all bodies, including technological bodies, blur, converge and multiply; they are guided and activated by literal and conceptual gestures of touch. One of the central tenets in this transdisciplinary field of concern is exploring humankind’s relation to the environment, unhinging the root causes of human hubris, habits of waste, control and dominance at the expense of other bodies and, hopefully, to stall or prevent the destruction of the earth and inequities resulting from the misuse of power. I am one of many artists exploring what happens when binaries are abandoned—when humans let go of their self-importance—to reignite a co-living model with other species. Resting on the prospect of making contact with, building a relationship with, communicating with another material body, a non-human body, the research wonders what a new relationship between humans and “other-than-humans” might be.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 This bloody show : outside and inside the artist's body in performance and video work : 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, 2019) Harris, ClaireUtilising autobiographical content and her own body as medium and subject, the artist seeks to represent aspects of risk and self-harming without replicating or staging acts of self-harm. Drawing on writers Lea Vergine, Jennifer Doyle, Maggie Nelson and Amelia Jones, and artist Gina Pane’s performance work, this exegesis identifies points of contention in the production and reception of performative acts of self-harm. Beginning with installation and video works the artist creates tangential situations alluding to anticipation, depersonalization, and self-reflexivity in self-harm. Through this research the artist arrives at eggs as a fluid proxy for the body/self and for dynamics of anxiety in video and live performance works. Additional issues arising involve perceptions harm and risk; the “feminist performance art meets misogynous cinema” dynamic within this MFA work; and the double consciousness, self-management, and projection in being female subject, performer, and artist. This abstract is old now and not totally relevant.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 No limit : imagining the boundaries of autonomy in a post-Fordist colonial settler state : thesis submission for a Master of Fine Arts (Fine Arts), Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand(Massey University, 2018) Aoake, Hana PeraThis exegesis will address the context of being a young, Māori artist living in a Post-Fordist colonial settler state. It will centre what these conditions what labour and the production of art looks like in Aotearoa, by analysing the ways in which our labour now fails to distinguish between ‘work’ and ‘occupation’. It will look at the way in which autonomy has been stripped through the tokenisation of a certain kind of indigenous practice that forces Māori artists into both performing indigeneity for Pākehā, as well as existing within individualistic imperial narrative that is toxic, colonising and alienating. I will discuss how this attempts to diminish the collaborative and intuitive approach to making art that is inherent within a larger history of contemporary Māori art by referring to senior wahine toa artists such as Shona Rapira-Davies. This research is explicitly centered around how the building of healthy, meaningful, ongoing working relationships with people I love has helped me redefine who my practice is for in spaces outside of the white cube. It will blend ideas garnered from both Western and indigenous frameworks, citing writing from theorists and artists including Hito Steyerl, Martha Rosler, Paolo Virno, Faith Wilson, Jenny Holzer and Natasha Matila-Smith (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Hine). It is hoped that in writing this exegesis I can articulate some adequate solutions to the current model for the production of art, which I believe is unsustainable and centered around ties to very colonial ideas of ‘community’ and of collaboration, particularly with the sharing of ideas and space.Item Pelagic states : beyond nomadic and oceanic practices : an exegesis written in partial completion of a PhD in Creative Practice at Massey University College of Creative Arts(Massey University, 2018) Trubridge, SamOceanographers have a name for that remote part of the ocean that is not connected to or defined by a coastline or sea-bed. This is the ‘pelagic zone’, where movement and operation occurs in a completely four-dimensional environment. My creative practice examines, occupies, and emerges from this condition, applying it across the spatial, technical, cultural, geographic, philosophical, and aesthetic layers across various works and processes. In the theatres, galleries, public spaces, dry deserts, and ocean spaces that I have worked in there is a pervasive liquidity and a pelagic nature that characterises all the states and forms that my works move through. This thesis argues that a fluid, mobile, and self-sufficient methodology of this kind is necessary in order to navigate the equally fluid landscapes of contemporary performance and culture, traversing diverse disciplinary boundaries, geographies, and modes of working in order to formulate a unique model for what is defined here as a pelagic practice. The ‘pelagic’ (from ancient Greek ‘pelagos’: of the open sea) is an adjective describing a complete, unboundaried liquidity. It is a term is often attached to species of ocean-going birds and fish, with little use outside of scientific texts, thus providing this research with an undefined space for discussion on creative practice, performance, and philosophy. It is also a term that suggests a proximity to and correlation with Pacific theorists and culture, allowing me to pay homage to this significant body of knowledge whilst avoiding appropriation of their specific cultural knowledge or viewpoints.--From OrientationItem Displaced rhythms and harmonic dissonance : Master of Fine Arts research exegesis(Massey University, 2017) Matthew, David WilliamDisplaced Rhythms and Harmonic Dissonance provides a discussion of environmental practices and identity, highlighted by exploration into the expanded fields of music, noise and sound production, tattoo, sculpture, video, and performance.Item To represent the sex of angels : trans/poetics : 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, 2017) Winter, AliyahThis exegesis utilises writer Rebekah Edwards’ definition of ‘trans-poetics’ as a methodology for the creation of performative and moving image artworks. The linguistic categories within transpoetics are transcribed through a creative practice, valuing language for its multiplicity, ambiguity and limitations. The projects outlined in this exegesis focus on queer and trans histories lifted from archival documentation. Trans-poetics are employed to circumvent and rearticulate the problematic legacy of queer and trans representation. The aim of this research is to utilise and push beyond the established oeuvre of queer autoethnographic work. To take the waters (2017) and Hardening (2017) are two moving image works formed in response to the life and events surrounding the internment of Hjelmar Von Danneville on Matiu Somes Island in 1917. As works of significance, they are clear distillations of modes and methods of transpoetics used in response to narratives within historical material.Item The artist is not present : a strategic investigation of psychological complexity through performance : a thesis submitted to the faculty a Massey University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in the College of Creative Arts in Massey University(Massey University, 2016) Beatrice, HannahHannah Beatrice, THE ARTIST IS NOT PRESENT: A strategic investigation of psychological complexity through performance. A solo female figure manipulates hybridized subjectivity and performed authenticity. I have the ability to displace audiences and present an alternative perspective of reality through the form of a live performance. I perform using expected frameworks: enacting social conventions and expectations based on the context of performances, [place, space, audience, time], and the subjectivity of performer; in order to simultaneously present, embody, and experience an exploration of the human psyche relevant to today’s decaying Western society. “And the question we must now ask ourselves is to know whether in this world that is slipping away, committing suicide without realizing it, a nucleus of men can be found to impress [a] higher idea of theatre on the world, to bring to all of us a natural, occult equivalent of the dogma we no longer believe.” - Antonin Artaud II The live performance work is influenced by tactics used in early Absurdist and Surrealist theatre practices, challenging traditional concepts of what live performance might achieve, along with its function: • Questioning the nature of existence and the validity of a decaying society through the deconstruction of both characteristic and anticipated frameworks. • Transgressing the boundary between audience and the performer to address psychological complexities. • A practice orientated towards audience affect, performer and audience relationship, and the audience’s specific role in relation to the body of work. The audience disturbs the work as much as the work disturbs the audience, making the practice audience responsive and it evolves based on its reception. Whether it is genuine or not, I have been interested in manifesting induced ‘liveness’ through dismantling boundaries, whilst still maintaining distance between the audience and myself. The reality of performing through qualities of intimacy, fantasy vs. fact, and performed authenticity, means that the work extends beyond simply the live performance event. I am not restricting myself to being responsive to the audience within the live performance events only, but across the practice through such things as residual documents and imagery. In this way, the emphasis is on a holistic practice, and the artist is then rarely present.Item Distaste and nonsense : some critical reflections on the interface between comedy and contemporary art : Master of Fine Arts, Massey University, Wellington(Massey University, 2016) Morrison, ScottThis thesis investigates, through a largely video and performance based art practice, some of the relationships between Comedy, Contemporary art and psychological defence mechanisms. This body of work aims to challenge some preconceived notions of what comedy in an artistic context can be, including comedy that involves elements of disgust, irony, failure and anti-humour. The research here also attempts to find unique perspectives that have come about through the intersection of specific psychological defence mechanisms, experimental comedy, and contemporary art.