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  • About
  • The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
    Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
21

Creating Kastom : contemporary art in Port Vila, Vanuatu

Mcdonald, Lisa January 2015 (has links)
This thesis explores the relationship between contemporary art and kastom in Port Vila, Vanuatu. Since the mid-1980s indigenous paintings, drawings, tapestries and sculptures have become prominent features of the urban visual landscape. By way of ethnological survey, this thesis examines current modes of production, circulation and reception to reveal the changing socio-cultural capital of these objects. Based on two periods of extended fieldwork, this research relies on participant observation, semi-structured interviews, studio and exhibition visits, written surveys and informal discussions for its primary data. Focusing on a core group of practicing artists who primarily belong to either the Nawita Contemporary Arts Association or the Red Wave Vanuatu Contemporary Arts Association, this thesis highlights the influences of island affiliation, kin networks and social relations upon the structure of the local artworld. Within the pluralistic matrix of town, artists adopt kastom as thematic content for their work. Representations of the chiefly body, dance routines, marriage ceremonies and traditional stories highlight the means by which makers creatively assert their cultural identity. Similarly, depictions that incorporate stylised icons and codified motifs convey the knowledge, status and entitlement held by different artists. When presented to local audiences, these visual cues are regarded as prideful celebrations of the unique characteristics of the nation. This thesis concludes that just as kastom is not a static entity, nor is the category of contemporary art. In Port Vila, a space of rapid social change, deeply embedded values and beliefs intertwine with the forces of modernity to redefine notions of indigenous heritage. Within this framework, artists in the capital interrogate the realities of their lived experiences to present images and forms that reflect the ever-evolving circumstances particular to their corpus and careers.
22

Strategies of camouflage : invisibility, schizoanalysis and multifocality in contemporary visual art

Zohar, Ayelet January 2007 (has links)
This is a project exploring camouflage and multifocality as a practice and theory based research, reflecting the mental state of disappearance that develops into multifocal existence, in the cultural context. The practice element consists of an installation, composed of four consecutive spaces, video-projections, paintings and objects, performing a trajectory between camouflage and multifocality. The first part engages with theoretical readings of camouflage as the effect of mimicry, proceeding into imperceptibility, consequently leading to loss of subjectivity, through self-shattering (Bersani) as a schizoanalytic process (Deleuze & Guattari) and the loss of identity within culture (Bhabha). Multifocality, therefore, is the materialisation of a rhizomatic structure and the multiplicity of gazes - as performed in installation art. Following the theoretical discussion, the subject-matter expands into two themes, articulating camouflage in contemporary art: There follows a view of the skin - as the location of self (Anzieu), and the Chinese understanding of the skin as a perforated layer, connecting the (hollow) body to the world (Kuriyama), where camouflage transforms skin into a visual membrane. Artists introduced here , are Yayoi Kusama, Takashi Murakami, Andy Warhol, Zhang Huan, and Seidou Keita among others. Disappearance and invisibility are considered as modes of intervention, through the media images of spectres of suicide-bombers (Derrida) and ghostwriting (Spivak). Consequently, invisibility ends in shattering and the consequent creation of multifocality. Artists presented include Banksy, Guerrilla Girls, Andre Serrano, Ibrahim Nubani, Morimura Yasumasa, Yinka Shonebare and others. Concluding with After Effects, I discuss projects that deal with multifocality as the final effect of the camouflaging process, and consider the works of Sawada Tomoko, Isaac Julien, Mike Nelson, Yan Zhenzhong, Kutlug Ataman, Candice Breitz and Mark Wallinger. The project is accompanied by images and discussion of my own visual work in relation to the intellectual texts and the work of other artists presented.
23

Dialogue as practice and understanding in contemporary art

Hammersley, John January 2015 (has links)
This study investigates how social constructionist dialogue as art demonstrates a layered mode of practical inquiry, which weaves together interactive and explorative, re-presentational and reflective modes of dialogue in the performance of knowledge. Recent art debates present dialogue as a relational, collaborative and situated mode of meaning-making, and an alternative to traditional constraining frameworks of art. However, artists have been criticised for idealised interpretations of dialogue, which present it as something essentially good and democratic, for insufficiently scrutinising dialogical relationships, and for not providing adequate process accounts for secondary audiences. This study’s multi-layered performance of knowledge draws on thematic insights developed through fourteen interviews and five field conversation artworks from 2008 onwards. Research material from conversational encounters was combined and presented as three constructed written dialogues, which reflect the tensions and questions that emerge out of enacting such a layered mode of dialogue as art. These tensions are re-presented, and discussed in three central thematic chapters, which frame these themes as issues of context, competing characteristics of meaningmaking and relating. The constructed written dialogues provide a platform for further discussion and reflective analysis, which in turn are proposed as an invitation to continued dialogue and socially grounded interaction. The central implication of this study’s contribution to knowledge is that such an approach to practice-led inquiry articulates how dialogue may contribute to the increasing shift in critical art practices towards to more imbricated, uncertain, and performative approaches to knowledge, and provide an alternative to essentialised and foundationalist interpretations of dialogue.
24

Integrating plant electrophysiology and sonic art

Leudar, Augustine Jan Seth Maranatha Bannatyne January 2017 (has links)
This thesis accompanies a portfolio of site specific sound art installations that were delivered in the UK, Europe and South America between 2012 and 2016. The principle focus of the research is to combine plant electrophysiology and sonic art with a particular emphasis on spatial audio. By using networks of electrodes, audio spatialisation and various artistic techniques, electrical activity in the biosphere was made tangible through sound in real-time. Installations based on this research were presented at public events, immersing listeners in the complexity of these processes. Bespoke software was created to meet creative and technical objectives. Sound installations were created that were designed to stand as works of art in their own right regardless of whether or not the audience knew there was a scientific component to the piece; at the same time new approaches to monitoring electrical activity in plants were developed. A description of how these two elements are combined and how scientific needs influence artistic work and vice versa is given. The principle object of this research is not to gather qualitative or quantitative data, but to convert signals into sound in real-time and create art installations that engender a space where independent elements of both disciplines can merge as well as develop independently from each other. Technical and artistic gaps in the field are identified through the literature review and addressed in the installations. The software created forms a bridge between the creative and the technical side of the research and is described by means of videos. This commentary is accompanied by a USB stick that has relevant software and audio documentation. It also includes an offline website which contains important information such as videos, and is referred to throughout the text and forms an essential component of the thesis.
25

Navigating the void : international contemporary art and the triangle network

Crane, Emily January 2015 (has links)
This thesis explores the artist-led initiatives associated with the Triangle Network in the United States, United Kingdom, Southern Africa and South Asia, between 1982 and 2015. It considers how artists have set up artist-led initiatives as a response to different circumstances in these regions, and how the idea of a network has influence this development. It is specifically concerned with how artist-led initiatives have contributed to shifts in art-world infrastructures and the writing of contemporary art histories. In particular it shows how the idea for international artist-led workshops spread from an intitial workshop in Upstate New York to an international network of partner-workshops across the world. It demonstrates how these workshops often led to: the creation of new spaces for artists to work and host visiting artists for residency programs; new exhibitions and publications; and a cosmopolitan sense of international artistic exchange. It also shows how these artistic exchanges have been concerned with better regional and South- South connectivity. It examines why and how such artist-led initiatives have been initiated and run, and what impact belonging to a network has had on the artists and artworks. The purpose of this thesis is to argue that an understanding of these types of organisations is a useful contribution to international contemporary art history, as they often represent moments of transformation and emergence. Using the notions of assemblages and networks as analytical tools, the thesis explores the possibilities these approaches have to art historical writing. Such an approach allows for analysis of heterogeneous actancts including artworks, materials, artists, institutions, books, spaces, websites, and funding streams. The intention of this thesis is to contribute an approach to writing about contemporary art history from the perspective of ‘grass-roots globalization’ (Appardurai, 1999) that can counter readings of global contemporary art based only on hegemonic institutions.
26

Art in the age of its dissolution : beyond the democratic paradox

Kollectiv, Galia January 2013 (has links)
Dating at least back to the avant-garde, the demand for increasing equality has generated several models for the production and consumption of fine art. Today, the democratization of artistic production and the transformation of everyday life into creative work is already happening in the post-Fordist labour market. Any attempt to re-think the parameters of a democratic art practice thus necessitates a re-evaluation of what critique art might continue to offer that is not immanent in this ironic realisation of the avant-garde dream of uniting everyday life and creativity for all. Critique’s current primary mode of operation, exposing that which is concealed within culture to reveal the power structures that determine it, relies on a kind of ironic gap, a hierarchy of knowledge that needs to be eliminated between how things are and how they appear. What happens, then, when this gap is closed, when we all share the underlying assumptions of critique? If the drive to democratise art has historically served as a critique of work and leisure divides outside the realm of art, how does it function in light of the new economy of the creative industry? A self-deprecating irony, exposing and re-enacting this position of impotence is one of the few gestures left in the arsenal of critical art. To overcome this stalemate, we propose an anti-humanist strategy derived from the concept of overidentification. Although related to irony, overidentification has important features that set it apart from other phenomena that fit in this category and make it a potentially useful tool in overcoming the impasse of infinite democratisation. We apply this term, which Žižek uses in passing, to a series of projects and case studies extending beyond the boundaries of professional art practice and investigate the role of authorship in producing and challenging neo-liberalism’s instrumentalisation of subjectivity.
27

Economies of character (or, character in the age of big data)

Rosamond, Emily January 2016 (has links)
In the age of big data, character becomes a newly foregrounded object – and product – of scrutiny. New credit scoring methods, which draw on big data analytics, claim to paint rich, nuanced pictures of prospective borrowers’ “true characters.” Micro-entrepreneurs, such as hosts on Airbnb, trade in reputation-images, seeking the best possible ratings and reviews in an online marketplace built on highly visible metrics. Surveillance apparatuses (both governmental and corporate) place ever more emphasis on propensity, analyzing not what a person has done so much as what she might do in future. In doing this, such apparatuses construct, enforce and enact new ways to hold people accountable for their represented, future selves – and to the characters understood to link their present selves to those futures. How might artists best respond to new social and economic pressures placed on character (as a concept governing representations of particularity and propensity) in the age of big data? What can be learned from contemporary art about the new economies of character, given art’s long-standing, privileged relationship to the production and circulation of its artists’ and subjects’ (perceived and represented) “characters”? Examining a wide range of artworks – including some recent works that respond directly to big data, but also many more that, more broadly, anticipate its perceptual politics – I argue that a significant response to such problems can be found in works that disturb the distinction between embedded, first person perspectives and so-called objective, external viewpoints on their subjects. Representations that trouble the distinction between shared and first-person perspectives enact the tension between privacy and sharing that has become increasingly vital to speculative market logics linking character to finance. The shared/private space of the disturbed first-person view lends perceptual logic to the personalization of prediction afforded by big data, and stages contemporary conflicts between privacy and sharing, quantities of data and qualitative perception.
28

Crosswords, problems and expectations of the curator of contemporary art exhibitions : a personal experience from the project Economy : Picasso

Roma Serrano, Valentín January 2013 (has links)
The present investigation project is an attempt to try to deepen in the vicissitudes, in the curatorial decisions and in the ways to dialogue in an exhibition carried out by Valentín Roma, with the purpose to explore critically which are the roles, the working lines and the responsibilities of a curator of contemporary art. Because its complexity and its longitude in the time, the show chosen as a study case, that was entitled Economy: Picasso and which different phases were held in the Museu Picasso of Barcelona between May 2011 and February 2013, offers an authentic panoptic of each and every one of the problems (design, managing, production, and mediation) that affect the curatorship, for what it constitutes, as well, a perfect example where we can observe the dynamics of the cultural policies and its difficulties to fit in from of the institutional frameworks until the ideological usages of the artists, audiences and curators. In order to contextualize this study we have elaborated a short chronological assay about the recent history of the curatorial practices since the seventies to our days. From another hand, and to help defining Economy: Picasso, we performed four interviews with the different agents involved in the project. Besides realising a very exhaustive analysis, this investigation work aspires to establish a certain pattern of analysis about the contemporary art exhibitions that could be extensible to other exhibition cases and to other curators.
29

Choking on the madeleine : encounters and alternative approaches to memory in a contemporary art practice

Andersdotter, Sara January 2015 (has links)
This practice-based thesis proposes radical, critical, creative reconsiderations of memory and how the mnemic may be expressed in art practice. The research took place through developing a series of works within contemporary installation art practice, which considers the experience of memory an abstract, affective event. The thesis confronts the typical assumptions and ocularcentric misconceptions that the mnemic is a visual phenomenon. It challenges presumed relationships between photographs and memory then asks: How may notions of memory be re-examined through art practice so as to allow alternative expressions of memory to emerge? After the critique, the thesis offers an alternative concept of memory that may be incorporated into art practice: the memory-event. The concept emerged through my art practice alongside engagement with the writings of philosophers Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and contemporary theorists such as Simon O’Sullivan and Brian Massumi. The inquiry utilises O’Sullivan’s framework as a method towards parallel critique and creation in contemporary art practices; these counter existing forms of thought. The framework includes seven Deleuzean concepts applied in rethinking memory: the encounter, affect, the production of subjectivity, the minor, the virtual, the event, and mythopoesis. The thesis adopts this approach, and demonstrates how the memory-event developed through phases of research. Firstly, the thesis establishes and critiques prevailing ideas and expressions of memory. It then defines the methods and theories to disrupt existing assumptions of the mnemic, showing how the defined methods and theories were applied in reconsidering and posing alternatives to established assumptions. Included is a visual and textual portfolio of work exploring the ideas of memory produced in my art practice. The implications of this research for art practice constitute, through the mobilisation of the memory-event, potentials for liberation from the constraints of representation and common assumptions of memory. This produces innovative expressions of the mnemic experience, and continues to challenge ways in which memory is considered.
30

Elements of shamanism within performance art

Babot, Philip January 2011 (has links)
No description available.

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