This paper is intended to serve as a supporting document for the exhibition Collective Case Studies that was held in The Gallery, at Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning. In Collective Case Studies, the head sculptures act as blank slates for my expression of personality archetypes. They embody a longstanding interest in the psyche, character and identity that continues to influence my art-making practice. These sculptures introduce a particular personality trait or present a case study to make human idiosyncrasies manifest in visual terms, both individually and relationally. Collectively, the works are inspired by psycho-social aspects of personality, including archetypes and stereotypes, in the past and present time. The leading sources for my work are psychological, cross-cultural and empirical.

This paper is intended to serve as a supporting document for the exhibition Collective Case Studies that was held in The Gallery, at Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning. In Collective Case Studies, the head sculptures act as blank slates for my expression of personality archetypes. They embody a longstanding interest in the psyche, character and identity that continues to influence my art-making practice. These sculptures introduce a particular personality trait or present a case study to make human idiosyncrasies manifest in visual terms, both individually and relationally. Collectively, the works are inspired by psycho-social aspects of personality, including archetypes and stereotypes, in the past and present time. The leading sources for my work are psychological, cross-cultural and empirical.

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No description available.

Through creative and theoretical research, this practice-led PhD project investigates the conditions that facilitate embodied sensory awareness within digital inter-media installation. Central to this exploration are questions concerning ‘immersion.’ The research uses this term to describe a transformation in perception that allows us to shake off representational and symbolic meaning in favour of embodied, sensory and intuitive awareness within an installation space. Drawing from embodied memories of immersion in natural and spiritual environments, I consider the elements that contributed to these experiences and ask whether it is possible to create this sense of immersion in art. I then consider the elements that produce immersive, inter-media environments including space, sound, light, and projected moving images. Drawing on theoretical and artistic precedents, I propose a set of principles for producing a sense of embodied sensory immersion. The practical outcomes of the research - three digital inter-media installations included in the exhibition, in an other light - incorporate different combinations and treatments of these material elements to investigate and test the proposed principles.

How might ‘the digital’ be conceived of in an ‘expanded field’ of art practice, where ontology is flattened such that it is not defined by a particular media? This text, together with an installation of art work at the Exhibition Research Lab, Liverpool John Moores University (13-24 March), constitutes the thesis submission as a whole, such that in the practice of ‘reading’ the thesis, each element remains differentiated from the other and makes no attempt to ‘represent’ the other. In negating representation, such practices present a ‘radical’ rethinking of the digital as a differentiated in-itself, one that is not defined solely by entrenched computational narratives derived from set theory. Rather, following Nelson Goodman’s nominalistic rejection of class constructs, ‘the digital’ is thus understood in onto-epistemic terms as being syntactically and semantically differentiated (Languages of Art 161). In the context of New Zealand Post-object Art practices of the late 1960s, as read through Jack Burnham’s systems thinking, such a digitally differentiated ontology is conceived of in terms of the how of practice, rather than what of objects (“Systems Aesthetics”). After Heidegger, such a practice is seen as an event of becoming realised by the method of formal indication, such that what is concealed is brought forth as a thing-in-itself (The Event; Phenomenological Interpretations 26). As articulated through the researcher’s own sculptural practice – itself indebted to Post-object Art – indication is developed as an intersubjective method applicable to both artists and audience. However, the constraints imposed on the thing-in-itself by the Husserlian phenomenological tradition are also taken as imposing correlational limitations on the ‘digital’, such that it is inherently an in-itself for-us and thus not differentiated in-itself. To resolve such Kantian dialectics, the thesis draws on metaphysical arguments put forward by contemporary speculative ontologies – in particular the work of Quentin Meillassoux and Tristan Garcia (After Finitude; Form and Object). Where these contemporary continental philosophies provide a means of releasing events from the contingency of human ‘reason’, the thesis argues for a practice of ‘un-reason’ in which indication is recognized as being contingent on speculation. Practice, it is argued, was never reason’s alone to determine. Instead, through the ‘radical’ method of speculative indication, practice is asserted as the event through which the differentiated digital is revealed as a thing-in-itself of itself and not for us.