Journal articles on the topic 'Degree Discipline: Theatre'

This paper explores the relevance to industry's needs of operations management (OM) teaching in higher education, by researching the content of OM modules delivered by UK academics and comparing the results of this research with the views of business practitioners having had first-hand experience of OM teaching on MBA programmes. To determine whether a gap exists in terms of the importance placed on key content areas, the views of OM academics and practitioners were empirically tested using an online survey instrument. The findings indicate that although there is a broad degree of cohesion among academics relating to module content there are gaps between academics and practitioners in terms of the relative importance of key content areas. Such differences are most evident with regard to supply chain management, capacity management, inventory control and lean production tools and techniques. In this regard, the results provide a backdrop for the development of this important subject discipline to ensure that what is taught in the lecture theatre is valued in the business environment.

Abstract Mar Gómez Glez’s 2014 site-specific and fact-inspired play Bajo el agua portrays the governing presence of the disciplinary mechanisms that operate upon the construction of the female body and feminine subjectivity through the unique focus on the microcosm of synchronized swimming. By deliberately placing a singular emphasis on a sport dominated by women, Gómez Glez calls attention to the gendered nature of disciplinary practices, inviting the reader/spectator to take stock of and better understand the degree of implementation and perpetuation within a wider social frame. This article proposes a reading of Bajo el agua through the theoretical writings of Michel Foucault and Sandra Lee Bartky, employing this critical prism as a means of elucidating the ways in which discipline is both implemented and gendered. My analysis additionally examines the inclusion of elements of performativity as well as the use of multimedia as crucial components of the play’s structural and thematic construction. Gómez Glez’s combination of dramatic fictions and real-life referents, together with contemporary experimental staging techniques further serve to actualize both the form and the content for modern audiences. My reading of Bajo el agua thus stands at the crossroads of studies on feminism, sports sociology, and contemporary theatre practices.

Jesuit boarding schools did not fulfil only social roles. They were educational institutions shaping discipline, morality and religiousness of their pupils. The monks organized various activities for their students which were conducive for acquiring and consolidating knowledge. Students’ time was filled with the review of school material, literary exercises, debates or production of theatre performances. The offer depended on the degree of exclusivity of a given establishment. In the Second Republic of Poland, there functioned three Jesuit schools for laymen: in Khyriv (Pol. Chyrów), Vilnius and Gdynia. Only the first two ran boarding schools. Both boarding schools offered very good living conditions, and the life of the alumni passed according to a similar, clearly defined day rhythm. The institutions in busy urban Vilnius and peripheral Khyriv were very much different. The educational process used for the boarding students from Vilnius lacked special rigours, which was different from the methods generally accepted at that time. The behaviours of boarding students from Khyriv, in turn, were regulated in the minutest detail by Statutes and regulations and the system of punishments was very elaborate. The schools tried to restore order by the method of overcoming the resistance of the more independently feeling and thinking pupils.

Abstract. In the era of ‘Smart Cities’, Planning Support Systems play an important role in providing a suite of digital tools to support evidenced based planning and design (Pettit et al. 2019). Planning Support Theatres vary from the traditional City Command Control Centres which are used to manage the real-time city (Kitchin 2014) in that they look at planning and design of future of cities and regions through collaboration (Healey 2003) between various stakeholders. Such methodologies which lend themselves to collaborative planning and design including Geo-design (Steinitz 2012; Pettit et al. 2019) and Co-design (Punt et al. 2020). There has been a plethora of virtual learning environments applicable to any discipline-specific application, each with their own names, terminology, feature sets and degrees of interoperability. In addition to providing the regular set of advantages such as ease of use across large geographies, improving collaboration between diverse set of stakeholders, these virtual platforms have become essential in the current world with travel restrictions and social distancing. In this context, it is imperative to explore the use of virtual systems for the purpose designing and implementing planning support theatre for city planning and design. This research builds a prototype for web based, 3D, immersive, planning support theatre and evaluates its functionality against similar physical theatres.

Purpose This study aims to assess current academic library services to theater students through an examination of online research guides. Design/methodology/approach This study uses a representative sample of 100 universities that offer theater degrees; the library website at each of these institutions is examined for the existence of a theater research guide. Each research guide was analyzed in depth. Findings The vast majority of the universities in the sample did create research guides for theater students, though the contents of these guides varied greatly. The study highlights findings including popular databases and journals for theater students, as well as media resources and common subjects for subsections or course guides. Research limitations/implications This study only examined a sample of 100 institutions; many theater research guides were not examined for this study. Additionally, analysis of online content is a time-specific endeavor: a guide may look significantly different from one month to the next, though the recommendations in this article might prove useful even if the sites at these institutions have since been updated. Practical implications Through an examination of a great number of guides, a few practical suggestions emerge for librarians looking to create theater research guides, such as highlighting playscripts and other print materials and including hyperlocal information (such as university production history). Originality/value Though several studies have been performed on research guides in various disciplines, this article is the first on those to theater students.

The high level of development of culture and art in modern Russia requires appropriate training of employees for the theater and concert complex. Well-trained specialists will be able to find a job and employment. In the labor market in the field of art and culture, there is creative competition. Therefore, the training of bachelors at the higher educational institutions should be guided by the requirements of the labor market in this area, and the higher educational institutions should produce competitive specialists in creative professions. In the higher education system of modern Russia, the issue of improving the quality of teaching of special (major) disciplines, as well as all subjects included in the training program, is on the agenda of the department collectives. The program trajectory, which is set through the Federal State Educational Standards, is associated with a certain experiment in modeling competencies based on accepted professional standards. An important component is the position of the higher educational institution and the right to develop competencies based on the experience, profile of the university and the composition of the teaching staff. Higher educational institutions have certain academic freedoms and use their opportunities to achieve a higher quality of bachelor's and master's degree training. The article deals with various aspects of vocal pedagogy, the formation of the necessary professional and general cultural competencies, and individual work with students. Such problems are raised by teachers of creative higher educational institutions. We considered it possible to enter into the discussion and conduct a friendly polemic.

The functional characteristics of urban systems vary predictably with Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) population, with certain metrics increasing apace with population (e.g., housing stock), some increasing faster than population (e.g., wealth), and others increasing slower than population (infrastructure elements). Culture has been designated the fourth pillar of sustainability. The population-dependent scaling of operating revenue, work space, and number of employees was investigated for almost 3000 arts organizations in the US, both in aggregate and by arts discipline (music, theater, visual and design arts, dance, and museums). Unlike general measures of creativity, the three measures of economic footprint did not scale supra-linearly with the population of metropolitan areas. Rather, operating revenue scaled linearly (e.g., like amenities), and work space and employee number scaled sub-linearly (e.g., like infrastructure). The cost of living, proxied by housing costs, increased with MSA population, though not as rapidly as did arts organization operating revenue, indicating a degree of uncoupling. The generally higher educational attainment of adults in larger cities, coupled with the growth of the education-dependent arts patronage, suggest a funding focus on less populous (50,000–1,000,000), as well as on under-performing, cities.

The uptake of virtual simulation technologies in both military and civilian surgical contexts has been both slow and patchy. The failure of the virtual reality community in the 1990s and early 2000s to deliver affordable and accessible training systems stems not only from an obsessive quest to develop the ‘ultimate’ in so-called ‘immersive’ hardware solutions, from head-mounted displays to large-scale projection theatres, but also from a comprehensive lack of attention to the needs of the end users. While many still perceive the science of simulation to be defined by technological advances, such as computing power, specialized graphics hardware, advanced interactive controllers, displays and so on, the true science underpinning simulation—the science that helps to guarantee the transfer of skills from the simulated to the real—is that of human factors, a well-established discipline that focuses on the abilities and limitations of the end user when designing interactive systems, as opposed to the more commercially explicit components of technology. Based on three surgical simulation case studies, the importance of a human factors approach to the design of appropriate simulation content and interactive hardware for medical simulation is illustrated. The studies demonstrate that it is unnecessary to pursue real-world fidelity in all instances in order to achieve psychological fidelity—the degree to which the simulated tasks reproduce and foster knowledge, skills and behaviours that can be reliably transferred to real-world training applications.

The article deals with the main aspects of organizational-pedagogical, scientific- research and theatrical-critical activity of the candidate of art studies A. V. Pletniov. Little-known biographical data on the life of the theater scientist and the creative environment, in which his professional formation took place, are presented. It is noted that A. V. Pletniov was one of the first graduates of the State Institute of Theatrical Arts named after A. V. Lunacharsky (now – RUTM). He studied there in 1934–1938, surrounded by highly-qualified students, many of whom subsequently became the pride of Russian theater studies. A. V. Pletniov entered the history of the theatrical culture of Kharkiv as a talented scientist-researcher, a well-known theater critic and teacher. He stood at the origins of theater studies in Kharkiv and for almost 30 years he headed the department of the History of the Theater (now – the Department of Theater Studies) of the higher theater educational institution in the city. However, the value of his activity is much wider. The formation of the Kharkiv State Theater Institute is closely linked with the personality of A. V. Pletniov, since 1963 he wax also connected with the theater department of the Kharkiv Institute of Arts named after I. P. Kotliarevsky, and in general – with the theatrical culture of our city. However, until this time his organizational-pedagogical, scientific-research, and theatrical-critical heritage has not been properly investigated and objectively not covered. The purpose of the research is to analyze the organizational, pedagogical, scientific, research and theatrical-critical activity of A. V. Pletniov, writing it into the socio-political and artistic context of time and, at the same time, into the history of theater studies of Ukraine. A. V. Pletniov started his pedagogical activity in 1938 at the Kharkiv Theater School as a teacher of the history of the theater and the head of the educational department. With the beginning of the war, the school, which merged with the Kyiv State Theater Institute, was evacuated to the city Saratov, where A. Pletniov as a teacher worked until January 1942. From this time until the end of the war he was on the front in the field force. In 1945 he returned to the newly founded Kharkiv State Theater Institute and was immediately appointed Deputy Director of Educational and Scientific Work and a senior lecturer at the Department of History of the Theater. Together with the director of the institute Z. Smoktiy, A. Pletniov was making considerable efforts to organize the educational process in the time of economic trouble, lack of staff with the corresponding education, and provided basic conditions of work and education in the newly created higher education. Existing and new departments were supplemented and opened, the prominent artists from Kharkiv theaters and leading scientists from other universities were invited to work. Among them: D. Antonovych, O. Serdiuk, M. Krushelnytsky, O. Kramov, L. Dubovyk, V. Chystiakova and others. The peculiarity of the organization of research and methodological work was its focus on providing educational process. Several comprehensive topics on the methodology of actor education, stage language teaching, encyclopedic dictionary of theatrical terms, and a study on the history of theater development in Kharkiv were planned. It was at that time that several dissertations were planned, including A. Pletniov’s “Kharkiv Theater of the Second Quarter of the 19th Century”, which he successfully presented in 1952 in his alma mater – State Institute of Theater Art after A. V. Lunacharsky, and he was awarded a degree Doctor of Arts. In 1960, the completed dissertation study was published in the form of a monograph titled “At the Origins of the Kharkiv Theater”, which until now has not lost its relevance and is actively used in the educational process. In 1947, while being the Deputy Director of the Institute, A. Pletniov also headed the Department of Theater History. It was with him as the head of the department, the actual renewal of the department as a theatrical research center and methodological center began, it largely determined the main directions of its activities for the future. Under the direction of A. V. Pletniov, the department trained a lot of talented theatrical scholars who successfully worked and work as teachers of higher educational institutions, heads of literary units of creative groups, heads of leading theaters, heads of cultural management, members of mass media staff, well-known theatrical critics. A. Pletniov headed the department for almost 30 years – until 1976 (with a brief break in 1961–1962), giving a significant impetus to the development of theater studies in Kharkiv, in particular, theatrical criticism. He himself was actively involved in the illumination of the theatrical process in Kharkiv, leaving after himself dozens of highly professional reviews, articles, notes, sometimes controversial, bearing the imprint of time. The article emphasizes that A. Pletniov was one of the most skilled and highly educated teachers. He taught a whole range of theater studies disciplines: the history of Russian theater, the history of foreign theater, the theory of drama, theatrical criticism. Until the last years of his life, A. Pletniov conducted active scientific research, methodological, theatrical-critical and public activity. In 1968–1972, he was the Vice-Rector of the Kharkiv State Institute of Arts named after I. P. Kotliarevsky for the scientific work and theatrical department. In 1975, he finished a doctoral dissertation “From the History of the Establishment of the Soviet Theater in Ukraine”, in which he for the first time thoroughly recreated the extremely complex and multifaceted theatric life of Kharkov in the October decade (1917–1927) in the socio-cultural context, but he did not have time to defense this study. Nowadays this scientific work is striking by its multidimensional and enormous amount of material. Conclusions. As a result of the research was established that with A. Pletniov personality as a well-known teacher, a scientist and theater critic, one of the leaders of the Kharkiv Theater Institute (1945–1953), later the Kharkiv Institute of Arts named after I. P. Kotliarevsky, more than thirty years of theater education in Kharkiv were connected. Particularly remarcable the role of A. Pletniov was in the development of theater studies and theater education in such a significant theatrical center as Kharkiv, where he nearly thirty years was heading the specialized department of the history of theater (now the department of theater studies). It was under his leadership that a methodology for preparing theatrical scholars of a broad profile was formed, based on a high level of general culture and education of future specialists, on the possession of a wide spectrum of theatrical research tools. Despite some contradictions inherent in A. Pletniov’s scientific and theatrical- critical activity and reflected in his heritage, that was typical for most scholars of the humanitarian sphere of the 1930–1970s, he remains one of the decisive figures in the development of theater education and theater researches in Kharkiv. All the above motivates for a further, more profound study of the scientific-pedagogical and theatrical-critical activity of A. Pletniov and, more broadly, the development of theater studies in Kharkiv.

Over the last 100 years since the planetarium was invented and began to spread across the planet, discipline-based planetarium education researchers have worked diligently to catalog what concepts are taught in the planetarium and what audiences learn when attending a planetarium show. What is not clearly known is precisely ‘who’ it is that are teaching astronomy in planetaria. Numerous small-scale studies give hints about who plantarians are, but the existing participant demographics provided shed precious little insight about them as broad field of professional experts. Knowing “who planetarians are” is critical to education researchers who need to know when they are studying planetarium educators who are more or less typical of most people in the field and when, instead, they are studying people who are unusual outliers and far less representative of the broader population. As a first step toward obtaining a glimpse of who planetarium educators are, a brief survey was broadly distributed through contemporary social media networks frequented by planetarium educators posing the question, “who are you?” The results from 61 respondents showed that 90% had undergraduate degrees, half of which were in physics or astronomy, and 38% hold graduate degrees. Additionally, only 8% have amateur astronomy or hobbyist backgrounds or any substantive K-12 classroom teaching experience. Perhaps unique to planetarium-based astronomy educators, 38% report having extensive backgrounds in theater and performance, These findings suggest that planetarium educators are a fundamentally different sort of individual than those who teach K-12 astronomy or do outreach as an amateur astronomer and, as such, perhaps have very different professional development requirements and expectations from those other astronomy-education related professional development consumers.

Let us begin with an unfortunate fact: Adébáyọ̀ Fálétí is one major writer that is hardly anthologized. The problem could not have been that he wrote in Yorùbá because Fágúnwà is far more anthologized than he is. Simon Gikandi’s edited Encyclopedia of African Literature (2003) has an entry and other multiple references to Fágúnwà. There is only one reference to Fálétí which is found in the index without any accompanying instance in the work. In Irele and Gikandi’s edited volumes, The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature (2004), Fálétí only managed an appearance in the bibliography that featured four of his works—Wọn Rò Pé Wèrè Ni ́ (1965), Ọmọ Olókùn Ẹṣin (1969), Baṣòrun Gáà (1972) and Ìdààmú Páàdì Mínkáílù (1974). In the preface, Irele and Gikandi write: The scholarly interest in African orality also drew attention to the considerable body of literature in the African languages that had come into existence as a consequence of the reduction of these languages to writing, one of the enduring effects of Christian evangelization. The ancient tradition of Ethiopian literature in Ge’ez, and modern works like Thomas Mofolo’s Shaka in the Sotho language, and the series of Yorùbá novels by D. O. Fágúnwà, were thus able finally to receive the consideration they deserved. African-language literatures came to be regarded as a distinct province of the general landscape of imaginative life and literary activity on the African continent (2004, xiii). Essays 60 Adeshina Afolayan In fact, the publication of Fágúnwà’s Ògbójù Ọdẹ Nínú Igbó Ìrúnmalẹ (The ̀ Intrepid Hunter in the Forest of Spirits, 1938) made the chronology of literary events in Africa, and it misses out Fálétí’s 1965 work. In her “Literature in Yorùbá: poetry and prose; traveling theater and modern drama,” in the same volume, Karin Barber seems to redress this imbalance when she gives a place to Fálétí in her discussion of post-Fágúnwà writers. According to her, In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s there was an explosion of literary creativity, with many new authors emerging and pioneering new styles and themes. Among the most prominent were Adébáyọ Fálétí whose ̀ Ọmọ Olókùn Ẹṣin (1969) is a historical novel dealing with a revolt against the overlordship of Ọyọ, and Ọládèjọ Òkédìjí, author of two brilliantly innovative crime thrillers (Àjà ló lẹrù, 1969, and Àgbàlagbà Akàn, 1971), as well as a more somber tragic novel of the destruction of a young boy who is relentlessly drawn into a life of crime in the underworld of Ifẹ (Atótó Arére, 1981). Notable also are Akínwùnmí Ìsòlá, whose university campus novel Ó le kú (1974) broke new ground in social setting and ambience; Afọlábí Ọlábímtán, author of several novels, including Kékeré Ẹkùn (1967), which deals with the conflicts arising from early Christian conversion in a small village, and Baba Rere! (1978), a contemporary satire on a corrupt big man; and Kólá Akínlàdé, prolific author of well-crafted detective stories such as Ta ló pa Ọmọ Ọba? (Who Killed the Prince’s Child?). These authors were all verbal stylists of a high order; they transformed the literary language, moving away from Fágúnwà’s rolling cadences to a more demotic, supple prose that successfully caught the accents of everyday life (2004, 368). While it may be misplaced to draw a comparison between Fágúnwà and Fálétí, there is a sense in which Fálétí’s demonstrates a more robust literary sensibility that goes beyond the allegorical into a realistic assessment of human relationship and sociality within the context of the Yorùbá cultural template. While Fágúnwà could not resist the influence of Christianity, and especially the allegorical motif of the journey in which humans encounter spiritual challenges (which John Bunyan’s Pilgrim Progress made popular), Fálétí is fundamentally a cultural connoisseur; a writer with a most intimate and dynamic understanding of the Yorùbá condition, especially in its conjunction with the political and sociocultural contexts of contemporary Nigeria. And we have Ọlátúndé Ọlátúnjí to thank for the deep exploration and interrogation of the fundamental poetic and literary nuances that Fálétí has left for us. In this essay, I will attempt to unearth the philosophical sensibility that undergirds Fálétí’s literary prowess, especially as demonstrated by his poems. Fálétí’s Philosophical Sensibility 61 Both the poets and the philosophers have always had one thing in common— the exploration of the possibilities that ideas and visions yield: As theoretical disciplines concerned with raising social consciousness, philosophy and literature engage in similar speculation about the good society and what is good for humanity. They influence thoughts about political currents and conditions. They can, for instance, lead the reader to critical reflections on the type of leaders suitable for a given society and on the degree of civic consciousness exercised by the people in protecting their rights. Philosophy and literature, equally, offer critical evaluation of existing and possible forms of political arrangements, beliefs and practices. In addition, they provide insights into political concepts and justification for normative judgements about politics and society. They also create awareness of possibilities for change (Okolo 2007, 1). Compared to Ọlátúnjí’s exploratory unraveling of Fálétí’s poetry, my objective is to enlist Fálétí as a poet that has not been given his due as one who is sensitive to the requirements of political philosophy and its objective of ensuring the imagination of a society that is properly ordered according to the imperatives of justice.

Improv theater has expanded beyond a popular American form of entertainment into an educational experience for students and teachers. It may be difficult to imagine that an interactive, joyful, and collaborative improv workshop might be harmful, but our own experiences as professional improvisers led us to observe that even well-intentioned, antiracist improv theater interventions tend to reflect Whiteness more than democratic values. We investigate this observation through a systematic review of education research articles. Our review of 30 studies reveals that, to varying degrees, researchers have regarded improvisation as an instrumental practice to improve some other activity or as metaphor for the activity of teaching. We found that Whiteness has been central to the use of improvisation in educational contexts. Finally, this study illustrates that a turn toward disciplined improvisation or an improvisational ethos offers one way to practice the ideals of democratic education.

«For a place to leave an impression on us, it must be made of time as well as space – of its past, its history, its culture» (Sciascia, 1987). Architecture is one the many disciplines which, due to their heteronomous nature, aspire to represent the past, present and future of a community. Just as the construction of buildings is not merely a response to a need, but rather an act that incorporates the concrete translation of desires and aspirations, so too do music, philosophy, and the figurative arts reflect contemporary themes in their evolution. The fragmentation of skills, the specialisation of knowledge, the rapid modification of the tools we work with, the digitalisation and hyperdevelopment of communication are all phenomena that have a substantial impact on the evolution of disciplines in a reciprocal interaction with the intangible values of a community – economic, social and cultural – as well as the material assets of the places where it expresses itself. Interpreting heteronomy as a condition in which an action is not guided by an autonomous principle that is intrinsic to the discipline, but rather determined by its interaction with external factors, a theoretical reflection on the evolution of the tools of knowledge and creation has the task of defining possible scenarios capable of tackling the risk of losing an ability to synthesise the relationships between the conditions that define the identity of architecture itself. The challenge of complexity is rooted in social, technological and environmental shifts: a challenge that involves space, a material resource, in its global scale and its human measure; and time, an immaterial resource, nowadays evaluated in terms of speed and flexibility, but also duration and permanence. These elements impact upon the project as a whole, as a combination of multiple forms of knowledge which, given their constant evolution, is subject to continuous comparison. The cultural debate has investigated at length the topic of art being forced to devote itself to heteronomy whilst also retaining a need for aesthetic autonomy. The risk of forgetting its own ontological status, of losing its own identity in the fragmentation and entropy of the contemporary world, finds an answer in the idea of design as a synthesis between an artistic idea and the social and environmental conditions in which it is places, configuring itself as an element capable of reconciling the antithetical drives towards an autonomous vision of the work, on the one hand, and a heteronomous one linked to its geographical, cultural, sociological and psychological characteristics, on the other. In the systemic and concerted working process so intrinsic to disciplines such as filmmaking and music – but also the visual arts or even philosophy – the act of designing is the expression of the relationship with a community of individuals whose actions are based on a role that is as social as it is technical, given that they act based on material and immaterial values of a public nature. If indeed the sciences – as Thomas Kuhn demonstrated in his writings on the scientific revolutions – cannot be understood without their historical dimension, then disciplines such as those addressed in this Dossier represent cultural phenomena that can only truly be understood in their entirety when considered in the context of their era and the many factors that fed into their creation. However, precisely as demonstrated by Kuhn’s theories (Kuhn, 1987), their evolution also consists of “scientific revolutions”: moments of disruption capable of changing the community’s attitude towards the discipline itself and, perhaps more importantly, its paradigms. Music, cinema, art, architecture and philosophy are all expressions of that which makes us human, in all its complexity: divided and confined to their own disciplinary fields, they are not capable of expressing the poetic quality of life and thus «making people feel and become aware of the aesthetic feeling» (Morin, 2019). Emanuele Coccia, an internationally renowned philosopher and associate professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, imagines a world in which everything you see is the product of an intentionality articulated by human, non-human and non-living actors. Design – not only anthropocentric design – is the most universal power in the world. Every living being can, in effect, design the world, but at the same time, every agent of matter can also design, and it is the interplay between these elements that creates a continuous metamorphosis of our environment. In other words, being alive is not a necessary condition for being a designer. The two anthropologists Alfred Gell and Philippe Descola, in their writings on Western society and nature, present contrasting views on the presence of the soul/animism in nature. The result is a sort of architecture of the landscape, in which nature itself is imbued with a sense of design intentionality that exists in a continuum with mankind. Edoardo Tresoldi, a young Italian sculptor, is one of the latest exponents of the heteronomy of architecture, which rejects the limiting confines of individual disciplines so as to imagine a transversal vision of the environment and its construction. Through the interplay of transparencies created with ephemeral metal structures, Tresoldi exalts the geometrical qualities of this raw material, going beyond the simple spatiotemporal dimension to establish a dialogue between place and the artistic representation thereof. Tresoldi recounts this journey of his through five themes: Place, because architecture in itself is markedly conditioned by its context, as is – in his case – art; Design, that is the act of envisaging the work, which is ultimately influenced by everything around us and our imagination; Time, as art is characterised by a potential interweaving, a continuity in the creative processes influenced by the history of the place; Material, or rather, materiality and the duality between the technical and artistic parts; and, finally, “What’s Next”, exploring the idea of what the future holds for us. On this last point, Tresoldi imagines his works further opening up to a diversified range of skills in a way that would also carve out new professional profiles for young people. Cristina Frosini, Director of the Milan Conservatory, with a contribution on music – «the supreme mystery of the sciences of man» (Lévi-Strauss, 2004) – offers reflections on a field with deep affinities with the discipline of architecture, with both sharing a strong relationship between composition and execution. The sheer vastness of musical expression, from the precision of the classical score to the freedom of interpretation exemplified by the conductor or the improvising jazz musician, sees the concepts of overall rhythm and melody, the homogeneity and identity of different instruments, and the circularity of the process as the key themes of music as a public art whose creative process has always been founded upon the relationship between technical factors and cultural factors. The contribution provided by Michele Guerra, an academic and professor of History of Cinema, confirms the words of Edgar Morin. «Nowadays, cinema is widely recognised as an art, and in my opinion, it is a tremendous polyphonic and polymorphous art that is capable of stimulating and integrating into itself the virtues of all the other arts: novel-writing, theatre, music, painting, scenography, photography. [...] it can be said that those who participate in the creation of a film are artisans, artists, who play an important role in the aesthetics of the film» (Morin, 2019). The work of the “cinematographic construction site” is driven by forces which, incorporating the status quo of the technical and material factors, lead to “an idea of imaginary metamorphosis” which reflects the aspirations of a society in its efforts to become contemporary. A concept of a heteronomous approach to “making” is also founded upon recognising the didactic value of the work, as emerges from Luigi Alini’s contribution on the figure of Vittorio Garatti – an intellectual first and architect second – whose pieces are the result of work that is as much immaterial as it is material, with an «experiential rather than mediatic» approach (Frampton, in Borsa and Carboni Maestri, 2018), as true architecture is expected to be. The heteronomy of architecture, much like that of other similar disciplines, is based on engagement on two fronts: an understanding of the relevant international scenarios and the definition of the project charter, with a view to conforming it so that it takes into account any changes, operates in continuity with and with an appreciation for history, and develops in harmony with the universality of the discipline and the teachings of its masters. Stimulating a dialogue between different cultural positions is a means to create the conditions for a degree of adherence to contemporaneity without compromising on a principle of historical continuity. In light of this, the contribution by Ferruccio Resta – the current Rector of the Politecnico di Milano – focuses on the varying cultural and intellectual positions that have animated the culture of the Politecnico over the years, representing a highly valuable heritage for the university. Nowadays, with the presence of certain indispensable premises such as sustainability and connectivity, technology seems to overwhelm the design process, outsourcing it to a sort of management of the engineering and component production aspects. Hence the need to reaffirm a “humanistic and human” dimension of the act of making, starting at the root by orienting the training processes in line with the words of historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari, who says: «Many pedagogical experts argue that schools should switch to teaching “the four Cs” – critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity. More broadly, they believe, schools should downplay technical skills and emphasize general-purpose life skills. Most important of all will be the ability to deal with change, learn new things, and preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations». This need reopens the theme of the dualism between “art” and “discipline”, surpassing it in favour of a coexistence of terminology in that it is the quality of the design and the piece that define where it belongs. Reflecting on the foundations of the paths and tools employed in different disciplines – in light of the innovations that involve the project charter in terms not only of concepts, but also of instruments – means reflecting on the concept of “project culture”, understood as the ability to work through actions which combine different contributions, tackling complex problems by way of a conscious creative process. The ability to envisage the new – as is implicit in the etymology of the word “project” itself – and, at the same time, to interpret continuity in the sense of a coherent system of methods and values, is shared by the disciplines and skills brought together in the Dossier: dealing with culture, society, the city, the landscape and the environment all at once requires a multifaceted vision, an ability to read problems, but also a certain openmindedness towards opportunities, the management of complexities, control of the risks of drops in quality in service of concepts of efficiency based on numerical parameters and the standardisation of languages. A comparison of the various contributions and perspectives throws up a picture in which the importance of relationships, the search for what Eiffell defined «the secret laws of harmony», the disciplinary specificity of design as the ability to relate in order to «understand, criticise, transform» (Gregotti, 1981), the ability to distinguish that which is different by involving it in the transformation of design, all represent the foundations for the evolution of heteronomous disciplines in how they move beyond the notions of technique and context as passive referents which generate possibilities in line with the Rogersian reflection on pre-existing environmental elements as historical conditions for reference, critically taken on as determinants. Hence the validity of a “polytechnic” cultural approach that is not only capable of deploying tools and skills which can deal with the operating conditions to be found in a heteronomous context, but also of stimulating critical approaches oriented towards innovation and managing change with the perspective of a project as an opportunity – in the words of Franco Albini – for «experimentation and verification in relation to the progression of construction techniques, tools for investigation, knowledge in the various fields and in relation to the shifts in contemporary culture» (Albini, 1968). The need for a sense of humanism is strongly linked to the reintroduction of the concept of “beauty”, in its modern meaning, under which it shifts from a subjective value to a universal one. Hence the importance of the dialogue with disciplines that identify with the polytechnic mould – that is, one which has always been deeply attentive to the relationship between theory and practice, to the design of architecture as an action that is at once intellectual and technical. As such, starting from the assumption that «no theory can be pursued without hitting a wall that only practice can penetrate» (Deleuze and Foucault 1972; Deleuze, 2002; Foucault, 1977; Deleuze, 2007), it is now essential to promote the professional profiles of artists, musicians, philosophers, humanistic architects and so on who are capable of managing design as a synthesis of external factors, but also as an internal dialectic, as well as skills capable of creating culture understood as technical knowledge. Sometimes, faced with the difficulty of discerning an identity for disciplines, we attempt to draw a boundary that allows us to better understand their meaning and content. However, going on the points of view that have emerged in the Dossier, it seems more important than ever to «work on the boundaries of each field of knowledge», drawing upon a concept expressed by Salvatore Veca (Veca, 1979), making communication between fields a central value, interpreting relationships and connections, identifying the relational perspective as a fundamental aspect of the creative act. The position of architecture as an “art at the edge of the arts”1, as so often posited by Renzo Piano, allows for a reflection on its identity by placing it in a position that centralises rather than marginalises it. A concept of “edge” that touches upon the sociological viewpoint that distinguishes the “finite limit” (boundary) from the “area of interaction” (border) (Sennet, 2011; Sennet, 2018), in which the transformational yet constructive contact with the entities necessary for its realisation takes place. The heteronomy of architecture coincides with its “universality”, a concept that Alberto Campo Baeza (Campo Baeza, 2018) believes to represent the identity of architecture itself. Indeed, its dependence upon human life, the development of society, of its cultural growth, derives from a single and inalienable factor: its heteronomy, the necessary condition for a process as artistic as it is technical, tasked with expressing the values of a community over time and representing the “beautiful” rather than the “new”. A design practice based on – to borrow some concepts already expressed years ago by Edgar Morin – “contaminations that are necessary as well as possible”, on the contribution of “knowledge as an open system”, but above all, one aimed at working “against the continuities incapable of grasping the dynamics of change” (Morin, 1974), thus becomes an opportunity to develop a theory on the identity of the discipline itself, striking a balance between the technical and poetic spheres, but necessarily materialising in the finished work, lending substance to the «webs of intricate relationships that seek form» (Italo Calvino).

This article aims to discuss the implementation and validity of the degree course in Rural Education, with specialization in Arts and Music, at the Federal University of Northern Tocantins (UFNT), in the Tocantinópolis campus. The course stands out for being one of the two existing courses in Brazil aimed at the formation of countryside educators to work specifically in the discipline of Art in Elementary and Secondary Education in rural schools. In the developed reflection, a qualitative approach of descriptive and documental character is used, performing an interpretative analysis of the researched data. Existing since 2014, the course has already graduated three classes in a trajectory of constructions and reconstructions, with the purpose of seeking a critical look at the course and adapting to the needs of curricular reconfigurations, in order to provide a public and quality education. Aiming to train educators to work with the Visual Arts, Music and Theater, the course of the UFNT-Tocantinópolis resists seeking to democratize the access to education, by contributing to the construction of a quality education that helps to improve the lives of peasant populations, in the construction of a more egalitarian and solidary society project and in the reduction of social inequalities.

Introduction Fashion has long been associated with resistance movements across Asia and Australia, from the hand-spun cotton Khadi of Mahatma Gandhi’s freedom struggle to the traditional ankle length robe worn by Tibetans in the ‘White Wednesday Movement’ (Singh et al.; Yangzom). There are many reasons why fashion and activism have been interlinked. Fashion can serve as a form of nonverbal communication (Crane), which can convey activists’ grievances and concerns while symbolising solidarity (Doerr). It can provide an avenue to enact individual agency against repressive, authoritarian regimes (Yangzom; Doerr et al.). Fashion can codify a degree of uniformity within groups and thereby signal social identity (Craik), while also providing a means of building community (Barry and Drak). Fashion, therefore, offers activists the opportunity to develop the three characteristics which unite a social or environmental movement: a shared concern about an issue, a sense of social identity, and connections between individuals and groups. But while these fashion functions map onto movement characteristics, it remains unclear whether activists across the world deliberately include fashion into their protest action repertoires. This uncertainty exists partly because of a research and media focus on large scale, mass protests (Lester and Hutchins), where fashion characteristics are immediately visible and amenable to retrospective interpretation. This focus helps explain the rich volume of research examining the manifestation of fashion in past protests, such as the black, red, and yellow colours worn during the 1988 Aboriginal Long March of Freedom, Justice, and Hope (Maynard Dress; Coghlan), and the pink anti-Trump ‘pussyhats’ (Thompson). However, the protest events used to identify these fashion characteristics are a relatively small proportion of actions used by environmental activists (Dalton et al.; Gulliver et al.), which include not only rallies and marches, but also information evenings, letter writing sessions, and eco-activities such as tree plantings. This article aims to respond to Barnard’s (Looking) call for more empirical work on what contemporary cultural groups visually do with what they wear (see also Gerbaudo and Treré) via a content analysis of 36,676 events promoted on Facebook by 728 Australian environmental groups between 2010 and 2019. The article firstly reports findings from an analysis of this dataset to identify how fashion manifests in environmental activism, building on research demonstrating the role of protest-related nonverbal communications, such as protest signage (Bloomfield and Doolin), images (Kim), and icons, slogans, and logos (Goodnow). The article then considers what activists may seek to achieve through incorporating fashion into their action repertoire, and whether this suggests solidarity with activists seeking to effect environmental change across the wider Asian region. Fashion Activism Fashion is created through a particular assemblage of clothes, accessories, and hairstyles (Barry and Drak), which in turn forms a prevailing custom or style of dress (Craik). It is a cultural practice, providing ‘real estate’ (Benda 7) for an individual to express their social roles (Craik) and political identity (Behnke). Some scholars argue that fashion became overtly political during the 1960s and 70s, as social movements politicised appearance (Edwards). This has only increased in relevance with the rise of far right, populist, and authoritarian regimes, whose sub-cultures enact politicised identities through their distinct fashion characteristics (Gaugele and Titton; Gaugele). Fashion can therefore play an important role in protest movements, as “political subjectivities, political authority, political power and discipline are rendered visible, and thereby real, by the way fashion co-establishes them” (Behnke 3). Across the literature scholars have identified two primary avenues by which fashion and activism are connected. The first of these relates to activism targeting the fashion industry. This type of activism is found in both Asia and Australia, and promotes sustainable consumption choices such as buying used goods and transforming existing items (Chung and Yim), as well as highlighting garment worker exploitation within the fashion industry (Khan and Richards). The second avenue is called ‘fashion activism’: the use of fashion to intentionally signal a message seeking to evoke social and/or political change (Thompson). In this conceptualisation, clothing is used to signify a particular message (Crane). An example of this type of fashion activism is the ‘SlutWalk’, a protest where participants deliberately wore outfits described as slutty or revealing as a response to victim-blaming of women who had experienced sexual assault (Thompson). A key element of fashion activism thus appears to be its message intentionality. Clothes are specifically utilised to convey a message, such as a grievance about victim-blaming, which can then be incorporated into design features displayed on t-shirts, pins, and signs both on the runway and in protest events (Titton). However, while this ‘sender/receiver’ model of fashion communication (Barnard, Fashion as) can be compelling for activists, it is complex in practice. A message receiver can never have full knowledge of what message the sender seeks to signify through a particular clothing item, nor can the message sender predict how a receiver will interpret that message. Particular arrangements of clothing only hold communicative power when they are easily interpreted and related to the movement and its message, usually only intelligible to a specific culture or subculture (Goodnow). Even within that subculture it remains problematic to infer a message from a particular style of dress, as demonstrated in examples where dress is used to imply sexual consent; for example, in rape and assault cases (Lennon et al.). Given the challenges of interpreting fashion, do activists appear to use the ‘real estate’ (Benda 7) afforded by it as a protest tool? To investigate this question a pre-existing dataset of 36,676 events was analysed to ascertain if, and how, environmental activism engages with fashion (a detailed methodology is available on the OSF). Across this dataset, event categories, titles, and descriptions were reviewed to collate events connecting environmental activism to fashion. Three categories of events were found and are discussed in the next section: street theatre, sustainable fashion practices, and disruptive protest. Street Theatre Street theatre is a form of entertainment which uses public performance to raise awareness of injustices and build support for collective action (Houston and Pulido). It uses costumes as a vehicle for conveying messages about political issues and for making demands visible, and has been utilised by protesters across Australia and Asia (Roces). Many examples of street theatre were found in the dataset. For example, Extinction Rebellion (XR) consistently promoted street theatre events via sub-groups such as the ‘Red Rebels’ – a dedicated team of volunteers specialising in costumed street theatre – as well as by inviting supporters to participate in open street theatre events, such as in the ‘Halloween Dead Things Disco’. Dressed as spooky skeletons (doot, doot) and ghosts, we'll slide and shimmy down Sydney's streets in a supernatural style, as we bring attention to all the species claimed by the Sixth Mass Extinction. These street theatre events appeared to prioritise spectacle rather than disruption as a means to attract attention to their message. The Cairns and Far North Environment Centre ‘Climate Action Float’, for example, requested that attendees: Wear blue and gold or dress as your favourite reef animal, solar panel, maybe even the sun itself!? Reef & Solar // Blue & Gold is the guiding theme but we want your creativity take it from there. Most groups used street theatre as one of a range of different actions organised across a period of time. However, Climacts, a performance collective which uses ‘spectacle and satire to communicate the urgency of the climate and biodiversity crisis’ (Climacts), utilised this tactic exclusively. Their Climate Guardians collective used distinctive angel costumes to perform at the Climate Conference of Parties 26, and in various places around Australia (see images on their Website). Fig. 1: Costumed protest against Downer EDI's proposed work on the Adani coalmine; Image by John Englart (CC BY-SA 2.0). Sustainable Fashion Practices The second most common type of event which connected fashion with activism were those promoting sustainable fashion practices. While much research has highlighted the role of activism in raising awareness of problems related to the fashion industry (e.g. Hirscher), groups in the dataset were primarily focussed on organising activities where supporters communally created their own fashion items. The most common of these was the ‘crafternoon’, with over 260 separate crafternoon events identified in the dataset. These events brought activists together to create protest-related kit such as banners, signs, and costumes from recycled or repurposed materials, as demonstrated by Hume Climate Action Now’s ‘Crafternoon for Climate’ event: Come along on Sunday arvo for a relaxed arvo making posters and banners for upcoming Hume Climate Action Now events… Bring: Paints, textas, cardboard, fabric – whatever you’ve got lying around. Don’t have anything? That’s cool, just bring yourself. Events highlighting fashion industry problems were less frequent and tended to prioritise sharing of information about the fashion industry rather than promoting protests. For example, Transition Town Vincent held a ‘Slowing Down Fast Fashion – Transition Town Vincent Movie Night’ while the Green Embassy promoted the ‘Eco Fashion Week’. This event, held in 2017, was described as Australia’s only eco-fashion week, and included runway shows, music, and public talks. Other events also focussed on public talks, such as a Conservation Council of ACT event called ‘Green Drinks Canberra October 2017: Summer Edwards on the fashion industry’ and a panel discussion organised by a group called SEE-Change entitled ‘The Sustainable Wardrobe’. Disruptive Protest and T-Shirts Few events in the dataset mentioned elements of fashion outside of street theatre or sustainable fashion practices, with only one organisation explicitly connecting fashion with activism in its event details. This group – Australian Youth Climate Coalition – organised an event called ‘Activism in Fashion: Tote Bags, T-shirts and Poster Painting!’, which asked: How can we consistently be involved in campaigning while life can be so busy? Can we still be loud and get a message across without saying a word? The iconic 21st century activist "t-shirt and tote-bag" combination is hard to miss these days! Unlike street theatre and sustainable fashion practices, fashion appeared to be a consideration for only a small number of disruptive protests promoted by environmental groups in Australia. XR Brisbane sought to organise a fashion parade during the 2019 Rebellion Week, while XR protesters in Melbourne stripped down to underwear for a march through Melbourne city arcades (see also Turbet). Few common fashion elements appeared consistently on individual activists participating in events, and these were limited to accessories, such as ‘Stop Adani’ earrings, or t-shirts sold for fundraising and promotional purposes. Indeed, t-shirts appeared to be the most promoted clothing item in the dataset, continuing a long tradition of their use in protests (e.g. Maynard, Blankets). Easy to create, suitable for displaying both text and imagery, t-shirts sharing anti-coal messages featured predominantly in the Stop Adani campaign, while yellow t-shirts were a common item in Knitting Nanna’s anti-coal seam gas mining protests. Fig. 2: Stop Adani earrings and t-shirts; Image by John Englart (CC BY-SA 2.0). The Role of Fashion in Environmental Activism As these findings demonstrate, fashion appears to be deliberately utilised in environmental activism primarily through street theatre and the promotion of sustainable fashion practices. While fewer examples of fashion in disruptive protest were found and no consistent fashion assemblage was identified, accessories and t-shirts were utilised by many groups. What may activists be seeking to achieve through incorporating fashion via street theatre and sustainable fashion practices? Some scholars have argued that incorporating fashion into protest allows activists to signal political dissent against authoritarian control. For example, Yanzoom noted that by utilising fashion as a means of communication, Tibetan activists were able to embody their political goals despite repression of speech and movement by political powerholders. However, a consistent fashion repertoire across protests in this Australian dataset was not found. The opportunities afforded by protected protest rights in Australia and absence of violent police repression of disruptive protests may be one explanation why distinctive dress such as the masks and black attire of Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters did not manifest in the dataset. Other scholars have observed that fashion sub-cultures also developed partly to express anti-establishment politics, such as the punk movement in the 1970s. Radical clothing accessorised by symbols, bright hair colours, body piercings, and heavy-duty books signalled opposition to the dominant political ideology (Craik). However, none of these purposes appeared to play a role in Australian environmental activism either. Instead, it appears that Maynard’s contention that Australian protest fashion barely deviates from everyday dress remains true today. Fashion within the events promoted in this large empirical dataset retained the ‘prevalence of everyday clothing’ (Maynard, Dress 111). The lack of a clearly discernible single protest fashion style within the dataset may be related to the shortcomings of the sender/receiver model of fashion communication. As Barnard (Fashion Statements) argued, fashion is not always used as a vehicle for conveying messages, but also as a platform for constructing and reproducing identity. Indeed, a multiplicity of researchers have noted how fashion acts as a signal of what social groups individuals belong to (see Roach-Higgins and Eicher). Activist groups have a variety of goals, which not only include promoting environmental change but also mobilising more people to join their cause (Gulliver et al., Understanding). Stereotyping can hinder achievement of these goals. It has been demonstrated, for example, that individuals who hold negative stereotypes of ‘typical’ activists are less likely to want to associate with them, and less likely to adopt their behaviours (Bashir et al.). Accordingly, some activist groups have been shown to actively promote dress associated with other identity groups, specifically to challenge cultural constructions of environmental activist stereotypes (see also Roces). For example, Bloomfield and Doolins’s study of the NZ anti-GE group MAdGE (Mothers against Genetic Engineering in Food and the Environment) demonstrated how visual protest artifacts conveyed the protesters’ social identity as mothers and customers rather than environmental activists, claiming an alternative cultural mandate for challenging the authority of science (see also Einwohner et al.). The data suggest that Australian activists are seeking to avoid this stereotype as well. The absence of a consistent fashion promoted within the dataset may reflect awareness of problematic stereotypes that activists may be then deliberately seeking to avoid. Maynard (Dress), for example, has noted how the everyday dress of Australian protesters serves to deflect stereotypical labelling of participants. This strategy is also mirrored by the changing nature of groups within the Australian environmental movement. The event database demonstrates that an increasing number of environmental groups are emerging with names highlighting non-stereotypical environmental identities: groups such as ‘Engineers Declare’ and ‘Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action’. Beyond these identity processes, the frequent use of costumed street theatre protest suggests that activists recognise the value of using fashion as a vehicle for communicating messages, despite the challenges of interpretation described above. Much of the language used to promote street theatre in the Facebook event listings suggests that these costumes were deliberately designed to signify a particular meaning, with individuals encouraged to dress up to be ‘a vehicle for myth and symbol’ (Lavender 11). It may be that costumes are also utilised in protest due to their suitability as an image event, convenient for dissemination by mass media seeking colourful and engaging imagery (Delicath and Deluca; Doerr). Furthermore, costumes, as with text or colours presented on t-shirts, may offer activists an avenue to clearly convey a visual message which is more resistant to stereotyping. This is especially relevant given that fashion can be re-interpreted and misinterpreted by audiences, as well as reframed and reinterpreted by the media (Maynard, Dress). While the prevalence of costumed performance and infrequent mentions of fashion in the dataset may be explained by stereotype avoidance and messaging clarity, sustainable fashion practices were more straightforward in intent. Groups used multiple approaches to educate audiences about sustainable fashion, whether through fostering sustainable fashion practices or raising awareness of fashion industry problems. In this regard, fashion in protest in Australia closely resembles Asian sustainable fashion activism (see e.g. Chon et al. regarding the Singaporean context). In particular, the large number of ‘crafternoons’ suggests their importance as sites of activism and community building. Craftivism – acts such as quilting banners, yarn bombing, and cross stitching feminist slogans – are used by many groups to draw attention to social, political and environmental issues (McGovern and Barnes). This type of ‘creative activism’ (Filippello) has been used to challenge aesthetic and political norms across a variety of contested socio-political landscapes. These activities not only develop activism skills, but also foster community (Barry and Drak). For environmental groups, these community building events can play a critical role in sustaining and supporting ongoing environmental activism (Gulliver et al., Understanding) as well as demonstrating solidarity with workers across Asia experiencing labour injustices linked to the fashion industry (Chung and Yim). Conclusion Studies examining protest fashion demonstrate that clothing provides a canvas for sharing protest messages and identities in both Asia and Australia (Benda; Yangzom; Craik). However, despite the fashion’s utility as communication tool for social and environmental movements, empirical studies of how fashion is used by activists in these contexts remain rare. This analysis demonstrates that Australian environmental activists use fashion in their action repertoire primarily through costumed street theatre performances and promoting sustainable fashion practices. By doing so they may be seeking to use fashion as a means of conveying messages, while avoiding stereotypes that can demobilise supporters and reduce support for their cause. Furthermore, sustainable fashion activism offers opportunities for activists to achieve multiple goals: to subvert the fast fashion industry, to provide participation avenues for new activists, to help build activist communities, and to express solidarity with those experiencing fast fashion-related labour injustices. These findings suggest that the use of fashion in protest actions can move beyond identity messaging to also enact sustainable practices while co-opting and resisting hegemonic ideas of consumerism. By integrating fashion into the vibrant and diverse actions promoted by environmental movements across Australia and Asia, activists can construct and perform identities while fostering the community bonds and networks from which movements demanding environmental change derive their strength. Ethics Approval Statement This study was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the University of Queensland (2018000963). 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This paper will use the popular television character, Dexter Morgan, to interrogate the relationship between self and persona, and unsettle the distinction between the two terms. This operation will enable me to raise a series of questions about the critical vocabulary and scholarly agenda of the nascent discipline of persona studies, which, I argue, needs to develop a critical genealogy of the term “persona.” This paper makes a modest contribution to such a project by drawing attention to some key questions regarding the discourse of authenticity in persona studies. For those not familiar with the show, Dexter portrays the life of a serial killer who only kills other serial killers. This is because Dexter, under the tutelage of his deceased father, develops a code that enables him to find a “socially useful” purpose for his homicidal impulses—by exclusively targeting other killers he rationalises his own deadly acts. Dexter necessarily leads a double life, which entails performing a series of normative social roles that conceal his true identity, and the murderous activities of his “dark passenger.” This apparent split between “true” self and “false” persona says a lot about popular conceptions of the performative nature of the self in contemporary culture, and provides a useful framework for unpacking some of the aporias generated by the concept of persona.My aim in the present context is to substantiate the argument that persona studies needs to engage with the philosophical discourse of “self” and “authenticity” if it is to provide a convincing account of the status and function of persona today. The term “persona” derives from the classical Latin word for mask, and has its roots in the theatre of ancient Greece. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term thus:1. An Assumed character or role, especially one adopted by an author in his or her writing, or by a performer.2.a. as the aspect of a person’s character that is displayed to or perceived by others.b. Psychol. In Jungian psychology: the outer or assumed aspect of character; a set of attitudes adopted by an individual to fit his or her perceived social role. Contrasted with anima.For Jung the persona is “a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual” (305). We can see that all these usages share a theatrical or actorly dimension. Persona is something we adopt, display, or assume. Further, it is an external quality, which masks, presumably, that which is not assumed or displayed—the private self. Thus, persona is predicated on an opposition between inside and outside. Moreover, it is not a value neutral concept, but one, I will argue, that connotes a sense of “inauthenticity” through suggesting a division between self and role. The “self” is a complicated word with a wide range of usages and connotations. The OED notes that when used with reference to a person the word refers to an essential entity.3. Chiefly Philos. That which in a person is really and intrinsically he (in contradistinction to what is adventitious); the ego (often identified with the soul or mind as opposed to the body); a permanent subject of successive and varying states of consciousness.Of course both terms are further complicated by the way they function within specific specialised discourses. Jung’s use of the term “persona” is part of a complex psychological theory of personality, and the term “self” appears in a multitude of forms in a plethora of scholarly disciplines. The “self” is obviously a key concept in psychology and philosophy, where it is sometimes conflated with something called the subject, or discussed with reference to questions of personal identity. Michel Foucault’s project to track “the constitution of the subject across history which has led us up to the modern concept of the self” (202) is perhaps the most complex and rich body of work with which persona studies must reckon if it is to produce a distinctive account of the relationship between persona and self. In broad terms, this paper advocates a loosely Foucauldian approach to understanding the relationship between self and persona, but defers a detailed encounter with Foucault’s work on the subject (which requires a much larger canvas).For the moment I want to focus on the status of authenticity in the self/persona relationship with specific reference to world of Dexter, which provides an accessible forum for examining a contemporary manifestation of the self/persona relationship with specific reference to the question of authenticity. Dexter conveys the division between authentic inner self and persona through the use of a first person narrative voice that provides a running commentary on the character’s thoughts, and exposes the gap between Dexter’s various social roles and his real sociopathic self. Dexter Morgan is, of course, an unreliable narrator, yet he is acutely aware of how others perceive him, and his narrative voice-over functions as a device to bind the viewer to the character’s first-person perspective. This is important because Dexter is devoid of empathy—he lacks the ability to feel genuine emotion, and conform to the social conventions that govern everyday activities, yet he is focus of audience identification. This means the voice-over must perform the work of making Dexter sympathetic.The voice-over narration in Dexter is characterised by an obsession with the presentation of self, and the disparity between self and persona. In an early episode, Dexter’s narrative voice proclaims a love of Halloween because it is “the one time of year when everyone wears a mask—not just me. People think it's fun to pretend you're a monster. Me, I spend my life pretending I'm not. Brother, friend, boyfriend—all part of my costume collection” (Dexter “Let’s Give the Boy a Hand”).Dexter develops a series of social masks and routines to disguise his “real” self. He is compelled to develop a series of elaborate ruses to appear like a regular guy—a “normal” person who needs to perform a series of social roles. He thus becomes a studious observer of everyday life, and much of the show’s appeal lies in the way he dissects the minutiae of human behavior in order to learn how be normal. Indeed, because he does not comprehend emotion he must learn how to read the external signs that convey care, love, interest, concern and so on—“I just don't understand all that emotion, which makes it tough to fake,” he declares (Dexter, “Popping Cherry”). Each social role requires a considerable degree of actorly preparation, and Dexter demonstrates what we might call, with Erving Goffman, a dramaturgical approach to everyday life (2).For example, Dexter enters into a relationship with Rita, an ostensibly naïve, doe-eyed single mother of two children and a victim of domestic violence—he chooses her because he believes that she is as damaged as he is, and unlikely to challenge him too strongly—“Rita's ex-hubby, the crack addict, repeatedly raped her, knocked her around. Ever since then she's been completely uninterested in sex. That works for me!” (Dexter “Dexter”). Rita provides the perfect cover because she facilitates Dexter’s construction of himself as a normal, heterosexual family man. However, in order to play this most paradigmatic normative role, he must learn how to play with children, and feign affection and intimacy. J. M. Tyree observes that Dexter “employs a fake-it-till-you-make-it strategy for imitating normal life” (82). Of course, he cannot maintain the role too long before Rita becomes suspicious, and aware of Dexter’s repeated lies and evasions.In short, Dexter dramatises what Goffman calls impression management—the character of Dexter Morgan must consistently “give off” signs of normativity (80). Goffman argues that we are all compelled to perform social roles in the manner of Dexter, and this perhaps accounts for why the show appealed to such a wide audience. In many ways, Dexter exposes normative behavior as an “act” that nobody can sustain no matter how hard they try. Dexter’s struggle to decode the conventions that govern everyday life make him a sympathetic character despite his obviously sociopathic tendencies. In other words we are all a little bit like Dexter insofar we must all perform social roles we may not find comfortable. Of course, the whole question of impression management in Dexter becomes even more complex if one considers Michael C. Hall’s celebrity persona and his performance as the titular character, but I do not have the space to pursue this line of inquiry in the present context.So, Dexter is a consummate actor within his “everyday” world, and neatly, perhaps too neatly, confirms Goffman’s “dramaturgical” theory of the “self.” In his essay, “Letter to a Poor Actor” David E. R. George provides a fascinating critique of Goffman from the perspective of a theatre studies scholar. George provocatively claims that Goffman was attracted to theatrical metaphors because of the “anti-theatrical prejudice” embedded within the western tradition. George cites Jonash Barish’s authoritative tome on this topic, which argues “that with infrequent exceptions, terms borrowed from the theatre—theatrical, operatic, melodramatic, stagey, etc.—tend to be hostile or belittling” (1).Barish cites instances of this prejudice from Plato through to St Augustine and beyond, and George situates Goffman within this powerful tradition. He writes,the theatrum mundi metaphor has always been a recipe for paranoia, and in this respect Goffman appears merely to be continuing a long philosophical tradition: the actor-as-paranoiac puts on the maximum number of masks to protect a threatened and fragile self against the daily threat of intimacy, disrespect, deception. (353)It is hardly surprising, then, that Dexter, a paranoid sociopath, stands as an exemplary instance of Goffman’s dramaturgical conception of the self, for Dexter is a show that consistently presents narratives about the relationship between the need to protect the “fragile” self through the construction of various personae. George also argues, with Lyman and Scott, that a “dramatistic” approach to understanding the world produces a cynical perspective because drama is predicated on the split between appearance and reality, nothing is what it appears to be, and nobody is what they appear to be (7). The actor, traditionally, has always worn a mask in some form or another. From the literal masks worn by the actors in ancient Greece to the sophisticated make-up and prosthetic devices worn by today’s thespians, actors, even when they are supposedly playing themselves, expose the gap between self and persona. Arguably, the most challenging and provocative aspect of George’s theory of the actor for persona studies lies in his thesis about how the reviled art of the theatre, which has been pilloried for so many centuries, can function as a paradigm for authenticity. He cites Artaud and Grotowski as examples of two iconic figures that view the theatre as a sacred space that facilitates ‘close encounters of the authentic kind (George 361).George attempts to rescue an authentic core identity, which he perceives to be under siege from the likes of Goffman, who proffers an “onion” model of the self. In George’s reading, Goffman produces a self without an essential, authentic core. This is hardly surprising given Goffman’s background. As an advocate of symbolic interactionism, a school of sociology that proposes that the self is produced as a result of various acts of socialisation, Goffman’s dramaturgical account of the self reinforces George Herbert Mead’s belief that “when a self does appear it always involves an experience of another; there could not be an experience of the self simply by itself” (195).Dexter not only dramatises this self/other dynamic, but also underscores the extent to which we, to use the terminology of Benita Luckmann, inhabit a series of “small life-worlds.” In other words, we lead a series of part-time lives in part-time worlds—modern life, for Luckmann writing in 1970, unfolds on multiple stages that are not necessarily connected or operate according to the same regulatory principles. She writes,The multi-world existence of modern man requires frequent ‘gear-shifting.’ As he moves from one small world into the next, he is faced with at least marginally different expectations, requiring different role performances in concert with different sets of people. (590)Dexter must negotiate a variety of different social roles, each with different requirements and demands. He must, therefore, cultivate a professional persona as a blood-splatter analyst, and perform the personal roles of brother, lover, husband, and so on. Each of these roles occurs in a different “life world” and requires a different presentation of self. Luckmann’s analysis of modern life remains compelling despite being written more than 40 years ago, and she raises one of the most crucial questions for persona studies: what “self,” if any, functions as the executive “gear-shifter?” In Dexter, the narrative voice, the voice behind the masks implies such an essential entity—the true, authentic self, which is consistent with Jung’s account of the relationship between self and persona.Despite a welter of critical theory that debunks the possibility of an essential, self-identical, authentic self (from Adorno’s anti-Heideggerean argument in The Jargon of Authenticity to various post-structuralist theories of subjectivity, especially Judith Butler’s conception of performativity) the idea of sovereign self stubbornly persists in everyday discourse. One of the tasks of persona studies must be to examine these common notions of self and authenticity. On one level, most people experience the “self” as something that refers to what we might call a singular sense of being, and speak about when the feel “most like themselves.” For some, the self emerges within the private realm, the “backstage” areas to use Goffman’s terminology (3). Others speak of feeling most like themselves in executing a social role or some kind of professional occupation. For example, take this extract from a contemporary self-growth web site:Are you feeling like you don’t know who you are anymore? Or maybe you feel like you never really knew yourself. Perhaps you’ve gone through most of your life living by other people’s agendas or ideas of who you should be, and are just now realizing that you really don’t know yourself, your dreams, or your purpose. (Ewing 2013)From the Platonic exhortation to “know thyself” through to the advice dispensed by self-help gurus, the self emerges as a persistent, if elusive, trope in scholarly and everyday discourse. Persona studies needs to reckon with the scope and breadth of the deployment of the self. Indeed it is the very ubiquity of terms like self, authenticity, and persona that require genealogical analysis in the Foucauldian sense of the term. This task entails looking for and uncovering the conditions of possibility for talking about the self across a wide range of contexts.In summary, then, I contend that persona studies needs to carefully examine the relationship between various theories of self and the discourse of authenticity, and establish the extent to which Goffman’s apparently cynical account for the self challenges the assumed authenticity of the self in the Jungian paradigm. Of course, there are many other approaches one could take to this question. For example, Sartrean existentialism problematises any simple opposition between self and persona in its insistence that the self is the product of the others’ perceptions of the subject. This position is captured in his famous maxim that “hell is other people.” This is not because other people are inherently antagonistic or hostile, but that one’s sense of self is in the hands of others. Sartre dramatises this conundrum elegantly in his 1944 play, No Exit.Sartre’s philosophy also engages with the discourse of authenticity, which it borrows from Heidegger’s Being and Time. Existentialism, in its many guises, dominated continental philosophy up until the 1960s and popularised the idea of “authenticity” as an ideal, which enables one to avoid the tyranny of the “They” and avoid the pitfalls of living in bad faith. There is a possibility that the nascent discipline of Persona Studies, as articulated by P. David Marshall and others, risks ignoring the crucial relationship between the discourse of authenticity and the presentation of self by concentrating on the “presentational self” as a set of pragmatic, tactical techniques designed to maximise the impact of impression management within a variety of social and professional contexts (Marshall “Persona”; Barbour and Marshall “Academic”). A more detailed and direct engagement with Foucault’s account of the emergence and constitution of the modern subject, as well as with theories of performativity and authenticity that challenge the arguments and verities of Goffman, and Jung, can provide a richer account of how the concept of persona operates today with reference to, say, “the networked self” (Papacharissi; Barbour and Marshall).So, I would like to conclude by returning to Dexter and the question of authenticity. Dexter can never really manage to identify his authentic self—his “gear-changing” core.It’s there always, this Dark Passenger. And when he’s driving, I feel alive, half sick with the thrill of complete wrongness [...] lately there are these moments when I feel connected to something else... someone. It’s like the mask is slipping and things... people... who never mattered before are suddenly starting to matter. (Dexter, “An Inconvenient Lie”)In this speech, he paradoxically identifies his “dark passenger” as the driver (Luckmann’s “gear-changer”) but then feels “the mask” slipping. There is something beyond what he assumed to be his dark core—the innermost aspect of being that makes executive decisions. Moreover, the status of Dexter’s “dark passenger” is unclear in this speech—is he ‘”he self” or some external agent impelling Dexter to commit murder. Either way Dexter questions the motives and authenticity of this “dark passenger” and those of us with a stake in the nascent discipline of persona studies would do well to be equally skeptical about the status of our key terms.References Adorno, Theodor. The Jargon of Authenticity. Trans. Tarnowski, Knut and Will, Fredric. London and New York: Routledge, 2009.“An Inconvenient Lie.” Dexter. Season 2, Episode 3. DVD Showtime, 2007.Barbour K and Marshall P. D. “The Academic Online: Constructing Persona through the World Wide Web.” First Monday 17.9 (2012). 16 May 2014 http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3969/3292.Barish, Jonas. The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice. University of California Press, 1981.Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. London and New York: Routledge, 1990.“Dexter.” Dexter. Season 1, Episode 1. DVD Showtime, 2006.Ewing, Catherine. ‘Do You Feel Like a Stranger to Yourself?’ 17 April 2014 ‹ http://reawakenyourdreamer.com/2013/09/feel-like-stranger/ ›.Foucault, Michel. “About the Beginnings of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth.” Political Theory (1993): 198-227.George, David E.R. “Letter to a Poor Actor.” New Theatre Quarterly 2.8 (1986): 352-362.Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday, 1959.Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarie and Edward Robinson. London: Blackwell, 2006.Jung, Carl. Collected Works 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.“Let’s Give the Boy a Hand.” Dexter. Season 1, Episode 4. DVD Showtime, 2006.Luckmann, Benita. “The Small Life-Worlds of Modern Man.” Social Research 37.4 (1970): 580-596.Lyman, S. M., and Scott, M. B. The Drama of Social Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Presss, 1975.Marshall, P. David. “Persona Studies: Mapping the Proliferation of the Public Self.” Journalism 15 (2014): 153-170.Mead, George Herbert. Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934.Papacharissi, Zizi (ed.). A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites. London and New York: Routledge, 2011.“persona, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2014. 12 April 2014.“Popping Cherry.” Dexter. Season 1, Episode 3. DVD Showtime, 2006.Sartre, Jean-Paul. No Exit and Three Other Plays. Trans. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Vintage, 1989.“self, pron., adj., and n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2014. 13 April 2014.Tyree, J.M. “Spatter Pattern.” Film Quarterly 62.1 (2008): 82-85.

Deconstruction has been used in theater practice and performance art since the 1960s -1970s as a strategy to guide viewers to observation of things and people in and around the performance practice, questioning meaning and its making. This paper proposes that deconstruction is relevant and of value to screendance practitioners for the way in which it supports the challenging of dominant narratives, and invites us to notice and question fixed truths, including our own. For the purpose of my argument I will focus on a film, The Host (2016) by Miranda Pennell, a film made from archive images, which are deconstructed by the filmmaker as part of her narrative making. Among the numerous studies and contributions Derrida has made within philosophical debate, I will focus solely on his theory of deconstruction of text and meaning to contextualize the deconstructive approach adopted by Miranda Pennell in her film The Host (2016). Pennell’s approach includes her research into the narrative of the film. This inclusion gives the film a performative attribute, which I argue to be a point for considering the film a work of screendance. The combination of the archive material and Pennell’s approach to it, allows her to shift between various possible truths that cohabit within a broad spectrum of time and space. In the words of Trinh T. Minh-ha in “The Totalizing Quest of Meaning” from Theorizing Documentary edited by Michael Renov: To compose is not always synonymous with ordering to persuade, and to give the filmed document another sense, another meaning, itis not necessarily to distort it. If life’s paradoxes and complexities are not to be suppressed, the question of degrees and nuances isincessantly crucial. Pennell’s deconstructive approach favors the consideration of such “degrees and nuances” when presenting her narrative, constructing meaning that is complex in its subtleties and implications by pairing opposite concepts and looking at their relation and their relation to herself and others. In The Host (2016) this pairing is consistent throughout the film, openly inviting viewers to question what is being shown. Through a close analysis of The Host, contextualized both with reference to Derrida and to the wider field of screendance, I conclude that a deconstructive approach offers filmmakers and screendance practitioners interested in reinterpreting archive materials through film editing the opportunity to expand choreography to another discipline. As a screendance practitioner, I find that this opens up a world of narrative possibilities, and this is reason enough to shine more light on works that do so.

Despite being a much used trope in intellectual activity at the moment, 'desire' may yet prove to be more resilient as a concept than some other much (ab)used tropes of the past (such as 'body', 'transgression', and, of course, the ever-popular [ab]use of parentheses). It may be possible, that is, that as we enter this 'new' millenium, intellectuals may continue to be able to use the word 'desire' without it signifying only that the intellectual is attempting to be screamingly fashionable (as, for example, seems to have been the fate befalling 'body', 'transgression', and the [ab]use of parentheses). The resilience of 'desire' as a concept may have something to do with intellectuals recognising that when they theorise desire, they are theorising their own intellectual activity. Empty 'desire' of all meaning and you also empty intellectual activity of meaning. Why is this? As the essays collected in this issue of M/C may suggest, the ways in which we now talk about desire are similar to the ways in which we talk about the pursuit of knowledge. In short, desire theory is also an expression of a desire for theory. The attempt to 'know' desire is in this sense also just one of the innumerable practices through which our desires are realised. This realisation is not, of course, the attainment of the object that we desire. Rather, it is the performance of desire, which entails the realisation of what psychoanalysts call the 'lack' of the object. This is to say that the pursuit of knowledge, like any other desire, is realised by continually pushing back the limit point that we might call the object of desire. In our feature article, "From the Fetish to the Factish and Back Again", for example, John Banks gives us an insight into the manifold perspectives from which desire works (or plays), in theory and practice, in his studies of computer gaming. As an ethnographer, a gamer, and a theorist, he strategically grounds these shifting perspectives in an attempt to define the notion of 'gameplay', yet he finds that gameplay itself is a decidedly unstable object for interpretation: as an experience of the game interface, as a way of talking about this experience, or as a discourse for fetishising games within a global industry, gameplay is one of the sites through which individuals and institutions contest their identities and desires, thereby "affirming the multiple and heterogeneous ontology of humans and nonhumans". As editors of this issue, our own desires were met by receiving articles from such diverse fields, all approaching the issue topic in interesting ways. Contemporary ideas surrounding the act of performance offers fertile ground for the following two articles, and just as John Banks presents us with 'manifold perspectives' on the workings of desire, so too do these articles speak from multiple perspectives; they write as practitioners, students of theory, and audience members. The stage has always been a crucible of ideas for theorists from all fields and disciplines, and happily finds a place within this issue on desire. In her article "Can't We Talk It Over in Bed?: Desiring Reconciliation in Recent Australian Theatre Productions of As You Like It and Romeo and Juliet", Melissa Western investigates the operation of desires in contemporary theatre practice and the political ramifications of this. Specifically she interrogates the practice of cross-cultural casting decisions, both in terms of post-colonial theory and political imperative, and uses two examples of recent Australian theatrical productions to illustrate her point. 'Desire' for Melissa shifts between a theoretical desire for 'other', and an apparent desire for reconciliation which lies at the core of the productions discussed. Melissa hints at a 'communal' desire, and also her own desire for good theatre. Marcel Dorney's article, "Don't Lean on the Window: Desire's Presence and Representations in Political Drama", is full of questions, both answered and open-ended, mostly centering on the theatrical staging of desire, and questions of exploitation. The thrust of Marcel's article sees 'desire' being constructed and examined both from an actor's and an audience's point of view, and he focuses on how questions of representation and perspective affect readings (exploitative or otherwise) of staged intimacy. The article is framed by a description of one scene from the 1999 production of Bulldog Front, and an account of the rehearsal processes leading to the final staging of this scene, in which two people engage in a sexual act. Moving away from the theatre, our next item takes us onto the big screen, in order to demonstrate the way in which popular cultural texts often express the communal side of desire that the previous essays have been considering. In "Grande, Decaf, Low Fat, Extra Dry Cappuccino: Postmodern Desire" Patricia Leavy observes that postmodern interrogations of consumer society make us increasingly suspicious of the objects of desire -- although the objects we desire and the choices we make seem to be 'ours' (a sense we may have of our 'selves') we are perhaps never less ourselves than when we desire or choose in the domain of simulacra. Patricia asks, "what happens to the individual when he/she discovers that the most intimate of desires is shared by countless others?" Our next essay is by Todd Holden, titled "The Evolution of Desire in Advertising: From Object-Obsession to Subject-Affection". Using advertising in Japan as a case in point, Todd points out the degree to which advertisements construct and produce desire, to the point that desire itself becomes the goal of advertising (the desire to be desiring and/or desired). He argues that as desire is constructed differently in relation to each product, the result is not a 'desire' that can be grounded conceptually in the language of polysemy; desire is understood here in terms of contingency and function -- desire as an expression of the controlling discourse of consumer capitalism. In these essays, we witness the conflict that often arises when individuals attempt to contain desire within their field of understanding, when they explain that desire is something that is excessive -- that is to say, it exceeds understanding. Axel Bruns explores this deeply unsettling tension between the desire for closure (a function of the way we have habitually engaged with texts of all kinds) and the information explosion on the WWW, in his contribution "What's the Story: The Unfulfilled Desire for Closure on the Web". In Axel's eyes, this desire for closure is confounded not simply by hypertextuality (there is a strong school of thought that argues hypertext is simply a faster variant of what happens in textuality in general) but by the sheer and continual expansiveness of the WWW -- it is impossible for anyone anymore to say that they 'know' all that there is to know on-line. Desire thus exceeds the moment of the text, which we might otherwise wish (or desire) to close around desire. The next few items explore some of desire's effects in such a way as to remind us that what desire inflects in the moment of the text is but a fraction of its effects -- desire speaks to us, changes us, and shapes our world in ways that we cannot control. In "The Subject of Howard's Desire: Passive Sentences and Political Intention", for example, Felicity Meakins casts a linguist's eyes over the draft preamble to the Australian Constitution, and observes that Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders are cast there as passive subjects, denied agency by the structure of the only sentence that gives them any recognition; while this "passivisation" reflects Liberal policy on indigenous groups, the more surprising discovery is the passivisation of all of the country's "citizens" measured against the agency given to terms referring to the nation. Howard's "desire for a mild form of nationalism" is thus reflected in the words he would have enshrined within the national constitution. In "Newly Desiring and Desired: Queer Man-Fisting Women", Simon-Astley Scholfield identifies the 'penetratrix' as a figure that embodies the shifting terrain of sexual politics at the end of the twentieth-century -- in cultural texts and sexual practices, the hegemony of the heterocentric paradigm is under threat from a figure that embodies the shift from the penetrated (the figure of castration and lack, which even the liberated 'woman-on-top' maintained) to the penetrating: to the "paradigm of woman-on-top and man-on-bottom have been added the queer figures of the woman-as-top and the man-as-bottom". Grouped together here as "Three Poems Touching on Desire", Bronwen Lea's three poems explore desire from a personal (and personalised) perspective, where the body of the text merges imperceptibly with the bodies it describes: if desire is lack, or has no object (as psychoanalysis suggests), these poems 'embody' desire -- that is to say, they return the desire of the theorists back to its proper domain: the body. Desire is thus controlled and controlling, at the level of the way in which we engage with the world and each other, and at the level of the ways we attempt to make sense of these engagements. Where, then, does that leave our pursuit of knowledge? First, we should not expect anymore to be able to answer such a question, since the pursuit of knowledge (like desire) is more about the pursuit than the knowledge -- it is the process of extending beyond ourselves, positing limits only in order to extend beyond them. This is indeed the initial limit point from which the final essay in this collection proceeds. Inspired by sitting at bus-stop across from churchgoers at mass (after all, inspiration is what the church is for [:)]), Sean Smith has hit upon a notion of desire at which he can only hint in his essay "[to be and to have]", which he does here through an engagement with some pervasive theories of desire. By positing desire as "a recognition, not of a lack, but of the necessary and perpetual circulation across the threshold ... of the array of subjectless individuations that collectively constitute us as 'human'", Sean opens out a field of possibility for reviving desire as a key to understanding ourselves -- or, perhaps, as understanding itself, understood here as a will to knowledge. As the prolegomenon to further work, this essay represents an ideally open-ended endpoint for this issue of desire, for we thirst for more... Citation reference for this article MLA style: Laurie Johnson, Marc Richards. "Editorial: 'Desire'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.5 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/edit.php>. Chicago style: Laurie Johnson, Marc Richards, "Editorial: 'Desire'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 5 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/edit.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Laurie Johnson, Marc Richards. (1999) Editorial: 'desire'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(5). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/edit.php> ([your date of access]).

IntroductionIf human beings have become a geophysical force, capable of impacting the very crust and atmosphere of the planet, and if geophysical forces become objects of study, presences able to be charted over millions of years—one of our many problems is a 'naming' problem. - Bethany NowviskieThe anthropocene "denotes the present time interval, in which many geologically significant conditions and processes are profoundly altered by human activities" (S.Q.S.). Although the narrative and terminology of the anthropocene has not been officially legitimized by the scientific community as a whole, it has been adopted worldwide by a plethora of social and cultural studies. The challenges of the anthropocene demand interdisciplinary efforts and actions. New contexts, situations and environments call for original naming propositions: new terminologies are always illegitimate at the moment of their first appearance in the world.Against the background of the naming challenges of the anthropocene, we will map the emergence and tell the story of a tiny world within the world of media studies: the world of the term 'nanomedia' and its hyphenated sister 'nano-media'. While we tell the story of the uses of this term, its various meanings and applications, we will provide yet another possible interpretation and application to the term, one that we believe might be helpful to interdisciplinary media studies in the context of the anthropocene. Contemporary media terminologies are usually born out of fortuitous exchanges between communication technologies and their various social appropriations: hypodermic media, interactive media, social media, and so on and so forth. These terminologies are either recognised as the offspring of legitimate scientific endeavours by the media theory community, or are widely discredited and therefore rendered illegitimate. Scientific legitimacy comes from the broad recognition and embrace of a certain term and its inclusion in the canon of an epistemology. Illegitimate processes of theoretical enquiry and the study of the kinds of deviations that might deem a theory unacceptable have been scarcely addressed (Delborne). Rejected terminologies and theories are marginalised and gain the status of bastard epistemologies of media, considered irrelevant and unworthy of mention and recognition. Within these margins, however, different streams of media theories which involve conceptual hybridizations can be found: creole encounters between high culture and low culture (James), McLuhan's hybrid that comes from the 'meeting of two media' (McLuhan 55), or even 'bastard spaces' of cultural production (Bourdieu). Once in a while a new media epistemology arises that is categorised as a bastard not because of plain rejection or criticism, but because of its alien origins, formations and shape. New theories are currently emerging out of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary thinking which are, in many ways, bearers of strange features and characteristics that might render its meaning elusive and obscure to a monodisciplinary perspective. Radical transdisciplinary thinking is often alien and alienated. It results from unconventional excursions into uncharted territories of enquiry: bastard epistemologies arise from such exchanges. Being itself a product of a mestizo process of thinking, this article takes a look into the term nanomedia (or nano-media): a marginal terminology within media theory. This term is not to be confounded with the term biomedia, coined by Eugene Thacker (2004). (The theory of biomedia has acquired a great level of scientific legitimacy, however it refers to the moist realities of the human body, and is more concerned with cyborg and post-human epistemologies. The term nanomedia, on the contrary, is currently being used according to multiple interpretations which are mostly marginal, and we argue, in this paper, that such uses might be considered illegitimate). ’Nanomedia’ was coined outside the communications area. It was first used by scientific researchers in the field of optics and physics (Rand et al), in relation to flows of media via nanoparticles and optical properties of nanomaterials. This term would only be used in media studies a couple of years later, with a completely different meaning, without any acknowledgment of its scientific origins and context. The structure of this narrative is thus illegitimate, and as such does not fit into traditional modalities of written expression: there are bits and pieces of information and epistemologies glued together as a collage of nano fragments which combine philology, scientific literature, digital ethnography and technology reviews. Transgressions Illegitimate theories might be understood in terms of hybrid epistemologies that intertwine disciplines and perspectives, rendering its outcomes inter or transdisciplinary, and therefore prone to being considered marginal by disciplinary communities. Such theories might also be considered illegitimate due to social and political power struggles which aim to maintain territory by reproducing specific epistemologies within a certain field. Scientific legitimacy is a social and political process, which has been widely addressed. Pierre Bourdieu, in particular, has dedicated most of his work to deciphering the intricacies of academic wars around the legitimacy or illegitimacy of theories and terminologies. Legitimacy also plays a role in determining the degree to which a certain theory will be regarded as relevant or irrelevant:Researchers’ tendency to concentrate on those problems regarded as the most important ones (e.g. because they have been constituted as such by producers endowed with a high degree of legitimacy) is explained by the fact that a contribution or discovery relating to those questions will tend to yield greater symbolic profit (Bourdieu 22).Exploring areas of enquiry which are outside the boundaries of mainstream scientific discourses is a dangerous affair. Mixing different epistemologies in the search for transversal grounds of knowledge might result in unrecognisable theories, which are born out of a combination of various processes of hybridisation: social, technological, cultural and material.Material mutations are happening that call for new epistemologies, due to the implications of current technological possibilities which might redefine our understanding of mediation, and expand it to include molecular forms of communication. A new terminology that takes into account the scientific and epistemological implications of nanotechnology applied to communication [and that also go beyond cyborg metaphors of a marriage between biology and cibernetics] is necessary. Nanomedia and nanomediations are the terminologies proposed in this article as conceptual tools to allow these further explorations. Nanomedia is here understood as the combination of different nanotechnological mediums of communication that are able to create and disseminate meaning via molecular exchange and/ or assembly. Nanomediation is here defined as the process of active transmission and reception of signs and meaning using nanotechnologies. These terminologies might help us in conducting interdisciplinary research and observations that go deeper into matter itself and take into account its molecular spaces of mediation - moving from metaphor into pragmatics. Nanomedia(s)Within the humanities, the term 'nano-media' was first proposed by Mojca Pajnik and John Downing, referring to small media interventions that communicate social meaning in independent ways. Their use of term 'nano-media' proposes to be a revised alternative to the plethora of terms that categorise such media actions, such as alternative media, community media, tactical media, participatory media, etc. The metaphor of smallness implied in the term nano-media is used to categorise the many fragments and complexities of political appropriations of independent media. Historical examples of the kind of 'nano' social interferences listed by Downing (2),include the flyers (Flugblätter) of the Protestant Reformation in Germany; the jokes, songs and ribaldry of François Rabelais’ marketplace ... the internet links of the global social justice (otromundialista) movement; the worldwide community radio movement; the political documentary movement in country after country.John Downing applies the meaning of the prefix nano (coming from the Greek word nanos - dwarf), to independent media interventions. His concept is rooted in an analysis of the social actions performed by local movements scattered around the world, politically engaged and tactically positioned. A similar, but still unique, proposition to the use of the term 'nano-media' appeared 2 years later in the work of Graham St John (442):If ‘mass media’ consists of regional and national print and television news, ‘niche media’ includes scene specific publications, and ‘micro media’ includes event flyers and album cover art (that which Eshun [1998] called ‘conceptechnics’), and ‘social media’ refers to virtual social networks, then the sampling of popular culture (e.g. cinema and documentary sources) using the medium of the programmed music itself might be considered nano-media.Nano-media, according to Graham St John, "involves the remediation of samples from popular sources (principally film) as part of the repertoire of electronic musicians in their efforts to create a distinct liminalized socio-aesthetic" (St John 445). While Downing proposes to use the term nano-media as a way to "shake people free of their obsession with the power of macro-media, once they consider the enormous impact of nano-technologies on our contemporary world" (Downing 1), Graham St John uses the term to categorise media practices specific to a subculture (psytrance). Since the use of the term 'nano-media' in relation to culture seems to be characterised by the study of marginalised social movements, portraying a hybrid remix of conceptual references that, if not completely illegitimate, would be located in the border of legitimacy within media theories, I am hereby proposing yet another bastard version of the concept of nanomedia (without a hyphen). Given that neither of the previous uses of the term 'nano-media' within the discipline of media studies take into account the technological use of the prefix nano, it is time to redefine the term in direct relation to nanotechnologies and communication devices. Let us start by taking a look at nanoradios. Nanoradios are carbon nanotubes connected in such a way that when electrodes flow through the nanotubes, various electrical signals recover the audio signals encoded by the radio wave being received (Service). Nanoradios are examples of the many ways in which nanotechnologies are converging with and transforming our present information and communication technologies. From molecular manufacturing (Drexler) to quantum computing (Deutsch), we now have a wide spectrum of emerging and converging technologies that can act as nanomedia - molecular structures built specifically to act as communication devices.NanomediationsBeyond literal attempts to replicate traditional media artifacts using nanotechnologies, we find deep processes of mediation which are being called nanocommunication (Hara et al.) - mediation that takes place through the exchange of signals between molecules: Nanocommunication networks (nanonetworks) can be used to coordinate tasks and realize them in a distributed manner, covering a greater area and reaching unprecedented locations. Molecular communication is a novel and promising way to achieve communication between nanodevices by encoding messages inside molecules. (Abadal & Akyildiz) Nature is nanotechnological. Living systems are precise mechanisms of physical engineering: our molecules obey our DNA and fall into place according to biological codes that are mysteriously written in our every cell. Bodies are perfectly mediated - biological systems of molecular communication and exchange. Humans have always tried to emulate or to replace natural processes by artificial ones. Nanotechnology is not an exception. Many nanotechnological applications try to replicate natural systems, for example: replicas of nanostructures found in lotus flowers are now being used in waterproof fabrics, nanocrystals, responsible for resistance of cobwebs, are being artificially replicated for use in resistant materials, and various proteins are being artificially replicated as well (NNI 05). In recent decades, the methods of manipulation and engineering of nano particles have been perfected by scientists, and hundreds of nanotechnological products are now being marketed. Such nano material levels are now accessible because our digital technologies were advanced enough to allow scientific visualization and manipulation at the atomic level. The Scanning Tunneling Microscopes (STMs), by Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer (1986), might be considered as the first kind of nanomedia devices ever built. STMs use quantum-mechanical principles to capture information about the surface of atoms and molecules, allowed digital imaging and visualization of atomic surfaces. Digital visualization of atomic surfaces led to the discovery of buckyballs and nanotubes (buckytubes), structures that are celebrated today and received their names in honor of Buckminster Fuller. Nanotechnologies were developed as a direct consequence of the advancement of digital technologies in the fields of scientific visualisation and imaging. Nonetheless, a direct causal relationship between nano and digital technologies is not the only correlation between these two fields. Much in the same manner in which digital technologies allow infinite manipulation and replication of data, nanotechnologies would allow infinite manipulation and replication of molecules. Nanocommunication could be as revolutionary as digital communication in regards to its possible outcomes concerning new media. Full implementation of the new possibilities of nanomedia would be equivalent or even more revolutionary than digital networks are today. Nanotechnology operates at an intermediate scale at which the laws of classical physics are mixed to the laws of quantum physics (Holister). The relationship between digital technologies and nanotechnologies is not just instrumental, it is also conceptual. We might compare the possibilities of nanotechnology to hypertext: in the same way that a word processor allows the expression of any type of textual structure, so nanotechnology could allow, in principle, for a sort of "3-D printing" of any material structure.Nanotechnologies are essentially media technologies. Nanomedia is now a reality because digital technologies made possible the visualization and computational simulation of the behavior of atomic particles at the nano level. Nanomachines that can build any type of molecular structure by atomic manufacturing could also build perfect replicas of themselves. Obviously, such a powerful technology offers medical and ecological dangers inherent to atomic manipulation. Although this type of concern has been present in the global debate about the social implications of nanotechnology, its full implications are yet not entirely understood. A general scientific consensus seems to exist, however, around the idea that molecules could become a new type of material alphabet, which, theoretically, would make possible the reconfiguration of the physical structures of any type of matter using molecular manufacturing. Matter becomes digital through molecular communication.Although the uses given to the term nano-media in the context of cultural and social studies are merely metaphorical - the prefix nano is used by humanists as an allegorical reference of a combination between 'small' and 'contemporary' - once the technological and scientifical realities of nanomedia present themselves as a new realm of mediation, populated with its own kind of molecular devices, it will not be possible to ignore its full range of implications anymore. A complexifying media ecosystem calls for a more nuanced and interdisciplinary approach to media studies.ConclusionThis article narrates the different uses of the term nanomedia as an illustration of the way in which disciplinarity determines the level of legitimacy or illegitimacy of an emerging term. We then presented another possible use of the term in the field of media studies, one that is more closely aligned with its scientific origins. The importance and relevance of this narrative is connected to the present challenges we face in the anthropocene. The reality of the anthropocene makes painfully evident the full extent of the impact our technologies have had in the present condition of our planet's ecosystems. For as long as we refuse to engage directly with the technologies themselves, trying to speak the language of science and technology in order to fully understand its wider consequences and implications, our theories will be reduced to fancy metaphors and aesthetic explorations which circulate around the critical issues of our times without penetrating them. The level of interdisciplinarity required by the challenges of the anthropocene has to go beyond anthropocentrism. Traditional theories of media are anthropocentric: we seem to be willing to engage only with that which we are able to recognise and relate to. Going beyond anthropocentrism requires that we become familiar with interdisciplinary discussions and perspectives around common terminologies so we might reach a consensus about the use of a shared term. For scientists, nanomedia is an information and communication technology which is simultaneously a tool for material engineering. For media artists and theorists, nano-media is a cultural practice of active social interference and artistic exploration. However, none of the two approaches is able to fully grasp the magnitude of such an inter and transdisciplinary encounter: when communication becomes molecular engineering, what are the legitimate boundaries of media theory? If matter becomes not only a medium, but also a language, what would be the conceptual tools needed to rethink our very understanding of mediation? Would this new media epistemology be considered legitimate or illegitimate? Be it legitimate or illegitimate, a new media theory must arise that challenges and overcomes the walls which separate science and culture, physics and semiotics, on the grounds that it is a transdisciplinary change on the inner workings of media itself which now becomes our vector of epistemological and empirical transformation. 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Introduction The first “Aquarius Festival” came together in Canberra, at the Australian National University, in the autumn of 1971 and was reprised in 1973 in the small rural town of Nimbin, in northern New South Wales. Both events reflected the Zeitgeist in what was, in some ways, an inchoate expression of the so-called “counterculture” (Roszak). Rather than attempting to analyse the counterculture as a discrete movement with a definable history, I enlist the theory of cultural memes to read the counter culture as a Dawkinsian cluster meme, with this paper offered as “testimonio”, a form of quasi-political memoir that views shifts in the culture through the lens of personal experience (Zimmerman, Yúdice). I track an evolving personal, “internal” topography and map its points of intersection with the radical social, political and cultural changes spawned by the “consciousness revolution” that was an integral part of the counterculture emerging in the 1970s. I focus particularly on the notion of “consciousness raising”, as a Dawkinsian memetic replicator, in the context of the idealistic notions of the much-heralded “New Age” of Aquarius, and propose that this meme has been a persistent feature of the evolution of the “meme cluster” known as the counterculture. Mimesis and the Counterculture Since evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins floated the notion of cultural memes as a template to account for the evolution of ideas within political cultures, a literature of commentary and criticism has emerged that debates the strengths and weaknesses of his proposed model and its application across a number of fields. I borrow the notion to trace the influence of a set of memes that clustered around the emergence of what writer Marilyn Ferguson called The Aquarian Conspiracy, in her 1980 book of that name. Ferguson’s text, subtitled Personal and Social Transformation in Our Time, was a controversial attempt to account for what was known as the “New Age” movement, with its late millennial focus on social and personal transformation. That focus leads me to approach the counterculture (a term first floated by Theodore Roszak) less as a definable historical movement and more as a cluster of aspirational tropes expressing a range of aspects or concerns, from the overt political activism through to experimental technologies for the transformation of consciousness, and all characterised by a critical interrogation of, and resistance to, conventional social norms (Ferguson’s “personal and social transformation”). With its more overtly “spiritual” focus, I read the “New Age” meme, then, as a sub-set of this “cluster meme”, the counterculture. In my reading, “New Age” and “counterculture” overlap, sharing persistent concerns and a broad enough tent to accommodate the serious—the combative political action of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), say, (see Elbaum)—to the light-hearted—the sport of frisbee for example (Stancil). The interrogation of conventional social and political norms inherited from previous generations was a prominent strategy across both movements. Rather than offering a sociological analysis or history of the ragbag counterculture, per se, my discussion here focuses in on the particular meme of “consciousness raising” within that broader set of cultural shifts, some of which were sustained in their own right, some dropping away, and many absorbed into the dominant mainstream culture. Dawkins use of the term “meme” was rooted in the Greek mimesis, to emphasise the replication of an idea by imitation, or copying. He likened the way ideas survive and change in human culture to the natural selection of genes in biological evolution. While the transmission of memes does not depend on a physical medium, such as the DNA of biology, they replicate with a greater or lesser degree of success by harnessing human social media in a kind of “infectivity”, it is argued, through “contagious” repetition among human populations. Dawkins proposed that just as biological organisms could be said to act as “hosts” for replicating genes, in the same way people and groups of people act as hosts for replicating memes. Even before Dawkins floated his term, French biologist Jacques Monod wrote that ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role. (165, emphasis mine) Ideas have power, in Monod’s analysis: “They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighbouring brains, and thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains” (Monod, cited in Gleick). Emblematic of the counterculture were various “New Age” phenomena such as psychedelic drugs, art and music, with the latter contributing the “Aquarius” meme, whose theme song came from the stage musical (and later, film) Hair, and particularly the lyric that runs: “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius”. The Australian Aquarius Festivals of 1971 and 1973 explicitly invoked this meme in the way identified by Monod and the “Aquarius” meme resonated even in Australia. Problematising “Aquarius” As for the astrological accuracy of the “Age of Aquarius meme”, professional astrologers argue about its dating, and the qualities that supposedly characterise it. When I consulted with two prominent workers in this field for the preparation of this article, I was astonished to find their respective dating of the putative Age of Aquarius were centuries apart! What memes were being “hosted” here? According to the lyrics: When the moon is in the seventh house And Jupiter aligns with Mars Then peace will guide the planets And love will steer the stars. (Hair) My astrologer informants assert that the moon is actually in the seventh house twice every year, and that Jupiter aligns with Mars every two years. Yet we are still waiting for the outbreak of peace promised according to these astrological conditions. I am also informed that there’s no “real” astrological underpinning for the aspirations of the song’s lyrics, for an astrological “Age” is not determined by any planet but by constellations rising, they tell me. Most important, contrary to the aspirations embodied in the lyrics, peace was not guiding the planets and love was not about to “steer the stars”. For Mars is not the planet of love, apparently, but of war and conflict and, empowered with the expansiveness of Jupiter, it was the forceful aggression of a militaristic mind-set that actually prevailed as the “New Age” supposedly dawned. For the hippified summer of love had taken a nosedive with the tragic events at the Altamont speedway, near San Francisco in 1969, when biker gangs, enlisted to provide security for a concert performance by The Rolling Stones allegedly provoked violence, marring the event and contributing to a dawning disillusionment (for a useful coverage of the event and its historical context see Dalton). There was a lot of far-fetched poetic licence involved in this dreaming, then, but memes, according to Nikos Salingaros, are “greatly simplified versions of patterns”. “The simpler they are, the faster they can proliferate”, he writes, and the most successful memes “come with a great psychological appeal” (243, 260; emphasis mine). What could be retrieved from this inchoate idealism? Harmony and understanding Sympathy and trust abounding No more falsehoods or derisions Golden living dreams of visions Mystic crystal revelation And the mind’s true liberation Aquarius, Aquarius. (Hair) In what follows I want to focus on this notion: “mind’s true liberation” by tracing the evolution of this project of “liberating” the mind, reflected in my personal journey. Nimbin and Aquarius I had attended the first Aquarius Festival, which came together in Canberra, at the Australian National University, in the autumn of 1971. I travelled there from Perth, overland, in a Ford Transit van, among a raggedy band of tie-dyed hippie actors, styled as The Campus Guerilla Theatre Troupe, re-joining our long-lost sisters and brothers as visionary pioneers of the New Age of Aquarius. Our visions were fueled with a suitcase full of potent Sumatran “buddha sticks” and, contrary to Biblical prophesies, we tended to see—not “through a glass darkly” but—in psychedelic, pop-, and op-art explosions of colour. We could see energy, man! Two years later, I found myself at the next Aquarius event in Nimbin, too, but by that time I inhabited a totally different mind-zone, albeit one characterised by the familiar, intense idealism. In the interim, I had been arrested in 1971 while “tripping out” in Sydney on potent “acid”, or LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide); had tried out political engagement at the Pram Factory Theatre in Melbourne; had camped out in protest at the flooding of Lake Pedder in the Tasmanian wilderness; met a young guru, started meditating, and joined “the ashram”—part of the movement known as the Divine Light Mission, which originated in India and was carried to the “West” (including Australia) by an enthusiastic and evangelical following of drug-toking drop-outs who had been swarming through India intent on escaping the dominant culture of the military-industrial complex and the horrors of the Vietnam War. Thus, by the time of the 1973 event in Nimbin, while other festival participants were foraging for “gold top” magic mushrooms in farmers’ fields, we devotees had put aside such chemical interventions in conscious awareness to dig latrines (our “service” project for the event) and we invited everyone to join us for “satsang” in the yellow, canvas-covered, geodesic dome, to attend to the message of peace. The liberation meme had shifted through a mutation that involved lifestyle-changing choices that were less about alternative approaches to sustainable agriculture and more about engaging directly with “mind’s true liberation”. Raising Consciousness What comes into focus here is the meme of “consciousness raising”, which became the persistent project within which I lived and worked and had my being for many years. Triggered initially by the ingestion of those psychedelic substances that led to my shocking encounter with the police, the project was carried forward into the more disciplined environs of my guru’s ashrams. However, before my encounter with sustained spiritual practice I had tried to work the shift within the parameters of an ostensibly political framework. “Consciousness raising” was a form of political activism borrowed from the political sphere. Originally generated by Mao Zedong in China during the revolutionary struggle to overthrow the vested colonial interests that were choking Chinese nationalism in the 1940s, to our “distant, foreign brains” (Monod), as Western revolutionary romantics, Chairman Mao and his Little Red Book were taken up, in a kind of international counterculture solidarity with revolutionaries everywhere. It must be admitted, this solidarity was a fairly superficial gesture. Back in China it might be construed as part of a crude totalitarian campaign to inculcate Marxist-Leninist political ideas among the peasant classes (see Compestine for a fictionalised account of traumatic times; Han Suyin’s long-form autobiography—an early example of testimonio as personal and political history—offers an unapologetic account of a struggle not usually construed as sympathetically by Western commentators). But the meme (and the processes) of consciousness raising were picked up by feminists in the United States in the late 1960s and into the 1970s (Brownmiller 21) and it was in this form I encountered it as an actor with the politically engaged theatre troupe, The Australian Performing Group, at Carlton’s Pram Factory Theatre in late 1971. The Performance Group I performed as a core member of the Group in 1971-72. Decisions as to which direction the Group should take were to be made as a collective, and the group veered towards anarchy. Most of the women were getting together outside of the confines of the Pram Factory to raise their consciousness within the Carlton Women’s Liberation Cell Group. While happy that the sexual revolution was reducing women’s sexual inhibitions, some of the men at the Factory were grumbling into their beer, disturbed that intimate details of their private lives—and their sexual performance—might be disclosed and raked over by a bunch of radical feminists. As they began to demand equal rights to orgasm in the bedroom, the women started to seek equal access within the performance group, too. They requested rehearsal time to stage the first production by the Women’s Theatre Group, newly formed under the umbrella of the wider collective. As all of the acknowledged writers in the Group so far were men—some of whom had not kept pace in consciousness raising—scripts tended to be viewed as part of a patriarchal plot, so Betty Can Jump was an improvised piece, with the performance material developed entirely by the cast in workshop-style rehearsals, under the direction of Kerry Dwyer (see Blundell, Zuber-Skerritt 21, plus various contributors at www.pramfactory.com/memoirsfolder/). I was the only male in the collective included in the cast. Several women would have been more comfortable if no mere male were involved at all. My gendered attitudes would scarcely have withstood a critical interrogation but, as my partner was active in launching the Women’s Electoral Lobby, I was given the benefit of the doubt. Director Kerry Dwyer liked my physicalised approach to performance (we were both inspired by the “poor theatre” of Jerzy Grotowski and the earlier surrealistic theories of Antonin Artaud), and I was cast to play all the male parts, whatever they would be. Memorable material came up in improvisation, much of which made it into the performances, but my personal favorite didn’t make the cut. It was a sprawling movement piece where I was “born” out of a symbolic mass of writhing female bodies. It was an arduous process and, after much heaving and huffing, I emerged from the birth canal stammering “SSSS … SSSS … SSMMMO-THER”! The radical reversioning of culturally authorised roles for women has inevitably, if more slowly, led to a re-thinking of the culturally approved and reinforced models of masculinity, too, once widely accepted as entirely biologically ordained rather than culturally constructed. But the possibility of a queer re-versioning of gender would be recognised only slowly. Liberation Meanwhile, Dennis Altman was emerging as an early spokesman for gay, or homosexual, liberation and he was invited to address the collective. Altman’s stirring book, Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation, had recently been published, but none of us had read it. Radical or not, the Group had shown little evidence of sensitivity to gender-queer issues. My own sexuality was very much “oppressed” rather than liberated and I would have been loath to use “queer” to describe myself. The term “homosexual” was fraught with pejorative, quasi-medical associations and, in a collective so divided across strict and sometimes hostile gender boundaries, deviant affiliations got short shrift. Dennis was unsure of his reception before this bunch of apparent “heteros”. Sitting at the rear of the meeting, I admired his courage. It took more self-acceptance than I could muster to confront the Group on this issue at the time. Somewhere in the back of my mind, “homosexuality” was still something I was supposed to “get over”, so I failed to respond to Altman’s implicit invitation to come out and join the party. The others saw me in relationship with a woman and whatever doubts they might have carried about the nature of my sexuality were tactfully suspended. Looking back, I am struck by the number of simultaneous poses I was trying to maintain: as an actor; as a practitioner of an Artaudian “theatre of cruelty”; as a politically committed activist; and as a “hetero”-sexual. My identity was an assemblage of entities posing as “I”; it was as if I were performing a self. Little gay boys are encouraged from an early age to hide their real impulses, not only from others—in the very closest circle, the family; at school; among one’s peers—but from themselves, too. The coercive effects of shaming usually fix the denial into place in our psyches before we have any intellectual (or political) resources to consider other options. Growing up trying to please, I hid my feelings. In my experience, it could be downright dangerous to resist the subtle and gross coercions that applied around gender normativity. The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, of the British object-relations school, argues that when the environment does not support the developing personality and requires the person to sacrifice his or her own spontaneous needs to adapt to environmental demands, there is not even a resting-place for individual experience and the result is a failure in the primary narcissistic state to evolve an individual. The “individual” then develops as an extension of the shell rather than that of the core [...] What there is left of a core is hidden away and is difficult to find even in the most far-reaching analysis. The individual then exists by not being found. The true self is hidden, and what we have to deal with clinically is the complex false self whose function is to keep this true self hidden. (212) How to connect to that hidden core, then? “Mind’s true liberation...” Alienated from the performative version of selfhood, but still inspired by the promise of liberation, even in the “fuzzy” form for which my inchoate hunger yearned (sexual liberation? political liberation? mystical liberation?), I was left to seek out a more authentic basis for selfhood, one that didn’t send me spinning along the roller-coaster of psychedelic drugs, or lie to me with the nostrums of a toxic, most forms of which would deny me, as a sexual, moral and legal pariah, the comforts of those “anchorage points to the social matrix” identified by Soddy (cited in Mol 58). My spiritual inquiry was “counter” to these institutionalised models of religious culture. So, I began to read my way through a myriad of books on comparative religion. And to my surprise, rather than taking up with the religions of antique cultures, instead I encountered a very young guru, initially as presented in a simply drawn poster in the window of Melbourne’s only vegetarian restaurant (Shakahari, in Carlton). “Are you hungry and tired of reading recipe books?” asked the figure in the poster. I had little sense of where that hunger would lead me, but it seemed to promise a fulfilment in ways that the fractious politics of the APG offered little nourishment. So, while many of my peers in the cities chose to pursue direct political action, and others experimented with cooperative living in rural communes, I chose the communal lifestyle of the ashram. In these different forms, then, the conscious raising meme persisted when other challenges raised by the counterculture either faded or were absorbed in the mainstream. I finally came to realise that the intense disillusionment process I had been through (“dis-illusionment” as the stripping away of illusions) was the beginning of awakening, in effect a “spiritual initiation” into a new way of seeing myself and my “place” in the world. Buddhist teachers might encourage this very kind of stripping away of false notions as part of their teaching, so the aspiration towards the “true liberation” of the mind expressed in the Aquarian visioning might be—and in my case, actually has been and continues to be—fulfilled to a very real extent. Gurus and the entire turn towards Eastern mysticism were part of the New Age meme cluster prevailing during the early 1970s, but I was fortunate to connect with an enduring set of empirical practices that haven’t faded with the fashions of the counterculture. A good guitarist would never want to play in public without first tuning her instrument. In a similar way, it is now possible for me to tune my mind back to a deeper, more original source of being than the socially constructed sense of self, which had been so fraught with conflicts for me. I have discovered that before gender, and before sexuality, in fact, pulsing away behind the thicket of everyday associations, there is an original, unconditioned state of beingness, the awareness of which can be reclaimed through focused meditation practices, tested in a wide variety of “real world” settings. For quite a significant period of time I worked as an instructor in the method on behalf of my guru, or mentor, travelling through a dozen or so countries, and it was through this exposure that I was able to observe that the practices worked independently of culture and that “mind’s true liberation” was in many ways a de-programming of cultural indoctrinations (see Marsh, 2014, 2013, 2011 and 2007 for testimony of this process). In Japan, Zen roshi might challenge their students with the koan: “Show me your original face, before you were born!” While that might seem to be an absurd proposal, I am finding that there is a potential, if unexpected, liberation in following through such an inquiry. As “hokey” as the Aquarian meme-set might have been, it was a reflection of the idealistic hope that characterised the cluster of memes that aggregated within the counterculture, a yearning for healthier life choices than those offered by the toxicity of the military-industrial complex, the grossly exploitative effects of rampant Capitalism and a politics of cynicism and domination. The meme of the “true liberation” of the mind, then, promised by the heady lyrics of a 1970s hippie musical, has continued to bear fruit in ways that I could not have imagined. References Altman, Dennis. Homosexual Oppression and Liberation. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1972. Blundell, Graeme. The Naked Truth: A Life in Parts. Sydney: Hachette, 2011. Brownmiller, Susan. In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution. New York: The Dial Press, 1999. Compestine, Ying Chang. Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party. New York: Square Fish, 2009. Dalton, David. “Altamont: End of the Sixties, Or Big Mix-Up in the Middle of Nowhere?” Gadfly Nov/Dec 1999. April 2014 ‹http://www.gadflyonline.com/archive/NovDec99/archive-altamont.html›. Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1976. Elbaum, Max. Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che. London and New York: Verso, 2002. Ferguson, Marilyn. The Aquarian Conspiracy. Los Angeles: Tarcher Putnam, 1980. Gleick, James. “What Defines a Meme?” Smithsonian Magazine 2011. April 2014 ‹http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/What-Defines-a Meme.html›. Hair, The American Tribal Love Rock Musical. Prod. Michael Butler. Book by Gerome Ragni and James Rado; Lyrics by Gerome Ragni and James Rado; Music by Galt MacDermot; Musical Director: Galt MacDermot. 1968. Han, Suyin. The Crippled Tree. 1965. Reprinted. Chicago: Academy Chicago P, 1985. ---. A Mortal Flower. 1966. Reprinted. Chicago: Academy Chicago P, 1985. ---. Birdless Summer. 1968. Reprinted. Chicago: Academy Chicago P, 1985. ---. The Morning Deluge: Mao TseTung and the Chinese Revolution 1893-1954. Boston: Little Brown, 1972. ---. My House Has Two Doors. New York: Putnam, 1980. Marsh, Victor. The Boy in the Yellow Dress. Melbourne: Clouds of Magellan Press, 2014. ---. “A Touch of Silk: A (Post)modern Faerie Tale.” Griffith Review 42: Once Upon a Time in Oz (Oct. 2013): 159-69. ---. “Bent Kid, Straight World: Life Writing and the Reconfiguration of ‘Queer’.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses 15.1 (April 2011). ‹http://www.textjournal.com.au/april11/marsh.htm›. ---. “The Boy in the Yellow Dress: Re-framing Subjectivity in Narrativisations of the Queer Self.“ Life Writing 4.2 (Oct. 2007): 263-286. Mol, Hans. Identity and the Sacred: A Sketch for a New Social-Scientific Theory of Religion. Oxford: Blackwell, 1976. Monod, Jacques. Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. New York: Doubleday, 1968. Salingaros, Nikos. Theory of Architecture. Solingen: Umbau-Verlag, 2006. Stancil, E.D., and M.D. Johnson. Frisbee: A Practitioner’s Manual and Definitive Treatise. New York: Workman, 1975 Winnicott, D.W. Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis: Collected Papers. 1958. London: Hogarth Press, 1975. Yúdice, George. “Testimonio and Postmodernism.” Latin American Perspectives 18.3 (1991): 15-31. Zimmerman, Marc. “Testimonio.” The Sage Encyclopedia of Social Science Research Methods. Eds. Michael S. Lewis-Beck, Alan Bryman and Tim Futing Liao. London: Sage Publications, 2003. Zuber-Skerritt, Ortrun, ed. Australian Playwrights: David Williamson. Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 1988.

IntroductionThis essay will focus on some of the connections between digitally transmitted stories, games, narrative processes, and the discipline whose ostensible job is the study of storytelling, namely literature. My observations will be limited to the specific case of computer games, storytelling, and what is often unproblematically referred to as “literature,” in order to focus attention on historical and contemporary features of the development of the relationship between the two that remain largely unexamined. Therefore, one goal of this essay is to re-think this relationship from a fresh perspective, whose “freshness” derives from reopening the past and re-examining what is overlooked when games scholars talk about “narrative” and “literature” as though they were interchangeable.Further, I will discuss the dissemination of narrative on/through various platforms before mass-media, such as textually transmitted stories that anticipate digitally disseminated narrative. This will include specific examples as well as a more general a re-examination of claims made on the topic of literature, narrative and computer games, via a brief review of disciplinary insights from the study of digital games and narrative. The following is therefore intended as a view of games and (literary) narrative in pre-digital forms as an attempt to build bridges between media studies and other disciplines by calling for a longer, developmental history of games, narrative and/or literature that considers them together rather than as separate territories.The Stakes of the Game My reasons for re-examining games and narrative scholarship include my desire to discuss a number of somewhat less-than-accurate or misleading notions about narrative and literature that have been folded into computer game studies, where these notions go unchallenged. I also want to point out a body of work on literature, mimesis and play that has been overlooked in game studies, and that would be helpful in thinking about stories and some of the (digital) platforms through which they are disseminated.To begin by responding to the tacit question of why it is worth asking what literary studies have to do with videogames, my answer resides in the link between play, games and storytelling forged by Aristotle in the Poetics. As a function of imitative play or “mimesis,” he claims, art forms mimic phenomena found in nature such as the singing of birds. So, by virtue of the playful mimetic function ascribed to the arts or “poesis,” games and storytelling are kindred forms of play. Moreover, the pretend function common to art forms such as realist fictional narratives that are read “as if” the story were true, and games played “as if” their premises were real, unfold in playfully imitative ways that produce possible worlds presented through different media.In the intervening centuries, numerous scholars discussed mimesis and play from Kant and Schiller in the 18th century, to Huizinga, and to many scholars who wrote on literature, mimesis and play later in the 20th century, such as Gadamer, Bell, Spariousu, Hutchinson, and Morrow. More recently, games scholar Janet Murray wrote that computer games are “a kind of abstract storytelling that resembles the world of common experience but compresses it in order to heighten interest,” hence even Tetris acts as a dramatic “enactment of the overtasked lives of Americans in the 1990’s” allowing them to “symbolically experience agency,” and “enact control over things outside our power” (142, 143). Similarly, Ryan has argued that videogames offer micro stories that are mostly about the pleasure of discovering nooks and crannies of on-line, digital possible worlds (10).At the same time, a tendency developed in games studies in the 1990s to eschew any connection with narrative, literature and earlier scholarship on mimesis. One example is Markku Eskelinen’s article in Game Studies wherein he argued that “[o]utside academic theory people are usually excellent at making distinctions between narrative, drama and games. If I throw a ball at you I don’t expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories.” Eskelinen then explains that “when games and especially computer games are studied and theorized they are almost without exception colonized from the fields of literary, theatre, drama and film studies.” As Eskelinen’s argument attests, his concern is disciplinary territorialisation rather than stories and their transmedial dissemination, whereas I prefer to take an historical approach to games and storytelling, to which I now direct my attention.Stepping Back Both mimesis and interactivity are central to how stories are told and travel across media. In light thereof, I recall the story of Zeuxis who, in the 5th century BC, introduced a realistic method of painting. As the story goes, Zeuxis painted a boy holding a bunch of grapes so realistically that it attracted birds who tried to enter the world of the painting, whereupon the artist remarked that, were the boy rendered as realistically as the grapes, he would have scared the birds away. Centuries later in the 1550s, the camera obscura and mirrors were used to project scenery as actors moved in and out of it as an early form of multimedia storytelling entertainment (Smith 22). In the late 17th century, van Mieris painted The Raree Show, representing an interactive travelling storyboard and story master who invited audience participation, hence the girl pictured here, leaning forward to interact with the story.Figure 1: The Raree Show (van Mieris)Numerous interactive narrative toys were produced in the 18th and 19th, such as these storytelling playing cards sold as a leaf in The Great Mirror of Folly (1720). Along with the plays, poems and cartoons also contained in this volume dedicated to the South Sea Bubble crisis of 1720, the cards serve as a storyboard with plot lines that follow suits, so that hearts picks up one narrative thread, and clubs, spades and diamonds another. Hence while the cards could be removed for gaming they could also be read as a story in a medium that, to borrow games scholar Espen Aarseth’s terminology, requires non-trivial physical or “ergodic effort” on the part of readers and players.Figure 2: playing cards from The Great Mirror of Folly (1720) In the 20th century examples of interactive and ergodic codex fiction abound, including Hesse’s Das Glasperlenspiel [Glass Bead Game] (1943, 1949), Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), Saporta’s Composition No. 1 (1962), and Winterson’s PowerBook (2001) that conceptually and/or physically mimic and anticipate hypertext. More recently, Chloé Delaume’s Corpus Simsi (2003) explicitly attempts to remediate a MMORPG as the title suggests, just as there are videogames that attempt, in various ways, to remediate novels. I have presented these examples to argue for a long-continuum view of storytelling and games, as a series of attempts to produce stories—from Zeuxis grapes to PowerBook and beyond—that can be entered and interacted with, at least metaphorically or cognitively. Over time, various game-like or playful interfaces from text to computer have invited us into storyworlds while partially impeding or opening the door to interaction and texturing our experience of the story in medium-specific ways.The desire to make stories interactive has developed across media, from image to text and various combinations thereof, as a means of externalizing an author’s imagination to be activated by opening and reading a novel, or by playing a game wherein the story is mediated through a screen while players interact to change the course of the story. While I am arguing that storytelling has for centuries striven to interpolate spectators or readers by various means and though numerous media that would eventually make storytelling thoroughly and not only metaphorically interactive, I want now to return briefly to the question of literature.Narrative vs LiteratureThe term “literature” is frequently assumed to be unambiguous when it enters discussions of transmedia storytelling and videogames. What literature “is” was, however, hotly debated in the 1980s-90s with many scholars concluding that literature is a construct invented by “old dead white men,” resulting in much criticism on the topic of canon formation. Yet, without rehearsing the arguments produced in previous decades on the topic of literariness, I want to provide a few examples of what happens when games scholars and practitioners assume they know what literature is and then absorb or eschew it in their own transmedia storytelling endeavours.The 1990s saw the emergence of game studies as a young discipline, eager to burst out of the crucible of English Departments that were, as Eskelinen pointed out, the earliest testing grounds for the legitimized study of games. Thus ensued the “ludology vs narratology” debate wherein “ludologists,” keen to move away from literary studies, insisted that games be studied as games only, and participated in what Gonzalo Frasca famously called the “debate that never happened.” Yet as short-lived as the debate may have been, a negative and limited view of literature still inheres in games studies along with an abiding lack of awareness of the shared origins of stories, games, and thinking about both that I have attempted to sketch out thus far.Exemplary of arguments on the side of “ludology,” was storytelling game designer Chris Crawford’s keynote at Mediaterra 2007, in which he explained that literariness is measured by degrees of fun. Hence, whereas literature is highly formulaic and structured, storytelling is unconstrained and fun because storytellers have no rigid blueprint and can change direction at any moment. Yet, Crawford went on to explain how his storytelling machine works by drawing together individual syntactic elements, oddly echoing the Russian formalists’ description of literature, and particularly models that locate literary production at the intersection of the axis of selection, containing linguistic elements such as verbs, nouns, adjectives and so on, and the axis of combination governed by rules of genre.I foreground Crawford’s ludological argument because it highlights some of the issues that arise when one doesn’t care to know much about the study of literature. Crawford understands literature as rule-based, rigid and non-fun, and then trots out his own storytelling-model based or rigid syntactical building blocks and rule-based laws of combination, without the understanding the irony. This returns me to ludologist Eskelinen who also argued that “stories are just uninteresting ornaments or gift-wrappings to games”. In either case, the matter of “story” is stretched over the rigid syntax of language, and the literary structuralist enterprise has consisted precisely in peeling back that narrative skin or “gift wrap” to reveal the bones of human cognitive thought processes, as for example, when we read rhetorical figures such as metaphor and metonymy. In the words of William Carlos Williams, poetry is a machine made out of words, from whose nuts and bolts meaning emerges when activated, similar to programing language in a videogame whose story is eminent and comes into being as we play.Finally, the question of genre hangs in the background given that “literature” itself is potentially transmedia because its content can take many forms and be transmitted across diverse platforms. Importantly in this regard the novel, which is the form most games scholars have in mind when drawing or rejecting connections between games and literature, is itself a shape-shifting, difficult-to-define genre whose form, as the term novel implies, is subject to the constant imperative to innovate across media as it has done over time.Different Approaches While I just highlighted inadequacies in some of the scholarship on games and narrative (or “literature” when narrative is defined as such) there is work on interactive storytelling and the transmedia dissemination of stories explicitly as games that deals with some of these issues. In their article on virtual bodies in Dante’s Inferno (2010), Welsh and Sebastian explain that the game is a “reboot of a Trecento poem,” and discuss what must have been Dante’s own struggle in the 14th century to “materialize sin through metaphors of suffering,” while contending “with the abstractness of the subject matter [as well as] the representational shortcomings of language itself,” concluding that Dante’s “corporeal allegories must become interactive objects constructed of light and math that feel to the user like they have heft and volume” (166). This notion of “corporeal allegories” accords with my own model of a “body hermeneutic” that could help to understand the reception of stories transmitted in non-codex media: a poetics of reading that includes how game narratives “engage the body hapitically” (Goggin 219).Likewise, Kathi Berens’s work on “Novel Games: Playable Books on iPad” is exemplary of what literary theory and game texts can do for each other, that is, through the ways in which games can remediate, imitate or simply embody the kind of meditative depth that we encounter in the expansive literary narratives of the 19th century. In her reading of Living Will, Berens argues that the best way to gauge meaning is not in the potentialities of its text, but rather “in the human performance of reading and gaming in new thresholds of egodicity,” and offers a close reading that uncovers the story hidden in the JavaScript code, and which potentially changes the meaning of the game. Here again, the argument runs parallel to my own call for readings that take into account the visceral experience of games, and which demands a configurative/interpretative approach to the unfolding of narrative and its impact on our being as a whole. Such an approach would destabilize the old mind/body split and account for various modes of sensation as part of the story itself. This is where literary theory, storytelling, and games may be seen as coming together in novels like Delaume’s Corpus Simsi and a host of others that in some way remediate video games. Such analyses would include features of the platform/text—shape, topography, ergodicity—and how the story is disseminated through the printed text, the authors’ websites, blogs and so on.It is likewise important to examine what literary criticism that has dealt with games and storytelling in the past can do for games. For example, if one agrees with Wittgenstein that language is inherently game-like or ludic and that, by virtue of literature’s long association with mimesis, its “as if” function, and its “autotelic” or supposedly non-expository nature, then most fiction is itself a form of game. Andrew Ferguson’s work on Finnegan’s Wake (1939) takes these considerations into account while moving games and literary studies into the digital age. Ferguson argues that Finnegan’s Wake prefigures much of what computers make possible such as glitching, which “foregrounds the gaps in the code that produces the video-game environment.” This he argues, is an operation that Joyce performed textually, thereby “radically destabilizing” his own work, “leading to effects [similar to] short-circuiting plot events, and entering spaces where a game’s normal ontological conditions are suspended.” As Ferguson points out, moreover, literary criticism resembles glitch hunting as scholars look for keys to unlock the puzzles that constitute the text through which readers must level up.Conclusion My intention has been to highlight arguments presented by ludologists like Eskelinnen who want to keep game studies separate from narrative and literary studies, as well as those game scholars who favour a narrative approach like Murray and Ryan, in order to suggest ways in which a longer, historical view of how stories travel across platforms might offer a more holistic view of where we are at today. Moreover, as my final examples of games scholarship suggest, games, and games that specifically remediate works of literature such as Dante’s Inferno, constitute a rapidly moving target that demands that we keep up by finding new ways to take narrative and ergodic complexity into account.The point of this essay was not, therefore, to adapt a position in any one camp but rather to nod to the major contributors in a debate which was largely about institutional turf, and perhaps never really happened, yet still continues to inform scholarship. At the same time, I wanted to argue for the value of discussing the long tradition of understanding literature as a form of mimesis and therefore as a particular kind of game, and to show how such an understanding contributes to historically situating and analysing videogames. Stories can be experienced across multiple platforms or formats, and my ultimate goal is to see what literary studies can do for game studies by trying to show that the two share more of the same goals, elements, and characteristics than is commonly supposed.ReferencesAristotle. Poetics, Trans. J. Hutton. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1982.Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007.Behrens, Kathi. “‘Messy’ Ludology: New Dimensions of Narrator Unreliability in Living Will.” No Trivial Effort: Essays on Games and Literary Theory. Eds. Joyce Goggin and Timothy Welsh. Bloomsbury: Forthcoming.Bell, D. Circumstances: Chance in the Literary Text. Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 1993. Delaume, Chloé. Corpus Simsi. Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer, 2003.Eskelinen, Markku. “The Gaming Situation”. Game Studies 1.1 (2011). <http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen/>. Ferguson, Andrew. “Let’s Play Finnegan’s Wake.” Hypermedia Joyce Studies 13 (2014). <http://hjs.ff.cuni.cz/archives/v13_1/main/essays.php?essay=ferguson>. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method, Trans. Barden and Cumming. New York: Crossroad, 1985.Goggin, Joyce. “A Body Hermeneutic?: Corpus Simsi or Reading like a Sim.” The Hand of the Interpreter: Essays on Meaning after Theory. Eds. G.F. Mitrano and Eric Jarosinski. Bern: Peter Lang, 2008. 205-223.Hesse, Hermann. The Glass Bead Game [Das Glasperlenspiel]. Trans. Clara Winston. London: Picador, 2002.Huizinga, Johann. Homo Ludens. Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff cop, 1938.Hutchinson, Peter. Games Authors Play. New York: Metheun, 1985.James, Joyce. Finnegan’s Wake. London: Faber and Faber, 1939.Morrow, Nancy. Dreadful Games: The Play of Desire and the 19th-Century Novel. Ohio: Kent State UP, 1988.Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge: MIT UP, 1997.Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York: Putnam, 1962.Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.Saporta, Marc. Composition No. 1. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1962.Smith, Grahame. Dickens and the Dream of Cinema. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003.Spariosu, Mihai. Literature, Mimesis and Play. Tübigen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1982.Winterson, Janette. The PowerBook. London: Vintage, 2001.Wittgenstein, Ludwig. The Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan: 1972.

“Why would I go to the library if I can get all I need from the web?” This question should sound familiar to anyone teaching media studies in a tertiary institution today, and it is becoming an increasingly common question. It is also a question that typifies what has been called the Net Generation, and at the same time raises important questions about the way we teach this generation, particularly when it comes to media education. No longer can we assume that students will actually take the time to read the required readings that we have so painstakingly put together, because it is simply not their way of approaching or engaging with information. The concept of scanning sums it up beautifully: they scan for information, rather than search for specific texts to be engaged with in depth. As Diana and James Oblinger note, “individuals raised with the computer deal with information differently compared to previous cohorts: they develop hypertext minds, they leap around. A linear thought process is much less common than bricolage, or the ability to piece information together from multiple sources” (2.4-2.5). In short, they develop scanning minds. At the risk of sounding ‘old school’, let’s stop and reflect on this for a moment. Firstly, there is the problematic notion of the Net Generation, and in particular its ‘generation’ component. Similar to previous generational constructs like Gen X, Y, Dot.Com Gen, etcetera, it implies that the Net Generation’s characteristics are specifically age related. It can be argued, however, that they are driven by technology (in its social and cultural context…naturally): in other words, regardless of your age, if you engage with a wide variety of media across different platforms in a sustained manner, you are just as likely to develop a scanning mind as any first year student, since the brain is a muscle which is remarkably adept at adapting. Secondly, if we accept that the scanning mind is here to stay, which will take a considerable shift, judging from the frequent rumbles in institutional corridors about the lack of student engagement in classrooms (and I’m certainly not exempt from this myself), then that raises a number of very important, and potentially uncomfortable, questions about our practice in classrooms. For example, if a scanning mind is the equipment that students bring to our lecture theatres, is it appropriate to expect them to listen to us in a sustained manner for two hours, like we have done since time immemorial? Similarly, is the general tutorial format of ‘required reading—discussion about the required reading’ the best way to engage students if the majority consistently fail to make it to the end of that reading? If we can identify what the characteristics of the Net Generation are, should we redesign our teaching practice to suit those characteristics? What are the implications of that for the various types of skills (including generic skills) we imagine to be worthy outcomes of a university degree (or ‘graduate capabilities’ in management speak)? Diana and James Oblinger (2.6-2.7) identify the following characteristics in the Net Generation: ability to read visual images (more comfortable in image-rich environments than with text) visual-spatial skills (developed through playing games) experiential (they learn better through discovery than by being told) ability to shift their attention rapidly from one task to another digitally literate connected/social (peer-to-peer approach) The ability to read visual images sits well with the often heard claim that this generation is ‘media savvy’, but there is a big difference between being able to read (and scan) images and being able to critically engage with those images. The latter poses a challenge to educators, because it is in this realm that traditional academic skills become important. In 1996, an influential paper in the Harvard Educational Review by the so-called New London Group, developed what they called a ‘pedagogy of multiliteracies’, in which they argued for a re-think of what we traditionally understand by literacy (i.e. text-based), to account for “the bourgeoning variety of text forms associated with information and multimedia technologies” (1-2). They implicitly suggest that we need to teach students multiliteracies, but this raises the question of what we understand by multiliteracies. According to Kalantzis and Cope, “meaning is made in ways that are increasingly multimodal—in which written linguistic modes of meaning interface with visual, audio, gestural, and spatial patterns of meaning” (9). This is only sporadically acknowledged in current teaching, and if incorporated at all, its application is generally left to the discretion of individual course coordinators, rather than integrated across the curriculum. At the same time, however, the characteristics of the Net Generation, as outlined above, suggest that there are many skills associated with a multimedia environment that we may not need to teach students. For example, when it comes to visual-spatial skills, developed through game playing, they can probably teach us more than what we can teach them. What the above list of characteristics allows us to do however, is to shift our focus to creatively incorporate the skills that students come equipped with in ways that would teach them the critical skills we want them to develop. This is precisely what MIT’s Comparative Media Studies Program has been concerned with in recent years: collaborating with a variety of partners, ranging from Microsoft to the Royal Shakespeare Company, they have developed gaming scenarios that “cut across different game genres, different academic fields, different pedagogical models, and different strategies for integrating games into the classroom” (Squire and Jenkins 10). There is recognition in their educational game designs that the Net Generation is more comfortable in image-rich environments, that they are experiential learners, that they have the ability to shift their attention rapidly from one task to another, and that they prefer a peer-to-peer approach. The games are designed for different disciplines, from science to history and literary studies, and some are multiplayer games while others are single player games. Students experience the games “not simply as readers or spectators but as players, directors, and authors” (Squire and Jenkins 21). Built into the game designs are mechanisms that stimulate critical thinking (and indeed the acquisition of knowledge); in order to win the game, students need to collaborate (social peer-to-peer interaction), find information, and reflect on their practice. Squire and Jenkins’ examples include a game which allows students to analyse a Shakespeare play (The Taming of the Shrew) by occupying the director’s chair, and an American history game where players fill the shoes of decision makers in history and thus have the ability to ‘virtually’ re-write history, as long as they take responsibility for their decisions. With some creative thinking, these examples could very well be applied to the study of films, television programs, media companies, or even games themselves. The MIT Program is still in its early stages, and there are many issues to be considered, both logistical and philosophical, and many pilot programs to scan, before radically changing age old practices. Furthermore, there is a need to be very clear on pedagogical objectives and projected outcomes, in order to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. In an increasingly competitive higher education context, the temptation to ‘please’ students/clients and peddle to their perceived needs looms large. However, initiatives like the MIT Program show promising ways to harness the Net Generation’s ‘natural’ abilities, rather than condemning them as ‘only interested in instant gratification’. The scanning mind can be seen as a dangerous mind if it never delves below the surface, but if we instead choose to see the scanning mind as a potentially suspicious or sceptical mind, then we have taken the first step in harnessing this scepticism and transforming it into a critical mind. Postscript Despite my initial resolve to make this piece highly scannable, by keeping my sentences short and sharp, I realise I have failed miserably in this regard, which I attribute to my membership of various pre-net generations… References Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. “Introduction.” Transformations in Language and Learning: Perspectives on Multiliteracies. Ed. Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope. Melbourne: Common Ground, 2001. 9-18. The New London Group. “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures.” Harvard Educational Review 66.1 (Spring 1996): 60-92. Oblinger, Diana G., and James L. Oblinger. “Is It Age or IT: First Steps toward Understanding the Net Generation.” Educating the Net Generation. Ed. Diana G. Oblinger and James L. Oblinger. Boulder: Educause, 2005. 2.1-2.20. Squire, Kurt, and Henry Jenkins. “Harnessing the Power of Games in Education.” InSight 3 (2003): 5-33. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Huijser, Henk. "Are Scanning Minds Dangerous Minds, or Merely Suspicious Minds?: Harnessing the Net Generation’s Ability to Scan." M/C Journal 8.4 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/09-huijser.php>. APA Style Huijser, H. (Aug. 2005) "Are Scanning Minds Dangerous Minds, or Merely Suspicious Minds?: Harnessing the Net Generation’s Ability to Scan," M/C Journal, 8(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/09-huijser.php>.

I. The Fidelity Reflex When Robert Stam entitles one of his recent efforts to theorise adaptation “Beyond Fidelity,” he could be speaking for a wide range of critics (54). Indeed, as the editor of two major adaptation anthologies, he is speaking for them. Stam’s principal objection is the covert moralising of fidelity discourse: “The conventional language of adaptation criticism has often been profoundly moralistic, rich in terms that imply that the cinema has somehow done a disservice to literature. … The standard rhetoric has often deployed an elegiac discourse of loss, lamenting what has been ‘lost’ in the translation from novel to film” (“Introduction”, 3). There are problems with fidelity discourse beyond its implied moralising. For Robert B. Ray and Dudley Andrew, the problem with fidelity is that it makes for boring criticism. “Unquestionably the most frequent and most tiresome discussion of adaptation (and of film and literature relations as well) concerns fidelity and transformation” (31). Part of what makes this discussion tiresome is its unswaying commitment to the historically dubious and logically unnecessary assumption that “the task of adaptation is the reproduction in cinema of something essential about an original text” (Andrew, 31). Linda Hutcheon, similarly bored with fidelity discussions, highlights the same logical flaw: “Of more interest to me is the fact that the morally loaded discourse of fidelity is based on the implied assumption that adapters aim simply to reproduce the adapted text” (7). Hutcheon may be writing 25 years after Andrew, but she still has something to gain by attacking what was, until recently, “the critical orthodoxy in adaptation studies” (7)—what Stam calls “the conventional language” and “the standard rhetoric” (3); what Ray calls (citing Jonathan Culler) “an endless series of twenty-page articles” (47). What she has to gain is the ability to talk about what interests her: “there appears to be little need to engage directly in the constant debate over degrees of proximity to the ‘original’” (7). This is a personal victory, not a disciplinary one (“Of more interest to me;” “I have always had a strong interest in what has come to be called ‘intertextuality’” [xii]). Still, it is a victory, if only on that scale. Andrew, by contrast, hoped his attacks on fidelity discourse would change the discipline. “Let us not use [adaptation] to fight battles over the essence of the media or the inviolability of individual artworks. Let us use it as we use all cultural practices” (37). Reviewing Andrew’s essay in 1984, Christopher Orr was more pessimistic about attempts to change adaptation studies, and blunt about his disciplinary aims: “Given the problematic nature of the discourse of fidelity, one is tempted to call for a moratorium on adaptation studies” (72). And looking back on Andrew and Orr, Ray agreed that harsh measures were necessary for the field, but he more or less blamed Andrew for offering a fillip to fidelity in his call for more sociologically aware studies of adaptation. “I think we more urgently need to know something else” (48). And yet the discipline resists. “All the various manifestations of ‘theory’ over the last decades should logically have changed this negative view of adaptation. … Yet … disparaging opinions on adaptation as a secondary mode—belated and therefore derivative—persist” (Hutcheon, xii-xiii, citing Stam). What I am calling the fidelity reflex, though, is not the persistence of the discourse, but the persistent call for it to end. For adaptation theory to have any chance of success, it must do two things. First, it must account for the persistence of fidelity discourse despite decades of resourceful argument against it. Second, it must account for its own blind spot: What has the campaign against fidelity failed to get at? And given this consistent failure to achieve its goals, why do critics persist in calling for an end to fidelity? II. The Conversation of Judgment How could adaptation studies have resisted such an onslaught—not simply of Hutcheon, Stam, Andrew, Orr, Naremore, Ray, and McFarlane, but also of Irigaray, Kristeva, Foucault, Derrida, Bakhtin, and Barthes? (Hutcheon, 21; Stam, 8-9). Ray’s answer is that the field of film and literature has remained in a “pre-paradigmatic state,” held there by the New Criticism’s “veneration of ‘art’.” (44-5). The “exigencies of the academic market” have given us a mountain of case studies that fail to add up to anything. They are the tribute paid to literature by those who would institutionalise film studies; adaptation studies make film acceptable to literature departments looking to “maintain declining enrollments in the humanities” (47), while “shor[ing] up literature’s crumbling walls” (46). As total an explanation as this is, indeed, as damning as Ray’s indictment of the field may seem, even he finds the origin of the fidelity discourse outside the academy. It lies in our ordinary discussions of adaptations: “Without the benefit of a presiding poetics, film and literature scholars could only persist [there it is again] in asking about individual movies the same unproductive layman’s question (How does the film compare with the book?) getting the same unproductive answer (The book is better)” (44). For Ray, the layman’s question has poisoned academic criticism because it rests on a comparison: “Most of the articles written could have used a variation of the words in the title ‘But Compared to the Original.’” (45). Hence the danger of Andrew’s position for Ray, which offered not freedom from comparison but a typology of relationships. “But Compared to the Original” is the title of an article by William Fadiman from 1965 that attempted to nip fidelity discourse in the bud. Yet as an instance of the fidelity reflex, Fadiman was already late to the game. The locus classicus is George Bluestone’s Novel into Film of 1957. Here, we find those same “unproductive laymen” making “such statements as ‘The film is true to the spirit of the book’; ‘It’s incredible how they butchered the novel’; ‘It cuts out key passages, but it’s still a good film’; ‘Thank God they changed the ending’—these and similar statements are predicated on certain assumptions which blur the mutational process” (Bluestone, 5; Metz, 112). They not only blur the mutational process; these statements make a terrible category error. “Changes are inevitable the moment one abandons the linguistic for the visual medium” (Bluestone, 6). “It is as fruitless to say that film A is better or worse than novel B as it is to pronounce Wright’s Johnson Wax Building better or worse than Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. In the last analysis, each is autonomous” (5-6). Or so Bluestone argues. None of our contemporary critics take such a hard line on medium specificity; for them, the crucial term is “intertextuality”. But whether they are partisans of a modernist medium specificity or a postmodern intertextuality (or intermediality), such critics are all dedicated to the proposition that there can be no hierarchy between textual instances. For the modernists, such rankings are impossible because there is an unbridgeable gap between media; for the postmodernists, because everything exists in a general citational field. Only fidelity discourse seems to require such impossible rankings. As Orr makes clear: “the danger of fidelity criticism, even when it is dealing with the most ‘faithful’ of film adaptations, is that it impoverishes the film’s intertextuality” (72). And if Orr weren’t clear enough, the editors at Wide-Angle chose that passage as a pull quote. Still, like a vampire, fidelity did not die. Let us back up. The joke Ray tells at the expense of his academic critic assumes that while the comparison of film with book has both a technical and an evaluative aspect, nevertheless the surreptitious evaluations of fidelity discourse corrupt even its technical conclusions. Yet it seems odd to claim that fidelity necessarily entails a surreptitious evaluation, even if it has done so in every case. For fidelity to seem a compelling standard, there would necessarily be an antecedent evaluation of the merits of the version the commenter had first encountered. No one would bother to discuss whether a book or film or any other version of a story were faithful unless she already had some allegiance to that story in some form—that would indeed be tiresome. I am saying that fidelity debates provide a way of avoiding questions of quality. Something is faithful or it’s not. At least, whether something is faithful seems an easier question to settle than whether something is better than something very different. Whether and how Cruel Intentions (Roger Kumble, 1999) is faithful to Choderlos de Laclos’ 1782 source novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses is an easier question to settle than whether the Johnson Wax Building is better than Swan Lake. Indeed, a person who shifts the conversation from a discussion of merits to a discussion of matching demonstrates an anxiety about settling questions of art. In that case, what is unsettling about the adaptation is not so much its relative goodness (in most cases, that would be quickly settled) as its ability to make us question a judgment we made of the prior work by providing a more-or-less systematic set of alternatives to and deviations from the prior work. (Here I mean prior, not “source” or “adapted” work. Whether we experience the adapted text or the adaptation first, we form our judgments about it, and those are the judgments that are under pressure.) Questions of matching or mis-matching address the viewer’s ability to recognise the systematicity of the differences between source and adaptation; questions of judgment speak to the perceptiveness of the viewer in recognising both the systematicity of the individual works and the grounds for her own judgments. Such recognitions are hard-won and evanescent; what was true for adaptation theorists is true for the laymen. III. Induction, Authority, and the Case Study If we see fidelity discourse as an avoidance of judgment, then, the repeated critical injunction against fidelity because it is surreptitiously judgmental is not an antidote to, but a reiteration of, the fundamental move. We may substitute something new for fidelity—sociology, medium specificity, textual openness—but we may not have improved our position. Indeed, one of the least attractive aspects of the campaign against fidelity is an unwillingness to see at all such “layman’s questions” as efforts to take the aesthetic seriously. If Ray shares Bluestone’s desire to end the conversation of judgment, what is more striking about his piece is that it represents an uncharacteristic step backward from Bluestone’s argument on the same issue. Leading into his dialogue excerpts, Bluestone notes that quantitative analyses of films based on books, or of books sold upon the release of a film “tell us nothing about the mutational process, let alone how to judge it” (5). One might say about Bluestone’s interlocutors that they tell us something, although not much, about the mutational process, and something else, although again not much, about how to judge it. They may be mere laymen, but they exist on a continuum with Bluestone’s own work. What distinguishes Bluestone is twofold: a closer attention to the “mutational process,” and a restriction of our judgment to comparisons within a single medium (5). For Ray, again, the problem with comparisons is not that they are inattentive but that they import precisely the evaluative stance Bluestone is attempting to rule out through a belief in medium specificity. Still, both are wary of the ordinary conversation about adaptations because it is improperly judgmental. For them, the passage from technical comparison to evaluative comparison is a slippery one. Better to hold off any consideration of merit, either through the wall of the medium or the archaeology of knowledge. Yet neither Ray nor Bluestone nor any of the other adaptation theorists has recognised the role fidelity discourse plays in the layman’s discussion, a role that is less the surreptitious evaluation of an adaptation than an attempt at an objective justification of the prior evaluation. When Orr offers a backhanded defense of a limited kind of fidelity criticism—“Fidelity to the letter, in contrast to fidelity to the spirit, can after all be verified” (74)—this is an extension, not a repudiation, of the layman’s discourse. Part of the reason that the evaluation of the worth of a work of art or the success of a story is difficult lies in the search for grounds of comparison. What exactly would make this a better book? A better film? A better game? A better story? And part of the reason that adaptation studies, or laymen’s discussions about the relative merits of two versions of a story, are useful is that multiple versions of the same story make it possible to examine aesthetic alternatives. (What would work better?) Adaptations put the options on the table; they suggest particular alternatives, and (despite Ray’s despair) over time they may provide cumulative support for notions of adaptive success and failure at various levels of generality. Adaptation studies efficiently model the need for induction. If comparisons are the first steps toward theorisation, fidelity discussions are the stalking horses for questions of authority, questions that might be (and are) answered sociologically or anthropologically or economically. Why is the first Harry Potter movie too faithful? Because Rowling successfully negotiated with Warner Bros. to get script approval (Pendreigh). In this frame, fidelity questions should be all the things Ray fears they are not: cumulative, heuristic, and, although he does not put it this way, worth the effort of professionalisation. IV. Fidelity without Borders If fidelity studies are the products of a New Critical “paradigm”, they are an important transformation of it. Where the New Critic might demonstrate the systematicity of a particular work of art, the adaptation critic would displace that systematicity to the relationships between works. No wonder that the attribution of fidelity to an adaptation has suggested to everyone since Bluestone that the next move in the argument should be a turn to the modes through which the system imposes itself—what Bluestone calls “the mutational process,” what Andrew calls “sociology.” Pragmatic questions of mode, process, or sociology frequently appear as pacifications of skeptical questions of knowledge and being. This debate is no exception. One skeptic here is Ray, who initially asks “Why had the cinema committed itself almost exclusively to storytelling?” and then rephrases thus, “Why was commercial filmmaking so eager to make feature-length fictional narrative seem the inherent definition of the cinema?” (42). The latter question is modal, but not in the same way the Harry Potter question was. It displaces its concern from the mode of adaptation to the discourse about that mode, and by doing so it makes the question a more pressing one, one that likely has a particular, historical answer. Ray’s answer is that commercial filmmaking turned to realistic storytelling to appeal to a middle-class audience, to hide its operations, and to solidify its self-regulating industrial oligopoly (45). Here, the denigration of the middle-class audience takes the place of the injunction against fidelity discourse. In this view, middle-class moralists are the perfect complement to an industry always looking for a way to reduce its risks and to find stories that are pre-sold. Yet that image of the industry is both partial and underthought. It is partial because the adapted film does not simply hope to find the same audience its source first located—it wants many more and must expect many others. And it is underthought because when a film turns to literature as a way of guaranteeing an audience, it solicits an audience that is in a unique position to judge it. That audience might find the film worse, better, or somehow irrelevant, but those opinions respond to the film’s openness to judgment in the first place. To be sure, realistic or studio-based cinema might have solicited comparisons only with other films (or with reality, or with the possibilities of film), but that is not, it seems, what occurred. Instead, the cinema in its most commercial forms opened itself up to judgment relative to the novel and the theater. It was a desperately bold move that paid off with startling rapidity. Kamilla Elliott spends the great majority of Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate in an argument that might liberate the discipline from skepticisim. How can adaptation be impossible and pervasive (134)? As an answer, she finds a productive “tension” in criticism between adherence to the theory that the content of a story cannot be separated from its form (hence cannot be carried from novel to film) and heretical arguments that show how it is that content peels off and finds new forms (134). The “heresies” are modes of adaptation that Hutcheon, Stam, and other postmodernist critics would recognise (ventriloquist, de(re)composing, genetic, etc.). Indeed, for Elliott, these heresies that are “so marginalised in the novel and film debate are central to its dynamics” (183). The move “away from categorical models” toward “critical rhetoric and aesthetic practices” (244) and her attempt to write “beyond fidelity” are both seemingly conventional. But for Elliott, the fidelity debate is misguided not because fidelity asks the impossible but because at bottom critics of fidelity seek to purge cinema of its literariness. Her refusal to do that positions her more firmly outside fidelity discourse than any other adaptation theorist. Instead of a rivalry between novel and film, she suggests we imagine literature and cinema to be “reciprocal looking glasses” (209-12). Such an analogy would “ensure … an endless series of inversions and reversals” (212). Fidelity may be gone, but its “endless” parade of case studies remains, yet not because the skeptical question went unasked. “Is adaptation possible?” may be pacified as we turn to practice, but when it comes time to determine exactly which analogies are fruitful because they are endless and which “have a pernicious tendency to invert and twist endlessly” “further clarification” (Elliott, 244) and “further study” (Elliott, 183) will always be needed. If laymen have persisted in judging adaptations and in raising fidelity questions when those judgments slip away, critics have persisted in their attempts to silence that conversation of judgment. Yet once criticism is freed from fidelity discourse’s judgmental “bad conscience,” it can only offer more of itself, endlessly. Questions of practice, authority, and generality float away from their original and insistent occasions. And when our conversation turns to judgments of adaptations, we will no longer have the criticism we most need, one that could let us know when we have reached the end of someone’s persuadability so we might stop trying. References Andrew, Dudley. “Adaptation.” Naremore 28-37. Bazin, André. “Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest.” Naremore 19-27. ———. “In Defense of Mixed Cinema.” What Is Cinema? Sel. and trans. Hugh Gray. Vol. 2. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. 53-75. Bluestone, George. Novels into Film. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957. Fadiman, William. “But Compared to the Original.” Films and Filming 11.5 (1965): 21-3. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006. McFarlane, Brian. Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Naremore, James. Film Adaptation. Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2000. Orr, Christopher. “The Discourse on Adaptation.” Wide Angle 6.2 (1984): 72-6. Pendreigh, Brian. “Hogwarts ’n’ All.” Iofilm 9 Nov. 2001. 9 Mar. 2007 http://www.iofilm.co.uk/feats/filmmaking/harry_potter.shtml>. Ray, Robert. “The Field of Literature and Film.” Naremore 38-53. Stam, Robert. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” Naremore 54-78. ———. “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation.” Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Adaptation. Ed. Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo. New York: Blackwell, 2005. 1-52. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Connor, J.D. "The Persistence of Fidelity: Adaptation Theory Today." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/15-connor.php>. APA Style Connor, J. (May 2007) "The Persistence of Fidelity: Adaptation Theory Today," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/15-connor.php>.

At its core the quality of being fungible is the quality of being interchangeable, more specifically interchangeable with its likeness. Our currencies, ergo our financial systems, ergo our ways of life have been underpinned by the stability that a $5 note is worth the same as every other $5 note. This is perhaps why the word fungible has never really spilled over into everyday usage: it has traditionally been a word for legal documents and economics texts. However, in the last couple of years the word fungible has made its way out of the lecture theatres of law classes and into the headlines of mainstream news services. On the back of a crypto currency boom it seemed only logical that markets that utilised this new form of wealth would emerge, the most prominent of these being the, at times lucrative, NFT (non-fungible token) market. Defining an NFT is problematic, because it is more about what it isn’t than what it is. People who have searched online looking for a definition will probably find an article or video that starts off with a semantic definition, e.g. it is a digital token with a unique signature making it unlike other tokens that are similar, which is then followed up by a spuriously comprehensible but ultimately ephemeral analogy. These definitions perhaps suffer by their ulterior motive of making NFTs sound more ground-breaking and more revolutionary than they are. If you were to say NFTs are like digital snowflakes, in that no two are the same, that might help, but it doesn’t add anything to their significance because whilst we may notionally find the idea interesting that no two snowflakes are the same, we ultimately don’t really care, and this doesn’t make any snowflake more important or valuable than any other. However, imagine a scenario in late capitalism where a certain configuration of snowflake has an exchange value greater than other configurations, or a scenario where a snowflake is worth more because Elon Musk once owned it. In practice, NFTs are comparable to digital receipts that give the owner exclusive access to a piece of data. This data maybe a small digital image, it might be a gif, it might be a high resolution digital artwork, it might be anything that can be stored digitally. The allure or uniqueness of these pieces of data lies in their non-fungibility. They are acquired through a crypto currency exchange (more often than not Ethereum, but not necessarily so) and as such are verified and secure, though it is worth noting that in 2021 crypto currency theft totalled A$4.5b and money lost to crypto scams totalled A$11b (Lane). There is an irony that emerges here in that the digital culture that has allowed the proliferation of fungible content has given rise to its own non-fungible counter-culture. It is as if the digital annihilation of Benjamin’s aura has been replaced by an 8-bit digital aura. Every $5 note may still have exactly the same value as another $5 note, and the actual Mona Lisa may be less beguiling now you can own it on a tote bag, but not every Bored Ape (an avatar comprised of a cartoon ape, generated by an algorithm) has the same value as another Bored Ape (see Bored Ape Yacht Club statistics). For example, less than 0.5% of generated Bored Apes have gold fur, making them more desirable, and all of a sudden it begins to feel like a familiar market with familiar characteristics of supply and demand. 2020 was a turbulent year, so it’s understandable that the seeds of some culturally significant trends were overlooked. Amongst these was the boom in the trading card market. This saw trading cards – those things kids buy in packs with their pocket money – become an investor industry. Sale prices skyrocketed during global pandemic lockdowns: for example, a LeBron James 2003-4 Upper Deck Exquisite Rookie Patch Autograph card (numbered 14/23) sold at Golden Auctions for US$1.84m; another version of the same card sold in April of 2021 for US$5.2m. This boom in the trading card market rolled over into the early adoption of NFT technology within the sports trading card market, a development that has been generally glossed over. Well before Beeple’s sale of Everydays: The First 5,000 Days (a collage of 5,000 digital artworks sold as an NFT) at Christie’s for slightly under US$70m (see Guardian), NFTs were breaking new ground in the sports card market in the form of NBA Top Shots (an official NBA product produced by Dapper Labs). When a person opens a digital pack of Top Shots they reveal “moments”, uniquely serial numbered highlight videos lasting a few seconds. Sales of NBA Top Shots totalled US$230m in 2020 (Young). There is perhaps little surprise in this early adoption of the investor/trading aspects of NFTs, given the crossover between pandemic-era sports card collectors and crypto currency speculators (Yahoo! Finance). Beyond these developments in NFT hobby collectibles, there has also been the development and gamification of NFT gambling in the form of horse-racing platforms like Zed Run. Zed Run allows users to race NFT horses in their virtual stable at the cost of a fee (payable in crypto currency), which is ostensibly a wager. Users can breed NFT horses with other NFT horses to create new NFT horses with unique characteristics, and then race them against other horses with comparable attributes. This platform, and ones like it, are playing a role in creating an unregulated gambling platform that operates on a global scale, at a time where many states in the USA are only years into a relaxed sports betting environment (in 2018 a Supreme Court ruling opened the door for all states to legalise sports betting; until that point sports betting was only legal in 4 states). It remains to be seen if the continued gamification of gambling will entrench itself further through means such as Zed Run, or if the practice will remain niche without the existence of a widely populated metasphere. It is clear that we are currently in the midst of a wave, potentially a flood, of NFT content, and a majority of this content exists as a variation of the theme “how to make money through NFTs”. NFTs are currently considered more for their potential profitability rather than their utility. The residue of this is that non-fungible markets seem to be replicating the traditional markets that they are notionally trying to subvert, and the practical uses of NFTs, e.g. as a solution to issues of digital ownership, are being overlooked. Perhaps this is the new manifestation of the neoliberal ideology, or perhaps it is the case in point that future generations will look back upon. Of course, there is an as yet generally unstated and significant point here, that what is being discussed is fungibility in terms of its non-ness. The mention of the term fungibility in a popular culture context immediately gives way to the consideration of the non-fungible, and the non-fungible is seemingly resolving itself, or at least can be understood, in the context of traditional wealth, with all of its fungible interchangeability. This issue of M/C Journal presents a range of insights and perspectives on this word that is increasingly flowing through discourses and practices. NFTs have a range of implications and a spectrum of potential uses depending on their context. But additionally, the usefulness of fungibility as a concept also comes into play here, as terminology traditionally shackled to other disciplines but increasingly pliable in the arts and humanities. This issue’s feature by Russell, “NFTs and Value”, meets some of the above issues head-on by immediately addressing the dichotomy of NFTs as the start of a new art format or NFTs as Western society’s most recent bubble market. Irrespective of these two positions there is an undeniable reality that these digital artefacts can potentially have real world wealth. Russell explores the potential underlying factors of this wealth and in turn what creates artistic wealth. Here a combination of factors such as the discourse around the work itself, or the place that work has in the context of Western art history are all considered as potential drivers of this new wave/bubble. Mason takes up the financial gains associated with some NFTs by examining the commodification of memes through the NFT format. In particular Mason considers the broader implications of this phenomenon outside of NFTs themselves by discussing the potential cultural and racial legacies at play. Mason’s work also notes the dominance of non-Black memes in the non-fungible market and the subsequent development of non-Black wealth that follows. Through this case study Mason touches upon an as of yet widely overlooked cultural implication of the non-fungible market, that of racial inequality and exploitation. In a different wing of the art world, Binns focusses on film, noting, after highlighting the significant ecological price and damage that comes with making transactions on prominent block chains, that the implications of NFTs on the film industry are still emerging. Despite the presence of some emerging marketplaces and vendors, the full utility of NFTs within the film industry remains untapped and unclear. Perhaps NFTs will supplement crowdfunding by offering exclusive memberships or perks (similar to the Bored Apes Yacht Club), or perhaps the fad will fade into the background without ever leaving an impression. In contrast, Robinson embraces the notion of fungibility as fungibility, stepping away from the contemporary discussion of “fungible” as being inherently “non-fungible” and looking at the interchangeability of identity and experience in online spaces. Through interviews Robinson considers how traditional notions of national and political identity are rendered fungible by digital spaces and how this aspect of fungibility manifests itself in invisibility, efficacy, and antagonism. This work is an important reminder of the suitability of fungible as a term in academic scholarship: Robinson’s notion of fungible citizenship opens up new perspectives in who we are, who we see ourselves to be, and to what we might aspire. Lyubchenko’s work is concerned with the place that NFT art has within a broader sense of art history. For Lyubchenko, crypto art can be considered as the culmination of the Dada movement, influenced by its various iterations such as Neo-Dadaism and Pop-Art. The result here is not so much a digital embodiment of the anti-art movement, arriving to land the final blow, but rather the newest form of anti-art, whose existence seems to only breathe life into that which it intends to kill. For Lyubchenko, crypto art it not so much a threat to traditional art forms, but rather a call to arms, a catalyst to regroup and reassert art’s timeless values. The place of the NFT in music is then the focus of Rogers et al., who seek to explore where music sits in the newly framed context of Web3. Whilst this position is not entirely constituted by the integration of NFT technology in music, it is at present a considerable factor and one that Rogers et al. explore through examination of functionality and discourse analysis. They note a degree of cynicism in the discourses surrounding popular music’s flirtation with NFTs, emerging largely from environmental impacts of blockchain ledgers and potential grey areas surrounding the industry’s legitimacy as a whole when it comes to claims of authenticity, security, and capacity. Interestingly they also note similarities in many of the cases they discuss with discourses surrounding previously emergent forms of music. Even seemingly banal music technologies in the past, such as the jukebox and the player piano, were subjected to comparable scrutiny. In the end time will give us a greater sense of whether the first few years of music within Web3 represent a cultural touchstone or a commercially driven false start. Finally, this collection progresses the discussion on how NFTs themselves present new opportunities for art practitioners. As Wilson notes, there is an inevitability that artists will begin to embrace the production of NFTs as part of the artistic process, as opposed to simply porting over existing artworks to the NFT format. Wilson considers his own work and Damien Hirst’s 2021 NFT works as examples of how considered and practical adoption of this new format challenges the neo-liberal economic conception of what NFTs are and what they are for. References Bored Ape Yacht Club statistics. 16 Apr. 2022 <https://www.nft-stats.com/collection/boredapeyachtclub>. The Guardian. “Christie’s Auctions 'First Digital-Only Artwork' for $70m.” 12 Mar. 2021. 16 Apr. 2022 <https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/mar/11/christies-first-digital-only-artwork-70m-nft-beeple>. Lane, Aaron M. “Crypto Theft Is on the Rise. Here’s How the Crimes are Committed, and How You Can Protect Yourself.” The Conversation 3 Feb. 2022. 15 Apr. 2022 <https://theconversation.com/crypto-theft-is-on-the-rise-heres-how-the-crimes-are-committed-and-how-you-can-protect-yourself-176027>. Yahoo! Finance. “Collector Coin Becomes First and Only Cryptocurrency for Card Collectors.” 30 June 2021. 16 Apr. 2022 <https://finance.yahoo.com/news/collector-coin-becomes-first-only-185000184.html>. Young, Jabari. “People Have Spent More than $230 Million Buying and Trading Digital Collectibles of NBA Highlights.” CNBC 28 Feb. 2021. 16 Apr. 2022 <https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/28/230-million-dollars-spent-on-nba-top-shot.html>.

The general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple ere the battle is fought. — Sun TzuWorld War II saw a proliferation of maps. From command posts to the pages of National Geographic to the pages of daily newspapers, they were everywhere (Schulten). The era also saw substantive developments in cartography, especially with respect to the topographical maps that feature in our selected films. This essay offers a preliminary examination of the battle-map as depicted in two films about the Second World War: Franklin J. Shaffner’s biopic Patton (1970) and Jack Smight’s epic Midway (1976). In these films, maps, charts, or tableaux (the three-dimensional models upon which are plotted the movements of battalions, fleets, and so on) emerge as an expression of both martial and cinematic strategy. As a rear-view representation of the relative movements of personnel and materiel in particular battle arenas, the map and its accessories (pins, tape, markers, and so forth) trace the broad military dispositions of Patton’s 2nd Corp (Africa), Seventh Army (Italy) and Third Army (Western Europe) and the relative position of American and Japanese fleets in the Pacific. In both Patton and Midway, the map also emerges as a simple mode of narrative plotting: as the various encounters in the two texts play out, the battle-map more or less contemporaneously traces the progress of forces. It also serves as a foreshadowing device, not just narratively, but cinematically: that which is plotted in advance comes to pass (even if as preliminary movements before catastrophe), but the audience is also cued for the cinematic chaos and disjuncture that almost inevitably ensues in the battle scenes proper.On one hand, then, this essay proposes that at the fundamental level of fabula (seen through either the lens of historical hindsight or through the eyes of the novice who knows nothing of World War II), the annotated map is engaged both strategically and cinematically: as a stage upon which commanders attempt to act out (either in anticipation, or retrospectively) the intricate, but grotesque, ballet of warfare — and as a reflection of the broad, sequential, sweeps of conflict. While, in War and Cinema, Paul Virilio offers the phrase ‘the logistics of perception’ (1), in this this essay we, on the other hand, consider that, for those in command, the battle-map is a representation of the perception of logistics: the big picture of war finds rough indexical representation on a map, but (as Clausewitz tells us) chance, the creative agency of individual commanders, and the fog of battle make it far less probable (than is the case in more specific mappings, such as, say, the wedding rehearsal) that what is planned will play out with any degree of close correspondence (On War 19, 21, 77-81). Such mapping is, of course, further problematised by the processes of abstraction themselves: indexicality is necessarily a reduction; a de-realisation or déterritorialisation. ‘For the military commander,’ writes Virilio, ‘every dimension is unstable and presents itself in isolation from its original context’ (War and Cinema 32). Yet rehearsal (on maps, charts, or tableaux) is a keying activity that seeks to presage particular real world patterns (Goffman 45). As suggested above, far from being a rhizomatic activity, the heavily plotted (as opposed to thematic) business of mapping is always out of joint: either a practice of imperfect anticipation or an equally imperfect (pared back and behind-the-times) rendition of activity in the field. As is argued by Tolstoj in War and Peace, the map then presents to the responder a series of tensions and ironies often lost on the masters of conflict themselves. War, as Tostoj proposes, is a stochastic phenomenon while the map is a relatively static, and naive, attempt to impose order upon it. Tolstoj, then, pillories Phull (in the novel, Pfuhl), the aptly-named Prussian general whose lock-stepped obedience to the science of war (of which the map is part) results in the abject humiliation of 1806:Pfuhl was one of those theoreticians who are so fond of their theory that they lose sight of the object of that theory - its application in practice. (Vol. 2, Part 1, Ch. 10, 53)In both Patton and Midway, then, the map unfolds not only as an epistemological tool (read, ‘battle plan’) or reflection (read, the near contemporaneous plotting of real world affray) of the war narrative, but as a device of foreshadowing and as an allegory of command and its profound limitations. So, in Deleuzian terms, while emerging as an image of both time and perception, for commanders and filmgoers alike, the map is also something of a seduction: a ‘crystal-image’ situated in the interstices between the virtual and the actual (Deleuze 95). To put it another way, in our films the map emerges as an isomorphism: a studied plotting in which inheres a counter-text (Goffman 26). As a simple device of narrative, and in the conventional terms of latitude and longitude, in both Patton and Midway, the map, chart, or tableau facilitate the plotting of the resources of war in relation to relief (including island land masses), roads, railways, settlements, rivers, and seas. On this syntagmatic plane, in Greimasian terms, the map is likewise received as a canonical sign of command: where there are maps, there are, after all, commanders (Culler 13). On the other hand, as suggested above, the battle-map (hereafter, we use the term to signify the conventional paper map, the maritime chart, or tableau) materialises as a sanitised image of the unknown and the grotesque: as apodictic object that reduces complexity and that incidentally banishes horror and affect. Thus, the map evolves, in the viewer’s perception, as an ironic sign of all that may not be commanded. This is because, as an emblem of the rational order, in Patton and Midway the map belies the ubiquity of battle’s friction: that defined by Clausewitz as ‘the only concept which...distinguishes real war from war on paper’ (73). ‘Friction’ writes Clausewitz, ‘makes that which appears easy in War difficult in reality’ (81).Our work here cannot ignore or side-step the work of others in identifying the core cycles, characteristics of the war film genre. Jeanine Basinger, for instance, offers nothing less than an annotated checklist of sixteen key characteristics for the World War II combat film. Beyond this taxonomy, though, Basinger identifies the crucial role this sub-type of film plays in the corpus of war cinema more broadly. The World War II combat film’s ‘position in the evolutionary process is established, as well as its overall relationship to history and reality. It demonstrates how a primary set of concepts solidifies into a story – and how they can be interpreted for a changing ideology’ (78). Stuart Bender builds on Basinger’s taxonomy and discussion of narrative tropes with a substantial quantitative analysis of the very building blocks of battle sequences. This is due to Bender’s contention that ‘when a critic’s focus [is] on the narrative or ideological components of a combat film [this may] lead them to make assumptions about the style which are untenable’ (8). We seek with this research to add to a rich and detailed body of knowledge by redressing a surprising omission therein: a conscious and focussed analysis of the use of battle-maps in war cinema. In Patton and in Midway — as in War and Peace — the map emerges as an emblem of an intergeneric dialogue: as a simple storytelling device and as a paradigmatic engine of understanding. To put it another way, as viewer-responders with a synoptic perspective we perceive what might be considered a ‘double exposure’: in the map we see what is obviously before us (the collision of represented forces), but an Archimedean positioning facilitates the production of far more revelatory textual isotopies along what Roman Jakobson calls the ‘axis of combination’ (Linguistics and Poetics 358). Here, otherwise unconnected signs (in our case various manifestations and configurations of the battle-map) are brought together in relation to particular settings, situations, and figures. Through this palimpsest of perspective, a crucial binary emerges: via the battle-map we see ‘command’ and the sequence of engagement — and, through Greimasian processes of axiological combination (belonging more to syuzhet than fabula), elucidated for us are the wrenching ironies of warfare (Culler 228). Thus, through the profound and bound motif of the map (Tomashevsky 69), are we empowered to pass judgement on the map bearers who, in both films, present as the larger-than-life heroes of old. Figure 1.While we have scope only to deal with the African theatre, Patton opens with a dramatic wide-shot of the American flag: a ‘map’, if you will, of a national history forged in war (Fig. 1). Against this potent sign of American hegemony, as he slowly climbs up to the stage before it, the general appears a diminutive figure -- until, via a series of matched cuts that culminate in extreme close-ups, he manifests as a giant about to play his part in a great American story (Fig. 2).Figure 2.Some nineteen minutes into a film, having surveyed the carnage of Kasserine Pass (in which, in February 1943, the Germans inflicted a humiliating defeat on the Americans) General Omar Bradley is reunited with his old friend and newly-nominated three-star general, George S. Patton Jr.. Against a backdrop of an indistinct topographical map (that nonetheless appears to show the front line) and the American flag that together denote the men’s authority, the two discuss the Kasserine catastrophe. Bradley’s response to Patton’s question ‘What happened at Kasserine?’ clearly illustrates the tension between strategy and real-world engagement. While the battle-plan was solid, the Americans were outgunned, their tanks were outclassed, and (most importantly) their troops were out-disciplined. Patton’s concludes that Rommel can only be beaten if the American soldiers are fearless and fight as a cohesive unit. Now that he is in command of the American 2nd Corp, the tide of American martial fortune is about to turn.The next time Patton appears in relation to the map is around half an hour into the two-and-three-quarter-hour feature. Here, in the American HQ, the map once more appears as a simple, canonical sign of command. Somewhat carelessly, the map of Europe seems to show post-1945 national divisions and so is ostensibly offered as a straightforward prop. In terms of martial specifics, screenplay writer Francis Ford Coppola apparently did not envisage much close scrutiny of the film’s maps. Highlighted, instead, are the tensions between strategy as a general principle and action on the ground. As British General Sir Arthur Coningham waxes lyrical about allied air supremacy, a German bomber drops its payload on the HQ, causing the map of Europe to (emblematically) collapse forward into the room. Following a few passes by the attacking aircraft, the film then cuts to a one second medium shot as a hail of bullets from a Heinkel He 111 strike a North African battle map (Fig. 3). Still prone, Patton remarks: ‘You were discussing air supremacy, Sir Arthur.’ Dramatising a scene that did take place (although Coningham was not present), Schaffner’s intention is to allow Patton to shoot holes in the British strategy (of which he is contemptuous) but a broader objective is the director’s exposé of the more general disjuncture between strategy and action. As the film progresses, and the battle-map’s allegorical significance is increasingly foregrounded, this critique becomes definitively sharper.Figure 3.Immediately following a scene in which an introspective Patton walks through a cemetery in which are interred the remains of those killed at Kasserine, to further the critique of Allied strategy the camera cuts to Berlin’s high command and a high-tech ensemble of tableaux, projected maps, and walls featuring lights, counters, and clocks. Tasked to research the newly appointed Patton, Captain Steiger walks through the bunker HQ with Hitler’s Chief of Staff, General Jodl, to meet with Rommel — who, suffering nasal diphtheria, is away from the African theatre. In a memorable exchange, Steiger reveals that Patton permanently attacks and never retreats. Rommel, who, following his easy victory at Kasserine, is on the verge of total tactical victory, in turn declares that he will ‘attack and annihilate’ Patton — before the poet-warrior does the same to him. As Clausewitz has argued, and as Schaffner is at pains to point out, it seems that, in part, the outcome of warfare has more to do with the individual consciousness of competing warriors than it does with even the most exquisite of battle-plans.Figure 4.So, even this early in the film’s runtime, as viewer-responders we start to reassess various manifestations of the battle-map. To put it as Michelle Langford does in her assessment of Schroeter’s cinema, ‘fragments of the familiar world [in our case, battle-maps] … become radically unfamiliar’ (Allegorical Images 57). Among the revelations is that from the flag (in the context of close battle, all sense of ‘the national’ dissolves), to the wall map, to the most detailed of tableau, the battle-plan is enveloped in the fog of war: thus, the extended deeply-focussed scenes of the Battle of El Guettar take us from strategic overview (Patton’s field glass perspectives over what will soon become a Valley of Death) to what Boris Eichenbaum has called ‘Stendhalian’ scale (The Young Tolstoi 105) in which, (in Patton) through more closely situated perspectives, we almost palpably experience the Germans’ disarray under heavy fire. As the camera pivots between the general and the particular (and between the omniscient and the nescient) the cinematographer highlights the tension between the strategic and the actual. Inasmuch as it works out (and, as Schaffner shows us, it never works out completely as planned) this is the outcome of modern martial strategy: chaos and unimaginable carnage on the ground that no cartographic representation might capture. As Patton observes the destruction unfold in the valley below and before him, he declares: ‘Hell of a waste of fine infantry.’ Figure 5.An important inclusion, then, is that following the protracted El Guettar battle scenes, Schaffner has the (symbolically flag-draped) casket of Patton’s aide, Captain Richard N. “Dick” Jenson, wheeled away on a horse-drawn cart — with the lonely figure of the mourning general marching behind, his ironic interior monologue audible to the audience: ‘I can't see the reason such fine young men get killed. There are so many battles yet to fight.’ Finally, in terms of this brief and partial assessment of the battle-map in Patton, less than an hour in, we may observe that the map is emerging as something far more than a casual prop; as something more than a plotting of battlelines; as something more than an emblem of command. Along a new and unexpected axis of semantic combination, it is now manifesting as a sign of that which cannot be represented nor commanded.Midway presents the lead-up to the eponymous naval battle of 1942. Smight’s work is of interest primarily because the battle itself plays a relatively small role in the film; what is most important is the prolonged strategising that comprises most of the film’s run time. In Midway, battle-tables and fleet markers become key players in the cinematic action, second almost to the commanders themselves. Two key sequences are discussed here: the moment in which Yamamoto outlines his strategy for the attack on Midway (by way of a decoy attack on the Aleutian Islands), and the scene some moments later where Admiral Nimitz and his assembled fleet commanders (Spruance, Blake, and company) survey their own plan to defend the atoll. In Midway, as is represented by the notion of a fleet-in-being, the oceanic battlefield is presented as a speculative plane on which commanders can test ideas. Here, a fleet in a certain position projects a radius of influence that will deter an enemy fleet from attacking: i.e. ‘a fleet which is able and willing to attack an enemy proposing a descent upon territory which that force has it in charge to protect’ (Colomb viii). The fleet-in-being, it is worth noting, is one that never leaves port and, while it is certainly true that the latter half of Midway is concerned with the execution of strategy, the first half is a prolonged cinematic game of chess, with neither player wanting to move lest the other has thought three moves ahead. Virilio opines that the fleet-in-being is ‘a new idea of violence that no longer comes from direct confrontation and bloodshed, but rather from the unequal properties of bodies, evaluation of the number of movements allowed them in a chosen element, permanent verification of their dynamic efficiency’ (Speed and Politics 62). Here, as in Patton, we begin to read the map as a sign of the subjective as well as the objective. This ‘game of chess’ (or, if you prefer, ‘Battleships’) is presented cinematically through the interaction of command teams with their battle-tables and fleet markers. To be sure, this is to show strategy being developed — but it is also to prepare viewers for the defamiliarised representation of the battle itself.The first sequence opens with a close-up of Admiral Yamamoto declaring: ‘This is how I expect the battle to develop.’ The plan to decoy the Americans with an attack on the Aleutians is shown via close-ups of the conveniently-labelled ‘Northern Force’ (Fig. 6). It is then explained that, twenty-four hours later, a second force will break off and strike south, on the Midway atoll. There is a cut from closeups of the pointer on the map to the wider shot of the Japanese commanders around their battle table (Fig. 7). Interestingly, apart from the opening of the film in the Japanese garden, and the later parts of the film in the operations room, the Japanese commanders are only ever shown in this battle-table area. This canonically positions the Japanese as pure strategists, little concerned with the enmeshing of war with political or social considerations. The sequence ends with Commander Yasimasa showing a photograph of Vice Admiral Halsey, who the Japanese mistakenly believe will be leading the carrier fleet. Despite some bickering among the commanders earlier in the film, this sequence shows the absolute confidence of the Japanese strategists in their plan. The shots are suitably languorous — averaging three to four seconds between cuts — and the body language of the commanders shows a calm determination. The battle-map here is presented as an index of perfect command and inevitable victory: each part of the plan is presented with narration suggesting the Japanese expect to encounter little resistance. While Yasimasa and his clique are confident, the other commanders suggest a reconnaissance flight over Pearl Harbor to ascertain the position of the American fleet; the fear of fleet-in-being is shown here firsthand and on the map, where the reconnaissance planes are placed alongside the ship markers. The battle-map is never shown in full: only sections of the naval landscape are presented. We suggest that this is done in order to prepare the audience for the later stages of the film: as in Patton (from time to time) the battle-map here is filmed abstractly, to prime the audience for the abstract montage of the battle itself in the film’s second half.Figure 6.Figure 7.Having established in the intervening running time that Halsey is out of action, his replacement, Rear Admiral Spruance, is introduced to the rest of the command team. As with all the important American command and strategy meetings in the film, this is done in the operations room. A transparent coordinates board is shown in the foreground as Nimitz, Spruance and Rear Admiral Fletcher move through to the battle table. Behind the men, as they lean over the table, is an enormous map of the world (Fig. 8). In this sequence, Nimitz freely admits that while he knows each Japanese battle group’s origin and heading, he is unsure of their target. He asks Spruance for his advice:‘Ray, assuming what you see here isn’t just an elaborate ruse — Washington thinks it is, but assuming they’re wrong — what kind of move do you suggest?’This querying is followed by Spruance glancing to a particular point on the map (Fig. 9), then a cut to a shot of models representing the aircraft carriers Hornet, Enterprise & Yorktown (Fig. 10). This is one of the few model/map shots unaccompanied by dialogue or exposition. In effect, this shot shows Spruance’s thought process before he responds: strategic thought presented via cinematography. Spruance then suggests situating the American carrier group just northeast of Midway, in case the Japanese target is actually the West Coast of the United States. It is, in effect, a hedging of bets. Spruance’s positioning of the carrier group also projects that group’s sphere of influence around Midway atoll and north to essentially cut off Japanese access to the US. The fleet-in-being is presented graphically — on the map — in order to, once again, cue the audience to match the later (edited) images of the battle to these strategic musings.In summary, in Midway, the map is an element of production design that works alongside cinematography, editing, and performance to present the notion of strategic thought to the audience. In addition, and crucially, it functions as an abstraction of strategy that prepares the audience for the cinematic disorientation that will occur through montage as the actual battle rages later in the film. Figure 8.Figure 9.Figure 10.This essay has argued that the battle-map is a simulacrum of the weakest kind: what Baudrillard would call ‘simulacra of simulation, founded on information, the model’ (121). Just as cinema itself offers a distorted view of history (the war film, in particular, tends to hagiography), the battle-map is an over-simplification that fails to capture the physical and psychological realities of conflict. We have also argued that in both Patton and Midway, the map is not a ‘free’ motif (Tomashevsky 69). Rather, it is bound: a central thematic device. In the two films, the battle-map emerges as a crucial isomorphic element. On the one hand, it features as a prop to signify command and to relay otherwise complex strategic plottings. At this syntagmatic level, it functions alongside cinematography, editing, and performance to give audiences a glimpse into how military strategy is formed and tested: a traditional ‘reading’ of the map. But on the flip side of what emerges as a classic structuralist binary, is the map as a device of foreshadowing (especially in Midway) and as a depiction of command’s profound limitations. Here, at a paradigmatic level, along a new axis of combination, a new reading of the map in war cinema is proposed: the battle-map is as much a sign of the subjective as it is the objective.ReferencesBasinger, Jeanine. The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre. Middletown, CT: Columbia UP, 1986.Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbour: U of Michigan Press, 1994.Bender, Stuart. Film Style and the World War II Combat Genre. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.Clausewitz, Carl. On War. Vol. 1. London: Kegan Paul, 1908.Colomb, Philip Howard. Naval Warfare: Its Ruling Principles and Practice Historically Treated. 3rd ed. London: W.H. Allen & Co, 1899.Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975.Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. London: Continuum, 2005.Eichenbaum, Boris. The Young Tolstoi. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1972.Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1976.Jakobson, Roman. "Linguistics and Poetics." Style in Language. Ed. T. Sebebeok. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1960. 350—77.Langford, Michelle. Allegorical Images: Tableau, Time and Gesture in the Cinema of Werner Schroeter. Bristol: Intellect, 2006.Midway. Jack Smight. Universal Pictures, 1976. Film.Patton. Franklin J. Schaffner. 20th Century Fox, 1970. Film.Schulten, Susan. World War II Led to a Revolution in Cartography. New Republic 21 May 2014. 16 June 2017 <https://newrepublic.com/article/117835/richard-edes-harrison-reinvented-mapmaking-world-war-2-americans>.Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. Vol. 2. London: Folio, 1997.Tomashevsky, Boris. "Thematics." Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Eds. L. Lemon and M. Reis, Lincoln: U. Nebraska Press, 2012. 61—95.Tzu, Sun. The Art of War. San Diego: Canterbury Classics, 2014.Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics. Paris: Semiotext(e), 2006.Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. London: Verso, 1989.

The National Cultural Policy Discussion Paper—drafted to assist the Australian Government in developing the first national Cultural Policy since Creative Nation nearly two decades ago—envisages a future in which arts, cultural and creative activities directly support the development of an inclusive, innovative and productive Australia. "The policy," it says, "will be based on an understanding that a creative nation produces a more inclusive society and a more expressive and confident citizenry by encouraging our ability to express, describe and share our diverse experiences—with each other and with the world" (Australian Government 3). Even a cursory reading of this Discussion Paper makes it clear that the question of impact—in aesthetic, cultural and economic terms—is central to the Government's agenda in developing a new Cultural Policy. Hand-in-hand with the notion of impact comes the process of measurement of progress. The Discussion Paper notes that progress "must be measurable, and the Government will invest in ways to assess the impact that the National Cultural Policy has on society and the economy" (11). If progress must be measurable, this raises questions about what arts, cultural and creative workers do, whether it is worth it, and whether they could be doing it better. In effect, the Discussion Paper pushes artsworkers ever closer to a climate in which they have to be skilled not just at making work, but at making the impact of this work clear to stakeholders. The Government in its plans for Australia's cultural future, is clearly most supportive of artsworkers who can do this, and the scholars, educators and employers who can best train the artsworkers of the future to do this. Teaching Artsworkers to Measure the Impact of Their Work: The Challenges How do we train artsworkers to assess, measure and articulate the impact of what they do? How do we prepare them to be ready to work in a climate that will—as the National Cultural Policy Discussion Paper makes clear—emphasise measuring impact, communicating impact, and communicating impact across aesthetic, cultural and economic categories? As educators delivering training in this area, the Discussion Paper has made this already compelling question even more pressing as we work to develop the career-ready graduates the Government seeks. Our program, the Master of Creative Industries (Creative Production & Arts Management) offered in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, is, like most programs in arts and cultural management in the US, UK, Europe and Australia, offering a three-Semester postgraduate program that allows students to develop the career-ready skills required to work as managers of arts, cultural or creative organisations. That we need to train our graduates to work not just as producers of plays, paintings or recordings, but as entrepreneurial arts advocates who can measure and articulate the value of their programs to others, is not news (Hadley "Creating" 647-48; cf. Brkic; Ebewo and Sirayi; Beckerman; Sikes). Our program—which offers training in arts policy, management, marketing and budgeting followed by training in entrepreneurship and a practical project—is already structured around this necessity. The question of how to teach students this diverse skill set is, however, still a subject of debate; and the question of how to teach students to measure the impact of this work is even more difficult. There is, of course, a body of literature on the impact of arts, cultural and creative activities, value and evaluation that has been developed over the past decade, particularly through landmark reports like Matarasso's Use or Ornament? The Social Impact of Participation in the Arts (1997) and the RAND Corporation's Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate about the Benefits of the Arts (2004). There are also emergent studies in an Australian context: Madden's "Cautionary Note" on using economic impact studies in the arts (2001); case studies on arts and wellbeing by consultancy firm Effective Change (2003); case studies by DCITA (2003); the Asia Pacific Journal of Arts and Cultural Management (2009) issue on "value"; and Australia Council publications on arts, culture and economy. As Richards has explained, "evaluation is basically a straightforward concept. E-value-ation = a process of enquiry that allows a judgment of amount, value or worth to be made" (99). What makes arts evaluation difficult is not the concept, but the measurement of intangible values—aesthetic quality, expression, engagement or experience. In the literature, discussion has been plagued by debate about what is measured, what method is used, and whether subjective values can in fact be measured. Commentators note that in current practice, questions of value are still deferred because they are too difficult to measure (Bilton and Leary 52), discussed only in terms of economic measures such as market share or satisfaction which are statistically quantifiable (Belfiore and Bennett "Rethinking" 137), or done through un-rigorous surveys that draw only ambiguous, subjective, or selective responses (Merli 110). According to Belfiore and Bennett, Public debate about the value of the arts thus comes to be dominated by what might best be termed the cult of the measurable; and, of course, it is those disciplines primarily concerned with measurement, namely, economics and statistics, which are looked upon to find the evidence that will finally prove why the arts are so important to individuals and societies. A corollary of this is that the humanities are of little use in this investigation. ("Rethinking" 137) Accordingly, Ragsdale states, Arts organizations [still] need to find a way to assess their progress in …making great art that matters to people—as evidenced, perhaps, by increased enthusiasm, frequency of attendance, the capacity and desire to talk or write about one's experience, or in some other way respond to the experience, the curiosity to learn about the art form and the ideas encountered, the depth of emotional response, the quality of the social connections made, and the expansion of one's aesthetics over time. Commentators are still looking for a balanced approach (cf. Geursen and Rentschler; Falk and Dierkling), which evaluates aesthetic practices, business practices, audience response, and results for all parties, in tandem. An approach which evaluates intrinsic impacts, instrumental impacts, and the way each enables the other, in tandem—with an emphasis not on the numbers but on whether we are getting better at what we are doing. And, of course, allows evaluators of arts, cultural and creative activities to use creative arts methods—sketches, stories, bodily movements and relationships and so forth—to provide data to inform the assessment, so they can draw not just on statistical research methods but on arts, culture and humanities research methods. Teaching Artsworkers to Measure the Impact of Their Work: Our Approach As a result of this contested terrain, our method for training artsworkers to measure the impact of their programs has emerged not just from these debates—which tend to conclude by declaring the needs for better methods without providing them—but from a research-teaching nexus in which our own trial-and-error work as consultants to arts, cultural and educational organisations looking to measure the impact of or improve their programs has taught us what is effective. Each of us has worked as managers of professional associations such as Drama Australia and Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama and Performance Studies (ADSA), members of boards or committees for arts organisations such as Youth Arts Queensland and Young People and the Arts Australia (YPAA), as well as consultants to major cultural organisations like the Queensland Performing Arts Centre and the Brisbane Festival. The methods for measuring impact we have developed via this work are based not just on surveys and statistics, but on our own practice as scholars and producers of culture—and are therefore based in arts, culture and humanities approaches. As scholars, we investigate the way marginalised groups tell stories—particularly groups marked by age, gender, race or ability, using community, contemporary and public space performance practices (cf. Hadley, "Bree"; Gattenhof). What we have learned by bringing this sort of scholarly analysis into dialogue with a more systematised approach to articulating impact to government, stakeholders and sponsors is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach. What is needed, instead, is a toolkit, which incorporates central principles and stages, together with qualitative, quantitative and performative tools to track aesthetics, accessibility, inclusivity, capacity-building, creativity etc., as appropriate on a case-by-case basis. Whatever the approach, it is critical that the data track the relationship between the experience the artists, audience or stakeholders anticipated the activity should have, the aspects of the activity that enabled that experience to emerge (or not), and the effect of that (or not) for the arts organisation, their artists, their partners, or their audiences. The combination of methods needs to be selected in consultation with the arts organisation, and the negotiations typically need to include detailed discussion of what should be evaluated (aesthetics, access, inclusivity, or capacity), when it should be evaluated (before, during or after), and how the results should be communicated (including the difference between evaluation for reporting purposes and evaluation for program improvement purposes, and the difference between evaluation and related processes like reflection, documentary-making, or market research). Translating what we have learned through our cultural research and consultancy into a study package for students relies on an understanding of what they want from their study. This, typically, is practical career-ready skills. Students want to produce their own arts, or produce other people's arts, and most have not imagined themselves participating in meta-level processes in which they argue the value of arts, cultural and creative activities (Hadley, "Creating" 652). Accordingly, most have not thought of themselves as researchers, using cultural research methods to create reports that inform how the Australian government values, supports, and services the arts. The first step in teaching students to operate effectively as evaluators of arts, cultural and creative activities is, then, to re-orient their expectations to include this in their understanding of what artsworkers do, what skills artsworkers need, and where they deploy these skills. Simply handing over our own methods, as "the" methods, would not enable graduates to work effectively in a climate were one size will not fit all, and methods for evaluating impact need to be negotiated again for each new context. 1. Understanding the Need for Evaluation: Cause and Effect The first step in encouraging students to become effective evaluators is asking them to map their sector, the major stakeholders, the agendas, alignments and misalignments in what the various players are trying to achieve, and the programs, projects and products through which the players are trying to achieve it. This starting point is drawn from Program Theory—which, as Joon-Yee Kwok argues in her evaluation of the SPARK National Mentoring Program for Young and Emerging Artists (2010) is useful in evaluating cultural activities. The Program Theory approach starts with a flow chart that represents relationships between activities in a program, allowing evaluators to unpack some of the assumptions the program's producers have about what activities have what sort of effect, then test whether they are in fact having that sort of effect (cf. Hall and Hall). It could, for example, start with a flow chart representing the relationship between a community arts policy, a community arts organisation, a community-devised show it is producing, and a blog it has created because it assumes it will allow the public to become more interested in the show the participants are creating, to unpack the assumptions about the sort of effect this is supposed to have, and test whether this is in fact having this sort of effect. Masterclasses, conversations and debate with peers and industry professionals about the agendas, activities and assumptions underpinning programs in their sector allows students to look for elements that may be critical in their programs' ability to achieve (or not) an anticipated impact. In effect to start asking about, "the way things are done now, […] what things are done well, and […] what could be done better" (Australian Government 12).2. Understanding the Nature of Evaluation: PurposeOnce students have been alerted to the need to look for cause-effect assumptions that can determine whether or not their program, project or product is effective, they are asked to consider what data they should be developing about this, why, and for whom. Are they evaluating a program to account to government, stakeholders and sponsors for the money they have spent? To improve the way it works? To use that information to develop innovative new programs in future? In other words, who is the audience? Being aware of the many possible purposes and audiences for evaluation information can allow students to be clear not just about what needs to be evaluated, but the nature of the evaluation they will do—a largely statistical report, versus a narrative summary of experiences, emotions and effects—which may differ depending on the audience.3. Making Decisions about What to Evaluate: Priorities When setting out to measure the impact of arts, cultural or creative activities, many people try to measure everything, measure for the purposes of reporting, improvement and development using the same methods, or gather a range of different sorts of data in the hope that something in it will answer questions about whether an activity is having the anticipated effect, and, if so, how. We ask students to be more selective, making strategic decisions about which anticipated effects of a program, project or product need to be evaluated, whether the evaluation is for reporting, improvement or innovation purposes, and what information stakeholders most require. In addition to the concept of collecting data about critical points where programs succeed or fail in achieving a desired effect, and different approaches for reporting, improvement or development, we ask students to think about the different categories of effect that may be more or less interesting to different stakeholders. This is not an exhaustive list, or a list of things every evaluation should measure. It is a tool to demonstrate to would-be evaluators points of focus that could be developed, depending on the stakeholders' priorities, the purpose of the evaluation, and the critical points at which desired effects need to occur to ensure success. Without such framing, evaluators are likely to end up with unusable data, which become a difficulty to deal with rather than a benefit for the artsworkers, arts organisations or stakeholders. 4. Methods for Evaluation: Process To be effective, methods for collecting data about how arts, cultural or creative activities have (or fail to have) anticipated impact need to include conventional survey, interview and focus group style tools, and creative or performative tools such as discussion, documentation or observation. We encourage students to use creative practice to draw out people's experience of arts events—for example, observation, documentation still images, video or audio documentation, or facilitated development of sketches, stories or scenes about an experience, can be used to register and record people's feelings. These sorts of methods can capture what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "flow" of experience (cf. Belfiore and Bennett, "Determinants" 232)—for example, photos of a festival space at hourly intervals or the colours a child uses to convey memory of a performance can capture to flow of movement, engagement, and experience for spectators more clearly than statistics. These, together with conventional surveys or interviews that comment on the feelings expressed, allow for a combination of quantitative, qualitative and performative data to demonstrate impact. The approach becomes arts- and humanities- based, using arts methods to encourage people to talk, write or otherwise respond to their experience in terms of emotion, connection, community, or expansion of aesthetics. The evaluator still needs to draw out the meaning of the responses through content, text or discourse analysis, and teaching students how to do a content analysis of quantitative, qualitative and performative data is critical at this stage. When teaching students how to evaluate their data, our method encourages students not just to focus on the experience, or the effect of the experience, but the relationship between the two—the things that act as "enablers" "determinants" (White and Hede; Belfiore and Bennett, "Determinants" passim) of effect. This approach allows the evaluator to use a combination of conventional and creative methods to describe not just what effect an activity had, but, more critically, what enabled it to have that effect, providing a firmer platform for discussing the impact, and how it could be replicated, developed or deepened next time, than a list of effects and numbers of people who felt those effects alone. 5. Communicating Results: Politics Often arts, cultural or creative organisations can be concerned about the image of their work an evaluation will create. The final step in our approach is to alert students to the professional, political and ethical implications of evaluation. Students learn to share their knowledge with organisations, encouraging them to see the value of reporting both correct and incorrect assumptions about the impact of their activities, as part of a continuous improvement process. Then we assist them in drawing the results of this sort of cultural research into planning, development and training documents which may assist the organisation in improving in the future. In effect, it is about encouraging organisations to take the Australian government at its word when, in the National Cultural Policy Discussion Paper, it says it that measuring impact is about measuring progress—what we do well, what we could do better, and how, not just success statistics about who is most successful—as it is this that will ultimately be most useful in creating an inclusive, innovative, productive Australia. Teaching Artsworkers to Measure the Impact of Their Work: The Impact of Our Approach What, then, is the impact of our training on graduates' ability to measure the impact of work? Have we made measurable progress in our efforts to teach artsworkers to assess and articulate the impact of their work? The MCI (CP&AM) has been offered for three years. Our approach is still emergent and experimental. We have, though, identified a number of impacts of our work. First, our students are less fearful of becoming involved in measuring the value or impact of arts, cultural and creative programs. This is evidenced by the number who chooses to do some sort of evaluation for their Major Project, a 15,000 word individual project or internship which concludes their degree. Of the 50 or so students who have reached the Major Project in three years—35 completed and 15 in planning for 2012—about a third have incorporated evaluation into their Major Project. This includes evaluation of sector, business or producing models (5), youth arts and youth arts mentorship programs (4), audience development programs (2), touring programs (4), and even other arts management training programs (1). Indeed, after internships in programming or producing roles, this work—aligned with the Government's interest in improving training of young artists, touring, audience development, and economic development—has become a most popular Major Project option. This has enabled students to work with a range of arts, cultural and creative organisations, share their training—their methods, their understanding of what their methods can measure, when, and how—with Industry. Second, this Industry-engaged training has helped graduates in securing employment. This is evidenced by the fact that graduates have gone on to be employed with organisations they have interned with as part of their Major Project, or other organisations, including some of Brisbane's biggest cultural organisations—local and state government departments, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane Festival, Metro Arts, Backbone Youth Arts, and Youth Arts Queensland, amongst others. Thirdly, graduates' contribution to local organisations and industry has increased the profile of a relatively new program. This is evidenced by the fact that it enrols 40 to 50 new students a year across Graduate Certificate / MCI (CP&AM) programs, typically two thirds domestic students and one third international students from Canada, Germany, France, Denmark, Norway and, of course, China. Indeed, some students are now disseminating this work globally, undertaking their Major Project as an internship or industry project with an organisation overseas. In effect, our training's impact emerges not just from our research, or our training, but from the fact that our graduates disseminate our approach to a range of arts, cultural and creative organisations in a practical way. We have, as a result, expanded the audience for this approach, and the number of people and contexts via which it is being adapted and made useful. Whilst few of students come into our program with a desire to do this sort of work, or even a working knowledge of the policy that informs it, on completion many consider it a viable part of their practice and career pathway. When they realise what they can achieve, and what it can mean to the organisations they work with, they do incorporate research, research consultant and government roles as part of their career portfolio, and thus make a contribution to the strong cultural sector the Government envisages in the National Cultural Policy Discussion Paper. Our work as scholars, practitioners and educators has thus enabled us to take a long-term, processual and grassroots approach to reshaping agendas for approaches to this form of cultural research, as our practices are adopted and adapted by students and industry stakeholders. Given the challenges commentators have identified in creating and disseminating effective evaluation methods in arts over the past decade, this, for us—though by no means work that is complete—does count as measurable progress. References Beckerman, Gary. "Adventuring Arts Entrepreneurship Curricula in Higher Education: An Examination of Present Efforts, Obstacles, and Best pPractices." The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society 37.2 (2007): 87-112. Belfiore, Eleaonora, and Oliver Bennett. "Determinants of Impact: Towards a Better Understanding of Encounters with the Arts." Cultural Trends 16.3 (2007): 225-75. ———. "Rethinking the Social Impacts of the Arts." International Journal of Cultural Policy 13.2 (2007): 135-51. Bilton, Chris, and Ruth Leary. "What Can Managers Do for Creativity? Brokering Creativity in the Creative Industries." International Journal of Cultural Policy 8.1 (2002): 49-64. Brkic, Aleksandar. "Teaching Arts Management: Where Did We Lose the Core Ideas?" Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society 38.4 (2009): 270-80. Czikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. "A Systems Perspective on Creativity." Creative Management. Ed. Jane Henry. Sage: London, 2001. 11-26. Australian Government. "National Cultural Policy Discussion Paper." Department of Prime Minster and Cabinet – Office for the Arts 2011. 1 Oct. 2011 ‹http://culture.arts.gov.au/discussion-paper›. Ebewo, Patrick, and Mzo Sirayi. "The Concept of Arts/Cultural Management: A Critical Reflection." Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society 38.4 (2009): 281-95. Effective Change and VicHealth. Creative Connections: Promoting Mental Health and Wellbeing through Community Arts Participation 2003. 1 Oct. 2011 ‹http://www.vichealth.vic.gov.au/en/Publications/Social-connection/Creative-Connections.aspx›. Effective Change. Evaluating Community Arts and Community Well Being 2003. 1 Oct. 2011 ‹http://www.arts.vic.gov.au/Research_and_Resources/Resources/Evaluating_Community_Arts_and_Wellbeing›. Falk, John H., and Lynn. D Dierking. "Re-Envisioning Success in the Cultural Sector." Cultural Trends 17.4 (2008): 233-46. Gattenhof, Sandra. "Sandra Gattenhof." QUT ePrints Article Repository. Queensland University of Technology, 2011. 1 Oct. 2011 ‹http://eprints.qut.edu.au/view/person/Gattenhof,_Sandra.html›. Geursen, Gus and Ruth Rentschler. "Unravelling Cultural Value." The Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society 33.3 (2003): 196-210. Hall, Irene and David Hall. Evaluation and Social Research: Introducing Small Scale Practice. London: Palgrave McMillan, 2004. Hadley, Bree. "Bree Hadley." QUT ePrints Article Repository. Queensland University of Technology, 2011. 1 Oct. 2011 ‹http://eprints.qut.edu.au/view/person/Hadley,_Bree.html›. ———. "Creating Successful Cultural Brokers: The Pros and Cons of a Community of Practice Approach in Arts Management Education." Asia Pacific Journal of Arts and Cultural Management 8.1 (2011): 645-59. Kwok, Joon. When Sparks Fly: Developing Formal Mentoring Programs for the Career Development of Young and Emerging Artists. Masters Thesis. Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology, 2010. Madden, Christopher. "Using 'Economic' Impact Studies in Arts and Cultural Advocacy: A Cautionary Note." Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy 98 (2001): 161-78. Matarasso, Francis. Use or Ornament? The Social Impact of Participation in the Arts. Bournes Greens, Stroud: Comedia, 1997. McCarthy, Kevin. F., Elizabeth H. Ondaatje, Laura Zakaras, and Arthur Brooks. Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate about the Benefits of the Arts. Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2004. Merli, Paola. "Evaluating the Social Impact of Participation in Arts Activities." International Journal of Cultural Policy 8.1 (2002): 107-18. Muir, Jan. The Regional Impact of Cultural Programs: Some Case Study Findings. Communications Research Unit - DCITA, 2003. Ragsdale, Diana. "Keynote - Surviving the Culture Change." Australia Council Arts Marketing Summit. Australia Council for the Arts: 2008. Richards, Alison. "Evaluation Approaches." Creative Collaboration: Artists and Communities. Melbourne: Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, 2006. Sikes, Michael. "Higher Education Training in Arts Administration: A Millennial and Metaphoric Reappraisal. Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society 30.2 (2000): 91-101.White, Tabitha, and Anne-Marie Hede. "Using Narrative Inquiry to Explore the Impact of Art on Individuals." Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society 38.1 (2008): 19-35.

Introduction: Technology EnthusiasmEnthusiasts are people who have a passion, keenness, dedication or zeal for a particular activity or hobby. Today, there are enthusiasts for almost everything, from genealogy, costume dramas, and country houses, to metal detectors, coin collecting, and archaeology. But to be described as an enthusiast is not necessarily a compliment. Historically, the term “enthusiasm” was first used in England in the early seventeenth century to describe “religious or prophetic frenzy among the ancient Greeks” (Hanks, n.p.). This frenzy was ascribed to being possessed by spirits sent not only by God but also the devil. During this period, those who disobeyed the powers that be or claimed to have a message from God were considered to be enthusiasts (McLoughlin).Enthusiasm retained its religious connotations throughout the eighteenth century and was also used at this time to describe “the tendency within the population to be swept by crazes” (Mee 31). However, as part of the “rehabilitation of enthusiasm,” the emerging middle-classes adopted the word to characterise the intensity of Romantic poetry. The language of enthusiasm was then used to describe the “literary ideas of affect” and “a private feeling of religious warmth” (Mee 2 and 34). While the notion of enthusiasm was embraced here in a more optimistic sense, attempts to disassociate enthusiasm from crowd-inciting fanaticism were largely unsuccessful. As such enthusiasm has never quite managed to shake off its pejorative connotations.The 'enthusiasm' discussed in this paper is essentially a personal passion for technology. It forms part of a longer tradition of historical preservation in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the world. From preserved railways to Victorian pumping stations, people have long been fascinated by the history of technology and engineering; manifesting their enthusiasm through their nostalgic longings and emotional attachment to its enduring material culture. Moreover, enthusiasts have been central to the collection, conservation, and preservation of this particular material record. Technology enthusiasm in this instance is about having a passion for the history and material record of technological development, specifically here industrial archaeology. Despite being a pastime much participated in, technology enthusiasm is relatively under-explored within the academic literature. For the most part, scholarship has tended to focus on the intended users, formal spaces, and official narratives of science and technology (Adas, Latour, Mellström, Oldenziel). In recent years attempts have been made to remedy this imbalance, with researchers from across the social sciences examining the position of hobbyists, tinkerers and amateurs in scientific and technical culture (Ellis and Waterton, Haring, Saarikoski, Takahashi). Work from historians of technology has focussed on the computer enthusiast; for example, Saarikoski’s work on the Finnish personal computer hobby:The definition of the computer enthusiast varies historically. Personal interest, pleasure and entertainment are the most significant factors defining computing as a hobby. Despite this, the hobby may also lead to acquiring useful knowledge, skills or experience of information technology. Most often the activity takes place outside working hours but can still have links to the development of professional expertise or the pursuit of studies. In many cases it takes place in the home environment. On the other hand, it is characteristically social, and the importance of friends, clubs and other communities is greatly emphasised.In common with a number of other studies relating to technical hobbies, for example Takahashi who argues tinkerers were behind the advent of the radio and television receiver, Saarikoski’s work focuses on the role these users played in shaping the technology in question. The enthusiasts encountered in this paper are important here not for their role in shaping the technology, but keeping technological heritage alive. As historian of technology Haring reminds us, “there exist alternative ways of using and relating to technology” (18). Furthermore, the sociological literature on audiences (Abercrombie and Longhurst, Ang), fans (Hills, Jenkins, Lewis, Sandvoss) and subcultures (Hall, Hebdige, Schouten and McAlexander) has also been extended in order to account for the enthusiast. In Abercrombie and Longhurst’s Audiences, the authors locate ‘the enthusiast’ and ‘the fan’ at opposing ends of a continuum of consumption defined by questions of specialisation of interest, social organisation of interest and material productivity. Fans are described as:skilled or competent in different modes of production and consumption; active in their interactions with texts and in their production of new texts; and communal in that they construct different communities based on their links to the programmes they like. (127 emphasis in original) Based on this definition, Abercrombie and Longhurst argue that fans and enthusiasts differ in three ways: (1) enthusiasts’ activities are not based around media images and stars in the way that fans’ activities are; (2) enthusiasts can be hypothesized to be relatively light media users, particularly perhaps broadcast media, though they may be heavy users of the specialist publications which are directed towards the enthusiasm itself; (3) the enthusiasm would appear to be rather more organised than the fan activity. (132) What is striking about this attempt to differentiate between the fan and the enthusiast is that it is based on supposition rather than the actual experience and observation of enthusiasm. It is here that the ethnographic account of enthusiasm presented in this paper and elsewhere, for example works by Dannefer on vintage car culture, Moorhouse on American hot-rodding and Fuller on modified-car culture in Australia, can shed light on the subject. My own ethnographic study of groups with a passion for telecommunications heritage, early British computers and industrial archaeology takes the discussion of “technology enthusiasm” further still. Through in-depth interviews, observation and textual analysis, I have examined in detail the formation of enthusiast societies and their membership, the importance of the material record to enthusiasts (particularly at home) and the enthusiastic practices of collecting and hoarding, as well as the figure of the technology enthusiast in the public space of the museum, namely the Science Museum in London (Geoghegan). In this paper, I explore the culture of enthusiasm for the industrial past through the example of the Greater London Industrial Archaeology Society (GLIAS). Focusing on industrial sites around London, GLIAS meet five or six times a year for field visits, walks and a treasure hunt. The committee maintain a website and produce a quarterly newsletter. The title of my paper, “If you can walk down the street and recognise the difference between cast iron and wrought iron, the world is altogether a better place,” comes from an interview I conducted with the co-founder and present chairman of GLIAS. He was telling me about his fascination with the materials of industrialisation. In fact, he said even concrete is sexy. Some call it a hobby; others call it a disease. But enthusiasm for industrial archaeology is, as several respondents have themselves identified, “as insidious in its side effects as any debilitating germ. It dictates your lifestyle, organises your activity and decides who your friends are” (Frow and Frow 177, Gillespie et al.). Through the figure of the industrial archaeology enthusiast, I discuss in this paper what it means to be enthusiastic. I begin by reflecting on the development of this specialist subject area. I go on to detail the formation of the Society in the late 1960s, before exploring the Society’s fieldwork methods and some of the other activities they now engage in. I raise questions of enthusiast and professional knowledge and practice, as well as consider the future of this particular enthusiasm.Defining Industrial ArchaeologyThe practice of 'industrial archaeology' is much contested. For a long time, enthusiasts and professional archaeologists have debated the meaning and use of the term (Palmer). On the one hand, there are those interested in the history, preservation, and recording of industrial sites. For example the grandfather figures of the subject, namely Kenneth Hudson and Angus Buchanan, who both published widely in the 1960s and 1970s in order to encourage publics to get involved in recording. Many members of GLIAS refer to the books of Hudson Industrial Archaeology: an Introduction and Buchanan Industrial Archaeology in Britain with their fine descriptions and photographs as integral to their early interest in the subject. On the other hand, there are those within the academic discipline of archaeology who consider the study of remains produced by the Industrial Revolution as too modern. Moreover, they find the activities of those calling themselves industrial archaeologists as lacking sufficient attention to the understanding of past human activity to justify the name. As a result, the definition of 'industrial archaeology' is problematic for both enthusiasts and professionals. Even the early advocates of professional industrial archaeology felt uneasy about the subject’s methods and practices. In 1973, Philip Riden (described by one GLIAS member as the angry young man of industrial archaeology), the then president of the Oxford University Archaeology Society, wrote a damning article in Antiquity, calling for the subject to “shed the amateur train drivers and others who are not part of archaeology” (215-216). He decried the “appallingly low standard of some of the work done under the name of ‘industrial archaeology’” (211). He felt that if enthusiasts did not attempt to maintain high technical standards, publish their work in journals or back up their fieldwork with documentary investigation or join their county archaeological societies then there was no value in the efforts of these amateurs. During this period, enthusiasts, academics, and professionals were divided. What was wrong with doing something for the pleasure it provides the participant?Although relations today between the so-called amateur (enthusiast) and professional archaeologies are less potent, some prejudice remains. Describing them as “barrow boys”, some enthusiasts suggest that what was once their much-loved pastime has been “hijacked” by professional archaeologists who, according to one respondent,are desperate to find subjects to get degrees in. So the whole thing has been hijacked by academia as it were. Traditional professional archaeologists in London at least are running head on into things that we have been doing for decades and they still don’t appreciate that this is what we do. A lot of assessments are handed out to professional archaeology teams who don’t necessarily have any knowledge of industrial archaeology. (James, GLIAS committee member)James went on to reveal that GLIAS receives numerous enquiries from professional archaeologists, developers and town planners asking what they know about particular sites across the city. Although the Society has compiled a detailed database covering some areas of London, it is by no means comprehensive. In addition, many active members often record and monitor sites in London for their own personal enjoyment. This leaves many questioning the need to publish their results for the gain of third parties. Canadian sociologist Stebbins discusses this situation in his research on “serious leisure”. He has worked extensively with amateur archaeologists in order to understand their approach to their leisure activity. He argues that amateurs are “neither dabblers who approach the activity with little commitment or seriousness, nor professionals who make a living from that activity” (55). Rather they pursue their chosen leisure activity to professional standards. A point echoed by Fine in his study of the cultures of mushrooming. But this is to get ahead of myself. How did GLIAS begin?GLIAS: The GroupThe 1960s have been described by respondents as a frantic period of “running around like headless chickens.” Enthusiasts of London’s industrial archaeology were witnessing incredible changes to the city’s industrial landscape. Individuals and groups like the Thames Basin Archaeology Observers Group were recording what they could. Dashing around London taking photos to capture London’s industrial legacy before it was lost forever. However the final straw for many, in London at least, was the proposed and subsequent demolition of the “Euston Arch”. The Doric portico at Euston Station was completed in 1838 and stood as a symbol to the glory of railway travel. Despite strong protests from amenity societies, this Victorian symbol of progress was finally pulled down by British Railways in 1962 in order to make way for what enthusiasts have called a “monstrous concrete box”.In response to these changes, GLIAS was founded in 1968 by two engineers and a locomotive driver over afternoon tea in a suburban living room in Woodford, North-East London. They held their first meeting one Sunday afternoon in December at the Science Museum in London and attracted over 130 people. Firing the imagination of potential members with an exhibition of photographs of the industrial landscape taken by Eric de Maré, GLIAS’s first meeting was a success. Bringing together like-minded people who are motivated and enthusiastic about the subject, GLIAS currently has over 600 members in the London area and beyond. This makes it the largest industrial archaeology society in the UK and perhaps Europe. Drawing some of its membership from a series of evening classes hosted by various members of the Society’s committee, GLIAS initially had a quasi-academic approach. Although some preferred the hands-on practical element and were more, as has been described by one respondent, “your free-range enthusiast”. The society has an active committee, produces a newsletter and journal, as well as runs regular events for members. However the Society is not simply about the study of London’s industrial heritage, over time the interest in industrial archaeology has developed for some members into long-term friendships. Sociability is central to organised leisure activities. It underpins and supports the performance of enthusiasm in groups and societies. For Fine, sociability does not always equal friendship, but it is the state from which people might become friends. Some GLIAS members have taken this one step further: there have even been a couple of marriages. Although not the subject of my paper, technical culture is heavily gendered. Industrial archaeology is a rare exception attracting a mixture of male and female participants, usually retired husband and wife teams.Doing Industrial Archaeology: GLIAS’s Method and PracticeIn what has been described as GLIAS’s heyday, namely the 1970s to early 1980s, fieldwork was fundamental to the Society’s activities. The Society’s approach to fieldwork during this period was much the same as the one described by champion of industrial archaeology Arthur Raistrick in 1973:photographing, measuring, describing, and so far as possible documenting buildings, engines, machinery, lines of communication, still or recently in use, providing a satisfactory record for the future before the object may become obsolete or be demolished. (13)In the early years of GLIAS and thanks to the committed efforts of two active Society members, recording parties were organised for extended lunch hours and weekends. The majority of this early fieldwork took place at the St Katherine Docks. The Docks were constructed in the 1820s by Thomas Telford. They became home to the world’s greatest concentration of portable wealth. Here GLIAS members learnt and employed practical (also professional) skills, such as measuring, triangulations and use of a “dumpy level”. For many members this was an incredibly exciting time. It was a chance to gain hands-on experience of industrial archaeology. Having been left derelict for many years, the Docks have since been redeveloped as part of the Docklands regeneration project.At this time the Society was also compiling data for what has become known to members as “The GLIAS Book”. The book was to have separate chapters on the various industrial histories of London with contributions from Society members about specific sites. Sadly the book’s editor died and the project lost impetus. Several years ago, the committee managed to digitise the data collected for the book and began to compile a database. However, the GLIAS database has been beset by problems. Firstly, there are often questions of consistency and coherence. There is a standard datasheet for recording industrial buildings – the Index Record for Industrial Sites. However, the quality of each record is different because of the experience level of the different authors. Some authors are automatically identified as good or expert record keepers. Secondly, getting access to the database in order to upload the information has proved difficult. As one of the respondents put it: “like all computer babies [the creator of the database], is finding it hard to give birth” (Sally, GLIAS member). As we have learnt enthusiasm is integral to movements such as industrial archaeology – public historian Raphael Samuel described them as the “invisible hands” of historical enquiry. Yet, it is this very enthusiasm that has the potential to jeopardise projects such as the GLIAS book. Although active in their recording practices, the GLIAS book saga reflects one of the challenges encountered by enthusiast groups and societies. In common with other researchers studying amenity societies, such as Ellis and Waterton’s work with amateur naturalists, unlike the world of work where people are paid to complete a task and are therefore meant to have a singular sense of purpose, the activities of an enthusiast group like GLIAS rely on the goodwill of their members to volunteer their time, energy and expertise. When this is lost for whatever reason, there is no requirement for any other member to take up that position. As such, levels of commitment vary between enthusiasts and can lead to the aforementioned difficulties, such as disputes between group members, the occasional miscommunication of ideas and an over-enthusiasm for some parts of the task in hand. On top of this, GLIAS and societies like it are confronted with changing health and safety policies and tightened security surrounding industrial sites. This has made the practical side of industrial archaeology increasingly difficult. As GLIAS member Bob explains:For me to go on site now I have to wear site boots and borrow a hard hat and a high visibility jacket. Now we used to do incredibly dangerous things in the seventies and nobody batted an eyelid. You know we were exploring derelict buildings, which you are virtually not allowed in now because the floor might give way. Again the world has changed a lot there. GLIAS: TodayGLIAS members continue to record sites across London. Some members are currently surveying the site chosen as the location of the Olympic Games in London in 2012 – the Lower Lea Valley. They describe their activities at this site as “rescue archaeology”. GLIAS members are working against the clock and some important structures have already been demolished. They only have time to complete a quick flash survey. Armed with the information they collated in previous years, GLIAS is currently in discussions with the developer to orchestrate a detailed recording of the site. It is important to note here that GLIAS members are less interested in campaigning for the preservation of a site or building, they appreciate that sites must change. Instead they want to ensure that large swathes of industrial London are not lost without a trace. Some members regard this as their public duty.Restricted by health and safety mandates and access disputes, GLIAS has had to adapt. The majority of practical recording sessions have given way to guided walks in the summer and public lectures in the winter. Some respondents have identified a difference between those members who call themselves “industrial archaeologists” and those who are just “ordinary members” of GLIAS. The walks are for those with a general interest, not serious members, and the talks are public lectures. Some audience researchers have used Bourdieu’s metaphor of “capital” to describe the experience, knowledge and skill required to be a fan, clubber or enthusiast. For Hills, fan status is built up through the demonstration of cultural capital: “where fans share a common interest while also competing over fan knowledge, access to the object of fandom, and status” (46). A clear membership hierarchy can be seen within GLIAS based on levels of experience, knowledge and practical skill.With a membership of over 600 and rising annually, the Society’s future is secure at present. However some of the more serious members, although retaining their membership, are pursuing their enthusiasm elsewhere: through break-away recording groups in London; active membership of other groups and societies, for example the national Association for Industrial Archaeology; as well as heading off to North Wales in the summer for practical, hands-on industrial archaeology in Snowdonia’s slate quarries – described in the Ffestiniog Railway Journal as the “annual convention of slate nutters.” ConclusionsGLIAS has changed since its foundation in the late 1960s. Its operation has been complicated by questions of health and safety, site access, an ageing membership, and the constant changes to London’s industrial archaeology. Previously rejected by professional industrial archaeology as “limited in skill and resources” (Riden), enthusiasts are now approached by professional archaeologists, developers, planners and even museums that are interested in engaging in knowledge exchange programmes. As a recent report from the British think-tank Demos has argued, enthusiasts or pro-ams – “amateurs who work to professional standards” (Leadbeater and Miller 12) – are integral to future innovation and creativity; for example computer pro-ams developed an operating system to rival Microsoft Windows. As such the specialist knowledge, skill and practice of these communities is of increasing interest to policymakers, practitioners, and business. So, the subject once described as “the ugly offspring of two parents that shouldn’t have been allowed to breed” (Hudson), the so-called “amateur” industrial archaeology offers enthusiasts and professionals alike alternative ways of knowing, seeing and being in the recent and contemporary past.Through the case study of GLIAS, I have described what it means to be enthusiastic about industrial archaeology. I have introduced a culture of collective and individual participation and friendship based on a mutual interest in and emotional attachment to industrial sites. As we have learnt in this paper, enthusiasm is about fun, pleasure and joy. The enthusiastic culture presented here advances themes such as passion in relation to less obvious communities of knowing, skilled practices, material artefacts and spaces of knowledge. Moreover, this paper has been about the affective narratives that are sometimes missing from academic accounts; overlooked for fear of sniggers at the back of a conference hall. Laughter and humour are a large part of what enthusiasm is. Enthusiastic cultures then are about the pleasure and joy experienced in doing things. Enthusiasm is clearly a potent force for active participation. I will leave the last word to GLIAS member John:One meaning of enthusiasm is as a form of possession, madness. Obsession perhaps rather than possession, which I think is entirely true. It is a pejorative term probably. The railway enthusiast. But an awful lot of energy goes into what they do and achieve. Enthusiasm to my mind is an essential ingredient. If you are not a person who can muster enthusiasm, it is very difficult, I think, to get anything out of it. On the basis of the more you put in the more you get out. 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IntroductionRegional identity is a constant construction, in which landscape, human activity and cultural imaginary build a narrative of place. For the Tasmanian Midlands, the interactions between history, ecology and agriculture both define place and present problems in how to recognise, communicate and balance these interactions. In this sense, regionality is defined not so much as a relation of margin to centre, but as a specific accretion of environmental and cultural histories. According weight to more-than-human perspectives, a region can be seen as a constellation of plant, animal and human interactions and demands, where creative art and design can make space and give voice to the dynamics of exchange between the landscape and its inhabitants. Consideration of three recent art and design projects based in the Midlands reveal the potential for cross-disciplinary research, embedded in both environment and community, to create distinctive and specific forms of connectivity that articulate a regional identify.The Tasmanian Midlands have been identified as a biodiversity hotspot (Australian Government), with a long history of Aboriginal cultural management disrupted by colonial invasion. Recent archaeological work in the Midlands, including the Kerry Lodge Archaeology and Art Project, has focused on the use of convict labour during the nineteenth century in opening up the Midlands for settler agriculture and transport. Now, the Midlands are placed under increasing pressure by changing agricultural practices such as large-scale irrigation. At the same time as this intensification of agricultural activity, significant progress has been made in protecting, preserving and restoring endemic ecologies. This progress has come through non-government conservation organisations, especially Greening Australia and their program Tasmanian Island Ark, and private landowners placing land under conservation covenants. These pressures and conservation activities give rise to research opportunities in the biological sciences, but also pose challenges in communicating the value of conservation and research outcomes to a wider public. The Species Hotel project, beginning in 2016, engaged with the aims of restoration ecology through speculative design while The Marathon Project, a multi-year curatorial art project based on a single property that contains both conservation and commercially farmed zones.This article questions the role of regionality in these three interconnected projects—Kerry Lodge, Species Hotel, and Marathon—sited in the Tasmanian Midlands: the three projects share a concern with the specificities of the region through engagement with specifics sites and their histories and ecologies, while also acknowledging the forces that shape these sites as far more mobile and global in scope. It also considers the interdisciplinary nature of these projects, in the crossover of art and design with ecological, archaeological and agricultural practices of measuring and intervening in the land, where communication and interpretation may be in tension with functionality. These projects suggest ways of working that connect the ecological and the cultural spheres; importantly, they see rural locations as sites of knowledge production; they test the value of small-scale and ephemeral interventions to explore the place of art and design as intervention within colonised landscape.Regions are also defined by overlapping circles of control, interest, and authority. We test the claim that these projects, which operate through cross-disciplinary collaboration and network with a range of stakeholders and community groups, successfully benefit the region in which they are placed. We are particularly interested in the challenges of working across institutions which both claim and enact connections to the region without being centred there. These projects are initiatives resulting from, or in collaboration with, University of Tasmania, an institution that has taken a recent turn towards explicitly identifying as place-based yet the placement of the Midlands as the gap between campuses risks attenuating the institution’s claim to be of this place. Paul Carter, in his discussion of a regional, site-specific collaboration in Alice Springs, flags how processes of creative place-making—operating through mythopoetic and story-based strategies—requires a concrete rather than imagined community that actively engages a plurality of voices on the ground. We identify similar concerns in these art and design projects and argue that iterative and long-term creative projects enable a deeper grappling with the complexities of shared regional place-making. The Midlands is aptly named: as a region, it is defined by its geographical constraints and relationships to urban centres. Heading south from the northern city of Launceston, travellers on the Midland Highway see scores of farming properties networking continuously for around 175 kilometres south to the outskirts of Brighton, the last major township before the Tasmanian capital city of Hobart. The town of Ross straddles latitude 42 degrees south—a line that has historically divided Tasmania into the divisions of North and South. The region is characterised by extensive agricultural usage and small remnant patches of relatively open dry sclerophyll forest and lowland grassland enabled by its lower attitude and relatively flatter terrain. The Midlands sit between the mountainous central highlands of the Great Western Tiers and the Eastern Tiers, a continuous range of dolerite hills lying south of Ben Lomond that slope coastward to the Tasman Sea. This area stretches far beyond the view of the main highway, reaching east in the Deddington and Fingal valleys. Campbell Town is the primary stopping point for travellers, superseding the bypassed towns, which have faced problems with lowering population and resulting loss of facilities.Image 1: Southern Midland Landscape, Ross, Tasmania, 2018. Image Credit: Patrick Sutczak.Predominantly under private ownership, the Tasmanian Midlands are a contested and fractured landscape existing in a state of ecological tension that has occurred with the dominance of western agriculture. For over 200 years, farmers have continually shaped the land and carved it up into small fragments for different agricultural agendas, and this has resulted in significant endemic species decline (Mitchell et al.). The open vegetation was the product of cultural management of land by Tasmanian Aboriginal communities (Gammage), attractive to settlers during their distribution of land grants prior to the 1830s and a focus for settler violence. As documented cartographically in the Centre for 21st Century Humanities’ Colonial Frontier Massacres in Central and Eastern Australia 1788–1930, the period 1820–1835, and particularly during the Black War, saw the Midlands as central to the violent dispossession of Aboriginal landowners. Clements argues that the culture of violence during this period also reflected the brutalisation that the penal system imposed upon its subjects. The cultivation of agricultural land throughout the Midlands was enabled by the provision of unfree convict labour (Dillon). Many of the properties granted and established during the colonial period have been held in multi-generational family ownership through to the present.Within this patchwork of private ownership, the tension between visibility and privacy of the Midlands pastures and farmlands challenges the capacity for people to understand what role the Midlands plays in the greater Tasmanian ecology. Although half of Tasmania’s land areas are protected as national parks and reserves, the Midlands remains largely unprotected due to private ownership. When measured against Tasmania’s wilderness values and reputation, the dry pasturelands of the Midland region fail to capture an equivalent level of visual and experiential imagination. Jamie Kirkpatrick describes misconceptions of the Midlands when he writes of “[f]latness, dead and dying eucalypts, gorse, brown pastures, salt—environmental devastation […]—these are the common impression of those who first travel between Spring Hill and Launceston on the Midland Highway” (45). However, Kirkpatrick also emphasises the unique intimate and intricate qualities of this landscape, and its underlying resilience. In the face of the loss of paddock trees and remnants to irrigation, change in species due to pasture enrichment and introduction of new plant species, conservation initiatives that not only protect but also restore habitat are vital. The Tasmanian Midlands, then, are pastoral landscapes whose seeming monotonous continuity glosses over the radical changes experienced in the processes of colonisation and intensification of agriculture.Underlying the Present: Archaeology and Landscape in the Kerry Lodge ProjectThe major marker of the Midlands is the highway that bisects it. Running from Hobart to Launceston, the construction of a “great macadamised highway” (Department of Main Roads 10) between 1820–1850, and its ongoing maintenance, was a significant colonial project. The macadam technique, a nineteenth century innovation in road building which involved the laying of small pieces of stone to create a surface that was relatively water and frost resistant, required considerable but unskilled labour. The construction of the bridge at Kerry Lodge, in 1834–35, was simultaneous with significant bridge buildings at other major water crossings on the highway, (Department of Main Roads 16) and, as the first water crossing south of Launceston, was a pinch-point through which travel of prisoners could be monitored and controlled. Following the completion of the bridge, the site was used to house up to 60 male convicts in a road gang undergoing secondary punishment (1835–44) and then in a labour camp and hiring depot until 1847. At the time of the La Trobe report (1847), the buildings were noted as being in bad condition (Brand 142–43). After the station was disbanded, the use of the buildings reverted to the landowners for use in accommodation and agricultural storage.Archaeological research at Kerry Lodge, directed by Eleanor Casella, investigated the spatial and disciplinary structures of smaller probation and hiring depots and the living and working conditions of supervisory staff. Across three seasons (2015, 2016, 2018), the emerging themes of discipline and control and as well as labour were borne out by excavations across the site, focusing on remnants of buildings close to the bridge. This first season also piloted the co-presence of a curatorial art project, which grew across the season to include eleven practitioners in visual art, theatre and poetry, and three exhibition outcomes. As a crucial process for the curatorial art project, creative practitioners spent time on site as participants and observers, which enabled the development of responses that interrogated the research processes of archaeological fieldwork as well as making connections to the wider historical and cultural context of the site. Immersed in the mundane tasks of archaeological fieldwork, the practitioners involved became simultaneously focused on repetitive actions while contemplating the deep time contained within earth. This experience then informed the development of creative works interrogating embodied processes as a language of site.The outcome from the first fieldwork season was earthspoke, an exhibition shown at Sawtooth, an artist-run initiative in Launceston in 2015, and later re-installed in Franklin House, a National Trust property in the southern suburbs of Launceston.Images 2 and 3: earthspoke, 2015, Installation View at Sawtooth ARI (top) and Franklin House (bottom). Image Credits: Melanie de Ruyter.This recontextualisation of the work, from contemporary ARI (artist run initiative) gallery to National Trust property enabled the project to reach different audiences but also raised questions about the emphases that these exhibition contexts placed on the work. Within the white cube space of the contemporary gallery, connections to site became more abstracted while the educational and heritage functions of the National Trust property added further context and unintended connotations to the art works.Image 4: Strata, 2017, Installation View. Image Credit: Karen Hall.The two subsequent exhibitions, Lines of Site (2016) and Strata (2017), continued to test the relationship between site and gallery, through works that rematerialised the absences on site and connected embodied experiences of convict and archaeological labour. The most recent iteration of the project, Strata, part of the Ten Days on the Island art festival in 2017, involved installing works at the site, marking with their presence the traces, fragments and voids that had been reburied when the landscape returned to agricultural use following the excavations. Here, the interpretive function of the works directly addressed the layered histories of the landscape and underscored the scope of the human interventions and changes over time within the pastoral landscape. The interpretative role of the artworks formed part of a wider, multidisciplinary approach to research and communication within the project. University of Manchester archaeology staff and postgraduate students directed the excavations, using volunteers from the Launceston Historical Society. Staff from Launceston’s Queen Victorian Museum and Art Gallery brought their archival and collection-based expertise to the site rather than simply receiving stored finds as a repository, supporting immediate interpretation and contextualisation of objects. In 2018, participation from the University of Tasmania School of Education enabled a larger number of on-site educational activities than afforded by previous open days. These multi-disciplinary and multi-organisational networks, drawn together provisionally in a shared time and place, provided rich opportunities for dialogue. However, the challenges of sustaining these exchanges have meant ongoing collaborations have become more sporadic, reflecting different institutional priorities and competing demands on participants. Even within long-term projects, continued engagement with stakeholders can be a challenge: while enabling an emerging and concrete sense of community, the time span gives greater vulnerability to external pressures. Making Home: Ecological Restoration and Community Engagement in the Species Hotel ProjectImages 5 and 6: Selected Species Hotels, Ross, Tasmania, 2018. Image Credits: Patrick Sutczak. The Species Hotels stand sentinel over a river of saplings, providing shelter for animal communities within close range of a small town. At the township of Ross in the Southern Midlands, work was initiated by restoration ecologists to address the lack of substantial animal shelter belts on a number of major properties in the area. The Tasmania Island Ark is a major Greening Australia restoration ecology initiative, connecting 6000 hectares of habitat across the Midlands. Linking larger forest areas in the Eastern Tiers and Central Highlands as well as isolated patches of remnant native vegetation, the Ark project is vital to the ongoing survival of local plant and animal species under pressure from human interventions and climate change. With fragmentation of bush and native grasslands in the Midland landscape resulting in vast open plains, the ability for animals to adapt to pasturelands without shelter has resulted in significant decline as animals such as the critically endangered Eastern Barred Bandicoot struggle to feed, move, and avoid predators (Cranney). In 2014 mass plantings of native vegetation were undertaken along 16km of the serpentine Macquarie River as part of two habitat corridors designed to bring connectivity back to the region. While the plantings were being established a public art project was conceived that would merge design with practical application to assist animals in the area, and draw community and public attention to the work that was being done in re-establishing native forests. The Species Hotel project, which began in 2016, emerged from a collaboration between Greening Australia and the University of Tasmania’s School of Architecture and Design, the School of Land and Food, the Tasmanian College of the Arts and the ARC Centre for Forest Value, with funding from the Ian Potter Foundation. The initial focus of the project was the development of interventions in the landscape that could address the specific habitat needs of the insect, small mammal, and bird species that are under threat. First-year Architecture students were invited to design a series of structures with the brief that they would act as ‘Species Hotels’, and once created would be installed among the plantings as structures that could be inhabited or act as protection. After installation, the privately-owned land would be reconfigured so to allow public access and observation of the hotels, by residents and visitors alike. Early in the project’s development, a concern was raised during a Ross community communication and consultation event that the surrounding landscape and its vistas would be dramatically altered with the re-introduced forest. While momentary and resolved, a subtle yet obvious tension surfaced that questioned the re-writing of an established community’s visual landscape literacy by non-residents. Compact and picturesque, the architectural, historical and cultural qualities of Ross and its location were not only admired by residents, but established a regional identity. During the six-week intensive project, the community reach was expanded beyond the institution and involved over 100 people including landowners, artists, scientists and school children from the region (Wright), attempting to address and channel the concerns of residents about the changing landscape. The multiple timescales of this iterative project—from intensive moments of collaboration between stakeholders to the more-than-human time of tree growth—open spaces for regional identity to shift as both as place and community. Part of the design brief was the use of fully biodegradable materials: the Species Hotels are not expected to last forever. The actual installation of the Species Hotelson site took longer than planned due to weather conditions, but once on site they were weathering in, showing signs of insect and bird habitation. This animal activity created an opportunity for ongoing engagement. Further activities generated from the initial iteration of Species Hotel were the Species Hotel Day in 2017, held at the Ross Community Hall where presentations by scientists and designers provided feedback to the local community and presented opportunities for further design engagement in the production of ephemeral ‘species seed pies’ placed out in and around Ross. Architecture and Design students have gone on to develop more examples of ‘ecological furniture’ with a current focus on insect housing as well as extrapolating from the installation of the Species Hotels to generate a VR visualisation of the surrounding landscape, game design and participatory movement work that was presented as part of the Junction Arts Festival program in Launceston, 2017. The intersections of technologies and activities amplified the lived in and living qualities of the Species Hotels, not only adding to the connectivity of social and environmental actions on site and beyond, but also making a statement about the shared ownership this project enabled.Working Property: Collaboration and Dialogues in The Marathon Project The potential of iterative projects that engage with environmental concerns amid questions of access, stewardship and dialogue is also demonstrated in The Marathon Project, a collaborative art project that took place between 2015 and 2017. Situated in the Northern Midland region of Deddington alongside the banks of the Nile River the property of Marathon became the focal point for a small group of artists, ecologists and theorists to converge and engage with a pastoral landscape over time that was unfamiliar to many of them. Through a series of weekend camps and day trips, the participants were able to explore and follow their own creative and investigative agendas. The project was conceived by the landowners who share a passion for the history of the area, their land, and ideas of custodianship and ecological responsibility. The intentions of the project initially were to inspire creative work alongside access, engagement and dialogue about land, agriculture and Deddington itself. As a very small town on the Northern Midland fringe, Deddington is located toward the Eastern Tiers at the foothills of the Ben Lomond mountain ranges. Historically, Deddington is best known as the location of renowned 19th century landscape painter John Glover’s residence, Patterdale. After Glover’s death in 1849, the property steadily fell into disrepair and a recent private restoration effort of the home, studio and grounds has seen renewed interest in the cultural significance of the region. With that in mind, and with Marathon a neighbouring property, participants in the project were able to experience the area and research its past and present as a part of a network of working properties, but also encouraging conversation around the region as a contested and documented place of settlement and subsequent violence toward the Aboriginal people. Marathon is a working property, yet also a vital and fragile ecosystem. Marathon consists of 1430 hectares, of which around 300 lowland hectares are currently used for sheep grazing. The paddocks retain their productivity, function and potential to return to native grassland, while thickets of gorse are plentiful, an example of an invasive species difficult to control. The rest of the property comprises eucalypt woodlands and native grasslands that have been protected under a conservation covenant by the landowners since 2003. The Marathon creek and the Nile River mark the boundary between the functional paddocks and the uncultivated hills and are actively managed in the interface between native and introduced species of flora and fauna. This covenant aimed to preserve these landscapes, linking in with a wider pattern of organisations and landowners attempting to address significant ecological degradation and isolation of remnant bushland patches through restoration ecology. Measured against the visibility of Tasmania’s wilderness identity on the national and global stage, many of the ecological concerns affecting the Midlands go largely unnoticed. The Marathon Project was as much a project about visibility and communication as it was about art and landscape. Over the three years and with its 17 participants, The Marathon Project yielded three major exhibitions along with numerous public presentations and research outputs. The length of the project and the autonomy and perspectives of its participants allowed for connections to be formed, conversations initiated, and greater exposure to the productivity and sustainability complexities playing out on rural Midland properties. Like Kerry Lodge, the 2015 first year exhibition took place at Sawtooth ARI. The exhibition was a testing ground for artists, and a platform for audiences, to witness the cross-disciplinary outputs of work inspired by a single sheep grazing farm. The interest generated led to the rethinking of the 2016 exhibition and the need to broaden the scope of what the landowners and participants were trying to achieve. Image 7: Panel Discussion at Open Weekend, 2016. Image Credit: Ron Malor.In November 2016, The Marathon Project hosted an Open Weekend on the property encouraging audiences to visit, meet the artists, the landowners, and other invited guests from a number of restoration, conservation, and rehabilitation organisations. Titled Encounter, the event and accompanying exhibition displayed in the shearing shed, provided an opportunity for a rhizomatic effect with the public which was designed to inform and disseminate historical and contemporary perspectives of land and agriculture, access, ownership, visitation and interpretation. Concluding with a final exhibition in 2017 at the University of Tasmania’s Academy Gallery, The Marathon Project had built enough momentum to shape and inform the practice of its participants, the knowledge and imagination of the public who engaged with it, and make visible the precarity of the cultural and rural Midland identity.Image 8. Installation View of The Marathon Project Exhibition, 2017. Image Credit: Patrick Sutczak.ConclusionThe Marathon Project, Species Hotel and the Kerry Lodge Archaeology and Art Project all demonstrate the potential of site-based projects to articulate and address concerns that arise from the environmental and cultural conditions and histories of a region. Beyond the Midland fence line is a complex environment that needed to be experienced to be understood. Returning creative work to site, and opening up these intensified experiences of place to a public forms a key stage in all these projects. Beyond a commitment to site-specific practice and valuing the affective and didactic potential of on-site installation, these returns grapple with issues of access, visibility and absence that characterise the Midlands. Paul Carter describes his role in the convening of a “concretely self-realising creative community” in an initiative to construct a meeting-place in Alice Springs, a community defined and united in “its capacity to imagine change as a negotiation between past, present and future” (17). Within that regional context, storytelling, as an encounter between histories and cultures, became crucial in assembling a community that could in turn materialise story into place. In these Midlands projects, a looser assembly of participants with shared interests seek to engage with the intersections of plant, human and animal activities that constitute and negotiate the changing environment. The projects enabled moments of connection, of access, and of intervention: always informed by the complexities of belonging within regional locations.These projects also suggest the need to recognise the granularity of regionalism: the need to be attentive to the relations of site to bioregion, of private land to small town to regional centre. The numerous partnerships that allow such interconnect projects to flourish can be seen as a strength of regional areas, where proximity and scale can draw together sets of related institutions, organisations and individuals. However, the tensions and gaps within these projects reveal differing priorities, senses of ownership and even regional belonging. Questions of who will live with these project outcomes, who will access them, and on what terms, reveal inequalities of power. Negotiations of this uneven and uneasy terrain require a more nuanced account of projects that do not rely on the geographical labelling of regions to paper over the complexities and fractures within the social environment.These projects also share a commitment to the intersection of the social and natural environment. They recognise the inextricable entanglement of human and more than human agencies in shaping the landscape, and material consequences of colonialism and agricultural intensification. Through iteration and duration, the projects mobilise processes that are responsive and reflective while being anchored to the materiality of site. Warwick Mules suggests that “regions are a mixture of data and earth, historically made through the accumulation and condensation of material and informational configurations”. Cross-disciplinary exchanges enable all three projects to actively participate in data production, not interpretation or illustration afterwards. Mules’ call for ‘accumulation’ and ‘configuration’ as productive regional modes speaks directly to the practice-led methodologies employed by these projects. The Kerry Lodge and Marathon projects collect, arrange and transform material taken from each site to provisionally construct a regional material language, extended further in the dual presentation of the projects as off-site exhibitions and as interventions returning to site. The Species Hotel project shares that dual identity, where materials are chosen for their ability over time, habitation and decay to become incorporated into the site yet, through other iterations of the project, become digital presences that nonetheless invite an embodied engagement.These projects centre the Midlands as fertile ground for the production of knowledge and experiences that are distinctive and place-based, arising from the unique qualities of this place, its history and its ongoing challenges. Art and design practice enables connectivity to plant, animal and human communities, utilising cross-disciplinary collaborations to bring together further accumulations of the region’s intertwined cultural and ecological landscape.ReferencesAustralian Government Department of the Environment and Energy. Biodiversity Conservation. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2018. 1 Apr. 2019 <http://www.environment.gov.au/biodiversity/conservation>.Brand, Ian. The Convict Probation System: Van Diemen’s Land 1839–1854. Sandy Bay: Blubber Head Press, 1990.Carter, Paul. “Common Patterns: Narratives of ‘Mere Coincidence’ and the Production of Regions.” Creative Communities: Regional Inclusion & the Arts. Eds. Janet McDonald and Robert Mason. Bristol: Intellect, 2015. 13–30.Centre for 21st Century Humanities. Colonial Frontier Massacres in Central and Eastern Australia 1788–1930. 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