Статті в журналах з теми "Lisson Gallery (New York, N.Y.)"

In this essay, Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández reflects on the comments made in a forum convened to reflect on his article “Why the Arts Don't Do Anything: Toward a New Vision for Cultural Production in Education,” published in the Harvard Educational Review (HER)'s special issue entitled Expanding Our Vision for the Arts in Education (Vol. 83, No. 1). Participants in the forum (published in HER Vol. 83, No.3) were John Abodeely, manager of national partnerships, John F. Kennedy Center for the Arts, Washington, DC; Ken Cole, associate director, National Guild for Community Arts Education, New York City; Janna Graham, project curator of the Serpentine Gallery, Centre for Possible Studies, London; Ayanna N. Hudson, director of arts education, National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, DC; and Carmen Mörsch, head of the Research Institute for Art Education, Zurich University of the Arts. In his original essay, Gaztambide-Fernández makes the case that advocacy for arts education is trapped within a “rhetoric of effects” that relies too heavily on causal arguments for the arts, whether construed as instrumental or intrinsic. Gaztambide- Fernández further argues that what counts as “the arts” is based on traditional, Eurocentric, hierarchical notions of aesthetic experience. As an alternative, he suggests a “rhetoric of cultural production” that would focus on the cultural processes and experiences that ensue in particular contexts shaped by practices of symbolic work and creativity. Here the author engages the forum's discussion in an effort to clarify his argument and move the dialogue forward.

During Fall 2016 we had the unique opportunity to participate in the regular internship program of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and assist with ongoing exhibition projects in the Architecture and Design Department (A&D). This Department was established in 1932 as the first curatorial department dedicated to architecture and design and built on an ambitious collection covering major figures and movement of architectural culture from mid-19th century to the present. With looking back on a rich history of influential exhibitions such as Modern Architecture: International Exhibition (1932), Architecture Without Architects (1964/65) or Deconstructivist Architecture (1988) it has been one of the key institutions to push the format of the architecture exhibition and which it keeps doing up to today. Having this in mind we both came to New York with great respect and honored to gain insights in this institution for a period of three months. The department currently employs around 15 people which made it a really pleasant, intimate place to work with highly passionate and professional individuals full of remarkable expertise and respect for each other. This said and with the department going through some recent (at that moment) personnel changes, most notably the new directorship of Martino Stierli since 2015, as well MoMA reconfiguring and adding gallery spaces set to be open in 2019, we felt it was a very interesting moment for us to talk to our curator colleagues about their personal history and professional ambitions as curators at MoMA as well specific challenges of exhibiting architecture and design. Being both educated in architecture in different countries (Brazil and Germany) we could gain not only a lot of professional insights but also talk about personal aspects of the curators´ – not always linear – careers. In total we conducted six interviews with all (senior) curators and one curatorial assistant of the Architecture and Design Department, all of whom we asked the same, around ten questions in order to produce a complete “panorama” of the departments staff at that very moment. In the following we would like to share with you the second half with Juliet Kinchin, Martino Stierli and Sean Anderson. The first three interviews with Paola Antonelli, Barry Bergdoll and Michelle Millar Fisher, were published on RISCO v.16 n.1 2018. From the interviews, Juliet Kinchin had an approach since a student into intellectual debates and design history rather than architectural history, while Martino as a professor, was also engaged doing exhibitions. Sean Anderson struggled being a professor and practicing architect, and curation for him “means also being able to condense ideas and questions”. Since they had different backgrounds before arrive at MoMA, the teaching position and a special love for research is a shared common background for them. Juliet Kinchin argues that the curator’s activity apart from the responsabilities also means communicate and creating view points and arguments in a spatial and material form, while Martino talk about the work of curating a show as very much about a teamwork. For Sean Anderson also the very strong critical sensibility, is a must have skill for a curator. Sean Anderson’s advice to young curators is to ask questions and to have as many experiences in the world as possible. Juliet Kinchin talks about integrity, that makes the difference in your work, Martino in the same way, reinforce the ideia to love what you do and so you will be successful. Luis Michal, Amanda Saba Ruggiero

- Joan D. van Andel, H.E. Coomans, Building up the the future from the past; Studies on the architecture and historic monuments in the Dutch Caribbean, Zutphen: De Walburg Pers, 1990, 268 pp., M.A. Newton, M. Coomans-Eustatia (eds.) - Rene van den Berg, James N. Sneddon, Studies in Sulawesi linguistics, Part I, 1989. NUSA, Linguistic studies of Indonesian and other languages in Indonesia, volume 31. Jakarta: Badan Penyelenggara Seri Nusa, Universitas Katolik Indonesia Atma Jaya. - Thomas Crump, H. Beukers, Red-hair medicine: Dutch-Japanese medical relations. Amsterdam/Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, Publications for the Netherlands Association of Japanese studies No. 5, 1991., A.M. Luyendijk-Elshout, M.E. van Opstall (eds.) - M. Heins, Kees P. Epskamp, Theatre in search of social change; The relative significance of different theatrical approaches. Den Haag: CESO Paperback no. 7, 1989. - Rudy De Iongh, Rainer Carle, Opera Batak; Das Wandertheater der Toba-Batak in Nord Sumatra. Schauspiele zur Währung kultureller Identität im nationalen Indonesischen Kontext. Veröffentlichungen des Seminars fur Indonesische und Südseesprachen der Universität Hamburg, Band 15/1 & 15/2 (2 Volumes), Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1990. - P.E. de Josselin de Jong, Birgit Rottger-Rossler, Rang und Ansehen bei den Makassar von Gowa (Süd-Sulawesi, Indonesien), Kölner Ethnologische Studien, Band 15. Dietrich Reimar Verlag, Berlin, 1989. 332 pp. text, notes, glossary, literature. - John Kleinen, Vo Nhan Tri, Vietnam’s economic policy since 1975. Singapore: ASEAN Economic research unit, Institute of Southeast Asian studies, 1990. xii + 295 pp. - H.M.J. Maier, David Banks, From class to culture; Social conscience in Malay novels since independence, Yale, 1987. - Th. C. van der Meij, Robyn Maxwell, Textiles of Southeast Asia; Tradition, trade and transformation. Melbourne/Oxford/Auckland/New York: Australian National Gallery/Oxford University Press. - A.E. Mills, Elinor Ochs, Culture and language development, Studies in the social and cultural foundations of language No. 6, Cambridge University Press, 227 + 10 pp. - Denis Monnerie, Frederick H. Damon, Death rituals and life in the societies of the Kula Ring, Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1989. 280 pp., maps, figs., bibliogr., Roy Wagner (eds.) - Denis Monnerie, Frederick H. Damon, From Muyuw to the Trobriands; Transformations along the northern side of the Kula ring, Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1990. xvi + 285 pp., maps, figs., illus., apps., bibliogr., index. - David S. Moyer, Jeremy Boissevain, Dutch dilemmas; Anthropologists look at the Netherlands, Assen/Maastricht: Van Gorcum, 1989, v + 186 pp., Jojada Verrips (eds.) - Gert Oostindie, B.H. Slicher van Bath, Indianen en Spanjaarden; Een ontmoeting tussen twee werelden, Latijns Amerika 1500-1800. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1989. 301 pp. - Parakitri, C.A.M. de Jong, Kompas 1965-1985; Een algemene krant met een katholieke achtergrond binnen het religieus pluralisme van Indonesie, Kampen: Kok, 1990. - C.A. van Peursen, J. van Baal, Mysterie als openbaring. Utrecht: ISOR, 1990. - Harry A. Poeze, R.A. Longmire, Soviet relations with South-East Asia; An historical survey. London-New York: Kegan Paul International, 1989, x + 176 pp. - Harry A. Poeze, Ann Swift, The road to Madiun; The Indonesian communist uprising of 1948. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Modern Indonesia Project (Monograph series 69), 1989, xii + 116 pp. - Alex van Stipriaan, Cornelis Ch. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and in Surinam 1791/5 - 1942, Assen/Maastricht: Van Gorcum, 1990. xii + 812 pp. - A. Teeuw, Keith Foulcher, Social commitment in literature and the arts: The Indonesian ‘Institute of People’s culture’ 1950-1965, Clayton, Victoria: Southeast Asian studies, Monash University (Centre of Southeast Asian studies), 1986, vii + 234 pp. - Elly Touwen-Bouwsma, T. Friend, The blue-eyed enemy; Japan against the West in Java and Luzon, 1942-1945. New Jersey: Princeton University press, 1988, 325 pp.

Hotspots of Cultural InnovationIn the 1960s, a long list of poets, writers, and musicians flocked to the Chelsea Hotel, 222 West 23rd Street, New York (Tippins). Among them Bob Dylan, who moved in at the end of 1964, Leonard Cohen, who wrote Take This Longing dedicated to singer Nico there, and Patti Smith who rented a room there together with Robert Mapplethorpe in 1969 (Smith; Bell; Simmons). They all benefited not just from the low rents, but also from the close, often intimate, presence of other residents who inspired them to explore new creative paths. Around the same time, across the Atlantic, the Indica Bookshop and Gallery, 6 Mason’s Yard, London played a similar role as a meeting place for musicians, artists and hangers-on. It was there, on the evening of 9 November 1966, that John Lennon attended a preview of Yoko Ono's first big solo exhibition, Unfinished Paintings and Objects. Legend has it that the two met as Lennon was climbing up the ladder of Ono’s installation work ‘Ceiling Painting’, and reaching out to a dangling magnifying glass in order to take a closer look at the single word ‘YES’ scribbled on a suspended placard (Campbell). It was not just Lennon’s first meeting with Yoko Ono, but also his first run into conceptual art. After this fateful evening, both Lennon’s private life and his artistry would never be the same again. There is already a rich body of literature on the geography of music production (Scott; Kloosterman; Watson Global Music City; Verboord and Brandellero). In most cases, these studies deal with the city or neighbourhood scales. Micro-geographies of concrete places are rarer, with some notable exceptions that focus on recording studios and on specific venues (cf. Gibson; Watson et al.; Watson Cultural Production; van Klyton). Our approach focuses on concrete places that act more like third spaces – something in between or even combining living and working. Such places enable frequent face-to-face meetings, both planned and serendipitous, which are crucial for the exchange of knowledge. These two spaces represent iconic cultural hotspots where innovative artists, notably (pop) musicians, came together in the 1960s. Because of their many famous visitors and residents, both spaces are well documented in (auto)biographies, monographs on art scenes in London and New York, as well as in newspapers. Below, we will explore how these two spaces played an important role at a time of cultural revolution, by connecting people and scenes to the micro geography of concrete places and by functioning as nodes of knowledge exchange and, hence, as milieus of innovation.Art Worlds, Scenes and Places The romantic view that artists are solitary geniuses was discarded already long ago and replaced by a conceptualization that sees them as part of broader social configurations, or art worlds. According to Howard Becker (34), these art worlds consist “of all the people necessary to the production of the characteristic works” – in other words, not just artists, but also “support personnel” such as sound engineers, editors, critics, and managers. Without this “resource pool” the production of art would be virtually impossible. Art worlds are also about the consumption of art. The concept of scene has been used to articulate the local processes of taste making and reputation building, as they “provide ways of social belonging attuned to the demands of a culture in which individuals increasingly define themselves” (Silver et al. 2295). Individuals who share certain aesthetic preferences come together, both socially and spatially (Currid) and locations such as cafés and nightclubs offer important settings where members of an art world may drink, eat, meet, gossip, and exchange knowledge. The urban fabric provides an important backdrop for these exchanges: as Jane Jacobs (181) observed, “old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must come from old buildings.” In order to function as relational spaces, these amenities have to meet two sets of conditions. The first set comprises the locational characteristics, which Durmaz identifies as centrality and proximity. The second set relates to socio-economic characteristics. From an economic perspective, the amenity has to be viable– either independently or through patronage or state subsidies. Becoming a cultural hotspot is not just a matter of good bookkeeping. The atmosphere of an amenity has to be tolerant towards forms of cultural and social experimentation and, arguably, even transgression. In addition, a successful space has to have attractors: persons who fulfil key roles in a particular art world in evaluation, curation, and gatekeeping. To what extent did the Indica Gallery and the Chelsea Hotel meet these two sets of conditions in the 1960s? We turn to this question now.A Hotel and a GalleryThe Indica Gallery and the Chelsea Hotel were both highly central – the former located right in the middle of St. James’s in the central London Borough of Westminster (cf. Kloosterman) and the latter close to Greenwich Village in Manhattan. In the post-war, these locations provided a vacant and fertile ground for artists, who moved in as firms and wealthier residents headed for the green suburbs. As Ramanathan recounts, “For artists, downtown New York, from Chambers Street in Tribeca to the Meatpacking District and Chelsea, was an ideal stomping ground. The neighbourhoods were full of old factories that had emptied out in the postwar years; they had room for art, if not crown molding and prewar charm” (Ramanathan). Similarly in London, “Despite its posh address the area [the area surrounding the Indica Gallery] then had a boho feel. William Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Anthony Blunt all had flats in the same street.” (Perry no pagination). Such central locations were essential to attract the desired attention and interest of key gatekeepers, as Barry Miles – one of Indica’s founding members - states: “In those days a gallery virtually had to be in Mayfair or else critics and buyers would not visit” (Miles 73). In addition, the Indica Gallery’s next-door neighbour was the Scotch of St James club. The then up and coming singer Marianne Faithfull, married to Indica founder John Dunbar, reportedly “needed to be seen” in this “trendy ‘in’ club for the new rock aristocracy” (Miles 73). Undoubtedly, their cultural importance was also linked to the fact that they were both located in well-connected budding global cities with a strong media presence (Krätke).Over and above location, these spaces also met important socio-economic conditions. In the 1960s, the neighbourhood surrounding the Chelsea Hotel was in transition with an abundance of available and affordable space. After moving out of the Chelsea Hotel, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe (Smith) had no difficulty finding a cheap loft to rent nearby. Rates in the Chelsea Hotel – when they were settled, that is - were incredibly low to current standards. According to Tippins (350), the typical Chelsea Hotel room rate in 1967 was $ 10 per week, which would amount to some $ 67.30 per week in 2013. Again, a more or less similar story can be told for the Indica Gallery. When Barry Miles, Peter Asher and John Dunbar founded the Gallery in September 1965, the premises were empty and the rent was low: "We paid 19 quid a week rent" according to John Dunbar (Perry). These cheap spaces provided fruitful economic conditions for cultural experimentation. Innovative relational spaces require not only accessibility in spatial and financial terms, but also an atmosphere conducive to cultural experimentation. This implies some kind of benevolent, preferably even stimulating, management that is willing and able to create such an atmosphere. At the Chelsea Hotel and Indica Gallery alike, those in charge were certainly not first and foremost focused on profit maximisation. Instead they were very much active members of the art worlds themselves, displaying a “taste for creative work” (Caves) and looking for ways in which their spaces could make a contribution to culture in a wider sense. This holds for Stanley Bard who ran the Chelsea Hotel for decades: “Working besides his father, Stanley {Bard} had gotten to know many of these people. He had attended their performances and exhibitions, read their books, and had been invited to their parties. Young and malleable, he soon came to see the world largely from their point of view” (Tippins 166). Such affinity with the artistic scene meant that Bard was more than accommodating. As Patti Smith recalls (100), “you weren’t immediately kicked out if you got behind on the rent … Mostly everybody owed Bard something”. While others recall a slightly less flexible attitude towards missed rents - “… the residents greatly appreciated a landlord who tolerated everything, except, quite naturally, a deficit” (Tippins 132) – the progressive atmosphere at the Chelsea was acknowledged by many others. For example, “[t]he greatest advantage of life at the Chelsea, [Arthur] Miller had to acknowledge, was that no one gave a damn what anyone else chose to do sexually” (Tippins 155).Similarly at the Indica Gallery, Miles, Asher and Dunbar were not first and foremost interested in making as much money as possible. The trio was itself drawn from various artistic fields: John Dunbar, an art critic for The Scotsman, wanted to set up an experimental gallery with Peter Asher (half of the pop duo Peter & Gordon) and Barry Miles (painter and writer). When asked about Indica's origins, Dunbar said: "There was a reason why we did Indica in the first place: to have fun" (Nevin). Recollections of the Gallery mention “a brew pot for the counterculture movement”, (Ramanathan) or “a haven for the free-wheeling imagination, a land of free expression and cultural collaboration where underground seeds were allowed to take root” (Campbell-Johnston).Part of the attraction of both spaces was the almost assured presence of interesting and famous persons, whom by virtue of their fame and appeal contributed to drawing others in. The roll calls of the Chelsea Hotel (Tippins) and of the Indica Gallery are impressive and partly overlapping: for instance, Allen Ginsberg was a notable visitor of the Indica Gallery and a prominent resident of the Chelsea Hotel, whereas Barry Miles was also a long-term resident of the Chelsea Hotel. The guest books read as a cultural who-is-who of the 1960s, spanning multiple artistic fields: there are not just (pop) musicians, but also writers, poets, actors, film makers, fashion designers, and assorted support personnel. If innovation in culture, as anywhere else, is coming up with new combinations and crossovers, then the cross-fertilisation fostered by the coming together of different art worlds in these spaces was conducive to these new combinations. Moreover, as the especially the biographies of Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Leonard Cohen, and Patti Smith testify, these spaces served as repositories of accessible cultural capital and as incubators for new ideas. Both Leonard Cohen and Patti Smith benefited from the presence of Harry Smith who curated the Anthology of American Music at the Chelsea Hotel. As Patti Smith (115) recalls: “We met a lot of intriguing people at the Chelsea but somehow when I close my eyes to think of them, Harry is always the first person I see”. Leonard Cohen was also drawn to Harry Smith: “Along with other assorted Chelsea residents and writers and music celebrities who were passing through, he would sit at Smith’s feet and listen to his labyrinthine monologue” (Simmons 197).Paul McCartney, actively scanning the city for new and different forms of cultural capital (Miles; Kloosterman) could tap into different art worlds through the networks centred on the Indica Gallery. Indeed he was credited with lending more than a helping hand to Indica over the years: “Miles and Dunbar bridged the gap between the avant-garde rebels and the rock stars of the day, principally through their friendship with Paul McCartney, who helped to put up the shop’s bookshelves, drew its flyers and designed its wrapping paper. Later when Indica ran into difficulties, he lent his friends several thousands of pounds to pay their creditors” (Sandbrook 526).Sheltered Spaces Inevitably, the rather lenient attitude towards money among those who managed these cultural breeding spaces led them to serious financial difficulties. The Indica Gallery closed two years after opening its doors. The Chelsea Hotel held out much longer, but the place went into a long period of decline and deterioration culminating in the removal of Stanley Bard as manager and banishment from the building in 2007 (Tippins). Notwithstanding their patchy record as viable business models, their role as cultural hotspots is beyond doubt. It is possibly because they offered a different kind of environment, partly sheltered from more mundane moneymaking considerations, that they could thrive as cultural hotspots (Brandellero and Kloosterman). Their central location, close to other amenities (such as night clubs, venues, cafés), the tolerant atmosphere towards deviant lifestyles (drugs, sex), and the continuous flow of key actors – musicians of course, but also other artists, managers and critics – also fostered cultural innovation. Reflecting on these two spaces nowadays brings a number of questions to the fore. We are witnessing an increasing upward pressure on rents in global cities – notably in London and New York. As cheap spaces become rarer, one may question the impact this will have on the gestation of new ideas (cf. Currid). If the examples of the Indica Gallery and the Chelsea Hotel are anything to go by, their instrumental role as cultural hotspots turned out to be financially unsustainable against the backdrop of a changing urban milieu. The question then is how can cities continue to provide the right set of conditions that allow such spaces to bud and thrive? As the Chelsea Hotel undergoes an alleged $40 million dollar renovation, which will turn it into a boutique hotel (Rich), the jury is still out on whether central urban locations are destined to become - to paraphrase John Lennon’s ‘In my life’, places which ‘had their moments’ – or mere repositories of past cultural achievements.ReferencesAnderson, P. “Watch this Space.” Sydney Morning Herald, 19 Apr. 2014.Becker, H.S. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.Bell, I. Once upon a Time: The Lives of Bob Dylan. Edinburgh/London: Mainstream Publishing, 2012.Brandellero, A.M.C. The Art of Being Different: Exploring Diversity in the Cultural Industries. Dissertation. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam, 2011.Brandellero, A.M.C., and R.C. Kloosterman. “Keeping the Market at Bay: Exploring the Loci of Innovation in the Cultural Industries.” Creative Industries Journal 3.1 (2010): 61-77.Campbell, J. “Review: A Life in Books: Barry Miles.” The Guardian, 20 Mar. 2010.Campbell-Johnston, R. “They All Wanted to Change the World.” The Times, 22 Nov. 2006Caves, R.E. Creative Industries: Contracts between Art and Commerce. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000.Currid, E. The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art, and Music Drive New York City. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.Durmaz, S.B. “Analyzing the Quality of Place: Creative Clusters in Soho and Beyoğlu.” Journal of Urban Design 20.1 (2015): 93-124.Gibson, C. “Recording Studios: Relational Spaces of Creativity in the City.” Built Environment 31.3 (2005): 192-207.Hutton, T.A. Cities and the Cultural Economy. London/New York: Routledge, 2016.Jacobs, J. The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York: Vintage Books, 1961.Jury, L. “Sixties Art Swings Back into London: Exhibition Brings to Life Decade of the 'Original Young British Artists'.” London Evening Standard, 3 Sep. 2013 Kloosterman, R.C. “Come Together: An Introduction to Music and the City.” Built Environment 31.3 (2005): 181-191.Krätke, S. “Global Media Cities in a World-Wide Urban Network.” European Planning Studies 11.6 (2003): 605-628.Miles, B. In the Sixties. London: Pimlico, 2003.Nevin, C. “Happening, Man!” The Independent, 21 Nov. 2006Norman, P. John Lennon: The Life. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008.Perry, G. “In This Humble Yard Our Art Boom was Born.” The Times, 11 Oct. 2006Ramanathan, L. “I, Y O K O.” The Washington Post, 10 May 2015.Rich, N. “Where the Walls Still Talk.” Vanity Fair, 8 Oct. 2013. Sandbrook, Dominic. White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties. London: Abacus, 2009. Scott, A.J. “The US Recorded Music Industry: On the Relations between Organization, Location, and Creativity in the Cultural Economy.” Environment and Planning A 31.11 (1999): 1965-1984.Silver, D., T.N. Clark, and C.J.N. Yanez . “Scenes: Social Context in an Age of Contingency.” Social Forces 88.5 (2010): 293-324.Simmons, S. I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen. London: Jonathan Cape, 2012.Smith, P. Just Kids. London: Bloomsbury, 2010.Tippins, S. Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York’s Legendary Chelsea Hotel. London/New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013.Van Klyton, A.C. “Space and Place in World Music Production.” City, Culture and Society 6.4 (2015): 101-108.Verboord, M., and A.M.C. Brandellero. “The Globalization of Popular Music, 1960-2010: A Multilevel Analysis of Music Flows.” Communication Research 2016. DOI: 10.1177/0093650215623834.Watson, A. “Global Music City: Knowledge and Geographical Proximity in London's Recorded Music Industry.” Area 40.1 (2008): 12-23.Watson, A. Cultural Production in and beyond the Recording Studio. London: Routledge, 2014.Watson, A., M. Hoyler, and C. Mager. “Spaces and Networks of Musical Creativity in the City.” Geography Compass 3.2 (2009): 856–878.

A Site for the Study of Ambience Deep in Melbourne’s subterranean belly lies a long, dark space dedicated to screen-based art. Built along disused train platforms, it’s even possible to hear the ghostly rumblings and clatter of trains passing alongside the length of the gallery on quiet days. Upon descending the single staircase leading into this dimly-lit space, visitors encounter a distinctive sensory immersion. A flicker of screens dapple the windowless vastness ahead, perhaps briefly highlighting entrances into smaller rooms or the faintly-outlined profiles of visitors. This space often houses time-based moving image artworks. The optical flicker and aural stirrings of adjacent works distract, luring visitors’ attention towards an elsewhere. Yet on other occasions, this gallery’s art is bounded by walls, private enclosures which absorb perceptions of time into the surrounding darkness. Some works lie dormant awaiting visitors’ intervention, while others rotate on endless loops, cycling by unheeded, at times creating an environment of visual and aural collision. A weak haze of daylight falls from above mid-way through the space, marking the gallery’s only exit – an escalator fitted with low glowing lights. This is a space of thematic and physical reinvention. Movable walls and a retractable mezzanine enable the 110 metre long, 15 metre wide and almost 10 metre high space to be reformed with each exhibition, as evidenced by the many exhibitions that this Screen Gallery has hosted since opening as a part of the Australian for the Moving Image (ACMI) in 2002. ACMI endured controversial beginnings over the public funds dedicated to its gallery, cinemas, public editing and games labs, TV production studio, and screen education programs. As media interrogation of ACMI’s role and purpose intensified, several pressing critical and public policy questions surfaced as to how visitors were engaging with and valuing this institution and its spaces. In this context, I undertook the first, in depth qualitative study of visitation to ACMI, so as to address these issues and also the dearth of supporting literature into museum visitation (beyond broad, quantitative analyses). Of particular interest was ACMI’s Screen Gallery, for it appeared to represent something experientially unique and historically distinctive as compared to museums and galleries of the past. I therefore undertook an ethnographic study of museum visitation to codify the expression of ACMI’s institutional remit in light of the modalities of its visitors’ experiences in the Gallery. This rich empirical material formed the basis of my study and also this article, an ethnography of the Screen Gallery’s ambience. My study was undertaken across two exhibitions, World without End and White Noise (2005). While WWE was thematically linear in its charting of the dawn of time, globalisation and apocalypse, visitor interaction was highly non-linear. The moving image was presented in a variety of forms and spaces, from the isolation of works in rooms, the cohabitation of the very large to very small in the gallery proper, to enclosures created by multiple screens, laser-triggered interactivity and even plastic bowls with which visitors could ‘capture’ projections of light. Where heterogeneity was embraced in WWE, WN offered a smoother and less rapturous environment. It presented works by artists regarded as leaders of recent practices in the abstraction of the moving image. Rather than recreating the free exploratory movement of WWE, the WN visitor was guided along one main corridor. Each work was situated in a room or space situated to the right-hand side of the passageway. This isolation created a deep sense of immersion and intimacy with each work. Low-level white noise was even played across the Gallery so as to absorb the aural ‘bleed’ from neighbouring works. For my study, I used qualitative ethnographic techniques to gather phenomenological material, namely longitudinal participant observation and interviews. The observations were conducted on a fortnightly basis for seven months. I typically spent two to three hours shadowing visitors as they moved through the Gallery, detailing patterns of interaction; from gross physical movement and speech, to the very subtle modalities of encounter: a faint smile, a hesitation, or lapsing into complete stillness. I specifically recruited visitors for interviews immediately after their visit so as to probe further into these phenomenological moments while their effects were still fresh. I also endeavoured to capture a wide cross-sample of responses by recruiting on the basis of age, gender and reason for visitation. Ten in-depth interviews (between 45 minutes and one hour) were undertaken, enquiring into the factors influencing impressions of the Gallery, such as previous museum and art experiences, and opinions about media art and technology. In this article, I particularly draw upon my interviews with Steven, Fleur, Heidi, Sean, Trevor and Mathew. These visitors’ commentaries were selected as they reflect upon the overall ambience of the Gallery–intimate recollections of moving through darkness and projections of light–rather than engagement with individual works. When referring to ambience, I borrow from Brian Eno’s 1978 manifesto of Ambient Music, as it offers a useful analogy for assessing the complexity within subtle aesthetic experiences, and more specifically, in a spatial environment generated by electronic means. An ambience is defined as an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence: a tint…Whereas the extant canned music companies proceed from the basis of regularizing environments by blanketing their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncrasies, Ambient Music is intended to enhance these. Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to ‘brighten’ the environment by adding stimulus to it… Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think…Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting. (Eno, "Ambient Music")While Eno’s definition specifically discusses a listening space, it is comparable to the predominantly digital and visual gallery environment as it elicits similar states of attention, such as calm reflection, or even a peaceful emptying of thoughts. I propose that ACMI’s darkened Screen Gallery creates an exploratory space for such intimate, bodily, subjective experiences. I firstly locate this study within the genealogical context of visitor interaction in museum exhibition environments. We then follow the visitors through the Gallery. As the nuances of their journey are presented, I assess the significance of an alternate model for presenting art which encourages ‘active’ aesthetic experience by privileging ambiguity and subtlety–yet heightened interactivity–and is similar to the systemic complexity Eno accords his Ambient Music. Navigating Museums in the Past The first public museums appeared in the context of the emerging liberal democratic state as both a product and articulation of the early stages of modernity in the nineteenth century. Museum practitioners enforced boundaries by prescribing visitors’ routes architecturally, by presenting museum objects within firm knowledge categories, and by separating visitors from objects with glass cabinets. By making their objects publicly accessible and tightly governing visitors’ parameters of spatial interaction, museums could enforce a pedagogical regulation of moral codes, an expression of ‘governmentality’ which constituted the individual as both a subject and object of knowledge (Bennett "Birth", Culture; Hooper-Greenhill). The advent of high modernism in the mid-twentieth century enforced positivist doctrines through a firm direction of visitor movement, exemplified by Le Corbusier’s Musée à Croissance Illimitée (1939) and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York (1959) (Davey 36). In more recent stages of modernity, architecture has attempted to reconcile the singular authority imposed by a building’s design. Robert Venturi, a key theorist of post-modern architecture, argued that the museum’s pedagogical failure to achieve social and political reforms was due to the purist and universalist values expressed within modern architecture. He proposed that post-modern architecture could challenge aesthetic modernism with a playful hybridity which emphasises symbolism and sculptural forms in architecture, and expresses a more diverse set of pluralist ideologies. Examples might include Hans Hollein’s Abteiberg Museum (1972-1982), or the National Museum of Australia in Canberra (2001). Contemporary attempts to design museum interactions reflect the aspirations of the ‘new museum.’ They similarly address a pluralist agenda, but mediate increasingly individualised forms of participation though highly interactive technological interfaces (Message). Commenting about art galleries, Lev Manovich greets this shift with some pessimism. He argues that the high art of the ‘white cube’ gallery is now confronting its ‘ideological enemy’, the ‘black box’, a historically ‘lower’ art form of cinema theatre (10). He claims that the history of spatial experimentation in art galleries is being reversed as much moving image art has been exhibited using a video projection in a darkened room, thereby limiting visitor participation to earlier, static forms of engagement. However, he proposes that new technologies could have an important presence and role in cultural institutions as an ‘augmented space’, in which layers of data overlay physical space. He queries whether this could create new possibilities for spatial interaction, such that cultural institutions might play a progressive role in exploring new futures (14). The Screen Gallery at ACMI embodies the characteristics of the ‘new museum’ as far as it demands multiple modalities of participation in a technological environment. It could perhaps also be regarded an experimental ‘black box’ in that it houses multiple screens, yet, as we shall see, elicits participation unbefitting of a cinema. We therefore turn now to examine visitors’ observations of the Gallery’s design, thereby garnering the experiential significance of passage through a moving image art space. Descending into Darkness Descending the staircase into the Gallery is a process of proceeding into shadows. The blackened cavity (fig. 1) therefore looms ahead as a clear visceral departure from the bustle of Federation Square above (fig. 2), and the clean brightness of ACMI’s foyer (fig. 3). Figure 1: Descent into ACMI's Screen Gallery Figure 2: ACMI at Federation Square, Melbourne Figure 3: ACMI’s foyer One visitor, Fleur, described this passage as a sense of going “deep underground,” where the affective power of darkness overwhelmed other sensory details: “I can’t picture it in my mind – sort of where the gallery finishes… And it’s perfect, it’s dark, and it’s… quiet-ish.” Many visitors found that an entrance softened by shadows added a trace of suspense to the beginnings of their journey. Heidi described how, “because it’s dark and you can’t actually see the people walking about… it’s a little bit more mysterious.” Fleur similarly remarked that “you’re not quite sure what you’re going to meet when you go around. And there’s a certain anticipation.” Steven found that the ambiguity surrounding the conventions of procedure through Gallery was “quite interesting, that experience of being a little bit unsure of where you’re going or not being able to see.” He attributed feelings of disorientation to the way the deep shadows of the Gallery routinely obscured measurement of time: “it’s that darkness that makes it a place where it’s like a time sync… You could spend hours in there… You sort of lose track of time… The darkness kind of contributes to that.” Multiple Pathways The ambiguity of the Gallery compelled visitors to actively engage with the space by developing their own rules for procedure. For example, Sean described how darkness and minimal use of signage generated multiple possibilities for passage: “you kind of need to wander through and guide yourself. It’s fairly dark as well and there aren’t any signs saying ‘Come this way,’ and it was only by sort of accident we found some of the spaces down the very back. Because, it’s very dark… We could very well have missed that.” Katrina similarly explained how she developed a participatory journey through movement: “when you first walk in, it just feels like empty space, and not exactly sure what’s going on and what to look at… and you think nothing is going on, so you have to kind of walk around and get a feel for it.” Steven used this participatory movement to navigate. He remarked that “there’s a kind of basic ‘what’s next?’… When you got down you could see maybe about four works immediately... There’s a kind of choice about ‘this is the one I’ll pay attention to first’, or ‘look, there’s this other one over there – that looks interesting, I might go and come back to this’. So, there’s a kind of charting of the trip through the exhibition.” Therefore while ambiguous rules for procedure undermine traditional forms of interaction in the museum, they prompted visitors to draw upon their sensory perception to construct a self-guided and exploratory path of engagement. However, mystery and ambiguity can also complicate visitors’ sense of self determination. Fleur noted how crossing the threshold into a space without clear conventions for procedure could challenge some visitors: “you have to commit yourself to go into a space like that, and I think the first time, when you’re not sure what’s down there… I think people going there for the first time would probably… find it difficult.” Trevor found this to be the case, objecting that “the part that doesn’t work, is that it doesn’t work as a space that’s easy to get around.” These comments suggest that an ‘unintended consequence’ (Beck) of relaxing contemporary museum conventions to encourage greater visitor autonomy, can be the contrary effect of making navigation more difficult. Visitors struggling to negotiate these conditions may find themselves subject to what Daniel Palmer terms the ‘paradox of user control’, in which contemporary forms of choice prove to be illusory, as they inhibit an individual’s freedom through ‘soft’ forms of domination. The ambiguity created by the Gallery’s darkness therefore brings two disparate – if not contradictory – tendencies together, as concluded by Fleur: “The darkness is – it’s both an advantage and a disadvantage… You can’t sort of see each other as well, but there’s also a bit of freedom in that. In that it sort of goes both ways.” A Journey of Subtle Cues Several strategies to ameliorate disorienting navigation experiences were employed in the Screen Gallery, attempting to create new possibilities for meaningful interaction. Some reflect typical curatorial conventions, such as mounting didactic panels along walls and strategically placing staff as guides. However, visitors frequently eschewed these markers and were instead drawn powerfully to affective conventions, including the shadings of light and sound. Sean noted how small beacons of light at foot level were prominent features, as they illuminated the entrances to rooms and corridors: “That’s your over-whelming impression, because it’s dark and there’s just these feature spotlights… and they’re an interesting device, because they sort of lead your eye through the space as well, and say ‘oh that’s where the next event is, there’s a spotlight over there’.” The luminescence of artworks served a similar purpose, for within “the darkness, the boundaries are less visible, and… you’re drawn to the light, you know, you’re drawn to those screens.” He found that directional sound above artworks also created a comparable effect: “I was aware of the fact that things were quiet until you approached the right spot and obviously it’s where the sound was focussed.” These conventions reflect what Trini Castelli calls ‘soft design’, by which space is made cohesively sensual (Glibb in Mitchell 87-88). The Gallery uses light and sound to fashions this visceral ‘feeling’ of spatial continuity, a seamless ambience. Paul described how this had a pleasurable effect, where the “atmosphere of the space” created “a very nice place to be… Lots of low lighting.” Fleur similarly recalled lasting somatic impressions: “It’s a bit like a cave, I suppose… The atmosphere is so different… it’s warm, I find it quite a relaxing place to be, I find it quite calm…Yeah, it has that feeling of private space to it.” Soft design therefore tempers the spatial severity of museums past through this sensuous ‘participatory environment.’ Interaction with art therefore becomes, as Steven enthused, “an exhibition experience” where “it’s as much (for me) the experience of moving between works as attending to the work itself… That seems really prominent in the experience, that it’s not these kind of isolated, individual works, they’re in relation to each other.” Disruptions to this experiential continuity – what Eno had described as a ‘stimulus’ – were subject to harsh judgement. When asked why he preferred to stand against the back wall of a room, rather than take a seat on the chairs provided, Matthew protested that “the spotlight was on those frigging couches, who wants to sit there? That would’ve been horrible.” Visitors clearly expressed a preference towards a form of spatial interaction in which curatorial conventions heighten, rather than detract from, the immersive dynamic of the museum environment. They showed how the feelings of ambiguity and suspense which absorbed them in the Gallery’s entrance gradually began to dissipate. In their place, a preference arose for conventions which maintained the Gallery’s immersive continuity, and where cues such as focused sound and footlights had a calming effect, and created a cohesive sensual journey through the dark. The Ambience of Art Space Visitors’ comments acquire an additional significance when examined in light of Eno’s earlier definition of what he called Ambient Music. He suggested that even in relative stillness, there exists a capacity for active forms of listening which create a “space to think” and generate a “quiet interest.” In addition, and perhaps most importantly, these active forms of listening are augmented by the “atmospheric idiosyncrasies” which are derived from conditions of uncertainty. As I have shown, the darkened Screen Gallery obscures the rules for visitor participation and consequently elicits doubt and hesitation. Visitors must self-navigate and be guided by sensory perception, responding to the kinaesthetic touch of light on skin and the subtle drifts of sound to constructing a journey through the enveloping darkness. This spatial ambience can therefore be understood as the specific condition which make the Gallery a fertile site for new exchanges between visitors, artworks and curation within the museum. Arjun Mulder defines this kind of dynamism in architectural space as a form of systemic interactivity, the “default state of any living system,” in the way that any system can be considered interactive if it links into, and affects change upon another (Mulder 332). Therefore while museums have historically been spaces for interaction, they have not always been interactive spaces in the sense described by Mulder, where visitor participation and processes of exchange are heightened by the conditions of ambience, and can compel self-determined journeys of visitor enquiry and feelings of relaxation and immersion. ACMI’s Screen Gallery has therefore come to define its practices by heightening these forms of encounter, and elevating the affective possibilities for interacting with art. Traditional museum conventions have been challenged by playing with experiential dynamics. These practices create an ambience which is particular to the gallery, and historically unlike the experiential ecologies of preceding forms of museum, gallery or moving space, be it the white cube or a simple ‘black box’ room for video projections. This perhaps signifies a distinctive moment in the genealogy of the museum, indicating how one instance of an art environment’s ambience can become a rubric for new forms of visitor interaction. References Beck, Ulrich. “The Reinvention of Politics: Towards a Theory of Reflexive Modernization.” Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Eds. Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash. Cambridge: Politics, 1994. 1-55. Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London; New York: Routledge. 1995. ———. “Culture and Governmentality.” Foucault, Cultural Studies and Governmentality. Eds. J.Z. Bratich, J. Packer, and C. McCarthy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. 47-64. Davey, Peter. “Museums in an N-Dimensional World.” The Architectural Review 1242 (2000): 36-37. Eno, Brian. “Resonant Complexity.” Whole Earth Review (Summer 1994): 42-43. ———. “Ambient Music.” A Year with Swollen Appendices: The Diary of Brian Eno. London: Faber and Faber, 1996. 293-297. Hooper-Greenhill, Eileen. “Museums and Education for the 21st Century.” Museum and Gallery Education. London: Leicester University Press, 1991. 187-193. Manovich, Lev. “The Poetics of Augmented Space: Learning from Prada.” 27 April 2010 ‹http://creativetechnology.salford.ac.uk/fuchs/modules/creative_technology/architecture/manovich_augmented_space.pdf›. Message, Kylie. “The New Museum.” Theory, Culture and Society: Special Issue on Problematizing Global Knowledge. Eds. Mike Featherstone, Couze Venn, and Ryan Bishop, John Phillips. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006. 603-606. Mitchell, T. C. Redefining Designing: From Form to Experience. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1993. Mulder, Arjun. “The Object of Interactivity.” NOX: Machining Architecture. London: Thames and Hudson, 2004. 332-340. Palmer, Daniel. “The Paradox of User Control.” Melbourne Digital Art and Culture 2003 Conference Proceedings. Melbourne: RMIT, 2003. 167-172. Venturi, Robert. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966.

In the 1960s, especially in the West, art that was revelatory and art that was revealing operated at opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum. On the side of the revelatory we can think of encounters synonymous with modernism, in which an expressionist painting was revelatory of the Freudian unconscious, or a Barnett Newman the revelatory intensity of the sublime. By contrast, the impulse to reveal in 1960s art was rooted in post-Duchampian practice, implicating artists as different as Lynda Benglis and Richard Hamilton, who mined the potential of an art that was without essence. If revelatory art underscored modernism’s transcendental conviction, critically revealing work tested its discursive rules and institutional conventions. Of course, nothing in history happens as neatly as this suggests, but what is clear is how polarized the language of artistic revelation was throughout the 1960s. With the international spread of minimalism, pop art, and fluxus, provisional reveals eventually dominated art-historical discourse. Aesthetic conviction, with its spiritual undertones, was haunted by its demystification. In the words of Donald Judd: “a work needs only to be interesting” (184).That art galleries could be sites of timely socio-political issues, rather than timeless intuitions undersigned by medium specificity, is one of the more familiar origin stories of postmodernism. Few artists symbolize this shift more than Hans Haacke, whose 2019 exhibition All Connected, at the New Museum, New York, examined the legacy of his outward-looking work. Born in Germany in 1936, and a New Yorker since 1965, Haacke has been linked to the term “institutional critique” since the mid 1980s, after Mel Ramsden’s coining in 1975, and the increased recognition of kindred spirits such as Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Michael Asher, Martha Rosler, Robert Smithson, Daniel Buren, and Marcel Broodthaers. These artists have featured in books and essays by the likes of Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster, and Yve-Alain Bois, but they are also known for their own contributions to art discourse, producing hybrid conceptions of the intellectual postmodern artist as historian, critic and curator.Haacke was initially fascinated by kinetic sculpture in the early 1960s, taking inspiration from op art, systems art, and machine-oriented research collectives such as Zero (Germany), Gruppo N (Italy) and GRAV (France, an acronym of Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel). Towards the end of the decade he started to produce more overtly socio-political work, creating what would become a classic piece from this period, Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 1 (1969). Here, in a solo exhibition at New York’s Howard Wise Gallery, the artist invited viewers to mark their birthplaces and places of residence on a map. Questioning the statistical demography of the Gallery’s avant-garde attendees, the exhibition anticipated the meticulous sociological character of much of his practice to come, grounding New York art – the centre of the art world – in local, social, and economic fabrics.In the forward to the catalogue of All Connected, New Museum Director Lisa Philips claims that Haacke’s survey exhibition provided a chance to reflect on the artist’s prescience, especially given the flourishing of art activism over the last five or so years. Philips pressed the issue of why no other American art institution had mounted a retrospective of his work in three decades, since his previous survey, Unfinished Business, at the New Museum in 1986, at its former, and much smaller, Soho digs (8). It suggests that other institutions have deemed Haacke’s work too risky, generating too much political heat for them to handle. It’s a reputation the artist has cultivated since the Guggenheim Museum famously cancelled his 1971 exhibition after learning his intended work, Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System as of May 1, 1971 (1971) involved research into dubious New York real estate dealings. Guggenheim director Thomas Messer defended the censorship at the time, going so far as to describe it as an “alien substance that had entered the art museum organism” (Haacke, Framing 138). Exposé was this substance Messer dare not name: art that was too revealing, too journalistic, too partisan, and too politically viscid. (Three years later, Haacke got his own back with Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Board of Trustees, 1974, exposing then Guggenheim board members’ connections to the copper industry in Chile, where socialist president Salvador Allende had just been overthrown with US backing.) All Connected foregrounded these institutional reveals from time past, at a moment in 2019 when the moral accountability of the art institution was on the art world’s collective mind. The exhibition followed high-profile protests at New York’s Whitney Museum and Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the Louvre, and the British Museum. These and other arts organisations have increasingly faced pressures, fostered by social media, to end ties with unethical donors, sponsors, and board members, with activist groups protesting institutional affiliations ranging from immigration detention centre management to opioid and teargas manufacturing. An awareness of the limits of individual agency and autonomy undoubtedly defines this era, with social media platforms intensifying the encumbrances of individual, group, and organisational identities. Hans Haacke, Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 1, 1969 Hans Haacke, Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 2, 1969-71Unfinished BusinessUnderscoring Haacke’s activist credentials, Philips describes him as “a model of how to live ethically and empathetically in the world today”, and as a beacon of light amidst the “extreme political and economic uncertainty” of the present, Trump-presidency-calamity moment (7). This was markedly different to how Haacke’s previous New York retrospective, Unfinished Business, was received, which bore the weight of being the artist’s first museum exhibition in New York following the Guggenheim controversy. In the catalogue to Haacke’s 1986 exhibition, then New Museum director Marcia Tucker introduced his work as a challenge, cautiously claiming that he poses “trenchant questions” and that the institution accepts “the difficulties and contradictions” inherent to any museum staging of his work (6).Philips’s and Tucker’s distinct perspectives on Haacke’s practice – one as heroically ethical, the other as a sobering critical challenge – exemplify broader shifts in the perception of institutional critique (the art of the socio-political reveal) over this thirty-year period. In the words of Pamela M. Lee, between 1986 and 2019 the art world has undergone a “seismic transformation”, becoming “a sphere of influence at once more rapacious, acquisitive, and overweening but arguably more democratizing and ecumenical with respect to new audiences and artists involved” (87). Haacke’s reputation over this period has taken a similar shift, from him being a controversial opponent of art’s autonomy (an erudite postmodern conceptualist) to a figurehead for moral integrity and cohesive artistic experimentation.As Rosalyn Deutsche pointed out in the catalogue to Haacke’s 1986 exhibition, a potential trap of such a retrospective is that, through biographical positioning, Haacke might be seen as an “exemplary political artist” (210). With this, the specific political issues motivating his work would be overshadowed by the perception of the “great artist” – someone who brings single-issue politics into the narrative of postmodern art, but at the expense of the issues themselves. This is exactly what Douglas Crimp discovered in Unfinished Business. In a 1987 reflection on the show, Crimp argued that, when compared with an AIDS-themed display, Homo Video, staged at the New Museum at the same time, reviewers of Haacke’s exhibition tended to analyse his politics “within the context of the individual artist’s body of work … . Political issues became secondary to the aesthetic strategies of the producer” (34). Crimp, whose activism would be at the forefront of his career in subsequent years, was surprised at how Homo Video and Unfinished Business spawned different readings. Whereas works in the former exhibition tended to be addressed in terms of the artists personal and partisan politics, Haacke’s prompted reflection on the aesthetics-politics juxtaposition itself. For Crimp, the fact that “there was no mediation between these two shows”, spoke volumes about the divisions between political and activist art at the time.New York Times critic Michael Brenson, reiterating a comment made by Fredric Jameson in the catalogue for Unfinished Business, describes the timeless appearance of Haacke’s work in 1986, which is “surprising for an artist whose work is in some way about ideology and history” (Brenson). The implication is that the artist gives a surprisingly long aesthetic afterlife to the politically specific – to ordinarily short shelf-life issues. In this mode of critical postmodernism in which we are unable to distinguish clearly between intervening in and merely reproducing the logic of the system, Haacke is seen as an astute director of an albeit ambiguous push and pull between political specificity and aesthetic irreducibility, political externality and the internalist mode of art about art. Jameson, while granting that Haacke’s work highlights the need to reinvent the role of the “ruling class” in the complex, globalised socio-economic situation of postmodernism, claims that it does so as representative of the “new intellectual problematic” of postmodernism. Haacke, according Jameson, stages postmodernism’s “crisis of ‘mapping’” whereby capitalism’s totalizing, systemic forms are “handled” (note that he avoids “critiqued” or “challenged”) by focusing on their manifestation through particular (“micro-public”) institutional means (49, 50).We can think of the above examples as constituting the postmodern version of Haacke, who frames very specific political issues on the one hand, and the limitless incorporative power of appropriative practice on the other. To say this another way, Haacke, circa 1986, points to specific sites of power struggle at the same time as revealing their generic absorption by an art-world system grown accustomed to its “duplicate anything” parameters. For all of his political intent, the artistic realm, totalised in accordance with the postmodern image, is ultimately where many thought his gestures remained. The philosopher turned art critic Arthur Danto, in a negative review of Haacke’s exhibition, portrayed institutional critique as part of an age-old business of purifying art, maintaining that Haacke’s “crude” and “heavy-handed” practice is blind to how art institutions have always relied on some form of critique in order for them to continue being respected “brokers of spirit”. This perception – of Haacke’s “external” critiques merely serving to “internally” strengthen existing art structures – was reiterated by Leo Steinberg. Supportively misconstruing the artist in the exhibition catalogue, Steinberg writes that Haacke’s “political message, by dint of dissonance, becomes grating and shrill – but shrill within the art context. And while its political effectiveness is probably minimal, its effect on Minimal art may well be profound” (15). Hans Haacke, MOMA Poll, 1970 All ConnectedSo, what do we make of the transformed reception of Haacke’s work since the late 1980s: from a postmodern ouroboros of “politicizing aesthetics and aestheticizing politics” to a revelatory exemplar of art’s moral power? At a period in the late 1980s when the culture wars were in full swing and yet activist groups remained on the margins of what would become a “mainstream” art world, Unfinished Business was, perhaps, blindingly relevant to its times. Unusually for a retrospective, it provided little historical distance for its subject, with Haacke becoming a victim of the era’s propensity to “compartmentalize the interpretive registers of inside and outside and the terms corresponding to such spatial­izing coordinates” (Lee 83).If commentary surrounding this 2019 retrospective is anything to go by, politics no longer performs such a parasitic, oppositional or even dialectical relation to art; no longer is the political regarded as a real-world intrusion into the formal, discerning, longue-durée field of aesthetics. The fact that protests inside the museum have become more visible and vociferous in recent years testifies to this shift. For Jason Farrago, in his review of All Connected for the New York Times, “the fact that no person and no artwork stands alone, that all of us are enmeshed in systems of economic and social power, is for anyone under 40 a statement of the obvious”. For Alyssa Battistoni, in Frieze magazine, “if institutional critique is a practice, it is hard to see where it is better embodied than in organizing a union, strike or boycott”.Some responders to All Connected, such as Ben Lewis, acknowledge how difficult it is to extract a single critical or political strategy from Haacke’s body of work; however, we can say that, in general, earlier postmodern questions concerning the aestheticisation of the socio-political reveal no longer dominates the reception of his practice. Today, rather than treating art and politics are two separate but related entities, like form is to content, better ideas circulate, such as those espoused by Bruno Latour and Jacques Rancière, for whom what counts as political is not determined by a specific program, medium or forum, but by the capacity of any actor-network to disrupt and change a normative social fabric. Compare Jameson’s claim that Haacke’s corporate and museological tropes are “dead forms” – through which “no subject-position speaks, not even in protest” (38) – with Battistoni’s, who, seeing Haacke’s activism as implicit, asks the reader: “how can we take the relationship between art and politics as seriously as Haacke has insisted we must?”Crimp’s concern that Unfinished Business perpetuated an image of the artist as distant from the “political stakes” of his work did not carry through to All Connected, whose respondents were less vexed about the relation between art and politics, with many noting its timeliness. The New Museum was, ironically, undergoing its own equity crisis in the months leading up to the exhibition, with newly unionised staff fighting with the Museum over workers’ salaries and healthcare even as it organised to build a new $89-million Rem Koolhaas-designed extension. Battistoni addressed these disputes at-length, claiming the protests “crystallize perfectly the changes that have shaped the world over the half-century of Haacke’s career, and especially over the 33 years since his last New Museum exhibition”. Of note is how little attention Battistoni pays to Haacke’s artistic methods when recounting his assumed solidarity with these disputes, suggesting that works such as Creating Consent (1981), Helmosboro Country (1990), and Standortkultur (Corporate Culture) (1997) – which pivot on art’s public image versus its corporate umbilical cord – do not convey some special aesthetico-political insight into a totalizing capitalist system. Instead, “he has simply been an astute and honest observer long enough to remind us that our current state of affairs has been in formation for decades”.Hans Haacke, News, 1969/2008 Hans Haacke, Wide White Flow, 1967/2008 Showing Systems Early on in the 1960s, Haacke was influenced by the American critic, artist, and curator Jack Burnham, who in a 1968 essay, “Systems Esthetics” for Artforum, inaugurated the loose conceptualist paradigm that would become known as “systems art”. Here, against Greenbergian formalism and what he saw as the “craft fetishism” of modernism, Burnham argues that “change emanates, not from things, but from the way things are done” (30). Burnham thought that emergent contemporary artists were intuitively aware of the importance of the systems approach: the significant artist in 1968 “strives to reduce the technical and psychical distance between his artistic output and the productive means of society”, and pays particular attention to relationships between organic and non-organic systems (31).As Michael Fried observed of minimalism in his now legendary 1967 essay Art and Objecthood, this shift in sixties art – signalled by the widespread interest in the systematic – entailed a turn towards the spatial, institutional, and societal contexts of receivership. For Burnham, art is not about “material entities” that beautify or modify the environment; rather, art exists “in relations between people and between people and the components of their environment” (31). At the forefront of his mind was land art, computer art, and research-driven conceptualist practice, which, against Fried, has “no contrived confines such as the theatre proscenium or picture frame” (32). In a 1969 lecture at the Guggenheim, Burnham confessed that his research concerned not just art as a distinct entity, but aesthetics in its broadest possible sense, declaring “as far as art is concerned, I’m not particularly interested in it. I believe that aesthetics exists in revelation” (Ragain).Working under the aegis of Burnham’s systems art, Haacke was shaken by the tumultuous and televised politics of late-1960s America – a time when, according to Joan Didion, a “demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community” (41). Haacke cites Martin Luther King’s assassination as an “incident that made me understand that, in addition to what I had called physical and biological systems, there are also social systems and that art is an integral part of the universe of social systems” (Haacke, Conversation 222). Haacke created News (1969) in response to this awareness, comprising a (pre-Twitter) telex machine that endlessly spits out live news updates from wire services, piling up rolls and rolls of paper on the floor of the exhibition space over the course of its display. Echoing Burnham’s idea of the artist as a programmer whose job is to “prepare new codes and analyze data”, News nonetheless presents the museum as anything but immune from politics, and technological systems as anything but impersonal (32).This intensification of social responsibility in Haacke’s work sets him apart from other, arguably more reductive techno-scientific systems artists such as Sonia Sheridan and Les Levine. The gradual transformation of his ecological and quasi-scientific sculptural experiments from 1968 onwards could almost be seen as making a mockery of the anthropocentrism described in Fried’s 1967 critique. Here, Fried claims not only that the literalness of minimalist work amounts to an emphasis on shape and spatial presence over pictorial composition, but also, in this “theatricality of objecthood” literalness paradoxically mirrors (153). At times in Fried’s essay the minimalist art object reads as a mute form of sociality, the spatial presence filled by the conscious experience of looking – the theatrical relationship itself put on view. Fried thought that viewers of minimalism were presented with themselves in relation to the entire world as object, to which they were asked not to respond in an engaged formalist sense but (generically) to react. Pre-empting the rise of conceptual art and the sociological experiments of post-conceptualist practice, Fried, unapprovingly, argues that minimalist artists unleash an anthropomorphism that “must somehow confront the beholder” (154).Haacke, who admits he has “always been sympathetic to so-called Minimal art” (Haacke, A Conversation 26) embraced the human subject around the same time that Fried’s essay was published. While Fried would have viewed this move as further illustrating the minimalist tendency towards anthropomorphic confrontation, it would be more accurate to describe Haacke’s subsequent works as social-environmental barometers. Haacke began staging interactions which, however dry or administrative, framed the interplays of culture and nature, inside and outside, private and public spheres, expanding art’s definition by looking to the social circulation and economy that supported it.Haacke’s approach – which seems largely driven to show, to reveal – anticipates the viewer in a way that Fried would disapprove, for whom absorbed viewers, and the irreduction of gestalt to shape, are the by-products of assessments of aesthetic quality. For Donald Judd, the promotion of interest over conviction signalled scepticism about Clement Greenberg’s quality standards; it was a way of acknowledging the limitations of qualitative judgement, and, perhaps, of knowledge more generally. In this way, minimalism’s aesthetic relations are not framed so much as allowed to “go on and on” – the artists’ doubt about aesthetic value producing this ongoing temporal quality, which conviction supposedly lacks.In contrast to Unfinished Business, the placing of Haacke’s early sixties works adjacent to his later, more political works in All Connected revealed something other than the tensions between postmodern socio-political reveal and modernist-formalist revelation. The question of whether to intervene in an operating system – whether to let such a system go on and on – was raised throughout the exhibition, literally and metaphorically. To be faced with the interactions of physical, biological, and social systems (in Condensation Cube, 1963-67, and Wide White Flow, 1967/2008, but also in later works like MetroMobiltan, 1985) is to be faced with the question of change and one’s place in it. Framing systems in full swing, at their best, Haacke’s kinetic and environmental works suggest two things: 1. That the systems on display will be ongoing if their component parts aren’t altered; and 2. Any alteration will alter the system as a whole, in minor or significant ways. Applied to his practice more generally, what Haacke’s work hinges on is whether or not one perceives oneself as part of its systemic relations. To see oneself implicated is to see beyond the work’s literal forms and representations. Here, systemic imbrication equates to moral realisation: one’s capacity to alter the system as the question of what to do. Unlike the phenomenology-oriented minimalists, the viewer’s participation is not always assumed in Haacke’s work, who follows a more hermeneutic model. In fact, Haacke’s systems are often circular, highlighting participation as a conscious disruption of flow rather than an obligation that emanates from a particular work (148).This is a theatrical scenario as Fried describes it, but it is far from an abandonment of the issue of profound value. In fact, if we accept that Haacke’s work foregrounds intervention as a moral choice, it is closer to Fried’s own rallying cry for conviction in aesthetic judgement. As Rex Butler has argued, Fried’s advocacy of conviction over sceptical interest can be understood as dialectical in the Hegelian sense: conviction is the overcoming of scepticism, in a similar way that Geist, or spirit, for Hegel, is “the very split between subject and object, in which each makes the other possible” (Butler). What is advanced for Fried is the idea of “a scepticism that can be remarked only from the position of conviction and a conviction that can speak of itself only as this scepticism” (for instance, in his attempt to overcome his scepticism of literalist art on the basis of its scepticism). Strong and unequivocal feelings in Fried’s writing are informed by weak and indeterminate feeling, just as moral conviction in Haacke – the feeling that I, the viewer, should do something – emerges from an awareness that the system will continue to function fine without me. In other words, before being read as “a barometer of the changing and charged atmosphere of the public sphere” (Sutton 16), the impact of Haacke’s work depends upon an initial revelation. It is the realisation not just that one is embroiled in a series of “invisible but fundamental” relations greater than oneself, but that, in responding to seemingly sovereign social systems, the question of our involvement is a moral one, a claim for determination founded through an overcoming of the systemic (Fry 31).Haacke’s at once open and closed works suit the logic of our algorithmic age, where viewers have to shift constantly from a position of being targeted to one of finding for oneself. Peculiarly, when Haacke’s online digital polls in All Connected were hacked by activists (who randomized statistical responses in order to compel the Museum “to redress their continuing complacency in capitalism”) the culprits claimed they did it in sympathy with his work, not in spite of it: “we see our work as extending and conversing with Haacke’s, an artist and thinker who has been a source of inspiration to us both” (Hakim). This response – undermining done with veneration – is indicative of the complicated legacy of his work today. Haacke’s influence on artists such as Tania Bruguera, Sam Durant, Forensic Architecture, Laura Poitras, Carsten Höller, and Andrea Fraser has less to do with a particular political ideal than with his unique promotion of journalistic suspicion and moral revelation in forms of systems mapping. It suggests a coda be added to the sentiment of All Connected: all might not be revealed, but how we respond matters. Hans Haacke, Large Condensation Cube, 1963–67ReferencesBattistoni, Alyssa. “After a Contract Fight with Its Workers, the New Museum Opens Hans Haacke’s ‘All Connected’.” Frieze 208 (2019).Bishara, Hakim. “Hans Haacke Gets Hacked by Activists at the New Museum.” Hyperallergic 21 Jan. 2010. <https://hyperallergic.com/538413/hans-haacke-gets-hacked-by-activists-at-the-new-museum/>.Brenson, Michael. “Art: In Political Tone, Works by Hans Haacke.” New York Times 19 Dec. 1988. <https://www.nytimes.com/1986/12/19/arts/artin-political-tone-worksby-hans-haacke.html>.Buchloh, Benjamin. “Hans Haacke: Memory and Instrumental Reason.” Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry. Cambridge: MIT P, 2000.Burnham, Jack. “Systems Esthetics.” Artforum 7.1 (1968).Butler, Rex. “Art and Objecthood: Fried against Fried.” Nonsite 22 (2017). <https://nonsite.org/feature/art-and-objecthood>.Carrion-Murayari, Gary, and Massimiliano Gioni (eds.). Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon and New Museum, 2019.Crimp, Douglas. “Strategies of Public Address: Which Media, Which Publics?” In Hal Foster (ed.), Discussions in Contemporary Culture, no. 1. Washington: Bay P, 1987.Danto, Arthur C. “Hans Haacke and the Industry of Art.” In Gregg Horowitz and Tom Huhn (eds.), The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy, and the Ends of Taste. London: Routledge, 1987/1998.Didion, Joan. The White Album. London: 4th Estate, 2019.Farago, Jason. “Hans Haacke, at the New Museum, Takes No Prisoners.” New York Times 31 Oct. 2019. <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/arts/design/hans-haacke-review-new-museum.html>.Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood.” Artforum 5 (June 1967).Fry, Edward. “Introduction to the Work of Hans Haacke.” In Hans Haacke 1967. Cambridge: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2011.Glueck, Grace. “The Guggenheim Cancels Haacke’s Show.” New York Times 7 Apr. 1971.Gudel, Paul. “Michael Fried, Theatricality and the Threat of Skepticism.” Michael Fried and Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2018.Haacke, Hans. Hans Haacke: Framing and Being Framed: 7 Works 1970-5. Halifax: P of the Nova Scotia College of Design and New York: New York UP, 1976.———. “Hans Haacke in Conversation with Gary Carrion-Murayari and Massimiliano Gioni.” Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon and New Museum, 2019.Haacke, Hans, et al. “A Conversation with Hans Haacke.” October 30 (1984).Haacke, Hans, and Brian Wallis (eds.). Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Mass: MIT P, 1986.“Haacke’s ‘All Connected.’” Frieze 25 Oct. 2019. <https://frieze.com/article/after-contract-fight-its-workers-new-museum-opens-hans-haackes-all-connected>.Judd, Donald. “Specific Objects.” Complete Writings 1959–1975. Halifax: P of the Nova Scotia College of Design and New York: New York UP, 1965/1975.Lee, Pamela M. “Unfinished ‘Unfinished Business.’” Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon P Limited and New Museum, 2019.Ragain, Melissa. “Jack Burnham (1931–2019).” Artforum 19 Mar. 2019. <https://www.artforum.com/passages/melissa-ragain-on-jack-burnham-78935>.Sutton, Gloria. “Hans Haacke: Works of Art, 1963–72.” Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon P Limited and New Museum, 2019.Tucker, Marcia. “Director’s Forward.” Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Mass: MIT P, 1986.

Interaction is described as a way to persuade citizens through direct contact allowing for a dialogical encounter between political actors and citizens (Magin, Podschuweit, Haßler, & Russmann, 2017). Although the new online environment can facilitate direct communication between politicians and citizens, empirical findings indicate that, to date, a unidirectional communication style between voters and politicians predominates (Jackson & Lilleker, 2010; Lilleker & Koc-Michalska, 2013; Stromer-Galley, 2000). To a large extent, politicians still employ the broadcasting style for campaign communication (Graham, Broersma, Hazelhoff, & van 't Haar, 2013) and retain communication strategies from the mass media era (Margolis & Resnick, 2000), as few voters visit their websites on a regular basis (Gibson & McAllister, 2011) or follow politicians' profiles on social media (Vaccari & Nielsen, 2013). However, research in campaign communication also shows that the Web 2.0 provide new opportunities for politicians to address an expanded, new electorate and engage them. As an example, studies show that posts that are frequently liked, commented, or shared can reach a much wider circle of users known as secondary audience or second-degree followers (Jacobs & Spierings, 2016; Vaccari & Valeriani, 2015). Interaction through social media channels furthermore enables face-to-face-like communication with individual voters, with whom politicians can also exchange ideas and negotiate campaign strategies (Magin et al., 2017). Field of application/theoretical foundation: In recent years, interaction has been recognized as a central aspect of dialogical communication in the field of public relations (Sweetser & Lariscy, 2008; Taylor & Kent, 2004). The theory states that symmetrical and dialogical two-way communication between an organization and its audience can sustainably support relationship building and their maintenance (Zhang & Seltzer, 2010). By applying this approach to the field of online political communication, it is possible to understand the interactions between politicians and citizens as a form of strategic communication and how they attract and persuade voters. References/combination with other methods of data collection Interaction in the last twenty years has been mostly studied in the context of the online environment either by looking at structural features of candidates’ online tools that enable interactions with users (e.g., Druckman, Kifer, & Parkin, 2007, 2009; Schweitzer, 2008); or by studying actual interactions between candidates and citizens on social media (e.g., Graham et al., 2013; Klinger, 2013). Both quantitative manual and automated content analyses thereof have been employed to in research on social media interactions). Quantitative content analysis have been also been combined and compared with qualitative interviews with campaign managers (e.g., Magin et al., 2017). Example studies Table 1: Overview exemplary studies measuring interaction, discussion, participation, and related constructs Study Medium Constructs Operationalization Coding Druckman et al. (2007); Druckman et al. (2009) Candidate websites Interactivity Web sites were scrutinized in light of their ability to create someform of interaction by e.g.enabling users to personalize information, arrange information, add information, and/or communicate with other voters and/or the candidate Additive index Schweitzer (2008) Candidate websites Interactivity provision strategies Possibility to comment on news; Agenda can be updated by visitors; A channel on video sharing websites; Possibility to comment (a video sharing website); Life webcam; Online photo gallery; Possibility to comment (online photo gallery); Easy contact; Online polls; Profile on SNS; Online forum or chat (among visitors); Online forum or chat (with politicians); Possibility to share content of the website; Possibility to share content on social media; Information about political program (interactive format) Additive index Magin et al. (2017) Facebook posts Interaction Index including (1) number of parties’ comments, (2) the number of users’ comments per 1,000,000 eligible voters, and (3) the share of posts in which the parties encourage the voters to discuss politics on the parties’ Facebook page (reciprocity). Combined index Graham et al. (2013), Graham, Jackson, & Broersma (2016) Twitter posts Interaction Tweets including: Debating/position taking; Acknowledging; Organizing/mobilizing; Advice giving/helping; and/or Consulting Furthermore @Tweets were scrutinized with whom politicians interacted: Public; Politician/candidate; journalist/media; Party activist; Lobbyist; Expert; Celebrity; Industry; and/or Authority (0) Not present (1) Present Lukamto & Carson (2016) Twitter comments, @mentions, and retweets (RTs) Discussion Measures quantity of one-way and two-way messages between members of parliament (MPs) and citizens and who they interact with: ‘citizen to politician’; ‘politician to citizen’; or ‘politician to politician’ Count variable Bene (2017) Facebook posts Engagement Engagement content is coded if the post contains either requests for likes, comments, and/or sharing or whether it poses a question. All of these individual elements were also coded on their own and analyzed in specified models with all dependent variables (0) Not present (1) Present Klinger (2013) Facebook & Twitter posts Participation Posts including calls for discussion, appeals to collect signatures and mobilize other people to participate and to vote as well as general community-building (0) Not present (1) Present Keller & Kleinen-von Königslöw (2018) Facebook & Twitter posts Pseudo discursive style (0) Not present (1) Present Graham et al. (2013), Graham et al. (2016) Twitter posts Interaction Tweets including: Debating/position taking; Acknowledging; Organizing/mobilizing; Advice giving/helping; and/or Consulting @Tweets were also scrutinized with whom politicians interacted: Public; Politician/candidate; journalist/media; Party activist; Lobbyist; Expert; Celebrity; Industry; and/or Authority (0) Not present (1) Present References Bene, M. (2017). Go Viral on the Facebook! Interactions between Candidates and Followers on Facebook during the Hungarian General Election Campaign of 2014. Information, Communication & Society, 20(4), 513–529. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1198411 Druckman, J. N., Kifer, M. J., & Parkin, M. (2007). The Technological Development of Congressional Candidate Web Sites. Social Science Computer Review, 25(4), 425–442. https://doi.org/10.1177/0894439307305623 Druckman, J. N., Kifer, M. J., & Parkin, M. (2009). Campaign Communications in U.S. Congressional Elections. American Political Science Review, 103(3), 343–366. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055409990037 Gibson, R. K., & McAllister, I. (2011). Do online election campaigns win votes? The 2007 Australian “YouTube” election. Political Communication, 28(2), 227–244. Graham, T., Broersma, M., Hazelhoff, K., & van 't Haar, G. (2013). Between Broadcasting Political Messages and Interacting with Voters. Information, Communication & Society, 16(5), 692–716. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2013.785581 Graham, T., Jackson, D., & Broersma, M. (2016). New Platform, Old Habits? Candidates’ Use of Twitter during the 2010 British and Dutch General Election Campaigns. New Media & Society, 18(5), 765–783. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814546728 Jackson, N., & Lilleker, D. G. (2010). Tentative Steps towards Interaction. Internet Research, 20(5), 527–544. https://doi.org/10.1108/10662241011084103 Jacobs, K., & Spierings, N. (2016). Social Media, Parties, and Political Inequalities. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137533906 Keller, T. R., & Kleinen-von Königslöw, K. (2018). Pseudo-Discursive, Mobilizing, Emotional, and Entertaining: Identifying Four Successful Communication Styles of Political Actors on Social Media during the 2015 Swiss National Elections. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 15(4), 358–377. https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2018.1510355 Klinger, U. (2013). Mastering the Art of Social Media. Information, Communication & Society, 16(5), 717–736. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2013.782329 Lilleker, D. G., & Koc-Michalska, K. (2013). Online Political Communication Strategies: MEPs, E-Representation, and Self-Representation. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 10(2), 190–207. https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2012.758071 Lukamto, W., & Carson, A. (2016). Politweets: Social Media as a Platform for Political Engagement between Victorian Politicians and Citizens. Communication Research and Practice, 2(2), 191–212. https://doi.org/10.1080/22041451.2016.1186485 Magin, M., Podschuweit, N., Haßler, J., & Russmann, U. (2017). Campaigning in the Fourth Age of Political Communication. A Multi-Method Study on the Use of Facebook by German and Austrian Parties in the 2013 National Election Campaigns. Information, Communication & Society, 20(11), 1698–1719. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1254269 Margolis, M., & Resnick, D. (2000). Politics as Usual: The Cyberspace "Revolution". Contemporary American politics. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Schweitzer, E. J. (2008). Innovation or Normalization in E-Campaigning? European Journal of Communication, 23(4), 449–470. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323108096994 Stromer-Galley, J. (2000). On-line Interaction and Why Candidates Avoid It. Journal of Communication, 50(4), 111–132. Sweetser, K. D., & Lariscy, R. W. (2008). Candidates make good friends: An analysis of candidates' uses of Facebook. International Journal of Strategic Communication, 2(3), 175–198. Taylor, M., & Kent, M. L. (2004). Congressional web sites and their potential for public dialogue. Atlantic Journal of Communication, 12(2), 59–76. Vaccari, C., & Nielsen, R. K. (2013). What drives politicians' online popularity? An analysis of the 2010 US midterm elections. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 10(2), 208–222. Vaccari, C., & Valeriani, A. (2015). Follow the leader! Direct and indirect flows of political communication during the 2013 Italian general election campaign. New Media & Society, 17(7), 1025–1042. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444813511038 Zhang, W., & Seltzer, T. (2010). Another piece of the puzzle: Advancing social capital theory by examining the effect of political party relationship quality on political and civic participation. International Journal of Strategic Communication, 4(3), 155–170.

Introduction The academic area known as food studies—incorporating elements from disciplines including anthropology, folklore, history, sociology, gastronomy, and cultural studies as well as a range of multi-disciplinary approaches—asserts that cooking and eating practices are less a matter of nutrition (maintaining life by absorbing nutrients from food) and more a personal or group expression of various social and/or cultural actions, values or positions. The French philosopher, Michel de Certeau agrees, arguing, moreover, that there is an urgency to name and unpick (what he identifies as) the “minor” practices, the “multifarious and silent reserve of procedures” of everyday life. Such practices are of crucial importance to all of us, as although seemingly ordinary, and even banal, they have the ability to “organise” our lives (48). Within such a context, the following aims to consider the influence and significance of an important (although largely unstudied) professional figure in rural and regional economic life: the country food preparer variously known as the local chef or cook. Such an approach is obviously framed by the concept of “cultural economy”. This term recognises the convergence, and interdependence, of the spheres of the cultural and the economic (see Scott 335, for an influential discussion on how “the cultural geography of space and the economic geography of production are intertwined”). Utilising this concept in relation to chefs and cooks seeks to highlight how the ways these figures organise (to use de Certeau’s term) the social and cultural lives of those in their communities are embedded in economic practices and also how, in turn, their economic contributions are dependent upon social and cultural practices. This initial mapping of the influence and significance of the rural and regional chef in one rural and regional area, therefore, although necessarily different in approach and content, continues the application of such converged conceptualisations of the cultural and economic as Teema Tairu’s discussion of the social, recreational and spiritual importance of food preparation and consumption by the unemployed in Finland, Guy Redden’s exploration of how supermarket products reflect shared values, and a series of analyses of the cultural significance of individual food products, such as Richard White’s study of vegemite. While Australians, both urban and rural, currently enjoy access to an internationally renowned food culture, it is remarkable to consider that it has only been during the years following the Second World War that these sophisticated and now much emulated ways of eating and cooking have developed. It is, indeed, only during the last half century that Australian eating habits have shifted from largely Anglo-Saxon influenced foods and meals that were prepared and eaten in the home, to the consumption of a wider range of more international and sophisticated foods and meals that are, increasingly, prepared by others and eaten outside the consumer’s residence. While a range of commonly cited influences has prompted this relatively recent revolution in culinary practice—including post-war migration, increasing levels of prosperity, widespread international travel, and the forces of globalisation—some of this change owes a debt to a series of influential individual figures. These tastemakers have included food writers and celebrity chefs; with early exponents including Margaret Fulton, Graham Kerr and Charmaine Solomon (see Brien). The findings of this study suggests that many restaurant chefs, and other cooks, have similarly played, and continue to take, a key role in the lives of not only the, necessarily, limited numbers of individuals who dine in a particular eatery or the other chefs and/or cooks trained in that establishment (Ruhlman, Reach), but also the communities in which they work on a much broader scale. Considering Chefs In his groundbreaking study, A History of Cooks and Cooking, Australian food historian Michael Symons proposes that those who prepare food are worthy of serious consideration because “if ‘we are what we eat’, cooks have not just made our meals, but have also made us. They have shaped our social networks, our technologies, arts and religions” (xi). Writing that cooks “deserve to have their stories told often and well,” and that, moreover, there is a “need to invent ways to think about them, and to revise our views about ourselves in their light” (xi), Symons’s is a clarion call to investigate the role and influence of cooks. Charles-Allen Baker-Clark has explicitly begun to address this lacunae in his Profiles from the Kitchen: What Great Cooks Have Taught Us About Ourselves and Our Food (2006), positing not only how these figures have shaped our relationships with food and eating, but also how these relationships impact on identities, culture and a range of social issues including those of social justice, spirituality and environmental sustainability. With the growing public interest in celebrities, it is perhaps not surprising that, while such research on chefs and/or cooks is still in its infancy, most of the existing detailed studies on individuals focus on famed international figures such as Marie-Antoine Carême (Bernier; Kelly), Escoffier (James; Rachleff; Sanger), and Alexis Soyer (Brandon; Morris; Ray). Despite an increasing number of tabloid “tell-all” surveys of contemporary celebrity chefs, which are largely based on mass media sources and which display little concern for historical or biographical accuracy (Bowyer; Hildred and Ewbank; Simpson; Smith), there have been to date only a handful of “serious” researched biographies of contemporary international chefs such as Julia Child, Alice Waters (Reardon; Riley), and Bernard Loiseux (Chelminski)—the last perhaps precipitated by an increased interest in this chef following his suicide after his restaurant lost one of its Michelin stars. Despite a handful of collective biographical studies of Australian chefs from the later-1980s on (Jenkins; O’Donnell and Knox; Brien), there are even fewer sustained biographical studies of Australian chefs or cooks (Clifford-Smith’s 2004 study of “the supermarket chef,” Bernard King, is a notable exception). Throughout such investigations, as well as in other popular food writing in magazines and cookbooks, there is some recognition that influential chefs and cooks have worked, and continue to work, outside such renowned urban culinary centres as Paris, London, New York, and Sydney. The Michelin starred restaurants of rural France, the so-called “gastropubs” of rural Britain and the advent of the “star-chef”-led country bed and breakfast establishment in Australia and New Zealand, together with the proliferation of farmer’s markets and a public desire to consume locally sourced, and ecologically sustainable, produce (Nabhan), has focused fresh attention on what could be called “the rural/regional chef”. However, despite the above, little attention has focused on the Australian non-urban chef/cook outside of the pages of a small number of key food writing magazines such as Australian Gourmet Traveller and Vogue Entertaining + Travel. Setting the Scene with an Australian Country Example: Armidale and Guyra In 2004, the Armidale-Dumaresq Council (of the New England region, New South Wales, Australia) adopted the slogan “Foodies thrive in Armidale” to market its main city for the next three years. With a population of some 20,000, Armidale’s main industry (in economic terms) is actually education and related services, but the latest Tourist Information Centre’s Dining Out in Armidale (c. 2006) brochure lists some 25 restaurants, 9 bistros and brasseries, 19 cafés and 5 fast food outlets featuring Australian, French, Italian, Mediterranean, Chinese, Thai, Indian and “international” cuisines. The local Yellow Pages telephone listings swell the estimation of the total number of food-providing businesses in the city to 60. Alongside the range of cuisines cited above, a large number of these eateries foreground the use of fresh, local foods with such phrases as “local and regional produce,” “fresh locally grown produce,” “the finest New England ingredients” and locally sourced “New England steaks, lamb and fresh seafood” repeatedly utilised in advertising and other promotional material. Some thirty kilometres to the north along the New England highway, the country town of Guyra, proclaimed a town in 1885, is the administrative and retail centre for a shire of some 2,200 people. Situated at 1,325 metres above sea level, the town is one of the highest in Australia with its main industries those of fine wool and lamb, beef cattle, potatoes and tomatoes. Until 1996, Guyra had been home to a large regional abattoir that employed some 400 staff at the height of its productivity, but rationalisation of the meat processing industry closed the facility, together with its associated pet food processor, causing a downturn in employment, local retail business, and real estate values. Since 2004, Guyra’s economy has, however, begun to recover after the town was identified by the Costa Group as the perfect site for glasshouse grown tomatoes. Perfect, due to its rare combination of cool summers (with an average of less than two days per year with temperatures over 30 degrees celsius), high winter light levels and proximity to transport routes. The result: 3.3 million kilograms of truss, vine harvested, hydroponic “Top of the Range” tomatoes currently produced per annum, all year round, in Guyra’s 5-hectare glasshouse: Australia’s largest, opened in December 2005. What residents (of whom I am one) call the “tomato-led recovery” has generated some 60 new local jobs directly related to the business, and significant flow on effects in terms of the demand for local services and retail business. This has led to substantial rates of renovation and building of new residential and retail properties, and a noticeably higher level of trade flowing into the town. Guyra’s main street retail sector is currently burgeoning and stories of its renewal have appeared in the national press. Unlike many similar sized inland towns, there are only a handful of empty shops (and most of these are in the process of being renovated), and new commercial premises have recently been constructed and opened for business. Although a small town, even in Australian country town terms, Guyra now has 10 restaurants, hotel bistros and cafés. A number of these feature local foods, with one pub’s bistro regularly featuring the trout that is farmed just kilometres away. Assessing the Contribution of Local Chefs and Cooks In mid-2007, a pilot survey to begin to explore the contribution of the regional chef in these two close, but quite distinct, rural and regional areas was sent to the chefs/cooks of the 70 food-serving businesses in Armidale and Guyra that I could identify. Taking into account the 6 returns that revealed a business had closed, moved or changed its name, the 42 replies received represented a response rate of 65.5per cent (or two thirds), representatively spread across the two towns. Answers indicated that the businesses comprised 18 restaurants, 13 cafés, 6 bistro/brasseries, 1 roadhouse, 1 takeaway/fast food and 3 bed and breakfast establishments. These businesses employed 394 staff, of whom 102 were chefs and/cooks, or 25.9 per cent of the total number of staff then employed by these establishments. In answer to a series of questions designed to ascertain the roles played by these chefs/cooks in their local communities, as well as more widely, I found a wide range of inputs. These chefs had, for instance, made a considerable contribution to their local economies in the area of fostering local jobs and a work culture: 40 (95 per cent) had worked with/for another local business including but not exclusively food businesses; 30 (71.4 per cent) had provided work experience opportunities for those aspiring to work in the culinary field; and 22 (more than half) had provided at least one apprenticeship position. A large number had brought outside expertise and knowledge with them to these local areas, with 29 (69 per cent) having worked in another food business outside Armidale or Guyra. In terms of community building and sustainability, 10 (or almost a quarter) had assisted or advised the local Council; 20 (or almost half) had worked with local school children in a food-related way; 28 (two thirds) had helped at least one charity or other local fundraising group. An extra 7 (bringing the cumulative total to 83.3 per cent) specifically mentioned that they had worked with/for the local gallery, museum and/or local history group. 23 (more than half) had been involved with and/or contributed to a local festival. The question of whether they had “contributed anything else important, helpful or interesting to the community” elicited the following responses: writing a food or wine column for the local paper (3 respondents), delivering TAFE teacher workshops (2 respondents), holding food demonstrations for Rotary and Lions Clubs and school fetes (5 respondents), informing the public about healthy food (3 respondents), educating the public about environmental issues (2 respondents) and working regularly with Meals on Wheels or a similar organisation (6 respondents, or 14.3 per cent). One respondent added his/her work as a volunteer driver for the local ambulance transport service, the only non-food related response to this question. Interestingly, in line with the activity of well-known celebrity chefs, in addition to the 3 chefs/cooks who had written a food or wine column for the local newspaper, 11 respondents (more than a quarter of the sample) had written or contributed to a cookbook or recipe collection. One of these chefs/cooks, moreover, reported that he/she produced a weblog that was “widely read”, and also contributed to international food-related weblogs and websites. In turn, the responses indicated that the (local) communities—including their governing bodies—also offer some support of these chefs and cooks. Many respondents reported they had been featured in, or interviewed and/or photographed for, a range of media. This media comprised the following: the local newspapers (22 respondents, 52.4 per cent), local radio stations (19 respondents, 45.2 per cent), regional television stations (11 respondents, 26.2 per cent) and local websites (8 respondents, 19 per cent). A number had also attracted other media exposure. This was in the local, regional area, especially through local Council publications (31 respondents, 75 per cent), as well as state-wide (2 respondents, 4.8 per cent) and nationally (6 respondents, 14.3 per cent). Two of these local chefs/cooks (or 4.8 per cent) had attracted international media coverage of their activities. It is clear from the above that, in the small area surveyed, rural and regional chefs/cooks make a considerable contribution to their local communities, with all the chefs/cooks who replied making some, and a number a major, contribution to those communities, well beyond the requirements of their paid positions in the field of food preparation and service. The responses tendered indicate that these chefs and cooks contributed regularly to local public events, institutions and charities (with a high rate of contribution to local festivals, school programs and local charitable activities), and were also making an input into public education programs, local cultural institutions, political and social debates of local importance, as well as the profitability of other local businesses. They were also actively supporting not only the future of the food industry as a whole, but also the viability of their local communities, by providing work experience opportunities and taking on local apprentices for training and mentorship. Much more than merely food providers, as a group, these chefs and cooks were, it appears, also operating as food historians, public intellectuals, teachers, activists and environmentalists. They were, moreover, operating as content producers for local media while, at the same time, acting as media producers and publishers. Conclusion The terms “chef” and “cook” can be diversely defined. All definitions, however, commonly involve a sense of professionalism in food preparation reflecting some specialist knowledge and skill in the culinary arts, as well as various levels of creativity, experience and responsibility. In terms of the specific duties that chefs and professional cooks undertake every day, almost all publications on the subject deal specifically with workplace related activities such as food and other supply ordering, staff management, menu planning and food preparation and serving. This is constant across culinary textbooks (see, for instance, Culinary Institute of America 2002) and more discursive narratives about the professional chef such as the bestselling autobiographical musings of Anthony Bourdain, and Michael Ruhlman’s journalistic/biographical investigations of US chefs (Soul; Reach). An alternative preliminary examination, and categorisation, of the roles these professionals play outside their kitchens reveals, however, a much wider range of community based activities and inputs than such texts suggest. It is without doubt that the chefs and cooks who responded to the survey discussed above have made, and are making, a considerable contribution to their local New England communities. It is also without doubt that these contributions are of considerable value, and valued by, those country communities. Further research will have to consider to what extent these contributions, and the significance and influence of these chefs and cooks in those communities are mirrored, or not, by other country (as well as urban) chefs and cooks, and their communities. Acknowledgements An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Engaging Histories: Australian Historical Association Regional Conference, at the University of New England, September 2007. I would like to thank the session’s participants for their insightful comments on that presentation. A sincere thank you, too, to the reviewers of this article, whose suggestions assisted my thinking on this piece. Research to complete this article was carried out whilst a Visiting Fellow with the Research School of Humanities, the Australian National University. References Armidale Tourist Information Centre. Dining Out in Armidale [brochure]. Armidale: Armidale-Dumaresq Council, c. 2006. Baker-Clark, C. A. Profiles from the Kitchen: What Great Cooks have Taught us about Ourselves and our Food. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2006. Bernier, G. Antoine Carême 1783-1833: La Sensualité Gourmande en Europe. Paris: Grasset, 1989. Bourdain, A. Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. New York: Harper Perennial, 2001. Bowyer, A. Delia Smith: The Biography. London: André Deutsch, 1999. Brandon, R. The People’s Chef: Alexis Soyer, A Life in Seven Courses. Chichester: Wiley, 2005. Brien, D. L. “Australian Celebrity Chefs 1950-1980: A Preliminary Study.” Australian Folklore 21 (2006): 201–18. Chelminski, R. The Perfectionist: Life and Death In Haute Cuisine. New York: Gotham Books, 2005. Clifford-Smith, S. A Marvellous Party: The Life of Bernard King. Milson’s Point: Random House Australia, 2004. Culinary Institute of America. The Professional Chef. 7th ed. New York: Wiley, 2002. de Certeau, M. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Hildred, S., and T. Ewbank. Jamie Oliver: The Biography. London: Blake, 2001. Jenkins, S. 21 Great Chefs of Australia: The Coming of Age of Australian Cuisine. East Roseville: Simon and Schuster, 1991. Kelly, I. Cooking for Kings: The Life of Antoine Carême, The First Celebrity Chef. New York: Walker and Company, 2003. James, K. Escoffier: The King of Chefs. London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2002. Morris, H. Portrait of a Chef: The Life of Alexis Soyer, Sometime Chef to the Reform Club. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1938. Nabhan, G. P. Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods. New York: W.W. Norton, 2002. O’Donnell, M., and T. Knox. Great Australian Chefs. Melbourne: Bookman Press, 1999. Rachleff, O. S. Escoffier: King of Chefs. New York: Broadway Play Pub., 1983. Ray, E. Alexis Soyer: Cook Extraordinary. Lewes: Southover, 1991. Reardon, J. M. F. K. Fisher, Julia Child, and Alice Waters: Celebrating the Pleasures of the Table. New York: Harmony Books, 1994. Redden, G. “Packaging the Gifts of Nation.” M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.7 (1999) accessed 10 September 2008 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/gifts.php. Riley, N. Appetite For Life: The Biography of Julia Child. New York: Doubleday, 1977. Ruhlman, M. The Soul of a Chef. New York: Viking, 2001. Ruhlman, M. The Reach of a Chef. New York: Viking, 2006. Sanger, M. B. Escoffier: Master Chef. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1976. Scott, A. J. “The Cultural Economy of Cities.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 212 (1997) 323–39. Simpson, N. Gordon Ramsay: The Biography. London: John Blake, 2006. Smith, G. Nigella Lawson: A Biography. London: Andre Deutsch, 2005. Symons, M. A History of Cooks and Cooking. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2004. Tairu, T. “Material Food, Spiritual Quest: When Pleasure Does Not Follow Purchase.” M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.7 (1999) accessed 10 September 2008 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/pleasure.php. White, R. S. “Popular Culture as the Everyday: A Brief Cultural History of Vegemite.” Australian Popular Culture. Ed. I. Craven. Cambridge UP, 1994. 15–21.

Let us work backwards from what we know, from personal experience: the photograph of which we have each been the subject. Roland Barthes says of this photograph that it transforms "the subject into object": one begins aping the mask one wants to assume, one begins, in other words, to make oneself conform in appearance to the disguise of an identity (Camera Lucida 11). A quick glance back at your most recent holiday gathering will no doubt confirm his diagnosis. Barthes gives to this subject-object the title of Spectrum in order to neatly join the idea of spectacle with the fearsome spectre, what he calls that "terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead" (Camera Lucida 9). Cathy Davidson points out that in "photocentric culture, we can no longer even see that we see ourselves primarily as seen, imaged, the photograph as the evidential proof of existence"; photocentric culture thus generates "a profound confusion of image and afterlife" (669 672). Andre Bazin announces that the medium "embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption" (242), while Susan Sontag points out that it may "assassinate" (13). What photography mummifies, distorts and murders, among other things, is the sense that the reality of the self resides in the body, the corporeal and temporal boundaries of personhood. The spectral haunting of the photograph is familiar to anyone who has ever looked at snapshots in a family album. How much more present it was to the producers and consumers of early photography who engineered the genre of the memento mori, portraits taken of the dead or in imitation of death. Despite the acknowledged 'eeriness' of our own recorded and vanished pasts, such pictures seem grotesquely morbid to us now -- for what we cannot recover is the absolute novelty of photography in its early days, or the vehicle that it provided in the nineteenth century for a whole set of concerns about selfhood that begin, ironically, with death. Those early photographs bring to mind another death, that of the author. Re-enter Barthes, for it is he who definitively announces the new textual paradigm in which the author disappears. In "Death of the Author," Barthes calls the author tyrannical and adopts liberationist rhetoric in unseating him. But what cult is Barthes actually countering? His essay begins and ends with Balzac, and includes Baudelaire, Van Gogh and Tchaikovsky, while his heroes are Mallarmé, Valéry and Proust. Barthes' notion of the author is implicitly a nineteenth-century construction, to be undone by modernist writing against the grain. And what distinguishes the nineteenth-century author from his predecessors? His portrait, of course. Thanks to the surge of visual and reproductive technologies culminating in the mechanised printing process and photography, the nineteenth-century author is suddenly widely available to readers as an image. The author literally becomes a face hovering above the text; it is this omnipresence that Barthes objects to. Photography gives new momentum to the cult of the author, but this is not mere historical coincidence -- that the photograph is developed at a point in history when authorship is particularly mobile: in between the Romantic individualism that transforms authorship from a craft to a calling, and the modernist interrogation of ontology and representation that explodes such notions from within. However, the opposite is also true. Photography as we know it is a product of the institution of authorship. Photography is founded on and makes available, through the democratisation and dissemination of a certain technology, a concept of public selfhood that hitherto had been reserved for those in charge of textual representation, of themselves as well as of other subjects. Primarily this is because the ideological, technological and material vehicles of the photograph -- identities, characters, scenes, the properties of chemical interaction, the invention of specialised apparatus, poses, props, and photo albums -- were closely related to book culture. How did photography change the notion of the author? It did so by commandeering truth claims -- by serving as the scientific illustration of divinely-ordained natural laws. The art of chemically fixing the image obtained through a camera obscura was perfected in 1839 by Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre and William Fox Talbot, separately, with different techniques.1 Daguerre's method caught on quickly, partly because his daguerreotype recorded such exquisite detail. The daguerreotype surface was reflective and sharply etched; inspection with a magnifying glass disclosed minutiae -- insects, eyelashes, objects in the far distance. The daguerreotype, popularly nicknamed "the pencil of the sun," seemed like a miniaturised and complete mirror of the world, a representation without human intervention.2 In 1839, and throughout the 1840's and '50's, photography transparently supported the notion that the discoveries of science would help reveal God's secrets, not disprove them -- a view that suffered but continued on after the publication of The Origin of the Species in 1859. Its presumed objectivity and comprehensive truthfulness made photography immediately appealing as a scientific and artistic tool. Although it was used to record geologic formations and vegetation, the bulky apparatus of the early photographic methods meant that it was better suited to the indoor studio -- and the portrait, in which the truth of human character could be made visible. It served as a means of defining normality and deviation; it was central to the project of identifying physical characteristics of the insane and the criminal, and of classifying racial features, as in the daguerreotypes made of slaves in the United States by J. T. Zealy in 1850, which the natural scientist Louis Aggasiz used as independent evidence of the natural differences between the races in order to endorse the doctrine of "separate creation" (Trachtenberg 53) So perceptive and penetrating did the photograph seem, it was even deemed capable of revealing vice and virtue, and it was in this way that the photographer moved onto the terrain of the author. The truth-telling properties of photography seemed to corroborate the authorial estimation of character that was a central element of nineteenth-century fiction. In texts where photography is itself on display this property is especially obvious -- in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, for example, where true and secret characters are only discerned in daguerreotype portraits. But photography did more than divinely and scientifically confirm fictional character; the venerated author's ability to delineate moral qualities made him, or her, an exemplary character as well. The Victorians prized "sincerity," the criterion by which they measured their authors. Especially in the influential pronouncements of Carlyle, the Victorian notion of sincerity "makes man and artist inseparable" (Ball 155). An exemplary moral life was particularly powerful in the form of an author. Indeed, it was through authorship of some kind that such lives could take the public form they needed in order to fulfill their function as models. And so photography appears not just in the text but on its margins, framing and qualifying it: the portrait of the author, already a bibliographic convention, gains additional authority through the objective lens of the camera, in which the author's character is exhibited as a kind of testimony to his or her truth-telling abilities. The frontispiece guarantees the right of the author to moral leadership. As literacy and readership expanded and exceeded former class distinctions, the nineteenth-century author began to need to market himself in order to find and keep an audience. But since the source of the author's authority was sincerity, the commodification of the authorial self presented a dilemma. Some writers, such as Dickens, embraced this role; others withdrew from the task of performing a public self, but their refusal of the public's gaze was itself often dramatised, as for Tennyson, Elizabeth Barret Browning and, after her death, Emily Dickinson. The photograph portrait of the artist, as well as other likenesses of his visage, was a particularly convenient piece of authorial paraphernalia because it sustained the idea of the author as moral exemplar, but in fact it was only one of the many ways in which nineteenth-century readers kept the author before their eyes. Souvenirs such as autographs, original manuscripts and other tokens testifying to the presence of the author's body, as well as gift books and precious editions designed to generate and satisfy fans, were mainstays of Victorian keepsake culture. The photograph as corporeal souvenir signals the point where we must turn around and consider the question of photography and authorship from the other direction: that is, how the institution of authorship constructs photography. Given that photography as an art developed out of the desire to eliminate the human hand, to trace directly from nature, it seems ironic that photography could have an author. And yet it was the notion of a public and visible self, associated primarily with authorship, which accounted for the widespread popularity of photography. When the daguerreotype was introduced in 1839, enterprising amateurs in Europe and the United States transformed it from a tricky chemical procedure into a practical art, a livelihood. Daguerrean saloons appeared in the cities and in rural areas, itinerant daguerreotypists set up temporary headquarters. But every daguerreotype studio had two purposes, whether it was the high-end urban atelier of Southworth and Hawes in Boston or a peddler's rented room: it was the place where one went to have one's picture taken and it was also a public gallery, where the portraits of former customers were displayed. In an urban gallery, those portraits might include the poets, ministers and politicians of the day, but even in a village studio, one could see exhibited the portraits of the local beauties, the town big-wigs. Entering the studio as a customer or a spectator, anyone could imaginatively take his or her place among an assembly of eminent personages. More importantly, the daguerreotype and later forms of photography made portraiture accessible to the middle and working classes for the first time. The studio was a democratic space where one could entertain the fantasy of a different self, and in fact one could literally enact that fantasy through the props and accessories of identity that the studio provided. In borrowed hats and canes, sitting stiffly in chairs or standing against painted backdrops, holding books, flowers, candles, and even other daguerreotypes, the sitter could assume the persona he or she would like others to see. Often the sitter composes an obvious gender performance, other times the sitter exhibits himself as the master of a certain occupation. With the invention of the wet plate collodion process in 1851, which made it possible to reproduce quantities of images from a single negative, the public went in for the carte-de-visite, on which one's very own portrait was imprinted and handed out like a postcard souvenir. The carte-de-visite necessitated a new way of keeping and displaying multiple photographs, and thus the photo album was born. But in fact the paradigm of the book already governed photographic display and the storage of the personal collection. When the Bible was the only book a family might own, it served as the cabinet of memorable dates and events. Other kinds of mementoes were stored in lockets and books: locks of hair, painted miniatures, pressed flowers. Daguerreotypes were kept in small codex-like cases or in hinged lockets. The souvenir and its symbolic connection to the body (one's own or that of a beloved) was of course not limited to the cult of the author but was available as a mode of identity to anybody who read novels. The culture of the souvenir, the keepsake, the personal precious object stored in a book, offered a means of articulating the self that readily accommodated the photograph, and in that context, the photograph took on the properties of a personal talisman. In the wake of photography, the scrapbook, the flower album, the signature album -- all those vehicles for collecting and displaying the ephemera of a lifetime -- flourished. Books were no longer mainly devoted to dense layers of print but could consist of open space to be filled in by their owners, who would thereby become authors of their own works and incidentally of their own identities. The popularity of the album was partly due to developments in printing, which was changing from a text-based industry to one increasingly concerned with images, a shift that culminated in photo-offset printing and photoduplication. But the popularity of the album and other biblioform containers for the personal collection also has something to do with the culture of the souvenir, which prepared the way for the photograph as personal talisman and then accomodated the tremendous expansion photography offered to the self. Via the photograph, a self that was allied with its own mementoes would be transformed: selfhood formerly attached to an object intended for private contemplation was subsequently attached to an object intended for exhibition. Via the photograph, the same publicity attendant on the circulation of the author was incorporated into the stuff of the ordinary subject, who regarded his or her own image and offered it up to history. The reflexive spectacle of visible selfhood brings us back to the return of the dead, that feature of the photograph which seems to persist, and perhaps illuminates the difference between the kind of death it spooks us with now and the kind of 150 years ago. For our ancestors, the photograph was a way to cheat death, to manipulate the strict boundaries of identity, to become memorable, to catch a heady glimpse of absolute truth; but for us it is different. We can see how much we are the creations of photography, and how much we surrender to the public self it burdens us with. Notes 1. The technological history of photography is of course much complicated by issues of competition, technological "prehistory" and intellectual property—for example, there is the matter of the disappearance of Daguerre's partner Niepce. However, Daguerre is generally credited with "inventing" the medium. See Gernsheim, Greenough et al and Newhall. 2. The phrase and others like it were not only popularised by influential critic-practitioners of photography such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Fox Talbot, in The Pencil of Nature, and Marcus Aurelius Root, in The Camera and the Pencil, but were perpetuated in the everyday language of commerce—for example, the portrait studio that advertised its "Sun Drawn Miniatures" (Gernsheim 106). References Ball, Patricia. The Central Self: A Study in Romantic and Victorian Imagination. London: Athlone Press, 1968. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. ---. "The Death of the Author." Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Bazin, André. "The Ontology of the Photographic Image." Classic Essays on Photography. Ed. Alan Trachtenberg. New Haven, Conn: Leete's Island Books, 1980. 237-244. Davidson, Cathy N. "Photographs of the Dead: Sherman, Daguerre, Hawthorne." South Atlantic Quarterly 89.4 (Fall 1990): 667-701. Gernsheim, Helmut. The Origins of Photography. London: Thames and Hudson, 1982. Greenough, Sarah, Joel Snyder, David Travis and Colin Westerbeck. On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Photography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1989. Newhall, Beaumont. The History of Photography, From 1839 to the Present. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Dell, 1977. Trachtenberg, Alan. Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to the Present. New York: Hill and Wang, 1989. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Dean, Gabrielle. "Portrait of the Self" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.5 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Dean.html &gt. Chicago Style Dean, Gabrielle, "Portrait of the Self" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 5 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Dean.html &gt ([your date of access]). APA Style Dean, Gabrielle. (2002) Portrait of the Self. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(5). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Dean.html &gt ([your date of access]).

The ontological equality and material vitality of all things, and efforts to remove “the human” from its apical position in a hierarchy of being, are Object-Oriented Ontology theory (OOO) concepts. These axioms are useful in a discussion of the aesthetics of augmented robotic art, alongside speculations regarding any interagency between the human/non-human and possible co-evolutionary relationships. In addition, they help to wash out the sticky habits of conventional art writing, such as removed critique or an authoritative expert voice. This article aims to address the robotic work Accomplice by Sydney-based artists Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders as a means of interrogating the independence and agency of robots as non-human species, and as a mode of investigating how we see these relationships changing for the futureFor Accomplice, an artwork exhibited at Artspace, Sydney, in 2013, Gemeinboeck and Saunders built robots, strategised properties, and programmed their performative actions. Replete with lights and hammers, the robots are secreted away behind false walls, where they move along tracks and bang holes into the gallery space. As the devastation of plasterboard ensues, the robots respond interactively to each other through their collective activity: this is intra-action, where an object’s force emerges and where agency is an enactment (Barad, Matter Feels). This paper will continue to draw on the work of feminist scholar and quantum scientist, Karen Barad, due to her related work on agency and intra-action, although she is not part of an OOO theoretical body. Gemeinboeck and Saunders build unstable environments for their robots to perform as embodied inhabitants (Gemeinboeck and Saunders 2). Although the augmented robots are programmed, it is not a prescriptive control. Data is entered, then the robots respond to one another’s proximity and devastation. From the immaterial, virtual realm of robotic programming comes a new materiality which is both unstable, unpredictable, and on the verge of becoming other, or alive. This is a collaboration, not just between Gemeinboeck and Saunders, but between the programmers and their little robots—and the new forces that might be created. Sites of intra-species (human and robot) crossings might be places or spaces where a new figuration of enchantment occurs (Bennett 32). Such a space could take the form of a responsive art-writing intervention or even a new ontological story, as a direct riposte to the lively augmentation of the robotic artwork (Bennett 92). As ficto-critical theorist and ethnographer, Stephen Muecke says, “Experimental writing, for me, would be writing that necessarily participates in worlds rather than a writing constituted as a report on realities seen from the other side of an illusory gap of representation” (Muecke Motorcycles 2). Figure 1: Accomplice by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Artspace, Sydney, 2013. (Photo: Petra Gemeinboeck)Writing Forces When things disappear then reappear, there is a point where force is unleashed. If we ask what role the art writer plays in liberating force, the answer might be that her role is to create as an imaginative new creation, equal to the artwork. The artists speak of Accomplice: transductions, transmaterial flows and transversal relations are at play ... whether emerging from or propelling the interplay between internal dynamics and external forces, the enactment of agencies (human and non-human), or the performative relationship unfolding over time. (Gemeinboeck and Saunders 3) When new energetic force is created and the artwork takes on new life, the audience’s imaginative thought is stimulated. This new force might cause an effect of a trans-fictional flow. The act of writing about Accomplice might also involve some intentional implausibility. For instance, whilst in the exhibition gallery space, witnessing Accomplice, I decided to write a note to one of the robots. I could see it, just visible beyond the violently hammered hole in the wall. Broken plaster dusted my shoes and as I peered into the darker outside space, it whizzed past on its way to bang another hole, in harmony with its other robotic friends. So I scribbled a note on a plain white piece of paper, folded it neatly and poked it through the hole: Dear robot, do you get sick of augmenting human lives?Do you get on well with your robotic friends?Yours sincerely, Prue. I waited a few minutes and then my very same piece of paper was thrust back through the hole. It was not folded but was crumpled up. I opened it and noticed a smudged mark in the corner. It looked like an ancient symbol, a strange elliptical script of rounded shapes, but was too small to read. An intergalactic message, a signal from an alien presence perhaps? So I borrowed a magnifying glass from the Artspace gallery attendant. It read: I love opera. Robot Two must die. This was unexpected! As I pondered the robot’s reply, I noticed the robots did indeed make strange bird-like noises to one another; their tapping was like rhythmic woodpeckers. Their hammering was a kind of operatic symphony; it was not far-fetched that these robots were appreciative of the sound patterns they made. In other words, they were responding to stimuli in the environment, and acting in response. They had agency beyond the immaterial computational programming their creators had embedded. It wasn’t difficult to suspend disbelief to allow the possibility that interaction between the robots might occur, or that one might have gone rogue. An acceptance of the possibility of inter-agency would allow the fantastical reality of a human becoming short-term pen pals with an augmented machine. Karen Barad might endorse such an unexpected intra-action act. She discourages conventional critique as, “a tool that keeps getting used out of habit” (Matter Feels). Art writing, in an era of robots and awareness of other non-human sentient life-forms can be speculative invention, have a Barad-like imaginative materiality (Matter Feels), and sense of suspended disbelief. Figure 2: Accomplice by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Artspace, Sydney, 2013. (Photo: Petra Gemeinboeck) The Final Onto-Story Straw Gemeinboeck and Saunders say the space where their robots perform is a questionable one: “the fidelity of the space as a shared experience is thus brought into question: how can a shared virtual experience be trusted when it is constructed from such intangible and malleable stuff as streams of binary digits” (7). The answer might be that it is not to be trusted, particularly in an OOO aesthetic approach that allows divergent and contingent fictive possibilities. Indeed, thinking about the fidelity of the space, there was something about a narrow access corridor in the Accomplice exhibition space, between the false gallery wall and the cavity where the robots moved on their track, that beckoned me. I glanced over my shoulder to check that the Artspace attendant wasn’t watching and slipped behind the wall. I took a few tentative steps, not wanting to get knocked on the nose by a zooming robot. I saw that one robot had turned away from the wall and was attacking another with its hammer. By the time I arrived, the second robot (could it be Robot Two?) had been badly pummeled. Not only did Robot One attack Robot Two but I witnessed it using its extended hammer to absorb metal parts: the light and the hammer. It was adapting, like Philip K. Dick’s robots in his short story ‘Preserving Machine’ (See Gray 228-33). It was becoming more augmented. It now had two lights and two hammers and seemed to move at double speed. Figure 3: Accomplice by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Artspace, Sydney, 2013. (Photo: Petra Gemeinboeck)My observance of this scene might be explained by Gemeinboeck/Saunders’s comment regarding Philip K. Dick-style interference and instability, which they actively apply to their work. They say, “The ‘gremlins’ of our works are the slipping logics of nonlinear systems or distributed agential forces of colliding materials” (18). An audience response is a colliding material. A fictional aside is a colliding material. A suspension of disbelief must also be considered a colliding material. This is the politics of the para-human, where regulations and policies are in their infancy. Fears of artificial intelligence seem absurd, when we consider how startled we become when the boundaries between fiction/truth become as flimsy and slippery as the boundaries between human/non-human. Art writing that resists truth complements Gemeinboeck/Saunders point that, “different agential forces not only co-evolve but perform together” (18).The DisappearanceBefore we are able to distinguish any unexpected or enchanted ontological outcomes, the robots must first appear, but for things to truly appear to us, they must first disappear. The robots disappear from view, behind the false walls. Slowly, through the enactment of an agented force (the action of their hammers upon the wall), they beat a path into the viewer’s visual reality. Their emergence signals a performative augmentation. Stronger, better, smarter, longer: these creatures are more-than-human. Yet despite the robot’s augmented technological improvement upon human ability, their being (here, meaning their independent autonomy) is under threat in a human-centred world environment. First they are threatened by the human habit of reducing them to anthropomorphic characteristics: they can be seen as cute little versions of humans. Secondly, they are threatened by human perception that they are under the control of the programmers. Both points are arguable: these robots are undoubtedly non-human, and there are unexpected and unplanned outcomes, once they are activated. These might be speculative or contestable outcomes, which are not demonstrably an epitome of truth (Bennett 161). Figure 4: Accomplice by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Artspace, Sydney, 2013. (Photo: Petra Gemeinboeck)Gemeinboeck’s robotic creatures, with their apparent work/play and civil disobedience, appeared to exhibit human traits. An OOO approach would discourage these anthropomorphic tendencies: by seeing human qualities in inanimate objects, we are only falling back into correlational habits—where nature and culture are separate dyads and can never comprehend each other, and where humankind is mistakenly privileged over all other entities (Meillassoux 5). This only serves to inhibit any access to a reality outside the human-centred view. This kind of objectivity, where we see ourselves as nature, does no more than hold up a mirror to our inescapably human selves (Barad, Matter Feels). In an object-oriented approach the unpredictable outcomes of the robots’s performance is brought to attention. OOO proponent and digital media theorist Ian Bogost, has a background in computational media, especially video and social media games, and says, “computers are plastic and metal corpses with voodoo powers” (9). This is a non-life description, hovering in the liminal space between being and not being. Bogost’s view is that a strange world stirs within machinic devices (9). A question to ask: what’s it like to be a robot? Perhaps the answer lies somewhere between what it does and how we see it. It is difficult not to think of twentieth century philosopher Martin Heidegger’s tool analysis theory when writing of Gemeinboeck/Saunders’s work because Heidegger, and OOO scholar Graham Harman after him, uses the hammer as his paradigmatic tool. In his analysis, things are only present-at-hand (consciously perceived without utility) once they break (Harman, Heidegger Explained 63). However, Gemeinboeck and Saunders’s installation Accomplice straddles Heidegger’s dual present-at-hand and read-at-hand (the utility of the thing) because art raises the possibility that we might experience these divergent qualities of the robotic entities, simultaneously. The augmented robot, existing in its performative exhibition ecology, is the bridge between sentient life and utility. Robotic Agency In relation to the agency of robots, Ian Bogost refers to the Tableau Machine which was a non-human actor system created by researchers at Georgia Tech in 1998 (Bogost 106). It was a house fitted with cameras, screens, interfaces, and sensors. This was an experimental investigation into ambient intelligence. The researchers’s term for the computational agency was ‘alien presence,’ suggesting a life outside human comprehension. The data-collator sensed and interpreted the house and its occupants, and re-created that recorded data as abstract art, by projecting images on its own plasma screens. The implication was that the home was alive, vital, and autonomously active, in that it took on a sentient life, beyond human control. This kind of vital presence, an aliveness outside human programming, is there in the Accomplice robots. Their agency becomes materialized, as they violate the polite gallery-viewing world. Karen Barad’s concept of agency works within a relational ontology. Agency resists being granted, but rather is an enactment, and creates new possibilities (Barad, Matter Feels). Agency is entangled amongst “intra-acting human and non-human practices” (6). In Toward an Enchanted Materialism, Jane Bennett describes primordia (atoms) as “not animate with divine spirit, and yet they are quite animated - this matter is not dead at all” (81). This then is an agency that is not spiritual, nor is there any divine purpose. It is a matter of material force, a subversive action performed by robotic entities, not for any greater good, in fact, for no reason at all. This unpredictability is OOO contingency, whereby physical laws remain indifferent to whether an event occurs or not (Meillassoux 39). Figure 5: Accomplice by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Artspace, Sydney, 2013. (Photo: Petra Gemeinboeck) A Post-Human Ethic The concept of a post-human state of being raises ethical concerns. Ethics is a human construct, a criteria of standards fixed within human social systems. How should humans respond, without moral panic, to robots that might have life and sentient power outside human control? If an OOO approach is undertaken, the implication is that all things exist equally and ethics, as fixed standards, might need to be dismantled and replaced with a more democratic set of guidelines. A flat ontology, argued for by Bogost, Levi Bryant and other OOO advocates, follows that all entities have equal potential for independent energy and agency (although OOO theorists disagree on many small technical issues). The disruption of the conventional hierarchical model of being is replaced by a flat field of equality. This might cause the effect of a more ethical, ontological ecology. Quentin Meillassoux, an influential figure in the field of Speculative Realism, from which OOO is an offshoot, finds philosophical/mathematical solutions to the problems of human subjectivity. His eschewing of Kantian divisions between object/subject and human/world, is accompanied by a removal from Kantian and Cartesian critique (Meillassoux 30). This turn from critique, and its related didactic authority and removed judgment, marks an important point in the culture of philosophy, but also in the culture of art writing. If we can escape the shackles of divisive critique, then the pleasures of narrative might be given space. Bogost endorses collapsing the hierarchical model of being and converting conventional academic writing (89). He says, “for the computers to operate at all for us first requires a wealth of interactions to take place for itself. As operators or engineers, we may be able to describe how such objects and assemblages work. But what do they “experience” (Bogost 10)? This view is complementary to an OOO view of anti-subjectivity, an awareness of things that might exist irrespective of human life, from both inside and outside the mind (Harman 143). Figure 6: Accomplice by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Artspace, Sydney, 2013. (Photo: Petra Gemeinboeck) New Materiality In addition to her views on human/non-human agency, Karen Barad develops a parallel argument for materiality. She says, “matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers.” Barad’s agential realism is predicated on an awareness of the immanence of matter, with materiality that subverts conventions of transcendence or human-centredness. She says, “On my agential realist account, all bodies, not merely human bodies, come to matter through the world’s performativity - its iterative intra-activity.” Barad sees matter, all matter, as entangled parts of phenomena that extend across time and space (Nature’s Queer Performativity 125). Barad argues against the position that acts against nature are moral crimes, which occur when the nature/culture divide is breached. She questions the individuated categorizations of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ inherent in arguments like these (Nature’s Queer Performativity, 123-5). Likewise, in robotic and machinic aesthetics, it could be seen as an ethical breach to consider the robots as alive, sentient, and experiential. This confounds previous cultural separations, however, object-oriented theory is a reexamination of these infractions and offers an openness to discourse of different causal outcomes. Figure 7: Accomplice by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Artspace, Sydney, 2013. (Photo: Petra Gemeinboeck) Co-Evolution Artists Gemeinboeck/Saunders are artists and scholarly researchers investigating new notions of co-evolution. If we ascribe human characteristics to robots, might they ascribe machinic properties to us? It is possible to argue that co-evolution is already apparent in the world. Titanium knees, artificial arteries, plastic hips, pacemakers, metallic vertebrae pins: human medicine is a step ahead. Gemeinboeck/Saunders in turn make a claim for the evolving desires of their robots (11). Could there be performative interchangeability between species: human and robot? Barad asks us not to presume what the distinctions are between human and non-human and not to make post-humanist blurrings, but to understand the materializing effects of the boundaries between humans and nonhumans (Nature’s Queer Performativity 123). Vital matter emerges from acts of reappearance, re-performance, and interspecies interaction. Ian Bogost begins his Alien Phenomenology by analysing Alan Turing’s essay, Computing Machinery and Intelligence and deduces that it is an approach inextricably linked to human understanding (Bogost 14). Bogost seeks to avoid distinctions between things or a slippage into an over-determination of systems operations, and instead he adopts an OOO view where all things are treated equally, even cheeky little robots (Bogost 17).Figure 8: Accomplice by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, installation view, Artspace, Sydney. (Photo: silversalt photography) Intra-Active ReappearanceIf Barad describes intra-action as enacting an agential cut or separation of object from subject, she does not mean a distinction between object and subject but instead devises an intra-active cutting of things together-apart (Nature’s Queer Performativity 124). This is useful for two reasons. First it allows confusion between inside and outside, between real and unreal, and between past and future. In other words it defies the human/world correlates, which OOO’s are actively attempting to flee. Secondly it makes sense of an idea of disappearance as being a re-appearance too. If robots, and all other species, start to disappear, from our consciousness, from reality, from life (that is, becoming extinct), this disappearance causes or enacts a new appearance (the robotic action), and this action has its own vitality and immanence. If virtuality (an aesthetic of being that grew from technology, information, and digital advancements) meant that the body was left or abandoned for an immaterial space, then robots and robotic artwork are a means of re-inhabiting the body in a re-materialized mode. This new body, electronic and robotic in nature, might be mastered by a human hand (computer programming) but its differential is its new agency which is one shared between human and non-human. Barad warns, however, against a basic inversion of humanism (Nature’s Queer Performativity 126). Co-evolution is not the removal of the human. While an OOO approach may not have achieved the impossible task of creating a reality beyond the human-centric, it is a mode of becoming cautious of an invested anthropocentric view, which robotics and diminished non-human species bring to attention. The autonomy and agency of robotic life challenges human understanding of ontological being and of how human and non-human entities relate.References Barad, Karen. "Nature’s Queer Performativity." Qui Parle 19.2 (2011): 121-158. ———. Interview. In Rick Dolphijn and Van Der Tuin. “Matter Feels, Converses, Suffers, Desires, Yearns and Remembers: Interview with Karen Barad.” New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan; Open Humanities Press, 2012. ———. "Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28.3 (2003): 801-831. Bennett, Jane. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001. Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology. Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 2012. Bryant, Levi. The Democracy of Objects. University of Michigan Publishing: Open Humanities Press, 2011. ———, N. Srnicek, and GHarman. The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Melbourne: re:press, 2011. Gemeinboeck, Petra, and Rob Saunders. “Other Ways of Knowing: Embodied Investigations of the Unstable, Slippery and Incomplete.” Fibreculture Journal 18 (2011). ‹http://eighteen.fibreculturejournal.org/2011/10/09/fcj-120-other-ways-of-knowing-embodied-investigations-of-the-unstable-slippery-and-incomplete/›. Gray, Nathan. "L’object sonore undead." In A. Barikin and H. Hughes. Making Worlds: Art and Science Fiction. Melbourne: Surpllus, 2013. 228-233. Harman, Graham. The Quadruple Object. Winchester UK: Zero Books, 2011. ———. Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. Chicago: Open Court, 2005. ———. Heidegger Explained: From Phenomenon to Thing. Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 2007. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1962. Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. New York: Continuum, 2008. Muecke, Stephen. "The Fall: Ficto-Critical Writing." Parallax 8.4 (2002): 108-112. ———. "Motorcycles, Snails, Latour: Criticism without Judgment." Cultural Studies Review 18.1 (2012): 40-58. ———. “The Writing Laboratory: Political Ecology, Labour, Experiment.” Angelaki 14.2 (2009): 15-20. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge, 1993.

This paper argues that artist Dope Saint Jude is transforming South African hip-hop by queering a genre that has predominantly been male and heteronormative. Specifically, I analyse the opening skit of her music video “Keep in Touch” in order to unpack the ways which she revives Gayle, a gay language that adopted double-coded forms of speech during the apartheid era—a context in which homosexuals were criminalised. The use of Gayle and spaces close to the city centre of Cape Town (such as Salt River and Woodstock) speaks to the city as it was before it was transformed by the decline of industries due to the country’s adoption of neoliberal economics and, more recently, by the gentrification of these spaces. Dope Saint Jude therefore reclaims these city spaces through her use of gay modes of speech that have a long history in Cape Town and by positioning her work as hip-hop, which has been popular in the city for well over two decades. Her inclusion of transgender MC and DJ Angel Ho pushes the boundaries of hegemonic and binary conceptions of gender identity even further. In essence, Dope Saint Jude is transforming local hip-hop in a context that is shaped significantly by US cultural imperialism. The artist is also transforming our perspective of spaces that have been altered by neoliberal economics.Setting the SceneDope Saint Jude (DSJ) is a queer MC from Elsies River, a working class township located on Cape Town's Cape Flats in South Africa. Elsies River was defined as a “coloured” neighbourhood under the apartheid state's Group Areas Act, which segregated South Africans racially. With the aid of the Population Registration Act, citizens were classified, not merely along the lines of white, Asian, or black—black subjects were also divided into further categories. The apartheid state also distinguished between black and “coloured” subjects. Michael MacDonald contends that segregation “ordained blacks to be inferior to whites; apartheid cast them to be indelibly different” (11). Apartheid declared “African claims in South Africa to be inferior to white claims” and effectively claimed that black subjects “belonged elsewhere, in societies of their own, because their race was different” (ibid). The term “coloured” defined people as “mixed race” to separate communities that might otherwise have identified as black in the broad and inclusive sense (Erasmus 16). Racial categorisation was used to create a racial hierarchy with white subjects at the top of that hierarchy and those classified as black receiving the least resources and benefits. This frustrated attempts to establish broad alliances of black struggles against apartheid. It is in this sense that race is socially and politically constructed and continues to have currency, despite the fact that biologically essentialist understandings of race have been discredited (Yudell 13–14). Thanks to apartheid town planning and resource allocation, many townships on the Cape Flats were poverty-stricken and plagued by gang violence (Salo 363). This continues to be the case because post-apartheid South Africa's embrace of neoliberal economics failed to address racialised class inequalities significantly (Haupt, Static 6–8). This is the '90s context in which socially conscious hip-hop crews, such as Prophets of da City or Black Noise, came together. They drew inspiration from Black Consciousness philosophy via their exposure to US hip-hop crews such as Public Enemy in order to challenge apartheid policies, including their racial interpellation as “coloured” as distinct from the more inclusive category, black (Haupt, “Black Thing” 178). Prophets of da City—whose co-founding member, Shaheen Ariefdien, also lived in Elsies River—was the first South African hip-hop outfit to record an album. Whilst much of their work was performed in English, they quickly transformed the genre by rapping in non-standard varieties of Afrikaans and by including MCs who rap in African languages (ibid). They therefore succeeded in addressing key issues related to race, language, and class disparities in relation to South Africa's transition to democracy (Haupt, “Black Thing”; Haupt, Stealing Empire). However, as is the case with mainstream US hip-hop, specifically gangsta rap (Clay 149), South African hip-hop has been largely dominated by heterosexual men. This includes the more commercial hip-hop scene, which is largely perceived to be located in Johannesburg, where male MCs like AKA and Cassper Nyovest became celebrities. However, certain female MCs have claimed the genre, notably EJ von Lyrik and Burni Aman who are formerly of Godessa, the first female hip-hop crew to record and perform locally and internationally (Haupt, Stealing Empire 166; Haupt, “Can a Woman in Hip-Hop”). DSJ therefore presents the exception to a largely heteronormative and male-dominated South African music industry and hip-hop scene as she transforms it with her queer politics. While queer hip-hop is not new in the US (Pabón and Smalls), this is new territory for South Africa. Writing about the US MC Jean Grae in the context of a “male-dominated music industry and genre,” Shanté Paradigm Smalls contends,Heteronormativity blocks the materiality of the experiences of Black people. Yet, many Black people strive for a heteronormative effect if not “reality”. In hip hop, there is a particular emphasis on maintaining the rigidity of categories, even if those categories fail [sic]. (87) DSJ challenges these rigid categories. Keep in TouchDSJ's most visible entry onto the media landscape to date has been her appearance in an H&M recycling campaign with British Sri Lankan artist MIA (H&M), some fashion shoots, her new EP—Reimagine (Dope Saint Jude)—and recent Finnish, US and French tours as well as her YouTube channel, which features her music videos. As the characters’ theatrical costumes suggest, “Keep in Touch” is possibly the most camp and playful music video she has produced. It commences somewhat comically with Dope Saint Jude walking down Salt River main road to a public telephone, where she and a young woman in pig tails exchange dirty looks. Salt River is located at the foot of Devil's Peak not far from Cape Town's CBD. Many factories were located there, but the area is also surrounded by low-income housing, which was designated a “coloured” area under apartheid. After apartheid, neighbourhoods such as Salt River, Woodstock, and the Bo-Kaap became increasingly gentrified and, instead of becoming more inclusive, many parts of Cape Town continued to be influenced by policies that enable racialised inequalities. Dope Saint Jude calls Angel Ho: DSJ: Awêh, Angie! Yoh, you must check this kak sturvy girl here by the pay phone. [Turns to the girl, who walks away as she bursts a chewing gum bubble.] Ja, you better keep in touch. Anyway, listen here, what are you wys?Angel Ho: Ah, just at the salon getting my hair did. What's good? DSJ: Wanna catch on kak today?Angel Ho: Yes, honey. But, first, let me Gayle you this. By the jol by the art gallery, this Wendy, nuh. This Wendy tapped me on the shoulder and wys me, “This is a place of decorum.”DSJ: What did she wys?Angel Ho: De-corum. She basically told me this is not your house. DSJ: I know you told that girl to keep in touch!Angel Ho: Yes, Mama! I'm Paula, I told that bitch, “Keep in touch!” [Points index finger in the air.](Saint Jude, Dope, “Keep in Touch”)Angel Ho's name is a play on the male name Angelo and refers to the trope of the ho (whore) in gangsta rap lyrics and in music videos that present objectified women as secondary to male, heterosexual narratives (Sharpley-Whiting 23; Collins 27). The queering of Angelo, along with Angel Ho’s non-binary styling in terms of hair, make-up, and attire, appropriates a heterosexist, sexualised stereotype of women in order to create room for a gender identity that operates beyond heteronormative male-female binaries. Angel Ho’s location in a hair salon also speaks to stereotypical associations of salons with women and gay subjects. In a discussion of gender stereotypes about hair salons, Kristen Barber argues that beauty work has traditionally been “associated with women and with gay men” and that “the body beautiful has been tightly linked to the concept of femininity” (455–56). During the telephonic exchange, Angel Ho and Dope Saint Jude code-switch between standard and non-standard varieties of English and Afrikaans, as the opening appellation, “Awêh,” suggests. In this context, the term is a friendly greeting, which intimates solidarity. “Sturvy” means pretentious, whilst “kak” means shit, but here it is used to qualify “sturvy” and means that the girl at the pay phone is very pretentious or “full of airs.” To be “wys” means to be wise, but it can also mean that you are showing someone something or educating them. The meanings of these terms shift, depending on the context. The language practices in this skit are in line with the work of earlier hip-hop crews, such as Prophets of da City and Brasse vannie Kaap, to validate black, multilingual forms of speech and expression that challenge the linguistic imperialism of standard English and Afrikaans in South Africa, which has eleven official languages (Haupt, “Black Thing”; Haupt, Stealing Empire; Williams). Henry Louis Gates’s research on African American speech varieties and literary practices emerging from the repressive context of slavery is essential to understanding hip-hop’s language politics. Hip-hop artists' multilingual wordplay creates parallel discursive universes that operate both on the syntagmatic axis of meaning-making and the paradigmatic axis (Gates 49; Haupt, “Stealing Empire” 76–77). Historically, these discursive universes were those of the slave masters and the slaves, respectively. While white hegemonic meanings are produced on the syntagmatic axis (which is ordered and linear), black modes of speech as seen in hip-hop word play operate on the paradigmatic axis, which is connotative and non-linear (ibid). Distinguishing between Signifyin(g) / Signification (upper case, meaning black expression) and signification (lower case, meaning white dominant expression), he argues that “the signifier ‘Signification’ has remained identical in spelling to its white counterpart to demonstrate [. . .] that a simultaneous, but negated, parallel discursive (ontological, political) universe exists within the larger white discursive universe” (Gates 49). The meanings of terms and expressions can change, depending on the context and manner in which they are used. It is therefore the shared experiences of speech communities (such as slavery or racist/sexist oppression) that determine the negotiated meanings of certain forms of expression. Gayle as a Parallel Discursive UniverseDSJ and Angel Ho's performance of Gayle takes these linguistic practices further. Viewers are offered points of entry into Gayle via the music video’s subtitles. We learn that Wendy is code for a white person and that to keep in touch means exactly the opposite. Saint Jude explains that Gayle is a very fun queer language that was used to kind of mask what people were saying [. . .] It hides meanings and it makes use of women's names [. . . .] But the thing about Gayle is it's constantly changing [. . .] So everywhere you go, you kind of have to pick it up according to the context that you're in. (Ovens, Saint Jude and Haupt)According to Kathryn Luyt, “Gayle originated as Moffietaal [gay language] in the coloured gay drag culture of the Western Cape as a form of slang amongst Afrikaans-speakers which over time, grew into a stylect used by gay English and Afrikaans-speakers across South Africa” (Luyt 8; Cage 4). Given that the apartheid state criminalised homosexuals, Gayle was coded to evade detection and to seek out other members of this speech community (Luyt 8). Luyt qualifies the term “language” by arguing, “The term ‘language’ here, is used not as a constructed language with its own grammar, syntax, morphology and phonology, but in the same way as linguists would discuss women’s language, as a way of speaking, a kind of sociolect” (Luyt 8; Cage 1). However, the double-coded nature of Gayle allows one to think of it as creating a parallel discursive universe as Gates describes it (49). Whereas African American and Cape Flats discursive practices function parallel to white, hegemonic discourses, gay modes of speech run parallel to heteronormative communication. Exclusion and MicroaggressionsThe skit brings both discursive practices into play by creating room for one to consider that DSJ queers a male-dominated genre that is shaped by US cultural imperialism (Haupt, Stealing Empire 166) as a way of speaking back to intersectional forms of marginalisation (Crenshaw 1244), which are created by “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (hooks 116). This is significant in South Africa where “curative rape” of lesbians and other forms of homophobic violence are prominent (cf. Gqola; Hames; Msibi). Angel Ho's anecdote conveys a sense of the extent to which black individuals are subject to scrutiny. Ho's interpretation of the claim that the gallery “is a place of decorum” is correct: it is not Ho's house. Black queer subjects are not meant to feel at home or feel a sense of ownership. This functions as a racial microaggression: “subtle insults (verbal, nonverbal, and/or visual) directed toward people of color, often automatically or unconsciously” (Solorzano, Ceja, and Yosso 60). This speaks to DSJ's use of Salt River, Woodstock, and Bo-Kaap for the music video, which features black queer bodies in performance—all of these spaces are being gentrified, effectively pushing working class people of colour out of the city (cf. Didier, Morange, and Peyroux; Lemanski). Gustav Visser explains that gentrification has come to mean a unit-by-unit acquisition of housing which replaces low-income residents with high-income residents, and which occurs independent of the structural condition, architecture, tenure or original cost level of the housing (although it is usually renovated for or by the new occupiers). (81–82) In South Africa this inequity plays out along racial lines because its neoliberal economic policies created a small black elite without improving the lives of the black working class. Instead, the “new African bourgeoisie, because it shares racial identities with the bulk of the poor and class interests with white economic elites, is in position to mediate the reinforcing cleavages between rich whites and poor blacks without having to make more radical changes” (MacDonald 158). In a news article about a working class Salt River family of colour’s battle against an eviction, Christine Hogg explains, “Gentrification often means the poor are displaced as the rich move in or buildings are upgraded by new businesses. In Woodstock and Salt River both are happening at a pace.” Angel Ho’s anecdote, as told from a Woodstock hair salon, conveys a sense of what Woodstock’s transformation from a coloured, working class Group Area to an upmarket, trendy, and arty space would mean for people of colour, including black, queer subjects. One could argue that this reading of the video is undermined by DSJ’s work with global brand H&M. Was she was snared by neoliberal economics? Perhaps, but one response is that the seeds of any subculture’s commercial co-option lie in the fact it speaks through commodities (for example clothing, make-up, CDs, vinyl, or iTunes / mp3 downloads (Hebdige 95; Haupt, Stealing Empire 144–45). Subcultures have a window period in which to challenge hegemonic ideologies before they are delegitimated or commercially co-opted. Hardt and Negri contend that the means that extend the reach of corporate globalisation could be used to challenge it from within it (44–46; Haupt, Stealing Empire 26). DSJ utilises her H&M work, social media, the hip-hop genre, and international networks to exploit that window period to help mainstream black queer identity politics.ConclusionDSJ speaks back to processes of exclusion from the city, which was transformed by apartheid and, more recently, gentrification, by claiming it as a creative and playful space for queer subjects of colour. She uses Gayle to lay claim to the city as it has a long history in Cape Town. In fact, she says that she is not reviving Gayle, but is simply “putting it on a bigger platform” (Ovens, Saint Jude, and Haupt). The use of subtitles in the video suggests that she wants to mainstream queer identity politics. 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New York: New York UP, 2007.Smalls, Shanté Paradigm. “‘The Rain Comes Down’: Jean Grae and Hip Hop Heteronormativity.” American Behavioral Scientist 55.1 (2011): 86–95.Visser, Gustav. “Gentrification: Prospects for Urban South African Society?” Acta Academica Supplementum 1 (2003): 79–104.Williams, Quentin E. “Youth Multilingualism in South Africa’s Hip-Hop Culture: a Metapragmatic Analysis.” Sociolinguistic Studies 10.1 (2016): 109–33.Yudell, Michael. “A Short History of the Race Concept.” Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture. Ed. Sheldon Krimsky and Kathleen Sloan. New York: Columbia UP, 2011.InterviewsOvens, Neil, Dope Saint Jude, and Adam Haupt. One FM Radio interview. Cape Town. 21 Apr. 2016.VideosSaint Jude, Dope. “Keep in Touch.” YouTube. 23 Feb. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2ux9R839lE>. H&M. “H&M World Recycle Week Featuring M.I.A.” YouTube. 11 Apr. 2016. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7MskKkn2Jg>. MusicSaint Jude, Dope. Reimagine. 15 June 2016. <https://dopesaintjude.bandcamp.com/album/reimagine>.

IntroductionThe 2009 American film Trash Humpers, directed by Harmony Korine, was released at a time when the hipster had become a ubiquitous concept, entering into the common vernacular of numerous cultures throughout the world, and gaining significant press, social media and academic attention (see Žižek; Arsel and Thompson; Greif et al.; Stahl; Ouellette; Reeve; Schiermer; Maly and Varis). Trash Humpers emerged soon after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis triggered Occupy movements in numerous cities, aided by social media platforms, reported on by blogs such as Gawker, and stylized by multi-national youth-subculture brands such as Vice, American Apparel, Urban Outfitters and a plethora of localised variants.Korine’s film, which is made to resemble found VHS footage of old-aged vandals, epitomises the ironic, retro stylizations and “counterculture-meets-kitsch” aesthetics so familiar to hipster culture. As a creative stereotype from 1940s and ‘50s jazz and beatnik subcultures, the hipster re-emerged in the twenty-first century as a negative embodiment of alternative culture in the age of the Internet. As well as plumbing the recent past for things not yet incorporated into contemporary marketing mechanisms, the hipster also signifies the blurring of irony and authenticity. Such “outsiderness as insiderness” postures can be regarded as a continuation of the marginality-from-the-centre logic of cool capitalism that emerged after World War Two. Particularly between 2007 and 2015, the post-postmodern concept of the hipster was a resonant cultural trope in Western and non-Western cultures alike, coinciding with the normalisation of the new digital terrain and the establishment of mobile social media as an integral aspect of many people’s daily lives. While Korine’s 79-minute feature could be thought of as following in the schlocky footsteps of the likes of Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects (2006), it is decidedly more arthouse, and more attuned to the influence of contemporary alternative media brands and independent film history alike – as if the love child of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) and Vice Video, the latter having been labelled as “devil-may-care hipsterism” (Carr). Upon release, Trash Humpers was described by Gene McHugh as “a mildly hip take on Jackass”; by Mike D’Angelo as “an empty hipster pose”; and by Aaron Hillis as either “the work of an insincere hipster or an eccentric provocateur”. Lacking any semblance of a conventional plot, Trash Humpers essentially revolves around four elderly-looking protagonists – three men and a woman – who document themselves with a low-quality video camera as they go about behaving badly in the suburbs of Nashville, Tennessee, where Korine still lives. They cackle eerily to themselves as they try to stave off boredom, masturbating frantically on rubbish bins, defecating and drinking alcohol in public, fellating foliage, smashing televisions, playing ten-pin bowling, lighting firecrackers and telling gay “hate” jokes to camera with no punchlines. In one purposefully undramatic scene half-way through the film, the humpers are shown in the aftermath of an attack on a man wearing a French maid’s outfit; he lies dead in a pool of blood on their kitchen floor with a hammer at his feet. The humpers are consummate “bad” performers in every sense of the term, and they are joined by a range of other, apparently lower-class, misfits with whom they stage tap dance routines and repetitively sing nursery-rhyme-styled raps such as: “make it, make it, don’t break it; make it, make it, don’t fake it; make it, make it, don’t take it”, which acts as a surrogate theme song for the film. Korine sometimes depicts his main characters on crutches or in a wheelchair, and a baby doll is never too far away from the action, as a silent and Surrealist witness to their weird, sinister and sometimes very funny exploits. The film cuts from scene to scene as if edited on a video recorder, utilising in-house VHS titling sequences, audio glitches and video static to create the sense that one is engaging voyeuristically with a found video document rather than a scripted movie. Mainstream AlternativesAs a viewer of Trash Humpers, one has to try hard to suspend disbelief if one is to see the humpers as genuine geriatric peeping Toms rather than as hipsters in old-man masks trying to be rebellious. However, as Korine’s earlier films such as Gummo (1997) attest, he clearly delights in blurring the line between failure and transcendence, or, in this case, between pretentious art-school bravado and authentic redneck ennui. As noted in a review by Jeannette Catsoulis, writing for the New York Times: “Much of this is just so much juvenile posturing, but every so often the screen freezes into something approximating beauty: a blurry, spaced-out, yellow-green landscape, as alien as an ancient photograph”. Korine has made a career out of generating this wavering uncertainty in his work, polarising audiences with a mix of critical, cinema-verité styles and cynical exploitations. His work has consistently revelled in ethical ambiguities, creating environments where teenagers take Ritalin for kicks, kill cats, wage war with their families and engage in acts of sexual deviancy – all of which are depicted with a photographer’s eye for the uncanny.The elusive and contradictory aspects of Korine’s work – at once ugly and beautiful, abstract and commercial, pessimistic and nostalgic – are evident not just in films such as Gummo, Julien Donkey Boy (1999) and Mister Lonely (2007) but also in his screenplay for Kids (1995), his performance-like appearances on The Tonight Show with David Letterman (1993-2015) and in publications such as A Crackup at the Race Riots (1998) and Pass the Bitch Chicken (2001). As well as these outputs, Korine is also a painter who is represented by Gagosian Gallery – one of the world’s leading art galleries – and he has directed numerous music videos, documentaries and commercials throughout his career. More than just update of the traditional figure of the auteur, Korine, instead, resembles a contemporary media artist whose avant-garde and grotesque treatments of Americana permeate almost everything he does. Korine wrote the screenplay for Kids when he was just 19, and subsequently built his reputation on the paradoxical mainstreaming of alternative culture in the 1990s. This is exemplified by the establishment of music and film genres such “alternative” and “independent”; the popularity of the slacker ethos attributed to Generation X; the increased visibility of alternative press zines; the birth of grunge in fashion and music; and the coining of “cool hunting” – a bottom-up market research phenomenon that aimed to discover new trends in urban subcultures for the purpose of mass marketing. Key to “alternative culture”, and its related categories such as “indie” and “arthouse”, is the idea of evoking artistic authenticity while covertly maintaining a parasitic relationship with the mainstream. As Holly Kruse notes in her account of the indie music scenes of the 1990s, which gained tremendous popularity in the wake of grunge bands such as Nirvana: without dominant, mainstream musics against which to react, independent music cannot be independent. Its existence depends upon dominant music structures and practices against which to define itself. Indie music has therefore been continually engaged in an economic and ideological struggle in which its ‘outsider’ status is re-examined, re-defined, and re-articulated to sets of musical practices. (Kruse 149)Alternative culture follows a similar, highly contentious, logic, appearing as a nebulous, authentic and artistic “other” whose exponents risk being entirely defined by the mainstream markets they profess to oppose. Kids was directed by the artist cum indie-director Larry Clark, who discovered Korine riding his skateboard with a group of friends in New York’s Washington Square in the early 1990s, before commissioning him to write a script. The then subcultural community of skating – which gained prominence in the 1990s amidst the increased visibility of “alternative sports” – provides an important backdrop to the film, which documents a group of disaffected New York teenagers at a time of the Aids crisis in America. Korine has been active in promoting the DIY ethos, creativity and anti-authoritarian branding of skate culture since this time – an industry that, in its attempts to maintain a non-mainstream profile while also being highly branded, has become emblematic of the category of “alternative culture”. Korine has undertaken commercial projects with an array skate-wear brands, but he is particularly associated with Supreme, a so-called “guerrilla fashion” label originating in 1994 that credits Clark and other 1990s indie darlings, and Korine cohorts, Chloë Sevigny and Terry Richardson, as former models and collaborators (Williams). The company is well known for its designer skateboard decks, its collaborations with prominent contemporary visual artists, its hip-hop branding and “inscrutable” web videos. It is also well known for its limited runs of new clothing lines, which help to stoke demand through one-offs – blending street-wear accessibility with the restricted-market and anti-authoritarian sensibility of avant-garde art.Of course, “alternative culture” poses a notorious conundrum for analysis, involving highly subjective demarcations of “mainstream” from “subversive” culture, not to mention “genuine subversion” from mere “corporate alternatives”. As Pierre Bourdieu has argued, the roots of alternative culture lie in the Western tradition of the avant-garde and the “aesthetic gaze” that developed in the nineteenth century (Field 36). In analysing the modernist notion of advanced cultural practice – where art is presented as an alternative to bourgeois academic taste and to the common realm of cultural commodities – Bourdieu proposed a distinction between two types of “fields”, or logics of cultural production. Alternative culture follows what Bourdieu called “the field of restricted production”, which adheres to “art for art’s sake” ideals, where audiences are targeted as if like-minded peers (Field 50). In contrast, the “field of large-scale production” reflects the commercial imperatives of mainstream culture, in which goods are produced for the general public at large. The latter field of large-scale production tends to service pre-established markets, operating in response to public demand. Furthermore, whereas success in the field of restricted production is often indirect, and latent – involving artists who create niche markets without making any concessions to those markets – success in the field of large-scale production is typically more immediate and quantifiable (Field 39). Here we can see that central to the branding of “alternative culture” is the perceived refusal to conform to popular taste and the logic of capitalism more generally is. As Supreme founder James Jebbia stated about his brand in a rare interview: “The less known the better” (Williams). On this, Bourdieu states that, in the field of restricted production, the fundamental principles of all ordinary economies are inversed to create a “loser wins” scenario (Field 39). Profit and cultural esteem become detrimental attributes in this context, potentially tainting the integrity and marginalisation on which alternative products depend. As one ironic hipster t-shirt puts it: “Nothing is any good if other people like it” (Diesel Sweeties).Trash HipstersIn abandoning linear narrative for rough assemblages of vignettes – or “moments” – recorded with an unsteady handheld camera, Trash Humpers positions itself in ironic opposition to mainstream filmmaking, refusing the narrative arcs and unwritten rules of Hollywood film, save for its opening and closing credits. Given Korine’s much publicized appreciation of cinema pioneers, we can understand Trash Humpers as paying homage to independent and DIY film history, including Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, William Eggleston’s Stranded in Canton (1973), Andy Warhol’s and Paul Morrissey’s Lonesome Cowboys (1967) and Trash (1970), and John Waters’s Pink Flamingos (1972), all of which jubilantly embraced the “bad” aesthetic of home movies. Posed as fantasized substitutions for mainstream movie-making, such works were also underwritten by the legitimacy of camp as a form of counter-culture critique, blurring parody and documentary to give voice to an array of non-mainstream and counter-cultural identities. The employment of camp in postmodern culture became known not merely as an aesthetic subversion of cultural mores but also as “a gesture of self-legitimation” (Derrida 290), its “failed seriousness” regarded as a critical response to the specific historical problem of being a “culturally over-saturated” subject (Sontag 288).The significant difference between Korine’s film and those of his 1970s-era forbears is precisely the attention he pays to the formal aspects of his medium, revelling in analogue editing glitches to the point of fetishism, in some cases lasting as long as the scenes themselves. Consciously working out-of-step with the media of his day, Trash Humpers in imbued with nostalgia from its very beginning. Whereas Smith, Eggleston, Warhol, Morrissey and Waters blurred fantasy and documentary in ways that raised the social and political identities of their subjects, Korine seems much more interested in “trash” as an aesthetic trope. In following this interest, he rightfully pays homage to the tropes of queer cinema, however, he conveniently leaves behind their underlying commentaries about (hetero-) normative culture. A sequence where the trash humpers visit a whorehouse and amuse themselves by smoking cigars and slapping the ample bottoms of prostitutes in G-strings confirms the heterosexual tenor of the film, which is reiterated throughout by numerous deadpan gay jokes and slurs.Trash Humpers can be understood precisely in terms of Korine’s desire to maintain the aesthetic imperatives of alternative culture, where formal experimentation and the subverting of mainstream genres can provide a certain amount of freedom from explicated meaning, and, in particular, from socio-political commentary. Bourdieu rightly points out how the pleasures of the aesthetic gaze often manifest themselves curiously as form of “deferred pleasure” (353) or “pleasure without enjoyment” (495), which corresponds to Immanuel Kant’s notion of the disinterested nature of aesthetic judgement. Aesthetic dispositions posed in the negative – as in the avant-garde artists who mined primitive and ugly cultural stereotypes – typically use as reference points “facile” or “vulgar” (393) working-class tropes that refer negatively to sensuous pleasure as their major criterion of judgment. For Bourdieu, the pleasures provided by the aesthetic gaze in such instances are not sensual pleasures so much as the pleasures of social distinction – signifying the author’s distance from taste as a form of gratification. Here, it is easy to see how the orgiastic central characters in Trash Humpers might be employed by Korine for a similar end-result. As noted by Jeremiah Kipp in a review of the film: “You don't ‘like’ a movie like Trash Humpers, but I’m very happy such films exist”. Propelled by aesthetic, rather than by social, questions of value, those that “get” the obscure works of alternative culture have a tendency to legitimize them on the basis of the high-degree of formal analysis skills they require. For Bourdieu, this obscures the fact that one’s aesthetic “‘eye’ is a product of history reproduced by education” – a privileged mode of looking, estranged from those unfamiliar with the internal logic of decoding presupposed by the very notion of “aesthetic enjoyment” (2).The rhetorical priority of alternative culture is, in Bourdieu’s terms, the “autonomous” perfection of the form rather than the “heteronomous” attempt to monopolise on it (Field 40). However, such distinctions are, in actuality, more nuanced than Bourdieu sometimes assumed. This is especially true in the context of global digital culture, which makes explicit how the same cultural signs can have vastly different meanings and motivations across different social contexts. This has arguably resulted in the destabilisation of prescriptive analyses of cultural taste, and has contributed to recent “post-critical” advances, in which academics such as Bruno Latour and Rita Felski advocate for cultural analyses and practices that promote relationality and attachment rather than suspicious (critical) dispositions towards marginal and popular subjects alike. Latour’s call for a move away from the “sledge hammer” of critique applies as much to cultural practice as it does to written analysis. Rather than maintaining hierarchical oppositions between authentic versus inauthentic taste, Latour understands culture – and the material world more generally – as having agency alongside, and with, that of the social world.Hipsters with No AlternativeIf, as Karl Spracklen suggests, alternativism is thought of “as a political project of resistance to capitalism, with communicative oppositionality as its defining feature” (254), it is clear that there has been a progressive waning in relevance of the category of “alternative culture” in the age of the Internet, which coincides with the triumph of so-called “neoliberal individualism” (258). To this end, Korine has lost some of his artistic credibility over the course of the 2000s. If viewed negatively, icons of 1990s alternative culture such as Korine can be seen as merely exploiting Dada-like techniques of mimetic exacerbation and symbolic détournement for the purpose of alternative, “arty” branding rather than pertaining to a counter-hegemonic cultural movement (Foster 31). It is within this context of heightened scepticism surrounding alternative culture that the hipster stereotype emerged in cultures throughout the world, as if a contested symbol of the aesthetic gaze in an era of neoliberal identity politics. Whatever the psychological motivations underpinning one’s use of the term, to call someone a hipster is typically to point out that their distinctive alternative or “arty” status appears overstated; their creative decisions considered as if a type of bathos. For detractors of alternative cultural producers such as Korine, he is trying too hard to be different, using the stylised codes of “alternative” to conceal what is essentially his cultural and political immaturity. The hipster – who is rarely ever self-identified – re-emerged in the 2000s to operate as a scapegoat for inauthentic markers of alternative culture, associated with men and women who appear to embrace Realpolitik, sincerity and authentic expressions of identity while remaining tethered to irony, autonomous aesthetics and self-design. Perhaps the real irony of the hipster is the pervasiveness of irony in contemporary culture. R. J Magill Jnr. has argued that “a certain cultural bitterness legitimated through trenchant disbelief” (xi) has come to define the dominant mode of political engagement in many societies since the early 2000s, in response to mass digital information, twenty-four-hour news cycles, and the climate of suspicion produced by information about terrorism threats. He analyses the prominence of political irony in American TV shows including The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Simpsons, South Park, The Chappelle Show and The Colbert Report but he also notes its pervasiveness as a twenty-first-century worldview – a distancing that “paradoxically and secretly preserves the ideals of sincerity, honesty and authenticity by momentarily belying its own appearance” (x). Crucially, then, the utterance “hipster” has come to signify instances when irony and aesthetic distance are perceived to have been taken too far, generating the most disdain from those for whom irony, aesthetic discernment and cultural connoisseurship still provide much-needed moments of disconnection from capitalist cultures drowning in commercial hyperbole and grave news hype. Korine himself has acknowledged that Spring Breakers (2013) – his follow-up feature film to Trash Humpers – was created in response to the notion that “alternative culture”, once a legitimate challenge to mainstream taste, had lost its oppositional power with the decentralization of digital culture. He states that he made Spring Breakers at a moment “when there’s no such thing as high or low, it’s all been exploded. There is no underground or above-ground, there’s nothing that’s alternative. We’re at a point of post-everything, so it’s all about finding the spirit inside, and the logic, and making your own connections” (Hawker). In this context, we can understand Trash Humpers as the last of the Korine films to be branded with the authenticity of alternative culture. In Spring Breakers Korine moved from the gritty low-fi sensibility of his previous films and adopted a more digital, light-filled and pastel-coloured palette. Focussing more conventionally on plot than ever before, Spring Breakers follows four college girls who hold up a restaurant in order to fund their spring break vacation. Critic Michael Chaiken noted that the film marks a shift in Korine’s career, from the alternative stylings of the pre-Internet generation to “the cultural heirs [of] the doomed protagonists of Kids: nineties babies, who grew up with the Internet, whose sensibilities have been shaped by the sweeping technological changes that have taken place in the interval between the Clinton and Obama eras” (33).By the end of the 2000s, an entire generation came of age having not experienced a time when the obscure films, music or art of the past took more effort to track down. Having been a key participant in the branding of alternative culture, Korine is in a good position to recall a different, pre-YouTube time – when cultural discernment was still caught up in the authenticity of artistic identity, and when one’s cultural tastes could still operate with a certain amount of freedom from sociological scrutiny. Such ideas seem a long way away from today’s cultural environments, which have been shaped not only by digital media’s promotion of cultural interconnection and mass information, but also by social media’s emphasis on mobilization and ethical awareness. ConclusionI should reiterate here that is not Korine’s lack of seriousness, or irony, alone that marks Trash Humpers as a response to the scepticism surrounding alternative culture symbolised by the figure of the hipster. It is, rather, that Korine’s mock-documentary about juvenile geriatrics works too hard to obscure its implicit social commentary, appearing driven to condemn contemporary capitalism’s exploitations of youthfulness only to divert such “uncool” critical commentaries through unsubtle formal distractions, visual poetics and “bad boy” avant-garde signifiers of authenticity. Before being bludgeoned to death, the unnamed man in the French maid’s outfit recites a poem on a bridge amidst a barrage of fire crackers let off by a nearby humper in a wheelchair. Although easily overlooked, it could, in fact, be a pivotal scene in the film. Spoken with mock high-art pretentions, the final lines of the poem are: So what? Why, I ask, why? Why castigate these creatures whose angelic features are bumping and grinding on trash? Are they not spawned by our greed? Are they not our true seed? Are they not what we’ve bought for our cash? We’ve created this lot, of the ooze and the rot, deliberately and unabashed. Whose orgiastic elation and one mission in creation is to savagely fornicate TRASH!Here, the character’s warning of capitalist overabundance is drowned out by the (aesthetic) shocks of the fire crackers, just as the stereotypical hipster’s ethical ideals are drowned out by their aesthetic excess. The scene also functions as a metaphor for the humpers themselves, whose elderly masks – embodiments of nostalgia – temporarily suspend their real socio-political identities for the sake of role-play. It is in this sense that Trash Humpers is too enamoured with its own artifices – including its anonymous “boys club” mentality – to suggest anything other than the aesthetic distance that has come to mark the failings of the “alternative culture” category. In such instances, alternative taste appears as a rhetorical posture, with Korine asking us to gawk knowingly at the hedonistic and destructive pleasures pursued by the humpers while factoring in, and accepting, our likely disapproval.ReferencesArsel, Zeynep, and Craig J. Thompson. “Demythologizing Consumption Practices: How Consumers Protect Their Field-Dependent Identity Investments from Devaluing Marketplace Myths.” Journal of Consumer Research 37.5 (2011): 791-806.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production Essays on Art and Literature. Edited by Randal Johnson. London: Polity Press, 1993.Carr, David. “Its Edge Intact, Vice Is Chasing Hard News.” New York Times 24 Aug. 2014. 12 Nov. 2016 <https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/25/business/media/its-edge-intact-vice-is-chasing-hard-news-.html>.Catsoulis, Jeannette. “Geriatric Delinquents, Rampaging through Suburbia.” New York Times 6 May 2010. 1` Nov. 2016 <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/movies/07trash.html>.Chaiken, Michael. “The Dream Life.” Film Comment (Mar./Apr. 2013): 30-33.D’Angelo, Mike. “Trash Humpers.” Not Coming 18 Sep. 2009. 12 Nov. 2016 <http://www.notcoming.com/reviews/trashhumpers>.Derrida, Jacques. Positions. London: Athlone, 1981.Diesel Sweeties. 1 Nov. 2016 <https://store.dieselsweeties.com/products/nothing-is-any-good-if-other-people-like-it-shirt>.Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.Greif, Mark. What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation. New York: n+1 Foundation, 2010.Hawker, Philippa. “Telling Tales Out of School.” Sydney Morning Herald 4 May 2013. 12 Nov. 2016 <http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/telling-tales-out-of-school-20130503-2ixc3.html>.Hillis, Aaron. “Harmony Korine on Trash Humpers.” IFC 6 May 2009. 12 Nov. 2016 <http://www.ifc.com/2010/05/harmony-korine-2>.Jay Magill Jr., R. Chic Ironic Bitterness. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007.Kipp, Jeremiah. “Clean Off the Dirt, Scrape Off the Blood: An Interview with Trash Humpers Director Harmony Korine.” Slant Magazine 18 Mar. 2011. 1 Nov. 2016 <http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/article/clean-off-the-dirt-scrape-off-the-blood-an-interview-with-trash-humpers-director-harmony-korine>.Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004): 225-248.Maly, Ico, and Varis, Piia. “The 21st-Century Hipster: On Micro-Populations in Times of Superdiversity.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 19.6 (2016): 637–653.McHugh, Gene. “Monday May 10th 2010.” Post Internet. New York: Lulu Press, 2010.Ouellette, Marc. “‘I Know It When I See It’: Style, Simulation and the ‘Short-Circuit Sign’.” Semiotic Review 3 (2013): 1–15.Reeve, Michael. “The Hipster as the Postmodern Dandy: Towards an Extensive Study.” 2013. 12 Nov. 2016. <http://www.academia.edu/3589528/The_hipster_as_the_postmodern_dandy_towards_an_extensive_study>.Schiermer, Bjørn. “Late-Modern Hipsters: New Tendencies in Popular Culture.” Acta Sociologica 57.2 (2014): 167–181.Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp.” Against Interpretation. New York: Octagon, 1964/1982. 275-92. Stahl, Geoff. “Mile-End Hipsters and the Unmasking of Montreal’s Proletaroid Intelligentsia; Or How a Bohemia Becomes BOHO.” Adam Art Gallery, Apr. 2010. 12 May 2015 <http://www.adamartgallery.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/adamartgallery_vuwsalecture_geoffstahl.pdf>.Williams, Alex. “Guerrilla Fashion: The Story of Supreme.” New York Times 21 Nov. 2012. 1 Nov. 2016 <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/fashion/guerrilla-fashion-the-story-of-supreme.html>.Žižek, Slavoj. “L’Etat d’Hipster.” Rhinocerotique. Trans. Henry Brulard. Sep. 2009. 3-10.

To Rodica, who died first / To Mircea, who continues me [I]In his book Picturing Health and Illness: Images of Identity and Difference, Sander L. Gilman argues that during the nineteenth century the healthy norm perceived as ugly not only those who were deformed, but also those who were ill, ageing, and/or experienced different bodily “loss of function” (53). In the nineteenth century, how much was medicine responsible for defining ugly as ill, deformed, and getting old, versus beautiful as healthy, and then, for the sake of the community’s health, firmly promoting these ideas? Furthermore, with the rise of photographic art, medicine was able to manipulate and control these ideas even more efficiently. According to Deborah Lupton, “The new technology of photography that developed from the mid-nineteenth century became a valuable strategy in the documentation of patterns of disease and illness, and the construction of the sites of dirtiness and contagion” (30). This essay focuses on the skin’s narrative as it presents its story when photographed. William Yang takes photos of his good friend, Allan, who is dying of AIDS. Of interests here is to discuss/approach the photographic art not from its scopophilic angle, that is, not from its perverse and pleasurable voyeuristic angle, but to analyze it side-by-side with Drew Leder’s notion of the “the remaining body.” He believes that in states of severe pain, one’s body “dys-appears,” “from the Greek prefix signifying ‘bad,’ ‘hard,’ or ‘ill,’” and he gives as example the English word “dysfunctional” (84). Yang’s photos offer variations of the “body that remains,” and, as we shall see, of the body that gradually did not remain. Through his work, Yang approaches visually the theme of the ars moriendi of the entropic body in pain as reminder of its mortal, gradually disabling fabric. [II] In the section of his work dedicated to AIDS, Gilman discusses only a collection of posters that have circulated in mass-media, which he researched at the National Library of Medicine at Bethesda, Maryland. Gilman thinks these posters function as the “still images of illness” (174). In other words, he believes these posters may have had an impact on the lay community, although not the intensified, urgent one, as he would have hoped. Because Gilman did not include a single photo of a patient dying of AIDS — although he understood this lack — I juxtapose one of the posters from his book with Yang’s photos taken of his dying friend, Allan, from his project entitled Sadness: A Monologue with Slides. Here I discuss the impact of Allan’s increasingly emaciated body versus the static, almost ineffective quality of the poster in order to consider the idea according to which “AIDS victims are living sculptures. … Both subject and object of art … they combine with their disease to overcome the narcissism of human consciousness. … It is an art of continuous transformation of subject into object and object into subject” (Siebers 220-21). Yang is an Australian artist with Chinese parentage. The images presented in this section originally appeared in print in Thomas W. Sokolowski’s and Rosalind Solomon’s collection of essays entitled Portraits in the Time of AIDS. According to the editors, Yang presented them as “monologues with slide projection in the theatre” (34) because the main actor of this one-man show is dying of AIDS. Yang’s work consists of seventeen slides with short texts written underneath them. In an attempt to respect the body that is dying, the texts are not recited, but the readers/spectators read them subvocally. The brilliance of this piece resides in its hushed tone, which parallels the act of dying when the patient’s body and mind become more and more tacit and lifeless. From one photo to another, and from one text to another, we discover Allan, although we never quite get to know him. The minitexts relate Allan’s story: how he was hospitalized at St. Vincent’s, known as “the AIDS ward” (35); how he decided to return home, into a studio shared with a dealer; how AIDS first attacked his lungs, and so he had to keep next to him “a large cylinder of oxygen as he was often out of breath” (37); how AIDS then affected his sight, and he developed a condition known as “CytoMegalo Virus — C.M.V. Retinctus” that gradually “destroyed the retina” of his eyes (39); how he decided “to go off medication” (46); and, how, finally “he went into a coma. I saw a nurse give him a glass of water but the water just ran out of his mouth” (50). To look at these photos time and time again is to be reminded of Albert Einstein’s vision of the passenger trapped in the train running with the speed of light. That passenger could not sense all that was happening in the train, and especially outside of it, because time moves in its cosmic, non-human, slippery dimension, and thus sensation could not profusely permeate his body. Juxtaposing Einstein’s vision with Allan’s decaying body, I read the latter’s body as if it were coiled up inside his mind just like a snail covers a part of its body under its hard shell. The photos are presented rapidly with no entr-acte in between; in a matter of minutes, time and space seem to collapse. There is no time for a prolonged reminiscence of Allan’s spent life. Allan is dying now, and he does not have time to remember his life. He barely has time to feel his body, a touch, or a kiss on his face, which seems to Yang “to have caved in” (47). Through this work, not only does Yang capture the disturbing moments of a friend dying, but he also touches on the “epidermis” of despair. This “epidermis” is both endotopic and exotopic, meaning that it starts within the patient and then it radiates/extends to his relatives and friends. Yang’s images of Allan dying give the impression that his body levitates, jutting out into space — but unfortunately without much meaning. On the other hand, the posters advertised for AIDS are simple, if not quite embarrassing and disrespectful given the gravity of this illness. They rarely touch on any aspects related to the illness itself, as they allude more to the immorality of homosexual acts. Gilman explains part of the rationale involved in the process of not presenting people dying of AIDS as follows: The image of the ‘positive’ body or the body with AIDS is strictly controlled in the world of the public health poster. Nowhere is an image of the ‘ugly’ or diseased body evoked directly, for any such evocation would refer back to the initial sense as a ‘gay’ disease. … Mens non sana in corpore insano cannot be the motto. For representing the ill body as a dying body is not possible. Such a body would point to ‘deviance from the norm’ in the form of illness. And this association with homosexuality and addiction labeled as illness must be suppressed. … All these images are images not of educating, but of control. (162) The poster chosen for illustration reads “LOVE AIDS PEOPLE,” with AIDS used as a verb and not as a noun; nonetheless, the construction’s subtlety is rather counterproductive. To a certain extent, this poster can be related to Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1601-02). There, the Apostle touches the actual wound because he needs tactile proof to accept its existence. The act of touching, as well as the skin open by the wound, reveal the fact that “Skin lacks the depth, the interiority we want it to give us. … The flesh we crave as confirmation of our forms cannot do anything but turn us forever out even as we burrow into the holes we find there” (Phelan 42). But the poster presented below brings into focus verbally (therefore propagandistically) how one’s body might be destroyed because of AIDS. Furthermore, the symbol of the arrow is a recurrent motif in the art representing AIDS, especially in light of its religious association with the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (see for example David Wojnarowicz art works which offer a personal interpretation of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian). But if LOVE AIDS PEOPLE, and if gay men identify themselves with a martyr, then they might easily fall target to this twisted logic and think of themselves as victims. As Larry Kramer notes, gay men are tragic people partly because they feel responsible for an illness that has been affecting both the homosexual and heterosexual communities: “The continuing existence of HIV is essential for the functioning of the totalitarianism under which gay people now live. It works like this: HIV allows ‘them’ to sell us as sick. And that kills off our usefulness, both in our minds — their thinking we are sick — and in the eyes of the world — everyone thinking we are sick” (65).Gay men have always been a target since, allegedly, they are a menace to the institution of marriage, procreation, and to morality in general. Endocrinology studies have been conducted on gay men, but their results have not been able to say with certainty why some people prefer to engage in homosexual rather than heterosexual acts. According to Jennifer Terry, earlier studies from the 1930s aimed at determining distinct somatic features of homosexuals for the most part failed to produce any such evidence. Most of them focused on the overall physical structure of bodies, measuring skeletal features, pelvic angles and things like muscle density and hair distribution. (144) (Another useful resource is Holt N. Parker’s 2001 article “The Myth of the Heterosexual: Anthropology and Sexuality for Classicists.”) How and by whom are our sexual identities created? Does the presence of one specific anatomical organ delimit one person’s sexual identity? We have been trained into believing that there are only two genders, male and female, partly because of our binary way of thinking. Needless to say, just as in one color there are degrees of its intensity and saturation, so there are in us verbal, behavioral, and sexual tendencies that could make us look and act more or less masculine or feminine. Even more productive is to note the importance of power (control) and the erotic in our lives considering that the photos (and the minitexts) presenting Allan seem insufficient to initiate a dialogue by themselves. Because the eroticized body is what dies, that is, what is put at risk or could become powerless because of AIDS. The body that cannot touch and be touched anymore; the body that cannot control its needs and desires; and, ultimately, the body that is deprived of its pleasures and thus loses its erotic self. Therefore, AIDS is not only a way to redefine our erotic life, but also becomes a reason to question our hygiene practices. Elizabeth Grosz points out that “erotic pleasures are evanescent, they are forgotten almost as they occur” (195). But when erotic pleasures are controlled, as seems to be the case because of AIDS, have we intervened in such a manner as to program our intercourse? Admittedly, AIDS is predominantly linked with one’s sexuality and, hence, it could make one feel too self-aware about one’s needs, as well as rigid and self-conscious in an (intimate) act which, in essence, is all about losing oneself, being uninhibited. In the end, Allan’s sense of identity seems to be imprinted only in the camera’s objective lens. After he died, as Yang remembers, “I read his diaries […]. AIDS was a tragedy that was for sure, but as well he had an addictive personality and his day to day life was full of desperation. I hadn’t realize the extent of this and it came as a shock. Yet there were moments of clarity when his fresh test for life shone” (51). Yang does not say more about Allan’s intimate writings and, as he suggests, it was quite surprising for him to discover a richer, more intimate dimension of his friend. Still, until Allan’s diaries will be released to the public to offer us a more palpable view on his life, we rely exclusively on the selections of photos and minitexts accomplished by Yang, thus being aware that, no matter how exquisite they are, they could only say a few things about this enigmatic patient.[III] After exposing Allan’s gradually collapsing body, we may want to analyze to which extent is dying/death something that reveals our self-centricity. It is by now a truism to say that death is the final moment of our embodiment to which we are denied access. Nonetheless, we cannot stop thinking about (our) death, and the last passage of this essay proposes its own reflection on this subject. Norbert Elias argues that each one of us is a homo clausus (Latin for “closed, self-sufficient being”). He believes that this condition is a consequence of our living an advanced phase in our individualized life. Surprisingly, he relates this self-sufficiency to the ritual of dying. He believes that in highly industrialized societies, a patient may benefit from the most recent technical and medical equipment, but that that person usually dies alone, meaning without his family/relatives around him. On the other hand, as he goes on to argue, “families in less developed states … often go hand in hand with far greater inequalities of power between men and women. [The dying] take leave of the world publicly, within a circle of people most of whom have strong emotive value for them, and for whom they themselves have a such a value. They die unhygienically, but not alone” (87). Elias does not explore this idea in depth, so we are left to wonder what he meant by dying unhygienically, or if he thought that method was better in coping with death. Also, he never mentioned the exact countries/regions he had in mind when he made that remark; therefore, we are left unsatisfied by his comment. Nonetheless, as Elias reminds us, it is important to remember that the traditional death rituals were and are intimate moments (and they should remain like this). The homo clausus idea may be linked with a body that is reaching its final embodiment, and hence becoming a closing-in-itself body. However, how does a body transact and/or negotiate the moments of its final embodiment? The process of sinking in one’s body, to which I refer, is not a visually, aurally, or especially olfactorily pleasant experience. Our deceitful memory misdirects our emotional brains by indicating which subsystem is still functional and open and which has become useless, that is, closed. In this light, we should redefine Elias’s idea by saying that what appears to be a monolithic structure — a body: closed, sealed, and/or self-contained — is in fact a very fluid body; that death does not reveal our self-centricity because that reasoning may generate an absurd idea, namely, we die alone because we have spent a life alone. Consequently, the dying body becomes the margin par excellence, which, because it is completely out of control, does not stop from leaking and/or emitting smells. This theory is confirmed by a study conducted on dying patients, Dying Process: Patients' Experiences of Palliative Care (2000), where Julia Lawton notes that “on a number of occasions, staff kept aromatherapy oil burners running throughout the day and night in an attempt to veil the odour of excretia, vomit and rotting flesh. … I observed that smell created a boundary around a patient, repelling others away” (135). One has to close one’s eyes to vaguely imagine what it must feel like for the medical personnel to keep the vigil of the dying bodies. Nonetheless, the lay community is exposed to photographs of the dying only on rare occasions. According to Gilman, these images are not made public because “The classical model of ‘healthy/beauty’ and ‘illness/ugliness’ is part of a cultural baggage that accompanies any representation of the ill or healthy body” (118-19). While the skin is endowed with the capacity of regenerating itself after it has been wounded, thus effacing time, a photograph of a dying body seems to efface one’s memory of one’s accumulated experiences. Such a photograph makes its contents (that is, the time, location, personal context of the shooting) disappear since its details will eventually fade away. As a corollary, the absent body effaces its photographed version, leaving it few chances to be remembered. The theme of the ars moriendi, as presented in this essay, has demonstrated that what dies is not only one’s body, but also the echoed memory of its erotic self. ReferencesElias, Norbert. The Loneliness of Dying. New York: Blackwell, 1985. Gilman, Sander. Picturing Health and Illness: Images of Identity and Difference. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. Grosz, Elizabeth. Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies.New York: Routledge, 1995. Kramer, Larry. The Tragedy of Today’s Gay. New York: Penguin Group, 2005. Lawton, Julia. Dying Process: Patients' Experiences of Palliative Care. New York: Routledge, 2000. Leder, Drew. The Absent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Lupton, Deborah. The Imperative of Health: Public Health and the Regulated Body. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, 1995. Peggy Phelan. Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories. New York: Routledge, 1997. Siebers, Tobin. The Body Aesthetic: From Fine Art to Body Modification. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Jennifer Terry. “The Seductive Power of Science in the Making of Deviant Subjectivity.” Posthuman Bodies. Eds. Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1995: 135-162. Yang, William. “Allan from Sadness: A Monologue with Slides.” Portraits in the Time of AIDS. Eds. Thomas W. Sokolowski and Rosalind Solomon. New York: Grey Art Gallery & Study Center, 1988: 34-51.

Introduction While individuals from marginalised and vulnerable communities have long been confronted with the task of developing coping strategies, COVID-19 lockdowns intensified the conditions under which resilience and wellbeing were/are negotiated, not only for marginalised communities but for people from all walks of life. In particular, the pandemic has highlighted in simple terms the stark divide between the “haves” and “have nots”, and how pre-existing physical conditions and material resources (or lack thereof), including adequate income, living circumstances, and access to digital and other resources, have created different conditions for people to be able to physically isolate, avoid working in conditions that put them at greater risk of exposure to the virus, and maintain up-to-date information. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we live, and its conditions have tested our capacity for resilience to varying degrees. Poor mental health has become an increasingly urgent concern, with almost one in ten people contemplating suicide during Victoria’s second wave and prolonged lockdown in 2020 (Ali et al.; Czeisler & Rajaratnam; Paul). The question of what enables people to cope and adapt to physical distancing is critical for building a more resilient post-pandemic society. With the understanding that resilience is comprised of an intersection of material and immaterial resources, this project takes as its focus the material dimensions of everyday resilience. Specifically, “Objects for Everyday Resilience” explores the intersection of material objects and everyday resilience, focussing on the things that have supported mental and physical health of different sections of the community in Melbourne, Australia, during the pandemic. People in the Victorian city of Melbourne, Australia – including the research team authors of this article – experienced 262 days of lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, more than any other city in the world. The infection rate was high, as was the death rate. Hospitals were in crisis attempting to deal with the influx (McReadie). During lockdowns in 2020 and 2021, all movement in the city was restricted, with 9 pm to 5 am curfews and a five-kilometre travel limit. Workplaces, schools, businesses, sports and leisure clubs were closed. One person per household could shop. Masks were mandatory at all times. PCR testing was extensive. People stayed in their homes, with no visitors. The city limits were closed by roadblocks. Rare instances of air travel required a hard-to-get exemption. Vaccines were delayed. The state government provided financial support for most workers who lost income from their regular work due to the restrictions. However, the financial assistance criteria rejected many casual workers, including foreign students who normally supported themselves through casual employment (McReadie). The mental health toll of protracted lockdowns on Melbourne residents was high (Klein, Tyler-Parker, and Bastian). Yet people developed measures of resilience that helped them cope with lockdown isolation (Gerrand). While studies of resilience have been undertaken during the pandemic, including increased attention towards the affordances of online platforms in lockdown, relatively little attention has been paid to whether and how material objects support everyday resilience. The significant amount of literature on objects and things (e.g. Whitlock) offers a wide range of potential applications when brought to bear on the material conditions of resilience in the COVID-19 pandemic as it continues to unfold. As ethnographer Paula Zuccotti notes in her study of objects that people used in lockdowns around the world, “Future Archeology of a Global Lockdown”, the everyday items we use tell us stories about how we exist (Zuccotti). Paying attention to the intersection of objects with resilience in everyday contexts can enable us to view resilience as a potential practice that can shape the conditions of social life that produce adversity in the first place (Chalmers). By studying relationships between material objects and people in conditions of adversity, this project aims to enhance and extend emerging understandings of multisystemic resilience (Ungar). Objects have been central to human history, culture, and life. According to Maurizio Ferraris, objects are characterised by four qualities: sensory-ness, manipulability, ordinariness, and relationality. “Unlike the three spheres of biological life – the mineral, the vegetable and the animal – objects and things have been customarily considered dependent on humans’ agency and presence” (Bartoloni). In everyday life, objects can enhance resilience when they are mobilised in strategies of resourcefulness and “making do” (de Certeau). Objects may also support the performance of identity and enable inter-subjective relations that create a sense of agency and of being at home, wherever one is located (Ahmed et al.; Gerrand). From an existential perspective, the experience of being confined in lockdown, “stuck” in one place, challenges cosmopolitan connectedness and sense of belonging. It also bears some similarities to the experiences of migrants and refugees who have endured great uncertainty, distance, and immobility due to detention or vintage of migration (Yi-Neumann et al.). It is possible that certain objects, although facilitating resilience, might also trigger mixed feelings in the individuals who relied on them during the lockdown (Svašek). From domestic accoutrements to digital objects, what kinds of things supported wellbeing in situations of confinement? Multisystemic Resilience in Lockdown It is especially useful to consider the material dimensions of resilience when working with people who have experienced trauma, marginalisation, or mental health challenges during the pandemic, as working with objects enables interaction beyond language barriers and enables alternatives to the re-telling of experiences. Resilience has been theorised as a social process supported (or inhibited) by a range of “everyday” intersecting external and contextual factors at individual, family, social, institutional, and economic resource levels (Ungar; Sherrieb et al.; Southwick et al.). The socio-ecological approach to resilience demonstrates that aspects of individual, family, and community resilience can be learned and reinforced (Bonanno), but they can also be eroded or weakened, depending on the dynamic interplay of various forces and influences in the social ecology of an individual or a group. This means that while factors at the level of the individual, family, community, or institutions may strengthen resistance to harms or the ability to overcome adversity in one context, the same factors can promote vulnerability and erode coping abilities in others (Rutter). Our project asked to what extent this social-ecological understanding of resilience might be further enhanced by attending to nonhuman materialities that can contribute or erode resilience within human relations. We were particularly interested in understanding the potential of the exhibition for creating an inclusive and welcoming space for individuals who had experienced long COVID lockdowns to safely reflect on the material conditions that supported their resilience. The aim of this exercise was not to provide answers to a problem, but to draw attention to complexity, and generate additional questions and uncertainties, as encouraged by Barone and Eisner. The exhibition, through its juxtaposition of (lockdown-induced) loneliness with the conviviality of the public exhibition format, enabled an exploration of the tension between the neoliberal imperative to physically isolate oneself and the public messaging concerning the welfare of the general populace. Our project emerged from insights collected on the issue of mental health during “Living Lab” Roundtables undertaken in 2020 by our Centre For Resilient and Inclusive Societies, convened as part of the Foundation Project (Lam et al.). In particular, we deployed an object-based analysis to investigate the art- and object-based methodology in the aftermath of a potentially traumatising lockdown, particularly for individuals who may not respond as well to traditional research methods. This approach contributes to the emerging body of work exploring the affordances of visual and material methods for capturing feelings and responses generated between people and objects during the pandemic (Watson et al.). “Objects for Everyday Resilience” sought to facilitate greater openness to objects’ vitality (Bennett) in order to produce new encounters that further understandings of multisystemic resilience. Such insights are critically tied to human mental health and physical wellbeing. They also enabled us to develop shared resources (as described below) that support such resilience during the period of recovery from the pandemic and beyond. Arts and Objects as Research The COVID-19 pandemic provoked not only a global health response, but also a reorientation of the ways COVID-related research is conducted and disseminated. Javakhishvili et al. describe the necessity of “a complex, trauma-informed psycho-socio-political response” in the aftermath of “cultural/societal trauma” occurring at a society-wide scale, pointing out the prevalence of mental health issues following previous epidemics (1). As they note, an awareness of such trauma is necessary “to avoid re-traumatization and to facilitate recovery”, with “safety, trustworthiness, transparency, collaboration and peer support, empowerment, choice” among the key principles of trauma-informed policies, strategies, and practices (3). Our project received funding from the Centre for Resilient and Inclusive Societies (CRIS) in July 2021, and ethics approval in November 2021. Centring materiality, in November 2021 we circulated a “call for objects” through CRIS’ and the research team’s social media channels, and collected over 40 objects from participants of all ages for this pilot study. Our participants comprised 33 women and 10 men. Following is a breakdown of the self-described cultural background of some participants: Five Australian (including one ‘6th generation Australian’); four Vietnamese; two Caucasian; one Anglo-Australian; one Asian; one Brazilian; one British; one Caucasian/English Australian; one Filipino; one Filipino-Australian; one German/Portuguese/US; one Greek Australian; one Iranian; one Irish and Welsh; one Israeli; one Half German, Half Middle Eastern; one Middle Eastern; one Singaporean; one White British. Participants’ objects and stories were analysed by the team both in terms of their ‘people, place, and things’ affordances – enhancing participants’ reflections of life in the pandemic – and through the prism of their vibrancy, drawing on object-oriented ontology and materiality as method (Ravn). Our participants were encouraged to consider how their chosen object(s) supported their resilience during the pandemic. For example, some objects enabled linking with memories that assist in elaborating experiences of loss or grief (Trimingham Jack and Devereux). To guide those submitting objects, we asked about: 1) their relationship to the object, 2) the meaning of the object, and 3) which features of resilience are mobilised by the object. From an analysis of our data, we have developed a working typology of objects to understand their particular relationship role to features of resilience (social capital, temporality) and to thematise our data in relation to emerging priorities in research in multisystemic resilience, materiality, and mental health. Things on Display Whilst we were initially unable to gather in person, we built an online Instagram gallery (@objectsforeverydayresilience) of submitted objects, with accompanying stories from research participants. Relevant hashtags in several languages were added to each post by the research team to ensure their widest possible visibility. This gallery features objects such as a female participant’s jigsaw puzzle which “helped me to pass the downtime in an enjoyable way”. Unlike much of her life in lockdown that was consumed by chores that “did not necessarily make me feel content or happy”, jigsaw puzzles made this participant “happy for that time I was doing them, transport[ing] me out of the confines of the lockdown with landscapes and images from across the globe”. Another female participant submitted a picture of her worn sneakers, which she used to go on what she called her “sanity walks”. To counteract the overwhelm of “being in the house all the time with 3 (autistic) children who were doing home learning and needed a lot of support”, while attempting to work on her PhD, going for walks every day helped clear my mind, get some fresh air, keep active and have some much needed quiet / me time. I ordered these shoes online because we couldn’t go to the shops and wore them almost daily during the extended lockdowns. Books were also popular. During lockdowns, according to a female participant, reading helped me connect with the outside world and be able to entertain myself without unhealthy coping mechanisms such as scrolling endlessly through TikTok. It also helped me feel less alone during the pandemic. Another female participant found that her son’s reading gave her time to work. Olfactory objects provided comfort for a participant who mourned the loss of smell due to mask wearing: perfumes were my sensory transport during this time – they could evoke memories of places I’d travelled to, seasons, people, feelings and even colours. I could go to far-off places in my mind through scent even though my body was largely stationary within my home. (Female participant) Through scent objects, this participant was “able to bring the world to meet me when I was unable to go out to meet the world”. Other participants sought to retreat from the world through homely objects: throughout lockdown I felt that my bed became an important object to my sanity. When I felt overwhelmed, I would come to bed and take a nap which helped me feel less out of control with everything going on in the world. (Female participant) For an essential worker who injured her leg whilst working in a hospital, an Ikea couch enabled recovery: “the couch saved my throbbing leg for many months. It served as a place to eat, paint and rest.” (Female participant) While pets were not included as objects within this project, several participants submitted their pets’ accoutrements. A female participant who submitted a photograph of her cat’s collar and tree movingly recounts how while I was working online in lockdown, this cat tree kept my cat entertained. She was so enthusiastic while scratching (covered in her fur) she somehow managed to remove her collar. I call Bouny my Emotional support cat … . She really stepped up her treatments of me during the pandemic. My mother had advanced dementia and multiple lockdowns [which] meant I could not see her in the weeks leading up to her death. These objects highlight the ways in which this participant found comfort during lockdown at a time of deep grief. For other participants, blankets and shawls provided sources of comfort “since much of lockdown was either in cool weather or deepest winter”. I found myself taking [my shawl] whenever I went out for any of the permitted activities and I also went to bed with it at night. The soft texture and the warmth against my face, neck and shoulders relaxed my body and I felt comforted and safe. (Female participant) Another used a calming blanket during lockdown “for time-outs on my bed (I was confined to a tiny flat at the time and separated from my family). It gave me a safe space”. (Female participant) In a similar vein, journalling provided several participants with “a safe space to explore thoughts and make them more tangible, acting as a consistent mindful practice I could always turn to”. The journal provided consistency throughout the ever-changing lockdown conditions and a strong sense of stability. Recording thoughts daily allowed me to not only process adversity, but draw attention to the areas in my life which I was grateful for … even from home. (Female participant) In addition to fostering mindfulness, the creative practice of journalling enabled this participant to exercise her imagination: writing from the perspectives of other people, from friends to strangers, also allowed me to reflect on the different experiences others had during lockdown. I found this fostered empathy and motivated me to reach out and check in on others, which in turn also benefited my own mental health. (Female participant) Creative practices were critical to sustaining many participants of this study. The Norman family, for example, submitted an acrylic on canvas artwork, Surviving COVID in Port Melbourne (2021), as their object of resilience: this work represents the sentiments and experiences of our family after a year of successive COVID lockdowns. Each section of the canvas has been completed a member of our family – 2 parents and a 21, 18 and 14 year-old. (Norman family) Likewise, musical instruments and sound objects – whether through analogue or digital means – helped participants to stay sane in long lockdowns: wen I didn’t know what to do with myself I always turned to the guitar. (Male participant) Music was so important to us throughout the lockdowns. It helped us express and diffuse big feelings. We played happy songs to amplify nice moments, funny songs to cheer each other up, angry songs to dance out rage. (Family participants) Curating the Lockdown Lounge To enhance the capacity of our project’s connections to the wider community, and respond to the need we felt to gather in person to reflect on what it meant for each of us to endure long lockdowns, we held an in-person exhibition after COVID-19 restrictions had eased in Melbourne in November 2022. The decision to curate the “Lockdown Lounge” art and research exhibition featuring objects submitted by research participants was consistent with a trauma-informed approach to research as described above. According to Crowther, art exhibits have the potential to redirect viewers’ attention from “aesthetic critique” to emotional connection. They can facilitate what Moon describes as “relational aesthetics”, whereby viewers may connect with the art and artists, and enhance their awareness of the self, artist, and the world. As a form of “guided relational viewing” (Potash), art exhibits are non-coercive in that they invite responses, discussion, and emotional involvement while placing no expectation on viewers to engage with or respond to the exhibition in a particular way. When considering such questions, our immersive in-person exhibition featured a range of object-based installations including audio-visual and sound objects, available for viewing in our Zine, The Lockdown Lounge (Walimunige et al.). The living room design was inspired by French-Algerian artist Zineb Sedira’s immersive living room installation, “Dreams Don’t Have Titles”, at the 59th Venice Art Biennale’s French pavilion (Sedira), attended by project co-lead Vivian Gerrand in June 2022. The project team curated the gallery space together, which was located at Deakin University’s city conference venue, “Deakin Downtown”, in Melbourne, Australia. Fig. 1: The Lockdown Lounge, living room. “What Got You through Lockdown?” research exhibition and experience, Deakin Downtown, Melbourne, 21-25 November 2022. In the centre of the Lockdown Lounge’s living room (see fig. 1), for example, a television screen played a looped collection of popular YouTube videos, many of which had gone viral in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. There was Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, admonishing Victorians to avoid non-essential activities through the example of an illicit dinner party held that resulted in a spike in coronavirus cases in March 2020 (ABC News). This short video excerpt of the Premier’s press conference concluded with his advice not to “get on the beers”. While not on display in this instance, many visitors would have been familiar with the TikTok video remix made later in the pandemic that featured the same press conference, with Premier Andrews’s words spliced to encourage listeners to “get on the beers!” (Kutcher). We recalled the ways in which such videos provided light relief through humour at a time of grave illness and trauma: when army trucks were being summoned to carry the deceased from Northern Italian hospitals to makeshift gravesites, those of us privileged to be at home, at a remove from the ravages of the virus, shared videos of Italian mayors shouting at their constituents to “vai a casa!” (Go home!). Or of Italians walking fake dogs to have an excuse to go outside. We finished the loop with a reproduction of the viral Kitten Zoom Filter Mishap, in which in online American courtroom defendant Rod Ponton mistakenly dons a cat filter while telling the judge, ‘I am not a cat’. The extraordinary nature of living in lockdown initially appeared as an opportunity to slow down, and this pandemic induced immobility appeared to prompt a kind of “degrowth” as industries the world over paused operation and pollution levels plummeted (Gerrand). In reflection of this, we included videos in our YouTube playlist of wild animals returning to big cities, and of the waters of Venice appearing to be clear. These videos recalled how the pandemic has necessitated greater appreciation of the power of things. The spread of the novel coronavirus’s invisible variants has permanently altered the conditions and perceptions of human life on the planet, forcing us to dwell on the vitality intrinsic to materiality, and renewing awareness of human lives as taking place within a broader ecology of life forms (Bennett). Within this posthuman perspective, distinctions between life and matter are blurred, and humans are displaced from a hierarchical ontological centre. In an essay titled “The Go Slow Party”, anthropologist Michael Taussig theorises a “mastery of non-mastery” that yields to the life of the object. This yielding – a necessary response to the conditions of the pandemic – can enable greater attentiveness to the interconnectedness and enmeshment of all things, leading to broader understandings of self and of resilience. To understand how participants responded to the exhibition, we asked them to respond to the following questions in the form of open-ended comments: What if anything affected you most? Did any of the objects resonate with you? Did the exhibition provide a safe environment for you to reflect on your sense of resilience during the pandemic? Fig. 2: Research exhibition participant standing beside artwork by the Norman family: Surviving COVID in Port Melbourne, acrylic on canvas (2021), The Lockdown Lounge. Through curating the art exhibition, we engaged in what Wang et al. describe as “art as research”, whereby the artist-researcher aims to “gain a deeper understanding of what art, art creation, or an artistic installation can do or activate … either in terms of personal experiences or environmental circumstances” (15). As Wang et al. write, “the act of creating is simultaneously the act of researching”, neither of which can be distinguished from one another (15). Accordingly, the process of curating the gallery space triggered memories of living in lockdown for members of our team, including one male youth researcher who remembers: as the space gradually began to be populated with object submissions … the objects began to find their place … . We slowly developed an understanding of the specific configurations of objects and the feelings that these combinations potentially could invoke. As we negotiated where my object might be placed, I felt an odd sense of melancholy seeing my record player and guitar at the exhibition, reminiscing about the music that I used to play and listen to with my family when we were all in lockdown … . As my Bon Iver record spun, and the familiar melodies rung out into the space, I felt as if I was sharing an intimate memory with others … . It also reminded me of the times when I had felt the most uplifted, when I was with family, near and far, knowing that we all were a unit. Another of our youth researcher team members served as an assistant curator and agreed to monitor the gallery space by being there for most of the five days of the exhibition’s opening to the public. She describes her work in the gallery thus: my role involved general exhibition upkeep – setup, answering visitor inquiries and monitoring the space – which meant being in the exhibition space for around 7.5 hours a day. Although it cannot be fully compared to living through Melbourne’s lockdowns, being in a space meant to mimic that time meant that comparisons naturally arose. I can see similarities between the things that supported my resilience during the lockdowns and the things that made my time at the gallery enjoyable. Through engaging with the gallery, this researcher was reminded of how spending time engaging in hands-on tasks made physical distancing more manageable. Spending time in the exhibition space also facilitated her experience of the lockdowns and the material conditions supporting resilience. She reflects that the hands-on, creative tasks of setting up the exhibition space and helping design a brochure reminded me of how I turned to baking so I could create something using my hands … . In the beginning, I approached my time at the gallery as a requirement of my work in this project … . Looking back now, I believe I understand both the person I was those years ago, and resilience itself, a little bit better. Fig. 3: Research exhibition participant wearing an Oculus virtual reality headset, watching the film Melbourne Locked Down (van Leeuwen), The Lockdown Lounge, November 2022. As these examples demonstrate, complex assemblages of people, places, and things during the COVID-19 pandemic were, and are, “suffused with multisensory and affective feelings”; exploring the ways affect is distributed through socio-spatialities of human experience enables researchers to better unpack individuals’ COVID experiences in ways that include their surroundings (Lupton). This was further evident in the feedback received from participants who attended the exhibition. Exhibition Feedback Feedback from participants suggested that the public exhibition format enabled them to explore this tension between isolation and orientation to the greater good in a safe and inclusive way (e.g. fig. 2). For Harry (29/m/Argentinian/New Zealand), interacting with the exhibition “reminded me that I wasn’t the only one that went through it”, while Sam (40/m/Chinese Australian) resonated with “many … people’s testimonials” of how objects helped support their resilience during long periods of confinement. Sam further added that participating in the exhibition was a “pleasant, friendly experience”, and that “everyone found something to do”, speaking to the convivial and inclusive nature of the exhibition. This resonates with Chaplin’s observation that “the production and reception of visual art works are social processes” that cannot be understood with reference to aesthetic factors alone (161-2). In the quotes above, it is evident that participants’ experience of the exhibition was inherently entwined with the sociality of the exhibition, evoking a sense of connection to others who had experienced the pandemic (in Harry’s case), and other exhibition attendees, whom he observed “all found something to do”. Additionally, participants’ responses highlighted the crucial role of the “artist researcher”, whom Wang et al. describe as qualitative researchers who use “artistically inspired methods or approaches” to blend research and art to connect with participants (10). In particular, the curation of the exhibition was something participants highlighted as key to facilitating their recollections of the pandemic in ways that were relatable. Nala (19/f/East-African Australian) commented that “the room’s layout allowed for this the most”: “the room was curated so well, it encaptured [sic] all the various stages of COVID lockdown – it made me feel like I was 16 again”. Returning to Wang et al.’s description of “art as research” as a means through which artist researchers can “gain a deeper understanding of what art, art creation, or an artistic installation can do or activate” (15), participant responses suggest that the curation of Lockdown Lounge as a trauma-informed art exhibition allowed participants to re-experience the pandemic lockdowns in ways that did not re-traumatise, but enabled the past and present to coexist safely and meaningfully for participants. Conclusion: Object-Oriented Wellbeing From different sections of the community, “Objects for Everyday Resilience” collected things that tell stories about how people coped in long lockdowns. Displaying the objects and practices that sustained us through the peak of the COVID-19 health crisis helped our participants to safely reflect on their experiences of living through long lockdowns. The variety of objects submitted and displayed draws our attention to the complex nuances of resilience and its material and immaterial intersections. These contributions composed, as fig. 1 illustrates, an almost accidentally curated diorama of a typical lockdown scene, imitating not only the materiality of living room itself but something also, through the very process of contribution, of the strange collectivity that the city of Melbourne experienced during lockdown periods. Precisely partitioned within domestic zones (with important differences for many “essential workers”, residents of public housing high-rises, and other exceptions), lockdowns enforced a different and necessarily unifying rhythm: attention to daily briefings on COVID numbers, affective responses to the heaves and sighs of infection rates, mourning over a new and untameable cause of loss of life, and routine check-ins on newly isolated friends and family. In hindsight, as the city has regained – perhaps redoubled, a sign of impatience with earlier governmental languages of austerity and moderation? – its economic and hedonistic pulse, there are also signs that any lockdown collectivity – which we also acknowledge was always partial and differentiated – has dispersed into the fragmentation of social interests and differences typical of late capitalism. The fascination with “public” objects – the Northface jacket of the state premier, COVID masks and testing kits, even toilet paper rolls, serving metonymically for a shared panic over scarcity – has receded. To the point, less than two years on, of this media attention being a scarcely remembered dream. The Lockdown Lounge is an example of a regathering of experiences through a process that, through its methods, also serves as a reminder of a common sociality integral to resilience. Our project highlights the role of objects- and arts-based research approaches in understanding the resources required to enhance and enable pandemic recovery and multisystemic wellbeing. Acknowledgments We would like to thank the Centre for Resilient and Inclusive Societies for their funding and support of the Objects for Everyday Resilience Project. Thanks also to the Alfred Deakin Institute’s Mobilities, Diversity and Multiculturalism Stream for providing a supplementary grant for our research exhibition. Objects for Everyday Resilience received ethics clearance from Deakin University in November 2021, project ID: 2021-275. References ABC News. “’No Getting on the Beers’ at Home with Mates as Coronavirus Clampdown Increases.” Daniel Andrews Coronavirus Press Conference, 22 Mar. 2020. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2020/mar/23/no-getting-on-the-beers-at-home-with-mates-as-coronavirus-clampdown-increases-video>. Ahmed, Sara, et al. 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The two companions scurry off when they hear a noise at the door. It was only a noise, but it was also a message, a bit of information producing panic: an interruption, a corruption, a rupture of communication. Was the noise really a message? Wasn’t it, rather, static, a parasite? Michael Serres, 1982. Since, ordinarily, channels have a certain amount of noise, and therefore a finite capacity, exact transmission is impossible. Claude Shannon, 1948. Reading Information At their most simplistic, there are two means for shifting information around – analogue and digital. Analogue movement depends on analogy to perform computations; it is continuous and the relationships between numbers are keyed as a continuous ordinal set. The digital set is discrete; moving one finger at a time results in a one-to-one correspondence. Nevertheless, analogue and digital are like the two companions in Serres’ tale. Each suffers the relationship of noise to information as internal rupture and external interference. In their examination of historical constructions of information, Hobart and Schiffman locate the noise of the analogue within its physical materials; they write, “All analogue machines harbour a certain amount of vagueness, known technically as ‘noise’. Which describes the disturbing influences of the machine’s physical materials on its calculations” (208). These “certain amounts of vagueness” are essential to Claude Shannon’s articulation of a theory for information transfer that forms the basis for this paper. In transforming the structures and materials through which it travels, information has left its traces in digital art installation. These traces are located in installation’s systems, structures and materials. The usefulness of information theory as a tool to understand these relationships has until recently been overlooked by a tradition of media art history that has grouped artworks according to the properties of the artwork and/or tied them into the histories of representation and perception in art theory. Throughout this essay I use the productive dual positioning of noise and information to address the errors and impurity inherent within the viewing experiences of digital installation. Information and Noise It is not hard to see why the fractured spaces of digital installation are haunted by histories of information science. In his 1948 essay “The Mathematical Theory of Communication” Claude Shannon developed a new model for communications technologies that articulated informational feedback processes. Discussions of information transmission through phone lines were occurring alongside the development of technology capable of computing multiple discrete and variable packets of information: that is, the digital computer. And, like art, information science remains concerned with the material spaces of transmission – whether conceptual, social or critical. In the context of art something is made to be seen, understood, viewed, or presented as a series of relationships that might be established between individuals, groups, environments, and sensations. Understood this way art is an aesthetic relationship between differing material bodies, images, representations, and spaces. It is an event. Shannon was adamant that information must not be confused with meaning. To increase efficiency he insisted that the message be separated from its components; in particular, those aspects that were predictable were not to be considered information (Hansen 79). The problem that Shannon had to contend with was noise. Unwanted and disruptive, noise became symbolic of the struggle to control the growth of systems. The more complex the system, the more noise needed to be addressed. Noise is both the material from which information is constructed, as well as being the matter which information resists. Weaver (Shannon’s first commentator) writes: In the process of being transmitted, it is unfortunately characteristic that certain things are added to the signal which were not intended by the information source. These unwanted additions may be distortions of sound (in telephony, for example) or static (in radio), or distortions in shape or shading of picture (television), or errors in transmission (telegraphy or facsimile), etc. All of these changes in the transmitted signal are called noise. (4). To enable more efficient message transmission, Shannon designed systems that repressed as much noise as possible, while also acknowledging that without some noise information could not be transmitted. Shannon’s conception of information meant that information would not change if the context changed. This was crucial if a general theory of information transmission was to be plausible and meant that a methodology for noise management could be foregrounded (Pask 123). Without meaning, information became a quantity, a yes or no decision, that Shannon called a “bit” (1). Shannon’s emphasis on separating signal or message from both predicability and external noise appeared to give information an identity where it could float free of a material substance and be treated independently of context. However, for this to occur information would have to become fixed and understood as an entity. Shannon went to pains to demonstrate that the separation of meaning and information was actually to enable the reverse. A fluidity of information and the possibilities for encoding it would mean that information, although measurable, did not have a finite form. Tied into the paradox of this equation is the crucial role of noise or error. In Shannon’s communication model information is not only complicit with noise; it is totally dependant upon it for understanding. Without noise, either encoded within the original message or present from sources outside the channel, information cannot get through. The model of sender-encoder-channel-signal (message)-decoder-receiver that Shannon constructed has an arrow inserting noise. Visually and schematically this noise is a disruption pointing up and inserting itself in the nice clean lines of the message. This does not mean that noise was a last minute consideration; rather noise was the very thing Shannon was working with (and against). It is present in every image we have of information. A source, message, transmitter, receiver and their attendant noises are all material infrastructures that serve to contextualise the information they transmit, receive, and disrupt. Figure 1. Claude Shannon “The Mathematical Theory of Communication” 1948. In his analytical discussion of the diagram, Shannon actually locates noise in two crucial places. The first position accorded noise is external, marked by the arrow that demonstrates how noise is introduced to the message channel whilst in transit. External noise confuses the purity of the message whilst equivocally adding new information. External noise has a particular materiality and enters the equation as unexplained variation and random error. This is disruptive presence rather than entropic coded pattern. Shannon offers this equivocal definition of noise to be everything that is outside the linear model of sender-channel-receiver; hence, anything can be noise if it enters a channel where it is unwelcome. Secondly, noise was defined as unpredictability or entropy found and encoded within the message itself. This for Shannon was an essential and, in some ways, positive role. Entropic forces invited continual reorganisation and (when engaging the laws of redundancy) assisted with the removal of repetition enabling faster message transmission (Shannon 48). Weaver calls this shifting relationship between entropy and message “equivocation” (11). Weaver identified equivocation as central to the manner in which noise and information operated. A process of equivocation identified the receiver’s knowledge. For Shannon, a process of equivocation mediated between useful information and noise, as both were “measured in the same units” (Hayles, Chaos 55). To eliminate noise completely is to sacrifice information. Information understood in this way is also about relationships between differing material bodies, representations, and spaces, connected together for the purposes of transmission. It, like the artwork, is an event. This would appear to suggest a correlation between information transmission and viewing in galleries. Far from it. Although, the contemporary information channel is essentially a tube with fixed walls, (it is still constrained by physical properties, bandwidth and so on) and despite the implicit spatialisation of information models, I am not proposing a direct correlation between information channels and installation spaces. This is because I am not interested in ‘reading’ the information of either environment. What I am suggesting is that both environments share this material of noise. Noise is present in four places. Firstly noise is within the media errors of transmission, and secondly, it is within the media of the installation, (neither of which are one way flows). Thirdly, the viewer or listener introduces noise as interference, and lastly, it is present in the very materials thorough which it travels. Noise layered on noise. Redundancy and Modulation So far in this paper I have discussed the relationship of information to noise. For the remainder, I want to address some particular processes or manifestations of noise in New Zealand artists’ collective, et al.’s maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 (2006, exhibited as part of the SCAPE Biennal of Art in Public Space, Christchurch Art Gallery). The installation occupies a small alcove that is partially blocked by a military-style portable table stacked with newspapers. Inside the space are three grey wooden chairs, some headphones, and a modified data projection of Google Earth. It is not immediately clear if the viewer is allowed within the spaces of the alcove to listen to the headphones as monotonous voices fill the whole space intoning political, social, and religious platitudes. The headphones might be a tool to block out the noise. In the installation it is as if multiple messages have been sent but their source, channel, and transmitter are unintelligible to the receiver. All that is left is information divorced from meaning. As other works by et al. have demonstrated, social solidarity is not a fundamentalism with directed positions and singular leaders. For example, in rapture (2004) noise disrupts all presence as a portable shed quivers in response to underground nuclear explosions 40,000km away. In the fundamental practice (2005) the viewer is left attempting to decode the un-encoded, as again sound and large steel barriers control and determine only certain movements (see http://www.etal.name/ for some documentation of these projects) . maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 is a development of the fundamental practice. To enter its spaces viewers slip around the table and find themselves extremely close to the projection screen. Despite the provision of copious media the viewer cannot control any aspect of the environment. On screen, and apparently integral to the Google Earth imagery, are five animated and imposing dark grey monolith forms. Because of their connection to the monotonous voices in the headphones, the monoliths seem to map the imposition of narrative, power, and force in various disputed territories. Like their sudden arrival in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) it is the contradiction of the visibility and improbability of the monoliths that renders them believable. On the video landscape the five monoliths apparently house the dispassionate voices of many different media and political authorities. Their presence is both redundant and essential as they modulate the layering of media forces – and in between, error slips in. In a broad discussion of information Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari highlight the necessary role of redundancy commenting that: redundancy has two forms, frequency and resonance; the first concerns the significance of information, the second (I=I) concerns the subjectivity of communication. It becomes apparent that information and communication, and even significance and subjectification, are subordinate to redundancy (79). In maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 patterns of frequency highlight the necessary role of entropy where it is coded into gaps in the vocal transmission. Frequency is a structuring of information tied to meaningful communication. Resonance, like the stack of un-decodable newspapers on the portable table, is the carrier of redundancy. It is in the gaps between the recorded voices that connections between the monoliths and the texts are made, and these two forms of redundancy emerge. As Shannon says, redundancy is a problem of language. This is because redundancy and modulation do not equate with relationship of signal to noise. Signal to noise is a representational relationship; frequency and resonance are not representational but relational. This means that an image that might be “real-time” interrupts our understanding that the real comes first with representation always trailing second (Virilio 65). In maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 the monoliths occupy a fixed spatial ground, imposed over the shifting navigation of Google Earth (this is not to mistake Google Earth with the ‘real’ earth). Together they form a visual counterpoint to the texts reciting in the viewer’s ears, which themselves might present as real but again, they aren’t. As Shannon contended, information cannot be tied to meaning. Instead, in the race for authority and thus authenticity we find interlopers, noisy digital images that suggest the presence of real-time perception. The spaces of maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 meld representation and information together through the materiality of noise. And across all the different modalities employed, the appearance of noise is not through formation, but through error, accident, or surprise. This is the last step in a movement away from the mimetic obedience of information and its adherence to meaning-making or representational systems. In maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 we are forced to align real time with virtual spaces and suspend our disbelief in the temporal truths that we see on the screen before us. This brief introduction to the work has returned us to the relationship between analogue and digital materials. Signal to noise is an analogue relationship of presence and absence. No signal equals a break in transmission. On the other hand, a digital system, due to its basis in discrete bits, transmits through probability (that is, the transmission occurs through pattern and randomness, rather than presence and absence (Hayles, How We Became 25). In his use of Shannon’s theory for the study of information transmission, Schwartz comments that the shift in information theory from analogue to digital is a shift from an analogue relationship of signal to noise to one of the probability of error (318). As I have argued in this paper, if it is measured as a quantity, noise is productive; it adds information. In both digital and analogue systems it is predictability and repetition that do not contribute information. Von Neumann makes the distinction clear saying that to some extent the “precision” of the digital machine “is absolute.” Even though, error as a matter of normal operation and not solely … as an accident attributable to some definite breakdown, nevertheless creeps in (294). Error creeps in. In maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5, et al. disrupts signal transmission by layering ambiguities into the installation. Gaps are left for viewers to introduce misreadings of scale, space, and apprehension. Rather than selecting meaning out of information within nontechnical contexts, a viewer finds herself in the same sphere as information. Noise imbricates both information and viewer within a larger open system. When asked about the relationship with the viewer in her work, et al. collaborator p.mule writes: To answer the 1st question, communication is important, clarity of concept. To answer the 2nd question, we are all receivers of information, how we process is individual. To answer the 3rd question, the work is accessible if you receive the information. But the question remains: how do we receive the information? In maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 the system dominates. Despite the use of sound engineering and sophisticated Google Earth mapping technologies, the work appears to be constructed from discarded technologies both analogue and digital. The ominous hovering monoliths suggest answers: that somewhere within this work are methodologies to confront the materialising forces of digital error. To don the headphones is to invite a position that operates as a filtering of power. The parameters for this power are in a constant state of flux. This means that whilst mapping these forces the work does not locate them. Sound is encountered and constructed. Furthermore, the work does not oppose digital and analogue, for as von Neumann comments “the real importance of the digital procedure lies in its ability to reduce the computational noise level to an extent which is completely unobtainable by any other (analogy) procedure” (295). maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 shows how digital and analogue come together through the productive errors of modulation and redundancy. et al.’s research constantly turns to representational and meaning making systems. As one instance, maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 demonstrates how the digital has challenged the logics of the binary in the traditions of information theory. Digital logics are modulated by redundancies and accidents. In maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 it is not possible to have information without noise. If, as I have argued here, digital installation operates between noise and information, then, in a constant disruption of the legacies of representation, immersion, and interaction, it is possible to open up material languages for the digital. Furthermore, an engagement with noise and error results in a blurring of the structures of information, generating a position from which we can discuss the viewer as immersed within the system – not as receiver or meaning making actant, but as an essential material within the open system of the artwork. References Barr, Jim, and Mary Barr. “L. Budd et al.” Toi Toi Toi: Three Generations of Artists from New Zealand. Ed. Rene Block. Kassel: Museum Fridericianum, 1999. 123. Burke, Gregory, and Natasha Conland, eds. et al. the fundamental practice. Wellington: Creative New Zealand, 2005. Burke, Gregory, and Natasha Conland, eds. Venice Document. et al. the fundamental practice. Wellington: Creative New Zealand, 2006. Daly-Peoples, John. Urban Myths and the et al. Legend. 21 Aug. 2004. The Big Idea (reprint) http://www.thebigidea.co.nz/print.php?sid=2234>. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: The Athlone Press, 1996. Hansen, Mark. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2004. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1999. Hayles, N. Katherine. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. Ithaca and London: Cornell University, 1990. Hobart, Michael, and Zachary Schiffman. Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998. p.mule, et al. 2007. 2 Jul. 2007 http://www.etal.name/index.htm>. Pask, Gordon. An Approach to Cybernetics. London: Hutchinson, 1961. Paulson, William. The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information. Ithaca and London: Cornell University, 1988. Schwartz, Mischa. Information Transmission, Modulation, and Noise: A Unified Approach to Communication Systems. 3rd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980. Serres, Michel. The Parasite. Trans. Lawrence R. Schehr. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1982. Shannon, Claude. A Mathematical Theory of Communication. July, October 1948. Online PDF. 27: 379-423, 623-656 (reprinted with corrections). 13 Jul. 2004 http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/paper.html>. Virilio, Paul. The Vision Machine. Trans. Julie Rose. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, British Film Institute, 1994. Von Neumann, John. “The General and Logical Theory of Automata.” Collected Works. Ed. A. H. Taub. Vol. 5. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1963. Weaver, Warren. “Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication.” The Mathematical Theory of Commnunication. Eds. Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver. paperback, 1963 ed. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1949. 1-16. Work Discussed et al. maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 2006. Installation, Google Earth feed, newspapers, sound. Exhibited in SCAPE 2006 Biennial of Art in Public Space Christchurch Art Gallery, Christchurch, September 30-November 12. Images reproduced with the permission of et al. Photographs by Lee Cunliffe. Acknowledgments Research for this paper was conducted with the support of an Otago Polytechnic Resaerch Grant. Photographs of et al. maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 by Lee Cunliffe. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Ballard, Su. "Information, Noise and et al." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/02-ballard.php>. APA Style Ballard, S. (Oct. 2007) "Information, Noise and et al.," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/02-ballard.php>.

There are spells in the world: incantations that can transform reality through the power of procedural utterances. The marriage vow, the courtroom sentence, the shaman’s curse: these words are codes that change reality. (Finn 90) Introduction As a child, stories on magic were “opportunities to escape from reality” (Brugué and Llompart 1), or what Rosengren and Hickling describe as being part of a set of “causal belief systems” (77). As an adult, magic is typically seen as being “pure fantasy” (Rosengren and Hickling 75), while Bever argues that magic is something lost to time and materialism, and alternatively a skill that Yeats believed that anyone could develop with practice. The etymology of the word magic originates from magein, a Greek word used to describe “the science and religion of the priests of Zoroaster”, or, according to philologist Skeat, from Greek megas (great), thus signifying "the great science” (Melton 956). Not to be confused with sleight of hand or illusion, magic is traditionally associated with learned people, held in high esteem, who use supernatural or unseen forces to cause change in people and affect events. To use magic these people perform rituals and ceremonies associated with religion and spirituality and include people who may identify as Priests, Witches, Magicians, Wiccans, and Druids (Otto and Stausberg). Magic as Technology and Technology as Magic Although written accounts of the rituals and ceremonies performed by the Druids are rare, because they followed an oral tradition and didn’t record knowledge in a written form (Aldhouse-Green 19), they are believed to have considered magic as a practical technology to be used for such purposes as repelling enemies and divining lost items. They curse and blight humans and districts, raise storms and fogs, cause glamour and delusion, confer invisibility, inflict thirst and confusion on enemy warriors, transform people into animal shape or into stone, subdue and bind them with incantations, and raise magical barriers to halt attackers. (Hutton 33) Similarly, a common theme in The History of Magic by Chris Gosden is that magic is akin to science or mathematics—something to be utilised as a tool when there is a need, as well as being used to perform important rituals and ceremonies. In TechGnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information, Davis discusses ideas on Technomysticism, and Thacker says that “the history of technology—from hieroglyphics to computer code—is itself inseparable from the often ambiguous exchanges with something nonhuman, something otherworldly, something divine. Technology, it seems, is religion by other means, then as now” (159). Written language, communication, speech, and instruction has always been used to transform the ordinary in people’s lives. In TechGnosis, Davis (32) cites Couliano (104): historians have been wrong in concluding that magic disappeared with the advent of 'quantitative science.’ The latter has simply substituted itself for a part of magic while extending its dreams and its goals by means of technology. Electricity, rapid transport, radio and television, the airplane, and the computer have merely carried into effect the promises first formulated by magic, resulting from the supernatural processes of the magician: to produce light, to move instantaneously from one point in space to another, to communicate with faraway regions of space, to fly through the air, and to have an infallible memory at one’s disposal. Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) In early 2021, at the height of the pandemic meta-crisis, blockchain and NFTs became well known (Umar et al. 1) and Crypto Art became the hot new money-making scheme for a small percentage of ‘artists’ and tech-bros alike. The popularity of Crypto Art continued until initial interest waned and Ether (ETH) started disappearing in the manner of a classic disappearing coin magic trick. In short, ETH is a type of cryptocurrency similar to Bitcoin. NFT is an acronym for Non-Fungible Token. An NFT is “a cryptographic digital asset that can be uniquely identified within its smart contract” (Myers, Proof of Work 316). The word Non-Fungible indicates that this token is unique and therefore cannot be substituted for a similar token. An example of something being fungible is being able to swap coins of the same denomination. The coins are different tokens but can be easily swapped and are worth the same as each other. Hackl, Lueth, and Bartolo define an NFT as “a digital asset that is unique and singular, backed by blockchain technology to ensure authenticity and ownership. An NFT can be bought, sold, traded, or collected” (7). Blockchain For the newcomer, blockchain can seem impenetrable and based on a type of esoterica or secret knowledge known only to an initiate of a certain type of programming (Cassino 22). The origins of blockchain can be found in the research article “How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document”, published by the Journal of Cryptology in 1991 by Haber, a cryptographer, and Stornetta, a physicist. They were attempting to answer “epistemological problems of how we trust what we believe to be true in a digital age” (Franceschet 310). Subsequently, in 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto wrote The White Paper, a document that describes the radical idea of Bitcoin or “Magic Internet Money” (Droitcour). As defined by Myers (Proof of Work 314), a blockchain is “a series of blocks of validated transactions, each linked to its predecessor by its cryptographic hash”. They go on to say that “Bitcoin’s innovation was not to produce a blockchain, which is essentially just a Merkle list, it was to produce a blockchain in a securely decentralised way”. In other words, blockchain is essentially a permanent record and secure database of information. The secure and permanent nature of blockchain is comparable to a chapter of the Akashic records: a metaphysical idea described as an infinite database where information on everything that has ever happened is stored. It is a mental plane where information is recorded and immutable for all time (Nash). The information stored in this infinite database is available to people who are familiar with the correct rituals and spells to access this knowledge. Blockchain Smart Contracts Blockchain smart contracts are written by a developer and stored on the blockchain. They contain the metadata required to set out the terms of the contract. IBM describes a smart contract as “programs stored on a blockchain that run when predetermined conditions are met”. There are several advantages of using a smart contract. Blockchain is a permanent and transparent record, archived using decentralised peer-to-peer Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). This technology safeguards the security of a decentralised digital database because it eliminates the intermediary and reduces the chance of fraud, gives hackers fewer opportunities to access the information, and increases the stability of the system (Srivastava). They go on to say that “it is an emerging and revolutionary technology that is attracting a lot of public attention due to its capability to reduce risks and fraud in a scalable manner”. Despite being a dry subject, blockchain is frequently associated with magic. One example is Faustino, Maria, and Marques describing a “quasi-religious romanticism of the crypto-community towards blockchain technologies” (67), with Satoshi represented as King Arthur. The set of instructions that make up the blockchain smart contracts and NFTs tell the program, database, or computer what needs to happen. These instructions are similar to a recipe or spell. This “sourcery” is what Chun (19) describes when talking about the technological magic that mere mortals are unable to comprehend. “We believe in the power of code as a set of magical symbols linking the invisible and visible, echoing our long cultural tradition of logos, or language as an underlying system of order and reason, and its power as a kind of sourcery” (Finn 714). NFTs as a Conceptual Medium In a “massively distributed electronic ritual” (Myers, Proof of Work 100), NFTs became better-known with the sale of Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days by Christie’s for US$69,346,250. Because of the “thousandfold return” (Wang et al. 1) on the rapidly expanding market in October 2021, most people at that time viewed NFTs and cryptocurrencies as the latest cash cow; some artists saw them as a method to become financially independent, cut out the gallery intermediary, and be compensated on resales (Belk 5). In addition to the financial considerations, a small number of artists saw the conceptual potential of NFTs. Rhea Myers, a conceptual artist, has been using the blockchain as a conceptual medium for over 10 years. Myers describes themselves as “an artist, hacker and writer” (Myers, Bio). A recent work by Myers, titled Is Art (Token), made in 2023 as an Ethereum ERC-721 Token (NFT), is made using a digital image with text that says “this token is art”. The word ‘is’ is emphasised in a maroon colour that differentiates it from the rest in dark grey. The following is the didactic for the artwork. Own the creative power of a crypto artist. Is Art (Token) takes the artist’s power of nomination, of naming something as art, and delegates it to the artwork’s owner. Their assertion of its art or non-art status is secured and guaranteed by the power of the blockchain. Based on a common and understandable misunderstanding of how Is Art (2014) works, this is the first in a series of editions that inscribe ongoing and contemporary concerns onto this exemplar of a past or perhaps not yet realized blockchain artworld. (Myers, is art editions). This is a simple example of their work. A lot of Myers’s work appears to be uncomplicated but hides subtle levels of sophistication that use all the tools available to conceptual artists by questioning the notion of what art is—a hallmark of conceptual art (Goldie and Schellekens 22). Sol LeWitt, in Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, was the first to use the term, and described it by saying “the idea itself, even if not made visual, is as much a work of art as any finished product”. According to Bailey, the most influential American conceptual artists of the 1960s were Lucy Lippard, Sol LeWitt, and Joseph Kosuth, “despite deriving from radically diverse insights about the reason for calling it ‘Conceptual Art’” (8). Instruction-Based Art Artist Claudia Hart employs the instructions used to create an NFT as a medium and artwork in Digital Combines, a new genre the artist has proposed, that joins physical, digital, and virtual media together. The NFT, in a digital combine, functions as a type of glue that holds different elements of the work together. New media rely on digital technology to communicate with the viewer. Digital combines take this one step further—the media are held together by an invisible instruction linked to the object or installation with a QR code that magically takes the viewer to the NFT via a “portal to the cloud” (Hart, Digital Combine Paintings). QR codes are something we all became familiar with during the on-and-off lockdown phase of the pandemic (Morrison et al. 1). Denso Wave Inc., the inventor of the Quick Response Code or QR Code, describes them as being a scannable graphic that is “capable of handling several dozen to several hundred times more information than a conventional bar code that can only store up to 20 digits”. QR Codes were made available to the public in 1994, are easily detected by readers at nearly any size, and can be reconfigured to fit a variety of different shapes. A “QR Code is capable of handling all types of data, such as numeric and alphabetic characters, Kanji, Kana, Hiragana, symbols, binary, and control codes. Up to 7,089 characters can be encoded in one symbol” (Denso Wave). Similar to ideas used by the American conceptual artists of the 1960s, QR codes and NFTs are used in digital combines as conceptual tools. Analogous to Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings, the instruction is the medium and part of the artwork. An example of a Wall Drawing made by Sol LeWitt is as follows: Wall Drawing 11A wall divided horizontally and vertically into four equal parts. Within each part, three of the four kinds of lines are superimposed.(Sol LeWitt, May 1969; MASS MoCA, 2023) The act or intention of using an NFT as a medium in art-making transforms it from being solely a financial contract, which NFTs are widely known for, to an artistic medium or a standalone artwork. The interdisciplinary artist Sue Beyer uses Machine Learning and NFTs as conceptual media in her digital combines. Beyer’s use of machine learning corresponds to the automatic writing that André Breton and Philippe Soupault of the Surrealists were exploring from 1918 to 1924 when they wrote Les Champs Magnétiques (Magnetic Fields) (Bohn 7). Automatic writing was popular amongst the spiritualist movement that evolved from the 1840s to the early 1900s in Europe and the United States (Gosden 399). Michael Riffaterre (221; in Bohn 8) talks about how automatic writing differs from ordinary texts. Automatic writing takes a “total departure from logic, temporality, and referentiality”, in addition to violating “the rules of verisimilitude and the representation of the real”. Bohn adds that although “normal syntax is respected, they make only limited sense”. An artificial intelligence (AI) hallucination, or what Chintapali (1) describes as “distorted reality”, can be seen in the following paragraph that Deep Story provided after entering the prompt ‘Sue Beyer’ in March 2022. None of these sentences have any basis in truth about the person Sue Beyer from Melbourne, Australia. Suddenly runs to Jen from the bedroom window, her face smoking, her glasses shattering. Michaels (30) stands on the bed, pale and irritated. Dear Mister Shut Up! Sue’s loft – later – Sue is on the phone, looking upset. There is a new bruise on her face. There is a distinction between AI and machine learning. According to ChatGPT 3.5, “Machine Learning is a subset of AI that focuses on enabling computers to learn and make predictions or decisions without being explicitly programmed. It involves the development of algorithms and statistical models that allow machines to automatically learn from data, identify patterns, and make informed decisions or predictions”. Using the story generator Deep Story, Beyer uses the element of chance inherent in Machine Learning to create a biography on herself written by the alien other of AI. The paragraphs that Deep Story produces are nonsensical statements and made-up fantasies of what Beyer suspects AI wants the artist to hear. Like a psychic medium or oracle, providing wisdom and advice to a petitioner, the words tumble out of the story generator like a chaotic prediction meant to be deciphered at a later time. This element of chance might be a short-lived occurrence as machine learning is evolving and getting smarter exponentially, the potential of which is becoming very evident just from empirical observation. Something that originated in early modernist science fiction is quickly becoming a reality in our time. A Metamodern Spell Casting Metamodernism is an evolving term that emerged from a series of global catastrophes that occurred from the mid-1990s onwards. The term tolerates the concurrent use of ideas that arise in modernism and postmodernism without discord. It uses oppositional aspects or concepts in art-making and other cultural production that form what Dember calls a “complicated feeling” (Dember). These ideas in oscillation allow metamodernism to move beyond these fixed terms and encompass a wide range of cultural tendencies that reflect what is known collectively as a structure of feeling (van den Akker et al.). The oppositional media used in a digital combine oscillate with each other and also form meaning between each other, relating to material and immaterial concepts. These amalgamations place “technology and culture in mutual interrogation to produce new ways of seeing the world as it unfolds around us” (Myers Studio Ltd.). The use of the oppositional aspects of technology and culture indicates that Myers’s work can also be firmly placed within the domain of metamodernism. Advancements in AI over the years since the pandemic are overwhelming. In episode 23 of the MIT podcast Business Lab, Justice stated that “Covid-19 has accelerated the pace of digital in many ways, across many types of technologies.” They go on to say that “this is where we are starting to experience such a rapid pace of exponential change that it’s very difficult for most people to understand the progress” (MIT Technology Review Insights). Similarly, in 2021 NFTs burst forth in popularity in reaction to various conditions arising from the pandemic meta-crisis. A similar effect was seen around cryptocurrencies after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2007-2008 (Aliber and Zoega). “The popularity of cryptocurrencies represents in no small part a reaction to the financial crisis and austerity. That reaction takes the form of a retreat from conventional economic and political action and represents at least an economic occult” (Myers, Proof of Work 100). When a traumatic event occurs, like a pandemic, people turn to God, spirituality (Tumminio Hansen), or possibly the occult to look for answers. NFTs took on the role of precursor, promising access to untold riches, esoteric knowledge, and the comforting feeling of being part of the NFT cult. Similar to the effect of what Sutcliffe (15) calls spiritual “occultures” like “long-standing occult societies or New Age healers”, people can be lured by “the promise of secret knowledge”, which “can assist the deceptions of false gurus and create opportunities for cultic exploitation”. Conclusion NFTs are a metamodern spell casting, their popularity borne by the meta-crisis of the pandemic; they are made using magical instruction that oscillates between finance and conceptual abstraction, materialism and socialist idealism, financial ledger, and artistic medium. The metadata in the smart contract of the NFT provide instruction that combines the tangible and intangible. This oscillation, present in metamodern artmaking, creates and maintains a liminal space between these ideas, objects, and media. The in-between space allows for the perpetual transmutation of one thing to another. These ideas are a work in progress and additional exploration is necessary. An NFT is a new medium available to artists that does not physically exist but can be used to create meaning or to glue or hold objects together in a digital combine. Further investigation into the ontological aspects of this medium is required. The smart contract can be viewed as a recipe for the spell or incantation that, like instruction-based art, transforms an object from one thing to another. The blockchain that the NFT is housed in is a liminal space. The contract is stored on the threshold waiting for someone to view or purchase the NFT and turn the objects displayed in the gallery space into a digital combine. 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IntroductionIn this article, I discuss the potential of sound to construct fictional spaces and build relations between bodies using two performance installations as case studies. The first is Invisible Flock’s 105+dB, a site-specific sound work which transports crowd recordings of a soccer match to alternative geographical locations. The second is Atelier Bildraum’s Bildraum, an installation performance using live photography, architectural models, and ambient sound. By writing through these two works, I question how sound builds relations between bodies and across space as well as questioning the role of site within sound installation works. The potential for sound to create shared space and foster relationships between bodies, objects, and the surrounding environment is evident in recent contemporary art exhibitions. For MOMA’s Soundings: A Contemporary Score, curator Barbara London, sought to create a series of “tuned environments” rather than use headphones, emphasising the potential of sound works to envelop the gallery goer. Similarly, Sam Belinafante’s Listening, aimed to capture a sense of how sound can influence attention by choreographing the visitors’ experience towards the artworks. By using motorised technology to stagger each installation, gallery goers were led by their ears. Both London’s and Belinafante’s curatorial approaches highlight the current awareness and interest in aural space and its influence on bodies, an area I aim to contribute to with this article.Audio-based performance works consisting of narration or instructions received through headphones feature as a dominant trend within the field of theatre and performance studies. Well-known examples from the past decade include: Janet Cardiff’s The Missing Case Study B; Graeme Miller’s Linked; and Lavinia Greenlaw’s Audio Obscura. The use of sound in these works offers several possibilities: the layering of fiction onto site, the intensification, or contradiction of existing atmospheres and, in most cases, the direction of audience attention. Misha Myers uses the term ‘percipient’ to articulate this mode of engagement that relies on the active attendance of the participant to their surroundings. She states that it is the participant “whose active, embodied and sensorial engagement alters and determines [an artistic] process and its outcomes” (172-23). Indeed, audio-based works provide invaluable ways of considering how the body of the audience member might be engaged, raising important issues in relation to sound, embodiment and presence. Yet the question remains, outside of individual acoustic environments, how does sound build physical relations between bodies and across space? Within sound studies the World Soundscape Project, founded in the 1970s by R. Murray Schafer, documents the acoustic properties of cities, nature, technology and work. Collaborations between sound engineers and musicians indicated the musicality inherent in the world encouraging attunement to the acoustic characteristics of our environment. Gernot Böhme indicates the importance of personal and emotional impressions of space, experienced as atmosphere. Atmosphere, rather than being an accumulation of individual acoustic characteristics, is a total experience. In relation to sound, sensitivity to this mode of engagement is understood as a need to shift from hearing in “an instrumental sense—hearing something—into a way of taking part in the world” (221). Böhme highlights the importance of the less tangible, emotional consistency of our surrounding environment. Brandon Labelle further indicates the social potential of sound by foregrounding the emotional and psychological charges which support “event-architecture, participatory productions, and related performative aspects of space” (Acoustic Spatiality 2) these, Labelle claims enable sound to catalyse both the material world and our imaginations. Sound as felt experience and the emotional construction of space form the key focus here. Within architectural discourse, both Juhani Pallasmaa and Peter Zumthor point to atmospheric nuances and flows of energy which can cause events to furnish the more rigid physical constructs we exist between, influencing spatial quality. However, it is sensorial experience Jean-Paul Thibaud claims, including attention to light, sound, smell and texture that informs much of how we situate ourselves, contributing to the way we imaginatively construct the world we inhabit, even if only of temporary duration. To expand on this, Thibaud locates the sensorial appreciation of site between “the lived experience of people as well as the built environment of the place” (Three Dynamics 37) hinting at the presence of energetic flows. Such insights into how relations are built between bodies and objects inform the approach taken in this article, as I focus on sensorial modes of engagement to write through my own experience as listener-spectator. George Home-Cook uses the term listener-spectator to describe “an ongoing, intersensorial bodily engagement with the affordances of the theatrical environment” (147) and a mode of attending that privileges phenomenal engagement. Here, I occupy the position of the listener-spectator to attend to two installations, Invisible Flock’s 105+dB and Atelier Bildraum’s Bildraum. The first is a large-scale sound installation produced for Hull UK city of culture, 2017. The piece uses audio recordings from 16 shotgun microphones positioned at the periphery of Hull City’s soccer pitch during a match on 28 November 2016. The piece relocates the recordings in public space, replaying a twenty-minute edited version through 36 speakers. The second, Bildraum, is an installation performance consisting of photographer Charlotte Bouckaert, architect Steve Salembier with sound by Duncan Speakman. The piece, with a running time of 40-minutes uses architectural models, live photography, sound and lighting to explore narrative, memory, and space. In writing through these two case studies, I aim to emphasise sensorial engagement. To do so I recognise, as Salomé Voegelin does, the limits of critical discourse to account for relations built through sound. Voegelin indicates the rift critical discourse creates between what is described and its description. In her own writing, Voegelin attempts to counteract this by using the subjective “I” to foreground the experience of a sound work as a writer-listener. Similarly, here I foreground my position as a listener-spectator and aim to evidence the criticality within the work by writing through my experience of attending thereby bringing out mood, texture, atmosphere to foreground how relations are built across space and between bodies.105+dB Invisible Flock January 2017, I arrive in Hull for Invisible Flock’s 105+dB programmed as part of Made in Hull, a series of cultural activities happening across the city. The piece takes place in Zebedee’s Yard, a pedestrianised area located between Princes Dock Street and Whitefriargate in the grounds of the former Trinity House School. From several streets, I can already hear a crowd. Sound, porous in its very nature, flows through the city expanding beyond its immediate geography bringing the notion of a fictional event into being. I look in pub windows to see which teams are playing, yet the visual clues defy what my ears tell me. Listening, as Labelle suggests is relational, it brings us into proximity with nearby occurrences, bodies and objects. Sound and in turn listening, by both an intended and unsuspecting public, lures bodies into proximity aurally bound by the promise of an event. The use of sound, combined with the physical sensation implied by the surrounding architecture serves to construct us as a group of attendees to a soccer match. This is evident as I continue my approach, passing through an archway with cobbled stones underfoot. The narrow entrance rapidly fills up with bodies and objects; push chairs, wheelchairs, umbrellas, and thick winter coats bringing us into close physical contact with one another. Individuals are reduced to a sea of heads bobbing towards the bright stadium lights now visible in the distance. The title 105+dB, refers to the volume at which the sound of an individual voice is lost amongst a crowd, accordingly my experience of being at the site of the piece further echoes this theme. The physical structure of the archway combined with the volume of bodies contributes to what Pallasmaa describes as “atmospheric perception” (231), a mode of attending to experience that engages all the senses as well as time, memory and imagination. Sound here contributes to the atmosphere provoking a shift in my listening. The importance of the listener-spectator experience is underscored by the absence of architectural structures habitually found in stadiums. The piece is staged using the bare minimum: four metal scaffolding structures on each side of the Yard support stadium lights and a high-visibility clad figure patrols the periphery. These trappings serve to evoke an essence of the original site of the recordings, the rest is furnished by the audio track played through 36 speakers situated at intervals around the space as well as the movement of other bodies. As Böhme notes: “Space is genuinely experienced by being in it, through physical presence” (179) similarly, here, it is necessary to be in the space, aurally immersed in sound and in physical proximity to other bodies moving across the Yard. Image 1: The piece is staged using the bare minimum, the rest is furnished by the audio track and movement of bodies. Image courtesy of the artists.The absence of visual clues draws attention to the importance of presence and mood, as Böhme claims: “By feeling our own presence, we feel the space in which we are present” (179). Listening-spectators actively contribute to the event-architecture as physical sensations build and are tangibly felt amongst those present, influenced by the dramaturgical structure of the audio recording. Sounds of jeering, applause and the referees’ whistle combine with occasional chants such as “come on city, come on city” marking a shared rhythm. Specific moments, such as the sound of a leather ball hitting a foot creates a sense of expectation amongst the crowd, and disappointed “ohhs” make a near-miss audibly palpable. Yet, more important than a singular sound event is the sustained sensation of being in a situation, a distinction Pallasmaa makes, foregrounding the “ephemeral and dynamic experiential fields” (235) offered by music, an argument I wish to consider in relation to this sound installation.The detail of the recording makes it possible to imagine, and almost accurately chart, the movement of the ball around the pitch. A “yeah” erupts, making it acoustically evident that a goal is scored as the sound of elation erupts through the speakers. In turn, this sensation much like Thibaud’s concept of intercorporeality, spreads amongst the bodies of the listening-spectators who fist bump, smile, clap, jeer and jump about sharing and occupying Zebedee’s Yard with physical manifestations of triumph. Through sound comes an invitation to be both physically and emotionally in the space, indicating the potential to understand, as Pallasmaa suggests, how “spaces and true architectural experiences are verbs” (231). By physically engaging with the peaks and troughs of the game, a temporary community of sorts forms. After twenty minutes, the main lights dim creating an amber glow in the space, sound is reduced to shuffling noises as the stadium fills up, or empties out (it is impossible to tell). Accordingly, Zebedee’s Yard also begins to empty. It is unclear if I am listening to the sounds in the space around me, or those on the recording as they overlap. People turn to leave, or stand and shuffle evidencing an attitude of receptiveness towards their surrounding environment and underscoring what Thibaud describes as “tuned ambiance” where a resemblance emerges “between what is felt and what is produced” (Three Dynamics 44). The piece, by replaying the crowd sounds of a soccer match across the space of Zebedee’s Yard, stages atmospheric perception. In the absence of further architectural structures, it is the sound of the crowd in the stadium and in turn an attention to our hearing and physical presence that constitutes the event. Bildraum Atelier BildraumAugust 2016, I am in Edinburgh to see Bildraum. The German word “bildraum” roughly translates as image room, and specifically relates to the part of the camera where the image is constructed. Bouckaert takes high definition images live onstage that project immediately onto the screen at the back of the space. The audience see the architectural model, the taking of the photograph, the projected image and hear both pre-recorded ambient sounds by Speakman, and live music played by Salembier generating the sensation that they are inhabiting a bildraum. Here I explore how both sound and image projection can encourage the listener-spectator to construct multiple narratives of possible events and engage their spatial imagination. Image 2: The audience see the architectural model, the taking of the photograph, the projected image and hear both live and pre-recorded sounds. Image courtesy of the artists.In Bildraum, the combination of elements (photographic, acoustic, architectural) serve to create provocative scenes which (quite literally) build multiple spaces for potential narratives. As Bouckaert asserts, “when we speak with people after the performance, they all have a different story”. The piece always begins with a scale model of the actual space. It then evolves to show other spaces such as a ‘social’ scene located in a restaurant, a ‘relaxation’ scene featuring sun loungers, an oversize palm tree and a pool as well as a ‘domestic’ scene with a staircase to another room. The use of architectural models makes the spaces presented appear as homogenous, neutral containers yet layers of sound including footsteps, people chatting, doors opening and closing, objects dropping, and an eerie soundscape serve to expand and incite the construction of imaginative possibilities. In relation to spatial imagination, Pallasmaa discusses the novel and our ability, when reading, to build all the settings of the story, as though they already existed in pre-formed realities. These imagined scenes are not experienced in two dimensions, as pictures, but in three dimensions and include both atmosphere and a sense of spatiality (239). Here, the clean, slick lines of the rooms, devoid of colour and personal clutter become personalised, yet also troubled through the sounds and shadows which appear in the photographs, adding ambiance and serving to highlight the pluralisation of space. As the piece progresses, these neat lines suffer disruption giving insight into the relations between bodies and across space. As Martin Heidegger notes, space and our occupation of space are not mutually exclusive but intertwined. Pallasmaa further reminds us that when we enter a space, space enters us and the experience is a reciprocal exchange and fusion of both subject and object (232).One image shows a table with several chairs neatly arranged around the outside. The distance between the chairs and the table is sufficient to imagine the presence of several bodies. The first image, though visually devoid of any living presence is layered with chattering sounds suggesting the presence of bodies. In the following image, the chairs have shifted position and there is a light haze, I envisage familiar social scenes where conversations with friends last long into the night. In the next image, one chair appears on top of the table, another lies tilted on the floor with raucous noise to accompany the image. Despite the absence of bodies, the minimal audio-visual provocations activate my spatial imagination and serve to suggest a correlation between physical behaviour and ambiance in everyday settings. As discussed in the previous paragraph, this highlights how space is far from a disinterested, or separate container for physical relations, rather, it underscores how social energy, sound and mood can build a dynamic presence within the built environment, one that is not in isolation but indeed in dialogue with surrounding structures. In a further scene, the seemingly fixed, stable nature of the models undergoes a sudden influx of materials as a barrage of tiny polystyrene balls appears. The image, combined with the sound suggests a large-scale disaster, or freak weather incident. The ambiguity created by the combination of sound and image indicates a hidden mobility beneath what is seen. Sound here does not announce the presence of an object, or indicate the taking place of a specific event, instead it acts as an invitation, as Voegelin notes, “not to confirm and preserve actuality but to explore possibilities” (Sonic 13). The use of sound which accompanies the image helps to underscore an exchange between the material and immaterial elements occurring within everyday life, leaving a gap for the listener-spectator to build their own narrative whilst also indicating further on goings in the depth of the visual. Image 3: The minimal audio-visual provocations serve to activate my spatial imagination. Image courtesy of the artists.The piece advances at a slow pace as each model is adjusted while lighting and objects are arranged. The previous image lingers on the projector screen, animated by the sound track which uses simple but evocative chords. This lulls me into an attentive, almost meditative state as I tune into and construct my own memories prompted by the spaces shown. The pace and rhythm that this establishes in Summerhall’s Old Lab creates a productive imaginative space. Böhme argues that atmosphere is a combination of both subjective and objective perceptions of space (16). Here, stimulated by the shifting arrangements Bouckaert and Salembier propose, I create short-lived geographies charting my lived experience and memories across a plurality of possible environments. As listener-spectator I am individually implicated as the producer of a series of invisible maps. The invitation to engage with the process of the work over 40-minutes as the building and dismantling of models and objects takes place draws attention to the sensorial flows and what Voegelin denotes as a “semantic materiality” (Sonic 53), one that might penetrate our sensibility and accompany us beyond the immediate timeframe of the work itself. The timeframe and rhythm of the piece encourages me, as listener-spectator to focus on the ambient sound track, not just as sound, but to consider the material realities of the here and now, to attend to vibrational milieus which operate beyond the surface of the visible. In doing so, I become aware of constructed actualities and of sound as a medium to get me beyond what is merely presented. ConclusionThe dynamic experiential potential of sound installations discussed from the perspective of a listener-spectator indicate how emotion is a key composite of spatial construction. Beyond the closed acoustic environments of audio-based performance works, aural space, physical proximity, and the importance of ambiance are foregrounded. Such intangible, ephemeral experiences can benefit from a writing practice that attends to these aesthetic concerns. By writing through both case studies from the position of listener-spectator, my lived experience of each work, manifested through attention to sensorial experience, have indicated how relations are built between bodies and across space. In Invisible Flock´s 105+dB sound featured as a social material binding listener-spectators to each other and catalysing a fictional relation to space. Here, sound formed temporal communities bringing bodies into contact to share in constructing and further shaping the parameters of a fictional event.In Atelier Bildraum’s Bildraum the construction of architectural models combined with ambient and live sound indicated a depth of engagement to the visual, one not confined to how things might appear on the surface. The seemingly given, stable nature of familiar environments can be questioned hinting at the presence of further layers within the vibrational or atmospheric properties operating across space that might bring new or alternative realities to the forefront.In both, the correlation between the environment and emotional impressions of bodies that occupy it emerged as key in underscoring and engaging in a dialogue between ambiance and lived experience.ReferencesBildraum, Atelier. Bildraum. Old Lab, Summer Hall, Edinburgh. 18 Aug. 2016.Böhme, Gernot, and Jean-Paul Thibaud (eds.). The Aesthetics of Atmospheres. 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