Papers by Madeleine Boyd
Academia, 2024
An interesting theme is navigation between ‘spirituality’, animism etc (not putting specific name... more An interesting theme is navigation between ‘spirituality’, animism etc (not putting specific names yet but pls bear with these as placeholder terms) and new materialism, particularly Baradian agential realism.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2016
A Game of Horseshoes for the Ineffectual Martyr (GOH) is a concept game with the intention of enc... more A Game of Horseshoes for the Ineffectual Martyr (GOH) is a concept game with the intention of encouraging human empathy with racehorses. Racehorses are documented as being subject to treatment that does not reflect the public interest to protect animal welfare in Australia. Based ideologically in new materialism, the game ‘works’ through drawing attention to comparative human and horse physical performance in real space time, rather than being played entirely in virtual space time. GOH V1.0 was exhibited as a semi-interactive prototype in 2013 (playable without actual digital interactivity of display). An academic paper was published on the animal justice research grounding the game conceptually during 2015. This current paper reports on GOH V2.0 development progress as of July 2016. The primary progress concerns actual interactivity of horseshoe placement in the horseshoe pit with game result display. Technology used is software TouchDesigner 088 by Derivative, triggered by hardware computer vision via Pixy (CMUcam5) by Charmed Labs. For GOH V.02 the horseshoe pit is conceived as the ‘controller’ rather than the ‘game’, and the physical design is amenable to rapid prototyping, open source sharing and transportability.
Animal Studies Journal, 2017
Leading up to the 2014 Melbourne Cup three communication modes were employed by unrelated horse w... more Leading up to the 2014 Melbourne Cup three communication modes were employed by unrelated horse welfare activists to raise awareness of cruelty in the racing industry. The intention to increase empathy with horses ties together these efforts, which are characterised as written, visual and immersive. This paper uses the lens of Jamie Lorimer’s three types of non-human charisma to consider the potential for each communication mode to achieve the goal of change towards interspecies response-ability. Charisma is considered in this paper to be a form of material-affect within new materialism that offers a more complex tool for analysis than the broad brush of ‘empathy’. A subjective case study describing the three communicative modes opens up dialogue on attentiveness to potential interactions towards their intended goal, or conversely towards alienation of the broader public. Of Lorimer’s three categories of charisma, aesthetic and ecological are considered to rely on pre-existing anthr...
Thesis Chapters by Madeleine Boyd
Making Art with Horses is a liminal experiment at the intersection of animal studies and performa... more Making Art with Horses is a liminal experiment at the intersection of animal studies and performative contemporary art. A starting point for research is the assertion that non-human species and processes have perspectives, and that these perspectives have been under-explored in contemporary art and theory. Epistemological and ontological direction is guided by Karen Barad’s Agential Realism, the broader movement of new materialisms including the assemblage theory of Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, as well as phenomenological observation practices. Horses have been selected as the species with which to think with, due to the historical entanglements of horse-with-human becomings, as well as the feasibility of working with such a large non-human mammal in an urban setting. Research contexts for the doctoral project are the Anthropocene, non-human and posthuman turns in Continental and Anglophile philosophy, the emergence of new materialisms, and the interdisciplinary qualities of recent contemporary art practice, particularly the permeability of art/science boundaries. The intention of this doctoral project is to extend thinking and practice in these disciplinary areas. An immersive approach was undertaken through engaging with two companion research horses, Picasso and Prince, over three years. Research videos, diary notes and the experiential records of specific experimental encounters are diffracted through theory in the thesis text. Art practice is considered as a productive zone for interspecies encounters that are not pre-determined by thinking in traditions of horse husbandry, scientific epistemologies such as behaviourism, and the competitive atmosphere of horse sports. Production of videos and paintings with the horses proved to be fecund sites for development of partial-perspectives with non-human species. A moral compass for the work was set to foreground the sentience of horses, as well as response-ability for the horses during each activity. A strong motif of justice-to-come, building on the interspecies ethical work of Donna Haraway, Karen Barad and Jacques Derrida pervades the thesis, due to perceived imbalances across inter-species utilitarianism. Contributions within the thesis include development of a performative multispecies aesthetics and extensions to human-animal art practice. A practice-led approach based in the arts is the modus operandi of the research described in this thesis. Sitting at multiple cusps in disciplines and perspective required an open ended and adaptive approach. Things and processes drove inquiry in tandem with existential concerns of contemporary philosophy. Based in a framework of interspecies justice, the artwork practice has strived to be horse-led, and so was facilitated then translated, rather than entirely directed, by the human artist. The methods by which other-than-human species can be invited to participate in cultural production are demonstrated through the artworks produced. Translation across multispecies perspectives from the paddock to the gallery has also been considered in depth through the mechanisms of material-affect. Artworks produced include paintings, art installations, video artworks, a participatory game and online social media outputs.
Uploads
Papers by Madeleine Boyd
Thesis Chapters by Madeleine Boyd