MFA Thesis - Additional Works Consulted Bibliography

2015

MFA Thesis (contemporary art, social theory, time and narrative theory, temporality, television theory, television studies) ‘Landscape’ is an active site of occurrence—a platform of media-influenced exchange. Reflected through televisual language, it offers a relative experience, tied to our sense of geography, time and shifting notions of history. The Cascade - Moments in the Televisual Desert engages TV-inflected landscape as a permeating condition. In this telescoping space, landscape conflates time and memory, location and topography, television and reality. Rooted in a personal connection to Southern California, which permeates American television from the 1960s-80s, I hunt, excavate and deploy conceptual instances of the Mojave Desert and its entanglement with the real, the vividly scripted and the iconic. Mediated by television, Los Angeles County becomes mercurial, behaving as stage and script, environment and blueprint—a mythic, cultural hunting ground. This transitory televisual landscape informs our understanding of place and event, blurring fiction and fact. The Cascade arrests this instability as an interdisciplinary investigation: a hot-and-cool mosaic that asks viewers to seek, receive and connect. Derived from a body of moments excavated from television, The Cascade suspends semi-narrative traces as elements removed from their physical location by the original filming and further removed by capturing and mutating temporal instants. The environments thus inhabit the actual, the imagined and the transient place of recollection—a collapsed space conflating personal history, geologic reality and cultural production. Using layers as an economical mode of storytelling (focused on suspension in the moment), I compress events and location into a system of surface-screens: layers provide non-linear depth and conversations between media offer different modes of viewing and consuming. Thesis covers aspects of related social and art theory.

AVANCA | CINEMA 2017, 2017

This paper critically reflects on the registers and affects of memory in relation to place, cinematic space, and the materiality of digital film-making technologies, using our recent moving image artwork, On Location (2017), as a case study: this practice-as-research film captures the location over a twelve month period in an unnamed sunken lane at a remote area of rural mid-Devon. On Location is a form of landscape cinema that observes a year’s seasonal cycle, capturing meteorological phenomena and the natural world using a range of experimental filming techniques, and accompanied by field recordings made at the site that capture the sonic architecture of the space. We made regular field trips to the location with cameras and sound equipment – these visits afforded us the opportunity to experience the place during a varied range of weather conditions through winter, spring, summer, and autumn, to respond intuitively using our camera and sound equipment, and then to review and reflect on the recordings we had made. Our memories became an integral part of this film-making methodology and were an important influence on the form of the completed film, which premiered in the cinema at Plymouth Arts Centre UK in January 2017. We explore the dynamic interrelationship between memory, the process of capturing moving image sequences and the affective interplay between the recordings and our memories through repeated presence and absence at a location that seems both unchanging and in constant flux; and we reflect on the audience’s embodied experience of moving image and sound.

andererseits, 2021

In Amsterdam, along its canals, many eighteenth-century buildings look freshly awakened. But in fact, these artifacts were recently leveled. Then, their bricks were stacked neatly, and mortared back together as façade. Next, the façade was laid on a wooden flat like a movie set, or a dead gunslinger ready for a daguerreotype. Anything behind that flat can be erased. Even the patina left by centuries of weather could be erased, to leave a building impermeable to all forms of moisture and greenhouse gases. Only the picturesque eighteenth-century façade is needed, what the camera will see. Beyond that first millimeter of brick, any kind of ahistorical white cube is fine.

2005

This thesis explores the relationship between the emergence of postimpressionist painting and the breakdown of the camera obscura as a model for the fixed stable capacity of human vision. This relationship is posited as a possible fmmework for understanding digital composite-images in a broader cultural context. The construction of my video-conceptualist work Hope B C Chainsaw Carvin~ Capital of the World is situated as the primary research object. Writings by Paul V d o on vision will be used to construct a relationship between vision, media and the virtuahtion of experience that is inherent to technologically mediated environments. The idea of the space-constructed image is extrapolated from the writings of Jonathan Gary, in particular, the relationship he constructs between cultural practices, technological innovation and the aesthetics of representation acts as a model in which the composite-image can be examined in terms of a larger field of cultural practices.

Narratives and Social Memory Theoretical and Methodological Approaches, 2013

Earth figured by cinema far from being a neutral task is a technique of representation engaged with a modern dominant visual order, a model of knowledge inside which the production of space participates in the reproduction of dominant social patterns. In the last decades geographers try to develop different methodologies for approaching the production of space by linear narrative in cinema and to understand how this spatialities shape interpersonal relations and collective identities. Within this field, the study of the role of cinematic landscape in the fabric and the reworking of social memory is a central path, namely for understanding the construction of geographical imagination. Through this article I will try to discuss and clarify how cinematic narratives fracture the tendency promoted by cultural industry for depicting landscape as a coherent portray of people and place, discarded to legitimate absolute space as universal category, namely by questioning institutional modes of production and by disclosing conventional categories of space-time representation. By presenting an analytic technology developed within the scope of a research project engaged with rethinking the relations between geography and cinema, I will try to show how cinematic narratives allow the emergence of a polyphony of voices and subjects in formation claiming the mediums efficiency for expressing different relations with material world, so as the realignment of social forces. The focus will be on one selected case study that allows the comprehension of how cinematic landscape envelopes narrative identities, functioning as a strong contribute for reframing social memory in postnational and postcolonial worlds.

"Aiming to explore the fragile contours of architectural phenomenology in the areas of sensing-experiencing, remembering–distorting and communicating–imagining the space of home, the paper dwells upon the virtual territories of film as a means of visually decoding these ineffable conceptual categories: the “moving images” of home. The new insights to architectural phenomenology discourse lie in film’s making visible of the invisible, as pointed out by film theorists: “cinema disintegrates familiar objects and brings to the fore – often just in moving about – previously invisible interrelationships between parts of them” (Kracauer, 1960); “the film experience uniquely opens up and exposes the inhabited space of direct experience as a condition of singular embodiment and makes it accessible and visible to more than a single consciousness who lives it” (Sobchack, 1991). What this paper calls “moving images of home” are not mere depictions of familiar spaces, but hypostases of these images in which sensorial perception is interwoven with memories and emotional associations, as Bergman puts it: “I can still roam through the landscape of my childhood and again experience lights, smells, people, rooms, moments, gestures, tones of voice and objects. These memories seldom have any particular meaning, but are like short or longer films with no point, shot at random”. In this context, the space of the childhood home is taken as a spatial experiential matrix, to which all later understandings of places relate; therefore, the discussion will revolve around two film makers with an acute awareness for the sense of place, Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007) and Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986), who have both worked extensively on depicting their childhood, while a closer look reveals infusions of these architecturally-situated memories on the spatiality of home places even in their non-autobiographical productions. The paper’s discourse situates the two artists at opposing poles. The Swedish Bergman is renowned for treating the interior of home in films in terms of tensions and emotions translated in big close-ups of the artists’ facial expressions, meanwhile, the Russian Tarkovsky deals with mostly the same existential topics, but has a completely different answer and expresses these domestic atmospheres, emotions and conflicts in terms of architectural, profoundly sensorial characteristics of space. Tarkovsky would say: “juxtaposing a person with an environment that is boundless, relating a person to the whole world – that is the meaning of cinema”. Nevertheless, their films are not characterized by either large open spaces, nor by placeless bodies in anonymous surroundings, instead narratives unfold and are framed in spaces imbued with a sense of home. Therefore, this sense of home, of the familiar, becomes a mediation between the two opposing approaches, and traces a movement from body to space, with all its intricate nuances, a movement reflecting the fundamentals of architectural phenomenology."

Springer Geography, 2014

The landscape contains messages -about the living environment, climate, culture, society, history. Reading the landscape reveals different information transmitted directly to the observer. The landscape exists in the eye of observer, it must be seen to be understood and represented. This paper debates how the messages are inserted in the urban landscape and the relationship developed between society, landscape and information. The tendencies from the last decade manifest towards inserting the media message in the architectural object, of harmonizing the information transmitted through the urban landscape with the environment. Using urban digital mediatisation, its organic integration into the urban landscape can help create a consciousness for the spirit of the place by communicating "stories" -historical, cultural, urban and local, by organizing spontaneous urban events or attractive activities, by appealing to the community's latent knowledge. It produces practically a media landscape -a space of transmission, in which the individual is not only receiver (as it was happening until recently) but also a transmitter of information; the user also generates content.

Societies, 2013

This paper explores the modern metropolis as an ironically concrete metaphor for the collective memory and the mourning of cinema's passing, as it-the "city"-is digitally constructed in two recent, auteur-directed, special effects-driven blockbuster films, Inception and Hugo. The modern city, and mass media, such as the cinema, as well as modes of mass transport, especially the train, all originate in the 19th century, but come into their own in the early 20th century in their address to a subject as the mobilised citizen-consumer who, as Anne Friedberg makes clear, is also always a viewer. Additionally, as Barbara Mennel has recently shown, the advent in Europe of trains and time zones, in their transformation of modern time and space, paved the way for cinema's comparably cataclysmic impact upon modern subjectivity in its iconic reproduction of movement within illusory 3D space. Both films, thus, in their different ways employ cinematic remediation as a form of cultural memory whose nostalgia for cinema's past is rendered with the latest digital effects, hidden in plain sight in the form of subjective memories (as flashback) and dreams. While a version of this reading has been advanced before (at least for Hugo), this paper goes further by connecting each film's status as remediated dream-memory to its respective dependence upon the city as a post-cinematic three-dimensional framework within which locative and locomotive desires alike determine a subject whose psyche is indistinguishable from the cityscape that surrounds him.

Student Anthropologist, 2010

This commentary critically reframes the concept of circulation in terms of time, defining the dislocation of space that occurs with media-defined as technology taken to be a social phenomenon-as an occurrence that creates, and is a result of, simultaneous streams of temporal flow. Counter to narratives that claim for technology and media's radical altering of subjectivity, I suggest that this notion of temporality was already present in cultural understandings of memory and monuments in the landscape. Circulation is predominantly thought about by anthropologists in terms of objects moving through space: media from Bollywood in the US hipster's DVD player, art moving between communities and museums, and cell phones linking Annapolis to Athens, Zion to Zimbabwe in the circulation of information. In what follows, however, I would like to think differently about circulation; I wish to consider temporal circulation, or the ways in which places are the locus of multiple simultaneous temporalities. This overlaps with a consideration of the temporal circulation of ideas in our own discipline today, as circulation harkens to notions of diffusionism (see Giddens 1990 and Jameson 1981) and other prior theoretical constructs. In bringing these parallel thoughts together, I will argue that what seems new is in many instances a resurfacing of an old problem in anthropology, which warrants a re-substantiation of old theories to create new solutions. I do so in order to a) bring new perspective into our conversations of circulation; and b) move towards (re)imaging problems implicated in circulation's ‗crisis of space' in creative and emancipative ways. My goal is not to ‗answer' these critiques and ideas; rather, it is to pose new questions-or, in this case, pose old questions for new materials-intended to shape the readers' experience of interrogating circulation throughout the journal. My research in Andalucía 1 focuses on the ways in which contemporary media ecology-defined as the sum total of digital media in an experienced space-affects people's embodied experience of landscapes, particularly the cultural construction of subjectivity vis-à-vis consumed sound and the clashes that come with embodying public sound symbols in different ways across cultural communities. On Main Street, Gibraltar, sound and its technology circulate freely in space, often with little hindrance besides other sounds and noises. This includes the sounds of Llanito being spoken on the streets, music from department stores that promotes hip and vibrant ‗club' scenes, shops with ‗exotic' sounds that attract tourists seeking ‗The Other' and the ‗Authentic', TV screens that imply sounds through the showing of photos of the Rock of Gibraltar and WWII monuments, etc. Moreover, there are other sonic experiences, including the silent ‗living statue' street performers depicting Roman-esque Saints and Sultans of ‗Arabia', bandoneón players

2020

Stefano Baschiera and Miriam De Rosa’s Film and Domestic Space arrived on my desk during the first wave of Covid-19 lockdowns, at a moment when attention had naturally turned inwards to the domestic interior. The book has therefore gained an unexpected sense of topicality. As the new constraints of physically distanced living have transformed houses and apartments into digitally networked hubs for home working and online social interaction, public and private space have blurred in unforeseen ways. More than ever, the home has become visible via media technologies. Through video calls and the ubiquitous array of the Zoom screen—now a staple of family hangouts, classrooms, and business meetings alike— images of other people’s homes have rarely been so present in our everyday lives. On television, broadcasting from home has offered glimpses into the domestic interiors of politicians, celebrities, presenters, and pundits—with the staging and semiotics of bookshelves even briefly becomin...