Revival: The Aesthetics of Revival Subcultures and Re-enactment Groups Explored Through Fashion Image-making

This research aims, through performance, fashion photography, video making and the theatrical devices that accompany such practice, to explore the style of a contemporary, largely male, subcultural collective. The common term that joins these loosely bound groups is revival as they appear driven by an impulse to simulate and re-enact the dress, rites and rituals of British and American subcultures from a perceived golden era. The similarities with re-enactment societies are also explored and exploited to the end of developing new style- based aesthetics in male fashion image-making formed around an elaborate re- enactment of Spartacus and the Third Servile Wars. Examined through comparative visuals (revivalists / re-enactors) a common thread is found in the wearing of leather as a metaphor for resistance, style and a pupa-like second skin. Subsequent findings of this research suggest that the cuirass of popular culture emerges as the motorcycle jacket of both the sword and sandal epic and the historical re-enactor. Addressing extremes in narcissistic dress and behaviour amongst certain individuals within these older male communities, this study also questions parts of established theory on subcultural development within the field of cultural studies and postulates on a metaphorical dandy gene. Citing two leading practitioners in the field of fashion photography the work of both Richard Prince and Bruce Weber is viewed through the lens of the subcultural aesthete and conclusions drawn as to their role as agents provocateurs in the development of the fashion image with a revival based narrative. In addition the often used term retro is examined, categorised and granted its own genre within fashion image- making and defined as being separate from the practice element of this research. Reflecting a multi-disciplinary approach that engages the researcher as Bricoleur and participant observer this research operates in the reflexive realm and uses simulation as a key method of enquiry. The practice-led outcome of this investigation takes the form of a final research exhibition that takes the form of a substantial installation of photography, video, clothing and textile prints. Key terms: dandy gene, historical re-enactment groups, internal theatre, narcissism, narrative image-making, reflexive practice, revival as theatre, subcultures,

Scholarly chronographics: can a timeline be useful in historiography?

Our paper is concerned with the visualisation of historical events and artefacts in the context of time. It arises from a project bringing together expertise in visualisation, historiography and software engineering. The work is the result of an extended enquiry over several years which has included investigation of the prior history of such chronographics and their grounding in the temporal ontology of the Enlightenment. Timelines - visual, spatial presentations of chronology - are generally regarded as being too simple, perhaps too childish, to be worthy of academic attention, yet such chronographics should be capable of supporting sophisticated thinking about history and historiography, especially if they take full advantage of the capabilities of digital technologies. They should enable even professional academic historians to 'make sense' of history in new ways, allowing them insights they would not otherwise have achieved. In our paper we highlight key findings from the history of such representations, principally from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and show how, in a project to develop new digital chronographics for collections of cultural objects and events, we have explored new implementations of the important ideas we have extracted about timewise presentation and interaction. This includes the representation of uncertainty, of relations between events, and the epistemology of time as a 'space' for history. We present developed examples, in particular a chronographic presentation of a large database of works by a single author, a composer, and discuss the extent to which our ambitions for chronographics have been realised in practice. Keywords: timeline, chronographics

The Essay as Art Form

Beginning with Montaigne’s essayistic dictum Que sais je? — ‘What do I know?’ — this PhD thesis examines the literary history, formal qualities, and theoretical underpinnings of the personal essay to both investigate and to practice its relevance as an approach to writing about art. The thesis proposes the essay as intrinsically linked to research, critical writing, and art making; it is a literary method that embodies the real experience of attempting to answer a question. The essay is a processual and reflexive mode of enquiry: a form that conveys not just the essayist’s thought, but the sense and texture of its movement as it attempts to understand its object. It is often invoked, across disciplines, in reference to the possibility of a more liberal sense of creative practice — one that conceptually and stylistically privileges collage, fragmentation, hybridity, chance, open-endedness, and the meander. Within this question of the essay as form, the thesis contains two distinct and parallel strands of analysis — subject matter and essay writing as research. At the core of the study lie two close-readings: Ana Mendieta’s Labyrinth of Venus (1982) and Le Couvent de la Tourette (1959) by Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis. In each case, the writing draws, in its tone and texture, on a range of literary influences, weaving together different voices, discussions, and approaches to enquiry. The practice of essay writing is presented alongside, part and party to, research: a method of interrogation that embraces risk and uncertainty, and simultaneously enacts its own findings as a critical-creative mode of study-via-form, and form-via-study. The thesis is presented as a book-length essay, in which the art in question is equal and intimately connected to the writing used to address it. Method and form are designed to respond to the oft-cited challenge of the essay as fundamentally unmethodical, ranging, and diverse. Research, critical study, writerly description, and storytelling are combined to elucidate and expose each other based not on surface continuity, but on a deep interconnection among ideas that, through language, cohere and become related — imbued with an affinity for one another. The consummate product is the argument, as it works across genres, disciplines, descriptive and critical models, to challenge the narrative structure and language used within contemporary writing about art.

Exploring Perceptual Matters: A Textile-Based Approach

This research takes a practice-based approach to exploring perceptual matters that often go unnoticed in the context of everyday lived experience. My approach focuses on the experiential possibilities of knowledge emerging through artistic enquiry, and uses a variety of modes (like textiles, sound, physical computing, programming, video and text) to be conducted and communicated. It examines scholarship in line with the ecological theory of perception, and is particularly informed by neurobiological research on sensory integration as well as by cultural theories that examine the role of sensory appreciation in perception. Different processes contributing to our perceptual experience are examined through the development of a touch-sensitive, sound-generating rug and its application in an experimental context. Participants’ interaction with the rug and its sonic output allows an insight into how they make sense of multisensory information via observation of how they physically respond to it. In creating possibilities for observing the two ends of the perceptual process (sensory input and behavioural output), the rug provides a platform for the study of what is intangible to the observer (perceptual activity) through what can actually be observed (physical activity). My analysis focuses on video recordings of the experimental process and data reports obtained from the software used for the sound generating performance of the rug. Its findings suggest that attentional focus, active exploration, and past experience actively affect the ability to integrate multisensory information and are crucial parameters for the formation of a meaningful percept upon which to act. Although relational to the set experimental conditions and the specificities of the experimental group, these findings are in resonance with current cross-disciplinary discourse on perception, and indicate that art research can be incorporated into the wider arena of neurophysiological and behavioural research to expand its span of resources and methods.