Can't sleep

A devised, alternative musical set in the future, the play charts the story of a group of scientists, who have been tasked with capturing light in deep space. The play’s premise is bound to a strong ideological question: Life After Death or Light After Death? While religions believe in, but cannot prove, ‘life after death’, science proves that there is ‘light after death’… Lotu then asks, what if light holds consciousness? And what if scientific technique could be developed to capture light and experiment on it? “Can’t Sleep” is a story that will trick you into believing that you have embarked on a journey into the absurd, only to reach the destination of a collective reality. Lotu Theatre was awarded a $15,000 Arts Project Grant from Regional Arts Victoria to create the play and to explore the process of professional artists development through the collaborative process.

Nothing is free in this life

This chapter raises the notion of whether creativity can be 'bought' and draws on Derrida's category of the 'invention' (as opposed to creativity, which Derrida defines differently) in order to examine closely the criteria of inventiveness. The latter overlap in certain ways with a Badiouian understanding of the event. The chapter goes on to argue, using Badiou's notion of the event and the void, that creativity is abundant and 'free', but that creative industries may be ethically justified in selling other knowledges relating to creative practice, but that they should be clear about what can be 'bought' and that which is - if examined rigorously - always already 'free'.

Vespers

Poem titled: 'Vespers' by Paul Venzo.

Review short: Cath Keneally's eaten cold

In The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, T. S. Eliot famously wrote, ‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.’ Cath Kenneally’s eaten cold offers a chain of indelible response-poems to New Zealand poet Janet Charman’s book, cold snack. In Kenneally’s collection, ‘Meanings perpetually eingeschachtelt into meanings’, creating new and original poetry that riffs off Charman’s book without ‘imitating’ or ‘defacing’ it.

The earth does not get fat

This story was shortlisted for the Ink Tears International short story competition (UK) 2013 and subsequently published by the Australasian Association of Writing Programs.

Boats on the roof of the house: the shadowy flux of alterity

Freud’s ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ focuses upon the relationship between the signs, in the surface content of the dream, and the operation of thought that produces these signs, in the latent content of the dream. Freud’s analysis is a means for tangling with a discontinuous narrative style because Freud’s analysis provides a methodological approach to the question: how does the novel bear witness to the writer’s subjective consciousness?

Indelicacies

This work combines the forms of photography, creative writing and wire sculpture, and explores the collisions of personal and public psychic interactions with the practices of logging of native forests in Victoria. It uses processes of creative research. Displayed at Gallery One-Three, Little Bourke Street, Melbourne, as part of the Love Forests Exhibition presented by The Wilderness Society, Sep 1-7, 2013.

Drawing the line: Chinese calligraphy, cultural materialisms and the “remixing of remix"

Remix in writing has very different expressions, and is grounded in very different legal, philosophical and creative materialisms, in Western and Chinese cultures. The infringement of authors’ Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) in China is not only an irritant for Chinese-Western commercial and legal relations. It also points to different formations of the creative and legal domains across global space, and serves to introduce notions of creativity and originality that are largely unfamiliar in the West. Calligraphy, as a pictorial and material mode of writing, comprises a practice of Chinese remix in which the apprentice traces the lines of the master’s work: repetition of Yun 韵 (‘composed body movements’) stimulates the expression of Qing 情 (‘feelings’). What appears from a distance to be slavish imitation actually involves a philosophy of learning (or more precisely, of ‘unlearnt learning’) that, bypassing plagiarism’s traps, effectively ‘remixes remix’ as a creative model no longer dependent on the familiar Western rationales for the legitimacy of remix as appropriation, homage and/or pastiche. To see this though, one has to deploy a Taoist rather than a Confucian framework in the analysis of calligraphic practices. The case of Kathy Acker, allied with the work of Gilles Deleuze, reveals a largely invisible lineage of Taoist-influenced remix in Western creative writing. In this way, calligraphy emerges as a model of remix relevant to all forms of writing—for all writing is material, whether calligraphic or not. Further, as Acker shows, the materiality of writing constantly replenishes its remixing with cultural elements that may not be otherwise visible.