The new wilderness: A practice-led model for arts based enquiry

The New Wilderness is a practice-led, multidisciplinary arts project first piloted by artists, writers, teachers and academics from Geelong, Deakin University and Courthouse ARTS Centre in 2013. In a series of workshops run by artists, and working to specific themes, the project provided a platform for participants to explore and respond creatively to change in the community; it culminated in a large-scale installation at Courthouse ARTS Centre’s main gallery. Our paper positions the project as a able to cut across convention, empowering young artists to respond to ‘big questions’ of relevance to the changing material, spatial and social relations within their communities. In questioning and seeking to transform communities into sustainable media, economic, environmental and social ecologies, this emergent model begins with a localised focus, which is designed to travel across time and place, and pedagogical frameworks. The paper positions Geelong as a community under radical transformation in its economic foundations and demographics. As artists and academics living and working in the region we see it as an experimental ground for investigations into a series of provocations that mirror the shape of the paper we intend to give. The provocations, as outlined in the workshops, might also be envisaged as new relations to:Object – From consumable to unusable to play. In revisiting the first iteration of The New wilderness in 2013 we discuss the ‘superfictional’ (Hill, 2000) enquiry that participants were asked to engage with. Its premise described Geelong as an abandoned, post-apocalyptic site. Participants were asked to imagine themselves as a group of future explorers and excavate objects from the city’s old tip. In unearthing their choices and re-presenting the objects in the gallery the participant was prompted to analyse site, situation, object and process as phenomena for ‘being’ or ‘telling stories’, providing insights into wider realms of cultural experience (Ellis, Adams and Bochner, 2010). Parallel to this ‘autoethnographic’ reflection our paper uses the philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of consumer and material culture. He traces the subject’s relation to objects from use-value, to exchange-value and in the era of extreme capitalism, to pure exhibition-value. He searches for ways that the objects produced in our material culture can be ‘profaned’ (Agamben, 2007). Space – From the material to the spatial to the situation. We are interested in how objects and the practices they elicit can be ‘profaned’ by their situation (Agamben, 2007; Wark, 2103). To profane, according to Agamben, is to open up the possibility that the object loses its exhibition-value to ‘a special form of negligence’ (Agamben). He uses the example of the child’s ability to insinuate any object into a new logic of play (Agamben). Like the objects excavated for The New Wilderness they could be from a variety of spheres – business, household, industry, health etc… The child, like the artist, reconstitutes, reorders and assembles new relations between things. In reflecting on the first New Wilderness project the paper correlates the creative response of the participant (student, child, artist) with the occupier. The Occupy Movement, which took up residence in many of the world’s cities’ financial districts in 2011, used a number of strategies commensurate with both Agamben’s notion of profanation and McKenzie Wark’s reading of the Situationist International’s use of détournement - as a strategy that releases objects and subjects back into the field of play (Wark, 2013). The field was taken by the occupy movement to be the space in which they occupied – capitalism, its logic and its practices, were, for a short time, redundant in the occupied field. The New Wilderness conceptualises the city as a localised field, from which its discarded objects can be ‘profaned’ or, repurposed, to reflect on shared histories, responsibilities, pedagogies and future action. Subject: self/other– As much as we propose New Wilderness to be a pedagogical initiative we see it as personal, critical and political. In the themed workshops, designed to elicit personal responses to the object and the site, which culminated in a multi-disciplinary installation, performance and/or text based work, participants were encouraged to think critically, and importantly, collectively. Through the four workshops run in the first iteration of the project participants were asked to re-consider their material value-systems, much as the occupy movement was trying to do, and like the occupiers, participants were empowered to be agents of change. Our paper reflects on the practical outcomes and the conceptual, political and pedagogical strategies embedded in The New Wilderness project. The paper affords us the additional opportunity to imagine a life for it in other geographical, socio-economic and educational situations. Merinda Kelly and Cameron Bishop, 2013Bio: Merinda Kelly is a sculptor and installation artist, educator and PhD student at Deakin University. Her research interests include Visual Culture, Practice Led Research, the Ontology of Art, and Autoethnography. Her most recent work includes the Pop Archaeology' and the Globo-Touro Projects.Bio: Dr Cameron Bishop is an artist and academic working in Visual Arts at Deakin University. He exhibits regularly and has written a number of journal articles and book chapters. His research has focused on the philosophical and postcolonial dimensions of space and subjectivity and more recently has evolved into an active interest in strategic interventions into space and practice.

Celebrity and public persona

Research on celebrity and public persona derives from fundamentally interdisciplinary sources. Although at its core, the study of public personality has been the object of investigations by those more closely associated with media and communication, the key disciplines of sociology, cultural studies, literary studies, political science, social psychology, and even anthropology and history have been part of its analysis. Celebrity identifies the “extra-textual” dimensions of the famous, in which the lives of the renowned are followed, read, and reported. It is a public celebration of individuality that is (but not exclusively) connected to consumer culture and democratic capitalism. Through these larger cultural tropes celebrity has had its strongest affiliations with the contemporary entertainment industries, particularly in terms of how they are covered by the media and the press for further value beyond the cultural forms that are often the origins of stardom—the public individual’s performances in fields such as film, television, sport, and popular music. Celebrity is a site of celebration and derogation in any culture: these public individuals are truly exalted and given a status beyond others, but they are also ridiculed for their believed-to-be unearned credentials for having such a public platform and voice. Moreover, the study of celebrity and public persona is also an investigation into the connection between the populace and these public personalities, where parasocial relations most evident in fandom identify how celebrities embody audiences with an affective connection that is truly powerful in contemporary culture. That power of embodiment and connection that celebrities possess is subsequently exploited by the media industries to promote and sell new connected cultural products. Identifying celebrities as part of a spectrum of public personas links the study of celebrity to the investigation of the celebrated and famed in a variety of professions and fields well beyond entertainment. Thus, the term persona is used in these studies of public personalities to acknowledge the mask that is deployed to present a public version of the self for this external consumption and reading by an audience, a collective, a network, a nation, a citizenry, or a community. Research into public personas has led to related studies of political leadership, self-branding, notoriety in business, and reputation management, and research delves into the presentation of the public self by greater portions of the populace in online cultures. Celebrity and public persona is a field in which research aims to investigate the significance and meaning of various versions of the public self in both contemporary culture and historically.

Eye tracking the sublime in spectacular moments of science fiction film

In this chapter I will explore science fiction film spectacle as a particular type of endangering sensorial experience. Employing eye-tracking technology to assess where a small group of viewers look, I will contend that through its spectacular set pieces, science fiction film creates two distinct gazing regimes. First, such spectacular scenes create an experience of sublime contemplation where the viewer is (haptically) lost in the wondrous images liquefying before them. These moments of sublime contemplation create the condition where the viewer feels as if they have had an outer-body experience; one that has been cut free from the borders of the linguistic-led self of everyday life. Second, I will argue that certain scenes of science fiction spectacle work to commodify the viewing experience, creating a gazing pattern that is ‘driven’ by the mechanics of the event moment, by the theme park ride aesthetic and the logic of late capitalism. Set in this sensible, empirical context, the sublime dangers of science fiction film can be considered in two distinct ways. On the one hand, when the viewer is caught gazing in a moment of sublime contemplation there is embodied transgression and transcendence: here I will postulate that the viewer exists purely as a carnal being, or are newly if momentarily constituted as post-human, in the impossible present or possible future world that has been spectacularly imagined for them. On the other hand, when the viewer is presented with a spectacle that demands attention to the mechanics and drivers of the scene as it unfolds, a viewing position is created where the very rhythms of the theme park ride is created, where capitalist life is simply being re-engineered. Sublime and spectacular science fiction endangerment, then, liberates and destroys, and it is the encounter between these two vexing poles that is of central concern in this chapter. My focus will predominately be on the eyes, on vision. Undertaking a small-scale empirical study that uniquely utilizes eye tracking technology, this chapter will concentrate on what viewers attend to, gaze at and ‘contemplate’ when viewing two differently constituted ‘spectacle’ sequences: the sun explodes scene from Sunshine (Boyle, 2007) and the Godzilla enters Manhattan scene from Godzilla (Emmerich, 1998).

Hayek the Schmittian: contextualising Cristi's account of Hayek's decisionism in the age of global wealth inequality

That capitalism, in all its variants, produces material inequality is beyond dispute.What is less clear, however, is not only whether Hayek’s ‘equality of opportunities’is immune to the inegalitarian trend, but also whether liberalism itself is the occultsource of this outcome. This paper delves into this by offering a post-nationalcontextualisation and partial critique of Renato Cristi’s 1984 and 1998scholarship on Hayek’s decisionism. The aim is to investigate the relationshipbetween liberal thought and wealth inequality in light of the global-order projectand crisis in democratic decision-making procedures. This will uncover a clearzone of interaction between Hayek’s notion of legal liberty and Schmitt’ssovereignty that was not spotted by Cristi and that will shed new light on thedehumanising and inegalitarian essence of the universalisation of liberalism andits notion of ‘civilised economy’.

Management and Michael Polanyi's thought

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand the role of management ideas as a resource for developing a new understanding of science and society.
Design/methodology/approach – Three important articles of Polanyi are studied in detail.
Findings – That writings of Graicunas, Foch and Liddell Hart definitely influenced the development of Polanyi’s thinking and writings of Gulick, Mooney among other management/organization theorists also likely contributed to Polanyi’s thought.
Research limitations/implications – The study opens a new seam for Polanyi intellectual – historical scholarship.
Practical implications – The article sheds light on facets of scientific life, including how scientists themselves participate in the overall management of science.
Social implications – This discussion of Polanyi deepens the appreciation of Liberal society’s functioning.
Originality/value – No other Polanyi scholar has dug deeply into the history of management, considering its intellectual value to Polanyi.

Hard times and the "fact" and "fancy" of modern labour management

Dickens believed that, played out in practical terms, the pursuit of a totally rationalised society devoid of ‘Fancy’ only served to benefit those in power to the impoverishment of those in their charge. He was appalled by a selfish and self-interested philosophy that combined with laissez-faire capitalism to reduce human effort to mere numbers for the sole purpose of determining its monetary worth. His story thus provides a rebuke to the dehumanising effects of utilitarianism and the way it is used to calculate workers in the manner of machines; reducing them to little more than a resource that is no more or less important any other resource used in industrial enterprise. Their modern-day counterparts live in similar Hard Times in being in the grip of laissez-fair economics of global proportions, which visits upon them similar conceptions of their worth, as evidenced by the current precariousness of their employment and their present exposure to the vicissitudes of arbitrary power exercised by managements still wedded to utilitarian principles. As a result, the ‘light of Fancy’ that at one time would periodically burst through in earnest storms of protest, is now refracted into cynical asides directed at rational systems that continue to standardise and homogenise all that ‘counts’ in working life.