Dreaming dreaming

These notes explore some of the background, the influences and pre-occupations at play in the construction of my short film Traum A Dream (Australia 6 minutes 2003) that was shown at the 2004 Double Dialogues Conference. This exercise thus places me in that terrain, that double dialogue between theory and practice. As both artist and commentator it also threatens to catch me hovering in that no-man’s land between the written word about the art and the artefact itself, judging my own folly.

Sisters of the sun

A film about flows of time and language on the Volcanic Plains of Western Victoria. Directed by Simon Wilmot. Produced by Patrick West & Simon Wilmot. Script by Patrick West.

The past has its place in the future. Wombeetch Puyuun is teaching Scottish-born settler Isabella Dawson his aboriginal tongue so that her father, James Dawson, can write his book. But how can language preserve the past in a land where time overwhelms words? Meanwhile, contemporary Australians from the Volcanic Plains of Victoria’s Western District meditate over life in a place of sheep, algae, eels, lava and stars. Susan Cole and Janice Austin, descendents of Isabella and Wombeetch’s people united for the first time, reflect on Wombeetch’s friendship with James, and what it means to be ‘the last of your tribe.’

The event 'Flows and Catchments' was held at the Warrnambool Art Gallery on 2/12/2012.

Sisters of the Sun has also screened at Lake Bolac Eel Festival (March 2014) and Warnambool Art Gallery (Feb 2013)

The performing frame

This project explores the ways that creative practices—improvised movement, choreographed dance, and digital video—produce new knowledge about the sociability of public space. In other words, it uses various theoretical concepts and practical strategies to document and analyse the ways people inhabit and sometimes subvert public spaces — such as plazas, malls and piazzas — as part of their everyday experience. Drawing on concepts developed within the fields of performance theory, spatial history, cultural geography and social theory, the project will build a methodological toolbox for understanding the relationships between the diverse groups that use public spaces in Melbourne, Australia. This ‘toolbox’ will subsequently be used to understand analogous public spaces in other parts of the world to generate comparative data about spatial sociability. The research will enable an innovative way of mapping social, civic and political relations in space through a series of creative interventions, and will reveal the politics of everyday movement while exposing tensions between the spaces of public culture — those framed and legitimated by state institutions — and what Michael Warner calls ‘Counter-Publics.’ That is, those oppositional groups who actively seek to use public space in subversive or unauthorised ways.

This project documents a series of performative interventions designed to harness the untapped potential of various forms of street performance genres to function as tools that can produce new ways of understanding the politics of movement in public space. These ‘interventions’ will be generated through a series of practical performance and movement workshops that will draw on street theatre techniques, contact improvisation, Laban movement analysis and contemporary dance choreography. The project will focus on a series of dyadic relationships: self and other, inside and outside, centre and periphery that are relevant to human interaction in public space.
Street performers — musicians, acrobats, jugglers, magicians, mimes and so on — seek public spaces with high volumes of pedestrian traffic in order to maximise their ability to draw an audience and make a living. These performers who create temporary performance zones alter the flow and intensity of movement around them, thereby transforming the plazas, piazzas, town squares and subways favoured by buskers. Some of these performers interact with their audience more than others, and are potentially capable of telling us something about the politics of space. The practice of ‘shadowing’ the movements of passers-by is an increasingly popular form of public entertainment around the world.

Oz@1950

This short film re-edits Australian historic newsreel footage to present the point of view of the migrant arriving into Australia in the 1950s.

Elizabeth Taylor Sometimes (Remix)

In this project the filmmaker revisits her 1998 short film 'Elizabeth Taylor Sometimes' that projects us into the post-human world in which the body is outmoded. The meat is despised and celebrity is a garment we buy at Target - cheap, accessible and banal. Remixed to reflect the impact of social media on the representation and presentation of celebrity

She sleeps

A short dance film screened at the ADF Dancing for the Camera Festival, Durham, NC, 2009.

she sleeps (2009) 3:47
Performed by Jaye Hayes
Camera, editing and sound: Dianne Reid
Created as part of an installation, Yours Truly, a City of Darebin artist-in-residence project for the Art of Difference Festival, Melbourne, 2009. This project examined the public perceptions of difference while exploring the intimate interior lives of five local disabled dancers working in collaboration with director Katrina Rank and filmmaker Dianne Reid. In "she sleeps" performer Jaye Hayes is a dancer navigating chronic illness (CFS).

Neglect

A short dance film screened at the ADF Dancing for the Camera Festival, Durham, NC, 2004.

Neglect (2003) 6 min
Performed by Chay Baker, Sheridan Lang, Emma Wilson
Direction, camera and editing by Dianne Reid
Soundscape by Mark Lang
Set in a circa 1963 apartment building in the heart of Melbourne's jewish quarter, Neglect chases clues of the hidden lives of three women. an eerie journey through corridors and stairwells, the building becomes a metaphor for the body as the location upon which emotional battles are played out and histories are inscribed.

Glassimations

Short movie that was the outcome of a class I taught at Pilchuck Glass School, USA

Left-wing melancholies

With the recent passing of the world's "best-known unknown filmmaker," Chris Marker, it is axiomatic that left-wing melancholy now includes the ongoing loss of previously lost causes – a paradox that suggests the true address of all lost causes worth defending is a strange confluence of past and futural states, as one state. This double loss as gain is also the primary mark of the "landscape" of pessimistic optimism that also denotes the foremost position to occupy today in the battles associated with capitalist End Times (Slavoj Žižek's term). Cultural ecology is no longer what it once was – that is to say, a strange amalgam of vernacular essences perpetrated in the rather forlorn 1970s and/or the insistent and incessant production of difference. Instead, cultural ecology invokes spectral civil war – arguably the very state of things today – and the return of "the dead" in the persistence of forms of high-formalist and high-conceptualist works of art and architecture. This paper examines the late works of the late Chris Marker, including the very short videos he uploaded to You Tube under the pseudonym "Kosinki" from 2007 to 2011, an event contiguous with his return to exhibiting very-still photography from 2006 to 2011. Marker's simultaneous returns to still photography and the short film-essay are both magnificent gestures toward the austerities required of present-day media to effect the necessary "return" to what is always present in one form or another anyway – the non-place between world and world-to-come.

A beautiful day

Short film screening.

Red rattler

A short dance film created and performed by Dianne Reid in response to the red train site and the 2013 performance season of Dance Interrogations in the red train.

PLT practitioners : soldiers For “vocationalism”, or double agents?

This presentation extends on some previous work around my PhD research.
I question ways in which social structures are inscribed into legal education practices, and conversely, whether practices can modify those structures. I argue PLT practitioners are not simply soldiers for a “vocationalist” strategy. Instead, I re-imagine PLT practitioners as “double agents” or “resistance fighters”, lamplighters in a still emergent professional trajectory. It is a trajectory catalysed by the 1970s introduction of institutional PLT; just a baby really, in the context of English common law.

In Bourdieu’s terms it is possible, by revisiting past struggles in Australian legal education, to conceptualise institutional PLT as the product of judicial, professional, and academic struggles to produce a vocationalised, non-academic, and critique-free sub-field within the juridical field. Those struggles succeeded, to some extent, in the extra-individual dimension of structures, regulation, and institutions, to collectively inculcate preferred dispositions within individuals about legal education and professional identity.

That account, however, ignores the potential for agency and alterity – the ways in which individuals might appropriate, in Certeau’s terms, the resources of the legal field to explore new professional trajectories. For some, these trajectories involve struggles to enrich, and add texture to, legal education. Drawing on interviews with PLT practitioners, I identify multi-vocal and multi-perspectival themes, including notions of social justice, equality, professional ethics, personal improvement, and indeed, interest in scholarship of teaching and learning.

It is in this sense I re-imagine PLT practitioners as “double agents”, operating betwixt and between dominant domains in law. In my view, PLT practitioners can participate in conceptualising and developing emergent approaches in legal education, and to theorise “practice” as lawyers and educators. Scholarship of teaching and learning has its part to play in this. It provides a means, as lawyers and as educators, to discover information, to reflect, critique, communicate, and conceptualise, insights about “practice” and practices.

Communicating history A-historically

A paper delivered in tandem with the short film Threshold (Dirk De Bruyn, 20 minutes, 2014), which documents the history and childhood remembrances of the Geelong Waterfront using photographic material gleaned from the Geelong Heritage Centre, the Victorian State Library, the National Film and Sound Archive and Auckland War Memorial Museum alongside Google Maps.

The nature of the surface film on steel treated with cerium and lanthanum cinnamate based corrosion inhibitors

The corrosion inhibition mechanisms of new cerium and lanthanum cinnamate based compounds have been investigated through the surface characterisation of the steel exposed to NaCl solution of neutral pH. Attenuated Total Reflectance-Fourier Transform Infrared (ATR-FTIR) spectroscopy was used to identify the nature of the deposits on the metal surface and demonstrated that after accelerated tests the corrosion product commonly observed on steel (i.e. lepidocrocite, γ-FeOOH) is absent. The cinnamate species were clearly present on the steel surface upon exposure to NaCl solution for short periods and appeared to coordinate through the iron. At longer times the Rare Earth Metal (REM) oxyhydroxide species are proposed to form as identified through the bands in the 1400–1500 cm⁻¹ region. These latter bands have been previously assigned to carbonate species adsorbed onto REM oxyhydroxide surfaces. The protection mechanism appears to involve the adsorption of the REM–cinnamate complex followed by the hydrolysis of the REM to form a barrier oxide on the steel surface.