‘The Making of the Book’: Roy Fisher, the Circle Press and the poetics of book art

Between 1972 and 2001, the English late-modernist poet Roy Fisher provided the text for nine separate artist's books produced by Ron King at the Circle Press. Taken together, as Andrew Lambirth has written, the Fisher-King collaborations represent a sustained investigation of the various ways in which text and image can be integrated, breaking the mould of the codex or folio edition, and turning the book into a sculptural object. From the three-dimensional pop-up designs of Bluebeard's Castle (1973), each representing a part of the edifice (the portcullis, the armoury and so on), to ‘alphabet books’ such as The Half-Year Letters (1983), held in an ingenious french-folded concertina which can be stretched to over a metre long or compacted to a pocketbook, the project of these art books is to complicate their own bibliographic codes, and rethink what a book can be. Their folds and reduplications give a material form to the processes by which meanings are produced: from the discovery, in Top Down, Bottom Up (1990), of how to draw on both sides of the page at the same time, to the developments of The Left-Handed Punch (1987) and Anansi Company (1992), where the book becomes first a four-dimensional theatre space, in which a new version of Punch and Judy is played out by twelve articulated puppets, and then a location for characters that are self-contained and removable, in the form of thirteen hand-made wire and card rod-puppets. Finally, in Tabernacle (2001), a seven-drawer black wooden cabinet that stands foursquare like a sculpture (and sells to galleries and collectors for over three thousand pounds), the conception of the book and the material history of print are fully undone and reconstituted. This paper analyses how the King-Fisher art books work out their radically material poetics of the book; how their emphasis on collaboration, between artist and poet, image and text, and also book and reader – the construction of meaning becoming a co-implicated process – continuously challenges hierarchies and fixities in our conception of authorship; and how they re-think the status of poetic text and the construction of the book as material object.

Look down, look up : Barbara Bolt's art beyond representation

I review the thinking of Barbara Bolt in her recent book, which is informed by Martin Heidegger’s theory of art. Bolt argues that it is in the flux of art practice, where the artist responds bodily, with hands and eyes, to the encounter with the materials of practice, that visual art produces real material effects. That is, through the praxical encounter, art does not merely represent, it performs radically. Bolt thus argues for a materialist ontology of the work of visual art. I examine what Bolt means by ‘real material effects’ and ‘radical performativity’.

In developing my own project on the poetic response to visual art, particularly portraiture, I have freely adapted Heidegger’s theory of art to propose that the poet responds to the visual encounter in a manner similar to that of Heidegger’s preserver, by restraining usual knowing and looking. In this way the poet facilitates the emergence from the work of visual art of truth about being and earth, as defined by Heidegger. In my forthcoming article ‘Ekphrasis and illumination of painting’, I argue that the poet, like the artist, restrains seeing-as and operates in a mode approximating mere seeing, as these terms are defined by Heidegger and Wittgenstein.

In the present article I propose to examine the role of looking down and looking up in non-representational art, and in particular Bolt’s ‘oil stain paintings’ exhibited in the Forty-five Downstairs gallery in Melbourne in conjunction with the launch of her book.

I propose to expose some blind spots in the thinking which underpins theories derived from Heidegger. I will examine the way ‘representation’ has been constructed in twentieth-century thought, and will argue that Heideggerian truth and Bolt’s ‘real material effects’ result from the privileging of perception over knowledge. I will examine, with particular reference to portraiture, Bolt’s assertion that the referent can be rehabilitated in Western thought and traced in ‘real material effects’. I will argue that ‘representation’ is an unstable process occurring within and outside signification, and that this very instability enables us to confidently predict that all art produces ‘real material effects’, or in other words, Heideggerian truth.

Mapeamento Mobile Art: propostas poéticas em telefones celulares : de 2001 a 2010

Pós-graduação em Artes - IA

Art, literature, and the drama

Spine title: Margaret Fuller's works

'Give back the human': poetic collaboration and hibakusha poems

Testimonies are viewed as essential for recording the experience of atomic warfare. However, hibakusha Keiko Ogura expresses the need for something more than recording and translating these testimonies. She highlights the need for an understanding of the hibakusha experience through a form of virtual collaboration with hibakusha and their stories. Ogura states that this is best achieved via ‘literature, art and poetry’ (Ogura 2015: n.pag.).This paper discusses why and how we speak about the atomic bomb and argues that virtual collaboration with hibakusha, by writing poetry based on their experiences and publishing it online, encourages empathy and keeps the experience alive for future generations. This paper uses Brandon Shimoda’s curated issue—entitled ‘Hiroshima/Nagasaki’—of Evening Will Come, a monthly online journal of poetics, as a case study.

Autoethnography : critical appreciation of an emerging art

In this article, the author discusses how she applied autoethnography in a study of the design of hypermedia educational resources and shows how she addressed problematic issues related to autoethnographic legitimacy and representation. The study covered a 6-year period during which the practitioner’s perspective on the internal and external factors influencing the creation of three hypermedia CD-ROMs contributed to an emerging theory of design. The author highlights the interrelationship between perception and reality as vital to qualitative approaches and encourages researchers to investigate their reality more fully by practicing the art of autoethnography.

The lens of ludic engagement : evaluating participation in interactive art installations

Designers and artists have integrated recent advances in interactive, tangible and ubiquitous computing technologies to create new forms of interactive environments in the domains of work, recreation, culture and leisure. Many designs of technology systems begin with the workplace in mind, and with function, ease of use, and efficiency high on the list of priorities. [1] These priorities do not fit well with works designed for an interactive art environment, where the aims are many, and where the focus on utility and functionality is to support a playful, ambiguous or even experimental experience for the participants. To evaluate such works requires an integration of art-criticism techniques with more recent Human Computer Interaction (HCI) methods, and an understanding of the different nature of engagement in these environments. This paper begins a process of mapping a set of priorities for amplifying engagement in interactive art installations. I first define the concept of ludic engagement and its usefulness as a lens for both design and evaluation in these settings. I then detail two fieldwork evaluations I conducted within two exhibitions of interactive artworks, and discuss their outcomes and the future directions of this research.

Microwave International Media Art Festival

An international festival that champions a pioneer role in promoting media/digital art in Hong Kong. Apart from organising international video screenings in which the latest media art with the most recent trend and development being introduced, a series of artist-in-resident workshops, exhibitions, seminars and symposiums were also hosted with a view to enhancing culture exchange and stimulating media art creation among overseas and local artists