Digital Debris of Internet Art: An Allegorical and Entropic Resistance to the Epistemology of Search

This Ph.D., by thesis, proposes a speculative lens to read Internet Art via the concept of digital debris. In order to do so, the research explores the idea of digital debris in Internet Art from 1993 to 2011 in a series of nine case studies. Here, digital debris are understood as words typed in search engines and which then disappear; bits of obsolete codes which are lingering on the Internet, abandoned website, broken links or pieces of ephemeral information circulating on the Internet and which are used as a material by practitioners. In this context, the thesis asks what are digital debris? The thesis argues that the digital debris of Internet Art represent an allegorical and entropic resistance to the what Art Historian David Joselit calls the Epistemology of Search. The ambition of the research is to develop a language in-between the agency of the artist and the autonomy of the algorithm, as a way of introducing Internet Art to a pluridisciplinary audience, hence the presence of the comparative studies unfolding throughout the thesis, between Internet Art and pionners in the recycling of waste in art, the use of instructions as a medium and the programming of poetry. While many anthropological and ethnographical studies are concerned with the material object of the computer as debris once it becomes obsolete, very few studies have analysed waste as discarded data. The research shifts the focus from an industrial production of digital debris (such as pieces of hardware) to obsolete pieces of information in art practice. The research demonstrates that illustrations of such considerations can be found, for instance, in Cory Arcangel’s work Data Diaries (2001) where QuickTime files are stolen, disassembled, and then re-used in new displays. The thesis also looks at Jodi’s approach in Jodi.org (1993) and Asdfg (1998), where websites and hyperlinks are detourned, deconstructed, and presented in abstract collages that reveals the architecture of the Internet. The research starts in a typological manner and classifies the pieces of Internet Art according to the structure at play in the work. Indeed if some online works dealing with discarded documents offer a self-contained and closed system, others nurture the idea of openness and unpredictability. The thesis foregrounds the ideas generated through the artworks and interprets how those latter are visually constructed and displayed. Not only does the research questions the status of digital debris once they are incorporated into art practice but it also examine the method according to which they are retrieved, manipulated and displayed to submit that digital debris of Internet Art are the result of both semantic and automated processes, rendering them both an object of discourse and a technical reality. Finally, in order to frame the serendipity and process-based nature of the digital debris, the Ph.D. concludes that digital debris are entropic . In other words that they are items of language to-be, paradoxically locked in a constant state of realisation.

Werner Büttner and the Melodic Tactics of Subversive Affirmation: an Introduction

An introduction to the work and practice of Werner Büttner included in Werner Büttner: Coincidence in Splendour, a retrospective monograph on the artist's painting practice from the late 1970s to present. In this shorter text, Slyce contextualises Büttner's practice amongst his contemporary German painters with which he worked and operated alongside.

Oramics: Atlantis Anew

A moving image work co-commissioned by the Science Museum (London), with extensive unprecedented access to the Oramics archive at Goldsmiths College and the Science Museum. Conceived of as an Artist's film in homage to Daphne Oram, the pioneer of British Electronic Music and co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic workshop in 1958, the film features a close-up encounter with her unique invention, the Oramics Machine, housed at the Science Museum in London. Oram used drawn sound principles to compose ‘handwrought' electronic music, and yet the visual nature of her work remains largely unseen and unsung. Exhibitions: ‘Oramics to Electronica’ Science Museum (London 2011-14); solo exhibition as part of the International Rotterdam Film Festival (2013); group exhibition ‘The Sight of Sound’, Deutsche Bank VIP Lounge, Frieze Art Fair, NY (2012); ‘Samsung Art+ Prize’ BFI Southbank, London (2012). Screenings: mini-retrospective at the Lincoln Centre, NY, as part of the New York Film Festival (2013); Jarman Award Tour screenings (2012, venues included Whitechapel Gallery, London; FACT, Liverpool; CCA, Glasgow; The Northern Charter in partnership with CIRCA projects; Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham; Watershed, Bristol; Duke of York Cinema, Brighton); Mini-retrospective screening and in conversation with Lis Rhodes, Tate Britain (London 2014); Mini-retrospective screening, DIM Cinema, The Cinematheque (Vancouver 2015); Mini-retrospective at Whitechapel Gallery (London 2016).

The Trembling Line

The Trembling Line is a film and multi-channel sound installation exploring the visual and acoustic echoes between decipherable musical gestures and abstract patterning, orchestral swells and extreme high-speed slow-motion close-ups of strings and percussion. It features a score by Leo Grant and a newly devised multichannel audio system by the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research, University of Southampton. The multi-channel speaker array is devised as an intimate sound spatialisation system in which each element of sound can be pried apart and reconfigured, to create a dynamically disorienting sonic experience. It becomes the inside of a musical instrument, an acoustic envelope or cage of sorts, through which viewers are invited to experience the film and generate cross-sensory connections and counterpoints between the sound and the visuals. Funded by a Leverhulme Artist-in-Residence Award and John Hansard Gallery, with support from ISVR and the Music Department, University of Southampton. The project provided a rare opportunity to work creatively with new cutting edge developments in sound distribution devised by ISVR, devising a new speaker array, a multi- channel surround listening sphere which spatialises the auditory experience. The sphere is currently used by ISVR for outreach and teaching purposes, and has enables future collaborations between music staff and students at Southampton University and staff and ISVR. Exhibitions: Solo exhibition at John Hansard Gallery, Southampton (Dec 2015-Jan 2016), across 5 rooms, including a retrospective of five previous film-works and a new series of photographic stills. Public lectures: two within the gallery. Reviews and interviews: Art Monthly, Studio International, The Quietus, The Wire Magazine.

Contributos para o estudo da pintura mural na arquitectura palatina lisboeta entre o tardo-barroco e o neoclassicismo, 1775-C. 1820

Tese de mestrado, Arte, Património e Teoria do Restauro, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Letras, 2011

Um objeto, um ponto de partida : uma exploração em Desenho A, 11º ano

Relatório da Prática de Ensino Supervisionada, Ensino das Artes Visuais, Universidade de Lisboa, 2013

Potencialidades da arte pública relacional na arte/educação:práticas da cidade como sala de aula

Tese de doutoramento, Belas-Artes (Educação Artística), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Belas-Artes, 2014

Um drama da crítica: Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater e Matthew Arnold, lidos por Fernando Pessoa

Tese de doutoramento, Estudos da Literatura e da Cultura (Teoria da Literatura), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Letras, 2014

O lugar e o objeto como circunstância do esquisso

Tese de doutoramento, Belas-Artes (Desenho), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Belas-Artes, 2016

A Concert of 17th and 18th Century Music, November 16, 1953

Concert Program for A Concert of 17th and 18th Century Music, November 16, 1953

Radical interiors: Cindy Sherman's ‘Sex pictures’ and Kathy Acker's 'My mother: demonology'

In 1989, the American visual artist Cindy Sherman produced her ‘Sex Pictures’, a number of photographic images of two medical mannequins whose bodies had been dismembered and reconstructed to form abstract configurations that alluded to pornographic poses. Sherman's series was a response to the National Endowment for the Arts controversy, in which American artists such as Andres Serrano and the late Robert Mapplethorpe, whose work was considered obscene by the Republican Congress, were censored. Many artists in the culture-war period had their grants rescinded. The American avant-garde writer Kathy Acker published My Mother: Demonology in 1993. A prominent concern of Acker's in the work is what she termed her ‘writing freedom’ in a climate of cultural expurgation by the Republican elite. In particular, Acker was worried that she was ‘internalizing certain censorships’. This article addresses Sherman's and Acker's work in a comparative context to explore, through the theoretical work of Julia Kristeva, the ways in which their responses to a climate of political censorship can be read as forms of intimate revolt. Kristeva's notion of ejection—the act of placing something beyond the scope of the possible—transpires as ‘a condition of art's creation’ in Sherman's and Acker's work. Acker and Sherman use the pornographic reference in their work to disrupt and dislocate the narrative and image from convention in order to de-eroticize the body, against heteronormativity's terms, and empower the female sex organs. Eversion—that is, in Sherman's and Acker's works, the act of turning the institutional and maternal body inside out—emerges as a mode of resistance to the danger of the writer and the artist internalizing cultural restrictions. The everted body creates a site of radical interiority which becomes the (impossible) site for the radical (re-)embodiment of the feminine subject.

Concert Program for Mallet Head Series, Mallet Jazz October 19, 2012

Concert Program

(un)childhood: performing the voices and times of childhood through relational video-making

This practice-based PhD is comprised of two interrelated elements: (i) ‘(un)childhood’, a 53’ video-essay shown on two screens; and (ii) a 58286 word written thesis. The project, which is contextualised within the tradition of artists working with their own children on time-based art projects, explores a new approach to timebased artistic work about childhood. While Stan Brakhage (1933-2003), Ernie Gher (1943-), Erik Bullot (1963-) and Mary Kelly (1941-) all documented, photographed and filmed their children over a period of years to produce art projects (experimental films and a time-based installation), these projects were implicitly underpinned by a construction of childhood in which children, shown as they grow, represent the abstract primitive subject. The current project challenges the convention of representing children entirely from the adult’s point of view, as aesthetic objects without a voice, as well as through the artist’s chronological approach to time. Instead, this project focuses on the relational joining of the child’s and adult’s points of view. The artist worked on a video project with her own son over a four-and-a-half year period (between the ages of 5 and 10) through which she developed her ‘relational video-making’ methodology. The video-essay (un)childhood performs the relational voices of childhood as resulting from the verbal interactions of both children and adults. The non-chronological nature of(un)childhood offers an alternative to the linear-temporal approach to the representation of childhood. Through montage and a number of literal allusions to time in its dialogue, (un)childhood performs the relational times of childhood by combining children’s lives in the present with the temporal dimensions that have traditionally constructed childhood: past, future and timeless.

Relações públicas e comunicação a internacionalização da banda Cambatango

O presente trabalho de projeto tem como tema Comunicação e Relações Públicas na internacionalização da banda Cambatango. Os Cambatango são uma orquestra típica de tango argentino que deseja consolidar a sua presença no mercado musical europeu. Assim, a pergunta de partida desta investigação é: como é que uma banda musical de origem argentina consegue promover o seu trabalho em território ibérico? O objetivo principal da investigação é associar as atividades de Relações Públicas à indústria da música. Para este fim, foi escolhido um objeto de estudo real, a orquestra Cambatango e proposto um Plano de Relações Públicas que ajude a: fortalecer a gestão e a imagem do grupo; fomentar a visibilidade da banda na indústria musical internacional; conquistar novos públicos e dinamizar a relação com os stakeholders de forma a impulsionar a presença do grupo em território ibérico. Esta investigação tem uma abordagem predominantemente qualitativa, nesse sentido, os métodos de pesquisa utilizados foram: análise SWOT; análise PEST; mapeamento de stakeholders; entrevistas (e respetiva análise categorial temática); pesquisa documental; auditoria em comunicação e pesquisa informal. As principais conclusões foram: existe uma vertente de Relações Públicas para a música, mas que ainda não é muito explorada pelos artistas independentes; um plano de Relações Públicas elaborado com base nas necessidades e objetivos dos artistas pode ajudar a projetar a sua carreira internacional; a indústria da música tem vindo a mudar face às novas tecnologias e os artistas precisam de acompanhar estas tendências; a comunicação é fundamental para estabelecer o diálogo com os diferentes públicos e ganhar maior projeção e visibilidade internacional.