Six rules for practice-led research

Recent experience of practice-led postgraduate supervision has prompted me to conclude that the practice-led research method, as it is currently construed, produces good outcomes, especially in permitting practitioners in the creative arts, design and media into the research framework, but at the same time it also generates certain recurring difficulties. What are these difficulties? Practice-led candidates tend to rely on a narrow range of formulations with the result that they assume: (i) the innovative nature of practice-led research; (ii) that its novelty is based in opposition to other research methods; (iii) that practice is intrinsically research, often leading to tautological formulations; (iv) the hyper-self-reflexive nature of practice-led research. This set of guidelines was composed in order to circumvent the shortcomings that result from these recurring formulations. My belief is that, if these shortcomings are avoided, there is nothing to prevent practice-led from further developing as a research inquiry and thus achieving rewarding and successful research outcomes. Originally composed for the purposes of postgraduate supervision, these six rules are presented here in the context of a wider analysis of the emergence of practice-led research and its current conditions of possibility as a research method.

"Gail Hastings"

A short piece on the artist Gail Hastings in the context of exploring the legacy of minimal art for the exhibition catalogue, Less Is More: Minimal + Post-Minimal Art in Australia, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2012

Chimaeric HIV-1 subtype C Gag molecules with large in-frame C-terminal polypeptide fusions form virus-like particles

HIV-1 Pr55 Gag virus-like particles (VLPs) are strong immunogens with potential as candidate HIV vaccines. VLP immunogenicity can be broadened by making chimaeric Gag molecules: however, VLPs incorporating polypeptides longer than 200 aa fused in frame with Gag have not yet been reported. We constructed a range of gag-derived genes encoding in-frame C-terminal fusions of myristoylation-competent native Pr55Gag and p6-truncated Gag (Pr50Gag) to test the effects of polypeptide length and sequence on VLP formation and morphology, in an insect cell expression system. Fused sequences included a modified reverse transcriptase-Tat-Nef fusion polypeptide (RTTN, 778 aa), and truncated versions of RTTN ranging from 113 aa to 450 aa. Baculovirus-expressed chimaeric proteins were examined by western blot and electron microscopy. All chimaeras formed VLPs which could be purified by sucrose gradient centrifugation. VLP diameter increased with protein MW, from ∼100 nm for Pr55Gag to ∼250 nm for GagRTTN. The presence or absence of the Gag p6 region did not obviously affect VLP formation or appearance. GagRT chimaeric particles were successfully used in mice to boost T-cell responses to Gag and RT that were elicited by a DNA vaccine encoding a GagRTTN polypeptide, indicating the potential of such chimaeras to be used as candidate HIV vaccines. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

HIV-1 sub-type C chimaeric VLPs boost cellular immune responses in mice

Several approaches have been explored to eradicate HIV; however, a multigene vaccine appears to be the best option, given their proven potential to elicit broad, effective responses in animal models. The Pr55 Gagprotein is an excellent vaccine candidate in its own right, given that it can assemble into large, enveloped, virus-like particles (VLPs) which are highly immunogenic, and can moreover be used as a scaffold for the presentation of other large non-structural HIV antigens. In this study, we evaluated the potential of two novel chimaeric HIV-1 Pr55 Gag-based VLP constructs - C-terminal fusions with reverse transcriptase and a Tat::Nef fusion protein, designated GagRT and GagTN respectively - to enhance a cellular response in mice when used as boost components in two types of heterologous prime-boost vaccine strategies. A vaccine regimen consisting of a DNA prime and chimaeric HIV-1 VLP boosts in mice induced strong, broad cellular immune responses at an optimum dose of 100 ng VLPs. The enhanced cellular responses induced by the DNA prime-VLP boost were two- to three-fold greater than two DNA vaccinations. Moreover, a mixture of GagRT and GagTN VLPs also boosted antigen-specific CD8+ and CD4+ T-cell responses, while VLP vaccinations only induced predominantly robust Gag CD4+ T-cell responses. The results demonstrate the promising potential of these chimaeric VLPs as vaccine candidates against HIV-1. © 2010 Pillay et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

Tracing moments

The interactive art system +-NOW captures moments in the past and present for dreamy, reflective play. It is composed of sand, imagery and interaction. This paper traces the creative process from initial landscape studies to museum installation in 2008. Key design concepts discussed include the origin and use of sand and emergence.

Asian-Australian Children’s Literature and Publishing (AACLAP)

Led by Queensland University of Technology, the Asian-Australian Children’s Literature and Publishing (AACLAP)research project investigates and records details of Australian children’s literature that is set in Asia and/or that represents Asian-Australian cultures and experiences and literature that is published in selected Asian languages. This includes East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the Bay of Bengal. The AACLAP dataset is a comprehensive collection of agent and work records related to ’Asia’, including, but not limited to, autobiography, fiction, criticism, poetry, drama, short stories, and picture books, published during a forty-year period from 1970 to 2010. The dataset provide valuable primary and secondary sources that are important for developing literature-focused educational programs in line with the national government’s push for Asia Literacy. AACLAP is a subset of AustLit, the virtual research environment and information resource for Australian literary, print, and narrative culture scholars, students, and the public.

Toward a theory of the architectural subject

The extraordinary event, for Deleuze, is the object becoming subject – not in the manner of an abstract formulation, such as the substitution of one ideational representation for another but, rather, in the introduction of a vast, new, impersonal plane of subjectivity, populated by object processes and physical phenomena that in Deleuze’s discovery will be shown to constitute their own subjectivities. Deleuze’s polemic of subjectivity (the refusal of the Cartesian subject and the transcendental ego of Husserl) – long attempted by other thinkers – is unique precisely because it heralds the dawning of a new species of objecthood that will qualify as its own peculiar subjectivity. A survey of Deleuze’s early work on subjectivity, Empirisme et subjectivité (Deleuze 1953), Le Bergsonisme (Deleuze 1968), and Logique du sens (Deleuze 1969), brings the architectural reader into a peculiar confrontation with what Deleuze calls the ‘new transcendental field’, the field of subjectproducing effects, which for the philosopher takes the place of both the classical and modern subject. Deleuze’s theory of consciousness and perception is premised on the critique of Husserlian phenomenology; and ipso facto his question is an architectural problematic, even if the name ‘architecture’ is not invoked...

Architecture post mortem : the diastolic architecture of decline, dystopia, and death

Architecture Post Mortem surveys architecture’s encounter with death, decline, and ruination following late capitalism. As the world moves closer to an economic abyss that many perceive to be the death of capital, contraction and crisis are no longer mere phases of normal market fluctuations, but rather the irruption of the unconscious of ideology itself. Post mortem is that historical moment wherein architecture’s symbolic contract with capital is put on stage, naked to all. Architecture is not irrelevant to fiscal and political contagion as is commonly believed; it is the victim and penetrating analytical agent of the current crisis. As the very apparatus for modernity’s guilt and unfulfilled drives-modernity’s debt-architecture is that ideological element that functions as a master signifier of its own destruction, ordering all other signifiers and modes of signification beneath it. It is under these conditions that architecture theory has retreated to an “Alamo” of history, a final desert outpost where history has been asked to transcend itself. For architecture’s hoped-for utopia always involves an apocalypse. This timely collection of essays reformulates architecture’s relation to modernity via the operational death-drive: architecture is but a passage between life and death. This collection includes essays by Kazi K. Ashraf, David Bertolini, Simone Brott, Peggy Deamer, Didem Ekici, Paul Emmons, Donald Kunze, Todd McGowan, Gevork Hartoonian, Nadir Lahiji, Erika Naginski, and Dennis Maher. Contents: Introduction: ‘the way things are’, Donald Kunze; Driven into the public: the psychic constitution of space, Todd McGowan; Dead or alive in Joburg, Simone Brott; Building in-between the two deaths: a post mortem manifesto, Nadir Lahiji; Kant, Sade, ethics and architecture, David Bertolini; Post mortem: building deconstruction, Kazi K. Ashraf; The slow-fast architecture of love in the ruins, Donald Kunze; Progress: re-building the ruins of architecture, Gevork Hartoonian; Adrian Stokes: surface suicide, Peggy Deamer; A window to the soul: depth in the early modern section drawing, Paul Emmons; Preliminary thoughts on Piranesi and Vico, Erika Naginski; architectural asceticism and austerity, Didem Ekici; 900 miles to Paradise, and other afterlives of architecture, Dennis Maher; Index.

Sublime acts : desire in the studio

Acknowledging the recent call to review design creativity and consideration of the body's affective states in education, this paper explores how desire, conceptualized as an immanent force (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) and an irresistible force (Burke, 1753) can be a means of deeper engagement within the design studio. Positing 'disruption or blockage' as a key agent which propels subjects from fields of normalcy to fields of otherness, and subsequently mobilises distinct modes of desire, this paper takes Edmund Burke's Romantic sublime and Patricia Yaeger's feminine sublime as critical lenses through which to review a first year interior program posited around the body. The paper highlights how the embodiment of 'desirous processes' within the design program and relational encounters within the studio represent an overarching pedagogical 'hinge' (Ellsworth, 2005). Rather than being a point of beginning, the start of first year is seen and experienced as a threshold opening to a new rhythm in a proces of becoming that is already underway.