WORDS
book chapters | journal articles | feature essays | proceedings
The Swarm
The Swarm: drone as composite technology and neo-liberal fantasy, in Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, Ecology . Richardson, M. & Pong, B. (eds), Technographies (OHP), August 2024
This chapter frames the complex cultural evolution of the drone against a global socio-political backdrop of surveillance, remote-warfare and climate collapse. Using key works from cinema, corporate advertising, military doctrine and media art it will demonstrate that the convergence of automation, machine vision and A.I. has become a central trope of our interpretation of what it might mean to be human in a near-future habitat fit for the swarm.
Dark Side of the Sky
Dark Side of the Sky: How the Age of Surveillance Makes Us All Targets, Rolling Stone, Jun-Aug 2023
Algorithms of surveillance and analysis are not passive: they are core components within a ‘black box society’ of invisible infrastructures and opaque operations. We might only notice their presence when our number comes up.
The Hunger
The Hunger’s deathly shadow: The sweet annihilation of David Bowie, NYC, circa. 1983, in I’m Not a Film Star: David Bowie as Actor, Dixon, I. & Black, B. (eds) Bloomsbury (2022)
This chapter is a performance of allusions, placing Bowie’s role in The Hunger at the centre of a convergent image stream of fabrication and mimicry, a hyper-visual culture that privileged style over substance, with allusions also to both the present and the past, burnt into Scott’s lavish film. Disfigurement, isolation, addiction, rejection, the cool logic of the decade of greed – it's all there in The Hunger.
Digital Gothic
Digital Gothic: the techno-cultural narrative of Bruce Sterling's dark euphoria, in Art+Australia / Amazon, Colless, E (ed), Art+ publications, (2021)
In 2009 at the Reboot 11 conference in Copenhagen, Bruce Sterling delivered one of his signature “closing rants” in which he characterised the coming decade as being overwhelmed by a sense of dark euphoria. The primary image he conjured was of a generation “afraid of the sky”, a state of endless freefall – between the duality of shiny techno-futurism and its dark gothic underbelly. This paper will seek to unpack not only the nature and texture of the fall but the accumulative image bank upon which this scene is etched. Game worlds, Hollywood cinema and television all prophesize the post-millennial technological catastrophe in a variety of lusty visual forms.
Liquid Electric
The Liquid Electric - Tracing Nature’s Machine Code in Virtualities and Realities: New Experiences, Art and Ecologies in Immersive Environments. Smite, R. & Smits, R. (eds), Acoustic Space, Volume 17, RIXC, (2019)
Representations of techno-ecologies have a deep and evocative history embedded as they are within our most elaborate cultural fantasies and our most extreme scientific simulations. These digital media dreamscapes constitute the foundation principles of an emergent data aesthetics of liquid. Hollywood has codified this through an art director’s pallet that is often blue and luminous in tone, is found at the core of a film’s novum and often takes on a kinetic electrical form. A ‘liquid modernity’ as it were, bracketed by the twilight years of industrialization and an emergent century of automation and augmentation.
Screen Circuits
Screen Circuits: Fear & Loathing in the Sprawl (circa. 1995) in M/C Journal, The Nineties, Breen, S. & Thompson, DJ. (eds) Volume 21, No. 5 (2018)
The 1990s was more of a feeling than a knowing. There was certainly change afoot and the clock was ticking on a violent century of accelerationism and shrinking horizons. Meanwhile, at the movies a seemingly grave warning was being issued as to what all of this might mean by interrogating a perceived social anxiety around a rapidly evolving information economy, whispers of a virtual reality and the growing hysteria around Y2K.
Dark Euphoria
Dark Euphoria: The Neo-Gothic Narrative of Millenial Technoculture, PhD dissertation, School of Humanities, Griffith University, Gold Coast, October 2014.
A project in two parts - where the text is the major component. The exegetical document provides the theoretical context for a series of media art works that were produced between 2011 and 2012 in response as much as in parallel to this analysis. The creative work, the online media assemblage Dark Euphoria: Unclassified Media should be seen in a non-traditional sense – a research-led practice component – contextualised by the broader theoretical narrative.
Mineral Machine Music
Highlights from the IEEE VIS 2016 and 2017 Arts Program (VISAP’16 and ’17) in Leonardo Journal Special Edition, Forbes, AG., Chung Han, Y., Bravo, EG., Boy, J. (eds), MIT, Boston, USA (2020)
This special section highlights artworks and design projects featured in the IEEE VIS 2016 and 2017 Arts Program, VISAP’16 and VISAP’17. The IEEE VIS Arts Program is a forum that encourages dialogue about the relationship between aesthetics and visualization and discussion of the potential roles of artists, humanities scholars and designers in foundational research in information visualization.
Capstone X
The Capstone Experience: Five Principles for a Connected Curriculum in Higher Education and the Future of Graduate Employability: A Connectedness Learning Approach, with Are, K, Schmidt, M, Goodwin-Hawkins, B, and Aayeshah, A. Bridgstock, R. & Tippett, N. (eds), Edward Elgar (2019)
In this chapter, we contribute to advancing thinking around capstone experiences by drawing on the Connectedness Learning Model which, we argue, can more closely address the challenges brought to higher education in our particular moment in the twenty-first century.
Resistance Screengrab 7
Resistance, curatorial essay written on the occasion of the Screenrab7: Resistance exhibition at eMerge Media Space, James Cook University and PInnacles Gallery, Townsville, Australia. September 2015.
For Screengrab7 all forms of resistance were considered, by an international community of over 400 media arts practitioners from some 54 countries: the politics of resistance, the physics of resistance, the messiness of resistance, and the urgency of resistance. In this age of contradiction – and as Bruce Sterling has observed, of “favela chic and gothic high-tech” – it is the duality of our relationship to the forces of order and control that is central to the examination being conducted here.
Velocity Screengrab 6
Velocity, curatorial essay written on the occasion of the Screenrab7: Velocity exhibition at eMerge Media Space, James Cook University and PInnacles Gallery, Townsville, Australia. September 2014.
Screengrab6 seeks to investigate accelerationism – direction, position, speed and most importantly context. It is as much about movement and shifting points of view as it is about studying objects from a fixed position. Velocity operates under various guises: hypervelocity exists at supersonic speeds in often imperceptible parcels of reality, while glacial velocity is represented by incremental modicums of change over a long extended period of time, while terminal velocity is the final act – the ultimate rendition – often going nowhere, preserved in its inertia back here where we started.