Transversal Practices Matter Ecology and Relationality

Transversal Practices:
Matter, Ecology
and Relationality
VI International Conference
on New Materialisms
27—29 September 2015
The Victorian College of the Arts,
The University of Melbourne, Australia

SUNDAY 27 SEPTEMBER
FEDERATION HALL 1 CINEMA 2 2 HUB SEMINAR ROOM 3 FOUNDERS GALLERY 4 ART AUDITORIUM 5
9:30 — 10:00 Coffee and Registrations
10:00 — 10:15 Welcome to Country
Boonwurrung Elder Aunty Carolyn Briggs
Chair and Founder of the
Boon Wurrung Foundation
10:15 — 11:15 Keynote: Professor Brian Martin
Shifting the Lens: Embodied
Memory, Culture and Practice
Chair: Estelle Barrett
11:15 — 11:45 Morning Tea
11:45 — 1:45 Relational Objects,
Transversal Methodologies
Chair: Estelle Barrett
Crafting Relations,
Practicing Activisms
Katve-Kaisa Kontturi
Victorian College of the Arts,
The University of Melbourne
Object Relations,
Transformational Encounters
in the Studio Archive
Rachael Haynes
Boxcopy Contemporary Art Space
I and I is We, Us
Amaara Raheem
RMIT University
“Writing to” to Get Between:
Traversing Materials Through
the Real and Imagined
Tania Spława-Neyman
RMIT University
1:45 — 2:45 Lunch
2:45 — 4:45 Indigenous Aesthetics
Chair: Barbara Bolt
Transversing Truganini Track:
Materiality and Sensation
in Drawing the Land
Jan Hogan
Tasmanian College of the Arts,
University of Tasmania
Memory, Image, Matter: Trauma
and Acts of Un-forgetting
Estelle Barrett
Institute of Koorie Education, Deakin University
Liquid Life
Chair: Barbara Bolt
Ecologies of Spirit in Timor Leste
Lisa Palmer
School of Geography,
The University of Melbourne
Queering Deep Time: Water as
a Planetary Archive of Feeling
Astrida Neimanis
University of Sydney
Bodying Language:
Languaging Body
Chair: Justy Phillips
Tending Deathwards
Sarah Jones
University of New South Wales,
Art and Design
Twirl-Whirling Lyric Essays
from a Post-Cartesian Body
Mattie Sempert
RMIT University
Let Me Tell You a Story.
Inside This Body There
is a Heart Just Like Yours.
Justy Phillips
RMIT University
The Texture of Rolling Forward
Csenge Kolozsvari
Senselab
Spatial and Temporal Politics,
Social Textures
Chair: Katve-Kaisa Kontturi
Diffraction & Dissensus:
Diffraction Methodologies
for Dissensual Art Making
Tal Fitzpatrick
Victorian College of the Arts,
The University of Melbourne
Crafting Asylum: Text, Textiles
and the Materiality of Hope
Margaret Mayhew
White House Institute of Design, Melbourne
Walking a Trail of Paper and
Gravel: The Grit and Grime
of Arts Activism
Louise Phillips and Scotia Monkivitch
The University of Queensland
and Walking Borders
Vitalist Progress(ion):
Feminist Temporality,
Corporeality and Connection
Karin Sellberg
Centre for the History of European Discourses,
University of Queensland
4:45 — 5:15 Afternoon Tea
6:00 onwards Weather Patterns, Where Forces Meet
Exhibition opening and off campus panel discussion
Rubicon Gallery, Level 1, 309 Queensberry Street, Melbourne
Chair: Sam Spurr, Presenters: Erin Manning Concordia University and SenseLab, Andrew Goodman
University of New South Wales, Sam Spurr University of New South Wales Art and Design
The Sidestep: Transversality
in Neighbourhood Art Projects
Chair: Janine Randerson
The Chasing Fog Club (Est. 2014):
Free Participation, Free T-Shirt
Layne Waerea
Art and Design, AUT University
Making as Currency,
Connecting the Everyday Social
Monique Redmond
AUT University
Ecologies of Practice:
Seawater and Dust
Janine Randerson
Art and Design, AUT University
Sonic Spaces, Vocal Relations
Chair: Erin Stapleton
SPEAK!
Julieanna Preston
College of Creative Arts, Massey University
Bodily Collisions: Towards
a New Materialist Understanding
of Art as Energy
Dorota Golanska
University of Lodz
Practices, Trajectories and the
Travels of Musical Instruments
Alejandro Miranda
University of Western Sydney
Ears to the Ground:
New Materialist Practices
of Voice in Contemporary Art
Norie Neumark
Victorian College of the Arts,
The University of Melbourne
Experimental Practices
Chair: Laura Woodward
Carceri: Prisons of Invention
Tero Nauha and Karolina Kucia
COST Action IS1307
Theatre Academy, University of the Arts, Helsinki
Elastic Perspective:
The Diagonal Line and the
Production of Deep Space
Rochelle Haley
University of New South Wales
Imag(in)ing the Impossible
—A Case Study in Drawing
and the Process of Designing
States of Experience
Luke Tipene
Whitehouse Institute of Design, Australia
The Performance Lecture
Mark Shorter
Victorian College of the Arts,
The University of Melbourne
Digital Ecologies,
Digital Materialities
Chair: Ilona Hongisto
The Shifting Context of Clouds,
Matter and Aesthetics
Paul Thomas
University of New South Wales
Art and Design
Expressive Collisions:
Art and Particle Physics
Chris Henschke
Monash University and Australian Synchrotron

MONDAY 28 SEPTEMBER
FEDERATION HALL 1 CINEMA 2 2 HUB SEMINAR ROOM 3 FOUNDERS GALLERY 4 ART AUDITORIUM 5
8:30 — 9:00 Coffee and Registrations
9:00 — 10:00 Keynote: Professor Karen Barad
Special Presentation
via Video Link
Chair: Barbara Bolt
10:00 — 10:30 Morning Tea
10:30 — 12:30 Vibrant Matter, Kinetic Practices
Chair: Estelle Barrett
Animate Materiality
Gyungju Chyon
RMIT University
Agential Relationships of Time,
Matter, Movement and
Experience in System-based
Kinetic Sculpture (using Luc
Besson’s "Lucy" as a Transversal
Testing Ground)
Laura Woodward
Victorian College of the Arts,
The University of Melbourne
Performing Objects:
Working in the Space Between
Materiality and the Imagination
Lynne Kent
LaTrobe University
Dancing with the Nonhuman
Petra Gemeinboeck
University of New South Wales
12:30 — 1:30 Lunch
1:30 — 3:30 The Work of the Work of Art
Chair: Barbara Bolt
Incidents and Situations:
Artworks as Empirical
Case Studies
Ash Tower
University of South Australia
Surface Activations
Andrea Eckersley
Monash University
With an Eye to Four Walls
and Two Ears to the Ground:
Making Art by Moving
Through a House
Lyndal Jones
RMIT University
More Than Material
Terri Bird
Monash University
Non-Human
Relationalities
Chair: Barbara Bolt
Anthropocene Interventions
Susie Lachal
RMIT School of Art
Diffractions and Intra-actions
for Multispecies Aesthetics
Madeleine Boyd
Sydney College of the Arts,
University of Sydney
Performing Landscape
— Swinging Together
Annette Arlander
University of the Arts Helsinki
Space, Textiles and
Knowledge Making
Chair: Robyn Creagh
Textile Practice a Dialogue
with Time and Space
Al Munro
Australian National University
Listening with Knots:
Making as Ethnography
and Ethnography as Making
Rachel Morgain
Australian National University
Spatial Interrelations:
Exploring Collaborative
Material Thinking
Robyn Creagh
Curtin University
Lucy Irvine
Spatialities of Playing, Learning
and Vocal Expression
Chair: James Oliver
Children Post-Digital Play and
the Aesthetics of Recruitment
Bjorn Nansen, Darshana Jayemanne
The University of Melbourne
Thomas Apperely
University of New South Wales
Surface Accretions:
Prototyping Posthumanist
Learning Environments
by Walking and Mapping
an Immersive Cartography
David Rousell
Southern Cross University
Ecocriticisms in Literature
and Theatre
Chair: James Oliver
Material Ecocriticism and
Posthuman Ethics in the
Language of Theatre:
Caryl Churchill’s “The Skriker”
Mohebat Ahmadi
The University of Melbourne
Deleuze, New Materialism
and an Australian Literature
for Crises of Ecologies?
David Harris
Deakin University
Architectural Atmospherics
Chair: James Oliver
The Energy Between Us: Two
Affective and Intertwined Space
Times Evoked by Architecture
as Prelude to a Proper Sharing?
Andrea Wheeler and Aniket Nagdive
Iowa State University,
Department of Architecture
Film Matters
Chair: Ilona Hongisto
Peter Gidal’s Challenge
to the New Materialisms
Kari Yli-Annala
Aalto University, Helsinki
Film-making with Objects:
Relational Cinema
Bogna Konior
Hong Kong Baptist University
Gestures of Diffraction:
Cell Division and the Film Edit
Kim Sargent-Wishart
Victoria University
Framing as Immanent Evaluation:
Performative Entanglements
in Post-Soviet Eastern
European Documentary
Ilona Hongisto
University of Turku, Finland and
The University of Melbourne, Australia
Cultural Practices,
Transversal Spaces
Chair: Ilona Hongisto
At the Barricade: Borderline
Events and the Transversal
Spatial Condition
Dorita Hannah
University of Tasmania
On the Relationality of Mental
and Material Forms Among
Tibetan Nomads
Gillian Tan
Deakin University
Between Steps: Exploring
the Transformative
Relationships Between
Pilgrimage, Person, and Place
Catherine Montes
University of Queensland
Mapping Disappearance through
Transversal Material Practices
in the Contemporary Hong Kong
Spatial Politics
Jo Law
University of Wollongong
Transversal Techniques
and Group Subjects
Laboratorium - 90 minutes
Anna Munster
University of New South Wales
This hands-on laboratorium looks to activate
processes of “listening in” differently to the
transmission of real time. Participants are
asked to bring along their own internet
connected device (phone/tablet/laptop)
and headphones/earbuds.
Experiential Laboratory
of Co-attuning Voice
Laboratorium - 90 minutes
Heidi Fast
Aalto University School of Arts and Design
This experiential labortorium will explore
how we co-emerge with other humans and
the surrounding non-human world through
embodied sonority. This enquiry examines
the relation of voice as vibrant matter and
relational event to sensibility, by developing
a vocal participatory framework.

MONDAY 28 SEPTEMBER
FEDERATION HALL 1 CINEMA 2 2 HUB SEMINAR ROOM 3 FOUNDERS GALLERY 4 ART AUDITORIUM 5
3:30 — 4:00 Afternoon Tea
4:00 — 5:30 Indigenous Ontologies
Chair: Estelle Barrett
Thingly Power: A Ta Moko
Signature on Paper
Te Kawehau Hoskins and Alison Jones
Te Puna Wanaga, The Faculty of Education
The Sense of the Matter
Debra Dank
Institute of Koorie Education,
Deakin University
Crossing an Uncommon Commons
Stephen Turner
University of Auckland
7:30 onwards Conference Dinner at ‘Cookie’
252 Swanston St, Melbourne VIC 3000
Please note: all food and drink
at individuals' own cost.
Design, Fashion, Co-creativity
Chair: Katve-Kaisa Kontturi
Unruly Measurements, Viscous
Time and Sensitive Screens
—Thinking Through Elasticity
Bettina Bruder
University of New South Wales
Zigzagging Fast and Slow:
The Continuous Movement
Between Fast and Slow
Thinking Within a Creative
Site—A Methodology that
Transversal Practices Call For
Haya Cohen
Queensland College of Art, Griffith University
How does Matter Comes to Matter
in a 21st Century Fashion System?
Rachel Matthews
Monash University
Affect, Pedagogy and Spatial
Encounters: Re-thinking
Education as a Materialist Practice
Chair: Stephanie Springgay
Playgrounds as Sites of Radical
Encounters: A Mapping of
Material, Affective, Spatial,
and Pedagogical Collisions
Linda Knight
Queensland University of Technology
The Post-human ‘I’
in "Love Your Lagoons"
Margaret Somerville
University of Western Sydney
The Artist’s Soup Kitchen:
Desire and Hope
as Radical Hospitality
Stephanie Springgay
University of Toronto
TUESDAY 29 SEPTEMBER
8.30 — 9:00 Coffee and registrations
9:00 — 10:00 Keynote: Curator Joshua Simon
Neomaterialism: Debt and the
Materiality of the Dividual
This keynote is presented in
partnership with West Space
Chair: Laura Woodward
10:00 — 10:30 Morning Tea
10:30 — 12:30 Body Environments
Chair: Barbara Bolt
The Matter of Thought:
New materialism
in 2 Places @ 1nce
Jondi Keane
Deakin University
On Consciousness and
Virtual Lines of Affection
Ana Ramos
Université de Montréal
Daydreaming and Dissociation:
Physical Encounters as Cognitive
Strategies in Sculptural Practice
Fleur Summers
RMIT University
Sculptural Occurrences and
Other Abfunctional Potentials
Simone Slee
Victorian College of the Arts,
The University of Melbourne
12:30 — 1:30 Lunch
Science and Diffractive
Technologies
Chair: Laura Woodward
Who knows? A New Materialist
Approach to the Agency
of Discovery
Maaike Bleeker
COST Action IS1307
Utrecht University
Props for Autonomous
Architecture
Stanislav Roudavski
The University of Melbourne
Denatured Painting and Idea
of an Aesthetic (re) Fold
Andre Brodyk
University of Newcastle
Cultural Production
and Aesthetic Practice
Chair: Glenn Wallace
Environment-movement:
a Creative Exploration of Travel
as Collective Movements with/in
Immersive Environments
Kaya Barry
Deakin University
City Rhythms Picturing
the (affective) Materialities
of Urban Spaces
Katie Rochow
Victoria University of Wellington
Activating the Transversal City:
Public Art and its Uses
Glenn Wallace
Sydney College of the Arts,
University of Sydney

TUESDAY 29 SEPTEMBER
FEDERATION HALL 1 CINEMA 2 2 HUB SEMINAR ROOM 3 FOUNDERS GALLERY 4 ART AUDITORIUM 5
1:30 — 3:00 Technologies of the Body,
Transversal Embodiments
Chair: Estelle Barrett
Gender Failure,
Trans-poetics and Change
Lotta Kähkönen
University of Turku, Finland
(Un)subjects: Diffractive
Making at the Borderlines
Ardath Whynacht
Mount Allison University
Geographical and Materialist
Constructions of
Therapeutic Space
Candice Boyd
The University of Melbourne
Education, Affect, Learning
Chair: Mary Dixon
Bullying Affect and
Productive Schooling
Melissa Wolfe
Monash University
Working With Young People’s
Emergent Becomings in
School-based Sexuality
Education Programmes
Kathleen Quinlivan
University of Canterbury
Materialising Learning
Mary Dixon
Deakin University
Material Transients
Chair: Julieanna Preston
Interrogating Time and Meaning:
Art Conservation, Scientific
Analysis, Historical Context
and the Missing Links
Robyn Sloggett
The Grimwade Centre for
Cultural Materials Conservation
On Mythbustin’ Macleay and the
Case of the Curious Kianpraty
Skull or Colonial Cryptozoology
and the Bunyip
Oliver Smith
Sydney College of the Arts
Destroying Nothing: the Material
Transience of the Digital Archive
Erin Stapleton
The University of Melbourne
Ecology, Ethics, Aesthetics
Chair: Andrew Lavery
Matter at the Coalface
Hartmut Veit
Victorian College of the Arts,
The University of Melbourne
Mining Matter: Materialist
Methodologies in the
Land Art of Robert Smithson
and Lara Almarcegui
Andrew Lavery
Sydney College of the Arts,
The University of Sydney
The Invisible Hand: Transversal
Thinking with New Materialism
in Curriculum Design
Lucinda McKnight
Deakin University
This participatory workshop seeks to question
how knowledge around curriculum is produced,
and to document the ways in which our work
as educators is part of a continuous becoming.
Though not essential, participants are invited
to bring photographs of the teaching spaces
for which they are designing curriculum,
and any other relevant curriculum materials
as stimulus.
3:00 — 3:30 Afternoon Tea
3:30 — 4:30 Keynote: Professor Hayden Lorimer
Pet Project
This keynote is supported
by COST Action IS1307
Chair: James Oliver
4:30 — 5:00 Break
5:00 — 6:00 Keynote: Prof. Erin Manning
Carrying the Feeling
This keynote is supported
by the Macgeorge Bequest
Chair: Katve-Kaisa Kontturi
This keynote lecture is open to the public
6:00 — 6:15 Conference Close
Barbara Bolt and Tal Fitzpatrick
CREATIVE
INSTALLATIONS
SHOWING THROUGHOUT
THE CONFERENCE
FEDERATION HALL 1
FOYER
Urban Swarming
A video Installation with an online element
accessible through QR code
Patricia Adams
QUT Creative Industries
Print Cultures: The Microbiotic
Colony as Feral Writing
Technology
An installation of agar-infused pages
of text that collect microbial matter from
the environment. This matter then assists
in composing and editing the texts over
the course of the conference.
Kay Rozynki
Wearable Landscapes:
Affectual Artifacts Collection
Spring/Summer 2015
An interactive wearable art experience,
open from early until lunch time every day
Alice Lewis
RMIT University
MARGARET LAWRENCE 6
GALLERY
The Material Turn
Major exhibition featuring the work of
Sarah CrowEST, 3-ply, Carolyn Eskdale,
Nathan Gray, Bianca Hester, Helen Johnson,
Katie Lee, D103, Lizzy Newman, Sophie
Takach, and Isadora Vaughan.
Curated by Rebecca Coates.
What influence does critical theory have on
contemporary art and artists? Conceived
as an expanded proposition, this exhibition
explores one of the current ‘critical turns’,
New Materialisms. What is this New
Materialisms beyond a literary or theoretical
series of positions and how might it inform
an artistic process? How does the material
practice of art speak back to critical theory?
The exhibition examines the dialogue between
practice and theory through the lens of new
materialisms within an academic, practice-led
research context and gallery space.
The exhibition is open Tuesday to Saturday
12pm to 5pm until 3 October 2015
RUBICON GALLERY
Level 1, 309 Queensberry Street, Melbourne
Weather Patterns,
Where Forces Meet
Exhibition featuring the work of
Prof. Erin Manning, Andrew Goodman
and Sam Spurr.
Opening event Sunday 27 September
—See program listing. The exhibition is open
Wednesday to Saturday 12pm to 5pm
until 10 October 2015

CREDITS
HOW TO GET THERE
CALL FOR PAPERS
Studies in Material Thinking (SMT)
Special Volume — Volume 17
How Matter Comes to Matter through
Transversal Practice: Matter,
Ecology and Relationality
Studies in Material Thinking (SMT) Auckland University of Technology is calling for
submissions to a special volume of research articles to be published late 2016, in
collaboration with the organisers of Transversal Practices: Matter, Ecology and
Relationality, the sixth Conference on New Materialisms and the ISCH COST Action
New Materialism: Networking Scholarship on ‘How Matter Comes to Matter.’
Researchers in all fields are increasingly seeking engagements across disciplines
using multiple conceptual and methodological frameworks. This transversal activity
affects the way in which creative research practices evolve. We are increasingly
networked with other practices, exposed to broader realms of knowledge and
faced with expectations arising from pervasive ecological concerns and
technological complexity.
This post-conference volume is aligned with the original conference stimulus.
We are interested in research and research practice that addresses
the two conference questions:
How do transversal practices
work and how can we account
for or conceptualise them?
What kinds of methodologies
do they necessitate,
or call for?
We encourage critical approaches that transversally cross the following: collectivity,
corporeality/incorporeality, materiality/immateriality, Indigeneity, individual/group
subjectivity, knowledge-production/onto-epistemologies, language, temporality,
transdisciplinarity, processes of making art/philosophy/activism, and the three
Ss—spatiality, sociality and the sensorium.
SMT 17 is open to innovative format options. We would like to encourage contributions
that explore experimental, innovative ways of communicating the value and significance
of speculative, pedagogical or applied design thinking. In particular we welcome
film/video documentation of processes and image cycles used in a positive, active,
discursive manner. We would like to produce a post-conference on-line volume that
values and supports researchers, artists, designers and design educators to explore
a strongly visual form of argumentation.
Co-editorial Team
Prof Estelle Barrett, A/Prof Barbara Bolt, A/Prof Nancy De Freitas,
Dr Kaisa Kontturi and Dr Laura Woodward.
Submission Process
Conference Dates
27 – 29 September 2015
|
Volume Editors for SMT 17 invite all those who presented at the conference during
27 – 29 September 2015 to submit full-length papers based on their conference
presentations with visual and graphic material included by 31 January 2016
|
Selection notifications by 29 February 2016
Peer Review, Revisions and Preparation of Final Drafts March to August 2016
|
Copy-editing and Final Formatting
September - October 2016
|
Expected Publication Date
November/December 2016
Submission Guidelines (Style Guide and Template)
https://www.materialthinking.org/submission-guides-and-electronic-form
NewMats2015 Convening Committee
A/Professor Barbara Bolt
The Victorian College of the Arts,
The University of Melbourne
Professor Estelle Barrett
Institute of Koori Education,
Deakin University
Dr James Oliver
Centre for Cultural Partnerships,
The Victorian College of the Arts,
The University of Melbourne
Dr Katve-Kaisa Kontturi
McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow,
The Victorian College of the Arts,
The University of Melbourne
Dr Ilona Hongisto
School of History, Culture and Arts Studies,
University of Turku, Finland;
The Victorian College of the Arts,
The University of Melbourne
Dr Laura Woodward
The Victorian College of the Arts,
The University of Melbourne
Tal Fitzpatrick (Conference Coordinator)
PhD Candidate, The Victorian College of the Arts,
The University of Melbourne
NewMats2015 Reference Group
Professor Julieanna Preston
College of Creative Arts, Toi Rauwharangi
Massey University, New Zealand
A/Professor Iris van der Tuin
Department of Media and Culture Studies and
the Research Institute for History and Culture,
Utrecht University, Universitair Hoofddocent
Dr Jondi Keane
Faculty of Arts and Education,
Deakin University
Andrew Lavery
Contemporary Art, The University of Sydney
Dr Terri Bird
Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture,
Monash University
Dr Milla Tiainen
University of Helsinki, Finland
Publication
Publication Front Cover
“Five” (detail) by Laura Woodward, 2014
Publication Design
Futureinform
www.futureinform.com
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Federation Hall
Gate 1
Grant St
Cinema 2
Level 1, Film and Television Building
Building 861
Hub Seminar Room
Ground Floor, Hub
Building 863
Founders Gallery
Ground Floor, Elisabeth Murdoch Building
Building 860
Art Auditorium
Through Gate 4, Dodds St
Building 877
Margaret Lawrence Gallery
Dodds St
Lionel Gell Lounge
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How to Submit your Paper
Please do not submit papers via the SMT website.
All submissions for this special volume to be emailed to admin@newmats2015.net
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All
Abstracts
& Biographies
How to use:
The abstracts are organised
in alphabetical order by
speaker's surname
You can also access
(specific) papers directly
from the program by
clicking on the titles.
Click on this symbol P
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Keynote Presenters
Professor Erin Manning
SenseLab, Concordia University, Canada
Carrying the Feeling
Carrying the Feeling explores autistic Lucy Blackman’s
use of “carrying” as an expressive force in her writing.
Continuing to delve into what I have called autistic
perception - the force of perception that doesn’t yet
parse out the environment but attends to the emergent
qualities of an environmentality in act - in this paper
I explore how else we might think concepts such
as volition, intentionality and agency. If carrying is
a force that already composes with language,
perhaps there is a productive way to consider an
environmentally propulsive concept of agencement
as operator in experience rather than the ubiquitous
first-person account of agency? Challenging what
I call “neurotypicality as first identity politics,”
I propose to open up a discussion of where else
a conversation of relation might begin.
Professor Manning holds a University Research Chair
in Relational Art and Philosophy in the Faculty of
Fine Arts at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada.
She is the founder and Director of SenseLab (founded
2004), an internationally acknowledged researchcreation
hub that works across artistic research
and aesthetics and encompasses new materialist
philosophy. She was nominated for the Royal Society
of Canada in 2014 by Concordia University for her
innovative and community engaged research.
Professor Manning leads the international
Immediations partnership project that received funding
from Social Sciences and Humanities, Research
Council of Canada (SSHRC)(2013-2018) to develop
artistic research. This collaborative project between
universities and community partners aims to establish
research-creation as a form of knowledge production
in its own right, to examine its unique methodologies,
and to foster artistic practice internationally.
Her books Relationscapes: Movement, Art,
Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009),
Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty
(Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2007),
Ephemeral Territories: Representing Nation, Home
and Identity in Canada (Minneapolis: Minnesota
University Press, 2003) and Always More than One:
Individuation’s Dance (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 2013) are seminal texts in artistic research
and new materialism. Her participatory fabric artwork
“Stitching Time” was exhibited at Sydney Biennale
(2012) and at Moscow Biennale (2012) and The Knots
of Time opened the new Flax Museum in Kortrijk,
Belgium (2014). The concepts and techniques
collectively arrived at over the first ten years of
SenseLab activities have been published in Erin
Manning and Brian Massumi, Thought in the Act:
Passages in the Ecology of Experience (University
of Minnesota Press, 2014).
Professor Brian Martin
Deakin University, Australia
Shifting the Lens: Embodied Memory,
Culture and Practice
Evolving cultural dynamics and research paradigms
shift our thinking and doing through modes of
different methodologies. Indigenous methodological
approaches operate in their own right, and at
the same time they accept existing binaries and
ambiguities, as they are not linear in their worldview
and epistemology. This is an exciting space for
research. It is through an examination of this space
and a critique of western notions of ideology,
particularly those based on representationalist ways
of thinking, that my research proposes an alternative
way of thinking about ideology and ontology in
relation to art practices in order to reveal a materialist
understanding of the real. My argument relates
specifically to art and culture and demonstrates
through theoretical argument and practice, how
Indigenous art and culture allow us to conceive of an
alternative understanding of ideology and materiality.
I elaborate an alternative framework of ideology
based on Indigenous culture which is grounded on
the relationship between culture and Land and posit
a materialist ontology that resolves the opposition
between “real” and the “imaginary”, the subject
and the object, as they are understood within
a representationalist framework. My argument is
underpinned by the crucial premise that an Indigenous
ideology is grounded upon the notion of “Country”
(Land) and its inextricable relation to culture.
Brian Martin is of Bundjalung and Muruwari descent.
He completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Hons) degree
at Sydney University. He has been a practising
artist for twenty-three years and has exhibited both
13
nationally and internationally specifically in the media
of painting and drawing. He completed his PhD
by research at Deakin University, which focused on
refiguring Australian art and culture from an Indigenous
ideological perspective based on a reciprocal
relationship to “Country”. Brian is currently Professor
and Deputy Director of the Institute of Koorie Education
at Deakin University where he leads research specifically
pertaining Indigenous knowledges, validity and
methodological approaches to a research paradigm.
Professor Hayden Lorimer
University of Glasgow, Scotland (COST Action IS1307)
Pet Project
First time I clapped eyes on the place, I knew there
was a project in it. The most precious plot in the town,
its seashore pet cemetery. Somewhere seemingly
charmed into a paradoxical state: of makeshift
permanency. A place giving off the impression of
having gotten lost, only to resurface by way of several
turning tides, misplaced and out-of-time. Sempiternal,
sunken, and estranged by 1001 love stories. One for
every companion creature buried in a sandy grave.
Since then, I’ve become a regular visitor, but I’m still
not anywhere near the bottom of it. One thing I know
for sure, my interest in this pet cemetery is about
more than pet cemeteries. Always good to think with,
the site seems to open a window on transversal
practices, offering an experimental test-bed for
theories of new materialism. Working this possible
relation ought to prove productive. Consequently,
my talk will take the form of a stylized landscapetour,
in which I consider critically the coupling of
conference theme and local site. As a locus of practice,
matter and relations, the cemetery is multiple and
unstable: a place of multi-species burial; mass
disposal; biochemical experiment; queered ecology;
shared personhood; deep sentimentality; public good;
solitary investment; private commemoration; collective
narrative; inadvertent art; indigenous culture; folk
craft; miniaturised design. And that is just the half of it.
Hayden Lorimer is Professor of Cultural Geography
in the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences,
University of Glasgow. His research explores diverse
geographies, of nature, landscape, biography,
memory, art, science, craft, fieldwork, and the life
of the senses. Recently, he has published essays
in Cultural Geographies, Performance Research
and GeoHumanities.

ALL ABSTRACTS & BIOGRAPHIES P
15
Professor Karen Barad
University of California, Santa Cruz,
U.S, via video link
Special Presentation via Video Link
Karen Barad is Professor of Feminist Studies,
Philosophy, and History of Consciousness at the
University of California at Santa Cruz. Barad’s Ph.D.
is in theoretical particle physics and quantum field
theory. Barad held a tenured appointment in a physics
department before moving into more interdisciplinary
spaces. Barad is the author of Meeting the Universe
Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement
of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007)
and numerous articles in the fields of physics,
philosophy, science studies, poststructuralist theory,
and feminist theory. Barad’s research has been
supported by the National Science Foundation, the
Ford Foundation, the Hughes Foundation, the
Irvine Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the
National Endowment for the Humanities. Barad is
the Co-Director of the Science & Justice Graduate
Training Program at UCSC.
Curator Joshua Simon
Chief Curator, The Bat Yam Art Museum, Israel
Neomaterialism: Debt and
the Materiality of the Dividual
The materiality of the commodity today is not limited
to labor but expands to debt. Things are the
plasticized negative space of debt. In-dividual holds
a double meaning – it is at the same time inseparable
from itself and separated from the rest. Therefore,
the individual is in itself a negation of the dividual,
that which is always already part of something else.
When Deleuze outlines the dividual in “Postscript
on the Societies of Control,” he uses it to denote
the collapse of the individual. The dividual for Deleuze
is this dissected entity, roaming through networks.
Converged through production protocols and the
debt economy, the dividual is in constant negotiation.
A non-fixed and mobile flow, always partial, the
dividual is in the process of subjectivation. As an
open form to all sorts of hybridizations, the dividual
is a matter of constant production, against fixed
subjectivity and rigid identity; a subjectivity in flow,
re-organizing, re-composing, a subjectivity in play.
Not an entity unto itself apart from all the rest, but
rather already in relation, always part of something.
Being the materialization of our social relations,
the commodity folds in itself the ever-shifting
omnipresence of our shared dividuality and
its connectedness.
Joshua Simon is director and chief curator of
MoBY-Museums of Bat Yam, Israel, and author
of numerous publications including most recently
Neomaterialism (Sternberg Press, 2013). Simon
is a fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics,
The New School, New York (2011-2013), and the
founding co-editor of Maayan Magazine for Poetry
and Literature and The New & Bad Art Magazine,
and editor of Maarvon – New Film Magazine,
all based in Tel Aviv-Jaffa. He is also the co-editor
of The Aesthetics of Terror (Charta, 2009), and the
editor of United States of Palestine-Israel, published
in the Solution series by Sternberg Press (2011),
and of Ruti Sela: For The Record (Archive Books,
2015). Recent curatorial projects include Francesco
Finizio: ARKPARKCRAFTRAFTCLINICCLUBPUB
(MoBY, 2015), : Ruti Sela: For The Record (MoBY
2014, Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, 2015),
Goods (co-curated with Liz Hagag, MoBY 2013),
ReCoCo – Life Under Representational Regimes
(co-curated with Siri Peyer, White Space, Zurich
and Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna, 2011),
The Unreadymade (FormContent, London, 2010),
Internazionale! (Left Bank, Israeli Communist Party
Culture Club, Tel Aviv, 2008). He will present an
exhibition at West Space, Melbourne, later this year:
Factory Fetish (co-curated with Liang Luscombe,
13 November - 12 December 2015).
Presenters
Patricia Adams
QUT Creative Industries
Urban Swarming
Through a participant viewing experience that involves
a spatial, locative format outside the confines of the
gallery the artwork, URBAN SWARMING investigates
inter-species proximity and human/non-human
relationality. Via information leaflets - situated at
various locations - participants can access the
artwork QR code, which is linked to the customised
URBAN SWARMING website, and download the
video+sound onto the intimate, hand-held screen
of their mobile smart device: http://trishadams.tv/
urban-swarming-project/
Rather than a focus on the honeybee’s productive
‘hive-mind’, URBAN SWARMING explores less
familiar aggressive honeybee behaviours.
Documentary footage, collected during Adams’
residency at the Visual and Sensory Neuroscience
Group, Queensland Brain Institute, shows the hectic
desperation and individually aggressive characteristics
of these honeybee responses. Contrary to their
regulated community activities in the hive, URBAN
SWARMING highlights more unfamiliar aggressive
honeybee behaviours and, alluding to shared
interspecies characteristics, compares them with
negative aspects of contemporary city life.
When downloaded onto individual participant
‘smart’ devices – such as iPhones – and played out
against the hubbub of busy urban locations, the video
images of desperate honeybee responses are viewed
against the backdrop of the rushing mass of the
urban population, scurrying hither and thither. In this
way the URBAN SWARMING participant experience
creates an immersive environment, where the tiny
bees appear to be held in the hand, captured within
the small screen. Honeybees are already regarded
as an endangered species and, evocatively, in
URBAN SWARMING both humans and honeybees
exhibit mindless – possibly doomed – behaviours.
Trish’s art/science research and artworks pose
questions about what it means to be human and the
ways in which our understanding of ourselves will
be changed by advances in biotechnology and
ecology. In a first for an artist, Trish changed adult
stem cells from her blood into beating cardiac cells
in vitro in a biomedical laboratory. As visiting artist
at the Queensland Brain Institute, Trish explored
cognition and navigation strategies in the European
Honeybee. Trish’s honeybee research, most recently
at the Australian Synchrotron, explores the nature
of inter-species proximity and the ecological issues
faced by the endangered honeybees.
Mohebat Ahmadi
The University of Melbourne
Material Ecocriticism and Posthuman
Ethics in the Language of Theatre:
Caryl Churchill’s “The Skriker”
This presentation will focus on the representation of
human/nonhuman relationship in The Skriker, a 1994
play by British playwright Caryl Churchill, from a
material ecocritical perspective. The emergence of
‘material ecocriticism’ as a “fourth-wave material
trend” in ecocritical theory from 2012 has provided
a more practical, physical and material way of
understanding nonhuman presence. Through such
a perspective, I elaborate on this important
question that how does the performance challenge
the mastery of human subjectivity by embracing a
non-anthropocentric view of material agency?
To challenge the conventional anthropocentric
attitudes of ecological plays and dismissal of
nonhumans to largely metaphorical and symbolical
margins, in my material ecocritical reading of
Churchill’s play I will elaborate upon Stacy Alaimo’s
concept of ‘trans-corporeality’. The material
ecocriticism emerges from this concept is dependent
on a sort of posthumanism that focuses on “the
material interrelatedness of all beings, including the
human” (2010: 151). Alaimo uses the concept of
‘trans-corporeality’ as a conceptual framework
for identifying the idea of ‘toxic bodies’. Using this
concept in the trans-corporeal landscape of The
Skriker, I argue how ecological risk and toxicity in the
play reveals the interconnection of multifold bodies
and movements, including “material, economic, and
cultural systems that are so harmful to the living
world and yet so difficult to contest or transform”
(Alaimo 2010:18).
I focus on how combining the ancient and
contemporary worlds of fairy creatures and thereby
breaking conventions of space and time in the play
contribute to show audiences the way risky changes
in the ecological condition of the world influence all

ALL ABSTRACTS & BIOGRAPHIES P
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the materials and the existence of both human and
nonhuman natures. The play’s trans-corporeal space,
in which the human and the nonhuman are entangled,
provides a vision of ‘posthuman environmental
ethics’. To illustrate this, I will also draw on Timothy
Morton’s concept of ‘strange stranger’ and Cary
Wolfe’s ‘What is Posthumanism?’ Through discussing
these concepts in textual and performance analysis
of the play, I take the question of nonhuman nature
to a new prominence and explore how nonhuman
performance involves similar issues of agency,
subjectivity and materiality that are applicable
to human performance.
Mohebat Ahmadi is currently a PhD candidate
in the School of Culture and Communication at the
University of Melbourne, Australia. Her thesis maps
out an ecocritical evolution of environmental
representation in a reading of selected dramatic
works. Her latest publication is a book review of
Readings in Performance and Ecology edited by
Wendy Arons and Theresa J. May in Green Letters:
Studies in Ecocriticism. She was awarded the
Veronica Kelly Prize for the Best Postgraduate Paper
at the Australasian Drama Studies Association
Conference in Wellington, New Zealand in June 2014.
Annette Arlander
University of the Arts Helsinki
Performing Landscape - Swinging Together
Swinging together is an artistic experiment that
involves performing with the projection of an image
on the site of its making. It relates to the themes of
spatiality, sociality and sensorium, the three ecologies
examined by Guattari (2000) and my previous work
with performing landscape. This experimental paper
is based on my previous attempts at swinging
together in Helsinki in 2014. I will discuss these
ecologies in relation to Karen Barad’s thinking (2007),
and ideas concerning moving images in Laura U.
Marks’ The Skin of Film (2007), and Ecocinema
Theory and Practice (2013) by Stephen Rust, Salma
Monani and Sean Cubitt. The experiences of the
participants will be shared and reflected upon as well.
Annette Arlander is an artist, researcher and a
pedagogue. She is educated as theatre director, MA
(philosophy) and DA (theatre and drama). She was
professor of performance art and theory at Theatre
Academy, Helsinki (2001-2013) and head of the
Performing Arts Research Centre (2007-2009).
Arlander is member of the editorial board of JAR
(Journal for Artistic Research) and co-convener of
the Performance as Research working group of IFTR.
Her research interests include artistic research,
performance as research, performance studies,
site-specificity and the environment. Her artwork is
focused on performing landscape by means of video
or recorded voice. http://annettearlander.com
Estelle Barrett
Institute of Koorie Education, Deakin University
Memory, Image, Matter: Trauma
and Acts of Un-forgetting
If as Edward Casey asserts that memory is to be
pursued into its own otherness, into what is other
than mind, how might we conceive of the role
of memory as a non-representational mode of
commemoration that reconstitutes and transforms
lived experience? In this paper I will draw on examples
of Indigenous art practice and epistemology and
apply conceptions of memory outlined in works
of Casey, Henri Bergson, J.E Malpas and others
to consider how direct and indirect social and
psychological effects of trauma is manifested through
generations. An understanding of the relationship
between images, memory, time and matter and of
memory as a primarily eidetic and material process
may also help to explain how some people are able
to avoid or overcome trauma. I suggest further that,
as image production, art-making and narrative
generate images that like memory, perform acts of
“unforgetting” through which the past is returned
as a presence that is materially apprehended. This
process can both sustain and transform individual
and collective histories; in some instances, it allows
unfinished business of the past to be overcome in
culturally appropriate ways or alternatively, relived
and repeated as original trauma. Central to this
idea is the notion that, the structure of mind and of
memory are co extensive with the external world
and that the articulation of consciousness is
crucially dependent on space and place.
Estelle Barrett is Professor and HDR Coordinator at
the Institute of Koorie Education, Deakin University.
Her co-edited book, Barrett, E. and Bolt B. (Eds.)
Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts
Enquiry, (I.B. Tauris London, 2007; reprinted 2010),
was followed by Barrett, E. and Bolt B. (Eds.)
Material Inventions: Applying Creative Research (B.
Tauris, 2014). Barrett has published reviews and
articles in Real Time, Artlink, Text, Social Semiotics,
Double Dialogues, The International Journal of
Critical Arts, Zetesis, and the Journal of Visual Arts
Practice. Her monograph, Kristeva Reframed:
Interpreting Key Thinkers for the Arts ( (2011),
examines the relevance of Kristevan thought for the
creative arts and artistic research. A recent book,
co-edited with Barbara Bolt, Carnal Knowledge:
Towards a “New Materialism” Through the Arts, was
published in 2013. Barrett is a Research Fellow
of the International Centre for Fine Arts Research
Birmingham University.
Kaya Barry
Deakin University
Environment-movement: A Creative
Exploration of Travel as Collective Movements
with/in Immersive Environments
Travelling involves a series of transitions through and
with new environments. Processes of disconnect
and realignment occurs as daily material processes
in travel, such as walking, touring, conversing,
or packing a bag, contrast to the immersion with/in
unfamiliar environmental intensities. The feeling
and sensing of this provides opportunities for
collective movements to unfold, where bodies
and environments, humans and nonhumans, move
together. This paper explores how experiences
of travel and transition can attune us to relational
practices that transgress material boundaries.
Discussing my net-based artwork “environmentmovement”,
I contemplate movements that go
between immersive, enveloping environmental
transitions, and the subtle, micro, everyday process
of packing a bag.
Displayed on a projector with a track-pad input,
the audience is invited to interact with the artwork
during the paper presentation. Tracking the creation
of the net-artwork through a mixture of experiences
– artistic, touristic, and ethnographic interviews in
Iceland and Nepal – I suggest how transversal
practices span individual and collective interactions
through movement. By situating practice somewhere
between a documented lived-experience and
creative engagement expands actions to be both
productive and contemplative. Focusing on how
tourist ideals mesh with sensations of the moment,
I highlight how everyday material practices forge
relations that can be collectively felt across bodilyenvironmental
entanglements.
Kaya Barry is a practice-led PhD candidate at
Deakin University, Melbourne. Her research project
“Creativity in-transit” focuses on material and spatial
interactions during travel. Her creative arts practice
involves producing interactive installations that utilise
site-specific engagements with spatial perception,
mobility and embodiment. She has exhibited in
South East Queensland, Melbourne, Iceland, and
online, and teaches new media theory and practice.
Terri Bird
Monash University
More than Material
New materialist thinking has contributed significantly
to discussions of contemporary art motivated by a
desire to move away from conventional understandings
that regard matter as inert and passive,
as merely a vehicle for expression or medium for
signifying something external to itself. Rethinking
material relations has enabled writing on art to focus
on the ‘work’ of the work of art, what it does, and
its material operations that acknowledge matter’s
potential force and dynamics. An influential
contributor to these discussions has been the
feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, whose 2008
text Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the framing
of the earth offers new approaches for thinking about
the way art enables matter to become expressive.
At recent conferences however, if not in print,
Grosz has made a point of saying she is not a
new materialist, or at least, not only a materialist.
Exploring pre-Socratic philosophers, such as
Anaximander, together with Raymond Ruyer, Gilbert
Simondon and Gilles Deleuze, Grosz argues for an
understanding of incorporeality that encompasses
both ideality and materiality. Her recent writings
suggest a relation between sense, signification and
materiality in which sense is not in opposition to
matter, but a shared surface of the incorporeal and
the material. This paper will examine the seemingly
paradoxically understanding of sense Grosz
advocates as a challenge to thinking about the sense
making properties of artworks.
Terri Bird is an artist, primarily practicing and exhibiting
with the collaborative group OSW. She is a senior
lecture in the department of Fine Art, MADA Monash

ALL ABSTRACTS & BIOGRAPHIES P
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University. Her essay ‘Figuring Materiality’ focusing
on the artwork of Fiona Abicare was published in
Angelaki in 2011. She has also published essays in
a number of artist’s catalogues including, ‘This
Conversation,’ written with Tom Nicholson, for
Bianca Hester’s 2010 exhibition at ACCA ‘Please
leave these windows open overnight ...’ .
Maaike Bleeker
Utrecht University
Who knows? A New Materialist
Approach to the Agency of Discovery
(COST Action IS1307)
“Kepler discovers eleven billion years old planets”
reads the headline of a recent article in a Dutch
newspaper. The Kepler referred to is not the 16th
century German astronomer but the telescope of
the Kepler Space Observatory developed by NASA.
The headline identifies the telescope as the agent
of the discovery, not the astronomers. And actually,
this is a pretty accurate representation of the situation.
For although it was humans that built the telescope,
the discoveries made with it cannot be understood
as resulting from individual human agency.
The satellite-telescope is a large scale highly
technological research project that involves complex
constellations of scientists and their instruments,
and in which human researchers are nodes in
networks that operate on a scale and in cognitive
modes that exceed human understanding. Science
projects like the Kepler Space Observatory, or
the large hadron collider at CERN, as well as new
developments in the so-called digital humanities
point to the need for an ecological approach to how
the universe matters and can be known within a
network of textual, conceptual, social, and technical
actors. Actors furthermore that are embodied and
material. This is what Latour terms ‘relational
materiality’.
Building on these and similar ideas currently
emerging from the philosophy of science and
technology as well as media theory, my presentation
explores what this may tell us about what it means
to discover something, who does so, how we know
what something is, and what (and where) such
knowledge is understood to be.
Maaike Bleeker is a professor of Theatre Studies,
and Head of the Department of Media and Culture
Studies at Utrecht University. She studied Art History,
Theatre Studies and Philosophy at the University
of Amsterdam. She is also active as dramaturge in
theatre and dance. Her monograph Visuality in the
Theatre was published by Palgrave (2008). She (co)
edited several volumes including Anatomy Live.
Performance and the Operating Theatre (2008) and
Performance & Phenomenology. (Routledge 2015).
She was the organizer of the 2011 world conference
of PSi titled Camillo 2.0: Technology, Memory,
Experience (2011). She is president of Performance
Studies international.
Candice Boyd
The University of Melbourne
Geographical and Materialist
Constructions of Therapeutic Space
Taking art making as its leitmotif, this paper considers
how materialities and affective intensities conjoin
in the production of therapeutic spaces. Drawing
from speculative pragmatism and vital materialism
in the creative arts (Bennett, 2010; Bolt, 2010; Grosz,
2009; Manning, 2009), non-representational theory
and post-phenomenology in geography (Ash &
Simpson, 2014; Dewsbury, 2003; McCormack, 2003;
Thrift, 2008), and process-oriented ontologies
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Guattari, 1995; Malabou,
2008; Whitehead, 1978), the paper contends that
attunement to the ‘spacings’ activated during events
of therapeutic art making promotes the development
of an ecological sense of self. The argument is
supported by practice-led research across a range
of practices from visual art to dance therapy,
graffiti, and poetic permaculture.
Candice Boyd is an artist-geographer with a
background in clinical psychology. Her interests are
in the geographies of mental health, cultures of sense
and movement, therapeutic spaces, and contemporary
museum geographies. Her art practice focuses on
the production of affective knowledges via painting,
sculpture, video, and soundscape. In addition to a
teaching and research career in rural adolescent
mental health, she has authored and published a
novel for young adults. She is currently completing
a second PhD in cultural geography and the creative
arts at the University of Melbourne and lectures
at the Centre for Youth Mental Health.
Madeleine Boyd
Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney
Diffractions and Intra-actions
for Multispecies Aesthetics
Karen Barad‘s agential realism is the basis
for developing a multispecies aesthetics intended
to contribute to conversations with artists and
art-theorists who have interests beyond human.
Like much of Barad’s own investigations the central
themes of this study have taken lead from nonhuman
phenomena and biological sciences also
known as multispecies studies.
With primary research conducted at the site of
performative art, this paper shows how a diffractive
analysis across multispecies artwork, the author’s
own art production with equines and agential realism
allows an aesthetics for multispecies justice (to come)
to emerge. Key themes including decentering the
human, meaning inherent within materials, inclusion
of the non-human in the production of culture,
emergent collaborations between species, slippage
between the animate and inanimate and performative
art that ‘does work’ for multispecies justice.
This paper will include images and discussion of
the author’s own art practice as well as well as several
artists whose works provide opportunity for engagement
with a multispecies practice. The author’s
project has particularly focused on making art with
two equines over the last three years resulting in the
production of interspecies collaborative paintings and
video artworks. This topic is also the subject of a
forthcoming paper to be published in Antennae:
Journal of Nature in Visual Culture in 2015, but has not
yet been present at a professional conference, or to
an audience with the shared focus of new materialism.
Madeleine Boyd is driven by a series of intense
inquiries that involve thinking with non-human animals
and the matter of existence. Currently engaged in
a process of discovering what it is like to ‘intra-act
with horses’, she presents her findings as a series
of public videos, online blogs and paddock-based
happenings. In 2013 Madeleine co-curated the
exhibition Intra-action: Multispecies Becomings
in the Anthropocene towards development of a
performative multispecies aesthetics. A forthcoming
edition of Antennae: Journal of Nature in Visual
Culture co-curated by Madeleine will feature a
selection of papers on multispecies art practices
as they intersect Karen Barad’s Agential Realism.
Andre Brodyk
University of Newcastle
Denatured painting and idea
of an aesthetic (re) fold
This paper develops an experimental interpretation
allied to the conceptual construct of transversal
practices namely transdisciplinarity as an agency not
an object being predicated upon a new bio-molecular
media aesthetic idea. Specifically this paper
considers transdisciplinarity as a folded aesthetic
idea effected through a denatured (separated) and
re-folded molecular topography. This becomes
reframed through an expanded (transversal) painting
paradigm involving a molecular biology interface.
So the significance of this paper is that it translates
and folds a transversal practices idea of painting
expanded in a transdisciplinarity frame of reference,
as something having correspondences to protein
folding capabilities inherent in molecular data.
As a model for creativity these molecular folding
capabilities become implicit as an expanded creative
transdisciplinarity agency. In this paper I argue that
the creative implications of this transdisciplinarity via
augmented creative data i.e. a molecular repository
are potentially limitless. This is evidenced by the 10
to the power of 30 folding capacity of molecular
tertiary structures i.e. proteins.
Supporting the creative transdisciplinarity
argument developed throughout this paper is an
elementary account from the perspective of a
non-scientist on how this denatured and unfolding/
refolding idea is predicated upon biochemistry
processes. This means that the paper considers an
aesthetic adaptation of this changed molecular
circumstance whereby some of the protein’s original
nature changed chemically is conceptually denatured
unfolded and re-folded as art (the idea of transversal
painting). So the conclusion arrived at through this
discussion is that protein folding re/folding translated
to art as expanded painting agency is instantiated
as a transformative, transdisciplinarity, transversal
practices idea. Contemporary expanded art theory
involving painting contextualizes the aesthetic
basis of the methodologies that underlie the
transdisciplinarity idea of a folded aesthetic.
Aesthetic extrapolations relative to the author’s
own transdisciplinary ideas and seminal Bio-artist
Joe Davis’ conceptual idea of ‘Genetic manifolds’
form the basis of this paper.

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Andre Brodyk is an interdisciplinary Bio-artist with
a PhD (Fine Art), from (UNSW), 2009 Brodyk has
exhibited widely in exhibitions centered on art and
science including Semipermeable (+), ISEA 2013,
Sydney Intra-action, Australian Animal Studies Group,
2013, Sydney Visceral, The Living Art Experiment,
Science Gallery, 2011, Dublin. As well as curated
shows in New York, New Orleans and San Francisco
USA Brodyk has undertaken many residencies
in molecular biology labs since 2001 and has
presented refereed conference papers including
in ‘Transdisciplinary Imaging 2012‘, VCA, University
of Melbourne AAANZ ‘Together Apart’, University
of Sydney, 2012 and ISEA 2011 Istanbul Sabanci
University, 2011.
Bettina Bruder
University of New South Wales
Unruly Measurements, Viscous Time
and Sensitive Screens - Thinking
Through Elasticity
The Toolkit for Elastic Understanding focuses on the
intersection of knowledge, media and representation.
Eleven projects provoke fluid ways of sense-making
via manipulated gauging devices. With custom-built
appliances I modify our epistemological systems,
subverting dichotomies and infusing an in-between
by means of material (1), performative (2) and spatial
(3) interventions.
My field of attention is metrology as unquestioned
authority in the construction of reality. Administrative
apparatuses and representations such as
measurements, industrial standards (e.g. paper sizes,
screen formats and grid systems) are transformed
to inject constructive and poetological irritations in
our meaning making processes. Three modes of
elasticity inspire the assemblage: Static (1) investigates
liquefying and stabilising features of matter. Stressed
and squeezed (2) explores discursive practices of
negotiation, accommodation and resistance.
Dynamic qualities, enabling constraints (Manning,
2009; Hayles, 2001) and Pickering’s mangle (1993)
come into being. The tools subvert disciplinary
routines of knowledge production as co-productive
agents. Split (3) opens up loopholes and leeways in
our preconfigured frames of reference transfecting
an idea of vibrancy.
My art practice is situated in the area of visual
communication with a focus on the transitional,
speculative/critical aspects of design practice (Dunne
& Raby, 2001; Yee, Jefferies, Tan, 2013). Similar
to Barad’s “diffraction apparatuses“ (2007) the
elastifying tools allow for propositions otherwise
excluded through established routines and
conventions in modernist knowledge production
(Latour, 1993; Stengers, 2000). The work is informed
by New Materialism and Actor Network Theory, both
articulating new narratives putting emphasis on
instantaneous potentialities for change (Folkers, 2013).
Bettina Bruder studied Communication Design
in Germany and received her MFA in Design &
Technology at Parsons, School of Design. She was
a lecturer and guest professor at the University for
Applied Sciences in Salzburg for Multimedia Art.
Before her PhD Candidature at UNSW in Arts, Design
& Media she worked as Senior Art Director for a
global corporation. This cross-disciplinary experience
informs her art practice. Her current research
investigates the potential for change within human
understanding through the concept of elasticity.
Her objective is the development of critical and
sensitive articulations, which she elaborates through
practice-based explorations, performances,
artefacts and installations.
Gyungju Chyon
RMIT University
Animate Materiality
Closing the window blinds, switching on the lights,
stirring sugar into a cup of coffee...These are
everyday occurrences that designers provide for
in their work. They are also occurrences in which
the objects and the world are static, operated by
users. Would seeing objects and the world as
inherently animate lead designers to design different
types of objects that are dynamic and vital?
In On the Animation of the Inorganic, historian
Spyros Papapetros defines animation in two modes
through “external stimulation of movement”,
and “static or inner liveliness of geometric forms
in abstract ornamentation”. In Animate Form,
Greg Lynn extends this idea of ‘inner liveliness’ in
his notion of ‘animate form’. Lynn’s design process
involves evolving a form with shaping forces in
a virtual world. The dynamic energy of the forces
is “stored as information in the shape of the form”.
Might there be other ways to animate objects than
through form making? Could matter also be lively?
Materials have tendencies and capabilities,
and they act upon us. In Vibrant matter, Jane Bennett
claims things continuously co-shape and influence
us. She calls this capacity “vital materiality”.
By foregrounding the object’s “vital materiality”,
could the designer create objects that are animate?
Gyungju Chyon is a Lecturer in industrial design at
RMIT and a partner in the Little Wonder design studio.
Her research and practice, crossing a broad
spectrum within objects design and installation,
is concerned with the relationship between
human, objects and environment, challenging the
status-quo by creating new experiences through
engaging natural phenomena, new materials and
processes, and cultural values. She has collaborated
with companies such as Rosenthal (DEU), Interface
(USA), Duravit (DEU), Emotis (FRA), and Lucifer
Lighting (USA).
Haya Cohen
Queensland College of Art, Griffith University
Zigzagging Fast and Slow: The Continuous
Movement Between Fast and Slow Thinking
Within a Creative Site - A Methodology
that Transversal Practices Call For.
A reflexive/reflective artist can begin to correlate the
numerous contrasting activities that run concurrently
through the body-environment. For example, actions
such as perceiving similarity and difference appear
simple and somewhat ‘automatic’—fast thinking.
However, in actuality, they involve extremely complex,
imaginative, unconscious processes that are
provided to consciousness after the intricate work
of combining imagination and reason—slow thinking
(Gill Fauconnier and Mark Turner 2002). If we follow
a line of argument, which views the links between
the world and body/thought/action as involving
myriad interconnections and unconscious blending
processes then, I argue, these links require the
element of making to become perceptible. Also,
when integrated as a creative site, reflecting on the
intensities of movement within the creative, acts
become catalyst for connectivity. Using hands-on
textile practices, with the emphasis on the process
of making art rather than on the product, I focus on
intensities of movement and thought: how making
art with/on the body, allows dimensions of time and
space take on different qualities; how collaborative
weavings facilitate cutting across diagrams and
the transformation of relations; how methodology
such as a creative site consists of overlapping
connections and non-linear conversations necessary
for transversal practices. I propose that hands-on
material tactic, which opens up story (meaning)
and connection (sensory engagement) accentuates
the continuous process of becoming, whether in a
new place or in refamiliarising oneself with a known
place especially on the background of a constant
people’s movement around the world.
Haya Cohen is an arts practitioner that expresses
and experiments with versatile mediums, currently
working with living art. She completed her PhD in
visual arts and cultural studies at Griffith University,
Australia .As an arts practitioner, Haya’s main focus
is on the continual processes of material thinking
and thinking through materials and the relationships
between body/self/environment. For Haya, making
yarns and fabric become a methodology for both
correlating transdisciplinary academic research
and producing experiential-based research. Her art
was exhibited internationally and across Australia.
Her academic work was presented in interdisciplinary
conferences and published in academic books
and journals.
Robyn Creagh & Lucy Irvine
Curtin University
Spatial Interrelations: Exploring
Collaborative Material Thinking
This presentation explores interdisciplinary
knowledge-making in the context of collaborative
material thinking through textile work. The authors
reflect on their experience at the three-day workshop
Gesture, Reverie, Enchantment run by Amanda
Ravaez and Alice Kettle at ANU Textile Department
in October of 2014. Within the framework of this
workshop the authors formed a new collaborative
relationship and produced a small set of works as
a study in possible interrelations between disciplines
and ways of thinking. The authors adopted concepts
used to describe aspects of space and textiles alike
—ground, line, volume, form, texture and relationship
of parts—to negotiate a framework for material
manipulation and aesthetic judgment, resulting in a
joint resolution of form and ideas. This presentation
reflects on the use of these spatial ideas as
metaphors—such as common ground, line of enquiry,
conceptual thread, contextual field—and their
material interpretation to explore the centrality of

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space in the interrelational and embodied context
of collaborative making. This presentation is
structured to first briefly outline the context within
which interdisciplinary teams are increasingly forming
in response to complex research problems. In this
context we consider potential openings for further
textile-centered research. The authors’ collaborative
material thinking is seen to underpin potential future
research responding to the transversal nature of
contemporary interdisciplinary spatial research.
Robyn Creagh is an architectural researcher
and creative practitioner. She is an early career
Research Fellow at Curtin University, in the faculty
of Humanities, attached to the Centre for Sport
and Recreation Research. She is an active
interdisciplinary collaborator—currently working
with colleagues in art, geography, planning, cultural
studies, anthropology, physical activity and health
sciences. Her work explores sense of place in urban
settings: understanding place as shifting, contested
and networked, and people as mobile and
creative agents.
Lucy Irvine is a Melbourne-based artist and educator
interested in the embodiment of knowledge and
the potential of weaving to intertwine the movement
of knowing within space and time. In her sculpture,
Irvine juxtaposes organic forms with industrially
produced, utilitarian materials to weave emergent
forms that challenge expectations of surface, volume
and space. Her work was selected for inclusion
in Melbourne Now at the NGV (2013-2014) and
the national touring Sensorial Loop, 1st Tamworth
Textile Triennial (2011-13). Recent solo exhibitions
include New Works as part of Irvine’s Visiting Artist
residency at the ANU Textile Workshop (2014) and
Mapless at Ararat Regional Art Gallery (2012).
Debra Dank
Institute of Koorie Education, Deakin University
The Sense of the Matter
As an Indigenous Australian woman, I am told often
who and what I am by the dominant Anglo Australian
cultural dialectic. As a person with a diverse ancestry,
I have been a ‘half caste’, a ‘mixed breed’, ‘mixed
descent’, of ‘hybrid’ culture among other things.
McCorquodale (1991) suggests there have been ‘no
less than 67 classifications, descriptions or definitions
to determine who is an Aboriginal person...’ These
terms are not what I know myself to be. I am being
articulated by the Other. My identity is cognisant
of the ways in which I have grown rather than terms
attributed according to corporeality. My identity
comprises the materiality of indigeneity from a
Gudanji perspective. The knowledge of this identity
arises through onto-epistemologies exposed through
language and the contexts of spatiality, sociality
and the sensorium. Can the dominant Anglo
Australian discourse articulate or make sense of
who I am from outside of the Gudanji cultural and
linguistic construct? Does the Anglo Australian
narrative have the ability to articulate my presence
in the centre as I am positioned within my own
cultural paradigm or am I destined to occupy the
space of the margins? What is the matter of margins
and the centre and how does this impact me?
I pose the current lexis of Anglo Australia struggles
to enable ‘Otherness’ away from the margins and
there is the need to develop an other discourse
to make sense of the matter.
I am Gudanji and from the Barkly Tablelands in the
Northern Territory. I have worked as a teacher for
almost thirty years in primary, secondary and tertiary
education. I am currently working on my PhD.
I am married and have three adult children and one
granddaughter. As a new, emerging academic, I am
keenly interested in the ways that language conveys
many layers of meaning far beyond the spoken word.
I am interested in how First Nations peoples in
Australia are asserting place through contributions
of new knowledges that are being derived from
truly ancient systems of knowing.
Mary Dixon
Deakin University
Materialising Learning
Within post humanist engagements in research
there are ongoing engagements with the question
of data and the questioning of data. Researching
education involves engaging with people, places,
things, spaces and words as data. Each ‘data set’
becomes ‘set’ with its own edges, paradigms and
provoked readings. Immersed or drowning in these
entangle-ments the question arises ‘what is not
data?’ This paper is not concerned with answering
that question. Rather the paper is concerned
with the question and the weight it bears
in educational research.
In a recent research project located in a university
teacher education course over 800 students were
asked to assemble objects from their schooling lives
to communicate their understanding of their own
learning history. When thousands of learning objects
were ‘collected’ researchers and students gingerly
stepped between these precarious assemblages.
The ‘data set’ merged, toppled, faltered. The students
interrupted the objects with signs, words and arrows.
The objects performed a learning history beyond the
students who had collected the objects, arranged
the objects and then inserted themselves through
word and sign back into the objects. We, the
researchers and the students, installed ourselves
in the ‘data’. The researchers imagined the intraactivity
between the students the objects, the room,
the other/s, the outside, the past.
Engaging with these arrangements was
not about uncovering the essence or truth of the
data in order to see the learning histories of these
students. That was never intended and would not
have been possible. We searched for what was
between the bodies and objects. For Deleuze life
does not spread out in some hierarchical order
from organic to inorganic but rather runs between
them. The assembled objects proved to be insistent
in their demands for making sense of learning. As
Liz Jones (2012) notes ‘things’ can pose questions
about ourselves, our needs and desires. The objects
assembled were ‘doing’ learning – ‘Jacob’ and his
objects – his class photo, his football beanie, his
chemistry medal and his signed graduation bear –
created an unstable and temporary union. ‘Jacob’,
although not in the room, was present there, not
represented by these objects, but entangled with
them. Learning was materialized in this dynamic
intra-active becoming (Barad, 2007). The meaning
of this learning matter was the performance of the
world as these objects, their students and the
researchers made the world known to each other.
The data exceeded the presented world.
Mary Dixon is an Associate Professor in the School
of Education, Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin
University. Her research interests include pedagogy,
identity curriculum, methodology and visual research
methods. She is Deputy Director of a Strategic
Research Centre at Deakin – Centre for Research
in Educational Futures and Innovation. She leads a
reading group at Deakin on New Materialisms. She
has worked as a researcher in Australia, Singapore,
Thailand and Nepal.
Andrea Eckersley
Monash University
Surface Activations
Painting is customarily understood as a relation of
mark making that renders materials, arrangements
of lines and areas of colour into compositions on
surfaces. While a painting can be conceived of
as more than a marked surface, it is primarily these
surface features that are said to comprise the material
aspects of a painting. This paper will present select
findings of my investigation into the intensive and
affective qualities of painting, utilising a conceptual
framework derived from the writings of Gilles Deleuze.
I will argue that painting involves an activation of
surfaces in an event felt as a difference in intensity.
In presenting this argument, I will briefly describe
my own painting practice where I work with a range
of materials and surface effects. My practice aims
to understand the material, affective and intensive
force of painting by investigating the relationship
between intensive and extensive space, colour and
sensation, the surface and affect. Each of these
dimensions contributes to the intensification of the
encounter with painting. Encounters between these
surfaces constitute an assemblage of affects, and
as such can be conceived of in terms of Deleuze’s
treatment of the event. For Deleuze, events describe
the totality of relations between actual things, materials
surfaces, bodies and affairs, and the independent
reality of these entities. This paper will conclude that
the event of painting can be understood in terms
of the activation of surfaces that creates a space
of intensity, sensation and affect.
Andrea Eckersley is currently finishing a PhD in Fine
Arts (Painting) at Monash University whilst chasing
around two little boys and teaching in Fashion Design
at RMIT. Primarily interested in the way the body
interacts with abstract shapes, Andrea’s work
investigates the material aspects of painting with
a particular focus on surfaces. She has recently
contributed a chapter for the book Deleuze and the
Schizoanalysis of Visual Culture. Andrea is the art
editor at the Deleuze Studies Journal and has
exhibited at Nellie Castan Gallery, Craft Victoria,
c3 and West Space in Melbourne.

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25
Heidi Fast
Aalto University School of Arts and Design
Experiential Laboratory of Co-attuning Voice
Sonorous attunement between several people and
the surrounding situation is, as it has started to appear
in the practice of my artistic research, a transformative
human force. This is a moment of intimate sharing,
a threshold moment of a becoming, transindividual
body. I would like to propose an experiential laboratorium
to explore with the affective and attuning
tendencies of non-verbal voice in practice. With
these tendencies I mean particular orientation in each
human’s voice gravitated in sensoriality, calling for
relationality. With the laboratorium I wish to tentatively
propose that these kinds of micro-musical actions
might carry, in particular situations radical potentiality
for creating new modes of sensibilities, even, to my
initial experience, in the midst of crises. The proposal
is part of my artistic doctoral research based on the
changes of sensibility and sensitivity in the conditions
of the mental, neural and embodied ecologies
of contemporary society. The inquiry examines the
relation of voice, as vibrant matter and relational
event to sensibility by developing a vocal participatory
technique. It is actualized in co-operation with the
Psychiatric hospital of Helsinki University and their
patients. In the laboratorium we will explore how
do we co-emerge with other humans and the
surrounding non-human world through embodied
sonority? How does the attuning tendency of voice
work: what could we do with it? Why do the affective
arousals potentially emerging “matter”? No “skills”
of singing are insisted. Due to the sensitive practice
maximum 20 people may attend. I suggest duration
of 90 minutes, but am willing to adapt when necessary.
Heidi Fast (b. 1975) is a vocal artist-researcher based
in Turku. She has studied performance art and theory
in Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts
Helsinki Finland (MA 2009) and is currently working
on her artistic doctoral thesis titled “Sensibility and
Singing” in Aalto University School of ARTS.
Coming from a background in singing, her artwork
pays attention to the affective capacities of voice and
develops an aesthetical-ethical technique, a copoietical
tool, to bring it forth. Her vocal participatory
artworks have been performed in international
festivals from 2005. She is part of Future Art Base
(Aalto University, USCS), an autonomous platform
researching and developing the basis for future art.
Tal Fitzpatrick
Victorian College of the Arts,
The University of Melbourne
Diffraction and Dissensus:
Methodologies for Dissensual Art Making
In this provocation practice-led-researcher, craftivist
and socially-engaged-art-maker asks two questions:
1) Can art operate as an apparatus sensitive enough
to make visible the diffraction patterns of dissensus?
And, if so 2) How might this approach provide us
with a better understanding of how art can bring
about political moments?
Diffraction methodologies provide us with a
non-representational approach for creating art that
makes tangible our natural-cultural entanglements,
and in turn enables us to better understanding
dissensus, the political moment and art’s efficacy
as a strategy for activism and change making.
Tal Fitzpatrick (b. Israel 1988) is a socially-engaged
practice-led researcher and art maker currently in
her second year of a PhD on ‘Craftivism and the
Political Moment’ at the Victorian College of Arts
with the Centre for Cultural Partnerships. Tal was
awarded a Bachelor of Arts with first class honours
from Griffith University (2009) where she majored in
Contemporary Arts and Studies in Arts and Creative
Industries. She has over seven years experience
working in the non-profit sector as a community
development worker and an arts worker, including
five years as the coordinator and facilitator
of Volunteering Qld’s ‘Natural Disaster Resilience
Leadership Project’.
Petra Gemeinboeck
University of New South Wales
Dancing with the Nonhuman
In this paper, I will look at my artistic practice through
the lens of New Materialism. Having worked across
media art fields, such as creative robotics, interactive
installation, locative media and ‘virtual reality’, my
driving forces have always been the indeterminate,
emergent, messy and unstable — a becoming that
neither I nor the audience can control. My practice
complicates notions of the artist as creator/author
and inhabits the uneasy but seductive space between
binaries, including materiality/immateriality, human/
nonhuman, animate/inanimate, and culture/nature.
Whilst teetering on the ‘cutting-edge’, it continuously
challenges the narrative of our technological agenda,
how technology empowers us to control and enhance
the world. How it renders us the superior species,
full stop. As a creator, I set in motion processes
where I struggle or at best collaborate with a variety
of materials, machine assemblages and the agencies
that emerge in the collision of the digital and physical.
My challenge is to gain a glimpse of understanding
of the the many, dynamic relations that shape the
work as it unfolds. Most of the time it is more
of a form of mingling, a being part of the ‘dynamic
material configuring’ (Barad 2007) and the ‘dance
of agency’ (Pickering 1995) that always is material
and corporeally affective. The paper will investigate
this onto-epistemological dance as it unfolds in the
making and performing of my artworks (a selection
thereof), including my current project, Machine
Movement Labs, that experiments with machines’
kinesthetic abilities by harnessing the corporeal
knowledge of dancers.
Petra Gemeinboeck is Deputy Director of the NIEA
Creative Robotics Lab and Senior Lecturer at UNSW
| Art & Design. In her experimental media art practice,
Petra explores the ambiguities and vulnerabilities
in our relationships with machines and is interested
in making tangible the desires and politics involved.
Petra’s works have been exhibited internationally,
including at the Ars Electronica Festival, AT,
International Triennial of New Media Art at NAMOC,
Beijing, CN; Centre des Arts Enghien at Paris;
Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT),
Liverpool, UK; Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane;
ICC Tokyo; MCA Chicago. She has published widely
on issues of interactivity and machine agency.
Dorota Golanska
University of Lodz
Bodily Collisions: Towards a New Materialist
Understanding of Art as Energy
In Difference and Repetition Gilles Deleuze writes:
“Something in the world forces us to think.
This something is not an object of recognition, but
a fundamental encounter” (2011, 176). The major
characteristic of this encounter is that it can only
be sensed. Drawing on Deleuze’s definition of art
as sensation, in my paper I will look at Menashe
Kadishman’s artistic installation titled Shalekhet (Fallen
Leaves), being a part of the Jewish Museum in Berlin.
My attention in this analysis is primarily focused
on the sonic energies being generated in the intense
and multidirectional encounter of the visitor’s body
and the work of art, which together form a dynamic
ecosystem, full of sensual interactions and
movements. I am interested in the vibrating material
workings of the installation and how it—in assemblagelike
fashion—animates corporeal and intellectual
flow of energies and forces. My investigations are
centered on the energetic specificities of the “bodily
collisions” and how these vibrating entanglements
generate certain kinds of enfleshed knowledges
or material impressions that reach us through the
senses. I am also interested in how these material/
affective/energetic “transactions” and “forces” can
stimulate a profound and transformative inquiry,
since—in Deleuzian terms—the I see, I hear, and
I think presuppose a really ontologically primary
I feel, which gives them their object, thought, and
content. Consequently, my analysis is a starting point
for offering a new materialist understanding of art as
energy, where art is imagined both as working through
energies and as energizing critical involvements.
Dorota Golańska (PhD in Humanities) is an Assistant
Professor at the Department of American and Media
Studies and affiliate researcher at the Women’s
Studies Centre, University of Łódź (Poland). Her
research activities are in the field of interdisciplinary
gender studies. She is interested in feminist theories
of art and visual culture, criticism of representation,
feminist new materialism, as well as in memory
studies. Her current research focuses on the issue
of affective memory, phenomenology of architecture,
synaesthesia, and aesthetics of trauma.
Rochelle Haley
University of New South Wales
Elastic Perspective: The Diagonal Line
and the Production of Deep Space
This paper considers a critical practice of experimental
drawing that crosses spatiality, collectivity and
temporality. It is a proposition to think perspective
‘materially’ rather than somewhere between
an abstract schema, metaphor for subjectivity
and an historical technical rule. It asks what does
a transversal perspective practice look like? The
paper offers in response a performative, relational,
immaterial line drawing involving two or more moving
participants who unpack the qualities of the diagonal

ALL ABSTRACTS & BIOGRAPHIES P
27
line in the production of deep space. Since Panofsky’s
spatial schema, implied in the concept of perspective
is a fixed, abstract technique for the approximate
suggestion of depth as seen by the eye of an observer.
However, Damisch links early experimentation with
the technique of perspective to Lacan’s theory of
consciousness in which a ‘subject’ finds its ‘bearings’
via point-of-view taking. Elkins proposes other
‘poetic’ alternatives for perspective in which he sees
a series of pictorial decisions in a line of argument
that recalls Merleau-Ponty’s ‘multiplicity’ of
perspectives produced by each subject’s condition
of object-hood from the position of another.
Through this research I introduce the possibility
of ‘perspective-ing’ – or, the elastic perspective
produced by an active configuring of spatial
ambiguity (or un-measured depth) that works against
the clarity and simplicity of space. What if perspective
is active, spatial and sensorial - a material thickness
through which objects ‘perspec-tive’ each other?
The practice explored in this paper demonstrates
how experimental drawing can bring participants
into connection through an ecology of transversal
lines established by sight in motion.
Rochelle Haley is an artist and researcher working
with experimental drawing, movement and spatial
performance practice. She is an associate lecturer,
UNSW Art & Design. Her current projects involve
live drawing and dance to explore space structured
around the sensation of the moving body. She has
an upcoming publication on transdisciplinary practice
in The International Journal of The Image. Her next
solo show ‘Through Form’ will be exhibited at
Galerie Pompom, Sydney, in 2015.
Dorita Hannah
University of Tasmania
At the Barricade: Borderline Events
and the Transversal Spatial Condition
In 2009 I visited Korea’s DMZ (Demilitarized Zone)
to find that inside the four kilometre wide no-man’s
land of this 250 kilometre long borderline lies an
ecosystem within which flora and fauna thrive.
A similar realization occurred 20 years earlier during
Lebanon’s civil war, in relation to Beirut’s demarcating
Green Line, in which things grew where people
feared to tread. Rather than dividing lines, precisely
cutting between one state and another, these
wild(erness) borderlines thicken to form volatile
and uncontainable organisms that resist their own
claims to fixity, stability and enduring separation.
Performance Design, an extended notion of
scenography, is posited in this paper as an interdisciplinary
practice that travels between discursive
fields in order to confront, critique and reimagine
our lived reality; especially within a globalized
condition of proliferating borders that reduce, control
and deny mobility for bodies and information.
And yet the borderline – more than a simple dividing
line between us/here and them/there – thickens
into a complex geographical, psychological and
metaphysical terrain that inhabits us just as we inhabit
it. As an anomalous socio-political and psychic zone,
it offers a transversal space for resistance, enacted
through fleeting interventions designed to destabilize
the constructed world’s will to be fixed and durable,
by concentrating on its evental complexities.
This emphasis on the temporal mutability of things
redresses Henri Lefebvre’s appraisal of implacable
objectality with Gilles Deleuze’s focus on the mobilized
objectile. Positing the barricade as an architectural
and social formation allows us to consider its shifting
political implications seen in public artworks that
are aligned with Rubió Ignaci Solà-Morales’ concept
of “weak architecture” as a productively scenographic
approach to the analysis and mediation of space.
Dorita Hannah is Research Professor of Interdisciplinary
Architecture, Art & Design at the University
of Tasmania (Australia) and Adjunct Professor of
Stage and Space at Aalto University (Finland).
Her creative work, teaching and research focus on
the intersection between performance and space.
She publishes on practices that negotiate the spatial,
visual and performing arts, with her designs
incorporating scenographic, interior, exhibition and
installation design, as well as a specialized consultancy
in theatre architecture and the creation of international
movement-architecture projects. Focusing on
‘event-space’ her work investigates how the built
environment housing an event is itself an event
and an integral driver of experience.
David Harris
Deakin University
Deleuze, New Materialism and an Australian
Literature for Crises of Ecologies?
If the novel carries ‘the power of life to unfold itself
differently’ (Colebrook, 1996) then, finding ourselves
subjected to the undoubted material pressures
of ecological crises, don’t we now, more than ever,
need the novel to do some ‘work’? Then again,
surely we cannot look to fiction to change the real
world? Can we expect it to bear such a burden?
This paper considers whether the ‘work’ of
literature could be to engender our resistance
to ecological crises. It focuses upon the intensive
qualities of the novel and the idea, inspired by New
Materialist thought, that literature can nurture
ecological ‘sense’: by breaking open the cracks in
how we represent the world; by conveying the
material agency of the non-and-more-than-human;
by expressing the traumatic effects of crises; by
prompting non-and-more-than human becomings;
and through the expressions of damaged
Minorities (Deleuze and Guattari).
I will respond to some questions that put these
ideas under critical pressure. Is a literature that
deconstructs Humanisms becoming passé? Is the
written page really an adequate substitute for getting
‘out there’ in ‘Nature’ amidst all that ‘vibrant matter’
(Bennett)? Aren’t we always, already, unavoidably
‘out there’? If we cannot already sense the effects
that flow from ecological crises then surely the work
of art cannot reach us? If we are looking for an
Australian Minor Literature for ecological crises, then
won’t it be indigenous and, if so, where does this
leave non-indigenous fiction? I will conclude by
considering what we should (not) expect of the writer
and the reader entering into these literary assemblages.
David Harris is a writer of fiction and an academic
based in South West Victoria. He is completing
a PhD at Deakin University. His research focuses
upon New Materialist and Deleuzian approaches to
the ‘work’ literature might do to nurture ecological
‘sense’ and to engender our resistance to and
renewal amidst ecological crises (climate change,
planetary degradation, mass extinction, Capitalism
and crises of agency). The current focus of this
research is upon contemporary Australian novels.
Rachael Haynes
Boxcopy Contemporary Art Space
Object Relations, Transformational
Encounters in the Studio Archive
‘Object relations’ is a lecture performance which takes
as its provocation Lygia Clark’s ‘relational objects’
and Eva Hesse’s material encounters in the studio,
drawing together an archive of images that document
material engagements in the studio by women artists.
At play in these images is the relational nature
between the feminine subject and the materiality of
the object, gendered implications of the body, and
interventions within these codes through selfrepresentation
in the context of the historically male
dominated domain of the studio.
Taking on the challenge set by Griselda Pollock
in her conception of the Virtual Feminist Museum
(VFM), this archive is arranged by a ‘feminist rather
than phallocentric logic’ and emphasizes a subjective
and affective engagement with these images. This
paper offers a feminist perspective on the archival
impulse and utilizes the strategy of ‘Re-vision’ to
open up new critical directions for feminisms own
histories and archives. The lecture performance
as a format draws together research, pedagogical
modes, embodied language and performativity and
as a strategy responds to feminist archives while at
the same time, performs a subjective feminist archive
through practice. As Griselda Pollock aptly asserts
in relation to the VFM: ‘The purpose is … a rereading
which is also a remembering – a word that in English
involves not only recalling from oblivion, but also
reassembling as an act – for a feminist future’
(Pollock 2007, 14).
Rachael Haynes is a Lecturer in Creative Practice
(Visual Arts) at Deakin University. Previously, she
was a tutor and lecturer at Queensland University
of Technology in Art History/Theory and Studio Art
Practice for ten years. Haynes completed her PhD,
an exploration of the ethics of exhibition practice,
examining encounters between artworks and
audiences in terms of difference, with the support
of an Australian Postgraduate Award in 2009.
Her current research investigates feminism and
relational practices, through solo creative works
and as part of the collective, Level. Rachael is the
Gallery Director of Boxcopy Contemporary Art Space.
Chris Henschke
Monash University / Australian Synchrotron
Expressive Collisions:
Art and Particle Physics
Through my residencies at the Australian Synchrotron
(2007, 2010) and my current ‘art@CMS’ residency
at CERN, I have been increasingly interested in the
nature of matter and energy when it is pushed to its

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experimental extremes. In collaboration with particle
physicists, and using the tools of experimental
physics, I seek to manifest the expressive qualities
of both macroscopic and subatomic matter at high
energies, in order to creatively explore the limits of,
and connections between, the material and energetic,
the corporeal and the evanescent.
I have developed a heuristic-based transdisciplinary
art / physics practice, which allows for
a relational understanding between the two cultures.
However such practice also challenges the scientists’
ownership of the phenomena manifested through
high energy physics research, as well as their
reductionist outcomes and dogma of equivalence -
for example in opposition to such scientific concepts
that all electrons are indistinguishable, I am
developing experiments that increase particles’
degrees of freedom which, in the words of Manuel
DeLanda, allows ‘even humble atoms [to] interact
with light in a way that literally expresses their identity’
and makes each particle expression a unique and
dynamic becoming.
I have also developed a practical interest in
Karen Barad’s “agential realist” stance on Niels Bohr’s
theory of “complementarity” in quantum mechanics,
and its application in both the subatomic and human
domains. Inspired by Barad, I have conducted
quantum-optical “metaphysical experiments”, in
collaboration with physicists, the outcomes of which
have poignant material and philosophical implications.
In conclusion, I argue that the apparatuses and
the phenomena produced in experimental physics,
whether for art or science, can be understood
as “epistemic things”, a term coined by scientist
Hans Rheinberger to denote knowledge-embedded
objects which have an unfolding ontology and are
being continually materially defined, such as the
devices used in particle accelerators.
Chris Henschke is an artist whose areas of practice
and research are in sound and visual relationships,
and collaborative art / science experiments. He has
exhibited around Australia and internationally,
including the Australian Centre for Contemporary
Art (2001), and the National Gallery of Australia (2004),
and has undertaken residencies at the Australian
Synchrotron (2007, 2010), and the ‘Art@CMS’
residency at CERN, the European Organisation
for Nuclear Research (2014-15), Switzerland.
He developed and lectured courses in time-based
and interactive media at RMIT University, and the
Art vs Science seminar series at the Victorian College
of the Arts Centre For Ideas, and is currently undertaking
a Doctorate of Philosophy at Monash University.
Jan Hogan
Tasmanian College of the Arts,
University of Tasmania
Transversing Truganini Track:
Materiality and Sensation
in Drawing the Land.
The Australian landscape tradition privileges a viewer
separated from the land. This perspectival view
of representation describes but also conditions
perception encouraging a hegemonic gaze to enjoy
the spoils of Empire. The art traditions of Aboriginal
Australians have demonstrated other ways
of depicting the Land that emphasise the need
for negotiations between differences.
As a settler Australian I explore visual art processes
to develop a new language to depict the land we share,
that responds to the propositions seen in Aboriginal
art but also acknowledges the colonial impact on the
land. Through process-led research I examine the site
of Truganini Track, named in memory of a Nuenonne
woman, contentiously called the last Aboriginal
Tasmanian. I place paper in the land to act as a
membrane between nature and culture, acquiring
knowledge through the materiality of the site.
In working with art as a membrane of memory
my aim is to allow a continual performativity where
memory brings forward the past to imagine a better
future. My processes of art making encourage
knowledge to be acquired through sensation, where
concept and materiality are intertwined. I argue
that through working directly on site, art processes
reveal traces in the land of past events. The
geological history and the social histories interweave
in a dialogue between artist and place. My research
explores the importance of touch in the gaining and
depiction of knowledge about the land. I propose
that depictions of the land developed from
‘the haptic’ in contrast to ‘the gaze’ communicate
knowledge of the environment in terms of sensation.
Jan Hogan is a practicing artist and academic currently
living and working in Tasmania. Her art practice is
interwoven with daily life exploring concepts of
belonging and dispossession. She works in situ in
the environment, on sites allocated as a commons.
Her work is a dialogue with the land and its people,
searching for a way that difference can occupy the
same space. After living in many remote areas of
Australia she became interested in conceptions of
time, materiality and place and whether it is possible
to have a cross-cultural dialogue through the Visual
Arts. This is the core of her research, art practice
and teaching.
Ilona Hongisto
University of Turku, Finland
The University of Melbourne, Australia
Framing as Immanent Evaluation:
Performative Entanglements in post-Soviet
Eastern European Documentary
This paper discusses framing as a practice of
immanent evaluation, a technique of filmmaking with
which documentarians evaluate the life conditions
of their subjects in the process of filmmaking.
Here, evaluation is not an ‘ex post facto’ act
of categorization or judgment, but an immanent
entanglement with the transversal factors that
constitute the situation being documented. Framing,
then, both captures the reality that unfolds in front
of the documentary camera, and expresses it in
potentially empowering ways.
The argument follows Félix Guattari’s (1995)
postulation of the ethico-aesthetic paradigm
according to which any therapeutic diagnosis of a
crisis situation must take place immanently to the
environment in question. With Guattari, the paper
conceptualizes documentary framing as an
immanent act of evaluation, as a technique of
entanglement that foregrounds the performative
nature of the filmmaking process.
The argument is developed with examples from
Gerd Kroske’s Kehraus trilogy (Germany 1990,
1997, 2006) – a longitudinal documentary about
street sweepers in post-Soviet Leipzig. The paper
contributes to and works with new materialist
debates on ‘performative entanglements’ (Barad
2007), ‘the real as an exhibiting agency’ (Coole and
Frost 2010) and ‘relational techniques’ (Manning
2009) to conceptualize documentary filmmaking as
immanent evaluation. It thus offers a radically new
approach to the documentary, as well as proposes
framing as a concept that could be adapted to wider
new materialist takes on the immanence of the
media in the real.
Ilona Hongisto is an Academy of Finland Postdoctoral
Research Fellow at the University of Turku (Finland)
and an Honorary Fellow at the Victorian College of the
Arts, University of Melbourne (Australia). Her research
cuts across documentary cinema, philosophies of
fabulation and geopolitics, most recently in a project
on post-Soviet Eastern European documentary cinema.
Hongisto’s monograph Soul of the Documentary:
Framing, Expression, Ethics is forthcoming from
Amsterdam University Press in November 2015.
Te Kawehau Hoskins & Alison Jones
Te Puna Wanaga, The Faculty of Education
Thingly Power: a Ta Moko
Signature on Paper
This is a joint paper by Te Kawehau Hoskins
(Ngāpuhi Māori) and Alison Jones (Pākehā settler).
We consider what might count as method when we
approach a fragment of archival text, in this case the
‘signature’ or sign of Hongi Hika drawn on a New
Zealand land deed, in 1819. The sign is a rendition
of Hongi Hika’s facial tattoo, his distinguishing
tā moko, drawn by him with a quill pen and ink on
parchment. From a Maori perspective, the tā moko
does not stand in for Hongi Hika, but is him. He is
embodied, materialised, on the page. His authoritative
presence inhabits the paper. Just as the forest or
stone have their own force, their own ‘thingly power’,
so does the hand-ink-paper intra-action have its
own hau, or breath. Some ontologies never had the
Cartesian moment; indigenous people engage quite
ordinarily in the non-binary logic sought by new
materialisms. We do not suggest that western
new materialism scholars take a quick lesson in
indigenous thought in order to access the inchoate
post-humanist ‘space’ of the erased nature-culture
binary. All we try and do is to think about what new
materialisms, empiricisms and indigenous ontologies
allow the sign/ature to say.
Te Kawehau Hoskins (Ngāpuhi) is an indigenous
Maori senior lecturer at Te Puna Wānanga School
of Maori Education, Faculty of Education, University
of Auckland. Her scholarly interest is in Levinas,
Maori governance, Maori-Pakeha relationships
and environment. She works and sometimes writes
with Professor Alison Jones, a Pakeha scholar
also located in Te Puna Wānanga School of Maori
Education, University of Auckland. With Professor
Kuni Jenkins (Ngāti Porou), Alison Jones writes
about the earliest Maori-Pakeha educational
relationships.

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Lyndal Jones
RMIT University
With an Eye to Four Walls and Two Ears
to the Ground: Making Art by Moving
Through a House
How might a house become an artwork?
Early in the development of Watford House, my
house-as-artwork project for the past ten years, it
became clear that I needed to be able to answer this
question.From the beginning it was at least clear
to me that the purpose of this faded old house was
not to be a venue for art events, nor an artist’s
residency, nor a decorated artist’s home. Instead,
somehow the house itself with its surrounding garden
was to be the artwork.
Furthermore, unlike DEAD HOUSE UR, German
artist Gregor Schneider’s reconstruction of his own
house-as-artwork that renders it largely unlivable,
the initial proposition was for this house to become
art by becoming increasingly liveable.
So my response to those who have asked why
a house?, how an artwork?, there is the short answer
and there is the long answer.
The short answer addresses the potency of a
particular embodied history whereby this house
continues as a first generation immigrant that arrived
as numbered planks by boat from Europe. Here, my
ongoing task is to support, enhance and highlight
its resilience in the face of the current widespread
antagonism to those seeking refuge after arriving
by boat.
The long answer is no answer at all but a series
of propositions addressing the materiality of this
house in relation to those who/that inhabit it, live in
its surroundings or visit it. And how might art itself
be changed by so doing?
Sarah Jones
University of New South Wales Art and Design
Tending Deathwards
Understanding text as a kind of emotional cartography
—exploring the (text)body in (time)space—I am
interested in the ways in which, text-based
artworks interact materially and conceptually at the
intersection of publishing and the problematising
of contemporary subjectivities. Publishing is
understood as the unfolding of a making public, an
act of collaborative desiring; the demand for a
witness who is simultaneously present and absent.
Publishing is fraught libidinal exchange, affective,
processual ontology, and at the same time, might
also activate momentary arrest. Publishing remains
an event that takes place, in place, directly addressing
issues of temporality within becoming. The act of
publishing makes possible text that is simultaneously
in situ and as site in which one publishes—witnesses,
reads—writes, speaks—listens.
Sarah Jones, (b. Australia,1982) is an artist, writer
and curator. Through first person narrative, both
written and performed, Sarah is interested in the
desire for the dissolution of the perceived self in
the spaces between the landscape and the body.
Sarah was awarded her Masters of Fine Art by the
Dutch Art Institute in the Netherlands, June 2014,
after completing her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the
University of Tasmania in 2007. She will continue her
research as a PhD candidate with the University of
New South Wales School of Art and Design this year.
Lotta Kähkönen
University of Turku, Finland
Gender Failure,
Trans-poetics and Change
In this paper, I examine a book entitled Gender Failure
(2014) by two Canadian trans artists, Rae Spoon
and Ivan E. Coyote. The book is based on their
collaborative live multimedia show that combined
storytelling, music, animations and photographs.
Likewise, the book has a hybrid form consisting of
first-person essays, song lyrics, stills from animations
created for the show and photographs of the authors
performing in the show. The book delves into the
artists’ individual journeys with gender and art,
focusing in particular on their failures to find their
place in the gender binary. Their journeys involve
various, multidimensional changes.
The changes that are realized by Spoon and
Coyote within and across processes of making art
open up to more comfortable ways of being in the
world. My emphasis in this paper is on change and
movement by focusing on the interaction between
doing art and experiencing self as embodied
materiality that is interdependent with embodied
others and non-human environment. I attend closely
to the practices of making art and to what the two
artists say about relationality of art and corporeality.
The collaborative practice of making art is accounted
in this case as trans-poetics (Ladin 2013;
Edwards 2014), a mode of mediating unstable and
contradictory ways of experiencing corporeality
and its multiple relations as a spatial and aesthetic
phenomenon. Trans-poetics works also as a method
of interpretation that attends to multifaceted
movements across linguistic, embodied, affective,
and political domains.
Lotta Kähkönen is an Academy of Finland
Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Turku (Finland)
in the department of Gender Studies. She earned
her PhD in Comparative Literature. Her current
interdisciplinary research project focuses on the
ethics and politics of gender variance, and examines
various ways of telling transgender life stories that
are understood as material-semiotic practices that
intersect with wider processes and changes. She
has co-edited an essay collection on remembrance
in contemporary German literature (2010). Her recent
articles focus on questions of ethics, temporality and
potentiality of narratives based on transgender lives.
Jondi Keane
Deakin University
The Matter of Thought:
New Materialism in 2 Places @ 1nce
Just in front of our noses—all that is evident and
comes to pass as the event-tide. Just behind our
noses—all that comes to pass as inflection of the
eventual. We are in 2 places @ 1nce—straddling the
bridge of the nose where the afferent and efferent
armies of attention camp. It is at this juncture the
rub of thought endures a sanding and sifting by a
unique, if turbulent, event-space. The infinite loop
directs and coordinates the movements of affecting
and being affected.
This paper will focus on the juncture (the bridge
of the nose) that holds positions so tightly in locked
step: form and process; object and relation. Each
position offers an intolerable, momentary conclusion
necessary to track the movement of the sensible,
the rational and the supersensible in an attempt to
understand the extent of the site of a person. Each
position, uniquely abstract, becomes a material
disposition that inflects what might happen next.
At this juncture, New Materialisms offer a reconfigurable
engagement with matter, data and
agency, which I will unpack through discussion of
Foucault’s ‘double invisibility’, Lyotard’s ‘matter of
thought’, Arakawa and Gins’ critical resemblances
and my own installation projects.
At the bridge of the nose, at the synch of the
feedback loop, the body-environment opens onto
the collective and into the variegated individuation,
allowing us to conflate, confabulate and squeeze
into 2 places @ 1nce.
Jondi Keane is an arts practitioner, critical thinker,
Senior lecturer and Associate Head of School
(Technology and Environments) at Deakin University.
Over the last three decades he has exhibited,
performed and published in the USA, UK, Europe and
Australia. His research interests include contemporary
art practices, particularly performance-installation
and collaboration as well as contemporary art and
cultural theory, theories of cognition and the
philosophy of perception, experimental architecture,
and the way in which the creative practices can
contribute to interdisciplinary inquiries and
collective concerns.
Lynne Kent
La Trobe University
Performing Objects: Working in the Space
Between Materiality and the Imagination
A seemingly quite ordinary object is transformed in
the hands of a puppeteer. An old and abandoned
handbag for example, can begin to breathe, to express
a desire to move and perhaps even perform on stage.
Puppeteers are trained to recognize the potential
agency of the object/thing. Size, shape, texture,
weight and colour are all tools in the palette
of materiality the puppet maker considers in creating
a performing object/thing. The puppet theatre
and its puppeteers have a part to play in accessing
and highlighting the vitality of things even at risk of
ridicule from the empiricism that can see such ideas
as primitive and therefore, naïve.
In this paper I will look at the blurred lines between
materiality and the imagination and between human
and non-human. Through my own creative practice
as puppeteer and the work of contemporary Australian
puppeteers, I will unfold the ways in that an ‘interconnectedness
of all things’ can be experienced.
Using political theorist Jane Bennett’s ‘positive
ontology of vibrant matter’ and Professor of
anthropology, Tim Ingold’s sophisticated philosophy
that sees things as live, not because they are
possessed of spirit but because they are a part of

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the complex web of life’s activity, this paper offers
a counter view to the perception of objects as
inanimate and therefore passive.
Lynne is a PhD candidate and puppeteer who has
toured, trained and worked with various companies
including The Victorian Opera, Terrapin Puppet
Theatre, Erth Physical Theatre, Circus Monoxide,
The Australian Centre for the Moving Image and
Queensland Theatre Company. In collaboration with
ArtPlay, Lynne has produced works at Federation
Square for the 2008 Melbourne Puppet Festival
and for the 2009 Castlemaine State Festival and the
2011 Cairns Festival. Lynne has received funding
for both creative development and professional
development to study with the renowned Italian
company, Teatro Gioco Vita at the International
Institute of Puppet Theatre, Charleville-Mezieres,
France. Lynne has conducted workshops with
children, young people in detention, teachers and
artists around Australia and is currently teaching artist
with the Victorian Arts Centre. Lynne has published
articles in Australian Puppeteer and I Pur Si Muove.
Linda Knight
Queensland University of Technology
Playgrounds as Sites of Radical Encounters:
A Mapping of Material, Affective, Spacial,
and Pedagogical Collisions
In a contemporary and risk-averse society, playground
spaces can be contaminated by governing forces
driven by litigation and the creeping hysteria around
children’s safety plus a distortion of a child’s physical
fragility. The most common playgrounds seen today,
the play spaces within institutions such as daycare,
schools and play centres, and the playgrounds
situated in public parks and municipal grounds are
heavily managed, their design and scale shrunk and
plasticised so that even the body movements and
physical reactions to the architecture of the space
seem managed and reduced, with children forced
to navigate their play in heavily choreographed ways.
Not all playspaces are the same however.
Adventure playgrounds can be sites that operate
from different aesthetics, architectures and
pedagogic agendas. Other play sites such as popup
playgrounds, artist-built playscapes and the
child-designed environments built at Gever Tulley’s
Tinkering School encourage children to make
decisions about structure, form and function as
well as encouraging them to consider how bodies
and materials occupy the play space.
This paper considers playgrounds as pedagogic
sites. Pedagogy is regarded here as radical, not
simply because the playground (and the pedagogical
activity) is the child’s but because children can
behave pedagogically from ‘an experience of learning
that has little to do with learning as compliance’
(Ellsworth 2005, p. 16). Using a new materialist
reading of radical pedagogy by creating drawn and
digital mappings: schizocartographs (Richardson,
2014) of the architecture of different playgrounds
and the collisions which occur between bodies,
spaces, airflows, pressures, sounds, forms, surfaces.
Linda Knight is a Senior Lecturer, Faculty of
Education, Queensland University of Technology,
Australia. A researcher and artist, Linda is interested
in radical research, art, and philosophies and theories
of childhood. Specifically she has explored: Deleuzian
and Guattarian theories in relation to early childhood
and education; Drawing as a critical act; Pedagogic
sites and acts; and Disruptive and unconventional
methodologies. Linda has a sustained reputation
as an international artist, exhibiting in Australia,
New Zealand, USA and UK over a period of 20 years
and her work is held in private collections in USA
and UK, and in research collections in Australia.
Csenge Kolozsvari
Senselab
The Texture of Rolling Forward
Untitled (Speculative Proposition) (2014) is a video
piece inspired by, and unfolding as a parallel
proposition to the live performance and sound
installation NONLINEAR, NON ARTICULATED (2012),
in which the resonance in a tight rope, created by
a balancing movement is recorded through contact
microphones, processed, accumulated, and live
projected back into the space. In Untitled (Speculative
Proposition), the tactile connection between the
digitally altered moving image of the balancing
performance and the analogue visual layer of vibrating
water generate a distorted moving image. This audible
and visible vibrational field performs a singular
event-time by decomposing the contours and creating
perceivable openings of body, space and line. The
Texture of Rolling Forward is a performance-paper
– a multi-modal choreography of video projection
and live, spoken-word performance that engages with
the act of generating and maintaining these vibrational
intensities across the multiplicity of performative
spaces. It unfolds rhythmical movements of language,
corporeal motion and the living resonance of potential.
With the ecology of its technological, physical
and imaginary components – the moving image
and sound, the imminent tactile vibrations of bodies,
voices and matter – this performance-paper explores
the complexification of superimposing durations
and the potential for human and non-human bodies
to be in transition, to mutate and invent themselves,
leaking into live experience, rhythmically.
Bogna Konior
Hong Kong Baptist University
Film-making with Objects: Relational Cinema
“Animists are people who recognize that the world
is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and
that life is always lived in relationship with others.”
(Graham Harvey, Animism) In the post-revolutionary
year of 1969, film scholar Noël Burch argued that
cinema was a system that fulfilled human desire for
totalizing representation. From André Bazin’s
“myth of total cinema” to film critics decoding the
“reality behind the picture”, cinema has been
confined to representation.
Building on the work of Jean Epstein, I argue that,
to the contrary, the act of film-making is a relational
practice that through its engagement with material
objects disrupts the anthropocentric hierarchy.
In claiming that cinema is animistic, Epstein argues
that it offers us not only the ability to penetrate into
the very life of matter, but that it makes us attuned
to the “soul of things.” Far from being an idealist,
Epstein refers here to animism as it is now understood
in anthropology: a relational ontology (Bird-David
1999) that recognizes both human and non-human
personhood, a material transversality.
Through Epstein’s theory, cinema can be
detached from representation, and animism can be
reclaimed from the realm of ideas into the field of
artistic practice. Drawing on the revival of animism
in contemporary anthropology (Descola, de Castro,
Kohn), and philosophy (Stengers), I examine how
the material practice of film-making with objects
can aid in combating anthropocentrism in an
increasingly relational world.
Bogna M. Konior is a PhD student at Hong Kong
Baptist University, where she works on the resonances
between “new animism” in anthropology and
philosophy, and contemporary Southeast Asian
cinema. She is part of the New Materialist Society,
Hong Kong and heads the Institute for Critical
Animal Studies, Asia.
Katve-Kaisa Kontturi
Victorian College of the Arts,
The University of Melbourne
Crafting Relations, Practicing Activisms
This paper pursues an understanding of crafting
as a genuinely affective and relational activity that
is first and foremost based on the subtle materialities
of making. It argues that communal craft-making
can bring people closer together in benefitting ways,
and can even open more sustainable futures for
communities struggling with almost unbridgeable
inequalities. Drawing from case studies that include
1) running art classes at a detention centre
2) participation in a Tjanpi desert weavers’ workshop
run by Australian indigenous women, and
3) a multi-ethnic community project resulting in
a giant knitted welcome mat in regional Australia,
this paper offers an affirmative take on the political
potentials of craft-making. With the case studies,
the paper fashions relational activism that instead
of loud and ardent messages and charismatic
leaders embraces subtle material-relational
transformations.
Working closely together in a craft circle with a
shared goal, and with tactile and tangible crafting
materials is an intimate process that enables bodies
to sense their relatedness and openness to each
other in ways not common in everyday engagements.
In situations of deep racial inequalities for example,
a common language is not necessarily enough to
‘talk things over’. While this paper does not claim
that we can understand each other better through
craft-making, it suggests that material-relational
encounters emerging in the processes of communal
craft-making may be able to enhance sensations
and techniques of communality.
Katve-Kaisa Kontturi is a McKenzie postdoctoral
fellow in the Victorian College of the Arts at the
University of Melbourne. She is a founding member
of the ISCH-COST action ‘New Materialism:
Networking European Scholarship on “How Matter
Comes to Matter”’(2014–2018), and co-chairs
it working group ‘Embracing Creative Arts’. Her

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research interests spread across material-relational
philosophies of the body and art, new materialist
research practices, contemporary art-making and
curating, craftivism, fashion and fabrics. Her
publications have appeared or are forthcoming, for
example, in Carnal Knowledge: Towards A ‘New
Materialism’ through the Arts (2013) and in the new
materialist special issues of AM Journal of Art+Media
Studies (2014) and Cultural Studies Review (2015).
Susie Lachal
RMIT School of Art
Anthropocene Interventions
This paper will explore how it is possible for humans
to connect with nature, relating to each other via
‘knots’ of interaction in a ‘meshwork’ of entanglements.
This transversal approach is being examined
through a collaborative arts project sited within a
functioning urban office space. The project seeks
to investigate whether providing opportunities to
explore Anthropocene relations through experiences
of artworks and subsequent discussions offers a new
method of viewing connections between elements
in the environment and their evolving ecologies.
In this project I propose to unravel concepts and
ideologies of anthropocentrism. I perceive a flattened
and relational model of entanglement with ‘things’
rather than a conventional hierarchy centralising the
human. The decision to embed the arts practice in
the culture of the workplace, inspirits a transposition
towards a new materialist take on “nature”. I am
activating inquiry within a group of participants by
embedding my practice into their workspace for an
extended period of time. The space for exploring
flattened ontologies is opened up through a process
of relational bustle which includes: dialogical
interactions by means of semi-structured interviews,
participatory activities and the gifting of artworks
to each office worker, whether or not they participate.
Specifically, this project investigates the role of art
in facilitating the viewer/participants’ reflection on
the complexity of the meshwork of our entanglements
across both space and time with nature.
Susie Lachal completed a Masters of Education at
the University of Melbourne entitled, ‘Educational
Approaches to a Sustainable Society’ in 1993. In
2014 she enrolled as a PhD Candidate in the School
of Art at RMIT with the project ‘Responding to the
Anthropocene: An enquiry into sculptural responses
for changing anthropocentric values’. With her
cross-disciplinary training she investigates methods
of art production to offer participants opportunities
to question their beliefs. Her research investigates
both collaborative art practices and the new
thinking in speculative realism.
Andrew Lavery
Sydney College of the Arts,
The University of Sydney
Mining matter: Materialist Methodologies
in the Land Art of Robert Smithson
and Lara Almarcegui
It is widely accepted that land artist Robert Smithson’s
(1938-73) monumental earthwork Spiral Jetty (1970)
expanded the spatial realm of art. In developing
Spiral Jetty, Smithson saw himself as a composer
of geological formations and natural materials, the
waste of the mining industry and the forces of
nature in the landscape.
Spiral Jetty is a composition of agential matter
that continues to tackle serious questions about the
anthropocene. Smithson’s work could be described
as prophetic to new materialist theories concerned
with the agency of matter and vital materiality
(Bennett). Indeed, New Materialism in the twentieth
first century has emerged in a similar context
to that of Smithson’s work in the 1960s and 1970s.
We are now experiencing the miasma of climate
change and its far-reaching ecological impacts.
Similar to the environmental (new conservationist)
and anti-capitalist movements of the Smithson era,
New Materialism is underpinned by similar ethical,
political and ecological dimensions. My talk draws
together factors influencing Smithson’s materialist
methodologies in the political and environmental
context of the 1960s and 1970s. To address the
contextual factors nuancing materialist methodologies
in land art since Smithson, I move forward to the
political and environmental context of contemporary
land artist Lara Almarcegui. Almarcegui’s works
focus on industrial and urban wastelands where the
urban and natural order intersect. My analysis seeks
to identify new materialist methodologies in land
art since Smithson and the nuances in the political
and environmental contexts that have shaped
these differences.
Andrew Lavery has maintained a long-standing
interest in exploring social issues through his art
practice, in particular notions of commodity and the
relationship of banality and suburban desire. More
recently, his works are a form of archaeological
barometer, exploring the impact of urban development
and ‘ghetto-ization’ in cities and metropolises and
the jarring social differences born from cultural
indifference and unmanageable population growth.
Andrew is a Senior Lecturer at Sydney College of
the Arts, The University of Sydney.
Jo Law
University of Wollongong
Mapping Disappearance through Transversal
Material Practices in the Contemporary
Hong Kong Spatial Politics
In Hong Kong: Culture of Disappearance (1997),
Ackbar Abbas characterises the cultural condition
in the former British colony as one of non-recognition.
Disappearance, he writes, is elusive and slippery,
in which ‘the more you try to make the world hold
still in a reflective gaze, the more it moves under you’.
In 2015, this condition has only intensified, with
disappearance taking on the violent forms of erasure,
demolition, and suppression. These contestations
of pre-colonial, colonial, and neo-colonial narratives
manifest most clearly in the city’s spatial politics.
This paper examines traversal strategies that map
the disappearance of the city through direct
engagement with the city’s physical matter. These
include typological studies, site drawings, and data
collection exemplified by critical architectural inquiries
including those of Transverse Studio and Docomomo.
These strategies locate the complex ecological
layering that constitutes the social, economic,
political, and cultural dimensions of Hong Kong now.
These mapped layerings of the sedimented places
of Hong Kong are further located, as in the meta
fictions of Dung Kai-Cheung and experimental media
works of Ip Yuk-yui and Jamsen Law, as atlases or
‘cosmological meditations on the fabric of the world’.
Jo Law is an artist and researcher. Her artworks have
been exhibited across Australia and internationally
including in Hong Kong, the United States, Mexico,
Norway, Philippines, and Taiwan. Jo’s publications
include a book chapter in Walter Benjamin and the
Architecture of Modernity and a co-authored article
in Ozone: The Journal of Object-orientated Studies.
She received a PhD from Murdoch University for
her thesis titled, Constellations: Walter Benjamin’s
Allegories and Montage, and the Contingent
Assemblies of Fragments in Art Practice. She currently
teaches media arts at the University of Wollongong.
Alice Lewis
RMIT University
Wearable Landscapes: Affectual Artifacts
Collection Spring/Summer 2015
Drawing upon my current practice-based doctorate,
this experiential laboratorium investigates the
effect of material garments on spatial ecologies.
The project itself is to be realized as a collection of
garments able to be worn by conference attendees,
with each garment provoking particular spatial
scenarios when corroborated by a body.
Through a process of making as well as careful
observation and evaluation, the interactive project
is intended to establish an understanding of the
relative position of the garment within the world as
an affectual tool in spatial design. The design and
physical construction of the garment collection occurs
prior to the conference. The collection consists of
six to ten complete outfits, each designed to provoke
a certain spatial scenario (or affect) when worn on a
body. Careful consideration is to be paid to materiality
and form, with in-depth background research currently
being conducted into existing affectual fabric research.
The interactive component of the project occurs
during the conference, when these garments are to
be displayed with attendees being invited through
formal invitation to wear them for a period of time.
This process of wearing and the consequential
effects caused by the garments is to be carefully
documented through visual media.
After the completion of the conference and
interactive stage, the work and method is to be
critically evaluated and the results compiled into
an article discussing position of relative position
of garments as tools for constructing spatial
ecologies.
Alice Lewis is a PhD candidate at RMIT University,
Melbourne, Australia. Her practice spans the
disciplines of Landscape Architecture and Fashion
Design investigating the relationality of each to the
other with the body as a central focus. Conducting
performative works across Australia and Europe
using garments as the primary method of research
her work contributes to an emerging field of
performative practice.

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Rachel Matthews
Monash University
How Does Matter Come to Matter
in a 21st Century Fashion System?
For the fashion system to continue to evolve, certain
ideas and objects need to matter (albeit briefly),
whilst others are ignored or rejected. The crucial
process of selection and endorsement of particular
objects has been transformed through digital
and technological developments. This paper reconceptualises
the previously hierarchical and strictly
controlled notion of the fashion system as a more
flexible, co-operative organisation or eco-system.
This view allows insight into the co-creativity and
broader interpretations of fashion (and its meaning)
that are mobilised through new webs of influence and
communication practices. These new collaborative
processes of meaning making and knowledge
production are most clearly visible in the noisy and
turbulent contemporary fashion media environment.
Co-creation and a more plural fashion aesthetic
challenge the power of professional cultural intermediaries
and enable influence to emerge from other
disciplines, locations and time. This paper explores
how matter does come to matter in a 21st century
fashion system, examining the changed relationships
and disrupted fluid structures operating in fashion.
Rachel Matthews is an academic and researcher,
whose work explores fashion communication through
object, image and text. She has a BA from Central
St Martins College of Art (London), and is currently
undertaking a PhD at Monash University (Melbourne)
exploring contemporary fashion taste-making.
Her career has combined senior posts in fashion
education, the fashion industry and international
consultancy projects. Her experience in academia
includes program management, course development
and lecturing in fashion design, fashion communication
and social theories of fashion in the UK and Australia.
Margaret Mayhew
Whitehouse Institute of Design, Melbourne
Crafting Asylum: Text, Textiles
and the Materiality of Hope.
This paper is a reflection on how the practice of
feminist ‘craftivism’ constitutes itself beyond extra
mural sites of community based work into the
walled spaces of state confinement. I will explore the
materiality of the porous textile text work, to explore
how ‘porous practices’ of ethical relationship across
intra and extra mural settings may encourage a shift
away from advocacy of or charity towards members
of marginalised and vulnerable communities, towards
the development of relationships of reciprocity,
creativity and sustainable social engagement.
Based on the informal volunteer work with asylum
seekers in Melbourne, this paper explores the
relationships between all participants and the work
we create. The informal quality of the classes intersects
with participants’ own practices of survival and craft
therapy, their economic aspirations, and their sense
of agency as marginalised, institutionalised
and isolated actants.
I explore the entanglements of these relations
with my own craftivist practice of creating large
crochet pieces, embedding text in the languages
of detained asylum seekers into banner-blankets,
that are intensely tactile and colourful. The bannerblankets
embody a series of tensions between the
force of political slogans, and the softness of yarn,
the shifting lucidity of the word FREEDOM in English,
Tamil, Farsi and Arabic and the intimate virtuosity of
crochet stitches. The size and spread of the blanket
banners, and their ambiguity as craft objects, mean
that they pass through the institutional barriers
of detention centres to enter into the spaces within,
traversing the porous spaces of detention centres
and the porous topographies of the nation state.
Margaret Mayhew is a coordinator for Master of
Design program at the Whitehouse Institute of Design
in Melbourne and practicing artist, who has run
volunteer art classes with asylum seekers in detention
since 2013. She has a PhD in Gender and Cultural
Studies, as well as undergraduate degrees in
Art History, Fine Arts and Science. Margaret has
exhibited soft sculpture and textile works in Sydney,
Paris and Melbourne since 2000. She is the author
of Looking At Life Drawing (forthcoming with IB Tauris)
as well as book chapters on precarious academic
practice and spectatorship, subjectivity and ethics.
Lucinda McKnight
Deakin University
The Invisible Hand: Transversal Thinking
with New Materialism in Curriculum Design
This proposal invites participation in a curriculum
design intensive, in which educators bring along an
idea for a unit, seminar, lecture, lesson as the basis
for a practical and creative workshop merging
conceptual art, writing, poetry and curriculum planning,
while engaging playfully with New Materialism. In this
work we seek to move beyond merely interrogating
designs for future subjects, and to embolden our
thinking about curriculum, asking questions to explore
how the pedagogical imagination works with both the
material and immaterial, the corporeal and incorporeal,
within ecologies continually transforming in the
process of making. Through this, we explore ways
to challenge “delivery”, or “conduit” metaphors of
education, to see design as “situated” in new ways
involving both human and nonhuman elements,
resisting stasis, resisting closure.
This workshop positions curriculum design in the
realm of the artist/activist, rather than that of the
bureaucrat/technician and opens up a space for
reflection on the processes of making curriculum.
The workshop also therefore seeks to question how
knowledge around curriculum is produced, and to
document the ways in which our work as educators
is part of a continuous becoming, as we ourselves,
and our designs, co-emerge. We remember that
curriculum design is fundamentally a creative project,
always taking form and transforming in relation to
what surrounds us, rather residing in documents,
which tend to conceal the entanglements around
their making. Instead, we embody and live
curriculum; it is happening now.
Lucinda McKnight is a lecturer in the school of
Education at Deakin University. She has a BA in Fine
Arts, an MA in Media, Culture and Communication, and
has recently completed her PhD in Education. Her
research interests are in the transdisciplinary studies
of curriculum design and creative research methodologies.
She is also a qualified teacher of Creative
Writing and award-winning writer and playwright.
Alejandro Miranda
University of Western Sydney
Practices, Trajectories and the
Travels of Musical Instruments
Artefacts have a significant role in the globalisation
of cultural practices. As objects of cultural and
historical interest, they are also associated to
embodied dispositions, tacit forms of knowledge,
habituated action, rules and routines. It has not
been long since social theorists started to analyse
systematically the role of material entities in the
enactment of practice. Yet, the issue of how material
entities intervene in the circulation and diffusion of
cultural practices requires further examination.
The main thesis of this paper is that the circulation
of musical instruments across networks of relationships
is key to the mobilities of music making. Practices do
not travel in the literal sense of the word, yet practitioners
and artefacts do. Analysing the trajectories
of objects such as musical instruments provides an
empirical window into larger social processes through
which cultural practices become appropriated and
recreated in different locations.
Drawing on ethnographic work conducted in
Mexico and the United States, this paper examines
the specific mechanisms through which musical
instruments get into the hands of its practitioners
in geographically dispersed locations. The case
of son jarocho is advanced to explore and discuss
these processes. Son jarocho is a cultural practice
originated in southeast Mexico, which has been used
to reclaim a traditional identity and elaborate discourses
of authenticity and preservation of a regional musical
heritage. However, this practice is currently sustained,
informed and reshaped by transnational and translocal
linkages. The transfor-mation of this practice has
been a noticeable outcome of its preservation and
recuperation. These changes can be traced to very
concrete elements, such as musical instruments.
Alejandro Miranda is a PhD Candidate at the Institute
for Culture and Society at the University of Western
Sydney. His research addresses the mobilities of
cultural practices across social spaces and their
relationship with belonging, attachment, amateurship
and transnationalism. He holds a Masters in social
sciences from Linköping University (Sweden) and an
undergraduate degree in sociology from the National
Autonomous University of Mexico. He has performed
as professional guitarist in several countries. In 2004
he was awarded with the first prize at two chamber
music competitions.
Catherine Montes
University of Queensland
Between Steps: Exploring the
Transformative Relationships Between
Pilgrimage, Person, and Place.
The Camino de Santiago is a network of historical

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and well-used paths starting at various points across
Europe and culminating at the tomb of St James in
Santiago de Compostela, Spain. As both a path and
a practice, this pilgrimage delineates a powerful
and potentially symbiotic space of physical, spiritual,
and intellectual transformation. Through this practice,
the individual is free to temporarily shed the mundane
skin of quotidian realities, and to walk beyond these
towards other understandings and ways of being.
However, rather than simply being a practice
that is undertaken by the individual for the individual,
this paper invites reflection around the impact of
the pilgrim (both individual and collective) on the
physical and conceptual elements of the path itself.
What is the nature of the transformative relationships
between pilgrimage, person, and place?
This paper aims to discuss the implications of
these interactions through my personal experience
of walking the northernmost route of the Camino de
Santiago. In telling this story, I will draw on multiple
modes of data collected in situ and deconstruct them
through the use of sensory ethnography. The relevance
of this paper lies in gaining deeper understandings
around the practice of walking for transformation, its
impact on the individual and the ways in which this
practice acts upon, and transforms, the path itself.
Catherine received her PhD at the University of
Queensland in the field of Education, with her research
and writing focusing primarily on the intersection
between education, languages and linguistics.
A passionate traveller, photographer and walker,
Catherine has extended her research interests
beyond the internationalisation of education,
to include explorations of culture, spirituality and
gender through walking and sensory ethnography.
Rachel Morgain
Australian National University
Listening with Knots: Making as Ethnography
and Ethnography as Making
This paper explores how ethnographic methods in
anthropology might be re-constructed through an
engagement with textile making as a mode of ethnographic
knowledge production. While visual methods
and writing poetics are now widely accepted as modes
of ethnographic production, the anthropology
of material culture has (with notable exceptions)
overwhelmingly focused on material objects as things
to be engaged with in forming ethnographic
understandings, rather than as means of distilling and
presenting such knowledge. This ongoing division
exposes perduring Cartesian delimitations of
ethnographic space, laced with racial and gendered
undercurrents, which have long underpinned
traditional conceptions of ‘participant-observation’.
This paper brings into conversation examples
of textile making and space making in Oceania with
insights from a practice-led workshop on gesture,
reverie and enchantment in art and anthropology
led by Amanda Ravetz and Alice Kettle. Through
the impulses towards gesture and reverie fostered
in the workshop, these modes and configurations
of ethnographic knowledge will be re-worked,
with a view to contributing to a growing recognition
of creative practice as means of ethnographic
knowledge production. Synthesising insights from
Tim Ingold, Katerina Teaiwa and Karen Barad, a
constructivist ethnography is proposed, underpinned
by a (re)conception of spaces as created through
the relations and actions of things and bodies. Thus
recognising making as ethnography, and ethnography
as making, displaces models of ethnography as
(‘impartial’) witness in favour of a focus on crafting
through interdisciplinary, intercultural activity.
Rachel Morgain is an anthropologist with an interdisciplinary
background in gender studies, cultural
studies, history, physics and astronomy. Her recent
work on religion and interethnic relations in Fiji has
engaged with material and visual culture, performance
and popular culture alongside more traditional
ethnographic approaches. She currently works as
a postdoctoral research fellow in the Laureate
Project ‘Engendering Persons, Transforming Things:
Christianity, Commodities and Individualism in
Oceania’, and is based in the Australian National
University’s Department of Gender, Media and
Cultural Studies, in the School of Culture, History
and Language, College of Asia and the Pacific.
Al Munro
Australian National University
Textile Practice: A Dialogue
with Time and Space
Drawing on contemporary visual art and vernacular
textile-based practice this paper will examine the
possibility of understanding the process of making
as a dialogue time and space. Focusing on the work
of Scottish artist Jeanette Sendler, Marcel Duchamp
and a number of international ‘craftivist’ projects
involving knitting and crochet, I will explore the idea
that textile techniques and materials allow for a
physical or embodied understanding of non-Euclidean
geometries and higher dimensional spaces. These
artists and practitioners have produced works which
not only illustrated the specific importance of textile
materials and methods for understanding higher
dimensional spaces, but also provide an insight into
textile practice as a dialogue between space and time.
The intersection of space and time has been
characterized by writers such as Lynda Dalrymple
Henderson as a fourth dimension, and I will speculate
that this intersection can be experienced through
textile making. This linking of time and space via the
specific qualities of textile-based media can also be
used to re-examine Gille Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s
notion of smooth/striated space and to speculate on
extending this pairing to a notion of smooth/stretchy/
striated space. The paper will make a case for textile
practices to be seen as a way to understand both
complex mathematical and philosophical ideas,
and to highlight the importance of an interdisciplinary
approach to contemporary art and craft theory.
Al is a Canberra-based artist and academic, whose
research spans textiles, print and drawing-based
media. She graduated with a Master of Philosophy
from ANU School of Art Printmedia Workshop in 2001,
producing written and studio research outcomes
focusing on the spatiality of print-based art practice
in relation to Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopic
space and as a critique of Jean Baudrillard’s notion of
simulation and simulacra. Her doctoral thesis focused
on the spatiality of fine arts and vernacular textile
practice, speculating on the necessity of textile forms
as a visual analogy for much of our contemporary
spatial understandings. Al’s studio work explores
drawing, print and textiles in relation to the
visualization of space, with a special interest in
scientific and mathematical visual forms and ideas.
She is currently lecturing in the Textiles Workshop
of the ANU School of Art and is represented
by Brenda May Gallery, Sydney.
Anna Munster
University of New South Wales
Transversal Technics and Group Subjects
In an early discussion of the concept of ‘transversality’
(Transversalite, 1972), Felix Guattari generated
a relational, embodied and affective image of
its practice: an enclosed field of blinkered horses
would move differently as a group if their blinkers
were adjusted to allow in some light. The event
of adjusting the blinkers tinkers with a technical
assemblage of group subjectification while
simultaneously engaging the horses’ potential
to move as a pack. It likewise shifts the affective
tonality of the horse-group – from subjugation
toward either potential trauma (too much light) or
joy in the liberation from blindness.
The transversal, then, is a movement practice
that activates and is activated across dynamic
process, technical elements and affect. How might
we take up these components in the context
of contemporary media assemblages? Today a
‘cybernetic subjectivity’ has taken hold via social
and online media platforms. But I will argue that
transversal experiments with real time transmissions
can open up communication flows to their mattering
and this can generate novel group affects.
Recent experiments have taken place in the
context of the project Immediations hosted by The
Senselab (http://senselab.ca/wp2/immediations/)
and have involved group reading of complex
philosophical texts via Skype across multiple spatial
and temporal zones. These experiments have effected
transversal shifts in listening and speaking across
the ‘group-subjects’ and in relation to signaletic
transmissions. This session will take place partly
through group Skype transmissions so as to ‘adjust
the headphones’ in situ, activating processes of
listening in differently to the transmission of real time.
Anna Munster is a writer, artist and associate
professor at UNSW Art and Design. Her research
interests cross the relations across and practices
of perception, art and politics. She has published
two books – An Aesthesia of Networks (MIT Press
2013) and Materializing New Media (Dartmouth
University Press, 2006). Anna collaborates
artistically with Michele Barker, with recent works
including: évasion (UTS Gallery, Sydney, 2014), an
8-channel responsive installation between dance,
performance and the moving image; and the multichannel
interactive work, HokusPokus (Watermans
Gallery London, 2012), which explores perception,
magic and early moving image technologies.
For further information, her website is:
http://sensesofperception.info

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Bjorn Nansen & Darshana Jayemanne
The University of Melbourne
Thomas Apperely
The University of New South Wales
Children, Post-Digital Play
and the Aesthetics of Recruitment
This paper analyses reconfigurations of children’s play
in emergent material-digital gaming compositions.
It extends work examining hybrid products by turning
attention to entanglements of senses, sociality and
spaces in the production and politics of children’s
post-digital play. Post-digital play designates trends
in gaming afforded by emerging technologies, and
includes a range of interfaces, genres and idioms.
For example, locative games, appcessory games
and connected toys. There is a long history of
hybridity in gaming, yet the contemporary situation
is redistributing relations between techniques,
objects, bodies, interfaces and networks in both
extensive and intensive attachments.
This paper analyses children’s post-digital
gaming through three examples: Osmo, a
crowdfunded tangible app that attaches a reflector
to an iPad redirecting the device’s camera towards
the surface, extending the play interface beyond
the screen; Hybrid Play, a smartphone game that
wirelessly connects to a sensor-equipped clip
to transform playground equipment into gaming
interfaces; Disney Fairy Trails, an augmented reality
app leveraging Disney’s Fairies franchise designed
to produce a ‘magical’ outdoor fairy hunt in
public gardens.
This paper draws on ethnographic research
into young children’s mobile media use and digital
methods research into the hashtag and comments
discussions around these hybrid games; conceptualising
post-digital play through materialist
approaches within critical interface studies. It argues
for addressing these hybrid arrangements through
an aesthetics of recruitment in which increasingly
diverse spatial domains, social practices, and material
lives are enrolled into novel relations, destabilising
affective associations with discrete spaces,
practices and materials.
Bjorn Nansen is a lecturer in Media and
Communications at the University of Melbourne,
a Melbourne Network Society Institute Fellow,
and a member of the Microsoft Social NUI Research
Centre. His research interests include technology
adoption, home media environments, young children
and mobile media, digitally mediated death,
and post-digital interfaces. He currently holds
an Australian Research Council funded Discovery
Early Career Researcher Award.
Tom Apperley, Ph.D. is an ethnographer that
specializes in researching digital media technologies.
His previous writing has covered broadband policy,
digital games, digital literacies and pedagogies,
mobile media, and social inclusion. Tom is currently
a Senior Lecturer at the UNSW, Australia. Tom’s more
recent work has appeared in Digital Creativity,
eLearning and Digital Media, and Westminster
Papers in Culture and Communication.
Darshana Jayemanne is a researcher at
The University of Melbourne. His work examines
temporality, embodiment, postdigital connectivity
and audio-visual culture. He has published in
fibreculture, Westminster Papers in Communication
and Kill Screen Magazine.
Tero Nauha and Karolina Kucia
University of the Arts, Helsinki (Theatre Academy)
Carceri: Prisons of Invention
(COST Action IS1307)
We regard via the series of Carceri by Piranesi
either a space of imaginary or prisons of invention.
For both, our proposal focuses on experiment
where architectonic objects, drawings, diagrams
and performance practice are combined. Based
on artworks to be presented at Mänttä Art Festival,
Finland and ‘Research Pavilion’ adjacent with
Biennale of Venice in 2015, we combine transversal
exercises between common and proper, private
and public, matter and expression.
We will guide the attention in this performative
experimentation on those fields, which include
theoretical presentation, intertwined with practical
experiment. This is a performative proposal in the
form of philosophical inquiry on parasites, heresy
and decisional thought-forms. We consider them
not as abstract concepts, but aim to locate them
in practice. It is through decisional thought-forms,
practice as philosophy, where anything is matter
for production, representation and artistic research.
We propose a critique of this reductionist and
correlative function in artistic practice.
In our previous practices of ‘lapsus’, ‘parasites’
and ‘schizoproduction’, we have regarded affective,
carnal, structures and discursive realms embedded.
This means processing through modulation and
mutation, instead of dramaturgy and improvisation.
Following François Laruelle we propose to regard
body as carnal, generic and as radical immanence.
We regard objects, matter and carnal as represented,
but also as indeterminate in contingency foreclosed
from decisional thought-forms. We choose to create
heretic and parasitic non-relation alongside of
being incarcerated by innovations and revolutions.
Karolina Kucia (MA) is an artist who combines objects,
actions and video image in site-specific and staged
context. She is working with mental ecology
and precarious labour in her own practice and
in organisations such as Molecular Organisation
and Future Art Base. Tero Nauha is a performance
and visual artist. He is a PhD candidate in Artistic
Research at The Theatre Academy of University of
the Arts Helsinki. He is a member of the Performance
and Philosophy group, IFTR and Society for Artistic
Research. His artistic works have been presented
at the Manifesta10, Frankfurter Kunstverein and
Performance Matters.
Astrida Neimanis
University of Sydney
Queering Deep Time: Water as a
Planetary Archive of Feeling
Recent interest in geological time and the vibrancy
of planetary matter invites consideration of human
participation in an archive of the long durée—a
practice of reading and writing a planet into being.
But “deep time” is not to be simply read by
geologists. As a transversal emergence, it demands
queer, counterarchival practices.
Here I consider how Anne Cvetkovich’s “archives
of feeling” allow us to encounter deep time queerly:
if “deep time” makes possible a more-than-human
planetary archive, then we must recall that the matters
of deep time, like any archive, are hardly an objective
or authoritative account of planetary entanglement.
We not only need to read these archives for signs
of past worlds, but we need to excavate our own
onto-epistemologies: what is kept, what is lost?
Who is charged with making meaning of our
retrievals? And, while the archives of rock are wellthumbed
pages of deep time’s dominant archive,
here I seek to loosen our terrestrial comforts, and
dive into the wreck: what about aqueous archives
of feeling? What can repositories of water-memory
teach us about our relation to wet ecologies?
What transversal practices facilitate readings
and misreadings of water archives? What are our
measures of literacy and modes of curation?
Finally, as Cvetkovich notes, our bodies are
a “site of weight-bearing. (…) We are a sensitive
interface with the world. We are carrying historical
residues, collective residues.” So, I wonder, in what
ways are our own living bodies of water transversally
buoyed by these water archives—forward and back?
Astrida is a Lecturer in the Dept of Gender + Cultural
Studies at the University of Sydney, Co-Founder
of the Environmental Humanities Collaboratory at
Linkoping University (SE) and an Affiliated Researcher
at LiU’s Posthumanities Hub (TEMA Gender). In 2015
she is also President of the Association for Literature,
Environment and Culture in Canada (alecc.ca).
Research interests include posthuman feminisms,
experimental writing methods, nature/culture, water,
climate change, environmental humanities,
environmental justice, embodiment, (bio)coloniality,
biotechnologies and feminist STS—and the common
and queer intersections of these things.
Norie Neumark
Victorian College of the Arts,
The University of Melbourne
Ears to the Ground: New Materialist Practices
of Voice in Contemporary Art
How can new materialism reinvigorate what we sense
and know through voice? In Vibrant Matter (2010),
political theorist Jane Bennett regularly evokes ‘voice’
in both a literal and metaphoric way to convey the
‘expressivity’ of things and assemblages. “Thus spoke
the grid,” she says of the NYC blackout. Speaking
here is not just ‘something’ humans do, as postphenomenologist
Don Ihde and anthropologist Tim
Ingold, among others, have written about in scholarly
depth; it also suggests that with post-humanism,
we can listen to the voices of things speaking within
assemblages and speaking of assemblages.
In this paper, I will work with the figure of voicetrack
to think about how assemblages or meshworks speak,
how they voice themselves as well as enmeshing
within themselves the voices of human, animals,
and things. The concept voicetrack redoubles the
performativity of both voice and track as each performs

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itself, here together. In this sense I will use voicetrack,
literally and metaphorically, to track how voices of
humans, animals and things move through contemporary
art and performatively alert us to their posthuman
potentials and possibilities. Approaching
creative practices through new materialism, I will ask:
How do contemporary artists evoke the vibrant
material qualities of voice – relational, located,
paradoxical and always ‘surprising? What are the
affects, ethics, and aesthetics enmeshed in the
voicetracks in the works of artists such as Elle-Mie
Hansen (DK), Vic McEwan (AUS), Susan Philipz
(UK) and Jon Rose (AUS)?
Norie Neumark, Professor and Chair in Media Studies,
La Trobe, is a sound/media artist and theorist. Her
award-winning collaborative art practice (www.outof-sync.com)
has been commissioned, exhibited,
and awarded artists’ residencies nationally and
internationally. Her sound studies research is currently
focused on voice and the new materialist turn. Her
writing on voice includes Voice: Vocal Aesthetics in
Digital Arts and Media (MIT Press, 2010), lead editor
and contributor, and an upcoming monograph,
Voicetracks – Voice, Media, and Media Arts in the
Posthumanist Turn, contracted by MIT Press, 2016.
Neumark has had visiting professorial fellowships
at Cornell (US) and Aarhus University (DK).
Lisa Palmer
School of Geography
Ecologies of Spirit in Timor Leste
Linking my ethnographic data to the theoretical
literature on post-humanism and vital materialism
in this presentation I advance an argument about
the forms, agency and temporal ecologies of water
and spirit in eastern Timor Leste. In this multidimensional
space, the notion of ‘inclusive sociality’
is applied to understand both water’s participation
in existence and the connectivity and political
effects of ‘consciousness’ manifesting in water and
associated ‘bodies’ and ‘things’ across space and
time. I show how the agential and temporal roles
of salt and fresh water are folded into complex
hydrosocial cycles, underpinning it in ways which
necessarily extend our understanding of the social.
Sensing the qualities of relatedness embedded in
these cycles, the political and ethical challenge
I argue is to pluralistically think through such
alternative renderings of water.
Lisa Palmer is a human geographer who teaches
and researches on socio-natures and indigenous
approaches to environmental and social governance.
Her research is focused on south-east Asia
(particularly East Timor) and indigenous Australia.
She has published widely and has just published
an ethnography of people’s complex relations with
water in East Timor titled Water Politics and Spiritual
Ecology: Custom, environmental governance and
development (2015, Routledge, London)
Justy Phillips
RMIT University
Let Me Tell You a Story. Inside This Body
There is a Heart Just Like Yours.
This performance-paper brings into language the
living experience of a hole in the heart. While a hole
in the heart is commonly understood as a congenital
cardiac defect, I re-conceptualise this relation as a
living hole – a self-organising assemblage of vital
matter. Living holes, I suggest, are interstitial bodies.
The aim of this research is to develop new ways
of experiencing and sharing the material holes that
compose us and address the complex problem of
how to transform a hole into an opening. Through
Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of ‘event’ and
‘desire’ I recognise a hole in the heart as a creative
force in itself.
Drawing on my own experience of a congenital
hole in the heart this research examines this
condition in the context of the more-than-human.
Through a focus on relationality I aim to transform
understandings of a hole in the heart away from the
grip of its defective congenital holding, and open it
instead as a productive, transversal relation. In this
paper I ask what it means to experience our material
holes through a shared heart? And how might
experiencing our hearts through the material holes
that compose-us enable us to relate, communicate,
feel and compose-with the lives of others, differently?
Justy Phillips is an artist, writer and publisher. From
the jaws of a captive polar bear in a Mexican zoo
to the slow moving ice floes of central Iceland,
Phillips lives in relation-with the world through a
process of research-creation she refers to as
fictiōneering – the speculative eventing of living
experience. Activating fictiō, the Latin root of fiction
– meaning ‘to make-with’ rather than ‘to make up’
– Phillips’ practice is an untamable hybrid of
interdisciplinary art, novella and process philosophy.
A graduate of the Royal College of Art, London,
Phillips moved to Australia in 2004, developing her
practice through text-based eventing and limitededition
publishing. In 2015, Phillips was awarded her
PhD, Scoreography: Compose-with a hole in the
heart! from RMIT University, Melbourne.
Louise Phillips and Scotia Monkivitch
The University of Queensland / Walking Borders
Walking a Trail of Paper and Gravel:
The Grit and Grime of Arts Activism
For two weeks surrounding the G20 Summit in 2014,
the restricted zone borders of Brisbane’s hotels
(where visiting international protected persons were
staying) and the declared zone border of Brisbane’s
CBD was walked and lined with paper boats, each
weighted with a handful of gravel, by participants
in Walking Borders arts activism for refugee rights.
The materiality of moving bodies, paper and
gravel collaborated to circumnavigate a 20 km
circumference of Brisbane’s CBD and surrounding
inner suburbs with a trace of visual activism for
refugee rights. The relationality of walking and
the fragility of the paper boats, dependent on the
im/materiality of gravel intersected to provoke
imaginings, emotions, questions and actions about
spatial politics, civil liberties, mobilities, sensation
and place-making. By placing the paper boats along
public footpaths their intersections with other matter
were unknown/ uncontrolled/ random; the boats
were in a constant state of becoming as their
interaction with other matter shifted and changed
their form. The traces told stories of harm, forced
removal, and offers of generosity and comfort.
Through a visual montage of still images captured
(by lead artist Scotia Monkivitch and researcher
Louise Phillips) during the walks, dialogue is
provoked, as meaning is made of imaginings,
emotions, metaphors, analogies, questions and
actions pertaining to borders and global mobilities,
and how the arts can invite us to re-engage with the
vitality of matter to reimagine political co-existence
with others.
Louise is an early years and arts education academic,
storyteller and walking enthusiast who follows
trails and pathways for the mystery of where they
might lead; and the corporeal and relational means
of uncovering stories of lived experiences as
palimpsests of place. Louise works with relational
artists who through walking provoke critical thinking
pertaining to civic engagement. Through story,
Louise weaves affective understandings of emplaced
bodily knowing into research methodology and
writings. In collaboration with fellow academics in
Aotearoa, Canada, Sweden, Thailand, UK, and the
USA Louise researches possibilities for children’s
rights and citizenship, and intergenerational
civic engagement.
Scotia has an extensive background in movement
based theatre, devised performance, and
coordination of projects and theatrical productions
in Australia and internationally. She is committed to
artistic collaborations which privilege the contributors
to develop their art, their audience and the cultural
relevance of their work – creating art that changes
the way people see their own and others’ lives.
Scotia is a Community Arts and Cultural Practitioner
of programs and partnerships for the arts and health
sector, and disability and creative aging. She currently
manages the Creative Recovery Network, building
the role of arts in community preparedness
and recovery post disaster.
Julieanna Preston
College of Creative Arts, Massey University
SPEAK!
SPEAK! speculates on the possibility that humans
and other matter can overcome differences that
hinder mutual understanding and respect in the
search for an expanded sense of well-being. While
prodding material to enunciate its own animate state,
this research confronts the strangeness of meeting
another object as foreign bodies. Such encounter
prompts an entangled process of becoming familiar
as equal things or like-species.
This paper will present the preliminary
experiments of this research in the form of sound
samples gathered from a site where large quantities
of presumably inert materials are stored such
as an industrial building site. Contact microphones
will register the transformational energy of sonic
vibrations at a pitch undetectable to the human ear.
A software interface will translate those sensations
from live interactions into a form of written language.
An innovation of the research is found in the
application of voice recognition software to ‘verbalise’
material phones. In this instance, one does not rely

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on old-age onomatopoeias to represent a sounding
action, but might instead, read and hear a material
speaking directly. While the software enables
a material to speak out, to be free to communicate,
it also raises a curious paradox about thing-to-thing
associations (including human to non-human
exchanges) and any expectation of legibility
or effective translation.
This research draws inspiration from contemporary
post-humanist philosophers such as Donna Haraway,
Greg Harman and Levi R. Bryant who speculate on
building a discourse with non-human object entities
engaged in complex and affective assemblages of
movement, experience and communication.
Professor Julieanna Preston is a spatial artist probing
the performative agency of materials through creative
works and a spatial writing practice. Her recent
projects include thirsty stuff (Topologies of Sexual
Difference, Melbourne 2014), meeting, you in detail
(Writingplace, Delft 2013), BALE (Snowhite Gallery,
Auckland 2011), and No Fixed Seating (Whirlwinds,
London 2010). Publications include Performing
Matter: interior surface and feminist actions
(Spurbuchverlag 2014), Interior Atmospheres
(Architectural Design 2008), Intimus: Interior Design
Theory Reader (co-edited with Mark Taylor, Wiley
2006), “Blazing Inter-Alia: Tropes of a Feminist Interior
Practice” (Feminist Practices: Interdisciplinary
Approaches to Women in Architecture, Lori Brown
ed., 2011), and as guest editor of Interior Economies
(IDEA Journal 2012). Julieanna contributes
to postgraduate research studies in the College
of Creative Arts, Massey University with a focus
on creative arts-led research across art and design.
Kathleen Quinlivan
University of Canterbury
Working With Young People’s
Emergent Becomings in School- based
Sexuality Education Programmes
In this paper I explore what school-based sexuality
education programmes could learn from attending
more closely to, and building on the ways in which
young people are already engaging with and
developing material, affective, intra-relational, and
embodied ways of becoming in their own lives.
Drawing on Deleuzo-Guattarian theory
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), and feminist philosophy
(Barad, 2007; Todd, 2011), I analyse findings from
a researcher-led student focus group gathered
as part of an Australian and New Zealand research
project designed to explore responses to religious
and cultural difference in sexuality education
programmes in Australian and New Zealand
(Rasmussen, Quinlivan, Allen, Sanjakdar, and Aspin,
2012). I show how, in retrospect, I came to understand
that the focus group interviews operated as a
pedagogical site for the students to acknowledge
and examine the ways in which they were materially,
affectively, and intra-relationally becoming in their
own lives (Gilbert, 2014; Ivinson & Renold, 2013).
Mapping the ways in which the focus group, as an
always un-finalised sexuality education assemblage,
produces possibilities for both re-territorialisation
and de-territorialisation, provides some productive,
albeit challenging, epistemological approaches for
school- based sexuality education programmes to
consider. I close by considering the implications of
such approaches for sexuality educators and schools.
Quinlivan is a Senior Lecturer In Education at the
University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.
She has researched and published widely in the area
of sexualities, genders and schooling. Dr Quinlivan
is a co-editor of The Politics of Pleasure in Sexuality
Education: Pleasure Bound (Routledge, 2014), and
the lead editor of Educational Enactments in a
Globalised World: Intercultural Conversations (Sense
Publishers, 2009). A monograph, Contemporary Issues
in Sexuality Education For Young People: Learning
and Teaching with Theory (Palgrave MacMillan)
is forthcoming. She is currently a co-investigator
on an Australian Research Council funded project;
Sexuality Education in Australia and New Zealand:
Responding to Cultural and Religious Difference.
Amaara Raheem
RMIT University
I and I is We, Us
The guiding principle of this performance-lecture asks:
can an autobiographical performance descend from
the power of one to ground zero i.e. a space in which
‘negative knowledge’ can be co-created in the moment
of (un)doing? Or another way to put it, can witnessing
a dancer moving and talking, become a social event?
Deidre Haddon located autobiographical
performance within and arising out of the secondwave
feminist movement claiming it as a platform
for speaking subjects resisting marginalisation
and objectification becoming instead self-agents/
enablers; performance then as a way to bring
into being a self and a means to reveal otherwise
invisible lives. Autobiographical performance has
long been considered the performance of possibility
and transformation as well as equally criticised as
egotistical, solipsistic, self-indulgent. The analyses
between autobiographical performance and
embodied praxis are striking similar. As methods,
both attempt to reveal interiority by articulating a
specific creative-cultural-kinaesthetic context.
This performance lecture proposes to move from
‘I’ to ‘We’ by maintaining a critical distance from the
notion of self whilst aesthetically executing the
confessional body. Haddon’s thinking in relation to
Eastern philosophy, focused on the notion of interdependent
origination, provides a fertile ground to
interrogate fluid narratives of self. Characterised by
exposing an ambiguity towards self this performance
lecture re-claims the politics of representation through
the practice of creative research and assembly; claiming
self by giving up what I think is mine and embracing
self from a place of form and theme; self then as
strategy; chorus; authentic fiction; co-emergence.
Amaara Raheem is a Sri Lankan born Australian/British
choreographer, performer and writer. Inspired by
a longing for and, belonging to several lands and
identities her work embodies multi-layered experiences
of in-between-ness. She is interested in articulating
ethics in relation to aesthetics, placing sound, words,
objects and movement in parallel to embody knowing
as flux. In 2015 Amaara begins a practice-led PhD at
School of Architecture and Design, RMIT, Melbourne,
Australia. Her doctoral research will explore auditory
consciousness in relation to memory, technology
and economies of attention.
Ana Ramos
Université de Montréal
On Consciousness and
Virtual Lines of Affection
If we want to think experience primarily as a relational
dimension by which dynamic forces get activated,
then we may need to conceive the body as a
crossroads as much as a threshold in which events
burst into.
First, it is a crossroads of virtual lines of affection
where consciousness becomes a with-ness in
which bodies-things-percepts-sensations collide:
intertwined movements of becoming. But it is also
a threshold because the body is a multidimensional
place where events get reported – or not. Like a black
hole, it is constantly attracting affectivities and
engulfing them: it is affected by its surroundings.
What becomes of these affectivities? The body
is not just a black hole, it is also a musical instrument:
it resonates with its surroundings, emitting affective
forces through the pulsation of its presence. The
body is affected as much as it affects its situation.
Thus, what becomes of the notion of subject?
If the body is the scene for aesthetic qualities to get
actualized, then experience becomes an activity
of co-creation of singularities. But what is the role
of consciousness in such conception? How do we
make sense of experiences? What does it mean to
have a conscious experience? Even though these
questions have been discussed by William James
(1912), what about bringing them back and rekindling
them with Whitehead’s concept of affective tonality
(Whitehead, 1933)? Moreover, what about fertilizing
these concepts with a pinch of embodiment discourse
and spicing it up with some sensorium flavour?
Ana Ramos is a Ph.D. candidate in the department
of communication at the Université de Montréal.
Her current research is dedicated to a better grasp
of the invisible processes which act as a foundation
for experience through the concept of the virtual.
What interests her the most is the diversification of
modes of perception through means as immersive
technologies and the techniques of the body.
Her most recent publication, “L’événement-dôme”,
in Archée: Arts Médiatiques & Cyberculture,
establishes the Satosphere (an immersive theatre
built at the Société des arts technologiques,
Montréal) as an autonomous entity emerging
as an animated process.
Janine Randerson
Art and Design, AUT University
Ecologies of Practice: Seawater and Dust
This presentation narrates the project Other Waters:
Art on the Manukau (2014), a public art and
performance event which took place on a condemned
bridge in Auckland city’s Southern Manukau harbour.
Artists engaged transversally with the Te Waiohua
iwi, environmental scientists, dancehall performers,
toxin-filtering reeds, local primary school children, the
weather, a dawn hike up a mountain, watery biota

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and chemical compounds. The ‘other’ in the Other
Waters title refers to the Manukau, a neglected
harbour in comparison to Auckland’s better known
central harbor, the Waitemata. While the Southern
harbour is still flushed with treated sewage and waste
from milk processing, the process of producing
Other Waters, the engagement with Te Waiohua
kaumatua (elders) opened up modes of engaging
with the Manukau, no longer as other, or as polluted
body of water, but rather as home.
Isabelle Stengers’ phrase of ‘ecologies of
practice’ (2004; 2010) resonates with cooperative
and curatorial practices of art-making adopted for
this event. Although Stengers focuses on ecologies
between scientific disciplines, her philosophy of
science was relevant to the creative works in Other
Waters, where material forms, including film, enabled
and enhanced practices of ‘experimental
togetherness.’ For instance, my black and white
film ‘Seawater and Dust’ assembled environmental
scientists, who tested water quality towards data
for the soundtrack; the coastguard and the boat
for the sea-based filming, the degraded material of
forty year old 16mm stock, and an intuitive response
to the words of Te Waiohua. (237)
Janine Randerson is an Auckland-based artist and
occasional curator. A research thread in Janine’s
video and film installations concerns technological
mediation in ecological systems. Her work is often
generated in partnership or collaboration with
atmospheric scientists and other human and nonhuman
inhabitants of the sites she works with.
Janine completed her PhD on Meteorological Art:
Weather as Media at the University of Melbourne
in 2012. She is currently the Acting Chair of
Research, and programme leader of the Master
of Performance and Media Arts at AUT University’s
Art & Design School.
Monique Redmond
AUT University
Making as Currency, Connecting
the Everyday Social
This paper will discuss the projects of Aucklandbased
collective Public Share; ALLOTTED
BREAKS(S), Carried Forward and SMOKO. Begun
as a simple exercise in the processes of making
and sharing—and the pleasure of that gesture,
Public Share has staged a series of projects that
situate generosity and social exchange as the
principal foci. Cooperative production utilising local
materials (clay) informs and determines social
communications that note a return to the basics
and an acknowledgment of the most fundamental of
transactions, the tea break and refreshment stop.
Working with institutional neighbours such as art
galleries and local industrial work sites, symposium
attendees and site workers, transversal links make
for undirected and responsive events of exchange.
From a critical standpoint, the delight in sourcing
clay from local motorway construction sites,
its transition into object form, its then use as a
functioning form into a received object seeks to
create time for shared conversation and mutuality.
Exchange is articulated through gestures inherent
in our everyday work-related lives and those inbetween
occasions for conversation that create
a collective pause in the working day.
Poised as makers of the social, the collective
proposes to frame the event as a site for exchange
through the production of objects, which act as
conduits for an extended form of sociality, generosity
and reciprocity. Our intent for the understated clay
objects is that they function within the confines
of a reciprocal gesture. The transmission of this
gesture is momentarily recorded in the communal act
of sharing a cuppa and biscuit.
Public Share includes Monique Redmond, Harriet
Stockman, Kirsten Dryburgh, Joe Prisk, Deborah
Rundle, Mark Schroder and Kelsey Stankovich.
[publicsharecollective.com]
Monique Redmond is an Associate Professor, Visual
Arts Postgraduate Strand Leader and Programme
Leader at AUT University. Her art practice is formed
primarily through collaborative and installation
processes. The event as a transactional space for
everyday gestures of exchange, conversation and
cooperation are explored through temporary public
practices and socially engaged events. Often situated
in suburban contexts, its sites, architecture, planting
and gardens are a source for event-based installation
projects that both draw upon and document the
lived spaces of her everyday. Collaborations include;
Suburban Floral Association with Tanya Eccleston,
A full season with Layne Waerea – and Public
Share collective.
Katie Rochow
Victoria University of Wellington
City Rhythms Picturing the (Affective)
Materialities of Urban Spaces
“Everywhere where there is interaction between
a place, a time and an expenditure of energy, there
is rhythm” (Lefebvre 2004, 15)
The idea of rhythm has figured as a key conceptual
and empirical motif in current research on (urban)
space, place and everyday life. Urban spaces are
considered polyrhythmic fields, a compound of varied
everyday life and spatial rhythms, which produce a
particular, but ever-changing, complex mix of heterogeneous
social interactions, mobilities, imaginaries
and materialities (Edensor 2010). Those changing
rhythmic processes interact and intermingle shaping
the diurnal, weekly and annual experience of urban
spaces and influence the ongoing formation of
its materiality. The affective materiality of the city
is to speak of the intensity of the various forms of
engagement, relations and encounters that give shape
and consistency to urban life. It is the unstable,
never quite concrete ‘stuff’ of the city, which can be
apprehended in the movement between questions
of the processual, the relational as well as the
powers of things (Latham and McCormack 2009).
This paper is dedicated to present a way of
capturing, understanding and sensing out the rhythmic
materiality of urban spaces. It will do so by emphasizing
the power of photographic images in urban-based
fieldwork in order to foreground the peculiar quality
of the city’s rhythmic materiality. Drawing upon current
explorations in the urban spaces of Copenhagen
(Denmark) and Wellington (Aotearoa/New Zealand),
the paper argues that an image is never just a representational
snapshot nor is it a material thing reducible
to brute object-ness. Rather, images can be understood
as resonant blocks of space-time that have duration
even though they appear still. Their pre-signifying
affective materiality is felt in bodies, which lays the
ground for an effective technique of experience and
experiment that elicits the rhythmic materiality
of urban spaces.
Katie Rochow is a PhD student in Media Studies at
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.
Her research focuses on the spatial dynamics of local
music-making in Wellington and Copenhagen. Katie
holds a Master of Social Sciences in Media and Communication
Studies from Uppsala University, Sweden.
Stanislav Roudavski
The University of Melbourne
Props for Autonomous Architecture
Today, human activities constitute the primary
environmental impact on the planet. In this context,
commitments to sustainability, or minimization of
damage, prove insufficient. To develop regenerative,
futuring capabilities, architectural design needs to
extend beyond the form and function of things and
engage with the management of complex systems.
Such systems involve multiple types of dynamic
phenomena – biotic and abiotic, technical and cultural
– and can be understood as living. Engagement
with such living systems implies manipulation
of pervasive and unceasing change, irrespective
of whether it is accepted by design stakeholders
or actively managed towards homeostatic or
homeorhetic conditions. On one hand, such
manipulation of continuity requires holistic and
persistent design involvements that are beyond
natural capabilities of human designers. On the
other hand, practical, political or creative implications
of reliance on automated systems capable of
tackling such tasks is as yet underexplored.
In response to this challenge, this paper
considers an experimental approach that utilised
methods of critical making and speculative designing
to explore potentials of autonomous architecture.
This approach combined 1) knowledge of animal
architecture that served as a lens for rethinking
human construction and as a source of alternative
design approaches; 2) practices of creative
computing that supported speculative applications
of data-driven and performance-oriented design;
and 3) techniques of robotics and mechatronics
that produced working prototypes of autonomous
devices that served as props for critical thinking
about alternative futures.
Stanislav Roudavski, PhD(cantab), MFA/MArch,
MSc(CABD), Senior Lecturer in Digital Architectural
Design, the University of Melbourne; a founding
partner of Elseware and ExLab, creative initiatives;
an editor of the International Journal of Architectural
Computing and the Digital Creativity journals;
committee member of CAAD Futures and CAADRIA
conferences with work published and exhibited
in multiple international venues. Stanislav’s research
interests include philosophy of place, ecology,
technology, design and architecture; emergence

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and self-organisation; design fiction, speculative
designing and critical making; as well as creative
computing including autonomy, algorithmic thinking,
complex geometries, digital fabrication; virtual
environments and pervasive systems.
David Rousell
Southern Cross University
Surface Accretions: Prototyping
Posthumanist Learning Environments
by Walking and Mapping an
Immersive Cartography
States and Territories is an artistic and philosophical
inquiry which collectively re-imagines university
learning environments for the Anthropocene epoch.
The project serves to prototype posthumanist learning
environments through relational compositions of public
art, speculative thought, and hypermedia architecture.
This has involved the installation of twelve hypercubes
in a topological network which is distributed
across the cultural landscapes of a regional university
campus. A hypercube can be described, following
Deleuze (1992), as an ‘objectile’: a becoming-cube
sustained by a vector of autonomous respiration.
Each cube installed on the campus projects a
second cube around the vicinity of its lines of site/
sight, generating an unfolding oscillation between
its interior and exterior surfaces.
In simultaneously projecting and containing
the learning environment, the hypercubes set the
coordinates for an immersive cartography that can
be entered, modified and expanded in any direction.
The archival inscriptions and gestures of bodies
accrete on the manifold surfaces of the cartography,
and are collected in the physical and digital repositories
located at each site. A transdisciplinary process of
anarchiving has also been activated, in which the
cartography is re-mapped through and across time
to reveal interstitial contact points which are transversal
to the longitudes and latitudes of its surfaces.
This paper works across the surface accretions
of learning environments as haptic interfaces, like
geological sediments being sifted by the movement
of thought. Rather than unearthing the present, the
paper performs an archaeology of the future in which
the ruins of the university are rediscovered by
a people yet to come.
David Rousell is a doctoral candidate in the School
of Education at Southern Cross University. David’s
doctoral project is funded by an Australian Postgraduate
Award and a grant from the Vice Chancellor’s
Sustainability Fund. He currently lectures across the
areas of curriculum and pedagogy, art history/theory
and media studies. David is also co-researcher for
the participatory research project Climate Change
and Me. David has exhibited widely as a contemporary
artist in Australia and overseas, and also publishes
his research in international journals. His research
explores the emerging intersections between ecology,
aesthetics and pedagogy in educational contexts, as
infected by various strands of speculative philosophy.
Kay Rozynski
Print Cultures: The Microbiotic Colony
as Feral Writing Technology
This creative work comprises a posthumanist
investigation into the injurious effects of the myth
of civility and culture as bounded and stable,
locating the feral in a very physical sense within
human being, and the cultural as an articulation
of the natural. As a work of conceptual writing,
it engages the particulate writing environment
in order to comment on its influence on creativity.
The work comprises a series of recycled pages,
printed with an altered version of Hélène Cixous’s
The Laugh of the Medusa and covered with an agar
veneer. These page-sized petri dishes were left to
collect microbial matter from the spaces of writing
– the internal and external dimensions of the writing
body, the desk, the apparatuses of inscription,
the writing studio’s climactic phenomena, dust.
Over the course of the exhibition, bacterial cultures
colonise the pages, de/composing and editing the
texts that dis/appear in real time – live, as it were.
The project seeks to address three discursive
oppositions: the cultural and the natural, the
immateriality of thought and the materiality of its
written expression, and the colony and the
uncultivated wild. Here, the microbial organisms
that ordinarily, though clandestinely, impregnate
the spaces of composition are invited to more
explicitly assert their influence on what is typically
considered to be the purely human (i.e. cultural,
incorporeal, cultivated) act of writing. The microbes’
behaviour as an organised, colonising force upsets
the clarity of these dyads’ distinctions. The project
also correlates ‘woman’ and nature, finding in Cixous’s
discussion of woman’s silencing a provocative
metaphor for the question of a ‘posthuman writing’.
Kay Rozynski (BA Hons U Melb, PhD UWS) writes
poetry and prose that conscientiously wears the
material conditions of its performance/production on
its sleeve, and practices the translation of Spanish
to English poetry as part of a perpetual apprenticeship
to language. From the Blue Mountains west of Sydney,
she now lives in Melbourne and teaches writing and
Hispanic cultural studies at the University of Melbourne.
Kim Sargent-Wishart
Victoria University
Gestures of Diffraction:
Cell Division and the Film Edit
Discussing diffraction, Karen Barad (2012) suggests
that knowing is “a cutting together-apart, where cuts
do violence but also open up and rework the agential
conditions of possibility.” This “cutting togetherapart”
could also describe the gesture of cell division,
an activity fundamental to our embryology and
ongoing physiology.
After conception, the first gesture that the first
cell enacts is cleavage, the one becoming two, in
an enfolding that “engenders an ontological novelty
… bring[ing] a previously non-existent inside/outside
difference into being” (Rotman 2009:76). One cell,
whole, relates with its environs. Enfolding introduces
the possibility of relationship within itself – through
contingent surfaces that can know one another. Further
divisions multiply possibilities for sharing information
and sensation within the developing organism.
In a sense, the complexity of our biological life
is based on repeatedly surrendering our wholeness
to diffraction and allowing the cut. I use film editing,
a craft defined by the cut, as metaphor and illustration,
and as part of my research practice. As a dance/
film maker, I tinker with the possible relationships
that a cut can engender, through interrupting and
enfolding the moving image. I will share clips of a
recent dance/film to illustrate this provocation.
Kim Sargent-Wishart is nearing completion of her Ph.D.
in Performance Studies at Victoria University. She holds
a BA with honours in Dance from Wesleyan University,
professional certification as a Body-Mind Centering ®
practitioner, and is an internationally registered somatic
movement educator (SME). Her doctoral research
explores the dynamics of creative activity with a focus
on narratives of embryology and art-making, and is
based in practices of somatics, dance improvisation,
Tibetan Buddhism and dance/filmmaking.
Karin Sellberg
Centre for the History of European Discourses,
University of Queensland
Vitalist Progress(ion): Feminist Temporality,
Corporeality and Connection
Contemporary feminist philosophy classically
tends to reject the idea of historical and biological
progress as a patriarchal and/or capitalist construct
of temporality. The conception of a continually
improving, evolving or advancing biological and
social state, is deemed ontologically disempowering,
and is often traded for the less “hierarchized” notions
of progression, historical and biological processes
and ontological duration.
This paper will critically examine the conception
of embodiment that emerges through the exchange
of progress for progression. It will argue that the
underlying temporal logic of the two concepts is
more similar than some leading feminist philosophers
acknowledge – and that progression can be conceived
in equally hierarchical terms as progress.
The paper will compare and contrast the different
Vitalist approaches to the history of science developed
in the works of Elizabeth Grosz, Elizabeth Wilson
and Jane Bennett. Whereas Grosz and Wilson use
Bergsonian ideas of progression to move away
from ideas of progress, Bennett employs the work
of Alfred North Whitehead and Henry Thoreau
to construct a less subject-centred conception
of progress that to some extent becomes a form
of progression.
Through an analysis of these different approaches,
I will contemplate what the differentiation between
progress and progression means for relationships
between embodiment and time in biological science,
corporeal philosophy and contemporary culture -
and furthermore, question what is at stake in
reconceptualising such dynamics.
Karin Sellberg is a postdoctoral research fellow at
the Centre for the History of European Discourses,
University of Queensland. She is primarily a literary
scholar with research interests in feminist
philosophy, gender studies, medical humanities
and historiography. She has a forthcoming book
on constructions of transgender embodiment
in late twentieth-century feminist and queer theory
and new historicist criticism of early modern drama
and she has published extensively on queer and
feminist conceptions of history and time.

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51
Mattie Sempert
RMIT University
Twirl-Whirling Lyric Essays
from a Post-Cartesian Body
As an acupuncturist and as a creative writer, I thinkfeel
through making. My listening hands think- feel
through the density of flesh, finding the grain of things
in the movement of feelingforward. As a creative
writer, I thinkfeel forward: the needlewhirls inspire
ideawhirls which I twirl into textwhirls and assemble
into pulsing lyric essays. The movement and friction
between ideas within each essay generates force,
and connective tissue (analogous to the structural
elements of the lyric essay) responds by laying
down more resonating, conceptfibres. If an idea
can’t stay in relationship with other ideas, no force
is generated, so it atrophies, and dies off. As my
whole body thinks, the elasticity of the ideawords
have the capacity to stretch beyond themselves and
find new narrative possibilities. Like the astounding
capacities of the human body, the lyric essay,
I propose, is a form flexible and agile enough to slip
out of binary traps, and flow into themultiplicities of
the fluxes. This paper explores the connective tissue
of language as a transversal opening of body.
Mattie Sempert is a practicing acupuncturist and
PhD student in Creative Writing at RMIT University.
Drawing on process and relational philosophies,
her research project involves writing a series
of lyric essays, with ficto-critical (exegical) writing
assemblages embedded within the ‘flesh’ of the
essays. Long thought of as the inert stuff to be
scraped away to better view the anatomical structures
underneath, connective tissue has been re-discovered
in bio-medicine as dynamic, alive (International
Fascia Research Congress, 2012). Mattie appropriates
this biological re-conceptualisation to vitalize,
and make juicy, the post-Cartesian body.
Mark Shorter
Victorian College of the Arts,
The University of Melbourne
The Performance Lecture
In the context of a conference on transversal practices
what does it mean to consider the form of the lecture
itself? The artist performance lecture provides a means
to consider the lecture space as a fluid and
transformative space for knowledge exchange.
This performance form has long been a method
to critique the lecture format while simultaneously
delivering new and innovative art practice and
content. Historically we might consider the futurist
Fillipo Marinetti and his antagonistic serate speeches
as a forerunner to the performance lecture.
Subsequently we can see the genre developed
through the work of artists such as Robert Smithson
(Hotel Palenque, 1972) and more recently Andrea
Fraser (Official Welcome, 2001-12).
For “Transversal Practices: Matter, Ecology
and Relationality” I propose a performance lecture
that will provide a vital counterpoint to the traditional
lecture format that will take place over the conference.
Incarnated as the time-travelling, landscape painting
critic Schleimgurgeln I will deliver a lecture that
reflects on 2000 years of imagined Antipodean space.
Guttural and non-verbal Schleimgurgeln’s lecture
will poetically draw the knowledge and space
of the conference into a transformative black hole
of space, place and sound.
Mark Shorter is a Melbourne based artist and
researcher who has exhibited extensively throughout
Australia. Notable examples include 50 Ways to Kill
Renny Kodgers at Contemporary Art Tasmania
and Dark MOFO; a survey of his Schleimgurgeln
performance and video work at the Tasmania
Museum and Art Gallery and Renny Kodgers LIVE
with Pee Pee as part of Superdeluxe@Artspace
and the Biennale of Sydney. From 2010–12 he was
the host of The Renny Kodgers Quiz Hour on FBi
94.5FM and in 2014 he published Quixotic Visions:
Tino La Bamba’s Great Australian Adventure.
Simone Slee
Victorian College of the Arts,
The University of Melbourne
Sculptural Occurrences and
Other Abfunctional Potentials
After making a series of wearable body-suits called
On (2000-2), the neologism abfunction emerged
in my vocabulary to describe the effects of the
artwork that notions of function, dysfunction or the
multifunctional could not fulfill.
This paper, based on my PhD project, tests the
validity of this new concept. It proposes that the ‘ab’
in abfunction is a ‘moving away’ from ‘function’, and by
doing so, reveals the premise that function is implicit
within the artwork. Yet Art has often been defined as
autonomous and in opposition to the ‘purposeful’ of the
everyday. If the definition of abfunction is a ‘moving
away’ from ‘function’, what is ‘function’, and how might
it operate within Art despite this established antithesis?
The Polish avant-garde sculptor Katarzyna Kobro
and her collaborator, Unist theorist and painter,
Wladyslaw Strzeminski, position sculpture as space,
and following this, define function as a utilitarian and
economical movement of the body in time and space
that informs the rhythmic division of space and form
(1931-36). How then, could one move away from the
functional prerequisites of economy and utility with the
role of the body, actions, materials, space and time
to produce an abfunctional sculptural occurrence?
By examining artworks I have produced, Hold
UP (2013), and How Long (2008-ongoing), in addition
to works by artists such as Andreas Slominski,
this paper will aim to reveal how concepts of the
abfunctional can provide a reconsideration of the
effects and the production of an artwork beyond a
simple opposition to notions of function.
Simone Slee makes work that enacts sculptural
propositions. She produces installations,
photographs, videos and sculptural objects that
often engage the body and materials and have
a performance potential. Questions of sculpture,
such as: How can a sculpture stand up?; What
shape should a sculpture be?; are recurring ideas
in the work, generating effects of absurdity,
embarrassment, instability and endurance. Simone
is the Head of Sculpture and Spatial Practice at the
School of Art, VCA, University of Melbourne. She
has an undergraduate degree in Sculpture from
the VCA, 1995, a Masters in Fine Art (Research)
from RMIT, 2000, and is currently a PhD candidate
at the School of Art, VCA. She was previously
an Anne and Gordon Samstag Scholar at the
Staedelschule, Frankfurt am Main 2004-6. Simone
has exhibited nationally and internationally and is
represented by Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne.
Robyn Sloggett
The Grimwade Centre for
Cultural Materials Conservation
Interrogating Time and Meaning:
Art Conservation, Scientific Analysis,
Historical Context and the Missing Links
Objects love to talk. But, just as for sentient beings,
their ability to communicate is dependent on their
condition and on the methods of interrogation.
Condition can compromise both the amount and the
type of information an object can provide. In order
to understand the extent of this compromise, access
to a well-considered and reconstructed idea of the
nature of the object at point of conception is required,
as well as access to methods for validating this
reconstruction. Well-defined parameters that identify
what constitutes optimum interrogation techniques,
as well as a rigorous and defensible idea of how
intention can be assessed, are also necessary.
Time, energy and matter are all tools in this process.
Drawing on the historically dichotomic paradigms
framed by art and science, and often defined in terms
of binaries such as predictable/erratic, quantifiable/
creative, and ephemeral/permanent, this paper
explores how the additional binaries of time/place,
light/matter, and energy/entropy can be brought into
alignment to provide a rich aesthetic and scientific
discourse, with the object as both the point of
departure and the point of arrival.
Robyn Sloggett is Director of the Centre for Cultural
Materials Conservation, which delivers industryfocused
teaching, research and consultancy
programs for cultural preservation. Her current
research incorporates art authentication, the scientific
and cultural analysis of painting and medium used
Australia, art market development and the impacts,
cultural conservation in Southeast Asia, and the
preservation of cultural material and digital archives
held in remote and regional communities.
Oliver Smith
Sydney College of the Arts
On Mythbustin’ Macleay and the Case
of the Curious Kianpraty Skull or
Colonial Cryptozoology and the Bunyip
Through the British colonisation of Australia a menagerie
of creatures was brought to global attention
and presented within a European framework as
strange, exotic and fantastic. Coinciding with the
gathering force of Evolutionary Theory within Biology
and increasing Western cultural dominance, the new
continent offered a wealth of animal species
to study, catalogue and collect.
On the edge of this great project the cryptozoologist
worked employing scientific methods and
quackery to speculate on what yet undiscovered life

ALL ABSTRACTS & BIOGRAPHIES P
53
forms might exist in the uncharted wilderness. A mythic
and folkloric view of a rich, animate world was restlessly
labouring beneath a rational and deceptive
veneer. Add to this the influence of indigenous cultural
perspectives, informed by local histories and traditions,
and the colonial misinterpretation of a wholly other
worldview, and we see a context take shape in which
human imagination and intuition is given ample opportunity
to enter a realm where the chimera holds sway.
The story of the bunyip, and its journey from
indigenous mythological beast to a central place
within contemporary Australian folklore, epitomises
the bizarre and revealing tendency for humans to
entertain fragments of information in irrational and
truly creative ways. To illustrate this phenomenon
this paper looks at William Sharp Macleay and his
intrepid interaction with a proposed kianpraty skull,
ancient aboriginal legends, a colonial sham, a tide
of public opinion and a seemingly irrepressible
appetite for the unknown.
Oliver Smith’s visual art practice draws on his
background in silversmithing, his love of the ductile
and malleable qualities of metal and his knowledge
of the history of the silversmith’s craft. His work,
ranging from sculptural object, through to image and
installation, explores themes of non-human agency, the
totemic and the numinous. Oliver’s current research
examines the link between the tool and talisman and
the role of material transformation and biomimicry
in human creativity and culture. Oliver is Head
of Department, Contemporary Art at the University
of Sydney’s School of Contemporary Art (SCA).
Margaret Somerville
Centre for Educational Research,
University of Western Sydney
The Post-human ‘I’ in “Love Your Lagoons”
Love Your Lagoons was an unruly partnership project,
a complex socio-political and environmental
entanglement in the Dharawal Country of Sydney’s
water catchment. The project, funded through an
‘enforceable action’ imposed on a coal seam gas
company for failure to monitor their sites in the study
area, was required to engage with three local shire
councils, a range of community organisations, and
primary and secondary schools across the catchment.
The method of the project was simple; schools
were invited to connect to a local wetland (river, creek,
lake, swamp, lagoon) within walking distance and
integrate the wetland as a place-based sustainability
activity into their curriculum. Schools and teachers
competed for places in the project, keen to learn how
to respond to the Sustainability priority in the new
embedded Australian curriculum. Seven primary
and secondary schools including over 300
children participated.
The focus of this presentation is how children
represented the post-human ‘I’, following Rautio’s
contention that we ‘consider whether bridging the
nature-culture divide can be attempted by exploring
practices through which children themselves seem
to do this’ (Rautio, 2013, 403). In particular the paper
analyses data from one high school that offered
the activity of a weekly walk to their local Redbank
Creek as a sports option called ‘Regeneration’.
The paper is framed in terms of the post-human
concept of entanglement (Barad, 2007) in recognition
of human entanglement in the fate of the planet
(Zalasiewicz et al, 2010, 2231). It addresses the “big,
risky, question, of the posthuman I, the one that enables
all the rest. If we give up ‘human’ as separate from
non-human, how do we exist? Are we willing to take
on this question that is so hard to think but that might
enable different lives?” (Lather & St Pierre, 2013, 631).
The data analysed in the paper consists of two
short videos of children’s engagement with Redbank
Creek and a body of artwork and photographs
produced by the children. The paper proposes that
viewing children’s responses to Redbank Creek
from the perspective of Barad’s ‘intra-action’ offers
new insights into the decentred human subject
of the posthuman ‘I’, requiring new theories of the
relations between language, representation and
worldly engagement. The special needs students
in particular have enabled a collective process of
learning to be human differently. It concludes with
some thoughts about learning to be human differently
through integrating the post-human into school
curriculum.
Tania Spława-Neyman
RMIT University
”Writing To” to Get Between: Traversing
Materials through the Real and Imagined
‘… Dear Red Jacket … I write to you in relation
to some recent contact we have made … I haven’t
always been good to you, and so I hope that my
latest efforts might make some amends …’
These words mark the beginnings of my letters
to Red Jacket, a series of communications with
an object — the materials it is made from and the
reshaped, emergent object it becomes — while
within the process of making this object into
something other. This making was itself shaped by
the act of ‘writing to’, while the artefacts from this
process of ‘writing to’ — the letters — are themselves
created and could not exist without the presence
of the object. They are interdependent artefacts,
with myself, the practitioner as a conduit between.
These concurrent creations, spanning both
a tangible, material-based world, and temporal,
imagined exchange, reflect the discord present
within current manifestations of design. Growing
emphasis on service and interaction and the
consequent dematerialisation of design is contemporaneous
with the ‘consumption’ and rapidly
increasing throughput of more ‘disposable’ materials
and objects than ever before. ‘Writing to’ Red Jacket,
exposes the slippery state between this desire
for enriching experiences and irresistible material
procurement, but also suggests an approach for
traversing this divide. This practice reveals the role
that fiction and imagined material interactions might
play in the making/remaking of a world that for the
sustainment of itself, must become less stuffed with
an over-prevalence of materials and objects that
too quickly become merely ‘stuff’.
Tania Spława-Neyman is a fashion practitioner and
sessional lecturer within the School of Fashion and
Textiles, RMIT University, Melbourne. She recently
completed a PhD by project within RMIT’s School
of Architecture and Design titled: Care Making:
Practices of gleaning, using and future fashioning.
This practice-based research explores making that is
carefully attuned to the inherent qualities of materials
encountered in everyday domestic settings, affording
a deep understanding of and caring for the life of
these materials. The enquiry addresses both problems
of waste and overabundance, working towards
creating a balanced ecology of objects that reshapes
professional design and everyday living practices.
Stephanie Springgay
University of Toronto
The Artist’s Soup Kitchen:
Desire and Hope as Radical Hospitality
This paper explores Deleuze’s notion of a theater
without representation where metaphysics is put
into motion. In exploring the concept of metaphysics
in motion, I seek to understand the ways in which
feminist performance art can enact this movement
and consequently create an affective event outside
of representation.
I ask questions about the elusive and contradictory
nature of desire by thinking-with a socially-engaged
performance art project the Artists’ Soup Kitchen an
event that took place over six Mondays. Each Monday
more than twenty-five volunteers worked with café
staff to prepare and cook a lunchtime meal, which was
then served to more than one hundred community
members. Unlike more traditional soup kitchens,
the event acted as an artistic intervention on utopic
and idealistic practices of social justice by disrupting
normative service practices, revealing social relations
that would otherwise go unnoticed. For example, the
artist Swintak boiled herself into a broth for two days
in a large metal vat over a fire with a selection of
winter vegetables, thereby creating a situation where
she was simultaneously both the chef and the food
being served.
In this paper, I consider “how we eat” as
movement—a becoming-sensation, and thus its
political and pedagogical potential. I argue that such
a socially-engaged event can open up the potential
for a radical hospitality, an affective hopeful proposition
that can create a new vision of the world
and new possibilities for social relations.
Stephanie Springgay is an Associate Professor in the
Department of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning
at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education,
University of Toronto. Her research focuses on
the intersections between contemporary art and
pedagogy, with a particular interest in theories
of matter, movement and affect. Her most recent
research-creation projects are documented
at www.thepedagogicalimpulse.com,
www.walkinglab.org and www.artistsoupkitchen.com.
She has published widely in academic journals and
is the co-editor of the book M/othering a Bodied
Curriculum: Emplacement, Desire, Affect University
of Toronto Press, with Debra Freedman; co-editor
of Curriculum and the Cultural Body, Peter Lang with
Debra Freedman; and author of Body Knowledge
and Curriculum: Pedagogies of Touch in Youth
and Visual Culture, Peter Lang.

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55
Sam Spurr
University of New South Wales
Erin Manning
Concordia University and SenseLab
Andrew Goodman
University of New South Wales
Weather Patterns, Where Forces Meet
This panel discussion will centre on the exhibition
Weather Patterns (Rubicon Gallery, Melbourne)
that coincides with the conference. The artists will
discuss the key conceptual framework for the
exhibition, around Manning’s concepts of the minor
gesture and weather patterns. This exhibition will
be the sixth experiment by Canadian artist and
philosopher Erin Manning considering the concept
of a weather pattern. The iterations have involved
open collaborations with various international artists
in a wide range of media. The 2015 Melbourne
project sees sound and interactive artist Andrew
Goodman and spatial designer Sam Spurr work
with Manning to develop a new, uniquely spatial
and experiential engagement with these ideas.
The ‘weather pattern’ proposed by the exhibition
investigates the problem of how an artistic system
might create what Manning has termed a ‘minor
gesture’, a capacity for the event to activate its
own internal motivations.
The discussion will centre on three entangled
questions about art making and philosophy:
Entertainment of the environment: how is it that
an artwork might tune in on its own potential and
intensively activate? How does Whitehead’s concept
of entertainment provide a way into thinking about
an ecological approach to participation that decenters
human or participation in favour of the enabling of
an emergent enjoyment on an ecological level?
Collaborative practice: How can collaborative
art practice also be conceived as emergent? What
techniques might be developed to enable three artists
to create a truly collaborative practice – a collective
individuation – that outstrips the potential of their
very different individual practices and backgrounds?
How might the notion of gifting artistic concepts
and materials activate an open-ended collaboration?
Research-creation: What is the relationship
between conceptual and artistic practice? How might
concepts activate speculative artistic research?
All these questions are approached in this project
through the concept of ‘minor gestures’ that emerge
from a complex ecology’s own feeling of potential,
as a series of differential events within a field that
catalyzes a collective tuning towards the field’s
relational concrescence into a dynamic and enmeshed
ecology. Here the potential of the minor gesture is
explored not only in terms of the artwork’s ecological
operations, but also as an investigation into the
activation of a field of potential within the larger
ecology of the collaborative relationships of the artists.
Erin Manning is an artist, writer, dancer and academic.
Her artworks utilise fabrics, electronics and other
components to create participatory or relational
experiences. As an artist she exhibits internationally
including showing in the Sydney and Moscow
Biennales. Erin collaborates with a number of artists
internationally. Erin holds the Concordia Research
Chair at Concordia University in Montreal, is the
director of the Senselab, an international art and
philosophy research laboratory. She presents and
publishes widely on philosophy, art and relational
practices, publications include Relationscapes,
Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance, and
Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of
Experience with Brian Massumi.
Andrew Goodman is a visual artist working with sound,
sculpture, performance and participatory installations.
He has an Honours degree from the VCA and a PhD
in Fine Art from Monash University, and lectures in
Art Theory and History at Monash and Federation
Universities. He is a member of the Senselab and is
currently a post-doctoral researcher at UNSW.
Sam Spurr has worked as an artist, designer and
curator with a PhD in performative architectures.
She has worked as a curator on the Kaldor Project
25, at the Gwangju Design Biennale 2011 and the
Prague Quadrennial 2011, worked as a commercial
designer and architect, and as an exhibition designer
for Erin Manning at the Sydney and Moscow Biennales.
She is currently a member of the Senselab and is a
Senior Lecturer at UNSW Art and Design in Sydney.
Erin Stapleton
The University of Melbourne
Destroying Nothing: The Material
Transience of the Digital Archive
Until very recently, the media and materials used
to create cultural objects and images have become
increasingly fragile. Where one might reasonably expect
a statue or building to last for a thousand years before
it crumbles, analog film and photographic images are
far less durable. The collapse of the material duration
of cultural objects has progressed along with
industrialisation and with the introduction of (chemical)
film and photographic techniques that appeared to
faithfully record the living index, while failing to outlive it.
This mechanical decay of the material object
of culture gives the appearance of being reversed
with the introduction of digital technology, and
in particular, the ability to copy and disperse files
through the internet, which makes digital images
appear immaterial, while also making them appear
permanent, or immortal.
In this paper, I will argue, with reference to recent
materialist theory (specifically Karen Barad as well
as others) alongside the materialist legacy of Georges
Bataille that the unpredictability of the residual
materiality of digital data is precisely that which
produces the capacity for its destruction, making the
digital archive as transient as any other.
Erin K Stapleton completed her PhD with the London
Graduate School at Kingston University in 2014.
She has since relocated to Melbourne.
Fleur Summers
RMIT University
Daydreaming and Dissociation: Physical
Encounters as Cognitive Strategies in
Sculptural Practice
Artists and thinkers have a long history of analysing
and incorporating spatial and physical experiences
into their practices. This is evident in the writings
of Henry David Thoreau on walking, musician David
Byrne’s bicycle activism, the documentary video
art of Francis Alys and Bruce Nauman, and the audio
walks of sound artist Janet Cardiff. This breadth of
practice and continuing engagement of contemporary
art with the motion of the human body demonstrates
a deep engagement with how we encounter the
world and art through physical activity.
Physical encounters also have a profound effect
on perception and cognition. It is understood that
everyday activities, such as walking and cycling,
promote thinking through a process of dissociation
similar to daydreaming. Undertaking simple physical
tasks relies on procedural memory and suppresses
active thought, allowing the mind to wander, consider
alternate, potentially rhizomatic, ideas and promotes
complex problem solving. These activities can
create new intensities of thought and are strategic
as cognitive and cultural enablers.
This paper considers the potential of the physical
encounter from the position of a sculptural
practitioner. It explores how dissociative activities
can be employed in ideation alongside ways in which
the viewer experience can be mediated by activity.
This strategy includes movement involved in viewing
a three dimensional artwork as well as participatory
works incorporating relational activities of viewers.
These works aim to empower the viewer so the
encounter is not only an active, participatory and
dialogic event but also has the potential to create
expanded fields of thought.
Fleur Summers is a practicing artist Lecturer in the
School of Art at RMIT University and currently teaches
in the Sculpture, Sound and Spatial Practice Studio.
She has over ten years teaching experience in
sculpture with a focus on process based methodologies
in the development of creativity in the studio.
She also teaches into Art History and Theory teaching
Art, Music and the Brain. Fleur is currently a
PhD candidate at RMIT University. Her project
Making Connections: The Sculptural Encounter
as a Neurocognitive Experience engages with the
intersection of sculpture and neuroscience through
the production of neurologically engaged art works.
Gillian Tan
Deakin University
On the Relationality of Mental and
Material Forms among Tibetan Nomads
Anthropological literature (Descola, Ingold, Pálsson,
Viveiros de Castro) on how various groups of people
actually relate with nonhuman Others has questioned
the universality of the Nature/Culture binary and,
particularly, the usefulness of the concept of Nature to
an understanding of human–nonhuman relationality.
In light of this, what then becomes of ecology?
In particular, can we retain the crucial ecological
notions of system and form while bypassing ‘Nature’?
Drawing on Gregory Bateson’s ecology of mind,
I have suggested - through an approach called
‘an ecology of religiosity’ - that an overall focus
on relationships may dissolve a priori distinctions
between Nature and Culture while foregrounding the
context in which relationships reshape themselves
through religious forms.

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This paper extends this thesis by exploring,
ethnographically, how an ‘ecology of religiosity’
unfolds among a community of nomadic pastoralists
in Eastern Tibet. Vernacular accounts of both the
connections between invisibility and materiality and
social relationships with worldly deities complicate
a linear dichotomy between the mental and material.
Yet, these transversal practices simultaneously create
different categories around which local Tibetans
understand relationships between the mental
and material. As a result, a kind of cross-hatching
– itself relational and dynamic – emerges as the
ethnographer’s perspective interweaves with that
of Tibetan nomads.
Gillian G. Tan is Lecturer in Anthropology at Deakin
University. Her research combines long-term
ethnographic fieldwork among nomads of eastern
Tibet with theoretical developments in phenomenology,
the anthropology of nature, and science and
technology studies. Her work elucidates the multiple
ways in which people understand, and live in, their
worlds. Her current research suggests an alternative
understanding to human-nonhuman-environment
relations and proposes that these interactions adapt
to changes based on a system of logic influenced
by religious forms and processes.
Paul Thomas
University of New South Wales Art and Design
The Shifting Context of Clouds,
Matter and Aesthetics
This paper addresses the moment in time when clouds
inadvertently became metaphors for chaos, and this,
I will argue, is comparable with the cloud’s new context
as a ubiquitous data archive and distribution process.
By using the concept of particles or bits of data
playing in the metaphorical molecular cloud, the paper
will use a theoretical argument to break down the
distinctive boundaries between our bodies, the object
world and clouds. The molecular cloud has become
a new atmospheric formation of rethinking data as
a global, and seemingly immaterial, distribution of
storage and retrieval, so ubiquitous that our experience
of it is akin to breathing in and breathing out. The
cloud is not an object but an experience, an invisible
materiality and its particles are the very building
blocks of a molecular aesthetic in which we live,
breathe and act.
Paul Thomas is Associate Professor and Director
of the Fine Arts program at UNSW Art and Design.
Thomas initiated and is the co-chair of the
Transdisciplinary Imaging Conference series 2010,
2012 and 2014. In 2000 Paul instigated and was the
founding Director of the Biennale of Electronic Arts
Perth 2002, 2004. Thomas’s work takes not only
inspiration from nanoscience and quantum theory,
but actually operates there. His current research
Quantum Consciousness is based on the research
being conducted by Associate Professor Andrea
Morello, Quantum Nanosystems, UNSW, looking
at the visualizing and sonifying the electrons
superposition in the development of quantum
computing. Thomas has exhibited nationally and
Internationally and his current publications are
Nanoart; The immateriality of art, Relive Media Art
Histories, co-edited with Sean Cubitt and Interference
Strategies, co-edited with Lanfranco Aceti and
Edward Colless.
Luke Tipene
Whitehouse Institute of Design, Australia
Imag(in)ing the Impossible - A Case Study
in Drawing and the Process of Designing
States of Experience
This paper is about design processes, drawing and
states of experience in a spatial design context.
It focuses on a reflective analysis of one of the author’s
own projects to illuminate an unanswered paradox in
the spatial design process: Can you explore intangible
states of experience through a spatial design process
that inherently aims to produce tangible outcomes?
States of experience are defined as intangible
constructs that affect our tangible actions in the
built environment. The role of drawing is discussed
as imag(in)ing these states of experience through
enabling ideas to become ‘spatial’ and bridging
the gap between reality and fiction, possible and
impossible and physical and non-physical. This
paper explores this question through an examination
of spatial design processes that purposely evade
tangible outcomes or processes that lead to tangible
outcomes; specifically, Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s
Carceri d’invenzione (Imaginary Prisons) (1745-61),
and Lars Lerup’s Planned Assaults (1987).
The paper argues that these projects purposely
‘sabotage’ the generally accepted flow of spatial
design processes towards buildable solutions.
It suggests that these apparent paradoxes of
designing unbuildable spaces re-frame spatial design
processes as rigorous and meaningful dialectics for
examining intangible, immaterial and non-physical
elements of our lived experience. Through the act
of designing things that cannot be made, topics
such as states of being, experience and identity can
be simultaneously defined, explored and imag(in)ed
using the fundamental properties of spatial design.
Luke Tipene is a Course Director at Whitehouse
Institute of Design, Australia. His research includes
architectural illustration and design thinking. In 2008
he received a Master of Architecture from the
University of New South Wales for his project
A Working Hypothesis on Non-Physical Architecture.
This project received a commendation for the RAIA
Design Medal by the Australian Institute of Architects.
Luke has participated in inter-disciplinary art
and architecture residencies both nationally and
internationally, including The British Council Design
Residency, Edinburgh, UK and UNSW/ETSA Design
Residency, Barcelona, Spain. He is currently consolidating
his research through lectures and academic
papers with the ambition to start a PhD in 2016.
Ash Tower
University of South Australia
Incidents and Situations:
Artworks as Empirical Case Studies
Artworks are like rivers – you can never step in the
same one twice. We as artists can only do so much
to control how our work performs in the world.
But this precariousness is not only an attribute
of the work, but the world itself.
This paper fixates on the nature of volatility
in artworks through systems theory and an actornetwork
sensibility. Using case studies to describe
artworks not only as objects, but as heterogeneous
composites of materials, ideas, agencies and
events, this paper proposes that an artwork is an
entanglement of material and immaterial phenomena.
John Law’s ethnographic case studies provide
a template for processing this complexity, and
indicates how we might view precariousness
and its subsequent qualities as appendages to an
artwork. A systems theoretical approach provides
a mean of analysing how, if an artwork is complex,
its interactions with the world can be accounted for.
This paper examines how an artwork’s autonomy
is not just a product of the art object, but a product
of the object’s engagement with a fragile world.
The artwork is a sum of its relations. Using an actornetwork
sensibility, the paper operates through
a series of artworks presented as case studies –
specifically - Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937), Renata
Lucas’ Quick Mathematics (2006) and my own
work Decompositions (2014), showing incidents
of relational effect clearly breaching into the process
of making. These case studies demonstrate how not
only objects and ideas (materials and semiotics)
are linked to artworks in a heterogeneous way, but
also spatiotemporal occurrences which Claire
Doherty defines as situations.
Based in Adelaide, South Australia, Ash Tower is an
artist and writer, graduating with first class Honours
from the Adelaide Central School of Art in 2014.
He has been involved in multiple group exhibitions,
including Hatched 2014 at the Perth Institute
of Contemporary Arts and FELTmaps, a public art
project by FELTspace. He was awarded the Tracey
Whiting award for an outstanding BVA [Hons]
graduate in 2014, and the James Martin Award for
most Outstanding Graduate [BVA] in 2013. He is
currently undertaking postgraduate research at the
University of South Australia.
Stephen Turner
University of Auckland
Crossing an Uncommon Commons
In the context of new materialisms this presentation
concerns the entwined ecology and place of
indigenous reality. An ‘uncommon commons’ refers
to the sense of place that Indigenous peoples have
in common with one another, which is an understanding
that another people, like themselves, will
have a law that differently governs conduct in that
place. Settlement of the same place by second
peoples makes this common understanding an
uncommon one in the majoritarian and made-over
territory of the settler colony. The short history
of settlers in that place stands in contrast to the
longer history of indigenous habitation.
I ask in this paper how settlers might respectfully
reside in a place whose indigenous governance, or
First law, is not more generally admitted. The material
reality of actually existing indigenous life, or full life,
may be understood, I suggest, in terms of its
currency, which I mean in at least three senses
of the word. Firstly, currency refers to the movement
of air and water, which have enabled the arrival

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of both settlers and Māori themselves. Secondly,
currency refers to what is current, or has deep public
import – in this case referring to the agency of air and
waters, to which many Māori iwi and hapu (larger
and smaller tribal groupings) lay claim, as having
constitutional force and bearing. Thirdly, currency
refers to the medium of transaction, which in settler
time is the money currency of settler-colonialism.
The materialism of Māori claims to governance
asks settlers to embrace currency, more broadly and
deeply, in an historical, ecological and supra-juridical
sense, in order that the fullness of Māori life and
flourishing that settlement inhibits might yet be
expressed. Isabelle Stengers’ concept of cosmopolitics,
taking the earth as source of sovereignty,
and in particular her reading of Alfred Whitehead,
provides the philosophical wherewithal for crossing,
with respect, the uncommon commons of
settler societies.
Stephen Turner teaches in English, Drama and
Writing Studies at the University of Auckland. He has
published widely on questions of settler colonialism,
indigeneity and First law. Alongside an interest in
writing and cultural transmission, he has published
numerous articles on the university, and is currently
co-writing a book with Sean Sturm about pedagogy,
fractal life and social futures.
Hartmut Veit
Victorian College of the Arts,
The University of Melbourne
Matter at the Coalface
Within the current ecological crisis coal actively
intervenes in complex climate, political and social
systems. This paper scrutinises coal’s use in an art
project to demonstrate that prevalent, traditional
disciplinary and linguistic frameworks and visual
representations of matter as inert market-driven
resource materials – without agency – are not
conducive to solving the problems created by
its exploitation. It transversally brings together
interdisciplinary research from the fields of history,
ecology, anthropology and art to reveal the
ecological impact deeply ingrained anthropocentric,
Cartesian worldviews exert in human’s commodified
relationships to matter, nature and place.
This research takes up environmental philosopher
Val Plumwood’s invitation in her article ‘Shadow
places and the politics of dwelling’ to reflect on
‘belonging’ and ‘dematerialisation’, through a sitespecific
study of place shaped by coal. Carbon’s
mobility is traced from ancient forests of the
Carboniferous era and coal, to fire and power through
ethnographic fieldwork in Latrobe Valley communities
and the frame of the Hazelwood Mine fire of 2014.
Excavating beneath the usual first person narratives
of trauma and survival – and the institutional interests
in resilience and community engagement – matter’s
non-innocent, agential nature as actant in connection
with environmental mal-adaption to land and false
consciousness of place is interrogated.
Rethinking matter through the embodied
processes of making and theorising this entanglement
towards a relationship of co-responsibility and
collaboration is discussed through texts from Bennett,
Barad, Latour and Heidegger. Public debate is reorientated
from purely industrial, economic concerns
towards considering matter’s agency, politics
and history as interrelated, blended and mutually
co-creative ecologies.
Hartmut Veit is a practising artist who predominately
works with sculpture. He is currently a PhD candidate
at The University of Melbourne within the Faculty
of the Victorian College of the Arts through the
Centre for Cultural Partnerships. His practice-led
research thesis questions the nature of our
relationship to matter and examines the agency
of site-specific material for spatial practice within
the geo-historical concept of the Anthropocene.
The longstanding emphases on social and political
imperatives within site-specific and socially engaged
art practices are informed by ethnographic methods
and expanded through a new materialist focus
to challenge dominant concepts and visual
representations of matter.
Layne Waerea
The Chasing Fog Club (Est. 2014): Free
Participation, Free T-Shirt
This paper will present documentation of the ongoing
visual arts project the chasing fog club (Est. 2014),
as evidence of free artistic association and
participation in the public social. “The chasing fog
club invites any genuine member of the public
to chase fog anytime, anywhere. In order to join
the club, applicants must submit a photo or video
as evidence of their efforts to chase fog, with all
successful documentation being posted to the blog.
New members receive 12 months free membership,
free entry to the AGM and Club Awards and
a free club t-shirt.” 1
This paper discusses whether active and free
participation, on terms and conditions selected
as favourable to any new or existing club member,
can question the social, legal and artistic rules
governing what is acceptable behaviour in public
spaces. This paper will outline how this club can
provide opportunities for random, yet seasonally
driven, social and artistic participation; even if the
attainment of the vaporous reward is only
momentary. For instance the act of chasing fog
may include trespass to private property and a reconsideration
of behavioural norms, or written and
unwritten laws. This paper suggests that these
free declarations of public effort, while unrestrained
by any formal rules of association and participation,
can quietly challenge and deny expectations of
preferred social and legal behaviour when producing
artwork in public spaces.
Layne Waerea (Te Arawa, Ngāti Kahungunu, New
Zealand/Pākehā) is an Auckland-based artist currently
working towards her PhD. Her Māori ancestry and
value base, and background in law, creates
a framework from which she interrogates sociopolitical
issues from within the visual arts. The main
focus of her practice-based research is to see how
performance art interventions in public spaces can
allow us to question the socio-cultural and legal
rules that govern our behaviours and beliefs.
Glenn Wallace
Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney
Activating the Transversal City:
Public Art and its Uses
Cities around the world are increasingly providing
opportunities for artists to engage in shaping public
space – not simply as ‘global city’ or ‘creative city’
branding – but in the creation of socially equitable
and environmentally sustainable cities. Further,
recent reflections on the post-conceptual nature of
contemporary art suggest art’s impact on urbanism
(Osborne 2013) while a renewed approach to urbanism
reflects the impact of the philosophy of Pragmatism
(Inam 2013). In a surprising and pragmatic sense,
Ranciere’s re-evaluation of aesthetics and politics
argues that the possibility of political change
is at the heart of aesthetics.
This paper argues that the threads of contemporary
art, urbanism and the politics of aesthetics may
be drawn together to suggest a new role for public art.
Based on case studies of recent public art in Sydney,
in particular Jenny Holzer’s I Stay, 2014, the paper
aims to consider the role of public art in achieving a
genuine (radical) democracy, one in which contested
ideas about art and place, space and identity, from
Aboriginal recognition and feminism to queer politics
and political economy, are openly discussed.
The paper specifically aims to explore how the reevaluation
of aesthetics and politics in recent public
art challenges the predominantly neo-liberal hegemony
that continues to shape the design and experience
of cities. It then aims to reconsider the principle of
re-activating public space (Marchart 1998), and the
role of public art in creating, transforming and
sustaining the diverse, vibrant and inclusive public
sphere(s) of the cities we live in. The artwork can
be viewed at: www.istaybyjennyholzer.com
Glenn Wallace is a senior project manager in public
art at the City of Sydney Council. Since 2004 he has
played a key role in delivering the City’s long term
Sustainable Sydney 2030 vision, the City Art public
art strategy, and the annual Laneway Art program
(2008-2012). Glenn is currently a PhD candidate
at Sydney College of the Arts where his research
responds to recent calls from political philosophy,
sociology and urban design for artists working
in public space to not only influence the design
of cities but to engage in transforming the political
and cultural capacities of their citizens.
Andrea Wheeler and Aniket Nagdive
Department of Architecture,
Iowa State University
The Energy Between Us: Two Affective
and Intertwined Space Times Evoked by
Architecture as Prelude to a Proper Sharing?
“I enter a building, see a room, and…” Peter Zumthor
writes, “in a fraction of a second I have this feeling
about it” (Zumthor 2006: 13). As an immediately
grasped judgment of environmental character,
atmosphere has been described as a collaboration
of an infinite number of multisensory factors:
a non-material experience, contrasting centuries
of tradition understanding architecture as material
artefact experienced through the limitation of vision
(Pallasmaa 2014: 20). Atmosphere calls upon our

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entire embodied and existential sense. It stimulates
and guides imagination. A different way of
understanding architecture is being proposed. It is
a vague experience, neither exact nor measurable,
created by an object, but not belonging to it.
Dufrenne (1975 [1953]) writes that atmosphere is a
‘…certain quality which words cannot translate but
which communicates itself in arousing a feeling’
(Dufrenne 1975 [1953]: 178). Atmosphere is a
quasi-objective experience and one, Gernot Bohme
(2014) writes, shared with others but that cannot be
described independently of them. Terms such as
“energy”, more familiar to the Eastern philosophical
tradition, find greater ease with such concepts.
So what is it, vaguely experienced through
different bodies, that evokes such affect? And how
does the relationality between two differently sexed
subjects, suggested by the philosophy of Luce
Irigaray, differently shape our relationship with the
artefact of architecture? Through Luce Irigaray’s
philosophy of being-two, I suggest two affective and
intertwined space-times aroused by atmosphere:
two worlds, two material and immaterial architectures,
as the prelude to a proper sharing.
Andrea Wheeler is Assistant Professor in the
Department of Architecture at the Iowa State
University, where she contributes to the required
technical lecture series and is a studio instructor.
She was awarded a PhD in Architecture from the
University of Nottingham in the UK in 2005. Her thesis
examined the question of dwelling through the
philosophy of Luce Irigaray. Her work is published
in two collections of essays edited by Luce Irigaray:
Teaching and Conservations. Andrea’s work is about
sustainable buildings: she cares about lifestyle
change, the actual performance of buildings and
challenging the sustainability agenda in architecture.
Aniket Nagdive is a Graduate Student in Architecture
at Iowa State University, and is Research Assistant
to Andrea Wheeler. He did his Bachelor’s degree in
Architecture at NIT- Bhopal in India where he worked
on heritage conservation projects during his final
year. During spring 2015 he worked with Iowa State
University Senior Lecturer of Architecture, Peter
Goché at the Black Contemporary Studio. This is
an experimental art and design laboratory in Ames,
Iowa, focused on theories of materiality and affect.
He developed an abstract art installation “Mirage”,
which portrays the seen and unseen energy of the
agricultural landscape of Iowa.
Ardath Whynacht
Mount Allison University
(un)subjects: Diffractive Making
at the Borderlines
(un)subjects explores diffraction (Barad, 2007) as a
method of collective making and considers the role
of vulnerability, attachment and boundaries in
collaborative research-creation methods. (Un)subjects
began as a participatory, arts-based researchcreation
project with a group of young women who
are diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.
Borderline personality disorder is the most
stigmatized disorder listed in the APA Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual and is predominantly diagnosed
in women. It is characterized by emotional instability
and persistent self-harm behaviours such as cutting.
Borderline women face incarceration rates that are
ten times higher than the general population. Critical
constructionist accounts of psychiatry and carceral
spaces have failed to account for the materiality
of suffering experienced by psychiatrized peoples,
instead, positioning itself as concerned purely with
‘meaning’ and against biomedical therapeutics
that seek to engage only with ‘matter’.
Alternatively, new materialist feminisms provide
a space in which to critically and intra-actively engage
with women who know all too well what ‘marks
on bodies’ mean in lived experience. This project
explores what it means to collectively read borderline
experiences diffractively (Haraway, 1997; Barad,
2007) and attempts to spatially map borderline
territories using digital media and curated objects
produced and/or discovered by the women involved
in the project. The author welcomes critical
discussion of the piece; it’s potential as a transversal
practice and the ethical implications of diffractivemaking
methods with highly vulnerable collaborators.
Ardath Whynacht is an interdisciplinary artist and
Doctoral candidate in the Interdisciplinary Humanities
Program at Concordia University. She is a founding
member of Phin; a transdisciplinary performance
collective with roots in contemporary dance and
poetry. She has a degree in Immunology and a
particular interest in contagion, entanglement and
the non-human in all of us. Ardath is currently a
professor of Sociology at Mount Allison University
and completing a two-year project supported by
the Canada Council for the Arts on magic and
everyday objects.
Melissa Wolfe
Monash University
Bullying Affect and Productive Schooling
In this visual research conducted with two intergenerational
groups of Australian females I attempt
to illuminate schoolgirling processes, as material
discursive practices, that refract ontology. In this
paper I theorise the recounted experiences of the
two youngest participants of this study and their
negotiation of what I have named bullying affect
at secondary school. Bullying affect is a conflict
involving a denial of material relationality paradoxically
entangled with a desire for belonging.
This paper is informed by Karen Barad’s (2007)
ontoepistomological framing where knowing
is a direct material experience of the world and the
present is productive of not only the past but also
the future. I consider how the material experience
for the schoolgirl subject might be explicitly extended
to allow, and promote, desires for alternative ways
of knowing what it is to be a successful girl at
school and beyond.
Melissa Wolfe is a photographer and educator
who has taught Media and Visual Art in Victorian
secondary schools for almost twenty years.
Melissa has an undergraduate degree in fine art and
postgraduate degrees in both education and media.
She holds a masters degree in education and
is currently in her final year of her PhD research
at Monash University where she is also a sessional
tutor in teacher education. Her filmic research
examines gendered experiences undergone
at secondary school in Australia
Laura Woodward
Victorian College of the Arts,
The University of Melbourne
Agential Relationships of Time, Matter,
Movement and Experience in System-based
Kinetic Sculpture (using Luc Besson’s
"Lucy" as a Transversal Testing Ground)
In Luc Besson’s 2014 science-fiction film “Lucy”,
lead protagonist Lucy (having absorbed drugs
allowing her to access her full cerebral capacity)
states: “Film a car speeding down a road; speed
up the image infinitely and the car disappears.
So what proof do we have of its existence? Time
gives legitimacy to its existence; time is the only
true unit of measure. It gives proof to the existence
of matter. Without time we don’t exist.”
My practice revolves around kinetic sculptural
installations involving post-humanist considerations
of matter, medium, agency, and systems. I was struck
by the resonance of Lucy’s statement with systembased
kinetic sculpture. The interrelationships
of matter, motion, time, components and sensory
experience are compounded and exposed in the
“ecological” emergence of these works. This paper
uses Lucy’s statement as a starting point – a
transversal testing ground, a framing tool – through
which to explore relationships of time, matter and
motion present in kinetic sculptural practice.
Elucidating how kinetic sculptural systems take
form through agential relationships, kinetic sculpture
is exposed as a site in which entanglements of time,
matter, motion, experience and practice can be
explored and articulated. Delving into these practiceled
articulations of system-based kinetic sculpture,
this paper will show that Lucy, in focusing on time
as the “legitimiser”, overlooks the equally relevant
and present agency of ever-moving matter. It will
foreground the agential entanglement and transversal
natures of time and matter – and by extension,
of motion, sensory experience, and agencies
encountered through artistic practice.
Laura Woodward is an artist and practice-led
researcher. Her practice and research focus on
system-based kinetic sculptural installations.
She received her PhD in 2014 with the practice-led
project “The Introverted Kinetic Sculpture”. She has
exhibited widely in Australia in solo and curated
group exhibitions, with a growing profile in public
sculpture commissions, with her most recent solo
exhibition shown at Ararat Regional Gallery in mid-
2015. She has presented at conferences in Sydney,
Scotland, Belgium and Melbourne. Publications
include a chapter in the collective volume Moving
Imagination: The Motor Dimension of Imagination
in the Arts, 2013; and a refereed article in
Studio Research, 2014.
Kari Yli-Annala
Aalto University, Helsinki
Peter Gidal’s Challenge to the New Materialisms
In Peter Gidal´s materialist/structural Room Film
(1973) the camera follows the surfaces and things

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in a room, repeating it´s movements in every
5 seconds. The grainy look of the film brings the film
very close to the “haptic” image, defined by Laura U.
Marks in her book Skin of the Film (2000). Gidal´s
own body of theoretical thought (i.e. Materialist Film,
1989) is tied strongly in the dialectical marxist view,
following its interpretation by Louis Althusser. How
can the two views be brought together in discussion?
In my paper I will develop this starting point for a
way to discuss about the differences between the
old and the new materialisms in regarding the
filmworks and writings by Gidal.
Kari Yli-Annala is a Helsinki-based researcher and
moving image artist. He is currently doing a doctoral
thesis at The Department of Film, Television
and Scenography in The School of Arts, Design
and Architecture of Aalto University, Helsinki.
Patricia Adams
Mohebat Ahmadi
Thomas Apperely
Annette Arlander
Professor Karen Barad
Estelle Barrett
Kaya Barry
Terri Bird
Maaike Bleeker
Candice Boyd
Madeleine Boyd
Andre Brodyk
Bettina Bruder
Gyungju Chyon
Haya Cohen
Robyn Creagh
Lucy Irvine
Debra Dank
Mary Dixon
Andrea Eckersley
Heidi Fast
Tal Fitzpatrick
Petra Gemeinboeck
Anna Gibbs
Andrew Goodman
Dorota Golanska
Rochelle Haley
Dorita Hannah
David Harris
Rachael Haynes
Chris Henschke
Jan Hogan
Ilona Hongisto
Te Kawehau Hoskins
Darshana Jayemanne
Alison Jones
Lyndal Jones
Sarah Jones
Lotta Kähkönen
Jondi Keane
Lynne Kent
Linda Knight
Bogna Konior
Katve-Kaisa Kontturi
Karolina Kucia
Susie Lachal
Andrew Lavery
Jo Law
Alice Lewis
Professor Hayden Lorimer
Professor Erin Manning
Professor Brian Martin
Rachel Matthews
Margaret Mayhew
Lucinda McKnight
Alejandro Miranda
Scotia Monkivitch
Catherine Montes
Rachel Morgain
Al Munro
Anna Munster
Aniket Nagdive
Bjorn Nansen
Tero Nauha
Astrida Neimanis
Norie Neumark
Lisa Palmer
Justy Phillips
Louise Phillips
Julieanna Preston
Kathleen Quinlivan
Amaara Raheem
Ana Ramos
Janine Randerson
Monique Redmond
Katie Rochow
Stanislav Roudavski
David Rousell
Kay Rozynski
Kim Sargent-Wishart
Karin Sellberg
Mattie Sempert
Mark Shorter
Simone Slee
Robyn Sloggett
Oliver Smith
Margaret Somerville
Tania Spława-Neyman
Stephanie Springgay
Sam Spurr
Curator Joshua Simon
Erin Stapleton
Fleur Summers
Gillian Tan
Paul Thomas
Luke Tipene
Ash Tower
Stephen Turner
Hartmut Veit
Layne Waerea
Glenn Wallace
Andrea Wheeler
Ardath Whynacht
Melissa Wolfe
Laura Woodward
Kari Yli-Annala

Transversal Practices focuses on how things, subjects, collectives, politics and
disciplines are in the making; how they take-form and transform in relation to
other elements, both human and nonhuman. Transversal Practices are concerned
with ecologies where intensities of movement are aligned with and embrace
hands-on attitude and artistic, scientific, ethnographical, philosophical
and activist praxis.
We offer three keywords to inspire thinking and to carve out the specificities
of practice. Matter refers to ubiquitous, vibrant and continuous becoming that
is one of the central concerns of New Materialism: practices are always material,
and surprising in nature. Ecology indicates an open and continuously
transforming system, which depends upon how its components relate to each
other. Relationality, for its part, is the moving principle of being in the world,
or with the world. We become in relation to others. We co-emerge, as do
artworks, ideas and collectives.
We question: How do transversal practices work and how can we account or
conceptualise them? What kind of methodologies do they necessitate, or call for?
We encourage critical approaches that transversally cross the following: collectivity,
corporeality/incorporeality, materiality/immateriality, indigeneity, individual/
group subjectivity, knowledge-production/onto-epistemologies, language,
temporality, transdisciplinarity, processes of making art/philosophy/ activism,
and the three Ss—spatiality, sociality and the sensorium.
The NewMats2015 Conference is sponsored by the Faculty of the VCA and MCM
at the University of Melbourne in co-operation with ISCH COST Action New
Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on ‘How Matter Comes to Matter’