main conference abstracts & biographies - University of New South ...

through events in the life of the World Trade Centre towers, in New York.
Predominantly, the paper works with the part these towers played in Phillip Petit’s
1974 tightrope performance experiment, as documented in the recent film Man
on Wire. The aim is to sketch out ways in which these towers can be understood
as an experimental life across the moments and momentum of their existence,
leading toward ways of approaching architecture in terms of the vitality it
contributes to the world.
BIOGRAPHY
Dr Pia Ednie-Brown is an Associate Professor in the Architecture
program and a research leader at the Spatial Information Architecture
Lab (SIAL), RMIT, Melbourne. She has a research practice, Onomatopoeia,
involving art-architecture installations, animation, sculpture, creative
writing and theoretical analysis. She is working on an Australian
Research Council project with Oron Catts of SymbioticA, Professor Mark
Burry, and Dr Andrew Burrow. This project aims to develop a qualitative
model of innovation, thorough an exploratory and generative case study
on the intersections between digital architecture, biological arts and
related spatial practices. She produced a book, Plastic Green (RMIT
Press, 2009), about a research project that investigated alternative
ways of constructing relationships with our environments, proposing an
idea of 'transformability' rather than 'sustainability'. Her papers have
been published in journals such as the Architectural Design Academy
Editions, The Fibreculture Journal, and 306090 books, among others.
AFFECTIVE EXPERIMENTS
JENNIFER BIDDLE
A politics of proximity: Tjanpi and other experimental Western Desert art
This paper is about new and experimental Western Desert Australian Aboriginal
art. It identifies affective intensification as the primary modality by which
culturally specific object relationality is developing in emergent Indigenous art
forms. Pace Deleuze, the aesthetic encounter is valuable above all else
because it incites sensation and participatory somatic transformation. This paper
develops an analysis of Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women’s
Tjanpi art as instigatory in a sentient reiteration of potent political exigency.
While Tjanpi may appear, at one level, as innocuous works of traditional handicraft
- baskets, bowls, figurative soft sculptures - at another level, these works reincite
a certain ‘nuclear script’ (Tomkins) of country, place and practice: a
conjointly female specific way of being with one another, and of being in
country. Imbrications of habit, affect and encounter take shape through cooriented
bodies in ‘concernful absorption’ by which country becomes a place of
feeling as much as practice. Incarnate forms index country directly – figures of
animals, birds, snakes, people; everyday secular forms. The use of grasses, rushes,
camel hair, human hair; collected, cut, dried; spindle spun, spat on even;
caressed, fondled, held - the viscera of country, person, and above all else, an
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