Present Ideas Symposium

 

 

1.00pm Introduction Paul Thomas and Julie Louise-Bacon

Chair Paul Thomas

1.05 pm Ian Howard

My art practice and its role as representation has been formed by a valuing of realism.

Consequently, I have developed a practice that utilises a direct-media approach.

The creation of images and ideas emerges from a one to one relationship between the subject matter and the means of representing it, applied within the actual presence and real time operation of that subject matter. Realism is central to the carriage of this work as access to normally restricted subjects: objects, individuals, installations and institutions can best be gained via the mutually agreed integrity of realism.

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1.20 pm Michele Barker

A cinema of movement

In this paper, I’d like to consider new approaches to cinematography, specifically how one might reconfigure moving images via reconsidering the relations of the (moving) camera to its (moving) subject(s). What happens when the camera and its environment become relational and abandon both a fixed camera position and a fixed point of view? I’d like to suggest you get another sense of the moving image: the camera as a ‘moving-with’ the image’s movement.

I will explore this theme through a discussion of my own moving image practice and ask how we can consider filmic movement not as playback of sequences of frames, but rather of moments in time.

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1.35 pm Lindsay Kelley

Tasting history

How might taste might inflect how we understand history? Annemarie Mol asks, for example, what it means to eat an apple, finding that taste can function as an archive: ‘because of the political history of Chile and its reception in the Netherlands, . . . Granny Smith apples came to taste of violence’ (2008, 33). An apple that tastes of violence connects international politics, national identity, and sensory encounter, creating new knowledge through these connections. Drawing from the intense histories and subtle tastes of wheat and wheat products, I will offer a tasting alongside a proposition for understanding history differently.

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1.50 – 2.05 pm Session discussion Q&A

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2.05 – 2.30 Break

Chair Julie Louise-Bacon

2.30 pm Josh Wodak

Energy In Equals Inergy Out: Living (and dying) in the material world

At the heart of the challenges posed by the Anthropocene is Earth’s energy imbalance between incoming solar energy absorbed vs radiated back out to space as heat. This presentation explores artistic engagement with materialising energy – in the form of geoengineering proposals to ‘design’ the seemingly immaterial properties that provide life support systems for the material world. With anthropogenic climate change constituting an unplanned and unintentional experiment on the biosphere and atmosphere, my work explores the ethics and efficacy of plans to intentionally mitigate human impact on the biosphere, through synthetic biology, and on the atmosphere, through climate engineering. The paper discusses how such art practice materialises energy, including an overview of the author’s installation ‘Shape Things To Come.’

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2.45 pm Izabela Pluta

IMAGES AND AGENCY Gleaning as practice: a method for examining expanded photographic materiality.

My current work looks at the practice of pseudo-archeology and the archive as a methodology for considering image agency and materiality in contemporary photographic practices. Like an itinerary that provides a traveller with a narrative to cross and connect sites, I introduce the concept of ’gleaning’ as a way of drawing us closer to the memory of an experience and to simultaneously disrupt the connection to that object or place.

I will draw on my new work Paper, stone and permutations in response to these ideas, where I use gleaning as a methodology for ‘displacing’ experience while drawing on the potential of photographs to evoke temporal and psychological distance from places. I consider these possibilities in relation contemporary ideas about ‘place’ and how it’s increasingly constructed in hybrid ways.

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3.00 pm Sam Spurr

Sam Spurr sets up a set of procedural translations that work across shifting scales and mediums creating a series of works using her own body, drawing, model making and installation. They seek to critically engage architectural drawing and diagramming with a processual understanding of the moving body. In ‘Diagramming the Body Geometric/ So You Think You Can Dance’, Kate Bush’s 1978 choreography for ‘Wuthering Heights’ was translated with her own mirrored performance that was then captured on video and then reconsidered through a set of diagrams. These diagrams formed the basis of six drawings that were explored three dimensionally into models and then rescaled and re-made into an installation.  Her current work is a tangential iteration of this project, that continues the procedure with a focus on the investigation of scale.

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Discussion session Q&A and Plenary session

Listen to session 2 discussion >>>