The moon as my witness (original) (raw)
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RE:SOURCE The 10th International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology Proceedings, 2023
This essay surveys a series of unique media artworks spanning a decade, the Moonwalk series, that combine technology, science, and art in the exploration of the cultural and material poetics of lunar artifacts. These works investigate humanity’s epistemological, ontological, and poetic knowledge of the universe via our relationship with the Moon. They are cinema-installations that take on the Moon as both their subject and the determination of their formal realization, engaging the audience with the poetics of semantic and somatic metaphors. The works in this series are composed of collected fragments of histories, stories, songs, poems, films, and scientific data assembled into lyrical, immersive films. Realized in formally diverse, spatialized projections, these cinema-installations disrupt the division between image and architectural space. The cinema- installations described here occupy domes, spheres, and skylines. They manifest as peripatetic films using the concept of somatic montage, the expansion of the cinematic experience into a supra- dimensional, architectonic, navigable space. Their formal realizations create multivalent spaces that rely on the viewers’ movements and attention to complete their narratives. They merge with architecture and engender psychic associations that echo the Moon’s original form and reframe one’s perception of our singular satellite back into the sky.
The Person in the Tree: Shared Writings from Space, Place, Body
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This paper was generated as an experimental collaborative writing exercise as part of the development of conceptual, theoretical and methodological resources of the Space, Place, Body Faculty of Education Research Group at Monash University. A group of higher degree research students undertook an exercise in body/place writing by going on a walk in the nearby Morwell National Park and producing a piece of writing in response to that experience. The responses became the data for the collaborative writing of a paper which followed the standard format of a thesis. Key theoretical influences included the writings of Elizabeth Grosz, Bronwyn Davies and Margaret Somerville. The process was found to generate a wide range of embodied walking stories. Analysis of the written reflections highlighted individually complex and different responses to place and ways of experiencing place. Through the collaborative process, intersections of meanings and new learnings about the ways in which we interact with place were facilitated.
Writing into or drawing from? Self-manifestation through movement in contemporary writing of space
Contemporary Australian cultural studies has seen a move towards a multimodal awareness of space and place in writing – a speculative turn in both critical and creative work confronting the subject/object dichotomy as a limitation in place-making. Theorists such as Ross Gibson, Stephen Muecke and Michael Farrell offer beautiful conceptualisations of written spaces, drawing from several philosophical traditions, which might give context to contemporary creative practices. This writing regularly draws from movement as an integral feature of the practice discussed, with walking emerging in several approaches to re-envision the poet wanderer. But it is also possible to trace in this writing an act of self-manifestation, a desire for the 'doing-making' of self to be inscribed within the multimodal spaces created. This paper will argue that this layering of self and space in the act of writing is both akin to and actively opposing the tradition of Romantic thought. While several features of the practices invoked might seem to draw from similar acts of immersion in landscape, the underlying trope of the Romantic poet's divine communion is inverted in the speculative drive towards multimodal relation.
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Identity landscapes: Contemplating place and the construction of self.. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill/Sense., 2020
The textures of identity and place are ever changing, yet as constant as the terrain that lives within my body. My limbs, tissues, cells, and blood hold memory of particular ethnicities, and my relation to place is deeply connected to my embodied understanding. As a dancer, poet, and arts-based scholar, the heart of my work has explored the way the body integrates and inspires connections, ruptures, and creative capacities to place. I resonate with Adrienne Rich's words, "Begin though, not with a continent or a country or a house, but with the geography closest in-the body" (2003, p. 30). The body holds a fragment of memory, conscious or unconscious, through the cellular landscape of skin, bone, tissues, and gestures. Here is the threshold for an embodied knowledge, which has the capacity to go beyond comprehension, and lies waiting to be discovered, holding possibility for deeper dialogue with how one traverses one's own relationship with their history or herstory. Through poetry, dance, and the spoken word I have cultivated lifelong practices of creating and recreating the fragments of what it means to be in connection to the natural world as well as my to own cultural identity of being Irish and Armenian. Place is both outside and inside my body, dancing in an ongoing relationship. There is a scent to the body's knowing. We smell, touch, feel the sensate world within and around us and here is a habitat of longing and belonging. I draw on forms of poetic inquiry and embodied inquiry, rooted in autobiographical methods, which explore a visceral connection to language, the earth, and cultural identity (
Bone Poems: Listening and Speaking from the Ground
The Ethnographic Edge, 2018
As a practice-led researcher traversing the multiple worlds that exist between artists, communities and institutions, I turned to poetry to begin to speak the unspeakable; to retrieve the metaphorical bones of a story that were taken out. The bones of this story came through the voices of four women who lived and worked at a site located in Western Sydney. Their stories opened a crack in the findings of the research. Unexpectedly their stories interconnected. In an emergent process rather than a predetermined one, the poetic became a way to bring some of the fragmented ‘bones’ of this story to light. A multilayered participatory process of hand making relationship maps and poetry as the final layer of this experimental approach to ethnographic inquiry, resulted in the creation of what I call ‘bone maps’ and ‘bone poems’. They have created ‘ethnographic places’ which allow for deeper inquiry into the human side of the story, interwoven with the complexity of official and often percei...
Moon-Struck: Artists Rediscover Nature And Observe
Earth Moon Planet, 2001
We discuss rare early depictions of the Moon by artists who actually observed Earth's nearest neighbor rather than relying on stylized formulas. The earliest, from the 14th and 15th centuries, reveal that revolutionary advances in both pre-telescopic astronomy and naturalistic painting could go hand-in-hand. This link suggests that when painters observed the world, their definition of world could also include the heavens and the Moon. Many of the artists we discuss - e.g., Pietro Lorenzetti, Giotto, and Jan Van Eyck - actually studied the Moon, incorporating their studies into several works. We also consider the star map on the dome over the altar in the Old Sacristy of San Lorenzo, Florence (c. 1442), whose likely advisor was Toscanelli. In addition, we examine representations by artists who painted for Popes Julius II and Leo X - Raphael and Sebastiano del Piombo, both of whom were influenced by individuals at the papal court, such as the astronomer, painter, and cartographer Johann (Giovanni) Ruysch and Leonardo da Vinci. We also discuss Leonardo's pre-telescopic notes and lunar drawings as they impacted on art and science in Florence, where Galileo would study perspective and chiaroscuro. Galileo's representations of the Moon (engraved in his Sidereus Nuncius, 1610) are noted, together with those by Harriot and Galileo's friend, the painter Cigoli. During the 17th century, the Moon's features were telescopically mapped by astronomers with repercussions in art, e.g., paintings by Donati Creti and Raimondo Manzini as well as Adam Elsheimer. Ending with a consideration of the 19th-century artists/astronomers John Russell and John Brett and early lunar photography, we demonstrate that artistic and scientific visual acuity belonged to the burgeoning empiricism of the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries that eventually yielded modern observational astronomy.
How We Review and Support the Art of Ethnographic Poetry in Anthropology and Humanism
Anthropology and Humanism, 2019
Introducing the New Editorial Collective "A good ethnographic poem needs to be attuned to poetry's extraordinary toolkit: using the line and its tension with the sentence and the stanza, their control and release, to offer a glimpse into what it is like to be alive in a body in the world."-Nomi Stone We are pleased to introduce our readers to the new editorial collective for the Poetry section at Anthropology and Humanism. We are honored to inherit the
Walking with the world: towards an ecological approach to performative art practice.
In this article I consider the potential in an artwork for walking to "world" the body. That is, how movement engages the body in processes by which a relational ecology begins to evolve. I begin with a concept of walking as a 'minor practice' that seeks a creative flight from the structured places of the city and of the body's own capacity to succumb to habit and a loss of breadth of expression. Erin Manning's writing on the moving body and Arakawa and Gins' theories on body-space entanglement are briefly explored, and these concepts are then applied to Nathaniel Stern's Compressionism performative work. This work, while it does not sit within any normative paradigm of walking based art, actively applies the differential potential of movement to explore the ecological engagement of such activities.