As an interdisciplinary artist-researcher, my work combines different modes of thinking, doing and making. I’m interested in processual, embodied, ecological and relational ways of working, with projects having iterative or ongoing developments around long-term themes and theoretical ideas. This covers three expanded fields of practice – performance art and dance, architecture and design, image making and media ontologies.
My Masters Research at the University of Technology Sydney explored Japanese Butoh dance through the lens of Gilles Deleuze’s cine-philosophy; which extended, through Doctoral work at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, into an analysis of psychophysical performance using diagrammatic understandings of affect, situated attention and the image, via object relations and the built environment. This shifted again, with a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Concordia University, in terms of collaborative techniques, collective action and process philosophy, through a special focus on planetary urbanism, using geolocative media and mobile devices. In my role as a Senior Lecturer in Architecture and Design at the University of Tasmania, I developed industry and community partnerships while coordinating student teams in Advanced Design Research. Conference and festival presentations focused on issues of sustainability, including projects around ecological restoration and architectural gamification, historical ruins and despoiled landscapes using drone photogrammetry, and bio-fabrication with mycelium and kelp.
I’m now based in South East Asia (while continuing in an Adjunct role at UTAS), where I’m developing art and design projects with local and international partners. I am Co-founder and Artistic Director of Buffalo Field Festival (2017-19) in the Bangkok Old Town area, in collaboration with Openspace and the Nang Loeng community; also involving colleagues from local and international Universities (Thammasat, UTAS, University of New South Wales, Arizona State University). Here, social practice in art and design meets curatorial experimentation, cross-cultural collaboration, community development, and the teaching-research nexus.
See below for details on Masters, Doctoral, and Post-Doctoral research.
My post-doctoral fellowship in the Senselab at Concordia University worked with theories and practices of participation and collaboration, through process philosophy and relational aesthetics, with a range of projects in interdisciplinary ‘research creation’ (the Canadian term for practice-based research). The fellowship was supported by an international partnership grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2013-2020), with a collaborative network extending to 19 universities and 20 community arts partners worldwide.
The two-year post-doc was an intensive period in which I co-facilitated a series of workshops, public talks and seminars with local Montreal partners – Usine-C, Oboro, Darling Foundry, and the Phi Centre. I also presented papers and performances at several conferences, including; ISEA 2015 in Vancouver; Theatre and Performance Studies, York University, Toronto; Affect Theory Conference, Millersville, Pennsylvania; and Time Forms, McGill University. I participated in regular reading groups, and several international symposia – including Three Mile Meal (Montreal, 2013), Enter Bioscleave (New York, 2013), Anarchiving Precarity (Sydney, 2014), and Fugitive Planning (Montreal, 2015). The post-doc also involved co-editing a special issue of Senselab’s Inflexions Journal, Radical Pedagogy (2015), including the co-authored introduction, Entry Ways, and my own essay, A Sahara in the Head, the Problem of Landing.
Many of these activities overlapped with my own creative works, with multiple collaborators and partners. These included the cross-platform project, O’megaVille (2014-15), and the media-art performance work, Ketl (2015). The latter resulted in further publication, with a book chapter, “So Soon, Too Late: Affective Shift in a Ketl”, in Immediation (Open Humanities Press, 2019).
Research Areas include:
Diagrammatic thinking in art, architecture, and philosophy (primarily Deleuze and Guattari, Bernard Cache, Arakawa and Gins); interdisciplinary practice-based research across dance, performance art and video installation; theories of affect, abstraction, embodied cognition and situated attention; Indonesian trance mediumship through performance practice; Butoh dance and Grotowski physical theatre method.
Thesis Abstract (excerpt):
“This doctoral research, conducted through both practice-based and theoretical inquiry, is located within the field of psychophysical performance practice, informed by and intersected with philosophical and architectural approaches to diagramming. The aim of the research is to develop ways of approaching and understanding how affectivity emerges and transforms in a particularly diagrammatic manner within a performative event. In particular, this is considered through the experience of an individual person, between people as intersubjective and collective bodies, and within the built environments they occupy.”
See here for full Abstract and Thesis download.
Research Areas include:
Practice-based research in Media Production; Avant-Garde performance histories, Antonin Artaud and Tatsumi Hijikata; Butoh dance; materialist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari; Cinephilosophy of Gilles Deleuze; Architecture of Peter Eisenman and Greg Lynn.
Thesis Abstract (excerpt):
“This thesis examines how the relationship between 'the body' and 'the image' may be understood within the Japanese dance movement called Butoh. The aim of the thesis is twofold - to investigate what it means to construct a body specific to Butoh, and to consider how the image in Butoh may be seen to affect this body. In the first instance, I examine how the materiality of the Butoh body constrains or delimits its expressive capacity. In the second instance, I investigate how the materiality of the Butoh image performs a generative function, to stretch the bounds of this body and the limits of its expression. As far as theorising the Butoh body is concerned, what interests me are the points of confluence that may be explored through the materialist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. I seek to demonstrate how the ideas of Tatsumi Hijikata (Butoh's co-founder) may be the discussed through the writing of Antonin Artaud, whose approach to the body influenced both Hijikata and the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. As far as the Butoh image is concerned, I seek to show how Deleuze's Cinephilosophy may also inform an understanding of Hijikata's choreographic method of working with images, called Butoh-fu.”
See here for full Abstract and Thesis download.