Ross Gibson

Mega Screens for Mega Cities

This article considers how networked large urban screens can act as a platform for the creation of an experimental transnational public sphere. It takes as a case study a specific Australia-Korea cultural event that linked large screens in Federation Square, Melbourne, and Tomorrow City, Incheon, 1 through the presentation of SMS-based interactive media art works. The article combines theoretical analyses of global citizenship, mobility, digital technologies, and networked public space with empirical analyses of audience response research data collected during the screen event. The central argument is that large public screens can offer a strategic site for examining transformations in the constitution of public agency in a digitized, globalized environment. The idea of ‘aesthetic cosmopolitanism’ is finally proposed as a conceptual framework for understanding how new forms of transnational public agency in mediated public spaces might operate.

On the senses and semantic excess in photographic evidence

It is widely accepted that forensic procedures are meant to bring precise interpretation to puzzling scenes and parcels of evidence. Forensic activity is a cool, slow and deliberate process of making meaning. But what of the feelings that also suffuse the scenes and the evidence? Does the force of affect linger in or around forensic materials? Can these feelings be evoked so they can be assayed to produce a particular kind of knowledge, even as they pulse and pass? How can investigators pay proper attention to the feelings that often elude or bamboozle conventional semiotic and semantic procedures? To address these questions, this article considers a specific archive of crime-scene photographs.

What the eye can hear

Abstract This paper draws on studies of encounters with remote Indigenous Australian cultures by scholars such as Barry Hill and Martin Thomas. I also refer to my own studies of the transactions between Indigenous and invasive cultures around Sydney, 1788_1791. Again and again in Europeans’ first-contact accounts of Indigenous cultures, there is a sense that Indigenous knowledge is arranged in people and in space and time in ways that are completely at odds with Western presumptions about cognition and interpretation. There is a sense that awareness is a multi-modal experience and that there is no point in separating the senses that Western commonsense tends to distinguish and hierarchise. While I do not purport to explain Indigenous thought here, I do want to dwell on the enigmas that arise in accounts of the encounters between the indigenous and incursive mentalities. What fundamental questions do the records of these encounters pose for Western assumptions about the operations of sense and the separated senses?

Patyegarang and William Dawes: the Space of Imagination

In January 1788 Lieutenant William Dawes came to Botany Bay, on Australia’s southeastern coast, with the First Fleet Marines. Lately he has loomed into contemporary awareness in Australia. This emergence has occurred after he had just about disappeared from accounts having completed his four-year Sydney sojourn in December 1791. For almost two hundred years Dawes missed out on close historical attention because his papers and effects had been assumed destroyed in family disputes and by a hurricane in Antigua during the nineteenth century. But in 1972 his two ‘language notebooks’ were discovered at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.1 Amounting to eighty small pages of spacious handwriting, the notebooks are a vital trace of the first four years of British colonisation in Australia, and since their retrieval growing numbers of scholars have been appreciating not only the timbre of Dawes’ intellect but equally the boldness and wit of the Indigenous people with whom he conversed.2

All things are in contact

I visit Kyoto regularly. Many years ago, preparing for my first sojourn there, I asked an experienced visitor what should I do on day one. She advised I bus out to the temple precinct at Daitoku-ji and spend the afternoon mooching to and fro among the Rinzai Sect gardens. Wryly she said, ‘It’s like speed-zen’. Decades later, I think this advice was canny. More than just wry, my friend gave me the means to get started. Like a koan, her counsel was ironic and sincere, senseless and sensible. For all its insufficiency and vapidity, the speed-zen approach has merit because it gives you an ordinary way into the mysteries. By ignoring any single, mandatory portal into the zen sensibility, you are freed from the paralysis that usually goes with the surfeit of significance overwhelming any newcomer to Kyoto. With speed-zen – despite how wrong it is in its swiftness and cognitive grabbiness – you do stand a chance of being shocked and stimulated by odd conjunctions. You might see, for example, how this revered garden path can be crash-edited against that glimpse of a tiny child crouching to inspect a stand of moss while her huge robot-shaped backpack peers companionably over her shoulder and absorbs the full world with unblinking serenity; or you might savour the vision of a monk polishing the hubcaps of his tangerine Mitsubishi while on the other side of the compound wall an advertising van chimes out a rendition of ‘Jingle Bells’ generated from a digital synthesiser’s version of Caribbean steel drums. After all, it is from these quotidian montages that little epiphanies sometimes spark, and through these tiny fissures in commonsense, so long as you can believe that a logic other than Rethinking History Vol. 14, No. 4, December 2010, 587–595

The Maslyn Williams Network

ABSTRACT This paper provides some accounting for recent work by the authors on a cultural biography of Ron Maslyn Williams (20 February 1911 to 11 August 1999), an Australian photographer, writer, film-maker, and musician. An inveterate traveller and man of influence in many artistic and diplomatic spheres around the world, he became a leading Catholic figure, a kind of “cultural ambassador” promoting a worldview that far outreached “Anglican” constraints. Williams’s prodigious talent is mirrored in his multi-perspectival career, extensive travels, and numerous relationships with people on the world stage. In attempting to locate the most appropriate way in which to deal with the fragments and encounters in Williams’s life, as they inform the particular yet multifarious post-war culture in which he performed, the authors have taken an historicist approach to identify six nodes of a transnational cultural network in which Williams operated.

Cast Against Type

William Dawes was a marine lieutenant in the First Fleet at Sydney Cove. A self-taught engineer and natural philosopher, he became involved with the local people, particularly with an investigation of the language. His notebooks show people and cultures on both sides of the colonial cut slipping their organizational categories and commonsense typologies. At Sydney Cove, Dawes swirled into a relational world that undid the nominalist world that he had been trained to manage.

Wayfaring strangers: reflections on an artistic investigation of mood in online mapping

On any leisured late night, preferably with a lamp lit against the sombreness, you can search online for criminal court reports that will set you up for cruising via Google’s Street View to the photographed locations of the misdemeanours you’ve just probed. In digital Dallas (Texas), for example, you can convene your own motorcade, as millions have done, banking off Elm Street past the grassy knoll on Dealey Plaza. Then from the shadow of the Book Depository you can drag the cursor way over the Equator to a poverty-struck corner of South Australia, as dozens may have done. There you can trundle a route that starts at a site of horror in the body-dump bank vault on the main street of Snowtown and finishes in a somewhat hallucinatory aftermath out amidst the heart-stopping photogenics of the sea-coast along Myponie Point Drive, one hypnotic hour’s travel from the gore. (Search Google for ‘Snowtown murders’ if you don’t know the case. Full disclosure: I have driven through the Yorke Peninsula a few times in the past and I have visited Snowtown, albeit a full decade before the horrors of the bank vault. So I have an embodied memory of the place that Street View can rouse.) Even with your domestic comforts close by and with your computer-screen filtering the terror that once hit several poor souls unmediated, you will sense the isolation along Myponie and you might crave a status report from Google: how many other folks are out here on this lonesome cybernetic road right now (which Google could tell you) and why are they abroad (which, most likely, not even the lurkers themselves could tell you). Facilitated by Street View, these stakeouts make an odd and addictive kind of tourism. It’s an experience steeped in the colonialism and globalization that drive Google’s mapping of space; it’s an experience inviting reflection on how many ways you can be in space or move through it, how space can be something that you think you possess and utilize even as it holds and inhabits you. The Street View scenes hang between space and place, therefore; between land and landscape; between travel and tenure. In his ‘landmark’ books The Dark Side of the Landscape and The Idea of Landscape, John Barrell studies rural politics and poetics in early industrial England. He examines the assault that fell upon the commons during the eighteenth century when land tenure was forcibly altered across most of Britain so that extensive tracts that had long been held, farmed and husbanded communally, in a ‘traditional’ way, were transformed to become intensive, enclosed estates that were owned personally, sequestered and exploited, in a ‘modern’ way. Barrell shows how the twinned phenomena of the Industrial Revolution and the Postcolonial Studies, 2014, Vol. 17, No. 3, 334–341

Translating Gesture in a Transnational Public Sphere

Translation is a key concept for interpreting cross-cultural exchanges. In this article, we track the development of an artistic project that we developed in conjunction with Federation Square Melbourne and Art Centre Nabi in Seoul. It involved the performance of a live telematic dance that occurred in both cities and was transmitted via the use of large screens. The interaction across these physical and mediated spaces produced a dynamic exchange of learning and communication. Through our active involvement as curators, participant observers and the gathering of audience participation data, we discovered that the corporeality of the dance placed both the addresser and the addressee in the context of the social practice of translation. In this context, we note that artistic projects can provide an embodied experience of the forms of heterolingual address and cross-cultural translation as analysed by Naoki Sakai. We conclude that the fascination for engaging in transnational communication was stimulated by the cross-cultural process of translating gestures.

The Flood of Associations

This essay examines natural and artificial signifiers in a tract of colonised land in south-east Australia. The essay asks how do country and human consciousness mingle to fashion each other in long processes of remembrance? How does the present loom out of the past across generations, ecologies and geographies, within communities formed by actively remembering individual psyches? Language is one of these ways. Therefore, the essay pays attention to the form of its writing.