Journal articles on the topic 'Andres, Mark. – Exhibitions'

Black women are treated as though we are a box of chocolates presented to individual white women for their eating pleasure, so they can decide for themselves and others which pieces are most tasty (hooks 80). Introduction bell hooks equates African-American women with chocolates, which are picked out and selected for someone else’s pleasure. In her writing about white women who have historically dominated the feminist movement, hooks challenges the ways that people conceptualise the “self” and “other”. She uses a feminist lens to question widespread assumptions about the place of Black women in American society. hooks’s work has been applied to the Australian context by Bronwyn Fredericks, to explore the ways that Aboriginal women and men are perceived and “selected” by the broader Australian society. In this paper, we extend previous work about the metaphor of chocolate to discuss the themes underpinning an art exhibition—Hot Chocolate—which was curated by Troy-Anthony Baylis and Frances Wyld. Baylis and Wyld are Aboriginal Australians who are based in Adelaide and whose academic and creative work is centred within South Australia. The exhibition was launched on 14 November 2012 as part of Adelaide’s Visual Arts Program Feast Festival 2012 (CroftWarcon and Fredericks). It was curated in Adelaide’s SASA Gallery (which is associated with the School of Art, Architecture and Design at the University of South Australia). This paper focuses on the development of Hot Chocolate and the work produced by Aboriginal artists contained within it, and it includes a conversation about the work of Pamela CroftWarcon. Moreover, it discusses these works produced by the artists and links them back to the issues of identity and race, and how some Aboriginal people are selected like chocolates over and above others. In this, we are interested in exploring some of the issues around politics, desire, skin, and the fetishisation of race and bodies. The Metaphor of Chocolate This work will focus on how Aboriginal Australians are positioned as “chocolates” and how people of colour are viewed by the wider society, and about whether people have a pliable “soft centre” or a brittle “hard centre.” It uses hooks’s work as a point of reference to the power of the metaphor of chocolate in considering questions about who is “tasty.” In the Australian context, some Aboriginal people are deemed to be more “tasty” than others, in terms of what they say, write, and do (or what they avoid saying, writing, or doing). That is, they are seen as being sweeter chocolates and nicer chocolates than others. We understand that some people find it offensive to align bodies and races of people with chocolate. As Aboriginal women we do not support the use of the term ‘chocolate’ or use it when we are referring to other Aboriginal people. However, we both know of other Aboriginal people who use the metaphor of chocolate to talk about themselves, and it is a metaphor that other people of colour throughout the world similarly might use or find offensive. Historically, chocolate and skin colour have been linked, and some people now see these connections as something that reminds them of a colonial and imperial past (Gill). Some Aboriginal people are chosen ahead of others, perhaps because of their “complementary sweetness,” like an after-dinner mint that will do what the government and decision makers want them to do. They might be the ones who are offered key jobs and positions on government boards, decision-making committees, or advisory groups, or given priority of access to the media outlets (Fredericks). Through these people, the government can say, “Aboriginal people agree with us” or “this Aboriginal person agrees with us.” Aileen Moreton-Robinson is important to draw upon here in terms of her research focused on white possession (2005). Her work explains how, at times, non-Indigenous Anglo-Australians may act in their own interests to further invest in their white possession rather than exercise power and control to make changes. In these situations, they may select Aboriginal people who are more likely to agree with them, ether knowingly or in ignorance. This recycles the colonial power gained through colonisation and maintains the difference between those with privilege and those without. Moreover, Aboriginal people are further objectified and reproduced within this context. The flip side of this is that some Aboriginal people are deemed to be the “hard centres” (who are not pliable about certain issues), the “less tasty” chocolates (who do not quite take the path that others expect), or the “brittle” types that stick in your teeth and make you question whether you made the right choice (who perhaps challenge others and question the status quo). These Aboriginal people may not be offered the same access to power, despite their qualifications and experience, or the depth of their on-the-ground, community support. They may be seen as stirrers, radicals, or trouble makers. These perceptions are relevant to many current issues in Australia, including notions of Aboriginality. Of course, some people do not think about the chocolate they choose. They just take one from the box and see what comes out. Perhaps they get surprised, perhaps they are disappointed, and perhaps their perceptions about chocolates are reinforced by their choice. In 2011, Cadbury was forced to apologise to Naomi Campbell after the supermodel claimed that an advertisement was racist in comparing her to a chocolate bar (Sweney). Cadbury was established in 1824 by John Cadbury in Birmingham, England. It is now a large international corporation, which sells chocolate throughout the world. The advertisement for Cadbury’s Bliss range of Dairy Milk chocolate bars used the strapline, “Move over Naomi, there's a new diva in town” (Moss). Campbell (quoted in Moss) said she was “shocked” by the ad, which was intended as a tongue-in-cheek play on Campbell's reputation for diva-style tantrums and behaviour. “It's upsetting to be described as chocolate, not just for me but for all black women and black people,” she said. “I do not find any humour in this. It is insulting and hurtful” (quoted in Moss). This is in opposition to the Aboriginal artists in the exhibition who, although as individuals might find it insulting and hurtful, are using the chocolate reference to push the boundaries and challenge the audience’s perceptions. We agree that the metaphor of chocolate can take us to the edge of acceptable discussion. But we also believe that being at the edge of acceptability allows us to explore issues that are uncomfortable. We are interested in using the metaphor of chocolate to explore the ways that non-Indigenous people view Aboriginal Australians, and especially, discussions around the politics of identity, desire, skin, and the fetishisation of race and bodies. Developing the Exhibition The Hot Chocolate exhibition connected chocolate (the food) and Hot Chocolate (the band) with chocolate-coloured people. It was developed by Troy-Anthony Baylis and Frances Wyld, who invited nine artists to participate in the exhibition. The invited artists were: Troy-Anthony Baylis, Bianca Beetson, Pamela CroftWarcon, Cary Leibowitz, Yves Netzhammer + Ralph Schraivogel, Nat Paton, Andrew Putter and Dieter Roth (CroftWarcon and Fredericks). The exhibition was built around questions of what hot chocolate is and what it means to individuals. For some people, hot chocolate is a desirable, tasty drink. For others, hot chocolate brings back memories of music from the British pop band popular during the 1970s and early 1980s. For people with “chocolate-coloured skin”, chocolate can be linked to a range of questions about desirability, place, and power. Hot Chocolate, the band, was based in Britain, and was an inter-racial group of British-born musicians and immigrants from Jamaica, the Bahamas, Trinidad and Grenada. The title and ethnic diversity of the group and some of their song lyrics connected with themes for curatorial exploration in the Hot Chocolate exhibition. For example: I believe in miracles. Where you from, you sexy thing? … Where did you come from baby? ... Touch me. Kiss me darling… — You Sexy Thing (1975). It started with a kiss. I didn’t know it would come to this… — It Started With A Kiss (1983). When you can't take anymore, when you feel your life is over, put down your tablets and pick up your pen and I'll put you together again… — I’ll Put You Together Again (1978). All nine artists agreed to use lyrics by Hot Chocolate to chart their journeys in creating artworks for the exhibition. They all started with the lyrics from It Started With A Kiss (1983) to explore ways to be tellers of their own love stories, juxtaposed with the possibility of not being chosen or not being memorable. Their early work explored themes of identity and desirability. As the artists collaborated they made many references to both Hot Chocolate song lyrics and to hooks’s discussion about different “types” of chocolate. For example, Troy-Anthony Baylis’s Emotional Landscape (1997-2010) series of paintings is constructed with multiple “x” marks that represent “a kiss” and function as markers for creating imaginings of Country. The works blow “air kisses” in the face of modernity toward histories of the colonial Australian landscape and art that wielded power and control over Aboriginal subjects. Each of the nine artists linked chocolate with categorisations and constructions of Aboriginality in Australia, and explored the ways in which they, as both Aboriginal peoples and artists, seemed to be “boxed” (packaged) for others to select. For some, the idea that they could be positioned as “hot chocolate”—as highly desirable—was novel and something that they never expected at the beginning of their art careers. Others felt that they would need a miracle to move from their early “box” into something more desirable, or that their art might be “boxed” into a category that would be difficult to escape. These metaphors helped the artists to explore the categories that are applied to them as artists and as Aboriginal people and, particularly, the categories that are applied by non-Indigenous people. The song lyrics provided unifying themes. I’ll Put You Together Again (1978) is used to name the solidarity between creative people who are often described as “other”; the lyrics point the way to find the joy in life and “do some tastin'.” You Sexy Thing (1975) is an anthem for those who have found the tastiness of life and the believing in miracles. In You Sexy Thing, Hot Chocolate ask “Where you from?”, which is a question that many Aboriginal people use to identify each others’ mobs and whom they belong to; this question allows for a place of belonging and identity, and it is addressed right throughout the exhibition’s works. The final section of the exhibition uses the positive Everyone’s A Winner (1978) to describe a place that satisfies. This exhibition is a winner, and “that’s no lie.” Pamela CroftWarcon’s Works In a conversation between this paper’s authors on 25 November 2013, Dr Pamela CroftWarcon reflected on her contributions to the Hot Chocolate exhibition. In this summary of the conversation, CroftWarcon tells the story of her artwork, her concepts and ideas, and her contribution to the exhibition. Dr Pamela CroftWarcon (PC): I am of the Kooma clan, of the Uralarai people, from south-west Queensland. I now live at Keppel Sands, Central Queensland. I have practised as a visual artist since the mid-1980s and have worked as an artist and academic regionally, nationally, and internationally. Bronwyn Fredericks (BF): How did you get involved in the development of Hot Chocolate? PC: I was attending a writing workshop in Brisbane, and I reconnected with you, Bronwyn, and with Francis Wyld. We began to yarn about how our lives had been, both personally and professionally, since the last time we linked up. Francis began to talk about an idea for an exhibition that she and Troy wanted to bring together, which was all about Hot Chocolate. As we talked about the idea for a Hot Chocolate exhibition, I recalled a past discussion about the writing of bell hooks. For me, hooks’s work was like an awakening of the sense and spirit, and I have shared hooks’s work with many others. I love her comment about Black women being “like a box of chocolates”. I can understand what she is saying. Her work speaks to me; I can make sense of it and use it in my arts practice. I thus jumped at the chance to be involved. BF: How do you understand the concepts that frame the exhibition? PC: Many of the conversations I have had with other Aboriginal people over the years have included issues about the politics of living in mixed-race skin. My art, academic papers, and doctoral studies (Croft) have all focused on these issues and their associated politics. I call myself a “fair-skinned Murri”. Many non-Indigenous Australians still associate the colour of skin with authentic Aboriginal identity: you have to be dark skinned to be authentic. I think that humour is often used by Aboriginal people to hide or brush away the trauma that this kind of classification can cause and I wanted to address these issues in the exhibition. Many of the exhibition’s artworks also emphasise the politics of desire and difference, as this is something that we as Indigenous people continually face. BF: How does your work connect with the theme and concepts of the exhibition? PC: My art explores the conceptual themes of identity, place and Country. I have previously created a large body of work that used found boxes, so it was quite natural for me to think about “a box of chocolates”! My idea was to depict bell hooks’s ideas about people of colour and explore ways that we, as Aboriginal people in Australia, might be similar to a box of chocolates with soft centres and hard centres. BF: What mediums do you use in your works for the exhibition? PC: I love working with found boxes. For this work, I chose an antique “Winning Post” chocolate box from Nestlé. I was giving new life to the box of chocolates, just with a different kind of chocolate. The “Winning Post” name also fitted with the Hot Chocolate song, Everyone’s A Winner (1978). I kept the “Winning Post” branding and added “Dark Delicacies” as the text along the side (see Figure 1). Figure 1.Nestle’s “Winning Post” Chocolate Box. Photograph by Pamela CroftWarcon 2012. PC: I bought some chocolate jelly babies, chocolates and a plastic chocolate tray – the kind that are normally inserted into a chocolate box to hold the chocolates, or that you use to mould chocolates. I put chocolates in the bottom of the tray, and put chocolate jelly babies on the top. Then I placed them into casting resin. I had a whole tray of little chocolate people standing up in the tray that fitted into the “Winning Post” box (see Figures 2 and 3). Figure 2. Dark Delicacies by Pamela CroftWarcon, 2012. Photograph by Bronwyn Fredericks 2012. Figure 3. Dark Delicacies by Pamela CroftWarcon, 2012. Photograph by Pamela CroftWarcon 2012. PC: The chocolate jelly babies in the artwork depict Aboriginal people, who are symbolised as “dark delicacies”. The “centres” of the people are unknown and waiting to be picked: maybe they are sweet; maybe they are soft centres; maybe they are hard centres. The people are presented so that others can decide who is “tasty”─maybe politicians or government officers, or maybe “individual white women for their eating pleasure” (hooks) (see Figures 4 and 5). Figure 4. Dark Delicacies by Pamela CroftWarcon, 2012. Photograph by Pamela CroftWarcon 2012. Figure 5. Dark Delicacies by Pamela CroftWarcon, 2012. Photograph by Pamela CroftWarcon 2012. BF: What do you hope the viewers gained from your works in the exhibition? PC: I want viewers to think about the power relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. I want people to listen with their ears, heart, mind, and body, and accept the challenges and changes that Indigenous people identify as being necessary. Icould have put names on the chocolates to symbolise which Aboriginal people tend to be selected ahead of others, but that would have made it too easy, and maybe too provocative. I didn’t want to place the issue with Aboriginal people, because it is mostly non-Indigenous people who do the “picking”, and who hope they get a “soft centre” rather than a “peanut brittle.” I acknowledge that some Aboriginal people also doing the picking, but it is not within the same context. BF: How do you respond to claims that some people might find the work offensive? PC: I believe that we can all tag something as offensive and it seems to be an easy way out. What really matters is to reflect on the concepts behind an artist’s work and consider whether we should make changes to our own ways of thinking and doing. I know some people will think that I have gone too far, but I’m interested in whether it has made them think about the issues. I think that I am often perceived as a “hard-centred chocolate”. Some people see me as “trouble,” “problematic,” and “too hard,” because I question, challenge, and don’t let the dominant white culture just simply ride over me or others. I am actually quite proud of being thought of as a hard-centred chocolate, because I want to make people stop and think. And, where necessary, I want to encourage people to change the ways they react to and construct “self” and “other.” Conclusion The Hot Chocolate exhibition included representations that were desirable and “tasty”: a celebration of declaring the self as “hot chocolate.” Through the connections with the food chocolate and the band Hot Chocolate, the exhibition sought to raise questions about the human experience of art and the artist as a memorable, tasty, and chosen commodity. For the artists, the exhibition enabled the juxtaposition of being a tasty individual chocolate against the concern of being part of a “box” but not being selected from the collection or not being memorable enough. It also sought to challenge people’s thinking about Aboriginal identity, by encouraging visitors to ask questions about how Aboriginal people are represented, how they are chosen to participate in politics and decision making, and whether some Aboriginal people are seen as being more “soft” or more “acceptable” than others. Through the metaphor of chocolate, the Hot Chocolate exhibition provided both a tasty delight and a conceptual challenge. It delivered an eclectic assortment and delivered the message that we are always tasty, regardless of what anyone thinks of us. It links back to the work of bell hooks, who aligned African American women with chocolates, which are picked out and selected for someone else’s pleasure. We know that Aboriginal Australians are sometimes conceptualised and selected in the same way. We have explored this conceptualisation and seek to challenge the imaginations of others around the issues of politics, desire, skin, and fetishisation of race and bodies. References Croft, Pamela. ART Song: The Soul Beneath My Skin. Doctor of Visual Art (Unpublished thesis). Brisbane: Griffith U, 2003. CroftWarcon, Pamela and Bronwyn Fredericks. It Started With a KISS. Hot Chocolate. Exhibition catalogue. Adelaide: SASA Gallery, 24 Oct.-29 Nov. 2012. Fredericks, Bronwyn. “Getting a Job: Aboriginal Women’s Issues and Experiences in the Health Sector.” International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies 2.1 (2009): 24-35. Gill, Rosalind. Gender and the Media. Malden, MA: Polity, 2007. hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress Education as the Practice of Freedom. London: Routledge, 1994. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. “The House That Jack Built: Britishness and White Possession.” ACRAWSA Journal 1, (2005): 21-29. 1 Feb. 2014. ‹http://www.acrawsa.org.au/ejournal/?id=8› Moss, Hilary. “Naomi Campbell: Cadbury Ad “Insulting & Hurtful”. The Huntington Post 31 May (2011). 16 Dec. 2013. ‹http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/31/naomi-campbell-cadbury-ad_n_868909.html#› Sweney, Mark. “Cadbury Apologises to Naomi Campbell Over ‘Racist’ Ad.” The Guardian 3 Jun. (2011). 16 Dec. 2013. ‹http://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/jun/03/cadbury-naomi-campbell-ad›

The debate on the social role of museums trundles along in an age where complex associations between community, collections, and cultural norms are highly contested (Silverman 3–4; Sandell, Inequality 3–23). This article questions whether, in the case of community groups whose aspirations often go unrecognised (in this case people with either blindness or low vision), there is a need to discuss and debate institutionalised approaches that often reinforce social exclusion and impede cultural access. If “access is [indeed] an entry point to experience” (Papalia), then the privileging of visual encounters in museums is clearly a barrier for people who experience sight loss or low vision (Levent and Pursley). In contrast, a multisensory aesthetic to exhibition display respects the gamut of human sensory experience (Dudley 161–63; Drobnick 268–69; Feld 184; James 136; McGlone 41–60) as do discursive gateways including “lectures, symposia, workshops, educational programs, audio guides, and websites” (Cachia). Independent access to information extends beyond Braille on toilet doors.Underpinning this article is an ongoing qualitative case study undertaken by the author involving participant observation, workshops, and interviews with eight adults who experience vision impairment. The primary research site has been the National Museum of Australia. Reflecting on the role of curators as storytellers and the historical development of museums and their practitioners as agents for social development, the article explores the opportunities latent in museum collections as they relate to community members with vision impairment. The outcomes of this investigation offer insights into emerging issues as they relate to the International Council of Museums (ICOM) definitions of the museum program. Curators as Storytellers“The ways in which objects are selected, put together, and written or spoken about have political effects” (Eilean Hooper-Greenhill qtd. in Sandell, Inequality 8). Curators can therefore open or close doors to discrete communities of people. The traditional role of curators has been to collect, care for, research, and interpret collections (Desvallées and Mairesse 68): they are characterised as information specialists with a penchant for research (Belcher 78). While commonly possessing an intimate knowledge of their institution’s collection, their mode of knowledge production results from a culturally mediated process which ensures that resulting products, such as cultural significance assessments and provenance determinations (Russell and Winkworth), privilege the knowing systems of dominant social groups (Fleming 213). Such ways of seeing can obstruct the access prospects of underserved audiences.When it comes to exhibition display—arguably the most public of work by museums—curators conventionally collaborate within a constellation of other practitioners (Belcher 78–79). Curators liaise with museum directors, converse with conservators, negotiate with exhibition designers, consult with graphics designers, confer with marketing boffins, seek advice from security, chat with editors, and engage with external contractors. I question the extent that curators engage with community groups who may harbour aspirations to participate in the exhibition experience—a sticking point soon to be addressed. Despite the team based ethos of exhibition design, it is nonetheless the content knowledge of curators on public display. The art of curatorial interpretation sets out not to instruct audiences but, in part, to provoke a response with narratives designed to reveal meanings and relationships (Freeman Tilden qtd. in Alexander and Alexander 258). Recognised within the institution as experts (Sandell, Inclusion 53), curators have agency—they decide upon the stories told. In a recent television campaign by the National Museum of Australia, a voiceover announces: a storyteller holds incredible power to connect and to heal, because stories bring us together (emphasis added). (National Museum of Australia 2015)Storytelling in the space of the museum often shares the histories, perspectives, and experiences of people past as well as living cultures—and these stories are situated in space and time. If that physical space is not fit-for-purpose—that is, it does not accommodate an individual’s physical, intellectual, psychiatric, sensory, or neurological needs (Disability Discrimination Act 1992, Cwlth)—then the story reaches only long-established patrons. The museum’s opportunity to contribute to social development, and thus the curator’s as the primary storyteller, will have been missed. A Latin-American PerspectiveICOM’s commitment to social development could be interpreted merely as a pledge to make use of collections to benefit the public through scholarship, learning, and pleasure (ICOM 15). If this interpretation is accepted, however, then any museum’s contribution to social development is somewhat paltry. To accept such a limited and limiting role for museums is to overlook the historical efforts by advocates to change the very nature of museums. The ascendancy of the social potential of museums first blossomed during the late 1960s at a time where, globally, overlapping social movements espoused civil rights and the recognition of minority groups (Silverman 12; de Varine 3). Simultaneously but independently, neighbourhood museums arose in the United States, ecomuseums in France and Quebec, and the integral museum in Latin America, notably in Mexico (Hauenschild; Silverman 12–13). The Latin-American commitment to the ideals of the integral museum developed out of the 1972 round table of Santiago, Chile, sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Giménez-Cassina 25–26). The Latin-American signatories urged the local and regional museums of their respective countries to collaborate with their communities to resolve issues of social inequality (Round Table Santiago 13–21). The influence of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire should be acknowledged. In 1970, Freire ushered in the concept of conscientization, defined by Catherine Campbell and Sandra Jovchelovitch as:the process whereby critical thinking develops … [and results in a] … thinker [who] feels empowered to think and to act on the conditions that shape her living. (259–260)This model for empowerment lent inspiration to the ideals of the Santiago signatories in realising their sociopolitical goal of the integral museum (Assunção dos Santos 20). Reframing the museum as an institution in the service of society, the champions of the integral museum sought to redefine the thinking and practices of museums and their practitioners (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization 37–39). The signatories successfully lobbied ICOM to introduce an explicitly social purpose to the work of museums (Assunção dos Santos 6). In 1974, in the wake of the Santiago round table, ICOM modified their definition of a museum to “a permanent non-profit institution, open to the public, in the service of society and its development” (emphasis added) (Hauenschild). Museums had been transformed into “problem solvers” (Judite Primo qtd. in Giménez-Cassina 26). With that spirit in mind, museum practitioners, including curators, can develop opportunities for reciprocity with the many faces of the public (Guarini). Response to Social Development InitiativesStarting in the 1970s, the “second museum revolution” (van Mensch 6–7) saw the transition away from: traditional roles of museums [of] collecting, conservation, curatorship, research and communication … [and toward the] … potential role of museums in society, in education and cultural action. (van Mensch 6–7)Arguably, this potential remains a work in progress some 50 years later. Writing in the tradition of museums as agents of social development, Mariana Lamas states:when we talk about “in the service of society and its development”, it’s quite different. It is like the drunk uncle at the Christmas party that the family pretends is not there, because if they pretend long enough, he might pass out on the couch. (Lamas 47–48)That is not to say that museums have neglected to initiate services and programs that acknowledge the aspirations of people with disabilities (refer to Cachia and Krantz as examples). Without discounting such efforts, but with the refreshing analogy of the drunken uncle still fresh in memory, Lamas answers her own rhetorical question:how can traditional museums promote community development? At first the word “development” may seem too much for the museum to do, but there are several ways a museum can promote community development. (Lamas 52) Legitimising CommunitiesThe first way that museums can foster community or social development is to:help the community to over come [sic] a problem, coming up with different solutions, putting things into a new perspective; providing confidence to the community and legitimizing it. (Lamas 52)As a response, my doctoral investigation legitimises the right of people with vision impairment to participate in the social and cultural aspects of publicly funded museums. The Australian Government upheld this right in 2008 by ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (and Optional Protocol), which enshrines the right of people with disability to participate in the cultural life of the nation (United Nations).At least 840,700 people in Australia (a minimum of four per cent of the population) experiences either blindness or low vision (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2009). For every one person in the Australian community who is blind, nearly five other people experience low vision. The medical model of disability identifies the impairment as the key feature of a person and seeks out a corrective intervention. In contrast, the social model of disability strives to remove the attitudinal, social, and physical barriers enacted by people or institutions (Landman, Fishburn, and Tonkin 14). Therein lies the opportunity and challenge for museums—modifying layouts and practices that privilege the visual. Consequently, there is scope for museums to partner with people with vision impairment to identify their aspirations rather than respond as a problem to be fixed. Common fixes in the museums for people with disabilities include physical alterations such as ramps and, less often, special tours (Cachia). I posit that curators, as co-creators and major contributors to exhibitions, can be part of a far wider discussion. In the course of doctoral research, I accompanied adults with a wide array of sight impairments into exhibitions at the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House, the Australian War Memorial, and the National Museum of Australia. Within the space of the exhibition, the most commonly identified barrier has been the omission of access opportunities to interpreted materials: that is, information about objects on display as well as the wider narratives driving exhibitions. Often, the participant has had to work backwards, from the object itself, to understand the wider topic of the exhibition. If aesthetics is “the way we communicate through the senses” (Thrift 291), then the vast majority of exhibits have been inaccessible from a sensory perspective. For people with low vision (that is, they retain some degree of functioning sight), objects’ labels have often been too small to be read or, at times, poorly contrasted or positioned. Objects have often been set too deep into display cabinets or too far behind safety barriers. If individuals must use personal magnifiers to read text or look in vain at objects, then that is an indicator that there are issues with exhibition design. For people who experience blindness (that is, they cannot see), neither the vast majority of exhibits nor their interpretations have been made accessible. There has been minimal access across all museums to accessioned objects, handling collections, or replicas to tease out exhibits and their stories. Object labels must be read by family or friends—a tiring experience. Without motivated peers, the stories told by curators are silenced by a dearth of alternative options.Rather than presume to know what works for people with disabilities, my research ethos respects the “nothing about us without us” (Charlton 2000; Werner 1997) maxim of disability advocates. To paraphrase Lamas, we have collaborated to come up with different solutions by putting things into new perspectives. In turn, “person-centred” practices based on rapport, warmth, and respect (Arigho 206–07) provide confidence to a diverse community of people by legitimising their right to participate in the museum space. Incentivising Communities Museums can also nurture social or community development by providing incentives to “the community to take action to improve its quality of life” (Lamas 52). It typically falls to (enthusiastic) public education and community outreach teams to engage underserved communities through targeted programs. This approach continues the trend of curators as advocates for the collection, and educators as advocates for the public (Kaitavouri xi). If the exhibition briefs normally written by curators (Belcher 83) reinforced the importance of access, then exhibition designers would be compelled to offer fit-for-purpose solutions. Better still, if curators (and other exhibition team members) regularly met with community based organisations (perhaps in the form of a disability reference group), then museums would be better positioned to accommodate a wider spectrum of community members. The National Standards for Australian Museums and Galleries already encourages museums to collaborate with disability organisations (40). Such initiatives offer a way forward for improving a community’s sense of itself and its quality of life. The World Health Organization defines health as a “state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. While I am not using quality of life indicators for my doctoral study, the value of facilitating social and cultural opportunities for my target audience is evident in participant statements. At the conclusion of one sensory based workshop, Mara, a female participant who experiences low vision in one eye and blindness in the other, stated:I think it was interesting in that we could talk together about what we were experiencing and that really is the social aspect of it. I mean if I was left to go to a whole lot of museums on my own, I probably wouldn’t. You know, I like going with kids or a friend visiting from interstate—that sort of thing. And so this group, in a way, replicates that experience in that you’ve got someone else to talk about your impressions with—much better than going on your own or doing this alone.Mara’s statement was in response to one of two workshops I held with the support of the Learning Services team at the National Museum of Australia in May 2015. Selected objects from the museum’s accessioned collection and handling collection were explored, as well as replicas in the form of 3D printed objects. For example, participants gazed upon and handled a tuckerbox, smelt and tasted macadamia nuts in wattle seed syrup, and listened to a genesis story about the more-ish nut recorded by the Butchulla people—the traditional owners of Fraser Island. We sat around a table while I, as the workshop mediator, sought to facilitate free-flowing discussions about their experiences and, in turn, mused on the capacity of objects to spark social connection and opportunities for cultural access. While the workshop provided the opportunity for reciprocal exchanges amongst participants as well as between participants and me, what was highly valued by most participants was the direct contact with members of the museum’s Learning Services team. I observed that participants welcomed the opportunity to talk with real museum workers. Their experience of museum practitioners, to date, had been largely confined to the welcome desk of respective institutions or through special events or tours where they were talked at. The opportunity to communicate directly with the museum allowed some participants to share their thoughts and feelings about the services that museums provide. I suggest that curators open themselves up to such exchanges on a more frequent basis—it may result in reciprocal benefits for all stakeholders. Fortifying IdentityA third way museums can contribute to social or community development is by:fortify[ing] the bonds between the members of the community and reaffirm their identities making them feel more secure about who they are; and give them a chance to tell their own version of their history to “outsiders” which empowers them. (Lamas 52)Identity informs us and others of who we are and where we belong in the world (Silverman 54). However, the process of identity marking and making can be fraught: “some communities are ours by choice … [and] … some are ours because of the ways that others see us” (Watson 4). Communities are formed by identifying who is in and who is out (Francois Dubet qtd. in Bessant and Watts 260). In other words, the construction of collective identity is reinforced through means of social inclusion and social exclusion. The participants of my study, as members or clients of the Royal Society for the Blind | Canberra Blind Society, clearly value participating in events with empathetic peers. People with vision impairment are not a homogenous group, however. Reinforcing the cultural influences on the formation of identity, Fiona Candlin asserts that “to state the obvious but often ignored fact, blind people … [come] … from all social classes, all cultural, racial, religious and educational backgrounds” (101). Irrespective of whether blindness or low vision arises congenitally, adventitiously, or through unexpected illness, injury, or trauma, the end result is an assortment of individuals with differing perceptual characteristics who construct meaning in often divergent ways (De Coster and Loots 326–34). They also hold differing world views. Therefore, “participation [at the museum] is not an end in itself. It is a means for creating a better world” (Assunção dos Santos 9). According to the Australian Human Rights Commissioner, Professor Gillian Triggs, a better world is: a society for all, in which every individual has an active role to play. Such a society is based on fundamental values of equity, equality, social justice, and human rights and freedoms, as well as on the principles of tolerance and embracing diversity. (Triggs)Publicly funded museums can play a fundamental role in the cultural lives of societies. For example, the Powerhouse Museum (Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences) in Sydney partnered with Vision Australia to host an exhibition in 2010 titled Living in a Sensory World: it offered “visitors an understanding of the world of the blindness and low vision community and celebrates their achievements” (Powerhouse Museum). With similar intent, my doctoral research seeks to validate the world of my participants by inviting museums to appreciate their aspirations as a distinct but diverse community of people. ConclusionIn conclusion, the challenge for museum curators and other museum practitioners is balancing what Richard Sennett (qtd. in Bessant and Watts 265) identifies as opportunities for enhancing social cohesion and a sense of belonging while mitigating parochialism and community divisiveness. Therefore, curators, as the primary focus of this article, are indeed challenged when asked to contribute to serving the public through social development—a public which is anything but homogenous. Mindful of cultural and social differences in an ever-changing world, museums are called to respect the cultural and natural heritage of the communities they serve and collaborate with (ICOM 10). It is a position I wholeheartedly support. This is not to say that museums or indeed curators are capable of solving the ills of society. However, inviting people who are frequently excluded from social and cultural events to multisensory encounters with museum collections acknowledges their cultural rights. I suggest that this would be a seismic shift from the current experiences of adults with blindness or low vision at most museums.ReferencesAlexander, Edward, and Mary Alexander. Museums in Motion: An Introduction to the History and Functions of Museums. 2nd ed. Lanham, Maryland: AltaMira Press, 2008.Arigho, Bernie. “Getting a Handle on the Past: The Use of Objects in Reminiscence Work.” Touch in Museums: Policy and Practice in Object Handling. Ed. Helen Chatterjee. Oxford: Berg, 2008. 205–12.Assunção dos Santos, Paula. Introduction. Sociomuseology 4: To Think Sociomuseologically. Eds. Paula Assunção dos Santos and Judite Primo. Lisbon: Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, 2010. 5–12.Australian Bureau of Statistics. “National Health Survey: Summary of Results (2007- 2008) (Reissue), Cat. No. 4364.0. 2009.” Australian Bureau of Statistics. 12 Feb. 2015 ‹http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/4364.0›.Belcher, Michael. Exhibitions in Museums. Leicester: Leicester UP, 1991.Bessant, Judith, and Rob Watts. Sociology Australia. 3rd ed. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2007.Cachia, Amanda. “Talking Blind: Disability, Access, and the Discursive Turn.” Disability Studies Quarterly 33.3 (2013). 23 July 2015 ‹http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3758›.Campbell, Catherine, and Sandra Jovchelovitch. "Health, Community and Development: Towards a Social Psychology of Participation." Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology 10.4 (2000): 255–70.Candlin, Fiona. "Blindness, Art and Exclusion in Museums and Galleries." International Journal of Art & Design Education 22.1 (2003): 100–10.Charlton, James. Nothing about Us without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000.De Coster, Karin, and Gerrit Loots. "Somewhere in between Touch and Vision: In Search of a Meaningful Art Education for Blind Individuals." International Journal of Art & Design Education 23.3 (2004): 32634.De Varine, Hugues. “Decolonising Museology.” ICOM News 58.3 (2005): 3.Desvallées, André, and François Mairesse. Key Concepts of Museology. Paris: Armand Colin, 2010. 16 Jun. 2015 ‹http://icom.museum/professional-standards/key-concepts-of-museology/›.Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (Cwlth). 14 June 2015 ‹https://www.comlaw.gov.au/Series/C2004A04426›.Drobnick, Jim. “Volatile Effects: Olfactory Dimensions of Art and Architecture.” Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Ed. David Howes. New York: Berg, 2005. 265–80.Dudley, Sandra. “Sensory Exile in the Field.” Museums Objects: Experiencing the Properties of Things. Ed. Sandra H. Dudley. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2012. 161–63.Feld, Steven. “Places Sensed, Senses Placed: Toward a Sensuous Epistemology of Environments.” Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Ed. David Howes. New York: Berg, 2005. 179–91.Fleming, David. “Positioning the Museum for Social Inclusion.” Museums, Society, Inequality. Ed. Richard Sandell. London: Routledge, 2002. 213–24.Giménez-Cassina, Eduardo. “Who Am I? An Identity Crisis. Identity in the New Museologies and the Role of the Museum Professional.” Sociomuseology 3: To Understand New Museology in the XXI Century. Eds. Paula Assunção dos Santos and Judite Primo. Lisbon: Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, 2010. 25–42. Guarini, Beaux. Up Close and Personal: Engaging Collections alongside Adults with Vision Impairment. 2015. 17 June 2015 ‹http://nma.gov.au/blogs/education/2015/06/17/4802/›.Hauenschild, Andrea. Claims and Reality of New Museology: Case Studies in Canada, the United States and Mexico. 1988. 21 June 2015 ‹http://museumstudies.si.edu/claims2000.htm›.Hoyt, Bridget O’Brien. “Emphasizing Observation in a Gallery Program for Blind and Low-Vision Visitors: Art beyond Sight at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.” Disability Studies Quarterly 33.3 (2013). 23 July 2015 ‹http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3737›.International Council of Museums. ICOM Code of Ethics for Museums. Paris: International Council of Museums, 2013. 6 June 2015 ‹http://icom.museum/the-vision/code-of-ethics/›.James, Liz. “Senses and Sensibility in Byzantium.” Museums Objects: Experiencing the Properties of Things. Ed. Sandra H. Dudley. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2012. 134–149.Kaitavouri, Kaija. Introduction. It’s All Mediating: Outlining and Incorporating the Roles of Curating and Education in the Exhibit Context. Eds. Kaija Kaitavouri, Laura Kokkonen, and Nora Sternfeld. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. x–xxi.Lamas, Mariana. “Lost in the Supermarket – The Traditional Museums Challenges.” Sociomuseology 3: To Understand New Museology in the XXI Century. Eds. Paula Assunção dos Santos and Judite Primo. Lisbon: Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, 2010. 42–58. Landman, Peta, Kiersten Fishburn, Lynda Kelly, and Susan Tonkin. Many Voices Making Choices: Museum Audiences with Disabilities. Sydney: Australian Museum and National Museum of Australia, 2005. Levent, Nina, and Joan Muyskens Pursley. “Sustainable Museum Acess: A Two-Way Street.” Disability Studies Quarterly 33.3 (2013). 22 July 2015 ‹http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3742›.McGlone, Francis. “The Two Sides of Touch: Sensing and Feeling.” Touch in Museums: Policy and Practice in Object Handling. Ed. Helen Chatterjee. Oxford: Berg, 2008. 41–60.National Museum of Australia. “Stories Can Unite Us as One.” YouTube 28 May 2015. 16 Jun. 2015 ‹https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qwxj_rC57zM›.National Standards Taskforce. National Standards for Australian Museums and Galleries (Version 1.4, October 2014). Melbourne: The National Standards Taskforce, 2014. 20 June 2015 ‹http://www.mavic.asn.au/assets/NSFAMG_v1_4_2014.pdf›.Papalia, Carmen. “A New Model for Access in the Museum.” Disability Studies Quarterly 33.3 (2013). 23 July 2015 ‹http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3757›.Powerhouse Museum. Living in a Sensory World: Stories from People with Blindness and Low Vision. nd. 18 Feb. 2015 ‹http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/previous/living/›.“Round Table Santiago do Chile ICOM, 1972.” Sociomuseology 4: To Think Sociomuseologically. Eds. Paula Assunção dos Santos and Judite Primo. Lisbon: Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, 2010.Royal Society for the Blind | Canberra Blind Society. Canberra Blind Society. nd. 14 Mar. 2015 ‹http://www.canberrablindsociety.org.au/›.Russell, Rosyln, and Kylie Winkworth. Significance 2.0: A Guide to Assessing the Significance of Collections. Adelaide: Collections Council of Australia, 2009. 15 June 2015 ‹http://arts.gov.au/sites/default/files/resources-publications/significance-2.0/pdfs/significance-2.0.pdf›.Sandell, Richard. “Museums and the Combatting of Social Inequality: Roles, Responsibities, Resistance.” Museums, Society, Inequality. Ed. Richard Sandell. London: Routledge, 2002. 3–23.———. "Social Inclusion, the Museum and the Dynamics of Sectoral Change." Museum and Society 1.1 (2003): 45–62.Silverman, Lois. The Social Work of Museums. London: Routledge, 2010.Thrift, Nigel. “Understanding the Material Practices of Glamour.” The Affect Theory Reader. Eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. 289–308.Triggs, Gillian. Social Inclusion and Human Rights in Australia. 2013. 6 June 2015 ‹https://www.humanrights.gov.au/news/speeches/social-inclusion-and-human-rights-australia›. United Nations. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. 2006. 16 Mar. 2015 ‹http://www.un.org/disabilities/default.asp?id=150?›.United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization. United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation Round Table on the Development and the Role of Museums in the Contemporary World - Santiago de Chile, Chile 20-31 May 1972. 1973. 18 June 2015 ‹http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0002/000236/023679EB.pdf›.Van Mensch, Peter. Towards a Methodology of Museology. Diss. U of Zagreb, 1992. 16 June 2015 ‹http://www.muzeologie.net/downloads/mat_lit/mensch_phd.pdf›.Watson, Sheila. “Museum Communities in Theory and Practice.” Museums and Their Communities. Ed. Sheila Watson. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2007. 1–24.Werner, David. Nothing about Us without Us: Developing Innovative Technologies for, vy, and with Disabled Persons. Palo Alto, CA: Healthwrights, 1997.World Health Organization. Mental Health: Strengthening Our Response, Fact Sheet No. 220, Updated April 2014. 2014. 2 June 2015 ‹http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs220/en/›.

Well, you couldn't control the situation to that extent. The world just comes in on top of you. It creeps under the door. It falls out of the sky. It's all around. (Leunig) Like the world that cartoonist Michael Leunig describes, ambience is all around. Everywhere you go. You cannot get away from it. You cannot hide from it. You cannot be without it. For ambience is that which surrounds us, that which pervades. Always-on. Always by-your-side. Always already. Here, there and everywhere. Super-surround-sound. Immersive. Networked and cloudy. Ubiquitous. Although you cannot avoid ambience, you may ignore it. In fact, ambience is almost as ignored as it is pervasive. For the most part, our attention is given over to what’s in front of us, what we pick up, what we handle, what is in focus. Instead of ambience, our phenomenal existence is governed by what we bring into the foreground of our lives. Our attention is, almost by definition, occupied not by what is ambient, but what is salient (Jaaniste, Approaching Ch. 1). So, when Brian Eno coined the term Ambient Music in the 1970s (see Burns; Radywyl; and Ensminger in this issue), he was doing something strange. He was bringing ambience, as an idea and in its palpable sonic dimension, into salience. The term, and the penchant for attuning and re-thinking our connections to our surroundings, caught on. By the end of the twentieth century, it was deemed by one book author worthy of being called the ambient century (Prendergast). Eno is undoubtedly the great populariser of the term, but there’s a backstory to ambience. If Spitzer’s detailed semantic analysis of ‘ambience’ and its counterpart ‘milieu’ published back in the 1940s is anything to go by, then Newtonian physics had a lot to do with how ambience entered into our Modern vernacular. Isaac Newton’s laws and theories of gravity and the cosmos offered up a quandary for science back then: vast amounts of empty space. Just like we now know that most of an atom is empty space, within which a few miserly electrons, protons, neutrons and other particle fly about (and doesn’t that seem weird given how solid everything feels?) so too it is with planets, stars, galaxies whose orbits traverse through the great vacuum of the universe. And that vacuum Newton called ambience. But maybe outer-space, and ambience, is not actually empty. There could be dark matter everywhere. Or other things not yet known, observed or accounted for. Certainly, the history of our thinking around ambience since its birth in physics has seen a shift from vacuity to great density and polyphony. Over time, several ‘spaces’ became associated with ambience, which we might think of as the great scapes of our contemporary lives: the natural environment, the built environment, the social world, the aesthetic worlds encountered ‘within’ artefacts, and the data-cloud. Now is not the time or place to give a detailed history of these discursive manoeuvres (although some key clues are given in Spizter; and also Jaaniste, Approaching). But a list of how the term has been taken up after Eno–across the arts, design, media and culture–reveals the broad tenets of ambience or, perhaps, the ambience of ambience. Nowadays we find talk of (in alphabetical order): ambient advertising (Quinion), aesthetics (Foster), architecture (CNRS; Sample), art (Desmarias; Heynen et al.), calculus (Cardelli), displays (Ambient Displays Reserch Group; Lund and Mikael; Vogel and Balakrishnan), fears (Papastergiadis), findability (Morville), informatics (Morville), intelligence (Weber et al.), media (Meeks), narratives (Levin), news (Hagreaves and Thomas), poetics (Morton), television (McCarthy), and video (Bizzocchi). There’s probably more. Time, then, to introduce the authors assembled for this special ‘ambient’ issue of M/C Journal. Writing from the globe, in Spain, Ukraine, Canada, United Sates, and New Zealand, and from cities across Australia, in Melbourne, Canberra and Perth, they draw on and update the ambience of ambience. Alison Bartlett, in our feature article, begins with bodies of flesh (and sweat and squinting) and bodies of thought (including Continental theory). She draws us into a personal, present tense and tensely present account of the way writing and thinking intertwine with our physical locality. The heat, light and weathered conditions of her place of writing, now Perth and previously Townsville, are evoked, as is some sort of teased out relation with Europe. If we are always immersed in our ambient conditions, does this effect and affect everything we do, and think? Bruce Arnold and Margalit Levin then shift gear, from the rural and natural to the densely mediated contemporary urban locale. Urban ambience, as they say, is no longer about learning to avoid (or love?) harsh industrial noises, but it’s about interactivity, surveillance and signalling. They ambivalently present the ambient city as a dialectic, where feeling connected and estranged go hand-in-hand. Next we explore one outcome or application of the highly mediated, iPhone and Twitter-populated city. Alfred Hermida has previously advanced the idea of ‘ambient journalism’ (Hermida, Twittering), and in his M/C Journal piece he outlines the shift from ambient news (which relies on multiple distribution points, but which relays news from a few professional sources) to a journalism that is ambiently distributed across citizens and non-professional para-journalists. Alex Burns takes up Hermida’s framework, but seeks to show how professional journalism might engage in complex ways with Twitter and other always-on, socially-networked data sources that make up the ‘awareness system’ of ambient journalism. Burns ends his provocative paper by suggesting that the creative processes of Brian Eno might be a model for flexible approaches to working with the ambient data fields of the Internet and social grid. Enter the data artist, the marginal doodler and the darkened museum. Pau Waelder examines the way artists have worked with data fields, helping us to listen, observe and embody what is normally ignored. David Ensminger gives a folklorist-inspired account of the way doodles occupy the ambient margins of our minds, personalities and book pages. And Natalia Radywyl navigates the experiences of those who encountered the darkened and ambiguously ambient Screen Gallery of the Australian Centre for Moving Image, and ponders on what this mean for the ‘new museum’. If the experience of doodles and darkened galleries is mainly an individual thing, the final two papers delve into the highly social forms of ambience. Pauline Cheong explores how one particular type of community, Christian churches in the United States, has embraced (and sometimes critiqued) the use of Twitter to facilitate the communal ambience, 140 characters at a time. Then Christine Teague with Lelia Green and David Leith report on the working lives of transit officers on duty on trains in Perth. This is a tough ambience, where issues of safety, fear, confusion and control impact on these workers as much as they try to influence the ambience of a public transport network. The final paper gives us something to pause on: ambience might be an interesting topic, but the ambience of some people and some places might be unpalatable or despairing. Ambience is morally ambivalent (it can be good, bad or otherwise), and this is something threading through many of the papers before us. Who gets to control our ambient surrounds? Who gets to influence them? Who gets to enjoy them, take advantage of them, ignore them? For better or worse. The way we live with, connect to and attune to the ambience of our lives might be crucially important. It might change us. And it might do so on many levels. As is now evident, all the great scapes, as I called them, have been taken up in this issue. We begin with the natural environment (Bartlett’s weather) and the urban built environment (Arnold and Levin; and also Radywyl). Then we enter the data-cloud (Herminda; Burns; Waelder, and also Cheong), shifting into the aesthetic artefact (Waelder; Ensminger; Radywyl), and then into the social sphere (Cheong; Teague, Green and Leith). Of course, all these scapes, and the authors’ concerns, overlap. Ambience is a multitude, and presses into us and through us in many ways. References Ambient Displays Research Group. “Ambient Displays Research Group.” 25 July 2006 ‹http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/Projects/CS/io/ambient/›. Bizzocchi, Jim. “Ambient Video: The Transformation of the Domestic Cinematic Experience.” Media Environments and the Liberal Arts Conference, 10-13 June 2004, Rochester Institute of Technology, New York. 26 July 2006 ‹http://www.dadaprocessing.com› [third version of this essay]. Cardelli, Luca. “Mobility and Security.” Lecture notes for Marktoberdorf Summer School 1999, summarising several Ambient Calculus papers by Luca Cardelli & Andrew Gordon. Foundations of Secure Computation. Eds. Friedrich L. Bauer and Ralf Steinbrüggen. NATO Science Series. Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Study Institute on Foundations of Secure Computation, Marktoberdorf, Germany, 27 July - 8 Aug. 1999. 3-37. ‹http://lucacardelli.name/Papers/Mobility%20and%20Security.A4.pdf›. CNRS. “UMR CNRS 1563: Ambiances architecturales et urbaines”. 2007. 9 Feb. 2007 ‹http://www.archi.fr/RECHERCHE/annuaireg/pdf/UMR1563.pdf›. Desmarias, Charles. “Nothing Compared to This: Ambient, Incidental and New Minimal Tendencies in Contemporary Art.” Catalogue essay for exhibition curated by Charles Desmarais at Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, 25 Sep. - 28 Nov. 2004. Foster, Cheryl. “The Narrative and the Ambient in Environmental Aesthetics.” Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism 56.2 (Spring 1998): 127-137. Hargreaves, Ian, and James Thomas. “New News, Old News.” ITC/BSC (October 2002). 3 May 2010 ‹http://legacy.caerdydd.ac.uk/jomec/resources/news.pdf›. Herminda, Alfred. “Twittering the News: The Emergence of Ambient Journalism.” Journalism Practice (11 March 2010). 3 May 2010 ‹http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a919807525›. Heynen, Julian, Kasper Konig, and Stefani Jansen. Ambiance: Des deux cơtes du Rhin. To accompany an exhibition of the same name at K21 Kuntstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf, 15 Oct. 2005 – 12 Feb. 2006. Köln: Snoeck. Jaaniste, Luke. Approaching the Ambient: Creative Practice and the Ambient Mode of Being. Doctoral thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 2007. 3 May 2010 ‹http://www.lukejaaniste.com/writings/phd›. Leunig, Michael. “Michael Leunig”. Enough Rope with Andrew Denton. ABC Television, 8 May 2006. 3 May 2010 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/tv/enoughrope/transcripts/s1632918.htm›. Lund, Andreas, and Mikael Wiberg. “Ambient Displays beyond Convention.” HCI 2004, The 18th British HCI Group Annual Conference, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK, 6-10 Sep. 2004. 18 Oct. 2005 ‹http://www.informatik.umu.se/~mwiberg/designingforattention_workshop_lund_wiberg.pdf›. Manovich, Lev. “Soft Cinema: Ambient Narratives.” Catalogue for the Soft Cinema Project presented at Future Cinema: The Cinemtic Imaginary after Film at ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, 16 Nov. 2002 - 30 March 2003. McCarthy, Anna. Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001. Meeks, Cyan. Ambient Media: Meanings and Implications. Masters of Fine Arts thesis, Graduate School of the State University of New York, Department of Media Study, August 2005. Morton, Timothy. “Why Ambient Poetics?: Outline for a Depthless Ecology.” The Wordsworth Circle 33.1 (Winter 2002): 52-56. Morville, Peter. Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become. O’Reilly Media, 2005. Papastergiadis, Nikos. “Ambient Fears.” Artlink 32.1 (2003): 28-34. Prendergast, Mark. The Ambient Century: From Mahler to Trance, the Evolution of Sound in the Electronic Age. London: Bloomsbury, 2000. Quinion, Michael. “Ambient Advertising.” World Wide Words 5 Sep. 1998. 3 Aug. 2006 ‹http://www.worldwidewords.org/turnsofphrase/tp-amb1.htm›. Sample, Hilary. “Ambient Architecture: An Environmental Monitoring Station for Pasadena, California.” 306090 07: Landscape with Architecture. 306090 Architecture Journal 7 (Sep. 2004): 200-210. Spitzer, Leo. “Milieu and Ambiance: An Essay in Historical Semantics (Part 2).” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 3.2 (Dec. 1942): 169–218. Vogel, Daniel, and Ravin Balakrishnan. “Interactive Public Ambient Displays: Transitioning from Implicit to Explicit, Public to Personal, Interaction with Multiple Users.” Proceedings of the 18th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. Large Public Displays session, Santa Fe. New York: ACM Press. 137-146. Weber, W., J.M. Rabaey, and E. Aarts. Eds. Ambient Intelligence. Berlin: Springer, 2005.

In the 1960s, especially in the West, art that was revelatory and art that was revealing operated at opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum. On the side of the revelatory we can think of encounters synonymous with modernism, in which an expressionist painting was revelatory of the Freudian unconscious, or a Barnett Newman the revelatory intensity of the sublime. By contrast, the impulse to reveal in 1960s art was rooted in post-Duchampian practice, implicating artists as different as Lynda Benglis and Richard Hamilton, who mined the potential of an art that was without essence. If revelatory art underscored modernism’s transcendental conviction, critically revealing work tested its discursive rules and institutional conventions. Of course, nothing in history happens as neatly as this suggests, but what is clear is how polarized the language of artistic revelation was throughout the 1960s. With the international spread of minimalism, pop art, and fluxus, provisional reveals eventually dominated art-historical discourse. Aesthetic conviction, with its spiritual undertones, was haunted by its demystification. In the words of Donald Judd: “a work needs only to be interesting” (184).That art galleries could be sites of timely socio-political issues, rather than timeless intuitions undersigned by medium specificity, is one of the more familiar origin stories of postmodernism. Few artists symbolize this shift more than Hans Haacke, whose 2019 exhibition All Connected, at the New Museum, New York, examined the legacy of his outward-looking work. Born in Germany in 1936, and a New Yorker since 1965, Haacke has been linked to the term “institutional critique” since the mid 1980s, after Mel Ramsden’s coining in 1975, and the increased recognition of kindred spirits such as Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Michael Asher, Martha Rosler, Robert Smithson, Daniel Buren, and Marcel Broodthaers. These artists have featured in books and essays by the likes of Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster, and Yve-Alain Bois, but they are also known for their own contributions to art discourse, producing hybrid conceptions of the intellectual postmodern artist as historian, critic and curator.Haacke was initially fascinated by kinetic sculpture in the early 1960s, taking inspiration from op art, systems art, and machine-oriented research collectives such as Zero (Germany), Gruppo N (Italy) and GRAV (France, an acronym of Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel). Towards the end of the decade he started to produce more overtly socio-political work, creating what would become a classic piece from this period, Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 1 (1969). Here, in a solo exhibition at New York’s Howard Wise Gallery, the artist invited viewers to mark their birthplaces and places of residence on a map. Questioning the statistical demography of the Gallery’s avant-garde attendees, the exhibition anticipated the meticulous sociological character of much of his practice to come, grounding New York art – the centre of the art world – in local, social, and economic fabrics.In the forward to the catalogue of All Connected, New Museum Director Lisa Philips claims that Haacke’s survey exhibition provided a chance to reflect on the artist’s prescience, especially given the flourishing of art activism over the last five or so years. Philips pressed the issue of why no other American art institution had mounted a retrospective of his work in three decades, since his previous survey, Unfinished Business, at the New Museum in 1986, at its former, and much smaller, Soho digs (8). It suggests that other institutions have deemed Haacke’s work too risky, generating too much political heat for them to handle. It’s a reputation the artist has cultivated since the Guggenheim Museum famously cancelled his 1971 exhibition after learning his intended work, Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System as of May 1, 1971 (1971) involved research into dubious New York real estate dealings. Guggenheim director Thomas Messer defended the censorship at the time, going so far as to describe it as an “alien substance that had entered the art museum organism” (Haacke, Framing 138). Exposé was this substance Messer dare not name: art that was too revealing, too journalistic, too partisan, and too politically viscid. (Three years later, Haacke got his own back with Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Board of Trustees, 1974, exposing then Guggenheim board members’ connections to the copper industry in Chile, where socialist president Salvador Allende had just been overthrown with US backing.) All Connected foregrounded these institutional reveals from time past, at a moment in 2019 when the moral accountability of the art institution was on the art world’s collective mind. The exhibition followed high-profile protests at New York’s Whitney Museum and Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the Louvre, and the British Museum. These and other arts organisations have increasingly faced pressures, fostered by social media, to end ties with unethical donors, sponsors, and board members, with activist groups protesting institutional affiliations ranging from immigration detention centre management to opioid and teargas manufacturing. An awareness of the limits of individual agency and autonomy undoubtedly defines this era, with social media platforms intensifying the encumbrances of individual, group, and organisational identities. Hans Haacke, Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 1, 1969 Hans Haacke, Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 2, 1969-71Unfinished BusinessUnderscoring Haacke’s activist credentials, Philips describes him as “a model of how to live ethically and empathetically in the world today”, and as a beacon of light amidst the “extreme political and economic uncertainty” of the present, Trump-presidency-calamity moment (7). This was markedly different to how Haacke’s previous New York retrospective, Unfinished Business, was received, which bore the weight of being the artist’s first museum exhibition in New York following the Guggenheim controversy. In the catalogue to Haacke’s 1986 exhibition, then New Museum director Marcia Tucker introduced his work as a challenge, cautiously claiming that he poses “trenchant questions” and that the institution accepts “the difficulties and contradictions” inherent to any museum staging of his work (6).Philips’s and Tucker’s distinct perspectives on Haacke’s practice – one as heroically ethical, the other as a sobering critical challenge – exemplify broader shifts in the perception of institutional critique (the art of the socio-political reveal) over this thirty-year period. In the words of Pamela M. Lee, between 1986 and 2019 the art world has undergone a “seismic transformation”, becoming “a sphere of influence at once more rapacious, acquisitive, and overweening but arguably more democratizing and ecumenical with respect to new audiences and artists involved” (87). Haacke’s reputation over this period has taken a similar shift, from him being a controversial opponent of art’s autonomy (an erudite postmodern conceptualist) to a figurehead for moral integrity and cohesive artistic experimentation.As Rosalyn Deutsche pointed out in the catalogue to Haacke’s 1986 exhibition, a potential trap of such a retrospective is that, through biographical positioning, Haacke might be seen as an “exemplary political artist” (210). With this, the specific political issues motivating his work would be overshadowed by the perception of the “great artist” – someone who brings single-issue politics into the narrative of postmodern art, but at the expense of the issues themselves. This is exactly what Douglas Crimp discovered in Unfinished Business. In a 1987 reflection on the show, Crimp argued that, when compared with an AIDS-themed display, Homo Video, staged at the New Museum at the same time, reviewers of Haacke’s exhibition tended to analyse his politics “within the context of the individual artist’s body of work … . Political issues became secondary to the aesthetic strategies of the producer” (34). Crimp, whose activism would be at the forefront of his career in subsequent years, was surprised at how Homo Video and Unfinished Business spawned different readings. Whereas works in the former exhibition tended to be addressed in terms of the artists personal and partisan politics, Haacke’s prompted reflection on the aesthetics-politics juxtaposition itself. For Crimp, the fact that “there was no mediation between these two shows”, spoke volumes about the divisions between political and activist art at the time.New York Times critic Michael Brenson, reiterating a comment made by Fredric Jameson in the catalogue for Unfinished Business, describes the timeless appearance of Haacke’s work in 1986, which is “surprising for an artist whose work is in some way about ideology and history” (Brenson). The implication is that the artist gives a surprisingly long aesthetic afterlife to the politically specific – to ordinarily short shelf-life issues. In this mode of critical postmodernism in which we are unable to distinguish clearly between intervening in and merely reproducing the logic of the system, Haacke is seen as an astute director of an albeit ambiguous push and pull between political specificity and aesthetic irreducibility, political externality and the internalist mode of art about art. Jameson, while granting that Haacke’s work highlights the need to reinvent the role of the “ruling class” in the complex, globalised socio-economic situation of postmodernism, claims that it does so as representative of the “new intellectual problematic” of postmodernism. Haacke, according Jameson, stages postmodernism’s “crisis of ‘mapping’” whereby capitalism’s totalizing, systemic forms are “handled” (note that he avoids “critiqued” or “challenged”) by focusing on their manifestation through particular (“micro-public”) institutional means (49, 50).We can think of the above examples as constituting the postmodern version of Haacke, who frames very specific political issues on the one hand, and the limitless incorporative power of appropriative practice on the other. To say this another way, Haacke, circa 1986, points to specific sites of power struggle at the same time as revealing their generic absorption by an art-world system grown accustomed to its “duplicate anything” parameters. For all of his political intent, the artistic realm, totalised in accordance with the postmodern image, is ultimately where many thought his gestures remained. The philosopher turned art critic Arthur Danto, in a negative review of Haacke’s exhibition, portrayed institutional critique as part of an age-old business of purifying art, maintaining that Haacke’s “crude” and “heavy-handed” practice is blind to how art institutions have always relied on some form of critique in order for them to continue being respected “brokers of spirit”. This perception – of Haacke’s “external” critiques merely serving to “internally” strengthen existing art structures – was reiterated by Leo Steinberg. Supportively misconstruing the artist in the exhibition catalogue, Steinberg writes that Haacke’s “political message, by dint of dissonance, becomes grating and shrill – but shrill within the art context. And while its political effectiveness is probably minimal, its effect on Minimal art may well be profound” (15). Hans Haacke, MOMA Poll, 1970 All ConnectedSo, what do we make of the transformed reception of Haacke’s work since the late 1980s: from a postmodern ouroboros of “politicizing aesthetics and aestheticizing politics” to a revelatory exemplar of art’s moral power? At a period in the late 1980s when the culture wars were in full swing and yet activist groups remained on the margins of what would become a “mainstream” art world, Unfinished Business was, perhaps, blindingly relevant to its times. Unusually for a retrospective, it provided little historical distance for its subject, with Haacke becoming a victim of the era’s propensity to “compartmentalize the interpretive registers of inside and outside and the terms corresponding to such spatial­izing coordinates” (Lee 83).If commentary surrounding this 2019 retrospective is anything to go by, politics no longer performs such a parasitic, oppositional or even dialectical relation to art; no longer is the political regarded as a real-world intrusion into the formal, discerning, longue-durée field of aesthetics. The fact that protests inside the museum have become more visible and vociferous in recent years testifies to this shift. For Jason Farrago, in his review of All Connected for the New York Times, “the fact that no person and no artwork stands alone, that all of us are enmeshed in systems of economic and social power, is for anyone under 40 a statement of the obvious”. For Alyssa Battistoni, in Frieze magazine, “if institutional critique is a practice, it is hard to see where it is better embodied than in organizing a union, strike or boycott”.Some responders to All Connected, such as Ben Lewis, acknowledge how difficult it is to extract a single critical or political strategy from Haacke’s body of work; however, we can say that, in general, earlier postmodern questions concerning the aestheticisation of the socio-political reveal no longer dominates the reception of his practice. Today, rather than treating art and politics are two separate but related entities, like form is to content, better ideas circulate, such as those espoused by Bruno Latour and Jacques Rancière, for whom what counts as political is not determined by a specific program, medium or forum, but by the capacity of any actor-network to disrupt and change a normative social fabric. Compare Jameson’s claim that Haacke’s corporate and museological tropes are “dead forms” – through which “no subject-position speaks, not even in protest” (38) – with Battistoni’s, who, seeing Haacke’s activism as implicit, asks the reader: “how can we take the relationship between art and politics as seriously as Haacke has insisted we must?”Crimp’s concern that Unfinished Business perpetuated an image of the artist as distant from the “political stakes” of his work did not carry through to All Connected, whose respondents were less vexed about the relation between art and politics, with many noting its timeliness. The New Museum was, ironically, undergoing its own equity crisis in the months leading up to the exhibition, with newly unionised staff fighting with the Museum over workers’ salaries and healthcare even as it organised to build a new $89-million Rem Koolhaas-designed extension. Battistoni addressed these disputes at-length, claiming the protests “crystallize perfectly the changes that have shaped the world over the half-century of Haacke’s career, and especially over the 33 years since his last New Museum exhibition”. Of note is how little attention Battistoni pays to Haacke’s artistic methods when recounting his assumed solidarity with these disputes, suggesting that works such as Creating Consent (1981), Helmosboro Country (1990), and Standortkultur (Corporate Culture) (1997) – which pivot on art’s public image versus its corporate umbilical cord – do not convey some special aesthetico-political insight into a totalizing capitalist system. Instead, “he has simply been an astute and honest observer long enough to remind us that our current state of affairs has been in formation for decades”.Hans Haacke, News, 1969/2008 Hans Haacke, Wide White Flow, 1967/2008 Showing Systems Early on in the 1960s, Haacke was influenced by the American critic, artist, and curator Jack Burnham, who in a 1968 essay, “Systems Esthetics” for Artforum, inaugurated the loose conceptualist paradigm that would become known as “systems art”. Here, against Greenbergian formalism and what he saw as the “craft fetishism” of modernism, Burnham argues that “change emanates, not from things, but from the way things are done” (30). Burnham thought that emergent contemporary artists were intuitively aware of the importance of the systems approach: the significant artist in 1968 “strives to reduce the technical and psychical distance between his artistic output and the productive means of society”, and pays particular attention to relationships between organic and non-organic systems (31).As Michael Fried observed of minimalism in his now legendary 1967 essay Art and Objecthood, this shift in sixties art – signalled by the widespread interest in the systematic – entailed a turn towards the spatial, institutional, and societal contexts of receivership. For Burnham, art is not about “material entities” that beautify or modify the environment; rather, art exists “in relations between people and between people and the components of their environment” (31). At the forefront of his mind was land art, computer art, and research-driven conceptualist practice, which, against Fried, has “no contrived confines such as the theatre proscenium or picture frame” (32). In a 1969 lecture at the Guggenheim, Burnham confessed that his research concerned not just art as a distinct entity, but aesthetics in its broadest possible sense, declaring “as far as art is concerned, I’m not particularly interested in it. I believe that aesthetics exists in revelation” (Ragain).Working under the aegis of Burnham’s systems art, Haacke was shaken by the tumultuous and televised politics of late-1960s America – a time when, according to Joan Didion, a “demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community” (41). Haacke cites Martin Luther King’s assassination as an “incident that made me understand that, in addition to what I had called physical and biological systems, there are also social systems and that art is an integral part of the universe of social systems” (Haacke, Conversation 222). Haacke created News (1969) in response to this awareness, comprising a (pre-Twitter) telex machine that endlessly spits out live news updates from wire services, piling up rolls and rolls of paper on the floor of the exhibition space over the course of its display. Echoing Burnham’s idea of the artist as a programmer whose job is to “prepare new codes and analyze data”, News nonetheless presents the museum as anything but immune from politics, and technological systems as anything but impersonal (32).This intensification of social responsibility in Haacke’s work sets him apart from other, arguably more reductive techno-scientific systems artists such as Sonia Sheridan and Les Levine. The gradual transformation of his ecological and quasi-scientific sculptural experiments from 1968 onwards could almost be seen as making a mockery of the anthropocentrism described in Fried’s 1967 critique. Here, Fried claims not only that the literalness of minimalist work amounts to an emphasis on shape and spatial presence over pictorial composition, but also, in this “theatricality of objecthood” literalness paradoxically mirrors (153). At times in Fried’s essay the minimalist art object reads as a mute form of sociality, the spatial presence filled by the conscious experience of looking – the theatrical relationship itself put on view. Fried thought that viewers of minimalism were presented with themselves in relation to the entire world as object, to which they were asked not to respond in an engaged formalist sense but (generically) to react. Pre-empting the rise of conceptual art and the sociological experiments of post-conceptualist practice, Fried, unapprovingly, argues that minimalist artists unleash an anthropomorphism that “must somehow confront the beholder” (154).Haacke, who admits he has “always been sympathetic to so-called Minimal art” (Haacke, A Conversation 26) embraced the human subject around the same time that Fried’s essay was published. While Fried would have viewed this move as further illustrating the minimalist tendency towards anthropomorphic confrontation, it would be more accurate to describe Haacke’s subsequent works as social-environmental barometers. Haacke began staging interactions which, however dry or administrative, framed the interplays of culture and nature, inside and outside, private and public spheres, expanding art’s definition by looking to the social circulation and economy that supported it.Haacke’s approach – which seems largely driven to show, to reveal – anticipates the viewer in a way that Fried would disapprove, for whom absorbed viewers, and the irreduction of gestalt to shape, are the by-products of assessments of aesthetic quality. For Donald Judd, the promotion of interest over conviction signalled scepticism about Clement Greenberg’s quality standards; it was a way of acknowledging the limitations of qualitative judgement, and, perhaps, of knowledge more generally. In this way, minimalism’s aesthetic relations are not framed so much as allowed to “go on and on” – the artists’ doubt about aesthetic value producing this ongoing temporal quality, which conviction supposedly lacks.In contrast to Unfinished Business, the placing of Haacke’s early sixties works adjacent to his later, more political works in All Connected revealed something other than the tensions between postmodern socio-political reveal and modernist-formalist revelation. The question of whether to intervene in an operating system – whether to let such a system go on and on – was raised throughout the exhibition, literally and metaphorically. To be faced with the interactions of physical, biological, and social systems (in Condensation Cube, 1963-67, and Wide White Flow, 1967/2008, but also in later works like MetroMobiltan, 1985) is to be faced with the question of change and one’s place in it. Framing systems in full swing, at their best, Haacke’s kinetic and environmental works suggest two things: 1. That the systems on display will be ongoing if their component parts aren’t altered; and 2. Any alteration will alter the system as a whole, in minor or significant ways. Applied to his practice more generally, what Haacke’s work hinges on is whether or not one perceives oneself as part of its systemic relations. To see oneself implicated is to see beyond the work’s literal forms and representations. Here, systemic imbrication equates to moral realisation: one’s capacity to alter the system as the question of what to do. Unlike the phenomenology-oriented minimalists, the viewer’s participation is not always assumed in Haacke’s work, who follows a more hermeneutic model. In fact, Haacke’s systems are often circular, highlighting participation as a conscious disruption of flow rather than an obligation that emanates from a particular work (148).This is a theatrical scenario as Fried describes it, but it is far from an abandonment of the issue of profound value. In fact, if we accept that Haacke’s work foregrounds intervention as a moral choice, it is closer to Fried’s own rallying cry for conviction in aesthetic judgement. As Rex Butler has argued, Fried’s advocacy of conviction over sceptical interest can be understood as dialectical in the Hegelian sense: conviction is the overcoming of scepticism, in a similar way that Geist, or spirit, for Hegel, is “the very split between subject and object, in which each makes the other possible” (Butler). What is advanced for Fried is the idea of “a scepticism that can be remarked only from the position of conviction and a conviction that can speak of itself only as this scepticism” (for instance, in his attempt to overcome his scepticism of literalist art on the basis of its scepticism). Strong and unequivocal feelings in Fried’s writing are informed by weak and indeterminate feeling, just as moral conviction in Haacke – the feeling that I, the viewer, should do something – emerges from an awareness that the system will continue to function fine without me. In other words, before being read as “a barometer of the changing and charged atmosphere of the public sphere” (Sutton 16), the impact of Haacke’s work depends upon an initial revelation. It is the realisation not just that one is embroiled in a series of “invisible but fundamental” relations greater than oneself, but that, in responding to seemingly sovereign social systems, the question of our involvement is a moral one, a claim for determination founded through an overcoming of the systemic (Fry 31).Haacke’s at once open and closed works suit the logic of our algorithmic age, where viewers have to shift constantly from a position of being targeted to one of finding for oneself. Peculiarly, when Haacke’s online digital polls in All Connected were hacked by activists (who randomized statistical responses in order to compel the Museum “to redress their continuing complacency in capitalism”) the culprits claimed they did it in sympathy with his work, not in spite of it: “we see our work as extending and conversing with Haacke’s, an artist and thinker who has been a source of inspiration to us both” (Hakim). This response – undermining done with veneration – is indicative of the complicated legacy of his work today. Haacke’s influence on artists such as Tania Bruguera, Sam Durant, Forensic Architecture, Laura Poitras, Carsten Höller, and Andrea Fraser has less to do with a particular political ideal than with his unique promotion of journalistic suspicion and moral revelation in forms of systems mapping. It suggests a coda be added to the sentiment of All Connected: all might not be revealed, but how we respond matters. Hans Haacke, Large Condensation Cube, 1963–67ReferencesBattistoni, Alyssa. “After a Contract Fight with Its Workers, the New Museum Opens Hans Haacke’s ‘All Connected’.” Frieze 208 (2019).Bishara, Hakim. “Hans Haacke Gets Hacked by Activists at the New Museum.” Hyperallergic 21 Jan. 2010. <https://hyperallergic.com/538413/hans-haacke-gets-hacked-by-activists-at-the-new-museum/>.Brenson, Michael. “Art: In Political Tone, Works by Hans Haacke.” New York Times 19 Dec. 1988. <https://www.nytimes.com/1986/12/19/arts/artin-political-tone-worksby-hans-haacke.html>.Buchloh, Benjamin. “Hans Haacke: Memory and Instrumental Reason.” Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry. Cambridge: MIT P, 2000.Burnham, Jack. “Systems Esthetics.” Artforum 7.1 (1968).Butler, Rex. “Art and Objecthood: Fried against Fried.” Nonsite 22 (2017). <https://nonsite.org/feature/art-and-objecthood>.Carrion-Murayari, Gary, and Massimiliano Gioni (eds.). Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon and New Museum, 2019.Crimp, Douglas. “Strategies of Public Address: Which Media, Which Publics?” In Hal Foster (ed.), Discussions in Contemporary Culture, no. 1. Washington: Bay P, 1987.Danto, Arthur C. “Hans Haacke and the Industry of Art.” In Gregg Horowitz and Tom Huhn (eds.), The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy, and the Ends of Taste. London: Routledge, 1987/1998.Didion, Joan. The White Album. London: 4th Estate, 2019.Farago, Jason. “Hans Haacke, at the New Museum, Takes No Prisoners.” New York Times 31 Oct. 2019. <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/arts/design/hans-haacke-review-new-museum.html>.Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood.” Artforum 5 (June 1967).Fry, Edward. “Introduction to the Work of Hans Haacke.” In Hans Haacke 1967. Cambridge: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2011.Glueck, Grace. “The Guggenheim Cancels Haacke’s Show.” New York Times 7 Apr. 1971.Gudel, Paul. “Michael Fried, Theatricality and the Threat of Skepticism.” Michael Fried and Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2018.Haacke, Hans. Hans Haacke: Framing and Being Framed: 7 Works 1970-5. Halifax: P of the Nova Scotia College of Design and New York: New York UP, 1976.———. “Hans Haacke in Conversation with Gary Carrion-Murayari and Massimiliano Gioni.” Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon and New Museum, 2019.Haacke, Hans, et al. “A Conversation with Hans Haacke.” October 30 (1984).Haacke, Hans, and Brian Wallis (eds.). Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Mass: MIT P, 1986.“Haacke’s ‘All Connected.’” Frieze 25 Oct. 2019. <https://frieze.com/article/after-contract-fight-its-workers-new-museum-opens-hans-haackes-all-connected>.Judd, Donald. “Specific Objects.” Complete Writings 1959–1975. Halifax: P of the Nova Scotia College of Design and New York: New York UP, 1965/1975.Lee, Pamela M. “Unfinished ‘Unfinished Business.’” Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon P Limited and New Museum, 2019.Ragain, Melissa. “Jack Burnham (1931–2019).” Artforum 19 Mar. 2019. <https://www.artforum.com/passages/melissa-ragain-on-jack-burnham-78935>.Sutton, Gloria. “Hans Haacke: Works of Art, 1963–72.” Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon P Limited and New Museum, 2019.Tucker, Marcia. “Director’s Forward.” Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Mass: MIT P, 1986.


 
 
 Introduction It appears that graffiti has begun to clean up its act. Escalating numbers of mature graffiti writers feel the removal of their graffiti has robbed them of a history, and are turning to legal projects in an effort to restore it. Phibs has declared the graffiti underground “limited” and Kano claims its illegal aspect no longer inspires him (Hamilton, 73). A sign of the times was the exhibition Sake of Name: Australian Graffiti Now which opened at the Wharf 2 Theatre in January 2001. The exhibition was commissioned by the Sydney Theatre Company and comprised twenty-two pieces painted by graffiti writers from around Australia. Keen to present a respectable image, writers rejected the original title of Bomb the Wharf, as they felt it focused on the negative aspects of the culture (Andrews, 2). Premier Bob Carr opened the exhibition with the declaration that there is a difference between “graffiti art” and “graffiti vandalism”. The Premier’s stance struck a discordant note with Tony Stevens, a twenty-three-year veteran graffiti cleaner. Described by the Sydney Morning Herald as an “urban art critic by default,” Stevens could see no distinction between graffiti art and vandalism (Leys, 1). Furthermore, he expressed his disappointment that the pieces had “no sense of individuality … it could be graffiti from any American city” (Stevens, 1). As far as Stevens could see, Australian graffiti expressed nothing of its Australian context; it simply mimicked that of America. Sydney Theatre Company director Benedict Andrews responded with a venomous attack on Stevens. Andrews accused the cleaner of being blinded by prejudice (1), and felt that years of cleaning texta tags from railway corridors could not have possibly qualified Stevens as an art critic (3). “The artists in this exhibition are not misfits,” Andrews wrote (2). “They are serious artists in dialogue with their culture and the landscapes in which they live” (2). He went on to hail the strength and diversity of the Australian graffiti scene: “it is a vital and agile international culture and in Australia has evolved in specific ways” (1). The altercation between Stevens and Andrews pointed to one of the debates concerning Australian graffiti: whether it is unique or simply imitative of the American form. Hinged on the assessment of graffiti as vandalism is the view that graffiti is dirty, a disease. Proponents of this view consider graffiti to be an undifferentiated global phenomenon. Others conceive of graffiti as art, and as such argue that it is expressive of local experiences. Graffiti writers maintain that graffiti is expressive of local experiences and they describe it in terms of regional styles and aesthetics. This article maps the transformation of hip hop graffiti as it has been disseminated throughout the world. It registers the distinctiveness of graffiti in Australia and argues that graffiti is not a globally homogenous form, but one which develops in a locally specific manner. Writing and Replicating: Hip Hop Graffiti and Cultural Imperialism Contemporary graffiti subcultures are strongly identified with large American cities. Originating in the black neighbourhood cultures of Philadelphia and New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s, hip hop graffiti emerged as part of a larger, homegrown, alternative youth culture (“Urban Graffiti”, 77). Before the end of the 1970s, the aesthetic codes and stylised images of hip hop graffiti began to disseminate to major cities across America and throughout the globe. Its transmission was facilitated by: the production and export of films such as Style Wars (Silver and Chalfant, 1983) and Wild Style (Ahearn, 1983); the covers of rap albums; graffiti magazines; art dealers; and style manuals such as Subway Art (Cooper and Chalfant) and Spraycan Art (Chalfant and Prigroff). Graffiti migrated to Australian shores during the early 1980s, gaining influence through the appearance of these seminal works, which are credited by many as having inspired them to pick up a can of spraypaint. During its larval stages, the subcultural codes of graffiti invented by American writers were reiterated in an Australian context. Australian graffiti writers poached the vocabulary and rhetoric invented by their American counterparts. Writers spoke of “getting up”, “getting fame” and their “crew”, classifying their work as “tags”, “pieces”, or “throw ups”. They utilised the same bubble letters, and later, the incomprehensible “wildstyle” originally devised by American writers. It was not long, however, before Australian writers were making their own innovations and developing a unique style. Despite this, there is still widespread conviction in the view that Australian graffiti is a replica of an American cultural form. This view is supported at a theoretical level by the concept of cultural imperialism. It is generally understood, at a basic level, to be the diffusion of a foreign culture at the expense of a local culture. The concept has been usefully clarified by John Tomlinson. Since there are various orders of power involved in allegations of cultural imperialism, Tomlinson attempts to resist some implicit “master narrative” of the term, accounting for cultural imperialism in a multidimensional fashion (20). He outlines five possible versions, which inflect cultural imperialism to mean cultural domination; a discourse of nationality; media imperialism; global capital; and modernity (19-28). The idea that Australian graffiti replicates American graffiti draws particularly on the first two versions—that of cultural imperialism as cultural domination, and the discourse of nationality. Both these approaches focus on the processes involved in cultural imperialism—“the invasion of an indigenous culture by a foreign one” (Tomlinson, 23). Many people I spoke to about graffiti saw it as evidence of foreign, particularly American, domination and influence over Australian culture. They expressed concern that the appearance of graffiti would signal an influx of “American” problems: gang activity, escalating violence and social disorder. Cultural imperialism as a discourse of nationality hinges on the concepts of “belonging” and “indigenous culture”. In a conference organised by the Graffiti Program of the Government of Western Australia, Senator Ian Campbell argued that graffiti had no place in Australia. He felt that, “there should be little need for social comment through the vandalism of other’s property. Perhaps in nations where … freedoms are not recognised … but not in Australia” (6). Tomlinson argues that the conceptions of cultural imperialism as both cultural domination and as a discourse of nationality are popular because of their highly ambiguous (and thus accommodating) nature (19, 23). However, both notions are problematic. Tomlinson immediately dismisses the notion of cultural imperialism as cultural domination, arguing that one should aim for specificity. “Imperialism” and “domination” are rather general notions, and as such both have sufficient conceptual breadth and ambiguity to accommodate most uses to which they might be put (19). Cultural imperialism as a discourse of nationality is similarly problematic, relying on the precise definitions of a series of terms—such as belonging, and indigenous culture—which have multiple inflections (24). Cultural imperialism has often been tracked as a process of homogenisation. Conceiving of cultural imperialism as homogenisation is particularly pertinent to the argument for the global homogeneity of graffiti. Cultural homogenisation makes “everywhere seem more or less the same,” assuming a global uniformity which is inherently Western, and in extreme cases, American (6). The implications of “Americanisation” are relevant to the attitudes of Australian graffiti writers. On the Blitzkrieg Bulletin Board—an internet board for Australian graffiti writers—I found evidence of a range of responses to “Americanisation” in Australian graffiti. One of the writers had posted: “you shouldn’t even be doing graff if you are a toy little kid, buying export paint and painting legal walls during the day … f*** all y’all niggaz!” s3 replied, “I do know that modern graffiti originated in America but … token are you American? Why do you want to talk like an American gangsta rapper?” The global currency of graffiti is one in which local originality and distinctiveness are highly prized. It is a source of shame for a writer to “bite”. Many of the writers I spoke to became irate when I suggested that Australian styles “bit” those of America. It seems inconsistent that Australian graffiti writers would reproduce American graffiti, if they do not even tolerate Australian writers using the word “nigga”. Like the argument that Australian graffiti replicates that of America, the concept of cultural imperialism is problematic. By the 1970s the concept was beginning to come apart at the seams, its “artificial coherence” exposed when subjected to a range of applications (Tomlinson, 8). Although the idea of cultural imperialism has been discredited and somewhat abandoned at the level of theory, the concept nonetheless continues to guide attitudes towards graffiti. Jeff Ferrell has argued that the interplay of cultural resources involved in worldwide graffiti directly locates it inside issues of cultural imperialism (“Review of Moscow Graffiti”, paragraph 5). Stylistic and subcultural consistencies are mobilised to substantiate assertions of the operation of cultural imperialism in the global form of graffiti. This serves to render it globally homogeneous. While many graffiti writers would concede that graffiti maintains certain global elements, few would agree that this is indicative of a global homogeneity of form. As part of the hip hop component of their website, Triple J conducted an investigation into graffiti. It found that “the graffiti aesthetic developed in New York has been modified with individual characteristics … and has transformed into a unique Australian style” (“Old Skool”, paragraph 6). Veteran writers Umph, Exit, Phibs and Dmote agree. Perth writer Zenith claims, “we came up with styles from the US back in the day and it has grown into something quite unique” (personal communication). Exit declares, “every city has its own particular style. Graffiti from Australia can easily be distinguished by graffiti artists. Australia has its own particular style” (1). Umph agrees: “to us writers, the differences are obvious” (2). Although some continue to perceive Australian graffiti as replicating that of America, it appears that this is no longer the case. Evidence has emerged that Australian graffiti has evolved into a unique and localised form, which no longer imitates that of America. “Going Over” Cultural Imperialism: Hip Hop Graffiti and Processes of Globalisation The argument that graffiti has developed local inflections has lately garnered increasing support due to new theories of global cultural interaction and exchange. The modern era has been characterised by the increasing circulation of goods, capital, knowledge, information, people, images, ideologies, technologies and practices across national borders and territorial boundaries (Appadurai, 230; Scholte, 10). Academic discussion of these developments has converged in recent years around the concept of “globalisation”. While cultural imperialism describes these movements as the diffusion of a foreign culture at the expense of a local one, globalisation interprets these profound changes as evidence of “a global ecumene of persistent cultural interaction and exchange” (Hannerz, 107). In such a view, the globe is not characterised by domination and homogenisation (as with cultural imperialism), but more in terms of exchange and heterogeneity. Recent studies acknowledge that globalisation is complex and multidimensional (Giddens, 30; Kalb, 1), even a process of paradoxes (Findlay, 30). Globalisation is frequently described in terms of contradictory processes—universalisation vs. particularisation, homogenisation vs. differentiation, integration vs. fragmentation. Another of these dialectical tendencies is that of localisation. Kloos defines localisation as representing “the rise of localised, culturally defined identities … localisation stresses sociocultural specificity, in a limited space” (281). While localisation initially appears to stand in opposition to globalisation, the concepts are actually involved in a dialectical process (Giddens, 64). The relationship between localisation and globalisation has been formulated as follows: “Processes of globalisation trigger identity movements leading to the creation of localised, cultural-specific, identities” (Kloos, 282). The development of localisation is particularly pertinent to this study of graffiti. The concept allows for local diversity and has led to the understanding that global cultural phenomena are involved in a process of exchange. Work around globalisation lends credence to the argument that, as graffiti has disseminated throughout the globe, it has mutated to the specific locale within which it exists. Graffiti has always been locally specific: from the early stages which witnessed writers such as Julio 204, Fran 207 and Joe 136 (the numbers referred to their street), to the more recent practice of suffixing tag names with the name of a writers’ crew and their area code. The tendency to include area codes has been largely abandoned in Australia as the law has responded to graffiti with increasing vigilance, but evolutions in graffiti have pointed towards the development of regionally specific styles which writers have come to recognise. Thus, graffiti cannot be thought of as a globally homogenous form, nor can it be said that Australian graffiti replicates that of America. As hip hop has circulated throughout the globe it has appeared to adopt local inflections, having adapted into something quite locally distinctive. In a sense hip hop has been “translated” to particular circumstances. It is now appropriate to consider Australian hip hop and graffiti as a translation of a global cultural phenomenon. A useful reference in this regard is Yuri Lotman, who designates dialogue as the elementary mechanism of translation (143). He suggests that participants involved in a dialogue alternate between a position of “transmission” and “reception” (144). Hence cultural developments are cyclical, and relationships between units—which may range from genres to national cultures—pass through periods of “transmission” and “reception” (144). Lotman proposes that the relationship between structures follows a pattern: at first, a structure will appear in decline, static, unoriginal. He records these “intermissions” as “pauses in dialogue”, during which the structure absorbs influences from the outside (144). When saturation reaches a certain limit, the structure begins producing its own texts as its “passive state changes to a state of alertness” (145). This is a useful way of comprehending Australian hip hop culture. It appears that the Australian hip hop scene has left behind its period of “reception” and is now witnessing one of “transmission” in which it is producing uniquely Australian flavours and styles. Of the contemporary graffiti I have observed, it appears that Australian writing is truly distinctive. Australian writers may have initially poached the subcultural codes developed by their American counterparts, however Australia has evolved to be truly unique where it counts—in graffiti styles. Distinctive graffiti styles can be witnessed, not only between different continents, but also within geographic locations. American graffiti registers a variety of locally specific forms. New York remains devoted to the letter, while graffiti on the west coast of America is renowned for its gang writing. American lettering styles tend to develop existing styles. New York wildstyle is easily recognised, and differs from letters in the Bay Area and San Francisco, which feature arrows inside the letters. While American graffiti is by and large concerned with letters, Australia has gained some repute for its exploration of characters. Like American writers, Australians employ characters poached from popular culture, but for the most part Australian writers employ characters and figures that they have invented themselves, often poaching elements from a wide variety of sources and utilising a wide variety of styles. Marine imagery, not usually employed in American graffiti, recurs in Australian pieces. Kikinit in the Park, a youth festival held in Fremantle in March 2001, featured a live urban art display by Bugszy Snaps, who combined oceanic and graffiti iconography, fusing sea creatures with spraypaint cans. Phibs also “uses images from the sea a lot” (Hamilton, 73), having grown up at the beach. In spite of this focus on the development of characters and images, Australia has not neglected the letter. While initially Australian graffiti artists imitated the styles developed in America, Australian lettering has evolved into something exceptional. Some writers have continued to employ bubble letters and wildstyle, and Australia has kept up with modifications in wildstyle that has seen it move towards 3D. Australia has cultivated this form of traditional wildstyle, elevating it to new heights. Sometimes it is combined with other styles; other times it appears as controlled wildstyle—set around a framework of some sort. In other instances, Australia has charted new territory with the letter, developing styles that are completely individual. Australian writing also blends a variety of lettering and graphic styles, combining letters and figures in new and exciting ways. Australian graffiti often fuses letters with images. This is relatively rare in American graffiti, which tends to focus on lettering and, on the whole, utilises characters to less effect than Australian graffiti. Conclusion Graffiti is not a globally homogeneous form, but one which has developed in locally specific and distinctive ways. As hip hop graffiti has circulated throughout the globe it has been translated between various sites and developed local inflections. In order to visualise graffiti in this manner, it is necessary to recognise theories of cultural imperialism as guiding the widespread belief that graffiti is a globally homogeneous form. I have refuted this view and the worth of cultural imperialism in directing attitudes towards graffiti, as there is a valid foundation for considering the local distinctiveness of Australian graffiti. By engaging critically with literature around globalisation, I have established a theoretical base for the argument that graffiti is locally specific. Envisaging the global form of hip hop graffiti as translated between various sites and having developed in locally specific ways has exposed the study of graffiti outside of the United States. Current writings on cultural studies and graffiti are dominated by the American academy, taking the United States as its centre. In rectifying this imbalance, I stress the need to recognise the distinctiveness of other cultures and geographic locations, even if they appear to be similar. While writers across Australia argue that their locations produce original styles, few have been willing to expound on how their scene is “fresh”. One writer I spoke with was an exception. Zenith explained that: “the way we are original is that our style has developed for so long, fermented if you will, because of Perth being so damned isolated” (personal communication). He went on to say: “I also happen to feel that we’re losing the originality every second of every day, for a number of reasons … with web sites, videos, magazines, and all this type of graffito affiliated stuff” (personal communication). Hip hop graffiti culture is one in which communication and exchange is of central concern. The circulation of this “graffito affiliated stuff”—websites, graffiti magazines, videos, books—as well as the fact that aerosol artists frequently travel to other cities and countries to write, demonstrates that this is a culture which, although largely identified with America, is also global in reach. This global interaction and exchange is increasingly characterised by a complex relationship which involves imitation and adaptation. Glossary Bite To copy another graffiti writer’s style Crew Organised group of graffiti writers Getting up Successful graffiti endeavour; to graffiti Going over To graffiti over another’s graffiti Piece The most sophisticated kind of graffiti, which includes characters, words and phrases Tag A stylised version of a signature; the most basic form of graffiti Throw up Two-dimensional version of a tag Wildstyle Style of graffiti characterised by interlocking letters and arrows Writer Graffiti artist; one who does graffiti References Andrews, Benedict. “If a Cleaner Can Review Graffiti Art, Then …” Sydney Morning Herald 15 Jan. 2001. 15 August 2001 http://www.smh.com.au/news/0101/15/features/features8.html>. Appadurai, Arjun. “Globalization and the Research Imagination.” International Social Science Journal 51.2 (1999): 229-38. Campbell, Ian. “The National Perspective.” Dealing with Graffiti. Ed. Graffiti Program, Government of Western Australia: Perth, 1997: 6-7. Chalfant, Henry, and James Prigroff. Spraycan Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 1987. Cooper, Martha, and Henry Chalfant. Subway Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 1984. “Exit”. n.d. [1998]. 18 Jul. 2001 http://loud.net.au/projects/digit/garry/exit.htm>. Ferrell, Jeff. “Review of Moscow Graffiti: Language and Subculture.” Social Justice 20.3-4 (1993): 188 (15). ———. “Urban Graffiti: Crime, Control, and Resistance.” Youth and Society 27 (1995-6): 73-87. Findlay, Mark. The Globalization of Crime: Understanding Transitional Relationships in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Giddens, Anthony. Runaway World: How Globalization Is Reshaping our Lives. New York: Routledge, 2000. Hamilton, Kate. “Can in Hand.” Rolling Stone 590 (2001): 72-5. Hannerz, Ulf. “Scenarios for Peripheral Cultures.” Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity. Ed. Anthony D. King. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1991. 107-28. Kalb, Don. “Localizing Flows: Power, Paths, Institutions, and Networks.” The Ends of Globalization: Bringing Society Back In. Ed. Don Kalb. Boston: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000. 1-29. Kloos, Peter. “The Dialectics of Globalization and Localization.” The Ends of Globalization: Bringing Society Back In. Ed. Don Kalb. Boston: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. 281-97. Leys, Nick. “Graffiti Removalist Gives Art Installation a Spray.” Sydney Morning Herald 9 January 2001. 9 Jan. 2001. http://www.smh.com.au/news/0101/09/national/national15.html>. Lotman, Yuri. The Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1990. “Old Skool.” Triple J. 2001. 18 Jul. 2001 http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/arts/graff/oldskool/default.htm>. s3. “Name & Email Supplied.” Online posting. 9 May 2004. Blitzkrieg Bulletin Board. 20 July 2001 http://network54.com/Forum>. Scholte, Jan Aarte. “Globalisation: Prospects For a Paradigm Shift.” Politics and Globalisation: Knowledge, Ethics and Agency. Ed. Martin Shaw. London: Routledge, 1999. 9-22. Stevens, Tony. “It’s Vandalism, It’s Illegal and It Causes Anguish and Frustration.” Sydney Morning Herald 5 Feb. 2001. 4 Mar. 2001 http://www.smh.com.au/news/0102/05/features/features10.html>. Style Wars. Dir. Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant. 1983. DVD. Passion River, 2005. Token. “F*** You Little Kids!” Online posting. 5 May 2000. Blitzkrieg Bulletin Board. 20 Jul. 2001 http://network54.com/Forum>. Tomlinson, John. Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction. London: Pinter Publishers, 1991. Umph. n.d. [1998]. 18 Jul. 2001. http://loud.net.au/projects/digit/garry/umph.htm>. Wild Style. Dir. Charlie Ahearn. 1983. DVD. Rhino Theatrical, 2002. 
 
 
 
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IntroductionAustralia is at a particular point in its history where there is a noticeable diaspora of artists and creative practitioners away from the major capitals of Sydney and Melbourne (in particular), driven in no small part by ballooning house prices of the last eight years. This has meant big changes for some regional spaces, and in turn, for the face of Australian cultural life. Regional cultural precincts are forming with tourist flows, funding attention and cultural economies. Likewise, there appears to be growing consciousness in the ‘art centres’ of Melbourne and Sydney of interesting and relevant activities outside their limits. This research draws on my experience as an art practitioner, curator and social researcher in one such region (Castlemaine in Central Victoria), and particularly from a recent interview series I have conducted in collaboration with art space in that region, Wide Open Road Art. In this, 23 regional and city-based artists were asked about the social, economic and local conditions that can and have supported their art practices. Drawing from these conversations and Bourdieu’s ideas around cultural production, the article suggests that authentic, diverse, interesting and disruptive creative practices in Australian cultural life involve the increasingly pressing need for security while existing outside the modern imperative of high consumption; of finding alternative ways to live well while entering into the shared space of cultural production. Indeed, it is argued that often it is the capacity to defy key economic paradigms, for example of ‘rational (economic) self-interest’, that allows creative life to flourish (Bourdieu Field; Ley “Artists”). While regional spaces present new opportunities for this, there are pitfalls and nuances worth exploring.Changes in Regional AustraliaAustralia has long been an urbanising nation. Since Federation our cities have increased from a third to now constituting two-thirds of the country’s total population (Gray and Lawrence 6; ABS), making us one of the most urbanised countries in the world. Indeed, as machines replaced manual labour on farms; as Australia’s manufacturing industry began its decline; and as young people in particular left the country for city universities (Gray and Lawrence), the post-war industrial-economic boom drove this widespread demographic and economic shift. In the 1980s closures of regional town facilities like banks, schools and hospitals propelled widespread belief that regional Australia was in crisis and would be increasingly difficult to sustain (Rentschler, Bridson, and Evans; Gray and Lawrence 2; Barr et al.; ABS). However, the late 1990s and early 21st century saw a turnaround that has been referred to by some as the rise of the ‘sea change’. That is, widespread renewed interest and idealisation of not just coastal areas but anywhere outside the city (Murphy). It was a simultaneous pursuit of “a small ‘a’ alternative lifestyle” and escape from rising living costs in urban areas, especially for the unemployed, single parents and those with disabilities (Murphy). This renewed interest has been sustained. The latest wave, or series of waves, have coincided with the post-GFC house price spike, of cheap credit and lenient lending designed to stimulate the economy. This initiative in part led to Sydney and Melbourne median dwelling prices rising by up to 114% in eight years (Scutt 2017), which alone had a huge influence on who was able to afford to live in city areas and who was not. Rapid population increases and diminished social networks and familial support are also considered drivers that sent a wave of people (a million since 2011) towards the outer fringes of the cities and to ‘commuter belt’ country towns (Docherty; Murphy). While the underprivileged are clearly most disadvantaged in what has actually been a global development process (see Jayne on this, and on the city as a consumer itself), artists and creatives are also a unique category who haven’t fared well with hyper-urbanisation (Ley “Artists”). Despite the class privilege that often accompanies such a career choice, the economic disadvantage art professions often involve has seen a diaspora of artists moving to regional areas, particularly those in the hinterlands around and train lines to major centres. We see the recent ‘rise of a regional bohemia’ (Regional Australia Institute): towns like Toowoomba, Byron Bay, Surf Coast, Gold Coast-Tweed, Kangaroo Valley, Wollongong, Warburton, Bendigo, Tooyday, New Norfolk, and countless more being re-identified as arts towns and precincts. In Australia in 2016–17, 1 in 6 professional artists, and 1 in 4 visual artists, were living in a regional town (Throsby and Petetskaya). Creative arts in regional Australia makes up a quarter of the nation’s creative output and is a $2.8 billion industry; and our regions particularly draw in creative practitioners in their prime productive years (aged 24 to 44) (Regional Australia Institute).WORA Conservation SeriesIn 2018 artist and curator Helen Mathwin and myself received a local shire grant to record a conversation series with 23 artists who were based in the Central Goldfields region of Victoria as well as further afield, but who had a connection to the regional arts space we run, WideOpenRoadArt (WORA). In videoed, in-depth, approximately hour-long, semi-structured interviews conducted throughout 2018, we spoke to artists (16 women and 7 men) about the relocation phenomenon we were witnessing in our own growing arts town. Most were interviewed in WORA’s roving art float, but we seized any ad hoc opportunity we had to have genuine discussions with people. Focal points were around sustainability of practice and the social conditions that supported artists’ professional pursuits. This included accessing an arts community, circles of cultural production, and the ‘art centre’; the capacity to exhibit; but also, social factors such as affordable housing and the ability to live on a low-income while having dependants; and so on. The conversations were rich with lived experiences and insights on these issues.Financial ImperativesIn line with the discussion above, the most prominent factor we noticed in the interviews was the inescapable importance of being able to live cheaply. The consistent message that all of the interviewees, both regional- and city-based, conveyed was that a career in art-making required an important independence from the need to earn a substantial income. One interviewee commented: “I do run my art as a business, I have an ABN […] it makes a healthy loss! I don’t think I’ve ever made a profit […].” Another put it: “now that I’m in [this] town and I have a house and stuff I do feel like there is maybe a bit more security around those daily things that will hopefully give me space to [make artworks].”Much has been said on the pervasive inability to monetise art careers, notably Bourdieu’s observations that art exists on an interdependent field of cultural capital, determining for itself an autonomous conception of value separate to economics (Bourdieu, Field 39). This is somewhat similar to the idea of art as a sacred phenomenon irreducible to dollar terms (Abbing 38; see also Benjamin’s “aura”; “The Work of Art”). Art’s difficult relationship with commodification is part of its heroism that Benjamin described (Benjamin Charles Baudelaire 79), its potential to sanctify mainstream society by staying separate to the lowly aspirations of commerce (Ley “Artists” 2529). However, it is understood, artists still need to attain professional education and capacities, yet they remain at the bottom of the income ladder not only professionally, but in the case of visual artists, they remain at the bottom of the creative income hierarchies as well. Further to this, within visual arts, only a tiny proportion achieve financially backed success (Menger 277). “Artistic labour markets are characterised by high risk of failure, excess supply of recruits, low artistic income level, skewed income distribution and multiple jobholding” (Mangset, Torvik Heian, Kleppe, and Løyland; Menger). Mangset et al. point to ideas that have long surrounded the “charismatic artist myth,” of a quasi-metaphysical calling to be an artist that can lead one to overlook the profession’s vast pitfalls in terms of economic sustainability. One interviewee described it as follows: “From a very young age I wanted to be an artist […] so there’s never been a time that I’ve thought that’s not what I’m doing.” A 1% rule seems widely acknowledged in how the profession manages the financial winners against those who miss out; the tiny proportion of megastar artists versus a vast struggling remainder.As even successful artists often dip below the poverty line between paid engagements, housing costs can make the difference between being able to live in an area and not (Turnbull and Whitford). One artist described:[the reason we moved here from Melbourne] was financial, yes definitely. We wouldn’t have been able to purchase a property […] in Melbourne, we would not have been able to live in place that we wanted to live, and to do what we wanted to do […]. It was never an option for us to get a big mortgage.Another said:It partly came about as a financial practicality to move out here. My partner […] wanted to be in the bush, but I was resistant at first, we were in Melbourne but we just couldn’t afford Melbourne in the end, we had an apartment, we had a studio. My partner was a cabinet maker then. You know, just every month all our money went to rent and we just couldn’t manage anymore. So we thought, well maybe if we come out to the bush […] It was just by a happy accident that we found a property […] that we could afford, that was off-grid so it cut the bills down for us [...] that had a little studio and already had a little cottage on there that we could rent that out to get money.For a prominent artist we spoke to this issue was starkly reflected. Despite large exhibitions at some of the highest profile galleries in regional Victoria, the commissions offered for these shows were so insubstantial that the artist and their family had to take on staggering sums of personal debt to execute the ambitious and critically acclaimed shows. Another very successful artist we interviewed who had shown widely at ‘A-list’ international arts institutions and received several substantial grants, spoke of their dismay and pessimism at the idea of financial survival. For all artists we spoke to, pursuing their arts practice was in constant tension with economic imperatives, and their lives had all been shaped by the need to make shrewd decisions to continue practising. There were two artists out of the 23 we interviewed who considered their artwork able to provide full-time income, although this still relied on living costs remaining extremely low. “We are very lucky to have bought a very cheap property [in the country] that I can [also] have my workshop on, so I’m not paying for two properties in Melbourne […] So that certainly takes a fair bit of pressure off financially.” Their co-interviewee described this as “pretty luxurious!” Notably, the two who thought they could live off their art practices were both men, mid-career, whose works were large, spectacular festival items, which alongside the artists’ skill and hard work was also a factor in the type of remuneration received.Decongested LivingBeyond more affordable real estate and rental spaces, life outside our cities offers other benefits that have particular relevance to creative practitioners. Opera and festival director Lindy Hume described her move to the NSW South Coast in terms of space to think and be creative. “The abundance of time, space and silence makes living in places like [Hume’s town] ideal for creating new work” (Brown). And certainly, this was a theme that arose frequently in our interviews. Many of our regionally based artists were in part choosing the de-pressurised space of non-metro areas, and also seeking an embedded, daily connection to nature for themselves, their art-making process and their families. In one interview this was described as “dreamtime”. “Some of my more creative moments are out walking in the forest with the dog, that sort of semi-daydreamy thing where your mind is taken away by the place you’re in.”Creative HubsAll of our regional interviewees mentioned the value of the local community, as a general exchange, social support and like-minded connection, but also specifically of an arts community. Whether a tree change by choice or a more reactive move, the diaspora of artists, among others, has led to a type of rural renaissance in certain popular areas. Creative hubs located around the country, often in close proximity to the urban centres, are creating tremendous opportunities to network with other talented people doing interesting things, living in close proximity and often open to cross-fertilisation. One said: “[Castlemaine] is the best place in Australia, it has this insane cultural richness in a tiny town, you can’t go out and not meet people on the street […] For someone who has not had community in their life that is so gorgeous.” Another said:[Being an artist here] is kind of easy! Lots of people around to connect—with […] other artists but also creatively minded people [...] So it means you can just bump into someone from down the street and have an amazing conversation in five minutes about some amazing thing! […] There’s a concentration here that works.With these hubs, regional spaces are entering into a new relevance in the sphere of cultural production. They are generating unique and interesting local creative scenes for people to live amongst or visit, and generating strong local arts economies, tourist economies, and funding opportunities (Rentschler, Bridson, and Evans). Victoria in particular has burgeoned, with tourist flows to its regions increasing 13 per cent in 5 years and generating tourism worth $10 billion (Tourism Victoria). Victoria’s Greater Bendigo is Australia’s most popularly searched tourist destination on Trip Advisor, with tourism increasing 52% in 10 years (Boland). Simultaneously, funding flows have increased to regional zones, as governments seek to promote development outside Australia’s urban centres and are confident in the arts as a key strategy in boosting health, economies and overall wellbeing (see Rentschler, Bridson, and Evans; see also the 2018 Regional Centre for Culture initiative, Boland). The regions are also an increasingly relevant participant in national cultural life (Turnbull and Whitford; Mitchell; Simpson; Woodhead). Opportunities for an openness to productive exchange between regional and metropolitan sites appear to be growing, with regional festivals and art events gaining importance and unique attributes in the consciousness of the arts ‘centre’ (see for example Fairley; Simpson; Farrelly; Woodhead).Difficulties of Regional LocationDespite this, our interviews still brought to light the difficulties and barriers experienced living as a regional artist. For some, living in regional Victoria was an accepted set-back in their ambitions, something to be concealed and counteracted with education in reputable metropolitan art schools or city-based jobs. For others there was difficulty accessing a sympathetic arts community—although arts towns had vibrant cultures, certain types of creativity were preferred (often craft-based and more community-oriented). Practitioners who were active in maintaining their links to a metropolitan art scene voiced more difficulty in fitting in and successfully exhibiting their (often more conceptual or boundary-pushing) work in regional locations.The Gentrification ProblemThe other increasingly obvious issue in the revivification of some non-metropolitan areas is that they can and are already showing signs of being victims of their own success. That is, some regional arts precincts are attracting so many new residents that they are ceasing to be the low-cost, hospitable environments for artists they once were. Geographer David Ley has given attention to this particular pattern of gentrification that trails behind artists (Ley “Artists”). Ley draws from Florida’s ideas of late capitalism’s ascendency of creativity over the brute utilitarianism of the industrial era. This has got to the point that artists and creative professionals have an increasing capacity to shape and generate value in areas of life that were previous overlooked, especially with built environments (2529). Now more than ever, there is the “urbane middle-class” pursuing ‘the swirling milieu of artists, bohemians and immigrants” (Florida) as they create new, desirable landscapes with the “refuse of society” (Benjamin Charles Baudelaire 79; Ley New Middle Class). With Australia’s historic shifts in affordability in our major cities, this pattern that Ley identified in urban built environments can be seen across our states and regions as well.But with gentrification comes increased costs of living, as housing, shops and infrastructure all alter for an affluent consumer-resident. This diminishes what Bourdieu describes as “the suspension and removal of economic necessity” fundamental to the avant-garde (Bourdieu Distinction 54). That is to say, its relief from heavy pressure to materially survive is arguably critical to the reflexive, imaginative, and truly new offerings that art can provide. And as argued earlier, there seems an inbuilt economic irrationality in artmaking as a vocation—of dedicating one’s energy, time and resources to a pursuit that is notoriously impoverishing. But this irrationality may at the same time be critical to setting forth new ideas, perspectives, reflections and disruptions of taken-for-granted social assumptions, and why art is so indispensable in the first place (Bourdieu Field 39; Ley New Middle Class 2531; Weber on irrationality and the Enlightenment Project; also Adorno’s the ‘primitive’ in art). Australia’s cities, like those of most developed nations, increasingly demand we busy ourselves with the high-consumption of modern life that makes certain activities that sit outside this almost impossible. As gentrification unfolds from the metropolis to the regions, Australia faces a new level of far-reaching social inequality that has real consequences for who is able to participate in art-making, where these people can live, and ultimately what kind of diversity of ideas and voices participate in the generation of our national cultural life. ConclusionThe revival of some of Australia’s more popular regional towns has brought new life to some regional areas, particularly in reshaping their identities as cultural hubs worth experiencing, living amongst or supporting their development. Our interviews brought to life the significant benefits artists have experienced in relocating to country towns, whether by choice or necessity, as well as some setbacks. It was clear that economics played a major role in the demographic shift that took place in the area being examined; more specifically, that the general reorientation of social life towards consumption activities are having dramatic spatial consequences that we are currently seeing transform our major centres. The ability of art and creative practices to breathe new life into forgotten and devalued ideas and spaces is a foundational attribute but one that also creates a gentrification problem. Indeed, this is possibly the key drawback to the revivification of certain regional areas, alongside other prejudices and clashes between metro and regional cultures. It is argued that the transformative and redemptive actions art can perform need to involve the modern irrationality of not being transfixed by matters of economic materialism, so as to sit outside taken-for-granted value structures. This emphasises the importance of equality and open access in our spaces and landscapes if we are to pursue a vibrant, diverse and progressive national cultural sphere.ReferencesAbbing, Hans. Why Artists Are Poor: The Exceptional Economy of the Arts. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2002.Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. London: Routledge, 1983.Australian Bureau of Statistics. “Population Growth: Capital City Growth and Development.” 4102.0—Australian Social Trends. 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Newspapers and the 7:15 Showing Cinemagoing involves planning. Even in the most impromptu instances, one has to consider meeting places, line-ups and competing responsibilities. One arranges child care, postpones household chores, or rushes to finish meals. One must organise transportation and think about routes, traffic, parking or public transit. And during the course of making plans for a trip to the cinema, whether alone or in the company of others, typically one turns to locate a recent newspaper. Consulting its printed page lets us ascertain locations, a selection of film titles and their corresponding show times. In preparing to feed a cinema craving, we burrow through a newspaper to an entertainment section, finding a tableau of information and promotional appeals. Such sections compile the mini-posters of movie advertisements, with their truncated credits, as well as various reviews and entertainment news. We see names of shopping malls doubling as names of theatres. We read celebrity gossip that may or may not pertain to the film selected for that occasion. We informally rank viewing priorities ranging from essential theatrical experiences to those that can wait for the videotape release. We attempt to assess our own mood and the taste of our filmgoing companions, matching up what we suppose are appropriate selections. Certainly, other media vie to supplant the newspaper's role in cinemagoing; many now access on-line sources and telephone services that offer the crucial details about start times. Nonetheless, as a campaign by the Newspaper Association of America in Variety aimed to remind film marketers, 80% of cinemagoers refer to newspaper listings for times and locations before heading out. The accuracy of that association's statistics notwithstanding, for the moment, the local daily or weekly newspaper has a secure place in the routines of cinematic life. A basic impetus for the newspaper's role is its presentation of a schedule of show times. Whatever the venue -- published, phone or on-line -- it strikes me as especially telling that schedules are part of the ordinariness of cinemagoing. To be sure, there are those who decide what film to see on site. Anecdotally, I have had several people comment recently that they no longer decide what movie to see, but where to see a (any) movie. Regardless, the schedule, coupled with the theatre's location, figures as a point of coordination for travel through community space to a site of film consumption. The choice of show time is governed by countless demands of everyday life. How often has the timing of a film -- not the film itself, the theatre at which it's playing, nor one's financial situation --determined one's attendance? How familiar is the assessment that show times are such that one cannot make it, that the film begins a bit too earlier, that it will run too late for whatever reason, and that other tasks intervene to take precedence? I want to make several observations related to the scheduling of film exhibition. Most generally, it makes manifest that cinemagoing involves an exercise in the application of cinema knowledge -- that is, minute, everyday facilities and familiarities that help orchestrate the ordinariness of cultural life. Such knowledge informs what Michel de Certeau characterises as "the procedures of everyday creativity" (xiv). Far from random, the unexceptional decisions and actions involved with cinemagoing bear an ordering and a predictability. Novelty in audience activity appears, but it is alongside fairly exact expectations about the event. The schedule of start times is essential to the routinisation of filmgoing. Displaying a Fordist logic of streamlining commodity distribution and the time management of consumption, audiences circulate through a machine that shapes their constituency, providing a set time for seating, departure, snack purchases and socialising. Even with the staggered times offered by multiplex cinemas, schedules still lay down a fixed template around which other activities have to be arrayed by the patron. As audiences move to and through the theatre, the schedule endeavours to regulate practice, making us the subjects of a temporal grid, a city context, a cinema space, as well as of the film itself. To be sure, one can arrive late and leave early, confounding the schedule's disciplining force. Most importantly, with or without such forms of evasion, it channels the actions of audiences in ways that consideration of the gaze cannot address. Taking account of the scheduling of cinema culture, and its implication of adjunct procedures of everyday life, points to dimensions of subjectivity neglected by dominant theories of spectatorship. To be the subject of a cinema schedule is to understand one assemblage of the parameters of everyday creativity. It would be foolish to see cinema audiences as cattle, herded and processed alone, in some crude Gustave LeBon fashion. It would be equally foolish not to recognise the manner in which film distribution and exhibition operates precisely by constructing images of the activity of people as demographic clusters and generalised cultural consumers. The ordinary tactics of filmgoing are supplemental to, and run alongside, a set of industrial structures and practices. While there is a correlation between a culture industry's imagined audience and the life that ensues around its offerings, we cannot neglect that, as attention to film scheduling alerts us, audiences are subjects of an institutional apparatus, brought into being for the reproduction of an industrial edifice. Streamline Audiences In this, film is no different from any culture industry. Film exhibition and distribution relies on an understanding of both the market and the product or service being sold at any given point in time. Operations respond to economic conditions, competing companies, and alternative activities. Economic rationality in this strategic process, however, only explains so much. This is especially true for an industry that must continually predict, and arguably give shape to, the "mood" and predilections of disparate and distant audiences. Producers, distributors and exhibitors assess which films will "work", to whom they will be marketed, as well as establish the very terms of success. Without a doubt, much of the film industry's attentions act to reduce this uncertainty; here, one need only think of the various forms of textual continuity (genre films, star performances, etc.) and the economies of mass advertising as ways to ensure box office receipts. Yet, at the core of the operations of film exhibition remains a number of flexible assumptions about audience activity, taste and desire. These assumptions emerge from a variety of sources to form a brand of temporary industry "commonsense", and as such are harbingers of an industrial logic. Ien Ang has usefully pursued this view in her comparative analysis of three national television structures and their operating assumptions about audiences. Broadcasters streamline and discipline audiences as part of their organisational procedures, with the consequence of shaping ideas about consumers as well as assuring the reproduction of the industrial structure itself. She writes, "institutional knowledge is driven toward making the audience visible in such a way that it helps the institutions to increase their power to get their relationship with the audience under control, and this can only be done by symbolically constructing 'television audience' as an objectified category of others that can be controlled, that is, contained in the interest of a predetermined institutional goal" (7). Ang demonstrates, in particular, how various industrially sanctioned programming strategies (programme strips, "hammocking" new shows between successful ones, and counter-programming to a competitor's strengths) and modes of audience measurement grow out of, and invariably support, those institutional goals. And, most crucially, her approach is not an effort to ascertain the empirical certainty of "actual" audiences; instead, it charts the discursive terrain in which the abstract concept of audience becomes material for the continuation of industry practices. Ang's work tenders special insight to film culture. In fact, television scholarship has taken full advantage of exploring the routine nature of that medium, the best of which deploys its findings to lay bare configurations of power in domestic contexts. One aspect has been television time and schedules. For example, David Morley points to the role of television in structuring everyday life, discussing a range of research that emphasises the temporal dimension. Alerting us to the non- necessary determination of television's temporal structure, he comments that we "need to maintain a sensitivity to these micro-levels of division and differentiation while we attend to the macro-questions of the media's own role in the social structuring of time" (265). As such, the negotiation of temporal structures implies that schedules are not monolithic impositions of order. Indeed, as Morley puts it, they "must be seen as both entering into already constructed, historically specific divisions of space and time, and also as transforming those pre-existing division" (266). Television's temporal grid has been address by others as well. Paddy Scannell characterises scheduling and continuity techniques, which link programmes, as a standardisation of use, making radio and television predictable, 'user friendly' media (9). John Caughie refers to the organization of flow as a way to talk about the national particularities of British and American television (49-50). All, while making their own contributions, appeal to a detailing of viewing context as part of any study of audience, consumption or experience; uncovering the practices of television programmers as they attempt to apprehend and create viewing conditions for their audiences is a first step in this detailing. Why has a similar conceptual framework not been applied with the same rigour to film? Certainly the history of film and television's association with different, at times divergent, disciplinary formations helps us appreciate such theoretical disparities. I would like to mention one less conspicuous explanation. It occurs to me that one frequently sees a collapse in the distinction between the everyday and the domestic; in much scholarship, the latter term appears as a powerful trope of the former. The consequence has been the absenting of a myriad of other -- if you will, non-domestic -- manifestations of everyday-ness, unfortunately encouraging a rather literal understanding of the everyday. The impression is that the abstractions of the everyday are reduced to daily occurrences. Simply put, my minor appeal is for the extension of this vein of television scholarship to out-of-home technologies and cultural forms, that is, other sites and locations of the everyday. In so doing, we pay attention to extra-textual structures of cinematic life; other regimes of knowledge, power, subjectivity and practice appear. Film audiences require a discussion about the ordinary, the calculated and the casual practices of cinematic engagement. Such a discussion would chart institutional knowledge, identifying operating strategies and recognising the creativity and multidimensionality of cinemagoing. What are the discursive parameters in which the film industry imagines cinema audiences? What are the related implications for the structures in which the practice of cinemagoing occurs? Vectors of Exhibition Time One set of those structures of audience and industry practice involves the temporal dimension of film exhibition. In what follows, I want to speculate on three vectors of the temporality of cinema spaces (meaning that I will not address issues of diegetic time). Note further that my observations emerge from a close study of industrial discourse in the U.S. and Canada. I would be interested to hear how they are manifest in other continental contexts. First, the running times of films encourage turnovers of the audience during the course of a single day at each screen. The special event of lengthy anomalies has helped mark the epic, and the historic, from standard fare. As discussed above, show times coordinate cinemagoing and regulate leisure time. Knowing the codes of screenings means participating in an extension of the industrial model of labour and service management. Running times incorporate more texts than the feature presentation alone. Besides the history of double features, there are now advertisements, trailers for coming attractions, trailers for films now playing in neighbouring auditoriums, promotional shorts demonstrating new sound systems, public service announcements, reminders to turn off cell phones and pagers, and the exhibitor's own signature clips. A growing focal point for filmgoing, these introductory texts received a boost in 1990, when the Motion Picture Association of America changed its standards for the length of trailers, boosting it from 90 seconds to a full two minutes (Brookman). This intertextuality needs to be supplemented by a consideration of inter- media appeals. For example, advertisements for television began appearing in theatres in the 1990s. And many lobbies of multiplex cinemas now offer a range of media forms, including video previews, magazines, arcades and virtual reality games. Implied here is that motion pictures are not the only media audiences experience in cinemas and that there is an explicit attempt to integrate a cinema's texts with those at other sites and locations. Thus, an exhibitor's schedule accommodates an intertextual strip, offering a limited parallel to Raymond Williams's concept of "flow", which he characterised by stating -- quite erroneously -- "in all communication systems before broadcasting the essential items were discrete" (86-7). Certainly, the flow between trailers, advertisements and feature presentations is not identical to that of the endless, ongoing text of television. There are not the same possibilities for "interruption" that Williams emphasises with respect to broadcasting flow. Further, in theatrical exhibition, there is an end-time, a time at which there is a public acknowledgement of the completion of the projected performance, one that necessitates vacating the cinema. This end-time is a moment at which the "rental" of the space has come due; and it harkens a return to the street, to the negotiation of city space, to modes of public transit and the mobile privatisation of cars. Nonetheless, a schedule constructs a temporal boundary in which audiences encounter a range of texts and media in what might be seen as limited flow. Second, the ephemerality of audiences -- moving to the cinema, consuming its texts, then passing the seat on to someone else -- is matched by the ephemerality of the features themselves. Distributors' demand for increasing numbers of screens necessary for massive, saturation openings has meant that films now replace one another more rapidly than in the past. Films that may have run for months now expect weeks, with fewer exceptions. Wider openings and shorter runs have created a cinemagoing culture characterised by flux. The acceleration of the turnover of films has been made possible by the expansion of various secondary markets for distribution, most importantly videotape, splintering where we might find audiences and multiplying viewing contexts. Speeding up the popular in this fashion means that the influence of individual texts can only be truly gauged via cross-media scrutiny. Short theatrical runs are not axiomatically designed for cinemagoers anymore; they can also be intended to attract the attention of video renters, purchasers and retailers. Independent video distributors, especially, "view theatrical release as a marketing expense, not a profit center" (Hindes & Roman 16). In this respect, we might think of such theatrical runs as "trailers" or "loss leaders" for the video release, with selected locations for a film's release potentially providing visibility, even prestige, in certain city markets or neighbourhoods. Distributors are able to count on some promotion through popular consumer- guide reviews, usually accompanying theatrical release as opposed to the passing critical attention given to video release. Consequently, this shapes the kinds of uses an assessment of the current cinema is put to; acknowledging that new releases function as a resource for cinema knowledge highlights the way audiences choose between and determine big screen and small screen films. Taken in this manner, popular audiences see the current cinema as largely a rough catalogue to future cultural consumption. Third, motion picture release is part of the structure of memories and activities over the course of a year. New films appear in an informal and ever-fluctuating structure of seasons. The concepts of summer movies and Christmas films, or the opening weekends that are marked by a holiday, sets up a fit between cinemagoing and other activities -- family gatherings, celebrations, etc. Further, this fit is presumably resonant for both the industry and popular audiences alike, though certainly for different reasons. The concentration of new films around visible holiday periods results in a temporally defined dearth of cinemas; an inordinate focus upon three periods in the year in the U.S. and Canada -- the last weekend in May, June/July/August and December -- creates seasonal shortages of screens (Rice-Barker 20). In fact, the boom in theatre construction through the latter half of the 1990s was, in part, to deal with those short-term shortages and not some year-round inadequate seating. Configurations of releasing colour a calendar with the tactical manoeuvres of distributors and exhibitors. Releasing provides a particular shape to the "current cinema", a term I employ to refer to a temporally designated slate of cinematic texts characterised most prominently by their newness. Television arranges programmes to capitalise on flow, to carry forward audiences and to counter-programme competitors' simultaneous offerings. Similarly, distributors jostle with each other, with their films and with certain key dates, for the limited weekends available, hoping to match a competitor's film intended for one audience with one intended for another. Industry reporter Leonard Klady sketched some of the contemporary truisms of releasing based upon the experience of 1997. He remarks upon the success of moving Liar, Liar (Tom Shadyac, 1997) to a March opening and the early May openings of Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (Jay Roach, 1997) and Breakdown (Jonathan Mostow, 1997), generally seen as not desirable times of the year for premieres. He cautions against opening two films the same weekend, and thus competing with yourself, using the example of Fox's Soul Food (George Tillman, Jr., 1997) and The Edge (Lee Tamahori, 1997). While distributors seek out weekends clear of films that would threaten to overshadow their own, Klady points to the exception of two hits opening on the same date of December 19, 1997 -- Tomorrow Never Dies (Roger Spottiswoode, 1997) and Titanic (James Cameron, 1997). Though but a single opinion, Klady's observations are a peek into a conventional strain of strategising among distributors and exhibitors. Such planning for the timing and appearance of films is akin to the programming decisions of network executives. And I would hazard to say that digital cinema, reportedly -- though unlikely -- just on the horizon and in which texts will be beamed to cinemas via satellite rather than circulated in prints, will only augment this comparison; releasing will become that much more like programming, or at least will be conceptualised as such. To summarize, the first vector of exhibition temporality is the scheduling and running time; the second is the theatrical run; the third is the idea of seasons and the "programming" of openings. These are just some of the forces streamlining filmgoers; the temporal structuring of screenings, runs and film seasons provides a material contour to the abstraction of audience. Here, what I have delineated are components of an industrial logic about popular and public entertainment, one that offers a certain controlled knowledge about and for cinemagoing audiences. Shifting Conceptual Frameworks A note of caution is in order. I emphatically resist an interpretation that we are witnessing the becoming-film of television and the becoming-tv of film. Underneath the "inversion" argument is a weak brand of technological determinism, as though each asserts its own essential qualities. Such a pat declaration seems more in line with the mythos of convergence, and its quasi-Darwinian "natural" collapse of technologies. Instead, my point here is quite the opposite, that there is nothing essential or unique about the scheduling or flow of television; indeed, one does not have to look far to find examples of less schedule-dependent television. What I want to highlight is that application of any term of distinction -- event/flow, gaze/glance, public/private, and so on -- has more to do with our thinking, with the core discursive arrangements that have made film and television, and their audiences, available to us as knowable and different. So, using empirical evidence to slide one term over to the other is a strategy intended to supplement and destabilise the manner in which we draw conclusions, and even pose questions, of each. What this proposes is, again following the contributions of Ien Ang, that we need to see cinemagoing in its institutional formation, rather than some stable technological, textual or experiential apparatus. The activity is not only a function of a constraining industrial practice or of wildly creative patrons, but of a complex inter-determination between the two. Cinemagoing is an organisational entity harbouring, reviving and constituting knowledge and commonsense about film commodities, audiences and everyday life. An event of cinema begins well before the dimming of an auditorium's lights. The moment a newspaper is consulted, with its local representation of an internationally circulating current cinema, its listings belie a scheduling, an orderliness, to the possible projections in a given location. As audiences are formed as subjects of the current cinema, we are also agents in the continuation of a set of institutions as well. References Ang, Ien. Desperately Seeking the Audience. New York: Routledge, 1991. Brookman, Faye. "Trailers: The Big Business of Drawing Crowds." Variety 13 June 1990: 48. Caughie, John. "Playing at Being American: Games and Tactics." Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Ed. Patricia Mellencamp. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steve Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Hindes, Andrew, and Monica Roman. "Video Titles Do Pitstops on Screens." Variety 16-22 Sep. 1996: 11+. Klady, Leonard. "Hitting and Missing the Market: Studios Show Savvy -- or Just Luck -- with Pic Release Strategies." Variety 19-25 Jan. 1998: 18. Morley, David. Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1992. Newspaper Association of America. "Before They See It Here..." Advertisement. Variety 22-28 Nov. 1999: 38. Rice-Barker, Leo. "Industry Banks on New Technology, Expanded Slates." Playback 6 May 1996: 19-20. Scannell, Paddy. Radio, Television and Modern Life. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. New York: Schocken, 1975. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Charles Acland. "Matinees, Summers and Opening Weekends: Cinemagoing Audiences as Institutional Subjects." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.1 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/cinema.php>. Chicago style: Charles Acland, "Matinees, Summers and Opening Weekends: Cinemagoing Audiences as Institutional Subjects," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 1 (2000), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/cinema.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Charles Acland. (2000) Matinees, Summers and Opening Weekends: Cinemagoing Audiences as Institutional Subjects. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/cinema.php> ([your date of access]).


 
 
 Working drawings are produced, when a house is designed, to envisage an imagined building. They are a tangible representation of an object that has no tangible existence. These working drawings act as a manual for constructing the house; they represent that which is to be built. The house comes into being, therefore, via this set of drawings. This is known as documentation. However, these drawings record the house at an ideal moment in time; they capture the house in stasis. They do not represent the future life of the house, the changes and traces the inhabitants make upon a space, nor do they document the path of the person, the arc of their actions, within the space of the house. Other types of documentation of the house allow these elements to be included. Documentation that is produced after-the-event, that interprets ‘the existing’, is absent from discourses on documentation; the realm of post factum documentation is a less examined form of documentation. This paper investigates post factum documentation of the house, and the alternative ways of making, producing and, therefore, thinking about, the house that it offers. This acknowledges the body in the space of architecture, and the inhabitation of space, and as a dynamic process. This then leads to the potential of the‘model of an action’ representing the motion and temporality inherent within the house. Architecture may then be seen as that which encloses the inhabitant. The word ‘document’ refers to a record or evidence of events. It implies a chronological sequence: the document comes after-the-event, that is, it is post factum. Within architecture, however, the use of the word documentation, predominantly, refers to working drawings that are made to ‘get to’ a building, drawings being the dominant representation within architecture. Robin Evans calls this notion, of architecture being brought into existence through drawing, the principle of reversed directionality (Evans 1997, 1989). Although it may be said that these types of drawings document the idea, or document the imagined reality of the building, their main emphasis, and reading, is in getting to something. In this case, the term documentation is used, not due to the documents’ placement within a process, of coming after the subject-object, but in referring to the drawings’ role. Other architectural drawings do exist that are a record of what is seen, but these are not the dominant drawing practice within architecture. Documentation within architecture regards the act of drawing as that process upon which the object is wholly dependent for its coming into existence. Drawing is defined as the pre-eminent methodology for generation of the building; drawings are considered the necessary initial step towards the creation of the 1:1 scale object. During the designing phase, the drawings are primary, setting out an intention. Drawings, therefore, are regarded as having a prescriptive endpoint rather than being part of an open-ended improvisation. Drawings, in getting to a building, draw out something, the act of drawing searches for and uncovers the latent design, drawing it into existence. They are seen as getting to the core of the design. Drawings display a technique of making and are influenced by their medium. Models, in getting to a building, may be described in the same way. The act of modelling, of making manifest two-dimensional sketches into a three-dimensional object, operates similarly in possessing a certain power in assisting the design process to unfurl. Drawing, as recording, alters the object. This act of drawing is used to resolve, and to edit, by excluding and omitting, as much as by including, within its page. Models similarly made after-the-fact are interpretive and consciously aware of their intentions. In encapsulating the subject-object, the model as documentation is equally drawing out meaning. This type of documentation is not neutral, but rather involves interpretation and reflection through representational editing. Working drawings record the house at an ideal moment in time: at the moment the builders leave the site and the owners unlock the front door. These drawings capture the house in stasis. There is often the notion that until the owners of a new house move in, the house has been empty, unlived in. But the life of the house cannot be fixed to any one starting point; rather it has different phases of life from conception to ruin. With working drawings being the dominant representation of the house, they exclude much; both the life of the house before this act of inhabitation, and the life that occurs after it. The transformations that occur at each phase of construction are never shown in a set of working drawings. When a house is built, it separates itself from the space it resides within: the domain of the house is marked off from the rest of the site. The house has a skin of a periphery, that inherently creates an outside and an inside (Kreiser 88). As construction continues, there is a freedom in the structure which closes down; potential becomes prescriptive as choices are made and embodied in material. The undesignedness of the site, that exists before the house is planned, becomes lost once the surveyors’ pegs are in place (Wakely 92). Next, the skeletal frame of open volumes becomes roofed, and then becomes walled, and walking through the frame becomes walking through doorways. One day an interior is created. The interior and exterior of the house are now two different things, and the house has definite edges (Casey 290). At some point, the house becomes lockable, its security assured through this act of sealing. It is this moment that working drawings capture. Photographs comprise the usual documentation of houses once they are built, and yet they show no lived-in-ness, no palimpsest of occupancy. They do not observe the changes and traces the inhabitants make upon a space, nor do they document the path of the person, the arc of their actions, within the space of the house. American architects and artists Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio have written of these traces of the everyday that punctuate floor and wall surfaces: the intersecting rings left by coffee glasses on a tabletop, the dust under a bed that becomes its plan analog when the bed is moved, the swing etched into the floor by a sagging door. (Diller & Scofidio 99) It is these marks, these traces, that are omitted from the conventional documentation of a built house. To examine an alternative way of documenting, and to redress these omissions, a redefinition of the house is needed. A space can be delineated by its form, its edges, or it can be defined by the actions that are performed, and the connections between people that occur, within it. To define the house by what it encapsulates, rather than being seen as an object in space, allows a different type of documentation to be employed. By defining a space as that which accommodates actions, rooms may be delineated by the reach of a person, carved out by the actions of a person, as though they are leaving a trace as they move, a windscreen wiper of living, through the repetition of an act. Reverse directional documentation does not directly show the actions that take place within a house; we must infer these from the rooms’ fittings and fixtures, and the names on the plan. In a similar way, Italo Calvino, in Invisible Cities, defines a city by the relationships between its inhabitants, rather than by its buildings: in Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or grey or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain … Thus, when travelling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of the abandoned cities without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form. (Calvino 62) By defining architecture by that which it encapsulates, form or materiality may be given to the ‘spiderwebs of intricate relationships’. Modelling the actions that are performed in the space of architecture, therefore, models the architecture. This is referred to as a model of an action. In examining the model of an action, the possibilities of post factum documentation of the house may be seen. The Shinkenchiku competition The Plan-Less House (2006), explored these ideas of representing a house without using the conventional plan to do so. A suggested alternative was to map the use of the house by its inhabitants, similar to the idea of the model of an action. The house could be described by a technique of scanning: those areas that came into contact with the body would be mapped. Therefore, the representation of the house is not connected with spatial division, that is, by marking the location of walls, but rather with its use by its inhabitants. The work of Diller and Scofidio and Allan Wexler and others explores this realm. One inquiry they share is the modelling of the body in the space of architecture: to them, the body is inseparable from the conception of space. By looking at their work, and that of others, three different ways of representing this inhabitation of space are seen. These are: to represent the objects involved in a particular action, or patterns of movement, that occurs in the space, in a way that highlights the action; to document the action itself; or to document the result of the action. These can all be defined as the model of an action. The first way, the examination of the body in a space via an action’s objects, is explored by American artist Allan Wexler, who defines architecture as ‘choreography without a choreographer, structuring its inhabitant’s movements’ (Galfetti 22). In his project ‘Crate House’ (1981), Wexler examines the notion of the body in a space via an action’s objects. He divided the house into its basic activities: bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and living room. Each of these is then defined by their artefacts, contained in their own crate on wheels, which is rolled out when needed. At any point in time, the entire house becomes the activity due to its crate: when a room such as the kitchen is needed, that crate is rolled in through one of the door openings. When the occupant is tired, the entire house becomes a bedroom, and when the occupant is hungry, it becomes a kitchen … I view each crate as if it is a diorama in a natural history museum — the pillow, the spoon, the flashlight, the pot, the nail, the salt. We lose sight of everyday things. These things I isolate, making them sculpture: their use being theatre. (Galfetti 42–6) The work of Andrea Zittel explores similar ideas. ‘A–Z Comfort Unit’ (1994), is made up of five segments, the centrepiece being a couch/bed, which is surrounded by four ancillary units on castors. These offer a library, kitchen, home office and vanity unit. The structure allows the lodger never to need to leave the cocoon-like bed, as all desires are an arm’s reach away. The ritual of eating a meal is examined in Wexler’s ‘Scaffold Furniture’ (1988). This project isolates the components of the dining table without the structure of the table. Instead, the chair, plate, cup, glass, napkin, knife, fork, spoon and lamp are suspended by scaffolding. Their connection, rather than being that of objects sharing a tabletop, is seen to be the (absent) hand that uses them during a meal; the act of eating is highlighted. In these examples, the actions performed within a space are represented by the objects involved in the action. A second way of representing the patterns of movement within a space is to represent the action itself. The Japanese tea ceremony breaks the act of drinking into many parts, separating and dissecting the whole as a way of then reassembling it as though it is one continuous action. Wexler likens this to an Eadweard Muybridge film of a human in motion (Galfetti 31). This one action is then housed in a particular building, so that when devoid of people, the action itself still has a presence. Another way of documenting the inhabitation of architecture, by drawing the actions within the space, is time and motion studies, such as those of Rene W.P. Leanhardt (Diller & Scofidio 40–1). In one series of photographs, lights were attached to a housewife’s wrists, to demonstrate the difference in time and effort required in the preparation of a dinner prepared entirely from scratch in ninety minutes, and a pre-cooked, pre-packaged dinner of the same dish, which took only twelve minutes. These studies are lines of light, recorded as line drawings on a photograph of the kitchen. They record the movement of the person in the room of the action they perform, but they also draw the kitchen in a way conventional documentation does not. A recent example of the documentation of an action was undertaken by Asymptote and the students at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture in their exhibition at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2000. A gymnast moving through the interior space of the pavilion was recorded using a process of digitisation and augmentation. Using modelling procedures, the spatial information was then reconstructed to become a full-scale architectural re-enactment of the gymnast’s trajectory through the room (Feireiss 40). This is similar to a recent performance by Australian contemporary dance company Chunky Move, called ‘Glow’. Infra-red video tracking took a picture of the dancer twenty-five times a second. This was used to generate shapes and images based on the movements of a solo dancer, which were projected onto the floor and the dancer herself. In the past, when the company has used DVDs or videos, the dancer has had to match what they were doing to the projection. This shifts the technology to following the dancer (Bibby 3). A third way of representing the inhabitation of architecture is to document the result of an action. Raoul Bunschoten writes of the marks of a knife being the manifestation of the act of cutting, as an analogy: incisions imply the use of a cutting tool. Together, cuts and cutting tool embrace a special condition. The actual movement of the incision is fleeting, the cut or mark stays behind, the knife moves on, creating an apparent discontinuity … The space of the cut is a reminder of the knife, its shape and its movements: the preparation, the swoop through the air, the cutting, withdrawal, the moving away. These movements remain implicitly connected with the cut as its imaginary cause, as a mnemonic programme about a hand holding a knife, incising a surface, severing skin. (Bunschoten 40) As a method of documenting actions, the paintings of Jackson Pollack can be seen as a manifestation of an act. In the late 1940s, Pollack began to drip paint onto a canvas laid flat on the floor; his tools were sticks and old caked brushes. This process clarified his work, allowing him to walk around it and work from all four sides. Robert Hughes describes it as ‘painting “from the hip” … swinging paintstick in flourishes and frisks that required an almost dancelike movement of the body’ (Hughes 154). These paintings made manifest Pollack’s gestures. As his arm swung in space, the dripping paint followed that arc, to be preserved on a flat plane as pictorial space (Hughes 262). Wexler, in another study, recorded the manifestation of an action. He placed a chair in a one-room building. It was attached to lengths of timber that extended outdoors through slots in the walls of the building. As the chair moved inside the building, its projections carved grooves in the ground outside. As the chair moved in a particular pattern, deeper grooves were created: ‘Eventually, the occupant of the chair has no choice in his movement; the architecture moves him.’ (Galfetti 14) The pattern of movement creates a result, which in turn influences the movement. By redefining architecture by what it encapsulates rather than by the enclosure itself, allows architecture to be documented by the post factum model of an action that occurs in that space. This leads to the exploration of architecture, formed by the body within it, since the documentation and representation of architecture starts to affect the reading of architecture. Architecture may then be seen as that which encloses the inhabitant. The documentation of the body and the space it makes concerns the work of the Hungarian architect Imre Makovecz. His exploration is of the body and the space it makes. Makovecz, and a circle of like-minded architects and artists, embarked on a series of experiments analysing the patterns of human motion and subsequently set up a competition based around the search for a minimum existential space. This consisted of mapping human motion in certain spatial conditions and situations. Small light bulbs were attached to points on the limbs and joints and photographed, creating a series of curves and forms. This led to a competition called ‘Minimal Space’ (1971–2), in which architects, artists and designers were invited to consider a minimal space for containing the human body, a new notion of personal containment. Makovecz’s own response took the form of a bell-like capsule composed of a double shell expressing its presence and location in both time and space (Heathcote 120). Vito Acconci, an artist turned architect by virtue of his installation work, explored this notion of enclosure in his work (Feireiss 38). In 1980 Acconci began his series of ‘self-erecting architectures’, vehicles or instruments involving one or more viewers whose operation erected simple buildings (Acconci & Linker 114). In his project ‘Instant House’ (1980), a set of walls lies flat on the floor, forming an open cruciform shape. By sitting in the swing in the centre of this configuration, the visitor activates an apparatus of cables and pulleys causing walls to rise and form a box-like house. It is a work that explores the idea of enclosing, of a space being something that has to be constructed, in the same way for example one builds up meaning (Reed 247–8). This documentation of architecture directly references the inhabitation of architecture. The post factum model of architecture is closely linked to the body in space and the actions it performs. Examining the actions and movement patterns within a space allows the inhabitation process to be seen as a dynamic process. David Owen describes the biological process of ‘ecopoiesis’: the process of a system making a home for itself. He describes the building and its occupants jointly as the new system, in a system of shaping and reshaping themselves until there is a tolerable fit (Brand 164). The definition of architecture as being that which encloses us, interests Edward S. Casey: in standing in my home, I stand here and yet feel surrounded (sheltered, challenged, drawn out, etc.) by the building’s boundaries over there. A person in this situation is not simply in time or simply in space but experiences an event in all its engaging and unpredictable power. In Derrida’s words, ‘this outside engages us in the very thing we are’, and we find ourselves subjected to architecture rather than being the controlling subject that plans or owns, uses or enjoys it; in short architecture ‘comprehends us’. (Casey 314) This shift in relationship between the inhabitant and architecture shifts the documentation and reading of the exhibition of architecture. Casey’s notion of architecture comprehending the inhabitant opens the possibility for an alternate exhibition of architecture, the documentation of that which is beyond the inhabitant’s direction. Conventional documentation shows a quiescence to the house. Rather than attempting to capture the flurry — the palimpsest of occupancy — within the house, it is presented as stilled, inert and dormant. In representing the house this way, a lull is provided, fostering a steadiness of gaze: a pause is created, within which to examine the house. However, the house is then seen as object, rather than that which encapsulates motion and temporality. Defining, and thus documenting, the space of architecture by its actions, extends the perimeter of architecture. No longer is the house bounded by its doors and walls, but rather by the extent of its patterns of movement. Post factum documentation allows this altering of the definition of architecture, as it includes the notion of the model of an action. By appropriating, clarifying and reshaping situations that are relevant to the investigation of post factum documentation, the notion of the inhabitation of the house as a definition of architecture may be examined. This further examines the relationship between architectural representation, the architectural image, and the image of architecture. References Acconci, V., and K. Linker. Vito Acconci. New York: Rizzoli, 1994. Bibby, P. “Dancer in the Dark Is Light Years Ahead.” Sydney Morning Herald 22 March 2007: 3. Brand, S. How Buildings Learn: What Happens after They’re Built. London: Phoenix Illustrated, 1997. Bunschoten, R. “Cutting the Horizon: Two Theses on Architecture.” Forum (Nov. 1992): 40–9. Calvino, I. Invisible Cities. London: Picador, 1979. Casey, E.S. The Fate of Place. California: U of California P, 1998. Diller, E., and R. Scofidio. Flesh: Architectural Probes. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994. Evans, R. Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997. ———. “Architectural Projection.” Eds. E. Blau and E. Kaufman. Architecture and Its Image: Four Centuries of Architectural Representation: Works from the Collection of the Canadian Center for Architecture. Exhibition catalogue. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989. 19–35. Feireiss, K., ed. The Art of Architecture Exhibitions. Rotterdam: Netherlands Architecture Institute, 2001. Galfetti, G.G., ed. Allan Wexler. Barcelona: GG Portfolio, 1998. Glanville, R. “An Irregular Dodekahedron and a Lemon Yellow Citroen.” In L. van Schaik, ed., The Practice of Practice: Research in the Medium of Design. Melbourne: RMIT University Press, 2003. 258–265. Heathcote, E. Imre Mackovecz: The Wings of the Soul. West Sussex: Academy Editions, 1997. Hughes, R. The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change. London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1980. Kreiser, C. “On the Loss of (Dark) Inside Space.” Daidalos 36 (June 1990): 88–99. Reed, C. ed. Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture. London: Thames & Hudson, 1996. “Shinkenchiku Competition 2006: The Plan-Less House.” The Japan Architect 64 (Winter 2007): 7–12. Small, D. Paper John. USA: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987. Wakely, M. Dream Home. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. 2003. 
 
 
 
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This paper provides embedded, reflective practice-based insight arising from my experience collaborating to produce online and print-on-demand editions of a magazine showcasing the photography of members of haphazart! Contemporary Abstracts group (hereafter referred to as haphazart!). The group’s online visual, textual and activity-based practices via the photo sharing social networking site Flickr are portrayed as achieving cohesive visual identity. Stylistic analysis of pictures in support of this claim is not attempted. Rather negotiation, that Elliot has previously described in M/C Journal as innate in collaboration, is identified as the unifying factor. However, the collaborators’ adherence to Flickr’s communication platform proves problematic in the editorial context. Some technical incoherence with possible broader cultural implications is encountered during the process of repurposing images from screen to print. A Scan of Relevant Literature The photographic gaze perceives and captures objects which seem to ‘carry within them ready-made’ a work of art. But the reminiscences of the gaze are only made possible by knowing and associating with groups that define a tradition. The list of valorised subjects is not actually defined with reference to a culture, but rather by familiarity with a limited group. (Chamboredon 144) As part of the array of socio-cultural practices afforded by Web 2.0 interoperability, sites of produsage (Bruns) are foci for studies originating in many disciplines. Flickr provides a rich source of data that researchers interested in the interface between the technological and the social find useful to analyse. Access to the Flickr application programming interface enables quantitative researchers to observe a variety of means by which information is propagated, disseminated and shared. Some findings from this kind of research confirm the intuitive. For example, Negoecsu et al. find that “a large percentage of users engage in sharing with groups and that they do so significantly” ("Analyzing Flickr Groups" 425). They suggest that Flickr’s Groups feature appears to “naturally bring together two key aspects of social media: content and relations.” They also find evidence for what they call hyper-groups, which are “communities consisting of groups of Flickr groups” ("Flickr Hypergroups" 813). Two separate findings from another research team appear to contradict each other. On one hand, describing what they call “social cascades,” Cha et al. claim that “content in the form of ideas, products, and messages spreads across social networks like a virus” ("Characterising Social Cascades"). Yet in 2009 they claim that homocity and reciprocity ensure that “popularity of pictures is localised” ("Measurement-Driven Analysis"). Mislove et al. reflect that the affordances of Flickr influence the growth patterns they observe. There is optimism shared by some empiricists that through collation and analysis of Flickr tag data, the matching of perceptual structures of images and image annotation techniques will yield ontology-based taxonomy useful in automatic image annotation and ultimately, the Semantic Web endeavour (Kennedy et al.; Su et al.; Xu et al.). Qualitative researchers using ethnographic interview techniques also find Flickr a valuable resource. In concluding that the photo sharing hobby is for many a “serious leisure” activity, Cox et al. propose that “Flickr is not just a neutral information system but also value laden and has a role within a wider cultural order.” They also suggest that “there is genuinely greater scope for individual creativity, releasing the individual to explore their own identity in a way not possible with a camera club.” Davies claims that “online spaces provide an arena where collaboration over meanings can be transformative, impacting on how individuals locate themselves within local and global contexts” (550). She says that through shared ways of describing and commenting on images, Flickrites develop a common criticality in their endeavour to understand images, each other and their world (554).From a psychologist’s perspective, Suler observes that “interpersonal relationships rarely form and develop by images alone” ("Image, Word, Action" 559). He says that Flickr participants communicate in three dimensions: textual (which he calls “verbal”), visual, and via the interpersonal actions that the site affords, such as Favourites. This latter observation can surely be supplemented by including the various games that groups configure within the constraints of the discussion forums. These often include submissions to a theme and voting to select a winning image. Suler describes the place in Flickr where one finds identity as one’s “cyberpsychological niche” (556). However, many participants subscribe to multiple groups—45.6% of Flickrites who share images share them with more than 20 groups (Negoescu et al., "Analyzing Flickr Groups" 420). Is this a reflection of the existence of the hyper-groups they describe (2009) or, of the ranging that people do in search of a niche? It is also probable that some people explore more than a singular identity or visual style. Harrison and Bartell suggest that there are more interesting questions than why users create media products or what motivates them to do so: the more interesting questions center on understanding what users will choose to do ultimately with [Web2.0] capabilities [...] in what terms to define the success of their efforts, and what impact the opportunity for individual and collaborative expression will have on the evolution of communicative forms and character. (167) This paper addresseses such questions. It arises from a participatory observational context which differs from that of the research described above. It is intended that a different perspective about online group-based participation within the Flickr social networking matrix will avail. However, it will be seen that the themes cited in this introductory review prove pertinent. Context As a university teacher of a range of subjects in the digital media field, from contemporary photomedia to social media to collaborative multimedia practice, it is entirely appropriate that I embed myself in projects that engage, challenge and provide me with relevant first-hand experience. As an academic I also undertake and publish research. As a practicing new media artist I exhibit publically on a regular basis and consider myself semi-professional with respect to this activity. While there are common elements to both approaches to research, this paper is written more from the point of view of ‘reflective practice’ (Holmes, "Reconciling Experimentum") rather than ‘embedded ethnography’ (Pink). It is necessarily and unapologetically reflexive. Abstract Photography Hyper-Group A search of all Flickr groups using the query “abstract” is currently likely to return around 14,700 results. However, only in around thirty of them does the group name, its stated rules and, the stream of images that flow through the pool arguably reflect a sense of collective concept and aesthetic that is coherently abstract. This loose complex of groups comprises a hyper-group. Members of these groups often have co-memberships, reciprocal contacts, and regularly post images to a range of groups and comment on others’ posts to be found throughout. Given that one of Flickr’s largest groups, Black and White, currently has around 131,150 members and hosts 2,093,241 items in its pool, these abstract special interest groups are relatively small. The largest, Abstract Photos, has 11,338 members and hosts 89,306 items in its pool. The group that is the focus of this paper, haphazart!, currently has 2,536 members who have submitted 53,309 items. The group pool is more like a constantly flowing river because the most recently added images are foremost. Older images become buried in an archive of pages which cannot be reverse accessed at a rate greater than the seven pages linked from a current view. A member’s presence is most immediate through images posted to a pool. This structural feature of Flickr promotes a desire for currency; a need to post regularly to maintain presence. Negotiating Coherence to the Abstract The self-managing social dynamics in groups has, as Suler proposes to be the case for individuals, three dimensions: visual, textual and action. A group integrates the diverse elements, relationships and values which cumulatively constitute its identity with contributions from members in these dimensions. First impressions of that identity are usually derived from the group home page which consists of principal features: the group name, a selection of twelve most recent posts to the pool, some kind of description, a selection of six of the most recent discussion topics, and a list of rules (if any). In some of these groups, what is considered to constitute an abstract photographic image is described on the group home page. In some it is left to be contested and becomes the topic of ongoing forum debates. In others the specific issue is not discussed—the images are left to speak for themselves. Administrators of some groups require that images are vetted for acceptance. In haphazart! particular administrators dutifully delete from the pool on a regular basis any images that they deem not to comply with the group ethic. Whether reasons are given or not is left to the individual prosecutor. Mostly offending images just disappear from the group pool without trace. These are some of the ways that the coherence of a group’s visual identity is established and maintained. Two groups out of the abstract photography hyper-group are noteworthy in that their discussion forums are particularly active. A discussion is just the start of a new thread and may have any number of posts under it. At time of writing Abstract Photos has 195 discussions and haphazart! — the most talkative by this measure—has 333. Haphazart! invites submissions of images to regularly changing themes. There is always lively and idiosyncratic banter in the forum over the selection of a theme. To be submitted an image needs to be identified by a specific theme tag as announced on the group home page. The tag can be added by the photographer themselves or by anyone else who deems the image appropriate to the theme. An exhibition process ensues. Participant curators search all Flickr items according to the theme tag and select from the outcome images they deem to most appropriately and abstractly address the theme. Copies of the images together with comments by the curators are posted to a dedicated discussion board. Other members may also provide responses. This activity forms an ongoing record that may serve as a public indicator of the aesthetic that underlies the group’s identity. In Abstract Photos there is an ongoing discussion forum where one can submit an image and request that the moderators rule as to whether or not the image is ‘abstract’. The same group has ongoing discussions labelled “Hall of Appropriate” where worthy images are reposted and celebrated and, “Hall of Inappropriate” where images posted to the group pool have been removed and relegated because abstraction has been “so far stretched from its definition that it now resides in a parallel universe” (Askin). Reasons are mostly courteously provided. In haphazart! a relatively small core of around twelve group members regularly contribute to the group discussion board. A curious aspect of this communication is that even though participants present visually with a ‘buddy icon’ and most with a screen name not their real name, it is usual practice to address each other in discussions by their real Christian names, even when this is not evident in a member’s profile. This seems to indicate a common desire for authenticity. The makeup of the core varies from time to time depending on other activities in a member’s life. Although one or two may be professionally or semi-professionally engaged as photographers or artists or academics, most of these people would likely consider themselves to be “serious amateurs” (Cox). They are internationally dispersed with bias to the US, UK, Europe and Australia. English is the common language though not the natural tongue of some. The age range is approximately 35 to 65 and the gender mix 50/50. The group is three years old. Where Do We Go to from Here? In early January 2009 the haphazart! core was sparked into a frenzy of discussion by a post from a member headed “Where do we go to from here?” A proposal was mooted to produce a ‘book’ featuring images and texts representative of the group. Within three days a new public group with invited membership dedicated to the idea had been established. A smaller working party then retreated to a private Flickr group. Four months later Issue One of haphazart! magazine was available in print-on-demand and online formats. Following however is a brief critically reflective review of some of the collaborative curatorial, editorial and production processes for Issue Two which commenced in early June 2009. Most of the team had also been involved with Issue One. I was the only newcomer and replaced the person who had undertaken the design for Issue One. I was not provided access to the prior private editorial ruminations but apparently the collaborative curatorial and editorial decision-making practices the group had previously established persisted, and these took place entirely within the discussion forums of a new dedicated private Flickr group. Over a five-month period there were 1066 posts in 54 discussions concerning matters such as: change of format from the previous; selection of themes, artists and images; conduct of and editing of interviews; authoring of texts; copyright and reproduction. The idiom of those communications can be described as: discursive, sporadic, idiosyncratic, resourceful, collegial, cooperative, emphatic, earnest and purposeful. The selection process could not be said to follow anything close to a shared manifesto, or articulation of style. It was established that there would be two primary themes: the square format and contributors’ use of colour. Selection progressed by way of visual presentation and counter presentation until some kind of consensus was reached often involving informal votes of preference. Stretching the Limits of the Flickr Social Tools The magazine editorial collaborators continue to use the facilities with which they are familiar from regular Flickr group participation. However, the strict vertically linear format of the Flickr discussion format is particularly unsuited to lengthy, complex, asynchronous, multithreaded discussion. For this purpose it causes unnecessary strain, fatigue and confusion. Where images are included, the forums have set and maximum display sizes and are not flexibly configured into matrixes. Images cannot readily be communally changed or moved about like texts in a wiki. Likewise, the Flickrmail facility is of limited use for specialist editorial processes. Attachments cannot be added. This opinion expressed by a collaborator in the initial, open discussion for Issue One prevailed among Issue Two participants: do we want the members to go to another site to observe what is going on with the magazine? if that’s ok, then using google groups or something like that might make sense; if we want others to observe (and learn from) the process - we may want to do it here [in Flickr]. (Valentine) The opinion appears socially constructive; but because the final editorial process and production processes took place in a separate private forum, ultimately the suggested learning between one issue and the next did not take place. During Issue Two development the reluctance to try other online collaboration tools for the selection processes requiring visual comparative evaluation of images and trials of sequencing adhered. A number of ingenious methods of working within Flickr were devised and deployed and, in my opinion, proved frustratingly impractical and inefficient. The digital layout, design, collation and formatting of images and texts, all took place on my personal computer using professional software tools. Difficulties arose in progressively sharing this work for the purposes of review, appraisal and proofing. Eventually I ignored protests and insisted the team review demonstrations I had converted for sharing in Google Documents. But, with only one exception, I could not tempt collaborators to try commenting or editing in that environment. For example, instead of moving the sequence of images dynamically themselves, or even typing suggestions directly into Google Documents, they would post responses in Flickr. To Share and to Hold From the first imaginings of Issue One the need to have as an outcome something in one’s hands was expressed and this objective is apparently shared by all in the haphazart! core as an ongoing imperative. Various printing options have been nominated, discussed and evaluated. In the end one print-on-demand provider was selected on the basis of recommendation. The ethos of haphazart! is clearly not profit-making and conflicts with that of the printing organisation. Presumably to maintain an incentive to purchase the print copy online preview is restricted to the first 15 pages. To satisfy the co-requisite to make available the full 120 pages for free online viewing a second host that specialises in online presentation of publications is also utilised. In this way haphazart! members satisfy their common desires for sharing selected visual content and ideas with an online special interest audience and, for a physical object of art to relish—with all the connotations of preciousness, fetish, talisman, trophy, and bookish notions of haptic pleasure and visual treasure. The irony of publishing a frozen chunk of the ever-flowing Flickriver, whose temporally changing nature is arguably one of its most interesting qualities, is not a consideration. Most of them profess to be simply satisfying their own desire for self expression and would eschew any critical judgement as to whether this anarchic and discursive mode of operation results in a coherent statement about contemporary photographic abstraction. However there remains a distinct possibility that a number of core haphazart!ists aspire to transcend: popular taste; the discernment encouraged in camera clubs; and, the rhetoric of those involved professionally (Bourdieu et al.); and seek to engage with the “awareness of illegitimacy and the difficulties implied by the constitution of photography as an artistic medium” (Chamboredon 130). Incoherence: A Technical Note My personal experience of photography ranges from the filmic to the digital (Holmes, "Bridging Adelaide"). For a number of years I specialised in facsimile graphic reproduction of artwork. In those days I became aware that films were ‘blind’ to the psychophysical affect of some few particular paint pigments. They just could not be reproduced. Even so, as I handled the dozens of images contributed to haphazart!2, converting them from the pixellated place where Flickr exists to the resolution and gamut of the ink based colour space of books, I was surprised at the number of hue values that exist in the former that do not translate into the latter. In some cases the affect is subtle so that judicious tweaking of colour levels or local colour adjustment will satisfy discerning comparison between the screenic original and the ‘soft proof’ that simulates the printed outcome. In other cases a conversion simply does not compute. I am moved to contemplate, along with Harrison and Bartell (op. cit.) just how much of the experience of media in the shared digital space is incomparably new? Acknowledgement Acting on the advice of researchers experienced in cyberethnography (Bruckman; Suler, "Ethics") I have obtained the consent of co-collaborators to comment freely on proceedings that took place in a private forum. They have been given the opportunity to review and suggest changes to the account. References Askin, Dean (aka: dnskct). “Hall of Inappropriate.” Abstract Photos/Discuss/Hall of Inappropriate, 2010. 12 Jan. 2010 ‹http://www.flickr.com/groups/abstractphotos/discuss/72157623148695254/>. Bourdieu, Pierre, Luc Boltanski, Robert Castel, Jean-Claude Chamboredeon, and Dominique Schnapper. Photography: A Middle-Brow Art. 1965. Trans. Shaun Whiteside. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. Bruckman, Amy. Studying the Amateur Artist: A Perspective on Disguising Data Collected in Human Subjects Research on the Internet. 2002. 12 Jan. 2010 ‹http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/ethics_bru_full.html>. Bruns, Axel. “Towards Produsage: Futures for User-Led Content Production.” Proceedings: Cultural Attitudes towards Communication and Technology 2006. Perth: Murdoch U, 2006. 275–84. ———, and Mark Bahnisch. Social Media: Tools for User-Generated Content. 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Davies, Julia. “Display, Identity and the Everyday: Self-Presentation through Online Image Sharing.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 28.4 (Dec. 2007): 549–564. Elliott, Mark. “Stigmergic Collaboration: The Evolution of Group Work.” M/C Journal 9.2 (2006). 12 Jan. 2010 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/03-elliott.php>. Harrison, Teresa, M., and Brea Barthel. “Wielding New Media in Web 2.0: Exploring the History of Engagement with the Collaborative Construction of Media Products.” New Media & Society 11.1-2 (2009): 155–178. Holmes, Ashley. “‘Bridging Adelaide 2001’: Photography and Hyperimage, Spanning Paradigms.” VSMM 2000 Conference Proceedings. International Society for Virtual Systems and Multimedia, 2000. 79–88. ———. “Reconciling Experimentum and Experientia: Reflective Practice Research Methodology for the Creative Industries”. Speculation & Innovation: Applying Practice-Led Research in the Creative Industries. Brisbane: QUT, 2006. Kennedy, Lyndon, Mor Naaman, Shane Ahern, Rahul Nair, and Tye Rattenbury. “How Flickr Helps Us Make Sense of the World: Context and Content in Community-Contributed Media Collections.” MM’07. ACM, 2007. Miller, Andrew D., and W. Keith Edwards. “Give and Take: A Study of Consumer Photo-Sharing Culture and Practice.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2007. 347–356. Mislove, Alan, Hema Swetha Koppula, Krishna P. Gummadi, Peter Druschel and Bobby Bhattacharjee. “Growth of the Flickr Social Network.” Proceedings of the First Workshop on Online Social Networks. ACM, 2008. 25–30. Negoescu, Radu-Andrei, and Daniel Gatica-Perez. “Analyzing Flickr Groups.” CIVR '08: Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Content-Based Image and Video Retrieval. ACM, 2008. 417–426. ———, Brett Adams, Dinh Phung, Svetha Venkatesh, and Daniel Gatica-Perez. “Flickr Hypergroups.” MM '09: Proceedings of the Seventeenth ACM International Conference on Multimedia. ACM, 2009. 813–816. Pink, Sarah. Doing Visual Ethnography: Images, Media and Representation in Research. 2nd ed. London: Sage, 2007. Su, Ja-Hwung, Bo-Wen Wang, Hsin-Ho Yeh, and Vincent S. Tseng. “Ontology–Based Semantic Web Image Retrieval by Utilizing Textual and Visual Annotations.” 2009 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology – Workshops. 2009. Suler, John. “Ethics in Cyberspace Research: Consent, Privacy and Contribution.” The Psychology of Cyberspace. 1996. 12 Jan. 2010 ‹http://www-usr.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/psycyber.html>. ———. “Image, Word, Action: Interpersonal Dynamics in a Photo-Sharing Community.” Cyberpsychology & Behavior 11.5 (2008): 555–560. Valentine, Mark. “HAPHAZART! 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Many years ago, while studying in Paris as a novice postgraduate, I was invited to accompany a friend to a seminar with Jacques Derrida. I leapt at the chance even though I was only just learning French. Although I tried hard to follow the discussion, the extent of my participation was probably signing the attendance sheet. Afterwards, caught up on the edges of a small crowd of acolytes in the foyer as we waited out a sudden rainstorm, Derrida turned to me and charmingly complimented me on my forethought in predicting rain, pointing to my umbrella. Flustered, I garbled something in broken French about how I never forgot my umbrella, how desolated I was that he had mislaid his, and would he perhaps desire mine? After a small silence, where he and the other students side-eyed me warily, he declined. For years I dined on this story of meeting a celebrity academic, cheerfully re-enacting my linguistic ineptitude. Nearly a decade later I was taken aback when I overheard a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Sydney re-telling my encounter as a witty anecdote, where an early career academic teased Derrida with a masterful quip, quoting back to him his own attention to someone else’s quote. It turned out that Spurs, one of Derrida’s more obscure early essays, employs an extended riff on an inexplicable citation found in inverted commas in the margins of Nietzsche’s papers: “J’ai oublié mon parapluie” (“I have forgotten my umbrella”). My clumsy response to a polite enquiry was recast in a process of Chinese whispers in my academic community as a snappy spur-of-the-moment witticism. This re-telling didn’t just selectively edit my encounter, but remixed it with a meta-narrative that I had myself referenced, albeit unknowingly. My ongoing interest in the more playful breaches of scholarly conventions of quotation and attribution can be traced back to this incident, where my own presentation of an academic self was appropriated and remixed from fumbler to quipster. I’ve also been struck throughout my teaching career by the seeming disconnect between the stringent academic rules for referencing and citation and the everyday strategies of appropriation that are inherent to popular remix culture. I’m taking the opportunity in this paper to reflect on the practice of scholarly quotation itself, before examining some recent creative provocations to the academic ‘author’ situated inventively at the crossroad between scholarly convention and remix culture. Early in his own teaching career at Oxford University Lewis Carroll, wrote to his younger siblings describing the importance of maintaining his dignity as a new tutor. He outlines the distance his college was at pains to maintain between teachers and their students: “otherwise, you know, they are not humble enough”. Carroll playfully describes the set-up of a tutor sitting at his desk, behind closed doors and without access to today’s communication technologies, relying on a series of college ‘scouts’ to convey information down corridors and staircases to the confused student waiting for instruction below. The lectures, according to Carroll, went something like this: Tutor: What is twice three?Scout: What’s a rice-tree?Sub-scout: When is ice free?Sub-sub-scout: What’s a nice fee??Student (timidly): Half a guinea.Sub-sub-scout: Can’t forge any!Sub-scout: Ho for jinny!Scout: Don’t be a ninny!Tutor (looking offended, tries another question): Divide a hundred by twelve.Scout: Provide wonderful bells!Sub-scout: Go ride under it yourself!Sub-sub-scout: Deride the dunderhead elf!Pupil (surprised): What do you mean?Sub-sub-scout: Doings between!Sub-scout: Blue is the screen!Scout: Soup tureen! And so the lecture proceeds… Carroll’s parody of academic miscommunication and misquoting was reproduced by Pierre Bourdieu at the opening of the book Academic Discourse to illustrate the failures of pedagogical practice in higher education in the mid 1960s, when he found scholarly language relied on codes that were “destined to dazzle rather than to enlighten” (3). Bourdieu et al found that students struggled to reproduce appropriately scholarly discourse and were constrained to write in a badly understood and poorly mastered language, finding reassurance in what he called a ‘rhetoric of despair’: “through a kind of incantatory or sacrificial rite, they try to call up and reinstate the tropes, schemas or words which to them distinguish professorial language” (4). The result was bad writing that karaoke-ed a pseudo academic discourse, accompanied by a habit of thoughtlessly patching together other peoples’ words and phrases. Such sloppy quoting activities of course invite the scholarly taboo of plagiarism or its extreme opposite, hypercitation. Elsewhere, Jacques Derrida developed an important theory of citationality and language, but it is intriguing to note his own considerable unease with conventional acknowledgement practices, of quoting and being quoted: I would like to spare you the tedium, the waste of time, and the subservience that always accompany the classic pedagogical procedures of forging links, referring back to past premises or arguments, justifying one’s own trajectory, method, system, and more or less skilful transitions, re-establishing continuity, and so on. These are but some of the imperatives of classical pedagogy with which, to be sure, one can never break once and for all. Yet, if you were to submit to them rigorously, they would very soon reduce you to silence, tautology and tiresome repetition. (The Ear of the Other, 3) This weariness with a procedural hyper-focus on referencing conventions underlines Derrida’s disquiet with the self-protecting, self-promoting and self-justifying practices that bolster pedagogical tradition and yet inhibit real scholarly work, and risk silencing the authorial voice. Today, remix offers new life to quoting. Media theorist Lev Manovich resisted the notion that the practice of ‘quotation’ was the historical precedent for remixing, aligning it instead to the authorship practice of music ‘sampling’ made possible by new electronic and digital technology. Eduardo Navas agrees that sampling is the key element that makes the act of remixing possible, but links its principles not just to music but to the preoccupation with reading and writing as an extended cultural practice beyond textual writing onto all forms of media (8). A crucial point for Navas is that while remix appropriates and reworks its source material, it relies on the practice of citation to work properly: too close to the original means the remix risks being dismissed as derivative, but at the same time the remixer can’t rely on a source always being known or recognised (7). In other words, the conceptual strategies of remix must rely on some form of referencing or citation of the ideas it sources. It is inarguable that advances in digital technologies have expanded the capacity of scholars to search, cut/copy & paste, collate and link to their research sources. New theoretical and methodological frameworks are being developed to take account of these changing conditions of academic work. For instance, Annette Markham proposes a ‘remix methodology’ for qualitative enquiry, arguing that remix is a powerful tool for thinking about an interpretive and adaptive research practice that takes account of the complexity of contemporary cultural contexts. In a similar vein Cheré Harden Blair has used remix as a theoretical framework to grapple with the issue of plagiarism in the postmodern classroom. If, following Roland Barthes, all writing is “a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centers of culture” (146), and if all writing is therefore rewriting, then punishing students for plagiarism becomes problematic. Blair argues that since scholarly writing has become a mosaic of digital and textual productions, then teaching must follow suit, especially since teaching, as a dynamic, shifting and intertextual enterprise, is more suited to the digital revolution than traditional, fixed writing (175). She proposes that teachers provide a space in which remixing, appropriation, patch-writing and even piracy could be allowable, even useful and productive: “a space in which the line is blurry not because students are ignorant of what is right or appropriate, or because digital text somehow contains inherent temptations to plagiarise, but because digital media has, in fact, blurred the line” (183). The clashes between remix and scholarly rules of attribution are directly addressed by the pedagogical provocations of conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith, who has developed a program of ‘uncreative writing’ at the University of Pennsylvania, where, among other plagiaristic tasks, he forces students to transcribe whole passages from books, or to download essays from online paper mills and defend them as their own, marking down students who show a ‘shred of originality’. In his own writing and performances, which depend almost exclusively on strategies of appropriation, plagiarism and recontextualisation of often banal sources like traffic reports, Goldsmith says that he is working to de-familiarise normative structures of language. For Goldsmith, reframing language into another context allows it to become new again, so that “we don’t need the new sentence, the old sentence re-framed is good enough”. Goldsmith argues for the role of the contemporary academic and creative writer as an intelligent agent in the management of masses of information. He describes his changing perception of his own work: “I used to be an artist, then I became a poet; then a writer. Now when asked, I simply refer to myself as a word processor” (Perloff 147). For him, what is of interest to the twenty-first century is not so much the quote that ‘rips’ or tears words out of their original context, but finding ways to make new ‘wholes’ out of the accumulations, filterings and remixing of existing words and sentences. Another extraordinary example of the blurring of lines between text, author and the discursive peculiarities of digital media can be found in Jonathan Lethem’s essay ‘An Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism’, which first appeared in Harpers Magazine in 2007. While this essay is about the topic of plagiarism, it is itself plagiarized, composed of quotes that have been woven seamlessly together into a composite whole. Although Lethem provides a key at the end with a list of his sources, he has removed in-text citations and quotation marks, even while directly discussing the practices of mis-quotation and mis-attribution throughout the essay itself. Towards the end of the essay can be found the paragraph: Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The citations that go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read; they are quotations without inverted commas. The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism. …By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. Neurological study has lately shown that memory, imagination, and consciousness itself is stitched, quilted, pastiched. If we cut-and-paste ourselves, might we not forgive it of our artworks? (68) Overall, Lethem’s self-reflexive pro-plagiarism essay reminds the reader not only of how ideas in literature have been continuously recycled, quoted, appropriated and remixed, but of how open-source cultures are vital for the creation of new works. Lethem (re)produces rather than authors a body of text that is haunted by ever present/absent quotation marks and references. Zara Dinnen suggests that Lethem’s essay, like almost all contemporary texts produced on a computer, is a provocation to once again re-theorise the notion of the author, as not a rigid point of origin but instead “a relay of alternative and composite modes of production” (212), extending Manovich’s notion of the role of author in the digital age of being perhaps closest to that of a DJ. But Lethem’s essay, however surprising and masterfully intertextual, was produced and disseminated as a linear ‘static’ text. On the other hand, Mark Amerika’s remixthebook project first started out as a series of theoretical performances on his Professor VJ blog and was then extended into a multitrack composition of “applied remixology” that features sampled phrases and ideas from a range of artistic, literary, musical, theoretical and philosophical sources. Wanting his project to be received not as a book but as a hybridised publication and performance art project that appears in both print and digital forms, remixthebook was simultaneously published in a prestigious university press and a website that works as an online hub and teaching tool to test out the theories. In this way, Amerika expands the concept of writing to include multimedia forms composed for both networked environments and also experiments with what he terms “creative risk management” where the artist, also a scholar and a teacher, is “willing to drop all intellectual pretence and turn his theoretical agenda into (a) speculative play” (xi). He explains his process halfway through the print book: Other times we who create innovative works of remix artare fully self-conscious of the rival lineagewe spring forth fromand knowingly take on other remixological styles just to seewhat happens when we move insideother writers’ bodies (of work)This is when remixologically inhabitingthe spirit of another writer’s stylistic tendenciesor at least the subconsciously imagined writerly gesturesthat illuminate his or her live spontaneous performancefeels more like an embodied praxis In some ways this all seems so obvious to me:I mean what is a writer anyway buta simultaneous and continuous fusion ofremixologically inhabited bodies of work? (109) Amerika mashes up the jargon of academic writing with avant-pop forms of digital rhetoric in order to “move inside other writers’ bodies (of work)” in order to test out his theoretical agenda in an “embodied praxis” at the same time that he shakes up the way that contemporary scholarship itself is performed. The remixthebook project inevitably recalls one of the great early-twentieth century plays with scholarly quotation, Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project. Instead of avoiding conventional quoting, footnoting and referencing, these are the very fabric of Benjamin’s sprawling project, composed entirely of quotes drawn from nineteenth century philosophy and literature. This early scholarly ‘remixing’ project has been described as bewildering and oppressive, but which others still find relevant and inspirational. Marjorie Perloff, for instance, finds the ‘passages’ in Benjamin’s arcades have “become the digital passages we take through websites and YouTube videos, navigating our way from one Google link to another and over the bridges provided by our favourite search engines and web pages" (49). For Benjamin, the process of collecting quotes was addictive. Hannah Arendt describes his habit of carrying little black notebooks in which "he tirelessly entered in the form of quotations what daily living and reading netted him in the way of 'pearls' and 'coral'. On occasion he read from them aloud, showed them around like items from a choice and precious collection" (45). A similar practice of everyday hypercitation can be found in the contemporary Australian performance artist Danielle Freakley’s project, The Quote Generator. For what was intended in 2006 to be a three year project, but which is still ongoing, Freakley takes the delirious pleasure of finding and fitting the perfect quote to fit an occasion to an extreme. Unlike Benjamin, Freakley didn’t collect and collate quotes, she then relied on them to navigate her way through her daily interactions. As The Quote Generator, Freakley spoke only in quotations drawn from film, literature and popular culture, immediately following each quote with its correct in-text reference, familiar to academic writers as the ‘author/date’ citation system. The awkwardness and seeming artificiality of even short exchanges with someone who responds only in quotes might be bewildering enough, but the inclusion of the citation after the quote maddeningly interrupts and, at the same time, adds another metalevel to a conversation where even the simple platitude ‘thank you’ might be followed by an attribution to ‘Deep Throat 1972’. Longer exchanges become increasingly overwhelming, as Freakley’s piling of quote on quote, and sometimes repeating quotes, demands an attentive listener, as is evident in a 2008 interview with Andrew Denton on the ABC’s Enough Rope: Andrew Denton’s Enough Rope (2008) Denton: So, you’ve been doing this for three years??Freakley: Yes, Optus 1991Denton: How do people respond to you speaking in such an unnatural way?Freakley: It changes, David Bowie 1991. On the streets AKA Breakdance 1984, most people that I know think that I am crazy, Billy Thorpe 1972, a nigger like me is going insane, Cyprus Hill 1979, making as much sense as a Japanese instruction manual, Red Dwarf 1993. Video documentation of Freakley’s encounters with unsuspecting members of the public reveal how frustrating the inclusion of ‘spoken’ references can be, let alone how taken aback people are on realising they never get Freakley’s own words, but are instead receiving layers of quotations. The frustration can quickly turn hostile (Denton at one point tells Freakley to “shut up”) or can prove contaminatory, as people attempt to match or one-up her quotes (see Cook's interview 8). Apparently, when Freakley continued her commitment to the performance at a Perth Centerlink, the staff sent her to a psychiatrist and she was diagnosed with an obsessive-compulsive disorder, then prescribed medication (Schwartzkoff 4). While Benjamin's The Arcades Project invites the reader to scroll through its pages as a kind of textual flaneur, Freakley herself becomes a walking and talking word processor, extending the possibilities of Amerika’s “embodied praxis” in an inescapable remix of other people’s words and phrases. At the beginning of the project, Freakley organised a card collection of quotes categorised into possible conversation topics, and devised a ‘harness’ for easy access. Image: Danielle Freakley’s The Quote Generator harness Eventually, however, Freakley was able to rely on her own memory of an astounding number of quotations, becoming a “near mechanical vessel” (Gottlieb 2009), or, according to her own manifesto, a “regurgitation library to live by”: The Quote Generator reads, and researches as it speaks. The Quote Generator is both the reader and composer/editor. The Quote Generator is not an actor spouting lines on a stage. The Quote Generator assimilates others lines into everyday social life … The Quote Generator, tries to find its own voice, an understanding through throbbing collations of others, constantly gluttonously referencing. Much academic writing quotes/references ravenously. New things cannot be said without constant referral, acknowledgement to what has been already, the intricate detective work in the barking of the academic dog. By her unrelenting appropriation and regurgitating of quotations, Freakley uses sampling as a technique for an extended performance that draws attention to the remixology of everyday life. By replacing conversation with a hyper-insistence on quotes and their simultaneous citation, she draws attention to the artificiality and inescapability of the ‘codes’ that make up not just ordinary conversations, but also conventional academic discourse, what she calls the “barking of the academic dog”. Freakley’s performance has pushed the scholarly conventions of quoting and referencing to their furthest extreme, in what has been described by Daine Singer as a kind of “endurance art” that relies, in large part, on an antagonistic relationship to its audience. In his now legendary 1969 “Double Session” seminar, Derrida, too, experimented with the pedagogical performance of the (re)producing author, teasing his earnest academic audience. It is reported that the seminar began in a dimly lit room lined with blackboards covered with quotations that Derrida, for a while, simply “pointed to in silence” (177). In this seminar, Derrida put into play notions that can be understood to inform remix practices just as much as they do deconstruction: the author, originality, mimesis, imitation, representation and reference. Scholarly conventions, perhaps particularly the quotation practices that insist on the circulation of rigid codes of attribution, and are defended by increasingly out-of-date understandings of contemporary research, writing and teaching practices, are ripe to be played with. Remix offers an expanded discursive framework to do this in creative and entertaining ways. References Amerika, Mark. remixthebook. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 29 July 2013 http://www.remixthebook.com/. Arendt, Hannah. “Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940.” In Illuminations. New York, NY: Shocken, 1969: 1-55. Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Image Music Text. Trans Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977: 142-148. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland & Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Blaire, Cheré Harden. “Panic and Plagiarism: Authorship and Academic Dishonesty in a Remix Culture.” Media Tropes 2.1 (2009): 159-192. Bourdieu, Pierre, Jean-Claude Passeron, and Monique de Saint Martin. Academic Discourse: Linguistic Misunderstanding and Professorial Power. Trans. Richard Teese. Stanford California: Stanford University Press, 1965. Carroll, Lewis (Charles Dodgson). “Letter to Henrietta and Edwin Dodgson 31 Jan 1855”. 15 July 2013 http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Letters_of_Lewis_Carroll. Cook, Richard. “Don’t Quote Me on That.” Time Out Sydney (2008): 8. http://rgcooke.wordpress.com/2008/02/13/interview-danielle-freakley.Denton, Andrew. “Interview: The Quote Generator.” Enough Rope. 29 Feb. 2008. ABC TV. 15 July 2013 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsrGvwXsenE. Derrida, Jacques. Spurs, Nietzsche’s Styles. Trans. Barbara Harlow. London: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Derrida, Jacques. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Text, Transference. Trans Peggy Kampf. New York: Shocken Books, 1985. Derrida, Jacques. “The Double Session”. Dissemination. Trans Alan Bass, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1981. Dinnen, Zara. "In the Mix: The Potential Convergence of Literature and New Media in Jonathan Letham's 'The Ecstasy of Influence'". Journal of Narrative Theory 42.2 (2012). Freakley, Danielle. The Quote Generator. 2006 to present. 10 July 2013 http://www.thequotegenerator.com/. Goldsmith, Kenneth. Uncreative Writing. New York: University of Colombia Press 2011. Gottlieb, Benjamin. "You Shall Worship No Other Artist God." Art & Culture (2009). 15 July 2013 http://www.artandculture.com/feature/999. Lethem, Jonathan. “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism.” Harper’s Magazine, Feb. 2007: 59-71. http://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/the-ecstasy-of-influence/. Manovich, Lev. "What Comes after Remix?" 2007. 15 July 2013 http://manovich.net/LNM/index.html. Markham, Annette. “Remix Methodology.” 2013. 9 July 2013 http://www.markham.internetinquiry.org/category/remix/.Morris, Simon (dir.). Sucking on Words: Kenneth Goldsmith. 2007. http://www.ubu.com/film/goldsmith_sucking.html.Navas, Eduardo. Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling. New York: Springer Wein, 2012. Perloff, Marjorie. Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Schwartzkoff, Louise. “Art Forms Spring into Life at Prima Vera.” Sydney Morning Herald 19 Sep. 2008: Entertainment, 4. http://www.smh.com.au/news/entertainment/arts/art-forms-spring-into-life-at-primavera/2008/09/18/1221331045404.html.Singer, Daine (cur.). “Pains in the Artists: Endurance and Suffering.” Blindside Exhibition. 2007. 2 June 2013 http://www.blindside.org.au/2007/pains-in-the-artists.shtml.

In “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” urban planners Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber outline what they term “wicked problems.” According to Rittel and Webber, wicked problems are unavoidably “ill-defined,” that is, unlike “problems in the natural sciences, which are definable and separable and may have solutions that are findable…[wicked problems] are never solved. At best they are only re-solved—over and over again” (160). Rittel and Webber were thinking specifically of the challenges involved in making decisions within immensely complex social circumstances—building highways through cities and designing low income housing projects, for example—but public policy-making and urban design are not the only fields rife with wicked problems. Indeed, the nub of Rittel and Webber’s articulation of wicked problems concerns a phenomenon common to many disciplines: interdisciplinary collaboration. As anyone who has collaborated with people outside her area of expertise will acknowledge, interdisciplinary collaboration itself is among the wickedest problems of all. By way of introduction, we direct the Learning Games Initiative (LGI), a transdisciplinary, inter-institutional research group that studies, teaches with, and builds computer games. In the seven years since LGI was inaugurated, we have undertaken many productive and well-received collaborations, including: 1) leading workshops at national and international conferences; 2) presenting numerous academic talks; 3) editing academic journals; 4) writing books, book chapters, journal articles, and other scholarly materials; 5) exhibiting creative and archival work in museums, galleries, and libraries; and 6) building one of the largest academic research archives of computer games, systems, paraphernalia, and print-, video-, and audio-scholarship in the world. We thus have a fair bit of experience with the wicked problem of collaboration. The purpose of this article is to share some of that experience with readers and to describe candidly some of the challenges we have faced—and sometimes overcome—working collaboratively across disciplinary, institutional, and even international boundaries. Collaborative Circle? Michael Farrell, whose illuminating analysis of “collaborative circles” has lent much to scholars’ understandings of group dynamics within creative contexts, succinctly describes how many such groups form: “A collaborative circle is a set of peers in the same discipline who, through open exchange of support, ideas, and criticism develop into an interdependent group with a common vision that guides their creative work” (266). Farrell’s model, while applicable to several of the smaller projects LGI has nurtured over the years, does not capture the idiosyncratic organizational method that has evolved more broadly within our collective. Rather, LGI has always tended to function according to a model more akin to that found in used car dealerships, one where “no reasonable offer will be refused.” LGI is open to anyone willing to think hard and get their hands dirty, which of course has molded the organization and its projects in remarkable ways. Unlike Farrell’s collaborative circles, for example, LGI’s collaborative model actually decentralizes the group’s study and production of culture. Any member from anywhere—not just “peers in the same discipline”—can initiate or join a project provided she or he is willing to trade in the coin of the realm: sweat equity. Much like the programmers of the open source software movement, LGI’s members work only on what excites them, and with other similarly motivated people. The “buy-in,” simply, is interest and a readiness to assume some level of responsibility for the successes and failures of a given project. In addition to decentralizing the group, LGI’s collaborative model has emerged such that it naturally encourages diversity, swelling our ranks with all kinds of interesting folks, from fine artists to clergy members to librarians. In large part this is because our members view “peers” in the most expansive way possible; sure, optical scientists can help us understand how virtual cameras simulate the real properties of lenses and research linguists can help us design more effective language-in-context tools for our games. However, in an organization that always tries to understand the layers of meaning-making that constitute computer games, such technical expertise is only one stratum. For a game about the cultural politics of ancient Greece that LGI has been working on for the past year, our members invited a musical instrument maker, a potter, and a school teacher to join the development team. These new additions—all experts and peers as far as LGI is concerned—were not merely consultants but became part of the development team, often working in areas of the project completely outside their own specialties. While some outsiders have criticized this project—currently known as “Aristotle’s Assassins”—for being too slow in development, the learning taking place as it moves forward is thrilling to those on the inside, where everyone is learning from everyone else. One common consequence of this dynamic is, as Farrell points out, that the work of the individual members is transformed: “Those who are merely good at their discipline become masters, and, working together, very ordinary people make extraordinary advances in their field” (2). Additionally, the diversity that gives LGI its true interdisciplinarity also makes for praxical as well as innovative projects. The varying social and intellectual concerns of the LGI’s membership means that every collaboration is also an exploration of ethics, responsibility, epistemology, and ideology. This is part of what makes LGI so special: there are multiple levels of learning that underpin every project every day. In LGI we are fond of saying that games teach multiple things in multiple ways. So too, in fact, does collaborating on one of LGI’s projects because members are constantly forced to reevaluate their ways of seeing in order to work with one another. This has been particularly rewarding in our international projects, such as our recently initiated project investigating the relationships among the mass media, new media, and cultural resource management practices. This project, which is building collaborative relationships among a team of archaeologists, game designers, media historians, folklorists, and grave repatriation experts from Cambodia, the Philippines, Australia, and the U.S., is flourishing, not because its members are of the same discipline nor because they share the same ideology. Rather, the team is maturing as a collaborative and productive entity because the focus of its work raises an extraordinary number of questions that have yet to be addressed by national and international researchers. In LGI, much of the sweat equity we contribute involves trying to answer questions like these in ways that are meaningful for our international research teams. In our experience, it is in the process of investigating such questions that effective collaborative relationships are cemented and within which investigators end up learning about more than just the subject matter at hand. They also learn about the micro-cultures, histories, and economies that provide the usually invisible rhetorical infrastructures that ground the subject matter and to which each team member is differently attuned. It is precisely because of this sometimes slow, sometimes tense learning/teaching dynamic—a dynamic too often invoked in both academic and industry settings to discourage collaboration—that François Chesnais calls attention to the fact that collaborative projects frequently yield more benefits than the sum of their parts suggests possible. This fact, says Chesnais, should lead institutions to value collaborative projects more highly as “resource-creating, value-creating and surplus-creating potentialities” (22). Such work is always risky, of course, and Jitendra Mohan, a scholar specializing in cross-cultural collaborations within the field of psychology, writes that international collaboration “raises methodological problems in terms of the selection of culturally-coloured items and their historical as well as semantic meaning…” (314). Mohan means this as a warning and it is heeded as such by LGI members; at the same time, however, it is precisely the identification and sorting out of such methodological problems that seems to excite our best collaborations and most innovative work. Given such promise, it is easy to see why LGI is quite happy to adopt the used car dealer’s slogan “no reasonable offer refused.” In fact, in LGI we see our open-door policy for projects as mirroring our primary object of study: games. This is another factor that we believe contributes to the success of our members’ collaborations. Commercial computer game development is a notoriously interdisciplinary and collaborative endeavor. By collaborating in a fashion similar to professional game developers, LGI members are constantly fashioning more complex understandings of the kinds of production practices and social interactions involved in game development; these practices and interactions are crucial to game studies precisely because they shape what games consist of, how they mean, and the ways in which they are consumed. For this reason, we think it foolish to refuse any reasonable offer to help us explore and understand these meaning-making processes. Wicked Problem Backlash Among the striking points that Rittel and Webber make about wicked problems is that solutions to them are usually created with great care and planning, and yet inevitably suffer severe criticism (at least) or utter annihilation (at worst). Far from being indicative of a bad solution, this backlash against a wicked problem’s solution is an integral element of what we call the “wicked problem dialectic.” The backlash against attempts to establish and nurture transdisciplinary collaboration is easy to document at multiple levels. For example, although our used car dealership model has created a rich research environment, it has also made the quotidian work of doing projects difficult. For one thing, organizing something as simple as a project meeting can take Herculean efforts. The wage earners are on a different schedule than the academics, who are on a different schedule from the artists, who are on a different schedule from the librarians. Getting everyone together in the same room at the same time (even virtually) is like herding cats. As co-directors of LGI, we have done our best to provide the membership with both synchronous and asynchronous resources to facilitate communication (e.g., conference-call enabled phones, online forums, chat clients, file-sharing software, and so on), but nothing beats face-to-face meetings, especially when projects grow complex or deadlines impend mercilessly. Nonetheless, our members routinely fight the meeting scheduling battle, despite the various communication options we have made available through our group’s website and in our physical offices. Most recently we have found that an organizational wiki makes the process of collecting and sharing notes, drawings, videos, segments of code, and drafts of writing decidedly easier than it had been, especially when the projects involve people who do not live a short distance (or a cheap phone call) away from each other. Similarly, not every member has the same amount of time to devote to LGI and its projects despite their considerable and demonstrated interest in them. Some folks are simply busier than others, and cannot contribute to projects as much as they might like. This can be a real problem when a project requires a particular skill set, and the owner of those skills is busy doing other things like working at a paying job or spending time with family. LGI’s projects are always done in addition to members’ regular workload, and it is understandable when that workload has to take precedence. Like regular exercise and eating right, the organization’s projects are the first things to go when life’s demands intrude. Different projects handle this challenge in a variety of ways, but the solutions always tend to reflect the general structure of the project itself. In projects that follow what Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede refer to as “hierarchical collaborations”—projects that are clearly structured, goal-oriented, and define clear roles for its participants—milestones and deadlines are set at the beginning of the project and are often tied to professional rewards that stand-in for a paycheck: recommendation letters, all-expenses-paid conference trips, guest speaking invitations, and so forth (133). Less organized projects—what Lunsford and Ede call “dialogic collaborations”—deal with time scheduling challenges differently. Inherently, dialogic collaborations such as these tend to be less hampered by time because they are loosely structured, accept and often encourage members to shift roles, and often value the process of working toward the project’s goals as highly as actually attaining them (134). The most common adaptive strategy used in these cases is simply for the most experienced members of the team to keep the project in motion. As long as something is happening, dialogic collaborations can be kept fruitful for a very long time, even when collaborators are only able to contribute once or twice a month. In our experience, as long as each project’s collaborators understand its operative expectations—which can, by the way, be a combination of hierarchical and dialogical modes—their work proceeds smoothly. Finally, there is the matter of expenses. As an institutionally unaffiliated collective, the LGI has no established revenue stream, which means project funding is either grant-based or comes out of the membership’s pockets. As anyone who has ever applied for a grant knows, it is one thing to write a grant, and another thing entirely to get it. Things are especially tough when grant monies are scarce, as they have been (at least on this side of the pond) since the U.S. economy started its downward spiral several years ago. Tapping the membership’s pockets is not really a viable funding option either. Even modest projects can be expensive, and most folks do not have a lot of spare cash to throw around. What this means, ultimately, is that even though our group’s members have carte blanche to do as they will, they must do so in a resource-starved environment. While it is sometimes disappointing that we are not able to fund certain projects despite their artistic and scholarly merit, LGI members learned long ago that such hardships rarely foreclose all opportunities. As Anne O’Meara and Nancy MacKenzie pointed out several years ago, many “seemingly extraneous features” of collaborative projects—not only financial limitations, but also such innocuous phenomena as where collaborators meet, the dance of their work and play patterns, their conflicting responsibilities, geographic separations, and the ways they talk to each other—emerge as influential factors in all collaborations (210). Thus, we understand in LGI that while our intermittent funding has influenced the dimension and direction of our group, it has also led to some outcomes that in hindsight we are glad we were led to. For example, while LGI originally began studying games in order to discover where production-side innovations might be possible, a series of funding shortfalls and serendipitous academic conversations led us to favor scholarly writing, which has now taken precedence over other kinds of projects. At the most practical level, this works out well because writing costs nothing but time, plus there is a rather desperate shortage of good game scholarship. Moreover, we have discovered that as LGI members have refined their scholarship and begun turning out books, chapters, and articles on a consistent basis, both they and the organization accrue publicity and credibility. Add to this the fact that for many of the group’s academics, traditional print-based work is more valued in the tenure and promotion economy than is, say, an educational game, an online teachers’ resource, or a workshop for a local parent-teacher association, and you have a pretty clear research path blazed by what Kathleen Clark and Rhunette Diggs have called “dialectical collaboration,” that is, collaboration marked by “struggle and opposition, where tension can be creative, productive, clarifying, as well as difficult” (10). Conclusion In sketching out our experience directing a highly collaborative digital media research collective, we hope we have given readers a sense of why collaboration is almost always a “wicked problem.” Collaborators negotiate different schedules, work demands, and ways of seeing, as well as resource pinches that hinder the process by which innovative digital media collaborations come to fruition. And yet, it is precisely because collaboration can be so wicked that it is so valuable. In constantly requiring collaborators to assess and reassess their rationales, artistic visions, and project objectives, collaboration makes for reflexive, complex, and innovative projects, which (at least to us) are the most satisfying and useful of all. References Chesnais, François. “Technological Agreements, Networks and Selected Issues in Economic Theory.” In Technological Collaboration: The Dynamics of Cooperation in Industrial Innovation. Rod Coombs, Albert Richards, Vivien Walsh, and Pier Paolo Saviotti, eds. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 1996. 18-33. Clark, Kathleen D., and Rhunette C. Diggs. “Connected or Separated?: Toward a Dialectical View of Interethnic Relationships.” In Building Diverse Communities: Applications of Communication Research. McDonald, Trevy A., Mark P. Orbe, and Trevellya Ford-Ahmed, eds. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002. 3-25. Farrell, Michael P. Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics & Creative Work. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001. Lunsford, Andrea, and Lisa Ede. Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990. Mohan, Jitendra. “Cross-Cultural Experience of Collaboration in Personality Research.” Personality across Cultures: Recent Developments and Debates. Jitendra Mohan, ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. 313-335. O’Meara, Anne, and Nancy R. MacKenzie. “Reflections on Scholarly Collaboration.” In Common Ground: Feminist Collaboration in the Academy. Elizabeth G. Peck and JoAnna Stephens Mink, eds. Albany: State U of New York P, 1998. 209-26. Rittel, Horst W. J., and Melvin M. Weber. “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.” Policy Sciences 4 (1973): 155-69. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Ruggill, Judd, and Ken McAllister. "The Wicked Problem of Collaboration." M/C Journal 9.2 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/07-ruggillmcallister.php>. APA Style Ruggill, J., and K. McAllister. (May 2006) "The Wicked Problem of Collaboration," M/C Journal, 9(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/07-ruggillmcallister.php>.

At last year’s Tour de France—the three-week cycling race—the winner of one stage was disqualified for allegedly obstructing a competitor. In newspapers and on social media, cycling fans immediately started a heated debate about the decision and about the actual course of events. They uploaded photographs and videos, which they had often edited and augmented with graphics to support their interpretation of the situation or to direct attention to some neglected detail (Simpson; "Tour de France").Due to their competitive character and their audience’s partisanship, modern media sports continuously create controversial moments like this, thereby providing ample opportunities for what Jason Mittell—with respect to complex narratives in recent TV drama—called “forensic fandom” ("Forensic;" Complex), in which audience members collectively investigate ambivalent or enigmatic elements of a media product, adding their own interpretations and explanations.Not unlike that of TV drama, sport’s forensic fandom is stimulated through complex forms of seriality—e.g. the successive stages of the Tour de France or the successive games of a tournament or a league, but also the repetition of the same league competition or tournament every (or, in the case of the Olympics, every four) year(s). To articulate their take on the disqualification of the Tour de France rider, fans refer to comparable past events, activate knowledge about rivalries between cyclists, or note character traits that they condensed from the alleged perpetrator’s prior appearances. Sport thus creates a continuously evolving and recursive storyworld that, like all popular seriality, proliferates across different media forms (texts, photos, films, etc.) and different media platforms (television, social media, etc.) (Kelleter).In the following I will use two examples (from 1908 and 1966) to analyse in greater detail why and how sport’s seriality and forensic attitude contribute to the highly dynamic “transmedia intertextuality” (Kinder 35) of media sport. Two arguments are of special importance to me: (1) While social media (as the introductory example has shown) add to forensic fandom’s proliferation, it was sport’s strongly serialized evaluation of performances that actually triggered the “spreadability” (Jenkins, Ford, and Green) of sport-related topics across different media, first doing so at the end of the 19th century. What is more, modern sport owes its very existence to the cross-media circulation of its events. (2) So far, transmedia has mainly been researched with respect to fictional content (Jenkins; Evans), yet existing research on documentary transmedia forms (Kerrigan and Velikovsky) and social media seriality (Page) has shown that the inclusion of non-fiction can broaden our knowledge of how storytelling sprawls across media and takes advantage of their specific affordances. This, I want to argue, ensures that sport is an insightful and important example for the understanding of transmedia world-building.The Origins of Sport, the Olympics 1908, and World-BuildingSome authors claim that it was commercial television that replaced descriptive accounts of sporting events with narratives of heroes and villains in the 1990s (Fabos). Yet even a cursory study of past sport reporting shows that, even back when newspapers had to explain the controversial outcome of the 1908 Olympic Marathon to their readers, they could already rely on a well-established typology of characters and events.In the second half of the 19th century, the rules of many sports became standardized. Individual events were integrated in organized, repetitive competitions—leagues, tournaments, and so on. This development was encouraged by the popular press, which thus enabled the public to compare performances from different places and across time (Werron, "On Public;" Werron, "World"). Rankings and tables condensed contests in easily comparable visual forms, and these were augmented by more narrative accounts that supplemented the numbers with details, context, drama, and the subjective experiences of athletes and spectators. Week by week, newspapers and special-interest magazines alike offered varying explanations for the various wins and losses.When London hosted the Olympics in 1908, the scheduled seriality and pre-determined settings and protagonists allowed for the announcement of upcoming events in advance and for setting up possible storylines. Two days before the marathon race, The Times of London published the rules of the race, the names of the participants, a distance table listing relevant landmarks with the estimated arrival times, and a turn-by-turn description of the route, sketching the actual experience of running the race for the readers (22 July 1908, p. 11). On the day of the race, The Times appealed to sport’s seriality with a comprehensive narrative of prior Olympic Marathon races, a map of the precise course, a discussion of the alleged favourites, and speculation on factors that might impact the performances:Because of their inelasticity, wood blocks are particularly trying to the feet, and the glitter on the polished surface of the road, if the sun happens to be shining, will be apt to make a man who has travelled over 20 miles at top speed turn more than a little dizzy … . It is quite possible that some of the leaders may break down here, when they are almost within sight of home. (The Times 24 July 1908, p. 9)What we see here can be described as a world-building process: The rules of a competition, the participating athletes, their former performances, the weather, and so on, all form “a more or less organized sum of scattered parts” (Boni 13). These parts could easily be taken up by what we now call different media platforms (which in 1908 included magazines, newspapers, and films) that combine them in different ways to already make claims about cause-and-effect chains, intentions, outcomes, and a multitude of subjective experiences, before the competition has even started.The actual course of events, then, like the single instalment in a fictional storyworld, has a dual function: on the one hand, it specifies one particular storyline with a few protagonists, decisive turning points, and a clear determination of winners and losers. On the other hand, it triggers the multiplication of follow-up stories, each suggesting specific explanations for the highly contingent outcome, thereby often extending the storyworld, invoking props, characters, character traits, causalities, and references to earlier instalments in the series, which might or might not have been mentioned in the preliminary reports.In the 1908 Olympic Marathon, the Italian Dorando Pietri, who was not on The Times’ list of favourites, reached the finish first. Since he was stumbling on the last 300 meters of the track inside the stadium and only managed to cross the finish line with the support of race officials, he was disqualified. The jury then declared the American John Hayes, who came in second, the winner of the race.The day after the marathon, newspapers gave different accounts of the race. One, obviously printed too hastily, declared Pietri dead; others unsurprisingly gave the race a national perspective, focusing on the fate of “their” athletes (Davis 161, 166). Most of them evaluated the event with respect to athletic, aesthetic, or ethical terms—e.g. declaring Pietri the moral winner of the race (as did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in The Daily Mail of July 25). This continues today, as praising sport performers often figures as a last resort “to reconstruct unproblematic heroism” (Whannel 44).The general endeavour of modern sport to scrutinize and understand the details of the performance provoked competing explanations for what had happened: was it the food, the heat, or the will power? In a forensic spirit, many publications added drawings or printed one of the famous photographs displaying Pietri being guided across the finish line (these still regularly appear in coffee-table books on sports photography; for a more extensive analysis, see Stauff). Sport—just like other non-fictional transmedia content—enriches its storyworld through “historical accounts of places and past times that already have their own logic, practice and institutions” (Kerrigan and Velikovsky 259).The seriality of sport not only fostered this dynamic by starting the narrative before the event, but also by triggering references to past instalments through the contingencies of the current one. The New York Times took the biggest possible leap, stating that the 1908 marathon must have been the most dramatic competition “since that Marathon race in ancient Greece, where the victor fell at the goal and, with a wave of triumph, died” (The New York Times 25 July 1908, p. 1). Dutch sport magazine De Revue der Sporten (6 August 1908, p. 167) used sport’s seriality more soberly to assess Hayes’ finishing time as not very special (conceding that the hot weather might have had an effect).What, hopefully, has become clear by now, is that—starting in the late 19th century—sporting events are prepared by, and in turn trigger, varying practices of transmedia world-building that make use of the different media’s affordances (drawings, maps, tables, photographs, written narratives, etc.). Already in 1908, most people interested in sport thus quite probably came across multiple accounts of the event—and thereby could feel invited to come up with their own explanation for what had happened. Back then, this forensic attitude was mostly limited to speculation about possible cause-effect chains, but with the more extensive visual coverage of competitions, especially through moving images, storytelling harnessed an increasingly growing set of forensic tools.The World Cup 1966 and Transmedia ForensicsThe serialized TV live transmissions of sport add complexity to storytelling, as they multiply the material available for forensic proliferations of the narratives. Liveness provokes a layered and constantly adapting process transforming the succession of actions into a narrative (the “emplotment”). The commentators find themselves “in the strange situation of a narrator ignorant of the plot” (Ryan 87), constantly balancing between mere reporting of events and more narrative explanation of incidents (Barnfield 8).To create a coherent storyworld under such circumstances, commentators fall back on prefabricated patterns (“overcoming bad luck,” “persistence paying off,” etc.) to frame the events while they unfold (Ryan 87). This includes the already mentioned tropes of heroism or national and racial stereotypes, which are upheld as long as possible, even when the course of events contradicts them (Tudor). Often, the creation of “non-retrospective narratives” (Ryan 79) harnesses seriality, “connecting this season with last and present with past and, indeed, present with past and future” (Barnfield 10).Instant-replay technology, additionally, made it possible (and necessary) for commentators to scrutinize individual actions while competitions are still ongoing, provoking revisions of the emplotment. With video, DVD, and online video, the second-guessing and re-telling of elements—at least in hindsight—became accessible to the general audience as well, thereby dramatically extending the playing field for sport’s forensic attitude.I want to elaborate this development with another example from London, this time the 1966 Men’s Football World Cup, which was the first to systematically use instant replay. In the extra time of the final, the English team scored a goal against the German side: Geoff Hurst’s shot bounced from the crossbar down to the goal line and from there back into the field. After deliberating with the linesman, the referee called it a goal. Until today it remains contested whether the ball actually was behind the goal line or not.By 1966, 1908’s sparsity of visual representation had been replaced by an abundance of moving images. The game was covered by the BBC and by ITV (for TV) and by several film companies (in colour and in black-and-white). Different recordings of the famous goal, taken from different camera angles, still circulate and are re-appropriated in different media even today. The seriality of sport, particularly World Cup Football’s return every four years, triggers the re-telling of this 1966 game just as much as media innovations do.In 1966, the BBC live commentary—after a moment of doubt—pretty soberly stated that “it’s a goal” and observed that “the Germans are mad at the referee;” the ITV reporter, more ambivalently declared: “the linesman says no goal … that’s what we saw … It is a goal!” The contemporary newsreel in German cinemas—the Fox Tönende Wochenschau—announced the scene as “the most controversial goal of the tournament.” It was presented from two different perspectives, the second one in slow motion with the commentary stating: “these images prove that it was not a goal” (my translation).So far, this might sound like mere opposing interpretations of a contested event, yet the option to scrutinize the scene in slow motion and in different versions also spawned an extended forensic narrative. A DVD celebrating 100 years of FIFA (FIFA Fever, 2002) includes the scene twice, the first time in the chapter on famous controversies. Here, the voice-over avoids taking a stand by adopting a meta-perspective: The goal guaranteed that “one of the most entertaining finals ever would be the subject of conversation for generations to come—and therein lies the beauty of controversies.” The scene appears a second time in the special chapter on Germany’s successes. Now the goal itself is presented with music and then commented upon by one of the German players, who claims that it was a bad call by the referee but that the sportsmanlike manner in which his team accepted the decision advanced Germany’s global reputation.This is only included in the German version of the DVD, of course; on the international “special deluxe edition” of FIFA Fever (2002), the 1966 goal has its second appearance in the chapter on England’s World Cup history. Here, the referee’s decision is not questioned—there is not even a slow-motion replay. Instead, the summary of the game is wrapped up with praise for Geoff Hurst’s hat trick in the game and with images of the English players celebrating, the voice-over stating: “Now the nation could rejoice.”In itself, the combination of a nationally organized media landscape with the nationalist approach to sport reporting already provokes competing emplotments of one and the same event (Puijk). The modularity of sport reporting, which allows for easy re-editing, replacing sound and commentary, and retelling events through countless witnesses, triggers a continuing recombination of the elements of the storyworld. In the 50 years since the game, there have been stories about the motivations of the USSR linesman and the Swiss referee who made the decision, and there have been several reconstructions triggered by new digital technology augmenting the existing footage (e.g. King; ‘das Archiv’).The forensic drive behind these transmedia extensions is most explicit in the German Football Museum in Dortmund. For the fiftieth anniversary of the World Cup in 2016, it hosted a special exhibition on the event, which – similarly to the FIFA DVD – embeds it in a story of gaining global recognition for the fairness of the German team ("Deutsches Fußballmuseum").In the permanent exhibition of the German Football Museum, the 1966 game is memorialized with an exhibit titled “Wembley Goal Investigation” (“Ermittlung Wembley-Tor”). It offers three screens, each showing the goal from a different camera angle, a button allowing the visitors to stop the scene at any moment. A huge display cabinet showcases documents, newspaper clippings, quotes from participants, and photographs in the style of a crime-scene investigation—groups of items are called “corpus delicti,” “witnesses,” and “analysis.” Red hand-drawn arrows insinuate relations between different items; yellow “crime scene, do not cross” tape lies next to a ruler and a pair of tweezers.Like the various uses of the slow-motion replays on television, in film, on DVD, and on YouTube, the museum thus offers both hegemonic narratives suggesting a particular emplotment of the event that endow it with broader (nationalist) meaning and a forensic storyworld that offers props, characters, and action building-blocks in a way that invites fans to activate their own storytelling capacities.Conclusion: Sport’s Trans-Seriality Sport’s dependency on a public evaluation of its performances has made it a dynamic transmedia topic from the latter part of the 19th century onwards. Contested moments especially prompt a forensic attitude that harnesses the affordances of different media (and quickly takes advantage of technological innovations) to discuss what “really” happened. The public evaluation of performances also shapes the role of authorship and copyright, which is pivotal to transmedia more generally (Kustritz). Though the circulation of moving images from professional sporting events is highly restricted and intensely monetized, historically this circulation only became a valuable asset because of the sprawling storytelling practices about sport, individual competitions, and famous athletes in press, photography, film, and radio. Even though television dominates the first instance of emplotment during the live transmission, there is no primordial authorship; sport’s intense competition and partisanship (and their national organisation) guarantee that there are contrasting narratives from the start.The forensic storytelling, as we have seen, is structured by sport’s layered seriality, which establishes a rich storyworld and triggers ever new connections between present and past events. Long before the so-called seasons of radio or television series, sport established a seasonal cycle that repeats the same kind of competition with different pre-conditions, personnel, and weather conditions. Likewise, long before the complex storytelling of current television drama (Mittell, Complex TV), sport has mixed episodic with serial storytelling. On the one hand, the 1908 Marathon, for example, is part of the long series of marathon competitions, which can be considered independent events with their own fixed ending. On the other hand, athletes’ histories, continuing rivalries, and (in the case of the World Cup) progress within a tournament all establish narrative connections across individual episodes and even across different seasons (on the similarities between TV sport and soap operas, cf. O’Connor and Boyle).From its start in the 19th century, the serial publication of newspapers supported (and often promoted) sport’s seriality, while sport also shaped the publication schedule of the daily or weekly press (Mason) and today still shapes the seasonal structure of television and sport related computer games (Hutchins and Rowe 164). This seasonal structure also triggers wide-ranging references to the past: With each new World Cup, the famous goal from 1966 gets integrated into new highlight reels telling the German and the English teams’ different stories.Additionally, together with the contingency of sport events, this dual seriality offers ample opportunity for the articulation of “latent seriality” (Kustritz), as a previously neglected recurring trope, situation, or type of event across different instalments can eventually be noted. As already mentioned, the goal of 1966 is part of different sections on the FIFA DVDs: as the climactic final example in a chapter collecting World Cup controversies, as an important—but rather ambivalent—moment of German’s World Cup history, and as the biggest triumph in the re-telling of England’s World Cup appearances. In contrast to most fictional forms of seriality, the emplotment of sport constantly integrates such explicit references to the past, even causally disconnected historical events like the ancient Greek marathon.As a result, each competition activates multiple temporal layers—only some of which are structured as narratives. It is important to note that the public evaluation of performances is not at all restricted to narrative forms; as we have seen, there are quantitative and qualitative comparisons, chronicles, rankings, and athletic spectacle, all of which can create transmedia intertextuality. Sport thus might offer an invitation to more generally analyse how transmedia seriality combines narrative and other forms. Even for fictional transmedia, the immersion in a storyworld and the imagination of extended and alternative storylines might only be two of many dynamics that structure seriality across different media.AcknowledgementsThe two anonymous reviewers and Florian Duijsens offered important feedback to clarify the argument of this text.ReferencesBarnfield, Andrew. "Soccer, Broadcasting, and Narrative: On Televising a Live Soccer Match." Communication & Sport (2013): 326–341.Boni, Marta. "Worlds Today." World Building: Transmedia, Fans, Industries. Ed. Marta Boni. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2017. 9–27."Das Archiv: das Wembley-Tor." Karambolage, 19 June 2016. 6 Feb. 2018 <https://sites.arte.tv/karambolage/de/das-archiv-das-wembley-tor-karambolage>.The Daily Mail, 25 July 1908.Davis, David. Showdown at Shepherd’s Bush: The 1908 Olympic Marathon and the Three Runners Who Launched a Sporting Craze. 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Property as both an idea and a practice has been interpreted through the prism of a liberal, law and economics paradigm since at least the 18th century. This dominant (and domineering) perspective stresses the primacy of individualism, the power of exclusion, and the values of private commodity. By contrast, concepts of property that evolved out of the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s challenged this hegemony. Countercultural, or Aquarian, ideas of property stressed pre-liberal, long forgotten property norms such as sociability, community, inclusion and personhood, and contested a private uniformity that seemed “totalizing and universalizing” (Blomley, Unsettling 102). This paper situates what it terms “Aquarian property” in the context of emergent property theory in the 1960s and 1970s, and the propertied practices these new theories engendered. Importantly, this paper also grounds Aquarian ideas of property to location. As legal geographers observe, the law inexorably occurs in place as well as time. “Nearly every aspect of law is located, takes place, is in motion, or has some spatial frame of reference” (Braverman et al. 1). Property’s radical yet simultaneously ancient alter-narrative found fertile soil where the countercultural experiment flourished. In Australia, one such place was the green, sub-tropical landscape of the New South Wales Northern Rivers, home of the 1973 Australian Union of Student’s Aquarius Festival at Nimbin. The Counterculture and Property Theory Well before the “Age of Aquarius” entered western youth consciousness (Munro-Clark 56), and 19 years before the Nimbin Aquarius Festival, US legal scholar Felix Cohen defined property in seminally private and exclusionary terms. To the world: Keep off X unless you have my permission, which I may grant or withhold.Signed: Private citizenEndorsed: The state. (374) Cohen’s formula was private property at its 1950s apogee, an unambiguous expression of its centrality to post-war materialism. William Blackstone’s famous trope of property as “that sole and despotic dominion” had become self-fulfilling (Rose, Canons). Why had this occurred? What had made property so narrow and instrumentalist to a private end? Several property theorists identify the enclosure period in the 17th and 18th centuries as seminal to this change (Blomley, Law; Graham). The enclosures, and their discourse of improvement and modernity, saw ancient common rights swept away in favour of the liberal private right. Property diversity was supplanted by monotony, group rights by the individual, and inclusion by exclusion. Common property rights were rights of shared use, traditionally agrarian incidents enjoyed through community membership. However, for the proponents of enclosure, common rights stood in the way of progress. Thus, what was once a vested right (such as the common right to glean) became a “mere practice”, condemned by its “universal promiscuity” and perceptions of vagrancy (Buck 17-8). What was once sited to context, to village and parish, evolved into abstraction. And what had meaning for person and place, “a sense of self; […] a part of a tribe’ (Neeson 180), became a tradable commodity, detached and indifferent to the consequences of its adverse use (Leopold). These were the transformed ideas of property exported to so-called “settler” societies, where colonialists demanded the secure property rights denied to them at home. In the common law tradition, a very modern yet selective amnesia took hold, a collective forgetting of property’s shared and sociable past (McLaren). Yet, property as commodity proved to be a narrow, one-sided account of property, an unsatisfactory “half right” explanation (Alexander 2) that omits inconvenient links between ownership on the one hand, and self and place on the other. Pioneering US conservationist Aldo Leopold detected as much a few years before Felix Cohen’s defining statement of private dominance. In Leopold’s iconic A Sand County Almanac, he wrote presciently of the curious phenomenon of hardheaded farmers replanting selected paddocks with native wildflowers. As if foreseeing what the next few decades may bring, Leopold describes a growing resistance to the dominant property paradigm: I call it Revolt – revolt against the tedium of the merely economic attitude towards land. We assume that because we had to subjugate the land to live on it, the best farm is therefore the one most completely tamed. These […] farmers have learned from experience that the wholly tamed farm offers not only a slender livelihood but a constricted life. (188)By the early 1960s, frustrations over the constrictions of post-war life were given voice in dissenting property literature. Affirming that property is a social institution, emerging ideas of property conformed to the contours of changing values (Singer), and the countercultural zeitgeist sweeping America’s universities (Miller). Thus, in 1964, Charles Reich saw property as the vanguard for a new civic compact, an ambitious “New Property” that would transform “government largess” into a property right to address social inequity. For Joseph Sax, property scholar and author of a groundbreaking citizen’s manifesto, the assertion of public property rights were critical to the protection of the environment (174). And in 1972, to Christopher Stone, it seemed a natural property incident that trees should enjoy equivalent standing to legal persons. In an age when “progress” was measured by the installation of plastic trees in Los Angeles median strips (Tribe), jurists aspired to new ideas of property with social justice and environmental resonance. Theirs was a scholarly “Revolt” against the tedium of property as commodity, an act of resistance to the centuries-old conformity of the enclosures (Blomley, Law). Aquarian Theory in Propertied Practice Imagining new property ideas in theory yielded in practice a diverse Aquarian tenure. In the emerging communes and intentional communities of the late 1960s and early 1970s, common property norms were unwittingly absorbed into their ethos and legal structure (Zablocki; Page). As a “way out of a dead-end future” (Smith and Crossley), a generation of young, mostly university-educated people sought new ways to relate to land. Yet, as Benjamin Zablocki observed at the time, “there is surprisingly little awareness among present-day communitarians of their historical forebears” (43). The alchemy that was property and the counterculture was given form and substance by place, time, geography, climate, culture, and social history. Unlike the dominant private paradigm that was placeless and universal, the tenurial experiments of the counter-culture were contextual and diverse. Hence, to generalise is to invite the problematic. Nonetheless, three broad themes of Aquarian property are discernible. First, property ceased being a vehicle for the acquisition of private wealth; rather it invested self-meaning within a communitarian context, “a sense of self [as] a part of a tribe.” Second, the “back to the land” movement signified a return to the country, an interregnum in the otherwise unidirectional post-enclosure drift to the city. Third, Aquarian property was premised on obligation, recognising that ownership was more than a bundle of autonomous rights, but rights imbricated with a corresponding duty to land health. Like common property and its practices of sustained yield, Aquarian owners were environmental stewards, with inter-connected responsibilities to others and the earth (Page). The counterculture was a journey in self-fulfillment, a search for personal identity amidst the empowerment of community. Property’s role in the counterculture was to affirm the under-regarded notion of property as propriety; where ownership fostered well lived and capacious lives in flourishing communities (Alexander). As Margaret Munro-Clark observed of the early 1970s, “the enrichment of individual identity or selfhood [is] the distinguishing mark of the current wave of communitarianism” (33). Or, as another 1970s settler remarked twenty years later, “our ownership means that we can’t liquefy our assets and move on with any appreciable amount of capital. This arrangement has many advantages; we don’t waste time wondering if we would be better off living somewhere else, so we have commitment to place and community” (Metcalf 52). In personhood terms, property became “who we are, how we live” (Lismore Regional Gallery), not a measure of commoditised worth. Personhood also took legal form, manifested in early title-holding structures, where consensus-based co-operatives (in which capital gain was precluded) were favoured ideologically over the capitalist, majority-rules corporation (Munro-Clark). As noted, Aquarian property was also predominantly rural. For many communitarians, the way out of a soulless urban life was to abandon its difficulties for the yearnings of a simpler rural idyll (Smith and Crossley). The 1970s saw an extraordinary return to the physicality of land, measured by a willingness to get “earth under the nails” (Farran). In Australia, communities proliferated on the NSW Northern Rivers, in Western Australia’s southwest, and in the rural hinterlands behind Queensland’s Sunshine Coast and Cairns. In New Zealand, intentional communities appeared on the rural Coromandel Peninsula, east of Auckland, and in the Golden Bay region on the remote northwestern tip of the South Island. In all these localities, land was plentiful, the climate seemed sunny, and the landscape soulful. Aquarians “bought cheap land in beautiful places in which to opt out and live a simpler life [...] in remote backwaters, up mountains, in steep valleys, or on the shorelines of wild coastal districts” (Sargisson and Sargent 117). Their “hard won freedom” was to escape from city life, suffused by a belief that “the city is hardly needed, life should spring out of the country” (Jones and Baker 5). Aquarian property likewise instilled environmental ethics into the notion of land ownership. Michael Metzger, writing in 1975 in the barely minted Ecology Law Quarterly, observed that humankind had forgotten three basic ecological laws, that “everything is connected to everything else”, that “everything must go somewhere”, and that “nature knows best” (797). With an ever-increasing focus on abstraction, the language of private property: enabled us to create separate realities, and to remove ourselves from the natural world in which we live to a cerebral world of our own creation. When we act in accord with our artificial world, the disastrous impact of our fantasies upon the natural world in which we live is ignored. (796)By contrast, Aquarian property was intrinsically contextual. It revolved around the owner as environmental steward, whose duty it was “to repair the ravages of previous land use battles, and to live in accord with the natural environment” (Aquarian Archives). Reflecting ancient common rights, Aquarian property rights internalised norms of prudence, proportionality and moderation of resource use (Rose, Futures). Simply, an ecological view of land ownership was necessary for survival. As Dr. Moss Cass, the Federal environment minister wrote in the preface to The Way Out: Radical Alternatives in Australia, ‘”there is a common conviction that something is rotten at the core of conventional human existence.” Across the Tasman, the sense of latent environmental crisis was equally palpable, “we are surrounded by glistening surfaces and rotten centres” (Jones and Baker 5). Property and Countercultural Place and Time In the emerging discipline of legal geography, the law and its institutions (such as property) are explained through the prism of spatiotemporal context. What even more recent law and geography scholarship argues is that space is privileged as “theoretically interesting” while “temporality is reduced to empirical history” (Braverman et al. 53). This part seeks to consider the intersection of property, the counterculture, and time and place without privileging either the spatial or temporal dimensions. It considers simply the place of Nimbin, New South Wales, in early May 1973, and how property conformed to the exigencies of both. Legal geographers also see property through the theory of performance. Through this view, property is a “relational effect, not a prior ground, that is brought into being by the very act of performance” (Blomley, Performing 13). In other words, doing does not merely describe or represent property, but it enacts, such that property becomes a reality through its performance. In short, property is because it does. Performance theory is liberating (Page et al) because it concentrates not on property’s arcane rules and doctrines, nor on the legal geographer’s alleged privileging of place over time, but on its simple doing. Thus, Nicholas Blomley sees private property as a series of constant and reiterative performances: paying rates, building fences, registering titles, and so on. Adopting this approach, Aquarian property is described as a series of performances, seen through the prism of the legal practitioner, and its countercultural participants. The intersection of counterculture and property law implicated my family in its performative narrative. My father had been a solicitor in Nimbin since 1948; his modest legal practice was conducted from the side annexe of the School of Arts. Equipped with a battered leather briefcase and a trusty portable typewriter, like clockwork, he drove the 20 miles from Lismore to Nimbin every Saturday morning. I often accompanied him on his weekly visits. Forty-one years ago, in early May 1973, we drove into town to an extraordinary sight. Seen through ten-year old eyes, surreal scenes of energy, colour, and longhaired, bare-footed young people remain vivid. At almost the exact halfway point in my father’s legal career, new ways of thinking about property rushed headlong and irrevocably into his working life. After May 1973, dinnertime conversations became very different. Gone was the mundane monopoly of mortgages, subdivisions, and cottage conveyancing. The topics now ranged to hippies, communes, co-operatives and shared ownerships. Property was no longer a dull transactional monochrome, a lifeless file bound in pink legal tape. It became an idea replete with diversity and innovation, a concept populated with interesting characters and entertaining, often quirky stories. If property is a narrative (Rose, Persuasion), then the micro-story of property on the NSW Northern Rivers became infinitely more compelling and interesting in the years after Aquarius. For the practitioner, Aquarian property involved new practices and skills: the registration of co-operatives, the drafting of shareholder deeds that regulated the use of common lands, the settling of idealistic trusts, and the ever-increasing frequency of visits to the Nimbin School of Arts every working Saturday. For the 1970s settler in Nimbin, performing Aquarian property took more direct and lived forms. It may have started by reading the open letter that festival co-organiser Graeme Dunstan wrote to the Federal Minister for Urban Affairs, Tom Uren, inviting him to Nimbin as a “holiday rather than a political duty”, and seeking his support for “a community group of 100-200 people to hold a lease dedicated to building a self-sufficient community [...] whose central design principles are creative living and ecological survival” (1). It lay in the performances at the Festival’s Learning Exchange, where ideas of philosophy, organic farming, alternative technology, and law reform were debated in free and unstructured form, the key topics of the latter being abortion and land. And as the Festival came to its conclusion, it was the gathering at the showground, titled “After Nimbin What?—How will the social and environmental experiment at Nimbin effect the setting up of alternative communities, not only in the North Coast, but generally in Australia” (Richmond River Historical Society). In the days and months after Aquarius, it was the founding of new communities such as Co-ordination Co-operative at Tuntable Creek, described by co-founder Terry McGee in 1973 as “a radical experiment in a new way of life. The people who join us […] have to be prepared to jump off the cliff with the certainty that when they get to the bottom, they will be all right” (Munro-Clark 126; Cock 121). The image of jumping off a cliff is a metaphorical performance that supposes a leap into the unknown. While orthodox concepts of property in land were left behind, discarded at the top, the Aquarian leap was not so much into the unknown, but the long forgotten. The success of those communities that survived lay in the innovative and adaptive ways in which common forms of property fitted into registered land title, a system otherwise premised on individual ownership. Achieved through the use of outside private shells—title-holding co-operatives or companies (Page)—inside the shell, the norms and practices of common property were inclusively facilitated and performed (McLaren; Rose, Futures). In 2014, the performance of Aquarian property endures, in the dozens of intentional communities in the Nimbin environs that remain a witness to the zeal and spirit of the times and its countercultural ideals. Conclusion The Aquarian idea of property had profound meaning for self, community, and the environment. It was simultaneously new and old, radical as well as ancient. It re-invented a pre-liberal, pre-enclosure idea of property. For property theory, its legacy is its imaginings of diversity, the idea that property can take pluralistic forms and assert multiple values, a defiant challenge to the dominant paradigm. Aquarian property offers rich pickings compared to the pauperised private monotone. Over 41 years ago, in the legal geography that was Nimbin, New South Wales, the imaginings of property escaped the conformity of enclosure. The Aquarian age represented a moment in “thickened time” (Braverman et al 53), when dissenting theory became practice, and the idea of property indelibly changed for a handful of serendipitous actors, the unscripted performers of a countercultural narrative faithful to its time and place. References Alexander, Gregory. Commodity & Propriety: Competing Visions of Property in American Legal Thought 1776-1970. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Aquarian Archives. "Report into Facilitation of a Rural Intentional Community." Lismore, NSW: Southern Cross University. Blomley, Nicholas. Law, Space, and the Geographies of Power. New York: Guildford Press, 1994. Blomley, Nicholas. Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property. New York: Routledge, 2004. Blomley, Nicholas. “Performing Property, Making the World.” Social Studies Research Network 2053656. 5 Aug. 2013 ‹http://ssrn.com/abstract=2053656›. Braverman, Irus, Nicholas Blomley, David Delaney, and Sandy Kedar. The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2014. Buck, Andrew. The Making of Australian Property Law. Sydney: Federation Press, 2006. Cock, Peter. Alternative Australia: Communities of the Future. London: Quartet Books, 1979. Cohen, Felix. “Dialogue on Private Property.” Rutgers Law Review 9 (1954): 357-387. Dunstan, Graeme. “A Beginning Rather than an End.” The Nimbin Good Times 27 Mar. 1973: 1. Farran, Sue. “Earth under the Nails: The Extraordinary Return to the Land.” Modern Studies in Property Law. Ed. Nicholas Hopkins. 7th edition. Oxford: Hart, 2013. 173-191. Graham, Nicole. Lawscape: Property, Environment, Law. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011. Jones, Tim, and Ian Baker. A Hard Won Freedom: Alternative Communities in New Zealand. Auckland: Hodder & Staughton, 1975. Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac with Other Essays on Conservation from Round River. New York: Ballantine Books, 1966. Lismore Regional Gallery. “Not Quite Square: The Story of Northern Rivers Architecture.” Exhibition, 13 Apr. to 2 June 2013. McLaren, John. “The Canadian Doukhobors and the Land Question: Religious Communalists in a Fee Simple World.” Land and Freedom: Law Property Rights and the British Diaspora. Eds. Andrew Buck, John McLaren and Nancy Wright. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2001. 135-168. Metcalf, Bill. Co-operative Lifestyles in Australia: From Utopian Dreaming to Communal Reality. Sydney: UNSW Press, 1995. Miller, Timothy. The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1999. Munro-Clark, Margaret. Communes in Rural Australia: The Movement since 1970. Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1986. Neeson, Jeanette M. Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Page, John. “Common Property and the Age of Aquarius.” Griffith Law Review 19 (2010): 172-196. Page, John, Ann Brower, and Johannes Welsh. “The Curious Untidiness of Property and Ecosystem Services: A Hybrid Method of Measuring Place.” Pace Environmental Law Rev. 32 (2015): forthcoming. Reich, Charles. “The New Property.” Yale Law Journal 73 (1964): 733-787. Richmond River Historical Society Archives. “After Nimbin What?” Nimbin Aquarius file, flyer. Lismore, NSW. Rose, Carol M. Property and Persuasion Essays on the History, Theory, and Rhetoric of Ownership. Boulder: Westview, 1994. Rose, Carol M. “The Several Futures of Property: Of Cyberspace and Folk Tales, Emission Trades and Ecosystems.” Minnesota Law Rev. 83 (1998-1999): 129-182. Rose, Carol M. “Canons of Property Talk, or Blackstone’s Anxiety.” Yale Law Journal 108 (1998): 601-632. Sargisson, Lucy, and Lyman Tower Sargent. Living in Utopia: New Zealand’s Intentional Communities. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2004. 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 In the third episode of the British sci-fi/thriller television series Torchwood (BBC3, 2007-) the team are investigating a portable ‘ghost machine’, which allows its users to see events which occurred in the past. After visiting an old man whose younger self the device may have allowed them to witness, the team’s medic, Owen Harper, spots Bernie Harris, who’d previously been in possession of the machine. A chase ensues; they run past a park, between a gang of kids playing football, over a railway bridge, through a housing estate, and eventually Bernie is cornered in a back garden and taken away for questioning. The scene demonstrates the series’ intention to be a fast-paced, modern, glossy thriller, with loud incidental music, fast cuts, and energetic camerawork. Yet for me the scene has quite a different meaning. The housing estate they run through is the one in which I used to live; the railway bridge they run over is the one I crossed every day on my way to and from work; the street they run down is my street; and there, in the background, clear and apparent and obvious for all to see, is my home. Yes; my house was on Torchwood. As Blunt and Dowling note, “home does not simply exist, but is made … [and] … this process has both material and imaginative elements” (23). It is through such imaginative elements that we turn ‘spaces’ that are “unnamed, unhistoried, unnarativized” into ‘places’ that are “indubitably bound up with personal experience” (Darby 50). Such experiences may be ‘real’ (as in things that actually happened there) or ‘representational’ (as in seen on television); my relationship to ‘home’ is here being inflected through the “indexical bond” (Kilborn and Izod 29) that links both of these strategies. In using a scene from Torchwood to say something about my personal history, I’m taking what is, in essence, a televisual ‘space’ and converting it into a ‘place’ which is not only defined by my “profilmic” (Ward 8) relationship to it, but also helps express that relationship. Telling everyone that my house was on Torchwood certainly says something about the programme; but more fundamentally I’m engaging in a process intended to say something about me. A bit of autobiography. The house is in Splott, a residential area of Cardiff, the capital of Wales, where Torchwood is set and filmed. I lived in Cardiff from 2000 to 2006, when I worked at the University of Glamorgan. For much of that time I lived in rented accommodation in Cathays, the student area of Cardiff. But in 2005 I bought a house in Splott, and this was the first property I ever owned. A year later I moved to Norwich (virtually the other side of the UK from Cardiff) to take a job at the University of East Anglia, but I kept the house in Cardiff and now rent it out. It was while living in Norwich that my house appeared on Torchwood, and I had no idea that the programme had been filming in that area. This means that, strictly speaking, at the time it was on television the property was no longer my ‘home’, but was instead my tenants’. Yet what I want to examine here is the “geography of feeling and emotion” (Rodaway 263) which is central to the idea of ‘home’, and which has been kick-started in me since some fictional television characters ran down the street I used to live in and the ‘real’ and the ‘representational’ began to intersect. There certainly is something personal which is required in order to turn a ‘space’ into a ‘place’, but what is it that then transforms it into ‘home’? That is, for me Cardiff is more than a ‘place’ which I know. Owning a property there makes a difference, but that is to too easily equate a commercial transaction with an emotive sense of feeling. Indeed, Cardiff felt like ‘home’ before I’d bought a house, and the majority of my memories of the city are connected to other properties I’ve lived in. In a capitalist society it’s tempting to equate ‘home’ with the property we own, and this probably is the case for the majority of people (Morley 19). Nevertheless, something emotive stirred in me when I saw my house in a chase sequence on a science-fiction television programme when I live in an entirely different city. Tuan defines this as ‘topophilia’, which is “the affective bond between people and place or setting” (Topophilia 4), and it’s clear that such bonds can be highly emotionally charged and a significant aspect of one’s sense of self. This is noticeable because of the ways in which I’ve used my house’s appearance on television. I’ve not been quiet about it; I was telling everyone at work the day after it appeared. Whenever people mention Torchwood it’s something I point out. This might not sound as if that is likely to occur very often, but considering the programme is a spin-off from the highly successful revival of Doctor Who (BBC1, 1963-89, 1996, 2005-) it is part of a well-known media landscape. Both Doctor Who and Torchwood are predominantly filmed in Cardiff and the surrounding areas of South Wales, but whereas Torchwood is also narratively set in Cardiff, Doctor Who merely uses the locations to represent other places, most often London. Yet many of these places are distinctive and therefore obviously Cardiff for those who know the area. For example, the hospital in the episode ‘New Earth’ (2006) is recognisably the interior of the Wales Millennium Centre, just as the exterior location where the Tardis lands at the beginning of the episode is clearly Rhossili on the Gower Peninsula. Inevitably, the use of such locations has often disrupted my understanding of the story being told. That is, it’s hard to accept that this episode is taking place on a planet at the other end of the galaxy thousands of years into the future if the characters are standing on a cliff you recognise because you’ve been camping there. Of course, the use of locations to represent other places is necessary in media fictions, and I’m not trying to carry out some kind of trainspotter location identification in an attempt to undermine the programme’s diegesis. But it is important to note that while “remembering is a process that today is increasingly media-afflicted” (Hoskins 110), media texts can also be affected by the memories, whether communal or individual, that we bring to bear on them. A ‘real’ relationship with a place can be so intimate that it refuses to be ignored when ‘representations’ require it to be unnecessary. I’m a fan of Doctor Who and would rather not recognise the places so I can just get on with enjoying the programme. But it’s not possible to simply erase “Expressions of community” (Moores 368) which bring together identity and place, especially when that place is your home. Importantly, my idea of ‘home’ is inextricably bound up in the past. As it is a place I no longer live in, the ways in which I feel towards it are predicated on the notion that I used to live there, but no longer do. It’s clear that notions of home – especially those related to nation – are often predicated on ideas of history with significant emotional resonance (Anderson; Blunt and Dowling 140-195; Calhoun). This is a place that is an emotional rather than geographical home, even if it used to also be my home geographically. In buying a house, and engaging in the consumer culture which dominates the ways in which we turn a house into a home (oh, those endless hours at Ikea), I spent a lot of time wondering what it was that this sofa, or those lampshades, or that rug, said about me. The idea that the buildings that we own are a key way of creating and demonstrating a particular kind of identity or affiliation with a certain social group is necessary to consumer capitalism. But as I no longer live in it, the inside of this house can no longer be used as something I can show to other people hoping that they’ll ‘read’ my home how I want them to. Instead, the sense of home invigorated by my house’s appearance on Torchwood is one centred on location, related to the city and the housing estate where my house is, rather than what I did to it. ‘Home’ here becomes something symbolised by the bricks and mortar of the house I bought, but is instead more accurately located in the city and area which the house sits in; Cardiff. More importantly, Cardiff and my house become emotionally meaningful because I’m no longer there. That is, while it’s clear I had a particular relationship to Cardiff when I was a resident, this has altered since my move to Norwich. In moving to a new city – one which I had never visited before, and had no family or friends living in – it seems that my understanding of Cardiff as my ‘home’ has become intensified. This might be because continuing to own property there gives me an investment in the city, both emotionally and financially. But this idea of ‘home’ would, I think, have existed even if I’d sold my house. Instead, Cardiff-as-home is predicated on an idea of personal history and nostalgia (Wheeler; Massey). Academics are used to moving great distances in order to get jobs; indeed, “To spend an entire working career in a single department may seem to be a failure of geographical imagination” (Ley 182). The labour market insists that “All people may now be wanderers” (Bauman, Globalization 87), and hence geographical origins become something to be discussed with new colleagues. For me, like most people, this is a complicated question; does it mean where I was born, or where I grew up, or where I studied, or where I have lived most of my life? In the choices I make to answer this question, I’m acknowledging that “migration is a complex process of cultural negotiation, resistance, and adaptation” (Sinclair and Cunningham 14). As Freeman notes, “the history one tells, via memory, assumes the form of a narrative of the past that charts the trajectory of how one’s self came to be” (33, italics in original). Importantly, this narrative must be seen to make sense; that is, it must help explain the present, conforming to narrative ideas of cause and effect. In constructing a “narratable self” (Caravero 33, italics in original) I’m demonstrating how I think I came to end up where I am now, doing the job I’m doing. In order to show that “I am more than what the thin present defines” (Tuan, Space and Place 186) it’s necessary to reiterate a notion of ‘home’ which supports and illustrates the desired identity narrative. This narrative is as much about “the reflexive project of the self” (Gauntlett 99) in these “liquid times” (Bauman, Liquid Times), as it is a “performance” (Goffman) for others. The coherence and stability of my performance was undercut in a recent episode of Doctor Who – ‘Smith and Jones’ (2007) – in which a family row occurred outside a pub. I became quite distraught that I couldn’t work out where that pub was, and was later reassured to discover that it was in Pontypridd, a town a good few miles from Cardiff, and therefore it wasn’t surprising that I couldn’t recognise it. But in being distraught at not recognising locations I was demonstrating how central knowledge is to an idea of ‘home’. Knowing your way around, knowing where certain shops are, knowing the history of the place; these are all aspects of home, all parts of what Crouch calls “lay knowledge” (217). Ignorance of a space marks the outsider, who must stand on street corners with a map and ask locals for directions. For someone like me who prides himself on his sense of direction (who says I conform to gender stereotypes?) an inability to recognise a pub that I thought I should know suggested my knowledge of the area was dissipating, and so perhaps my ability to define that city as my home was becoming less valid. This must be why I take pleasure in noting that Torchwood’s diegesis is often geographically correct, for the ‘representational’ helps demonstrate my knowledge of the ‘real’ place’s layout. As Tuan notes, “When space feels thoroughly familiar to us, it has become place” (Space and Place 73), and the demonstration of that familiarity is one of the ways of reasserting one’s relationship to home. In demonstrating a knowledge of the place I’m defining as home, I’m also insisting that I’m not a tourist. Urry shows how visitors use a “tourist gaze” (The Tourist Gaze), arguing viewing is the most important activity when encountering a place, just as Tuan (Space and Place 16) and Strain (3) do. To visit somewhere is to employ “a dominance of the eye” (Urry, “Sensing the City” 71); this is why photography has become the dominant manner for recording tourist activity. Strain sees the tourist gaze as one “trained for consumerism” (15) with tourist activity defined primarily by commerce. Since Doctor Who returned Cardiff has promoted its association with the programme, opening an ‘Up Close’ exhibition and debating whether to put together a tourist trail of locations. As a fan of these programmes I’m certainly excited by all of this, and have been to the exhibition. Yet it feels odd being a tourist in a place I want to call home, and some of my activity seems an attempt to demonstrate that it was my home before it became a place I might want to visit for its associations with a television programme. For example, I never went and watched the programme being filmed, even though much of it was shot within walking distance of my house, and “The physical places of fandom clearly have an extraordinary importance for fans” (Sandvoss 61). While some of this was due to not wanting to know what was going to happen in the programme, I was uncomfortable with carrying out an activity that would turn a “landscape” into a “mediascape” (Jansson 432), replacing the ‘real’ with the ‘representational’. In insisting on seeing Cardiff, and my house, as something which existed prior to the programmes, I’m attempting to maintain the “imagined community” (Anderson) I have for my home, distinguishing it from the taint of commerce, no matter how pointless or naïve such an act is in effect. Hence, home is resolutely not a commercial place; or, at least, it is a location whose primary emotive aspects are not defined by consumerism. When houses are seen as nothing more than aspects of commerce, that’s when they remain ‘houses’ or ‘properties’; the affective aspects of ‘homes’ are instead emotionally detached from the commercial factors which bring them about. I think this is why I’m keen to demonstrate that my associations with Cardiff existed before Doctor Who started being made there, for if the place only meant anything to me because of the programme that would define me as a tourist and therefore undermine those emotional and personal aspects of the city which allow me to call it ‘home’. It also means I can be proud that such a cultural institution is being made in ‘my’ city. But it’s a city I can no longer claim residence in. This means that Torchwood and Doctor Who have become useful ways for me to ‘visit’ Cardiff. It seems I have started to adopt a ‘tourist gaze’, for the programmes visually recreate the locations and all I can do is view them, no matter how much I use my knowledge of location in an attempt to interpret those images differently from a tourist. It’s tempting to suggest that this shows how there is a “perpetual negotiation between the real event and its representation” (Bruzzi 9), and how willing I am to engage in the “mobile privatization” that Williams saw as a defining aspect of television (26). But this would be to accept the “unhomeyness” which results from “the ultimate failures of the home in postmodern times” (Lewis and Cho 74). In adopting an autobiographical approach to these issues, I hope I’ve demonstrated the ways in which individuals can experience emotional resonances related to ‘home’ which, while clearly inflected through the social, cultural, and technological aspects I’ve outlined, are nevertheless meaningful and maintain a dominance of the ‘real’ over the ‘representational’. Furthermore, my job tells me I shouldn’t feel this way about my home; or, at least, it reminds me that such emotionality can be explained away through cultural analysis. But that doesn’t in any way make ‘home’ any less powerful nor fully explain how such dry criteria mutate into humanist, emotional significance. So, I can tell you what my home is: but I’m not sure I can get you to understand how seeing my home on television makes me feel. In that sense it’s almost too neat that the episode which kick-started all of this is called ‘Ghost Machine’, for television has become the technology through which the ghosts of my home haunt me on a weekly basis, and ghosts have always been difficult to make sense of. References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1983. Bauman, Zygmunt. Globalization: The Human Consequences. Cambridge: Polity, 1998. ———. Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Bruzzi, Stella. New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Calhoun, Craig. Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Caravero, Adriana. Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood. Trans. Paul A. Kottman. London and New York: Routledge, 2000/1997. 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Lewis, Tyson, and Daniel Cho. “Home Is Where the Neurosis Is: A Topography of the Spatial Unconscious.” Cultural Critique 64.1 (2006): 69-91. Ley, David. “Places and Contexts.” Approaches to Human Geography. Eds. Stuart Aitken and Gill Valentine. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage, 2006. 178-83. Massey, Doris. For Space. London: Sage, 2005. Moores, Shaun. “Television, Geography and ‘Mobile Privatization’.” European Journal of Communication 8.4 (1993): 365-79. Morley, David. Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Rodaway, Paul. “Humanism and People-Centred Methods.” Approaches to Human Geography. Eds. Stuart Aitken and Gill Valentine. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage, 2006. 263-72. Sandvoss, Cornel. Fans: The Mirror of Consumption. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Sinclair, John, and Stuart Cunningham. “Go with the Flow: Diasporas and the Media.” Television and New Media 1.1 (2000): 11-31. Strain, Ellen. Public Places, Private Journeys: Ethnography, Entertainment, and the Tourist Gaze. New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers UP, 2003. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. New York: Columbia UP, 1974. ———. Space and Place: the Perspective of Experience. London: Edward Arnold, 1977. Urry, John. “Sensing the City.” The Tourist City. Eds. Dennis R. Judd and Susan S. Fainstein. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1999. 71-86. ———. The Tourist Gaze. 2nd ed. London: Sage, 2002. Ward, Paul. Documentary: The Margins of Reality. London and New York: Wallflower, 2005. Wheeler, Wendy. A New Modernity: Change in Science, Literature and Politics. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1999. Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. 
 
 
 
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Unlike some current discourse on automediality, this essay eschews most of the analysis concerning the adoption or modification of avatars to deliberately enhance, extend or distort the self. Rather than the automedial enabling of alternative, virtual selves modified by playful, confronting or disarming avatars we concentrate instead on emerging efforts to present the self in hyper-realist, interactive modes. In doing so we ask, what is the relationship between traumatic forms of automediation and the affective impact on and response of the audience? We argue that, while on the one hand there are promising avenues for valuable individual and social engagements with traumatic forms of automediation, there is an overwhelming predominance of suffering as a theme in such virtual depictions, comingled with uncritically asserted promises of empathy, which are problematic as the technology assumes greater mainstream uptake.As Smith and Watson note, embodiment is always a “translation” where the body is “dematerialized” in virtual representation (“Virtually” 78). Past scholarship has analysed the capacity of immersive realms, such as Second Life or online games, to highlight how users can modify their avatars in often spectacular, non-human forms. Critics of this mode of automediality note that users can adopt virtually any persona they like (racial, religious, gendered and sexual, human, animal or hybrid, and of any age), behaving as “identity tourists” while occupying virtual space or inhabiting online communities (Nakamura). Furthermore, recent work by Jaron Lanier, a key figure from the 1980s period of early Virtual Reality (VR) technology, has also explored so-called “homuncular flexibility” which describes the capacity for humans to seemingly adapt automatically to the control mechanisms of an avatar with multiple legs, other non-human appendages, or for two users to work in tandem to control a single avatar (Won et. al.). But this article is concerned less with these single or multi-player online environments and the associated concerns over modifying interactive identities. We are principally interested in other automedial modes where the “auto” of autobiography is automated via Artificial Intelligences (AIs) to convincingly mimic human discourse as narrated life-histories.We draw from case studies promoted by the 2017 season of ABC television’s flagship science program, Catalyst, which opened with semi-regular host and biological engineer Dr Jordan Nguyen, proclaiming in earnest, almost religious fervour: “I want to do something that has long been a dream. I want to create a copy of a human. An avatar. And it will have a life of its own in virtual reality.” As the camera followed Nguyen’s rapid pacing across real space he extolled: “Virtual reality, virtual human, they push the limits of the imagination and help us explore the impossible […] I want to create a virtual copy of a person. A digital addition to the family, using technology we have now.”The troubling implications of such rhetoric were stark and the next third of the program did little to allay such techno-scientific misgivings. Directed and produced by David Symonds, with Nguyen credited as co-developer and presenter, the episode “Meet the Avatars” immediately introduced scenarios where “volunteers” entered a pop-up inner city virtual lab, to experience VR for the first time. The volunteers were shown on screen subjected to a range of experimental VR environments designed to elicit fear and/or adverse and disorienting responses such as vertigo, while the presenter and researchers from Sydney University constantly smirked and laughed at their participants’ discomfort. We can only wonder what the ethics process was for both the ABC and university researchers involved in these broadcast experiments. There is little doubt that the participant/s experienced discomfort, if not distress, and that was televised to a national audience. Presenter Nguyen was also shown misleading volunteers on their way to the VR lab, when one asked “You’re not going to chuck us out of a virtual plane are you?” to which Nguyen replied “I don't know what we’re going to do yet,” when it was next shown that they immediately underwent pre-programmed VR exposure scenarios, including a fear of falling exercise from atop a city skyscraper.The sweat-inducing and heart rate-racing exposures to virtual plank walks high above a cityscape, or seeing subjects haptically viewing spiders crawl across their outstretched virtual hands, all elicited predictable responses, showcased as carnivalesque entertainment for the viewing audience. As we will see, this kind of trivialising of a virtual environment’s capacity for immersion belies the serious use of the technology in a range of treatments for posttraumatic stress disorder (see Rizzo and Koenig; Rothbaum, Rizzo and Difede).Figure 1: Nguyen and researchers enjoying themselves as their volunteers undergo VR exposure Defining AutomedialityIn their pioneering 2008 work, Automedialität: Subjektkonstitution in Schrift, Bild und neuen Medien, Jörg Dünne and Christian Moser coined the term “automediality” to problematise the production, application and distribution of autobiographic modes across various media and genres—from literary texts to audiovisual media and from traditional expression to inter/transmedia and remediated formats. The concept of automediality was deployed to counter the conventional critical exclusion of analysis of the materiality/technology used for an autobiographical purpose (Gernalzick). Dünne and Moser proffered a concept of automediality that rejects the binary division of (a) self-expression determining the mediated form or (b) (self)subjectivity being solely produced through the mediating technology. Hence, automediality has been traditionally applied to literary constructs such as autobiography and life-writing, but is now expanding into the digital domain and other “paratextual sites” (Maguire).As Nadja Gernalzick suggests, automediality should “encourage and demand not only a systematics and taxonomy of the constitution of the self in respectively genre-specific ways, but particularly also in medium-specific ways” (227). Emma Maguire has offered a succinct working definition that builds on this requirement to signal the automedial universally, noting it operates asa way of studying auto/biographical texts (of a variety of forms) that take into account how the effects of media shape the kinds of selves that can be represented, and which understands the self not as a preexisting subject that might be distilled into story form but as an entity that is brought into being through the processes of mediation.Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson point to automediality as a methodology, and in doing so emphasize how the telling or mediation of a life actually shapes the kind of story that can be told autobiographically. They state “media cannot simply be conceptualized as ‘tools’ for presenting a preexisting, essential self […] Media technologies do not just transparently present the self. They constitute and expand it” (Smith and Watson “Virtually Me” 77).This distinction is vital for understanding how automediality might be applied to self-expression in virtual domains, including the holographic avatar dreams of Nguyen throughout Catalyst. Although addressing this distinction in relation to online websites, following P. David Marshall’s description of “the proliferation of the public self”, Maguire notes:The same integration of digital spaces and platforms into daily life that is prompting the development of new tools in autobiography studies […] has also given rise to the field of persona studies, which addresses the ways in which individuals engage in practices of self-presentation in order to form commoditised identities that circulate in affective communities.For Maguire, these automedial works operate textually “to construct the authorial self or persona”.An extension to this digital, authorial construction is apparent in the exponential uptake of screen mediated prosumer generated content, whether online or theatrical (Miller). According to Gernalzick, unlike fictional drama films, screen autobiographies more directly enable “experiential temporalities”. Based on Mary Anne Doane’s promotion of the “indexicality” of film/screen representations to connote the real, Gernalzick suggests that despite semiotic theories of the index problematising realism as an index as representation, the film medium is still commonly comprehended as the “imprint of time itself”:Film and the spectator of film are said to be in a continuous present. Because the viewer is aware, however, that the images experienced in or even as presence have been made in the past, the temporality of the so-called filmic present is always ambiguous” (230).When expressed as indexical, automedial works, the intrinsic audio-visual capacities of film and video (as media) far surpass the temporal limitations of print and writing (Gernalzick, 228). One extreme example can be found in an emergent trend of “performance crime” murder and torture videos live-streamed or broadcast after the fact using mobile phone cameras and FaceBook (Bender). In essence, the political economy of the automedial ecology is important to understand in the overall context of self expression and the governance of content exhibition, access, distribution and—where relevant—interaction.So what are the implications for automedial works that employ virtual interfaces and how does this evolving medium inform both the expressive autobiographical mode and audiences subjectivities?Case StudyThe Catalyst program described above strove to shed new light on the potential for emerging technology to capture and create virtual avatars from living participants who (self-)generate autobiographical narratives interactively. Once past the initial gee-wiz journalistic evangelism of VR, the episode turned towards host Nguyen’s stated goal—using contemporary technology to create an autonomous virtual human clone. Nguyen laments that if he could create only one such avatar, his primary choice would be that of his grandfather who died when Nguyen was two years old—a desire rendered impossible. The awkward humour of the plank walk scenario sequence soon gives way as the enthusiastic Nguyen is surprised by his family’s discomfort with the idea of digitally recreating his grandfather.Nguyen next visits a Southern California digital media lab to experience the process by which 3D virtual human avatars are created. Inside a domed array of lights and cameras, in less than one second a life-size 3D avatar is recorded via 6,000 LEDs illuminating his face in 20 different combinations, with eight cameras capturing the exposures from multiple angles, all in ultra high definition. Called the Light Stage (Debevec), it is the same technology used to create a life size, virtual holocaust survivor, Pinchas Gutter (Ziv).We see Nguyen encountering a life-size, high-resolution 2D screen version of Gutter’s avatar. Standing before a microphone, Nguyen asks a series of questions about Gutter’s wartime experiences and life in the concentration camps. The responses are naturalistic and authentic, as are the pauses between questions. The high definition 4K screen is photo-realist but much more convincing in-situ (as an artifact of the Catalyst video camera recording, in some close-ups horizontal lines of transmission appear). According to the project’s curator, David Traum, the real Pinchas Gutter was recorded in 3D as a virtual holograph. He spent 25 hours providing 1,600 responses to a broad range of questions that the curator maintained covered “a lot of what people want to say” (Catalyst).Figure 2: The Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan presented an installation of New Dimensions in Testimony, featuring Pinchas Gutter and Eva SchlossIt is here that the intersection between VR and auto/biography hybridise in complex and potentially difficult ways. It is where the concept of automediality may offer insight into this rapidly emerging phenomenon of creating interactive, hyperreal versions of our selves using VR. These hyperreal VR personae can be questioned and respond in real-time, where interrogators interact either as casual conversers or determined interrogators.The impact on visitors is sobering and palpable. As Nguyen relates at the end of his session, “I just want to give him a hug”. The demonstrable capacity for this avatar to engender a high degree of empathy from its automedial testimony is clear, although as we indicate below, it could simply indicate increased levels of emotion.Regardless, an ongoing concern amongst witnesses, scholars and cultural curators of memorials and museums dedicated to preserving the history of mass violence, and its associated trauma, is that once the lived experience and testimony of survivors passes with that generation the impact of the testimony diminishes (Broderick). New media modes of preserving and promulgating such knowledge in perpetuity are certainly worthy of embracing. As Stephen Smith, the executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation suggests, the technology could extendto people who have survived cancer or catastrophic hurricanes […] from the experiences of soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder or survivors of sexual abuse, to those of presidents or great teachers. Imagine if a slave could have told her story to her grandchildren? (Ziv)Yet questions remain as to the veracity of these recorded personae. The avatars are created according to a specific agenda and the autobiographical content controlled for explicit editorial purposes. It is unclear what and why material has been excluded. If, for example, during the recorded questioning, the virtual holocaust survivor became mute at recollecting a traumatic memory, cried or sobbed uncontrollably—all natural, understandable and authentic responses given the nature of the testimony—should these genuine and spontaneous emotions be included along with various behavioural ticks such as scratching, shifting about in the seat and other naturalistic movements, to engender a more profound realism?The generation of the photorealist, mimetic avatar—remaining as an interactive persona long after the corporeal, authorial being is gone—reinforces Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra, where a clone exists devoid of its original entity and unable to challenge its automedial discourse. And what if some unscrupulous hacker managed to corrupt and subvert Gutter’s AI so that it responded antithetically to its purpose, by denying the holocaust ever happened? The ethical dilemmas of such a paradigm were explored in the dystopian 2013 film, The Congress, where Robyn Wright plays herself (and her avatar), as an out of work actor who sells off the rights to her digital self. A movie studio exploits her screen persona in perpetuity, enabling audiences to “become” and inhabit her avatar in virtual space while she is limited in the real world from undertaking certain actions due to copyright infringement. The inability of Wright to control her mimetic avatar’s discourse or action means the assumed automedial agency of her virtual self as an immortal, interactive being remains ontologically perplexing.Figure 3: Robyn Wright undergoing a full body photogrammetry to create her VR avatar in The Congress (2013)The various virtual exposures/experiences paraded throughout Catalyst’s “Meet the Avatars” paradoxically recorded and broadcast a range of troubling emotional responses to such immersion. Many participant responses suggest great caution and sensitivity be undertaken before plunging headlong into the new gold rush mentality of virtual reality, augmented reality, and AI affordances. Catalyst depicted their program subjects often responding in discomfort and distress, with some visibly overwhelmed by their encounters and left crying. There is some irony that presenter Ngyuen was himself relying on the conventions of 2D linear television journalism throughout, adopting face-to-camera address in (unconscious) automedial style to excitedly promote the assumed socio-cultural boon such automedial VR avatars will generate.Challenging AuthenticityThere are numerous ethical considerations surrounding the potential for AIs to expand beyond automedial (self-)expression towards photorealist avatars interacting outside of their pre-recorded content. When such systems evolve it may be neigh impossible to discern on screen whether the person you are conversing with is authentic or an indistinguishable, virtual doppelganger. In the future, a variant on the Turning Test may be needed to challenge and identify such hyperreal simulacra. We may be witnessing the precursor to such a dilemma playing out in the arena of audio-only podcasts, with some public intellectuals such as Sam Harris already discussing the legal and ethical problems from technology that can create audio from typed text that convincingly replicate the actual voice of a person by sampling approximately 30 minutes of their original speech (Harris). Such audio manipulation technology will soon be available to anybody with the motivation and relatively minor level of technological ability in order to assume an identity and masquerade as automediated dialogue. However, for the moment, the ability to convincingly alter a real-time computer generated video image of a person remains at the level of scientific innovation.Also of significance is the extent to which the audience reactions to such automediated expressions are indeed empathetic or simply part of the broader range of affective responses that also include direct sympathy as well as emotions such as admiration, surprise, pity, disgust and contempt (see Plantinga). There remains much rhetorical hype surrounding VR as the “ultimate empathy machine” (Milk). Yet the current use of the term “empathy” in VR, AI and automedial forms of communication seems to be principally focused on the capacity for the user-viewer to ameliorate negatively perceived emotions and experiences, whether traumatic or phobic.When considering comments about authenticity here, it is important to be aware of the occasional slippage of technological terminology into the mainstream. For example, the psychological literature does emphasise that patients respond strongly to virtual scenarios, events, and details that appear to be “authentic” (Pertaub, Slater, and Barker). Authentic in this instance implies a resemblance to a corresponding scenario/activity in the real world. This is not simply another word for photorealism, but rather it describes for instance the experimental design of one study in which virtual (AI) audience members in a virtual seminar room designed to treat public speaking anxiety were designed to exhibit “random autonomous behaviours in real-time, such as twitches, blinks, and nods, designed to encourage the illusion of life” (Kwon, Powell and Chalmers 980). The virtual humans in this study are regarded as having greater authenticity than an earlier project on social anxiety (North, North, and Coble) which did not have much visual complexity but did incorporate researcher-triggered audio clips of audience members “laughing, making comments, encouraging the speaker to speak louder or more clearly” (Kwon, Powell, and Chalmers 980). The small movements, randomly cued rather than according to a recognisable pattern, are described by the researchers as creating a sense of authenticity in the VR environment as they seem to correspond to the sorts of random minor movements that actual human audiences in a seminar can be expected to make.Nonetheless, nobody should regard an interaction with these AIs, or the avatar of Gutter, as in any way an encounter with a real person. Rather, the characteristics above function to create a disarming effect and enable the real person-viewer to willingly suspend their disbelief and enter into a pseudo-relationship with the AI; not as if it is an actual relationship, but as if it is a simulation of an actual relationship (USC). Lucy Suchman and colleagues invoke these ideas in an analysis of a YouTube video of some apparently humiliating human interactions with the MIT created AI-robot Mertz. Their analysis contends that, while it may appear on first glance that the humans’ mocking exchange with Mertz are mean-spirited, there is clearly a playfulness and willingness to engage with a form of AI that is essentially continuous with “long-standing assumptions about communication as information processing, and in the robot’s performance evidence for the limits to the mechanical reproduction of interaction as we know it through computational processes” (Suchman, Roberts, and Hird).Thus, it will be important for future work in the area of automediated testimony to consider the extent to which audiences are willing to suspend disbelief and treat the recounted traumatic experience with appropriate gravitas. These questions deserve attention, and not the kind of hype displayed by the current iteration of techno-evangelism. Indeed, some of this resurgent hype has come under scrutiny. From the perspective of VR-based tourism, Janna Thompson has recently argued that “it will never be a substitute for encounters with the real thing” (Thompson). Alyssa K. Loh, for instance, also argues that many of the negatively themed virtual experiences—such as those that drop the viewer into a scene of domestic violence or the location of a terrorist bomb attack—function not to put you in the position of the actual victim but in the position of the general category of domestic violence victim, or bomb attack victim, thus “deindividuating trauma” (Loh).Future work in this area should consider actual audience responses and rely upon mixed-methods research approaches to audience analysis. In an era of alt.truth and Cambridge Analytics personality profiling from social media interaction, automediated communication in the virtual guise of AIs demands further study.ReferencesAnon. “New Dimensions in Testimony.” Museum of Jewish Heritage. 15 Dec. 2017. 19 Apr. 2018 <http://mjhnyc.org/exhibitions/new-dimensions-in-testimony/>.Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Meet The Avatars.” Catalyst, 15 Aug. 2017.Baudrillard, Jean. “Simulacra and Simulations.” Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988. 166-184.Bender, Stuart Marshall. Legacies of the Degraded Image in Violent Digital Media. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.Broderick, Mick. “Topographies of Trauma, Dark Tourism and World Heritage: Hiroshima’s Genbaku Dome.” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific. 24 Apr. 2010. 14 Apr. 2018 <http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue24/broderick.htm>.Debevec, Paul. “The Light Stages and Their Applications to Photoreal Digital Actors.” SIGGRAPH Asia. 2012.Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002.Dünne, Jörg, and Christian Moser. “Allgemeine Einleitung: Automedialität”. Automedialität: Subjektkonstitution in Schrift, Bild und neuen Medien. Eds. Jörg Dünne and Christian Moser. München: Wilhelm Fink, 2008. 7-16.Harris, Sam. “Waking Up with Sam Harris #64 – Ask Me Anything.” YouTube, 16 Feb. 2017. 16 Mar. 2018 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMTuquaAC4w>.Kwon, Joung Huem, John Powell, and Alan Chalmers. “How Level of Realism Influences Anxiety in Virtual Reality Environments for a Job Interview.” International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 71.10 (2013): 978-87.Loh, Alyssa K. "I Feel You." Artforum, Nov. 2017. 10 Apr. 2018 <https://www.artforum.com/print/201709/alyssa-k-loh-on-virtual-reality-and-empathy-71781>.Marshall, P. David. “Persona Studies: Mapping the Proliferation of the Public Self.” Journalism 15.2 (2014): 153-170.Mathews, Karen. “Exhibit Allows Virtual ‘Interviews’ with Holocaust Survivors.” Phys.org Science X Network, 15 Dec. 2017. 18 Apr. 2018 <https://phys.org/news/2017-09-virtual-holocaust-survivors.html>.Maguire, Emma. “Home, About, Shop, Contact: Constructing an Authorial Persona via the Author Website” M/C Journal 17.9 (2014).Miller, Ken. More than Fifteen Minutes of Fame: The Evolution of Screen Performance. Unpublished PhD Thesis. Murdoch University. 2009.Milk, Chris. “Ted: How Virtual Reality Can Create the Ultimate Empathy Machine.” TED Conferences, LLC. 16 Mar. 2015. <https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_milk_how_virtual_reality_can_create_the_ultimate_empathy_machine>.Nakamura, Lisa. “Cyberrace.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Madison, Wisconsin: U of Wisconsin P, 2014. 42-54.North, Max M., Sarah M. North, and Joseph R Coble. "Effectiveness of Virtual Environment Desensitization in the Treatment of Agoraphobia." International Journal of Virtual Reality 1.2 (1995): 25-34.Pertaub, David-Paul, Mel Slater, and Chris Barker. “An Experiment on Public Speaking Anxiety in Response to Three Different Types of Virtual Audience.” Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 11.1 (2002): 68-78.Plantinga, Carl. "Emotion and Affect." The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film. Eds. Paisley Livingstone and Carl Plantinga. New York: Routledge, 2009. 86-96.Rizzo, A.A., and Sebastian Koenig. “Is Clinical Virtual Reality Ready for Primetime?” Neuropsychology 31.8 (2017): 877-99.Rothbaum, Barbara O., Albert “Skip” Rizzo, and JoAnne Difede. "Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy for Combat-Related Posttraumatic Stress Disorder." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1208.1 (2010): 126-32.Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide to Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.———. “Virtually Me: A Toolbox about Online Self-Presentation.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2014. 70-95.Suchman, Lucy, Celia Roberts, and Myra J. Hird. "Subject Objects." Feminist Theory 12.2 (2011): 119-45.Thompson, Janna. "Why Virtual Reality Cannot Match the Real Thing." The Conversation, 14 Mar. 2018. 10 Apr. 2018 <http://theconversation.com/why-virtual-reality-cannot-match-the-real-thing-92035>.USC. "Skip Rizzo on Medical Virtual Reality: USC Global Conference 2014." YouTube, 28 Oct. 2014. 2 Apr. 2018 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFge2XgDa8>.Won, Andrea Stevenson, Jeremy Bailenson, Jimmy Lee, and Jaron Lanier. "Homuncular Flexibility in Virtual Reality." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 20.3 (2015): 241-59.Ziv, Stan. “How Technology Is Keeping Holocaust Survivor Stories Alive Forever”. 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Our thesis is that the city’s ambience is now an unstable dialectic in which we are watchers and watched, mirrored and refracted in a landscape of iPhone auteurs, eTags, CCTV and sousveillance. Embrace ambience! Invoking Benjamin’s spirit, this article does not seek to limit understanding through restriction to a particular theme or theoretical construct (Buck-Morss 253). Instead, it offers snapshots of interactions at the dawn of the postmodern city. That bricolage also engages how people appropriate, manipulate, disrupt and divert urban spaces and strategies of power in their everyday life. Ambient information can both liberate and disenfranchise the individual. This article asks whether our era’s dialectics result in a new personhood or merely restate the traditional spectacle of ‘bright lights, big city’. Does the virtualized city result in ambient anomie and satiation or in surprise, autonomy and serendipity? (Gumpert 36) Since the steam age, ambience has been characterised in terms of urban sound, particularly the alienation attributable to the individual’s experience as a passive receptor of a cacophony of sounds – now soft, now loud, random and recurrent–from the hubbub of crowds, the crash and grind of traffic, the noise of industrial processes and domestic activity, factory whistles, fire alarms, radio, television and gramophones (Merchant 111; Thompson 6). In the age of the internet, personal devices such as digital cameras and iPhones, and urban informatics such as CCTV networks and e-Tags, ambience is interactivity, monitoring and signalling across multiple media, rather than just sound. It is an interactivity in which watchers observe the watched observing them and the watched reshape the fabric of virtualized cities merely by traversing urban precincts (Hillier 295; De Certeau 163). It is also about pervasive although unevenly distributed monitoring of individuals, using sensors that are remote to the individual (for example cameras or tag-readers mounted above highways) or are borne by the individual (for example mobile phones or badges that systematically report the location to a parent, employer or sex offender register) (Holmes 176; Savitch 130). That monitoring reflects what Doel and Clark characterized as a pervasive sense of ambient fear in the postmodern city, albeit fear that like much contemporary anxiety is misplaced–you are more at risk from intimates than from strangers, from car accidents than terrorists or stalkers–and that is ahistorical (Doel 13; Scheingold 33). Finally, it is about cooption, with individuals signalling their identity through ambient advertising: wearing tshirts, sweatshirts, caps and other apparel that display iconic faces such as Obama and Monroe or that embody corporate imagery such as the Nike ‘Swoosh’, Coca-Cola ‘Ribbon’, Linux Penguin and Hello Kitty feline (Sayre 82; Maynard 97). In the postmodern global village much advertising is ambient, rather than merely delivered to a device or fixed on a billboard. Australian cities are now seas of information, phantasmagoric environments in which the ambient noise encountered by residents and visitors comprises corporate signage, intelligent traffic signs, displays at public transport nodes, shop-window video screens displaying us watching them, and a plethora of personal devices showing everything from the weather to snaps of people in the street or neighborhood satellite maps. They are environments through which people traverse both as persons and abstractions, virtual presences on volatile digital maps and in online social networks. Spectacle, Anomie or Personhood The spectacular city of modernity is a meme of communication, cultural and urban development theory. It is spectacular in the sense that of large, artificial, even sublime. It is also spectacular because it is built around the gaze, whether the vistas of Hausmann’s boulevards, the towers of Manhattan and Chicago, the shopfront ‘sea of light’ and advertising pillars noted by visitors to Weimar Berlin or the neon ‘neo-baroque’ of Las Vegas (Schivelbusch 114; Fritzsche 164; Ndalianis 535). In the year 2010 it aspires to 2020 vision, a panoptic and panspectric gaze on the part of governors and governed alike (Kullenberg 38). In contrast to the timelessness of Heidegger’s hut and the ‘fixity’ of rural backwaters, spectacular cities are volatile domains where all that is solid continues to melt into air with the aid of jackhammers and the latest ‘new media’ potentially result in a hypereality that make it difficult to determine what is real and what is not (Wark 22; Berman 19). The spectacular city embodies a dialectic. It is anomic because it induces an alienation in the spectator, a fatigue attributable to media satiation and to a sense of being a mere cog in a wheel, a disempowered and readily-replaceable entity that is denied personhood–recognition as an autonomous individual–through subjection to a Fordist and post-Fordist industrial discipline or the more insidious imprisonment of being ‘a housewife’, one ant in a very large ant hill (Dyer-Witheford 58). People, however, are not automatons: they experience media, modernity and urbanism in different ways. The same attributes that erode the selfhood of some people enhance the autonomy and personhood of others. The spectacular city, now a matrix of digits, information flows and opportunities, is a realm in which people can subvert expectations and find scope for self-fulfillment, whether by wearing a hoodie that defeats CCTV or by using digital technologies to find and associate with other members of stigmatized affinity groups. One person’s anomie is another’s opportunity. Ambience and Virtualisation Eighty years after Fritz Lang’s Metropolis forecast a cyber-sociality, digital technologies are resulting in a ‘virtualisation’ of social interactions and cities. In post-modern cityscapes, the space of flows comprises an increasing number of electronic exchanges through physically disjointed places (Castells 2002). Virtualisation involves supplementation or replacement of face-to-face contact with hypersocial communication via new media, including SMS, email, blogging and Facebook. In 2010 your friends (or your boss or a bully) may always be just a few keystrokes away, irrespective of whether it is raining outside, there is a public transport strike or the car is in for repairs (Hassan 69; Baron 215). Virtualisation also involves an abstraction of bodies and physical movements, with the information that represents individual identities or vehicles traversing the virtual spaces comprised of CCTV networks (where viewers never encounter the person or crowd face to face), rail ticketing systems and road management systems (x e-Tag passed by this tag reader, y camera logged a specific vehicle onto a database using automated number-plate recognition software) (Wood 93; Lyon 253). Surveillant Cities Pervasive anxiety is a permanent and recurrent feature of urban experience. Often navigated by an urgency to control perceived disorder, both physically and through cultivated dominant theory (early twentieth century gendered discourses to push women back into the private sphere; ethno-racial closure and control in the Black Metropolis of 1940s Chicago), history is punctuated by attempts to dissolve public debate and infringe minority freedoms (Wilson 1991). In the Post-modern city unprecedented technological capacity generates a totalizing media vector whose plausible by-product is the perception of an ambient menace (Wark 3). Concurrent faith in technology as a cost-effective mechanism for public management (policing, traffic, planning, revenue generation) has resulted in emergence of the surveillant city. It is both a social and architectural fabric whose infrastructure is dotted with sensors and whose people assume that they will be monitored by private/public sector entities and directed by interactive traffic management systems – from electronic speed signs and congestion indicators through to rail schedule displays –leveraging data collected through those sensors. The fabric embodies tensions between governance (at its crudest, enforcement of law by police and their surrogates in private security services) and the soft cage of digital governmentality, with people being disciplined through knowledge that they are being watched and that the observation may be shared with others in an official or non-official shaming (Parenti 51; Staples 41). Encounters with a railway station CCTV might thus result in exhibition of the individual in court or on broadcast television, whether in nightly news or in a ‘reality tv’ crime expose built around ‘most wanted’ footage (Jermyn 109). Misbehaviour by a partner might merely result in scrutiny of mobile phone bills or web browser histories (which illicit content has the partner consumed, which parts of cyberspace has been visited), followed by a visit to the family court. It might instead result in digital viligilantism, with private offences being named and shamed on electronic walls across the global village, such as Facebook. iPhone Auteurism Activists have responded to pervasive surveillance by turning the cameras on ‘the watchers’ in an exercise of ‘sousveillance’ (Bennett 13; Huey 158). That mirroring might involve the meticulous documentation, often using the same geospatial tools deployed by public/private security agents, of the location of closed circuit television cameras and other surveillance devices. One outcome is the production of maps identifying who is watching and where that watching is taking place. As a corollary, people with anxieties about being surveilled, with a taste for street theatre or a receptiveness to a new form of urban adventure have used those maps to traverse cities via routes along which they cannot be identified by cameras, tags and other tools of the panoptic sort, or to simply adopt masks at particular locations. In 2020 can anyone aspire to be a protagonist in V for Vendetta? (iSee) Mirroring might take more visceral forms, with protestors for example increasingly making a practice of capturing images of police and private security services dealing with marches, riots and pickets. The advent of 3G mobile phones with a still/video image capability and ongoing ‘dematerialisation’ of traditional video cameras (ie progressively cheaper, lighter, more robust, less visible) means that those engaged in political action can document interaction with authority. So can passers-by. That ambient imaging, turning the public gaze on power and thereby potentially redefining the ‘public’ (given that in Australia the community has been embodied by the state and discourse has been mediated by state-sanctioned media), poses challenges for media scholars and exponents of an invigorated civil society in which we are looking together – and looking at each other – rather than bowling alone. One challenge for consumers in construing ambient media is trust. Can we believe what we see, particularly when few audiences have forensic skills and intermediaries such as commercial broadcasters may privilege immediacy (the ‘breaking news’ snippet from participants) over context and verification. Social critics such as Baudelaire and Benjamin exalt the flaneur, the free spirit who gazed on the street, a street that was as much a spectacle as the theatre and as vibrant as the circus. In 2010 the same technologies that empower citizen journalism and foster a succession of velvet revolutions feed flaneurs whose streetwalking doesn’t extend beyond a keyboard and a modem. The US and UK have thus seen emergence of gawker services, with new media entrepreneurs attempting to build sustainable businesses by encouraging fans to report the location of celebrities (and ideally provide images of those encounters) for the delectation of people who are web surfing or receiving a tweet (Burns 24). In the age of ambient cameras, where the media are everywhere and nowhere (and micro-stock photoservices challenge agencies such as Magnum), everyone can join the paparazzi. Anyone can deploy that ambient surveillance to become a stalker. The enthusiasm with which fans publish sightings of celebrities will presumably facilitate attacks on bodies rather than images. Information may want to be free but so, inconveniently, do iconoclasts and practitioners of participatory panopticism (Dodge 431; Dennis 348). Rhetoric about ‘citizen journalism’ has been co-opted by ‘old media’, with national broadcasters and commercial enterprises soliciting still images and video from non-professionals, whether for free or on a commercial basis. It is a world where ‘journalists’ are everywhere and where responsibility resides uncertainly at the editorial desk, able to reject or accept offerings from people with cameras but without the industrial discipline formerly exercised through professional training and adherence to formal codes of practice. It is thus unsurprising that South Australia’s Government, echoed by some peers, has mooted anti-gawker legislation aimed at would-be auteurs who impede emergency services by stopping their cars to take photos of bushfires, road accidents or other disasters. The flipside of that iPhone auteurism is anxiety about the public gaze, expressed through moral panics regarding street photography and sexting. Apart from a handful of exceptions (notably photography in the Sydney Opera House precinct, in the immediate vicinity of defence facilities and in some national parks), Australian law does not prohibit ‘street photography’ which includes photographs or videos of streetscapes or public places. Despite periodic assertions that it is a criminal offence to take photographs of people–particularly minors–without permission from an official, parent/guardian or individual there is no general restriction on ambient photography in public spaces. Moral panics about photographs of children (or adults) on beaches or in the street reflect an ambient anxiety in which danger is associated with strangers and strangers are everywhere (Marr 7; Bauman 93). That conceptualisation is one that would delight people who are wholly innocent of Judith Butler or Andrea Dworkin, in which the gaze (ever pervasive, ever powerful) is tantamount to a violation. The reality is more prosaic: most child sex offences involve intimates, rather than the ‘monstrous other’ with the telephoto lens or collection of nastiness on his iPod (Cossins 435; Ingebretsen 190). Recognition of that reality is important in considering moves that would egregiously restrict legitimate photography in public spaces or happy snaps made by doting relatives. An ambient image–unposed, unpremeditated, uncoerced–of an intimate may empower both authors and subjects when little is solid and memory is fleeting. The same caution might usefully be applied in considering alarms about sexting, ie creation using mobile phones (and access by phone or computer monitor) of intimate images of teenagers by teenagers. Australian governments have moved to emulate their US peers, treating such photography as a criminal offence that can be conceptualized as child pornography and addressed through permanent inclusion in sex offender registers. Lifelong stigmatisation is inappropriate in dealing with naïve or brash 12 and 16 year olds who have been exchanging intimate images without an awareness of legal frameworks or an understanding of consequences (Shafron-Perez 432). Cameras may be everywhere among the e-generation but legal knowledge, like the future, is unevenly distributed. Digital Handcuffs Generations prior to 2008 lost themselves in the streets, gaining individuality or personhood by escaping the surveillance inherent in living at home, being observed by neighbours or simply surrounded by colleagues. Streets offered anonymity and autonomy (Simmel 1903), one reason why heterodox sexuality has traditionally been negotiated in parks and other beats and on kerbs where sex workers ply their trade (Dalton 375). Recent decades have seen a privatisation of those public spaces, with urban planning and digital technologies imposing a new governmentality on hitherto ambient ‘deviance’ and on voyeuristic-exhibitionist practice such as heterosexual ‘dogging’ (Bell 387). That governmentality has been enforced through mechanisms such as replacement of traditional public toilets with ‘pods’ that are conveniently maintained by global service providers such as Veolia (the unromantic but profitable rump of former media & sewers conglomerate Vivendi) and function as billboards for advertising groups such as JC Decaux. Faces encountered in the vicinity of the twenty-first century pissoir are thus likely to be those of supermodels selling yoghurt, low interest loans or sportsgear – the same faces sighted at other venues across the nation and across the globe. Visiting ‘the mens’ gives new meaning to the word ambience when you are more likely to encounter Louis Vuitton and a CCTV camera than George Michael. George’s face, or that of Madonna, Barack Obama, Kevin 07 or Homer Simpson, might instead be sighted on the tshirts or hoodies mentioned above. George’s music might also be borne on the bodies of people you see in the park, on the street, or in the bus. This is the age of ambient performance, taken out of concert halls and virtualised on iPods, Walkmen and other personal devices, music at the demand of the consumer rather than as rationed by concert managers (Bull 85). The cost of that ambience, liberation of performance from time and space constraints, may be a Weberian disenchantment (Steiner 434). Technology has also removed anonymity by offering digital handcuffs to employees, partners, friends and children. The same mobile phones used in the past to offer excuses or otherwise disguise the bearer’s movement may now be tied to an observer through location services that plot the person’s movement across Google Maps or the geospatial information of similar services. That tracking is an extension into the private realm of the identification we now take for granted when using taxis or logistics services, with corporate Australia for example investing in systems that allow accurate determination of where a shipment is located (on Sydney Harbour Bridge? the loading dock? accompanying the truck driver on unauthorized visits to the pub?) and a forecast of when it will arrive (Monmonier 76). Such technologies are being used on a smaller scale to enforce digital Fordism among the binary proletariat in corporate buildings and campuses, with ‘smart badges’ and biometric gateways logging an individual’s movement across institutional terrain (so many minutes in the conference room, so many minutes in the bathroom or lingering among the faux rainforest near the Vice Chancellery) (Bolt). Bright Lights, Blog City It is a truth universally acknowledged, at least by right-thinking Foucauldians, that modernity is a matter of coercion and anomie as all that is solid melts into air. If we are living in an age of hypersocialisation and hypercapitalism – movies and friends on tap, along with the panoptic sorting by marketers and pervasive scrutiny by both the ‘information state’ and public audiences (the million people or one person reading your blog) that is an inevitable accompaniment of the digital cornucopia–we might ask whether everyone is or should be unhappy. This article began by highlighting traditional responses to the bright lights, brashness and excitement of the big city. One conclusion might be that in 2010 not much has changed. Some people experience ambient information as liberating; others as threatening, productive of physical danger or of a more insidious anomie in which personal identity is blurred by an ineluctable electro-smog. There is disagreement about the professionalism (for which read ethics and inhibitions) of ‘citizen media’ and about a culture in which, as in the 1920s, audiences believe that they ‘own the image’ embodying the celebrity or public malefactor. Digital technologies allow you to navigate through the urban maze and allow officials, marketers or the hostile to track you. Those same technologies allow you to subvert both the governmentality and governance. You are free: Be ambient! References Baron, Naomi. Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Bauman, Zygmunt. 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The western world has an enthusiasm for blondes that amounts to a cultural fetish. As a signifier the blonde is loaded: blondes have more fun, blondes are dumb, blondes are more sexually available, blondes are less capable, less serious, less complicated. The blonde is, in modern day patriarchy, often portrayed as the ideal woman. The Oxford Dictionary defines a Goddess as a female deity or a woman who is adored for her beauty. The Blonde Goddess then is the ultimate contemporary female, worshipped for her appearance, erotically idolised. She may be a Playboy bunny, the hot girl on the beach or the larger than life billboard, but everywhere her image haunts mere mortals: the men who can’t have her and the women who can’t be her. During the second wave of feminism the Blonde Goddess was vilified as an unrealistic illusion and exploitive fantasy and our enthusiasm for her was roundly challenged. She was a stereotype, feminists cried, a site of oppression, a phoney construct. Men were judged harshly for desiring her and women were discouraged from being her. Well beyond hair colour and its power as signifier the very notion of Goddessness, of being adored for one’s beauty, was considered repressive. Women were called upon to refuse participation in blondeness (in its signifying sense) and Goddessness (in the sense of being revered for attractiveness) and men were chastised for being superficial and chauvinistic.Nevertheless, decades later, many men continue to lust after her, women (and increasingly younger girls) work ever harder at being her — bleaching, shaving, breast augmenting and botoxing — and the media promotes endless representations of her. If the second wave thought the Blonde Goddess would give up the ghost easily it was mistaken but what their enthusiastic critique did enable is the birth of a new type of Blonde Goddess, one generally considered to be stronger, more empowered and a better role model for the 21st century Miss. Though the likes of Mae West hinted at this type of Blonde Goddess well before Madonna it was not until Madonna’s generation that she went mainstream. There have been many Blonde Goddess “It girls” — Jean Harlow, Jayne Mansfield and Debbie Harry (singer of the band Blondie) to name a few, but two in particular stand out as the embodiment of these types; their bodies and identities going beyond the image-making machinery to become a kind of Blonde Goddess performance art. They are Marilyn Monroe and Madonna. The enthusiasm for blondeness and Goddessness routinely gives rise to faddish cultural enthusasisms. In Monroe’s day her curvaceous figure was upheld as the model female form. After Madonna appeared with her bangles and layered tops girls all across America and around the world dressed like her. Drawing on Angela Carter’s feminist readings of De Sade in The Sadeian Woman and envisioning Monroe and Madonna, two of the most fêted examples of Blonde Goddessness in history, as De Sade’s Justine and Juliette reveals their erotic currency as both couched in patriarchal gender relations and binding us to it. Considering Monroe and Madonna with the Marquis De Sade characters Justine and Juliette in mind illustrates that Goddessness as I’m defining it here — the enthusiasm which with women rely on beauty for affirmation and men’s enthusiastic feeding of that dependence — amounts to a feminine masquerade that disempowers women from a real experience of femaleness, emancipation and eroticism. When feminists in the 60s and 70s critiqued the Blonde Goddess as the poster-child for good old-fashioned sexism it was women like Monroe they had in mind. What feminists argued for they largely got — access to life beyond the domestic domain, financial autonomy, self-determination — but, as a De Sadian viewing of Madonna will show, we’re still compromised. While many feminists, most notably Andrea Dworkin, rejected the Marquis De Sade, notorious libertine and writer, as a dishonourable pornographer, others, such as Luce Irigaray and Angela Carter, felt he accurately reflected the social structures and relations of western civilisation and was therefore fertile ground for the exploration of what it is to be a woman in our culture. Justine and Juliette are erotic novels that recount the very different fortunes of two dissimilar sisters. They are beautiful (of course) and as such they are Goddesses, even while being defiled and defiling. Monroe and Madonna are metaphorical sisters in a man's world (and it was an infamous touch of video genius when Madonna acknowledged as much by doing Monroe in the video for “Material Girl” early on in her career). Yet one is a survivor and one isn't. One is living and one is long dead. Monroe is the Blonde Goddess as victim; Madonna is the Blonde Goddess as Villain. Monroe cast a shadow; Madonna has danced with the shadow. Both Marilyn and Madonna assumed a feminine masquerade so successful, so omnipotent, that they became not just Goddesses, desired by men, admired by women, and emulated by girls, but the most iconic and celebrated Blonde Goddesses of their age. It was, and in Madonna’s case still is, a highly sexualised masquerade that utilises and promotes itself as a commodity. Both women milked this masquerade to achieve notoriety and wealth in a world where women are disadvantaged in the public sphere. Some read this kind of exploitation of erotic desire as a mark of subjugation while others see it as a feminist act: a knowing usage of means toward a self-possessed end, but as Carter will help demonstrate, masquerade is, either way, an artificial construct and our enthusiasm for trading in it comes at a high price. Monroe, the sexy, fragile child-woman, was the firstborn of the sisters. Her star rose in the moralistic fifties, and by all accounts she spent most of her time in the limelight frustrated by her career and by the studio’s control of it. She was “owned”, and she rebelled against it, fleeing to New York City to study acting at the renowned Actors Studio. She became a devoted student of method acting, a technique that encourages actors to plumb their emotional depths and experiences, though her own psychological instability threatened her career. She was scandalously difficult to work with: chronically late, forgetful, and self-indulgent; and she died alone, intoxicated and naked. Conspiracy theories aside, it seems likely that a cocktail of mental disturbance, man trouble, and substance addiction led to her premature death by overdose in 1962. Monroe’s traditional take on blondeness and Goddessness embodied the purely feminine masquerade and translated to the classic Justine trajectory.Madonna can be thought of as Monroe’s post-modern younger sister, the next generation of Blonde Goddessness. Known for her self-determination, business savvy and self-control Madonna’s self-parody and decades long survival and triumph in a male dominated industry is remarkable. Perhaps this is where the sisters differ most: Madonna challenges the dominant semiotic code of traditional gender roles in that she combines her feminine masquerade with masculinity, witness the pointy cone bra worn with pinstripe trousers and monocle on the “Blonde Ambition” tour. Madonna is the new blonde — shrewder, more forceful, more man-like. She plays girly in her feminine masquerade, but she does so self-consciously, with a wink, as the second sister who has observed and learned the lesson of the first. In Carter’s exploration of the characters of Justine and Juliette she notes that when the orphaned girls are turned out of the convent to fend for themselves, Justine, the sister whose goodness and innocence is constantly met with the brutality and betrayal of men, "embarks on a dolorous pilgrimage in which each preferred sanctuary turns out to be a new prison and all the human relations offered her are a form of servitude" (39). During Monroe’s pilgrimage from foster care, to young wife, to teen model, to star she found herself trapped in an abusive studio system that could not nurture her and instead raped her over and over again in the sense that it thwarted her personal aspirations as an actor and her desire for creative autonomy by overpowering her with its demands. Monroe did not own her own life and sexuality so much as function as a site of objectification, a possession of the Tinsel Town suits. In her personal life she was endowed with the “feminine” trait of feeling; she was, like Justine, "the broken heart, the stabbed dove, the violated sepulcher, the persecuted maiden whose virginity is perpetually refreshed by rape” (Carter 49).In real life and in most of her characters Monroe was kind hearted, generous, caring and compassionate. It is this heart that Justine values most; whatever happens to the body, no matter how impure it becomes, the heart remains sacred. The victim with heart is morally superior to her masters. In a suffering that becomes second nature, "Justine marks the start of a kind of self-regarding female masochism, a woman with no place in the world, no status, the core of whose resistance has been eaten away by self-pity” (57).Conspiracy theories and rumors of Monroe's suffering and possible murder at the hands of the Kennedys (cast as evil Sadian masters) abound. Suicide attempts, drug dependency, and nervous breakdowns were the order of the day in her final years. The continuing fascination with Monroe lies in the fact that she was the archetypal sullied virgin. Feminine virtue and goodness require sexual innocence and purity. If Monroe’s innocence (a feature of films like Some Like it Hot) was too often confused with stupidity she made the most of it by cornering the market on bimbo roles (Gentleman Prefer Blondes is her ultimate dumb blonde performance). But even those who thought she couldn’t act realised that her appeal was potent because her innocence was infused with the potentiality of an uncontainable libidinous energy. Like Justine, Juliette was a woman born into a man's world, but in her corruption Juliette decided beat men at their own game, to transcend her destiny as woman at any cost. Carter says of Juliette: She is rationality personified and leaves no single cell of her brain unused. She will never obey the fallacious promptings of her heart. Her mind functions like a computer programmed to produce two results for herself — financial profit and libidinal gratification. (79)Indeed, it could be said that it is financial profit and libidinal gratification that most defines Madonna in the public’s eye. She is obscenely rich and often cited for her calculated re-inventions and assertive sexuality (which peaked in the early nineties with the album Erotica and the graphic Sex book). Madonna, like Juliette, is a story-teller. Even if she isn’t always the author of her songs she creates narrative interplay using song, fashion, and video. Like Juliette Madonna takes control of her destiny. She heads her own production company and is intimately involved with the details of her multi-faceted career. Like Monroe Madonna is said to have slept around strategically in her pre-stardom years, but unlike Monroe she was not passed around. The men in Madonna’s life early in her career were critical to advancing it. From Dan Gilroy, who helped form her first rock band, the Breakfast Club to DJ John "Jellybean" Benitez, who remixed tracks on her debut album Madonna took every step up the ladder of success guided by a precision instinct for self-preservation and promotion. She was not used up as she used others. Her trail leaves no sign of weakness, just one envelope-pushing accomplishment after another, with a few failures along the way, most notably in film. Though very different central to both Monroe and Madonna’s lives and careers is a mega-watt erotic appeal, an appeal that has everything to do with their respective differential repetitions of being blonde.In Eroticism Georges Bataille defines eroticism as the fusion of separate objects involving the play of discontinuity and continuity. In Bataille’s work these words have a specific and unconventional meaning. Discontinuity describes our individuality, our separateness from each other, a separateness that reigns in our social and work-a-day lives. Continuity refers to dissolution of separateness that is most associated with death but which is also experienced by way of exalted living through a taste of transcendence. Bataille posits three types of eroticism: physical, emotional and religious and he claims that they all “substitute for the individual isolated discontinuity a feeling of profound continuity” (15).Here Bataille meets De Sade. In the Introduction to Eroticism Bataille speaks of De Sade’s assertion that we come closest to death (continuity) through the “licentious image.” Further, Bataille declares that eroticism is not just an enthusiasm; it is the enthusiasm of humankind. “It seems to be assumed that man has his being independently of his passions,” he says. “I affirm, on the other hand, that we must never imagine existence except in terms of these passions” (12). He goes on to state that our enthusiasm/eroticism is not just an aspect of our being, but its driving force: “We are discontinuous beings, individuals who perish in isolation in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure, but we yearn for our lost continuity. We find the state of affairs that binds us to our random and ephemeral individuality hard to bear.” (15).Human beauty is, Bataille suggests, measured by its distance from the animal — the more ethereal (light and unearthly) the female shape and texture, and the less clear its relation to animal reality, the more beautiful — the erotic moment lies in profaning that beauty, reducing it to its animal essence. Perhaps this is another reason why blondeness matters and signifies sex, conferring as it does a halo, an ethereal “light” which evokes the sacredness of continuity while denying the animal (the hairy and base reality of the body). This is the invitation The Blonde Goddess makes to defilement, her begging to be reduced to her private parts. Juliette/Madonna subverts her blonde invitation to be profaned by actively taking part in the profanation. Madonna has openly embraced gay culture, S & M, exhibitionism, fetishism, role-play and religious symbolism placing herself centre stage at all times. Justine/Monroe attracted erotic victimisation while Juliette/Madonna refused it by sleight of hand, and here again De Sade can help make sense of this. The works that illustrate this difference between Justine/Monroe and Juliette/Madonna most clearly are The Misfits and Truth or Dare. The Misfits is a beautiful and delicate film, written by Monroe’s then husband, Arthur Miller. The role of Roslyn is rumored to be based on Monroe's own character and her relationship with its three metaphorically dying cowboys reveals an enchanting and pale Justine broken by the dysfunctional and dominating masculinity around her. In contrast, Truth or Dare is a self styled documentary of Madonna’s “Blonde Ambition” tour. It portrays Madonna striking a pose as the tough-talking Queen of the castle, calling the shots, with a bevy of play-thing pawns scuttling beneath her. But, opposite as these characterisations are, some sameness emanates from the two women in these works. Something haunts the screen and it is this: the sisters’ unavoidable cultural roots as women. Even as Madonna sucks on a bottle in faux fellatio, even as she simulates masturbation on stage or scolds her messy young dancers there is something melancholic about her, a vague relationship to Monroe. And here Carter helps solve the mystery: "She [Juliette] is just as her sister is, a description of a type of female behavior rather than a model of female behavior and her triumph is just as ambivalent as is Justine's disaster. Justine is the thesis, Juliette the antithesis” (79).In other words, in Carters’ view Justine/Monroe as heart personified maintains the traditional role of woman as body, as one belonging to the private sphere who pays dearly for entering public life, while Juliette/Madonna as reason personified infiltrates the male dominated territory of culture. Unlike Monroe, Madonna gets away with being a public figure, flourishes even, but as Carter’s Juliette, this victory has required her to betray herself in some way. It is “ambivalent” and Madonna doesn’t quite get off scot free. Madonna has been progressive in that she moved away from the traditional feminine role of body in a forbidding industry, but even though her lucrative maneuvering is more sophisticated than Monroe’s careening, she walks a fine line. In De Sade the sexuality of a libertine is a male identified desire in which women are objectified and exploited. Madonna’s trick is to manifest in feminine masquerade then take an ironic turn in objectifying and exploiting herself in what amounts to a split persona, half woman, half man. In other words she seduces herself under our gaze, and she dares to enjoy it. Ultimately, neither sister can escape the social structure into which she was born. Monroe, who was unable to live as a real woman, lives on as a legend, a Blonde Goddess in the eternal feminine masquerade. Madonna is reborn every time she re-invents herself but it’s hard to tell, with all the costume changing, who the real Madonna is. It was the unactualised real woman that the second wave tried to free by daring to suggest that she existed and was valuable beyond signification and Goddessness and that she had a right to her own experience of enthusiasm/eroticism rather than being relegated to the role of being the “licentious image” for the male gaze. The attack on the Blonde Goddess underestimated the deeply rooted psychic/emotional conditioning at play on both sides of the Blonde Goddess game. Here we are in a new millennium in which the ‘pornified’ Blonde Goddess is everywhere but even if she’s more unfettered and sexually active that deeply rooted conditioning remains. For Carter neither Justine nor Juliette is a worthy role model for the women of today and it would seem to follow that neither are Monroe nor Madonna. However, Carter does speak of “a future in which might lie the possibility of a synthesis of their modes of being, neither submissive nor aggressive, capable of both thought and feeling” (79). Blondeness as a signifier and Goddessness as a function inhibit an experience of shared enthusiasm and eroticism between men and women. When Bataille speaks of nakedness he means eroticism as the destruction of the self-contained character that gives rise to an experience of continuity. This kind of absolute nakedness is impossible for those trapped in the cycle of signification and functional relations. I suggest that the liberation project of the second wave of feminism stalled when in our desire to not be Justines we simply became more akin to Juliette. Blondeness as a signifier is still problematic, and Goddessness of the kind I have spoken of here — women’s attachment to using beauty to garner adoration in place of an innate sense of self and worth and men’s willingness to patronise it — is still rampant and both the Justine and Juliette feminine masquerades produce a false economy of enthusiasm and eroticism that denies the experience of authenticity and the true potential of relationship. The challenge now is one that most needs to be met not in the spotlight but in the privacy of our own beings and the forum of our lives as the struggle for synthesis continues in those of us, female and male, blonde, brunette, redhead, black or grey-haired, who long for an experience of ourselves and each other that transcends masquerade. ReferencesCarter, Angela. The Sadeian Woman. London: Virago Press, 1979.Bataille, Georges. Eroticism. London: Marion Boyars Publishers, 1987.Madonna. Erotica. Warner Bros, 1992.———. “Material Girl.” Like a Virgin. WEA/Warner Bros, 1984.——— and Steven Meisel. Sex. Warner Bros, 1992. The Misfits. Dir. John Huston.. MGM, 1961. Some Like It Hot. Dir. Billy Wilder, Billy. MGM, 1959. Truth or Dare. Dir. Alek Keshishian. Live/Artisan, 1991.

Every act of art is able to reveal, balance and revive the relations between a territory and its inhabitants (François Davin, Southern Forest Sculpture Walk Catalogue)Introducing the Understory Art in Nature TrailIn February 2015, a colossal wildfire destroyed 98,300 hectares of farm and bushland surrounding the town of Northcliffe, located 365 km south of Perth, Western Australia (WA). As the largest fire in the recorded history of the southwest region (Southern Forest Arts, After the Burn 8), the disaster attracted national attention however the extraordinary contribution of local knowledge in saving a town considered by authorities to be “undefendable” (Kennedy) is yet to be widely appreciated. In accounting for a creative scene that survived the conflagration, this case study sees culture mobilised as a socioeconomic resource for conservation and the healing of community spirit.Northcliffe (population 850) sits on a coastal plain that hosts majestic old-growth forest and lush bushland. In 2006, Southern Forest Arts (SFA) dedicated a Southern Forest Sculpture Walk for creative professionals to develop artworks along a 1.2 km walk trail through pristine native forest. It was re-branded “Understory—Art in Nature” in 2009; then “Understory Art in Nature Trail” in 2015, the understory vegetation layer beneath the canopy being symbolic of Northcliffe’s deeply layered caché of memories, including “the awe, love, fear, and even the hatred that these trees have provoked among the settlers” (Davin in SFA Catalogue). In the words of the SFA Trailguide, “Every place (no matter how small) has ‘understories’—secrets, songs, dreams—that help us connect with the spirit of place.”In the view of forest arts ecologist Kumi Kato, “It is a sense of place that underlies the commitment to a place’s conservation by its community, broadly embracing those who identify with the place for various reasons, both geographical and conceptual” (149). In bioregional terms such communities form a terrain of consciousness (Berg and Dasmann 218), extending responsibility for conservation across cultures, time and space (Kato 150). A sustainable thematic of place must also include livelihood as the third party between culture and nature that establishes the relationship between them (Giblett 240). With these concepts in mind I gauge creative impact on forest as place, and, in turn, (altered) forest’s impact on people. My abstraction of physical place is inclusive of humankind moving in dialogic engagement with forest. A mapping of Understory’s creative activities sheds light on how artists express physical environments in situated creative practices, clusters, and networks. These, it is argued, constitute unique types of community operating within (and beyond) a foundational scene of inspiration and mystification that is metaphorically “rising from the ashes.” In transcending disconnectedness between humankind and landscape, Understory may be understood to both culturalise nature (as an aesthetic system), and naturalise culture (as an ecologically modelled system), to build on a trope introduced by Feld (199). Arguably when the bush is cultured in this way it attracts consumers who may otherwise disconnect from nature.The trail (henceforth Understory) broaches the histories of human relations with Northcliffe’s natural systems of place. Sub-groups of the Noongar nation have inhabited the southwest for an estimated 50,000 years and their association with the Northcliffe region extends back at least 6,000 years (SFA Catalogue; see also Crawford and Crawford). An indigenous sense of the spirit of forest is manifest in Understory sculpture, literature, and—for the purpose of this article—the compilation CD Canopy: Songs for the Southern Forests (henceforth Canopy, Figure 1).As a cultural and environmental construction of place, Canopy sustains the land with acts of seeing, listening to, and interpreting nature; of remembering indigenous people in the forest; and of recalling the hardships of the early settlers. I acknowledge SFA coordinator and Understory custodian Fiona Sinclair for authorising this investigation; Peter Hill for conservation conversations; Robyn Johnston for her Canopy CD sleeve notes; Della Rae Morrison for permissions; and David Pye for discussions. Figure 1. Canopy: Songs for the Southern Forests (CD, 2006). Cover image by Raku Pitt, 2002. Courtesy Southern Forest Arts, Northcliffe, WA.Forest Ecology, Emotion, and ActionEstablished in 1924, Northcliffe’s ill-founded Group Settlement Scheme resulted in frontier hardship and heartbreak, and deforestation of the southwest region for little economic return. An historic forest controversy (1992-2001) attracted media to Northcliffe when protesters attempting to disrupt logging chained themselves to tree trunks and suspended themselves from branches. The signing of the Western Australian Regional Forest Agreement in 1999 was followed, in 2001, by deregulation of the dairy industry and a sharp decline in area population.Moved by the gravity of this situation, Fiona Sinclair won her pitch to the Manjimup Council for a sound alternative industry for Northcliffe with projections of jobs: a forest where artists could work collectively and sustainably to reveal the beauty of natural dimensions. A 12-acre pocket of allocated Crown Land adjacent to the town was leased as an A-Class Reserve vested for Education and Recreation, for which SFA secured unified community ownership and grants. Conservation protocols stipulated that no biomass could be removed from the forest and that predominantly raw, natural materials were to be used (F. Sinclair and P. Hill, personal interview, 26 Sep. 2014). With forest as prescribed image (wider than the bounded chunk of earth), Sinclair invited the artists to consider the themes of spirituality, creativity, history, dichotomy, and sensory as a basis for work that was to be “fresh, intimate, and grounded in place.” Her brief encouraged artists to work with humanity and imagination to counteract residual community divisiveness and resentment. Sinclair describes this form of implicit environmentalism as an “around the back” approach that avoids lapsing into political commentary or judgement: “The trail is a love letter from those of us who live here to our visitors, to connect with grace” (F. Sinclair, telephone interview, 6 Apr. 2014). Renewing community connections to local place is essential if our lives and societies are to become more sustainable (Pedelty 128). To define Northcliffe’s new community phase, artists respected differing associations between people and forest. A structure on a karri tree by Indigenous artist Norma MacDonald presents an Aboriginal man standing tall and proud on a rock to become one with the tree and the forest: as it was for thousands of years before European settlement (MacDonald in SFA Catalogue). As Feld observes, “It is the stabilizing persistence of place as a container of experiences that contributes so powerfully to its intrinsic memorability” (201).Adhering to the philosophy that nature should not be used or abused for the sake of art, the works resonate with the biorhythms of the forest, e.g. functional seats and shelters and a cascading retainer that directs rainwater back to the resident fauna. Some sculptures function as receivers for picking up wavelengths of ancient forest. Forest Folk lurk around the understory, while mysterious stone art represents a life-shaping force of planet history. To represent the reality of bushfire, Natalie Williamson’s sculpture wraps itself around a burnt-out stump. The work plays with scale as small native sundew flowers are enlarged and a subtle beauty, easily overlooked, becomes apparent (Figure 2). The sculptor hopes that “spiders will spin their webs about it, incorporating it into the landscape” (SFA Catalogue).Figure 2. Sundew. Sculpture by Natalie Williamson, 2006. Understory Art in Nature Trail, Northcliffe, WA. Image by the author, 2014.Memory is naturally place-oriented or at least place-supported (Feld 201). Topaesthesia (sense of place) denotes movement that connects our biography with our route. This is resonant for the experience of regional character, including the tactile, olfactory, gustatory, visual, and auditory qualities of a place (Ryan 307). By walking, we are in a dialogue with the environment; both literally and figuratively, we re-situate ourselves into our story (Schine 100). For example, during a summer exploration of the trail (5 Jan. 2014), I intuited a personal attachment based on my grandfather’s small bush home being razed by fire, and his struggle to support seven children.Understory’s survival depends on vigilant controlled (cool) burns around its perimeter (Figure 3), organised by volunteer Peter Hill. These burns also hone the forest. On 27 Sept. 2014, the charred vegetation spoke a spring language of opportunity for nature to reassert itself as seedpods burst and continue the cycle; while an autumn walk (17 Mar. 2016) yielded a fresh view of forest colour, patterning, light, shade, and sound.Figure 3. Understory Art in Nature Trail. Map Created by Fiona Sinclair for Southern Forest Sculpture Walk Catalogue (2006). Courtesy Southern Forest Arts, Northcliffe, WA.Understory and the Melody of CanopyForest resilience is celebrated in five MP3 audio tours produced for visitors to dialogue with the trail in sensory contexts of music, poetry, sculptures and stories that name or interpret the setting. The trail starts in heathland and includes three creek crossings. A zone of acacias gives way to stands of the southwest signature trees karri (Eucalyptus diversicolor), jarrah (Eucalyptus marginata), and marri (Corymbia calophylla). Following a sheoak grove, a riverine environment re-enters heathland. Birds, insects, mammals, and reptiles reside around and between the sculptures, rendering the earth-embedded art a fusion of human and natural orders (concept after Relph 141). On Audio Tour 3, Songs for the Southern Forests, the musician-composers reflect on their regionally focused items, each having been birthed according to a personal musical concept (the manner in which an individual artist holds the totality of a composition in cultural context). Arguably the music in question, its composers, performers, audiences, and settings, all have a role to play in defining the processes and effects of forest arts ecology. Local musician Ann Rice billeted a cluster of musicians (mostly from Perth) at her Windy Harbour shack. The energy of the production experience was palpable as all participated in on-site forest workshops, and supported each other’s items as a musical collective (A. Rice, telephone interview, 2 Oct. 2014). Collaborating under producer Lee Buddle’s direction, they orchestrated rich timbres (tone colours) to evoke different musical atmospheres (Table 1). Composer/Performer Title of TrackInstrumentation1. Ann RiceMy Placevocals/guitars/accordion 2. David PyeCicadan Rhythmsangklung/violin/cello/woodblocks/temple blocks/clarinet/tapes 3. Mel RobinsonSheltervocal/cello/double bass 4. DjivaNgank Boodjakvocals/acoustic, electric and slide guitars/drums/percussion 5. Cathie TraversLamentaccordion/vocals/guitar/piano/violin/drums/programming 6. Brendon Humphries and Kevin SmithWhen the Wind First Blewvocals/guitars/dobro/drums/piano/percussion 7. Libby HammerThe Gladevocal/guitar/soprano sax/cello/double bass/drums 8. Pete and Dave JeavonsSanctuaryguitars/percussion/talking drum/cowbell/soprano sax 9. Tomás FordWhite Hazevocal/programming/guitar 10. David HyamsAwakening /Shaking the Tree /When the Light Comes guitar/mandolin/dobro/bodhran/rainstick/cello/accordion/flute 11. Bernard CarneyThe Destiny Waltzvocal/guitar/accordion/drums/recording of The Destiny Waltz 12. Joel BarkerSomething for Everyonevocal/guitars/percussion Table 1. Music Composed for Canopy: Songs for the Southern Forests.Source: CD sleeve and http://www.understory.com.au/art.php. Composing out of their own strengths, the musicians transformed the geographic region into a living myth. As Pedelty has observed of similar musicians, “their sounds resonate because they so profoundly reflect our living sense of place” (83-84). The remainder of this essay evidences the capacity of indigenous song, art music, electronica, folk, and jazz-blues to celebrate, historicise, or re-imagine place. Firstly, two items represent the phenomenological approach of site-specific sensitivity to acoustic, biological, and cultural presence/loss, including the materiality of forest as a living process.“Singing Up the Land”In Aboriginal Australia “there is no place that has not been imaginatively grasped through song, dance and design, no place where traditional owners cannot see the imprint of sacred creation” (Rose 18). Canopy’s part-Noongar language song thus repositions the ancient Murrum-Noongar people within their life-sustaining natural habitat and spiritual landscape.Noongar Yorga woman Della Rae Morrison of the Bibbulmun and Wilman nations co-founded The Western Australian Nuclear Free Alliance to campaign against the uranium mining industry threatening Ngank Boodjak (her country, “Mother Earth”) (D.R. Morrison, e-mail, 15 July 2014). In 2004, Morrison formed the duo Djiva (meaning seed power or life force) with Jessie Lloyd, a Murri woman of the Guugu Yimidhirr Nation from North Queensland. After discerning the fundamental qualities of the Understory site, Djiva created the song Ngank Boodjak: “This was inspired by walking the trail […] feeling the energy of the land and the beautiful trees and hearing the birds. When I find a spot that I love, I try to feel out the lay-lines, which feel like vortexes of energy coming out of the ground; it’s pretty amazing” (Morrison in SFA Canopy sleeve) Stanza 1 points to the possibilities of being more fully “in country”:Ssh!Ni dabarkarn kooliny, ngank boodja kookoorninyListen, walk slowly, beautiful Mother EarthThe inclusion of indigenous language powerfully implements an indigenous interpretation of forest: “My elders believe that when we leave this life from our physical bodies that our spirit is earthbound and is living in the rocks or the trees and if you listen carefully you might hear their voices and maybe you will get some answers to your questions” (Morrison in SFA Catalogue).Cicadan Rhythms, by composer David Pye, echoes forest as a lively “more-than-human” world. Pye took his cue from the ambient pulsing of male cicadas communicating in plenum (full assembly) by means of airborne sound. The species were sounding together in tempo with individual rhythm patterns that interlocked to create one fantastic rhythm (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Composer David Pye). The cicada chorus (the loudest known lovesong in the insect world) is the unique summer soundmark (term coined by Truax Handbook, Website) of the southern forests. Pye chased various cicadas through Understory until he was able to notate the rhythms of some individuals in a patch of low-lying scrub.To simulate cicada clicking, the composer set pointillist patterns for Indonesian anklung (joint bamboo tubes suspended within a frame to produce notes when the frame is shaken or tapped). Using instruments made of wood to enhance the rich forest imagery, Pye created all parts using sampled instrumental sounds placed against layers of pre-recorded ambient sounds (D. Pye, telephone interview, 3 Sept. 2014). He takes the listener through a “geographical linear representation” of the trail: “I walked around it with a stopwatch and noted how long it took to get through each section of the forest, and that became the musical timing of the various parts of the work” (Pye in SFA Canopy sleeve). That Understory is a place where reciprocity between nature and culture thrives is, likewise, evident in the remaining tracks.Musicalising Forest History and EnvironmentThree tracks distinguish Canopy as an integrative site for memory. Bernard Carney’s waltz honours the Group Settlers who battled insurmountable terrain without any idea of their destiny, men who, having migrated with a promise of owning their own dairy farms, had to clear trees bare-handedly and build furniture from kerosene tins and gelignite cases. Carney illuminates the culture of Saturday night dancing in the schoolroom to popular tunes like The Destiny Waltz (performed on the Titanic in 1912). His original song fades to strains of the Victor Military Band (1914), to “pay tribute to the era where the inspiration of the song came from” (Carney in SFA Canopy sleeve). Likewise Cathie Travers’s Lament is an evocation of remote settler history that creates a “feeling of being in another location, other timezone, almost like an endless loop” (Travers in SFA Canopy sleeve).An instrumental medley by David Hyams opens with Awakening: the morning sun streaming through tall trees, and the nostalgic sound of an accordion waltz. Shaking the Tree, an Irish jig, recalls humankind’s struggle with forest and the forces of nature. A final title, When the Light Comes, defers to the saying by conservationist John Muir that “The wrongs done to trees, wrongs of every sort, are done in the darkness of ignorance and unbelief, for when the light comes the heart of the people is always right” (quoted by Hyams in SFA Canopy sleeve). Local musician Joel Barker wrote Something for Everyone to personify the old-growth karri as a king with a crown, with “wisdom in his bones.”Kevin Smith’s father was born in Northcliffe in 1924. He and Brendon Humphries fantasise the untouchability of a maiden (pre-human) moment in a forest in their song, When the Wind First Blew. In Libby Hammer’s The Glade (a lover’s lament), instrumental timbres project their own affective languages. The jazz singer intended the accompanying double bass to speak resonantly of old-growth forest; the cello to express suppleness and renewal; a soprano saxophone to impersonate a bird; and the drums to imitate the insect community’s polyrhythmic undercurrent (after Hammer in SFA Canopy sleeve).A hybrid aural environment of synthetic and natural forest sounds contrasts collision with harmony in Sanctuary. The Jeavons Brothers sampled rustling wind on nearby Mt Chudalup to absorb into the track’s opening, and crafted a snare groove for the quirky eco-jazz/trip-hop by banging logs together, and banging rocks against logs. This imaginative use of percussive found objects enhanced their portrayal of forest as “a living, breathing entity.”In dealing with recent history in My Place, Ann Rice cameos a happy childhood growing up on a southwest farm, “damming creeks, climbing trees, breaking bones and skinning knees.” The rich string harmonies of Mel Robinson’s Shelter sculpt the shifting environment of a brewing storm, while White Haze by Tomás Ford describes a smoky controlled burn as “a kind of metaphor for the beautiful mystical healing nature of Northcliffe”: Someone’s burning off the scrubSomeone’s making sure it’s safeSomeone’s whiting out the fearSomeone’s letting me breathe clearAs Sinclair illuminates in a post-fire interview with Sharon Kennedy (Website):When your map, your personal map of life involves a place, and then you think that that place might be gone…” Fiona doesn't finish the sentence. “We all had to face the fact that our little place might disappear." Ultimately, only one house was lost. Pasture and fences, sheds and forest are gone. Yet, says Fiona, “We still have our town. As part of SFA’s ongoing commission, forest rhythm workshops explore different sound properties of potential materials for installing sound sculptures mimicking the surrounding flora and fauna. In 2015, SFA mounted After the Burn (a touring photographic exhibition) and Out of the Ashes (paintings and woodwork featuring ash, charcoal, and resin) (SFA, After the Burn 116). The forthcoming community project Rising From the Ashes will commemorate the fire and allow residents to connect and create as they heal and move forward—ten years on from the foundation of Understory.ConclusionThe Understory Art in Nature Trail stimulates curiosity. It clearly illustrates links between place-based social, economic and material conditions and creative practices and products within a forest that has both given shelter and “done people in.” The trail is an experimental field, a transformative locus in which dedicated physical space frees artists to culturalise forest through varied aesthetic modalities. Conversely, forest possesses agency for naturalising art as a symbol of place. Djiva’s song Ngank Boodjak “sings up the land” to revitalise the timelessness of prior occupation, while David Pye’s Cicadan Rhythms foregrounds the seasonal cycle of entomological music.In drawing out the richness and significance of place, the ecologically inspired album Canopy suggests that the community identity of a forested place may be informed by cultural, economic, geographical, and historical factors as well as endemic flora and fauna. Finally, the musical representation of place is not contingent upon blatant forms of environmentalism. The portrayals of Northcliffe respectfully associate Western Australian people and forests, yet as a place, the town has become an enduring icon for the plight of the Universal Old-growth Forest in all its natural glory, diverse human uses, and (real or perceived) abuses.ReferencesAustralian Broadcasting Commission. “Canopy: Songs for the Southern Forests.” Into the Music. Prod. Robyn Johnston. Radio National, 5 May 2007. 12 Aug. 2014 <http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/intothemusic/canopy-songs-for-the-southern-forests/3396338>.———. “Composer David Pye.” Interview with Andrew Ford. The Music Show, Radio National, 12 Sep. 2009. 30 Jan. 2015 <http://canadapodcasts.ca/podcasts/MusicShowThe/1225021>.Berg, Peter, and Raymond Dasmann. “Reinhabiting California.” Reinhabiting a Separate Country: A Bioregional Anthology of Northern California. Ed. Peter Berg. San Francisco: Planet Drum, 1978. 217-20.Crawford, Patricia, and Ian Crawford. Contested Country: A History of the Northcliffe Area, Western Australia. Perth: UWA P, 2003.Feld, Steven. 2001. “Lift-Up-Over Sounding.” The Book of Music and Nature: An Anthology of Sounds, Words, Thoughts. Ed. David Rothenberg and Marta Ulvaeus. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2001. 193-206.Giblett, Rod. People and Places of Nature and Culture. Bristol: Intellect, 2011.Kato, Kumi. “Addressing Global Responsibility for Conservation through Cross-Cultural Collaboration: Kodama Forest, a Forest of Tree Spirits.” The Environmentalist 28.2 (2008): 148-54. 15 Apr. 2014 <http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10669-007-9051-6#page-1>.Kennedy, Sharon. “Local Knowledge Builds Vital Support Networks in Emergencies.” ABC South West WA, 10 Mar. 2015. 26 Mar. 2015 <http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2015/03/09/4193981.htm?site=southwestwa>.Morrison, Della Rae. E-mail. 15 July 2014.Pedelty, Mark. Ecomusicology: Rock, Folk, and the Environment. Philadelphia, PA: Temple UP, 2012.Pye, David. Telephone interview. 3 Sep. 2014.Relph, Edward. Place and Placelessness. London: Pion, 1976.Rice, Ann. Telephone interview. 2 Oct. 2014.Rose, Deborah Bird. Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness. Australian Heritage Commission, 1996.Ryan, John C. Green Sense: The Aesthetics of Plants, Place and Language. Oxford: Trueheart Academic, 2012.Schine, Jennifer. “Movement, Memory and the Senses in Soundscape Studies.” Canadian Acoustics: Journal of the Canadian Acoustical Association 38.3 (2010): 100-01. 12 Apr. 2016 <http://jcaa.caa-aca.ca/index.php/jcaa/article/view/2264>.Sinclair, Fiona. Telephone interview. 6 Apr. 2014.Sinclair, Fiona, and Peter Hill. Personal Interview. 26 Sep. 2014.Southern Forest Arts. Canopy: Songs for the Southern Forests. CD coordinated by Fiona Sinclair. Recorded and produced by Lee Buddle. Sleeve notes by Robyn Johnston. West Perth: Sound Mine Studios, 2006.———. Southern Forest Sculpture Walk Catalogue. Northcliffe, WA, 2006. Unpaginated booklet.———. Understory—Art in Nature. 2009. 12 Apr. 2016 <http://www.understory.com.au/>.———. Trailguide. Understory. Presented by Southern Forest Arts, n.d.———. After the Burn: Stories, Poems and Photos Shared by the Local Community in Response to the 2015 Northcliffe and Windy Harbour Bushfire. 2nd ed. Ed. Fiona Sinclair. Northcliffe, WA., 2016.Truax, Barry, ed. Handbook for Acoustic Ecology. 2nd ed. Cambridge Street Publishing, 1999. 10 Apr. 2016 <http://www.sfu.ca/sonic-studio/handbook/Soundmark.html>.

To Remember‘The central problem of today’s global interactions is the tension between cultural homogenisation and cultural heterogenisation.’ (Appadurai 49)While this statement has been made more than twenty years, it remains more relevant than ever. The current age is one of widespread global migrations and dis-placement. The phenomenon of globalisation is the first and major factor for this newly created shift of ground, of transmigration as defined by its etymological meaning. However, a growing number of migrations also result from social or political oppression and war as we witness the current flow of refugees from Africa or Syria to Europe and with growing momentum, from climate change, the people of Tokelau or Nauru migrating as a result of the rise of sea levels in their South Pacific homeland. Such global migrations lead to an intense co-habitation of various cultures, ethnicities and religions in host societies. In late twentieth century Giddens explains this complexity and discusses how globalisation requires a re-organisation of time and space in social and cultural life of both the host and the migrant (Giddens 14). In the host country, Appadurai terms the physical consequences of this phenomenon as the new ‘ethnoscape’ (Appadurai 51). This fact is particularly relevant to New Zealand, a country that is currently seeing an unprecedented level of immigration from various and numerous ethnic groups which is evidently influencing the makeup of its entire population.For the migrant, according to Xavier & Rosaldo, social life following migration re-establishes itself on two fronts: the first is the pre-modern manner of being present through participation in localised activities at specific locales; the second is about fostering relationships with absent others through media and across the world. These “settings for distanced relations – for relations at a distance, [are] stretched out across time and space” (Xavier & Rosaldo 8). Throughout the world, people in dis-placement reorganise their societies in both of these fronts.Dis-placement is ‘a potentially traumatic event that is collectively experienced" (Norris 128). Disaster and trauma related dis-placement as stressors happen to entire communities, not just individuals, families and neighbourhoods. Members are exposed together and it has been argued, must, therefore, recover together, (Norris 145). On one hand, in the situation of collective trauma some attachment to a new space ‘increases the likelihood that a community as a whole has the will to rebuild’ (Norris 145). On the other, it is suggested that for the individual, place attachment makes the necessary relocation much harder. It is in re-location however that the will to recreate or reproduce will emerge. Indeed part of the recovery in the case of relocation can be the reconstruction of place. The places of past experiences and rituals for meaning are commonly recreated or reproduced as new places of attachment abroad. The will and ability to reimagine and re-materialise (Gupta & Ferguson 70) the lost heritage is motivational and defines resilience.This is something a great deal of communities such as the displaced Coptic community in New Zealand look to achieve, re-constructing a familiar space, where rituals and meaning can reaffirm their ideal existence, the only form of existence they have ever known before relocation. In this instance it is the reconstruction and reinterpretation of a traditional Coptic Orthodox church. Resilience can be examined as a ‘sense of community’, a concept that binds people with shared values. Concern for community and respect for others can transcend the physical and can bind disparate individuals in ways that otherwise might require more formal organisations. It has been noted that trauma due to displacement and relocation can enhance a sense of closeness and stronger belonging (Norris 139). Indeed citizen participation is fundamental to community resilience (Norris 139) and it entails the engagement of community members in formal organisations, including religious congregations (Perkins et al. 2002; Norris 139) and collective gatherings around cultural rituals. However, the displacement also strengthens the emotional ties at the individual level to the homeland, to kinfolk and to the more abstract cultural mores and ideas.Commitment and AttachmentRecalling places of collective events and rituals such as assembly halls and spaces of worship is crucially important for dis-placed communities. The attachment to place exposes the challenges and opportunities for recollecting the spirit of space in the situation of a people abroad. This in turn, raises the question of memory and its representation in re-creating the architectural qualities of the cultural space from its original context. This article offers the employ of visual representation (drawings) as a strategy of recall. To explore these ideas further, the situation of the Egyptian community of Coptic Orthodox faith, relocated, displaced and living ‘abroad’ in New Zealand is being considered. This small community that emigrated to New Zealand firstly in the 1950s then in the 1970s represents in many ways the various ethnicities and religious beliefs found in New Zealand.Rituals and congregations are held in collective spaces and while the attachment to the collective is essential, the question to be addressed here relates to the role of the physical community space in forming or maintaining the attachment to community (Pretty, Chipuer, and Bramston 78). Groups or societies use systems of shared meanings to interpret and make sense of the world. However, shared meanings have traditionally been tied to the idea of a fixed territory (Manzo & Devine-Wright 335, Xavier & Rosaldo 10). Manzo and Perkins further suggest that place attachments provide stability and are integral to self-definitions (335-350). Image by Vioula Said.Stability and self-definition and ultimately identity are in turn, placed in jeopardy with the process of displacement and de-territorilisation. Shared meanings are shifted and potentially lost when the resultant instability occurs. Norris finds that in the strongest cases, individuals, neighbourhoods and communities lose their sense of identity and self-definition when displaced due to the destruction of natural and built environments (Norris 139). This comment is particularly relevant to people who are emigrating to New Zealand as refugees from climate change such as Pasifika or from wars and oppression such as the Coptic community. This loss strengthens the requirement for something greater than just a common space of congregation, something that transcends the physical. The sense of belonging and identity in the complexity of potential cultural heterogenisation is at issue. The role of architecture in dis-placement is thereby brought into question seeking answers to how it should facilitate a space of attachment for resilience, for identity and for belonging.A unity of place and people has long been assumed in the anthropological concept of culture (Gupta & Ferguson: 75). According to Xavier & Rosaldo the historical tendency has been to connect the realm of constructing meaning to the particularities of place (Xavier & Rosaldo 10). Thereby, cultural meanings are intrinsically linked to place. Therefore, place attachment to the reproduced or re-interpreted place is crucially important for dis-placed societies in re-establishing social and cultural content. Architectural spaces are the obvious holders of cultural, social and spiritual content for such enterprises. Hillier suggests that all "architecture is, in essence, the application of speculative and abstract thought to the non-discursive aspects of building, and because it is so, it is also its application to the social and cultural contents of buildings” (Hillier 3).To Re-ImagineAn attempt to reflect the history, stories and the cultural mores of the Coptic community in exile by privileging material and design authenticity, merits attention. An important aspect of the Coptic faith lies within its adherence to symbolism and rituals and strict adherence to the traditional forms and configurations of space may reflect some authenticity of the customary qualities of the space (Said 109). However, the original space is itself in flux, changing with time and environmental conditions; as are the memories of those travelling abroad as they come from different moments in time. Experience has shown that a communities’ will to re-establish social and cultural content through their traditional architecture on new sites has not always resurrected their history and reignited their original spirit. The impact of the new context’s reality on the reproduction or re interpretation of place may not fully enable its entire community’s attachment to it. There are significant implications from the displacement of site that lead to a disassociation from the former architectural language. Consequently there is a cultural imperative for an approach that entails the engagement of community in the re-making of a cultural space before responding to the demands of site. Cultures come into conflict when the new ways of knowing and acting are at odds with the old. Recreating a place without acknowledging these tensions may lead to non-attachment. Facing cultural paradox and searching for authenticity explains in part, the value of intangible heritage and the need to privilege it over its tangible counterpart.Intangible HeritageThe intangible qualities of place and the memory of them are anchors for a dis-placed community to reimagine and re-materialise its lost heritage and to recreate a new place for attachment. This brings about the notion of the authenticity of cultural heritage, it exposes the uncertain value of reconstruction and it exhibits the struggles associated with de-territorilisation in such a process.In dealing with cultural heritage and contemporary conservation practice with today’s wider understanding of the interdisciplinary field of heritage studies, several authors discuss the relevance and applicability of the 1964 Venice Charter on architectural heritage. Glendinning argues that today’s heritage practices exploit the physical remains of the past for useful modern and aesthetic purposes as they are less concerned with the history they once served (Glendinning 3). For example, the act of modernising and restoring a historic museum is counterbalanced by its ancient exhibits thereby highlighting modern progress. Others support this position by arguing that relationships, associations and meanings that contribute to the value of a site should not be dismissed in favour of physical remains (Hill 21). Smith notes that the less tangible approaches struggle to gain leverage within conventional practice, and therefore lack authenticity. This can be evidenced in so many of our reconstructed heritage sites. This leads to the importance of the intangible when dealing with architectural heritage. Image by Vioula Said.In practice, a number of different methods and approaches are employed to safeguard intangible cultural heritage. In order to provide a common platform for considering intangible heritage, UNESCO developed the 2003 ‘Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage’. Rather than simply addressing physical heritage, this convention helped to define the intangible and served to promote its recognition. Intangible cultural heritage is defined as expressions, representations, practices, skills and knowledge that an individual a community or group recognise as their cultural heritage.Safeguarding intangible heritage requires a form of translation, for example, from the oral form into a material form, e.g. archives, inventories, museums and audio or film records. This ‘freezing’ of intangible heritage requires thoughtfulness and care in the choosing of the appropriate methods and materials. At the same time, the ephemeral aspects of intangible heritage make it vulnerable to being absorbed by the typecast cultural models predominant at any particular time. This less tangible characteristic of history and the pivotal role it plays in conveying a dialogue between the past and the present demands alternative methods. At a time when the identity of dis-placed people is in danger of being diminished by dominant host societies, the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage is critically important in re-establishing social and cultural content.Recent news has shown the destruction of many Coptic churches in Egypt, through fire at increasing rates since 2011 or by bombings such as the ones witnessed in April 2017. For this particular problem of the Coptic Community, the authors propose that visual representation of spiritual spaces may aid in recollecting and re-establishing such heritage. The illustrations in this article present the personal journey of an artist of Egyptian Copt descent drawing from her memories of a place and time within the sphere of religious rituals. As Treib suggests, “Our recollections are situational and spatialised memories; they are memories attached to places and events” (Treib 22). The intertwining of real and imagined memory navigates to define the spirit of place of a lost time and community.The act of remembering is a societal ritual and in and of itself is part of the globalised world we live in today. The memories lodged in physical places range from incidents of personal biography to the highly refined and extensively interpreted segments of cultural lore (Treib 63). The act of remembering allows for our sense of identity and reflective cultural distinctiveness as well as shaping our present lives from that of our past. To remember is to celebrate or to commemorate the past (Treib 25).Memory has the aptitude to generate resilient links between self and environment, self and culture, as well as self and collective. “Our access to the past is no longer mediated by the account of a witness or a narrator, or by the eye of a photographer. We will not respond to a re-presentation of the historical event, but to a presentation or performance of it” (van Alphen 11). This statement aligns with Smith’s critical analysis of heritage and identity, not as a set of guidelines but as a performance experienced through the imagination, “experienced within a layering of performative qualities that embody remembrance and commemoration and aim to construct a sense of place and understanding within the present”(van Alphen 11). Heritage is hereby investigated as a re-constructed experience; attempting to identify a palette of memory-informed qualities that can be applied to the re-establishing of the heritage lost. Here memory will be defined as Aristotle’s Anamnesis, to identify the capacity to stimulate a range of physical and sensory experiences in the retrieval of heritage that may otherwise be forgotten (Cubitt 75; Huyssen 80). In architectural terms, Anamnesis, refers to the process of retrieval associated with intangible heritage, as a performance aimed at the recovery of memory, experienced through the imagination (Said 143). Unfortunately, when constructing an experience aimed at the recovery of memory, the conditions of a particular moment do not, once passed, move into a state of retirement from which they can be retrieved at a later date. Likewise, the conditions and occurrences of one moment can never be precisely recaptured, Treib describes memory as an interventionist:it magnifies, diminishes, adjusts, darkens, or illuminates places that are no longer extant, transforming the past anew every time it is called to mind, shorn or undesirable reminiscence embellished by wishful thinking, coloured by present concerns. (Treib 188)To remember them, Cubitt argues, we must reconstruct them; “not in the sense of reassembling something that has been taken to pieces and carefully stored, but in the sense of imaginatively configuring something that can no longer have the character of actuality” (Cubitt 77). Image by Vioula Said.Traditionally, history and past events have been put in writing to preserve their memory within the present. However, as argued by Treib, this mode of representation is inherently linear and static; contributing to a flattening of history. Similarly, Nelson states; “I consider how a visual mode of representation – as opposed to textual or oral – helps to shape memory” (Nelson 37). The unflattening of past events can occur by actively engaging with culture and tradition through the mechanism of reconstruction and representation of the intangible heritage (Said 145). As memory becomes crucial in affirming collective identity, place also becomes crucial in anchoring such experience. Interactive exhibition facilitates this act using imagery, interpretation and physical engagement while architectural place gives distinctiveness to cultural products and practices. Architectural space is always intrinsically bound with cultural practice. Appadurai says that where a groups’ past increasingly becomes part of museums, exhibits and collection, its culture becomes less a realm of reproducible practices and more an arena of choices and cultural reproduction (59). When place is shifted (de-territorilisation in migration) the loss of territorial roots brings “an erosion of the cultural distinctiveness of places, a de-territorilisation of identity” (Gupta & Ferguson 68). According to Gupta & Ferguson, “remembered places have …. often served as symbolic anchors of community for dispersed people” (Gupta & Ferguson 69).To Re-MakeIn the context of de-territorialisation the intangible qualities of the original space offer an avenue for the creation and experience of a new space in the spirit of its source. Simply reproducing a traditional building layout in the new territory or recollecting artefacts does not suffice in recalling the essence of place, nor does descriptive writing no matter how compelling. Issues of authenticity and identity underpin both of these strategies. Accepting the historical tendency to reconnect the realm of constructing meaning to the particularities of place requires an investigation on those ‘particularities of place’. Intangible heritage can bridge the problems of being out of one’s country, overseas, or ‘abroad’. While architecture can be as Hillier suggests, “in essence, the application of speculative and abstract thought to the non-discursive aspects of building” (Hillier 3). Architecture should not be reproduced but rather re-constructed as a holder or facilitator of recollection and collective performance. It is within the performance of intangible heritage in the ‘new’ architecture that a sense of belonging, identity and reconnection with home can be experienced abroad. Its visual representation takes centre stage in the process. The situation of the Egyptian community of Coptic faith in New Zealand is here looked at as an illustration. The intangibility of architectural heritage is created through one of the author’s graphic work here presented. Image by Vioula Said.The concept of drawing as an anchor for memory and drawing as a method to inhabit space is exposed and this presents a situation where drawing has an experiential nature in itself.It has been argued that a drawing is simply an image that compresses an entire experience of temporality. Pallasmaa suggests that “every drawing is an excavation into the past and memory of its creator” (Pallasmaa 91). The drawing is considered as a process of both observation and expression, of receiving and giving. The imagined or the remembered space turns real and becomes part of the experiential reality of the viewer and of the image maker. The drawing as a visual representation of the remembered experience within the embrace of an interior space is drawn from the image maker’s personal experience. It is the expression of their own recollection and not necessarily the precise realityor qualities perceived or remembered by others. This does not suggest that such drawing has a limited value. This article promotes the idea that such visual representation has potentially a shared transformative role. The development of drawings in this realm of intangible heritage exposes the fact that the act of drawing memory may provide an intimate relationship between architecture, past events within the space, the beholder of the memory and eventually the viewer of the drawing. The drawings can be considered a reminder of moments past, and an alternative method to the physical reproduction or preservation of the built form. It is a way to recollect, express and give new value to the understanding of intangible heritage, and constructs meaning.From the development of a personal spatial and intuitive recall to produce visual expressions of a remembered space and time, the image author optimistically seeks others to deeply engage with these images of layered memories. They invite the viewer to re-create their own memory by engaging with the author’s own perception. Simply put, drawings of a personal memory are offered as a convincing representation of intangible heritage and as an authentic expression of the character or essence of place to its audience. This is offered as a method of reconstructing what is re-membered, as a manifestation of symbolic anchor and as a first step towards attachment to place. The relevance of which may be pertinent for people in exile in a foreign land.ReferencesAppadurai, A. “Sovereignty without Territoriality: Notes for a Postnational Geography.” The Geography of Identity. Ed. Patricia Yaeger. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 1997. 40–58. Brown, R.H., and B. Brown. “The Making of Memory: The Politics of Archives, Libraries and Museum in the Construction of National Consciousness.” History of Human Sciences 11.4 (1993): 17–32.Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997.Cubitt, Geoffrey. History and Memory. London: Oxford UP, 2013.Giddens, A. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990.Gupta, A., and J. Ferguson. “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference.” Religion and Social Justice for Immigrants. Ed. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2006.Glendinning, Miles. The Conservation Movement: A History of Architectural Preservation: Antiquity to Modernity. London: Routledge, 2013.Hill, Jennifer. The Double Dimension: Heritage and Innovation. Canberra: The Royal Australian Institute of Architects, 2004.Hillier, Bill, Space Is the Machine. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge UP, 1996.Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts, Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.Lira, Sergio, and Rogerio Amoeda. Constructing Intangible Heritage. Barcelos, Portugal: Green Lines Institute for Sustainable Development, 2010.Manzo, Lynne C., and Douglas Perkins. “Finding Common Ground: The Importance of Place Attachment to Community Participation and Planning.” Journal of Planning Literature 20 (2006): 335–350. Manzo, Lynne C., and Patrick Devine-Wright. Place Attachment: Advances in Theory, Methods and Applications. London: Routledge. 2013.Nelson, Robert S., and Margaret Olin. Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2003.Norris, F.H., S.P. Stevens, B. Pfefferbaum, KF. Wyche, and R.L. Pfefferbaum. “Community Resilience as a Metaphor, Theory, Set of Capacities and Strategy for Disaster Readiness.” American Journal of Community Psychology 41 (2008): 127–150.Perkins, D.D., J. Hughey, and P.W. Speer. “Community Psychology Perspectives on Social Capital Theory and Community Development Practice.” Journal of the Community Development Society 33.1 (2002): 33–52.Pretty, Grace, Heather H. Chipuer, and Paul Bramston. “Sense of Place Amongst Adolescents and Adults in Two Rural Australian Towns: The Discriminating Features of Place Attachment, Sense of Community and Place Dependence in Relation to Place Identity.” Journal of Environmental Psychology 23.3 (2003): 273–87.Said, Vioula. Coptic Ruins Reincarnated. Thesis. Master of Interior Architecture. Victoria University of Wellington, 2014.Smith, Laura Jane. Uses of Heritage. New York: Routledge, 2006.Treib, Marc. Spatial Recall: Memory in Architecture and Landscape. New York: Routledge, 2013.UNESCO. “Text of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Human Heritage.” 2003. 15 Aug. 2017 <http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/en/convention>.Van Alphen, Ernst. Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature and Theory. Redwood City, CA: Stanford UP, 1997.Xavier, Jonathan, and Renato Rosaldo. “Thinking the Global.” The Anthropology of Globalisation. Eds. Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo. 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No man [...] can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which one may be true. (Nathaniel Hawthorne Scarlet Letter – as seen and pondered by Tony Soprano at Bowdoin College, The Sopranos, Season 1, Episode 5: “College”)The fictitious is a particular and varied source of insight into the everyday world. The idea of seriality—with its variations of the serial, series, seriated—is very much connected to our patterns of entertainment. In this essay, I want to begin the process of testing what values and meanings can be drawn from the idea of seriality into comprehending the play of persona in contemporary culture. From a brief overview of the intersection of persona and seriality as well as a review of the deployment of seriality in popular culture, the article focuses on the character/ person-actor relationship to demonstrate how seriality produces persona. The French term for character—personnage—will be used to underline the clear relations between characterisation, person, and persona which have been developed by the recent work by Lenain and Wiame. Personnage, through its variation on the word person helps push the analysis into fully understanding the particular and integrated configuration between a public persona and the fictional role that an actor inhabits (Heinich).There are several qualities related to persona that allow this movement from the fictional world to the everyday world to be profitable. Persona, in terms of origins, in and of itself implies performance and display. Jung, for instance, calls persona a mask where one is “acting a role” (167); while Goffman considers that performance and roles are at the centre of everyday life and everyday forms and patterns of communication. In recent work, I have use persona to describe how online culture pushes most people to construct a public identity that resembles what celebrities have had to construct for their livelihood for at least the last century (“Persona”; “Self”). My work has expanded to an investigation of how online persona relates to individual agency (“Agency”) and professional postures and positioning (Barbour and Marshall).The fictive constructions then are intensified versions of what persona is addressing: the fabrication of a role for particular directions and ends. Characters or personnages are constructed personas for very directed ends. Their limitation to the study of persona as a dimension of public culture is that they are not real; however, when one thinks of the actor who takes on this fictive identity, there is clearly a relationship between the real personality and that of the character. Moreover, as Nayar’s analysis of highly famous characters that are fictitious reveals, these celebrated characters, such as Harry Potter or Wolverine, sometime take on a public presence in and of themselves. To capture this public movement of a fictional character, Nayar blends the terms celebrity with fiction and calls these semi-public/semi-real entities “celefiction”: the characters are famous, highly visible, and move across media, information, and cultural platforms with ease and speed (18-20). Their celebrity status underlines their power to move outside of their primary text into public discourse and through public spaces—an extra-textual movement which fundamentally defines what a celebrity embodies.Seriality has to be seen as fundamental to a personnage’s power of and extension into the public world. For instance with Harry Potter again, at least some of his recognition is dependent on the linking or seriating the related books and movies. Seriality helps organise our sense of affective connection to our popular culture. The familiarity of some element of repetition is both comforting for audiences and provides at least a sense of guarantee or warranty that they will enjoy the future text as much as they enjoyed the past related text. Seriality, though, also produces a myriad of other effects and affects which provides a useful background to understand its utility in both the understanding of character and its value in investigating contemporary public persona. Etymologically, the words “series” and seriality are from the Latin and refer to “succession” in classical usage and are identified with ancestry and the patterns of identification and linking descendants (Oxford English Dictionary). The original use of the seriality highlights its value in understanding the formation of the constitution of person and persona and how the past and ancestry connect in series to the current or contemporary self. Its current usage, however, has broadened metaphorically outwards to identify anything that is in sequence or linked or joined: it can be a series of lectures and arguments or a related mark of cars manufactured in a manner that are stylistically linked. It has since been deployed to capture the production process of various cultural forms and one of the key origins of this usage came from the 19th century novel. There are many examples where the 19th century novel was sold and presented in serial form that are too numerous to even summarise here. It is useful to use Dickens’ serial production as a defining example of how seriality moved into popular culture and the entertainment industry more broadly. Part of the reason for the sheer length of many of Charles Dickens’ works related to their original distribution as serials. In fact, all his novels were first distributed in chapters in monthly form in magazines or newspapers. A number of related consequences from Dickens’ serialisation are relevant to understanding seriality in entertainment culture more widely (Hayward). First, his novel serialisation established a continuous connection to his readers over years. Thus Dickens’ name itself became synonymous and connected to an international reading public. Second, his use of seriality established a production form that was seen to be more affordable to its audience: seriality has to be understood as a form that is closely connected to economies and markets as cultural commodities kneaded their way into the structure of everyday life. And third, seriality established through repetition not only the author’s name but also the name of the key characters that populated the cultural form. Although not wholly attributable to the serial nature of the delivery, the characters such as Oliver Twist, Ebenezer Scrooge or David Copperfield along with a host of other major and minor players in his many books become integrated into everyday discourse because of their ever-presence and delayed delivery over stories over time (see Allen 78-79). In the same way that newspapers became part of the vernacular of contemporary culture, fictional characters from novels lived for years at a time in the consciousness of this large reading public. The characters or personnages themselves became personalities that through usage became a way of describing other behaviours. One can think of Uriah Heep and his sheer obsequiousness in David Copperfield as a character-type that became part of popular culture thinking and expressing a clear negative sentiment about a personality trait. In the twentieth century, serials became associated much more with book series. One of the more successful serial genres was the murder mystery. It developed what could be described as recognisable personnages that were both fictional and real. Thus, the real Agatha Christie with her consistent and prodigious production of short who-dunnit novels was linked to her Belgian fictional detective Hercule Poirot. Variations of these serial constructions occurred in children’s fiction, the emerging science fiction genre, and westerns with authors and characters rising to related prominence.In a similar vein, early to mid-twentieth century film produced the film serial. In its production and exhibition, the film serial was a déclassé genre in its overt emphasis on the economic quality of seriality. Thus, the film serial was generally a filler genre that was interspersed before and after a feature film in screenings (Dixon). As well as producing a familiarity with characters such as Flash Gordon, it was also instrumental in producing actors with a public profile that grew from this repetition. Flash Gordon was not just a character; he was also the actor Buster Crabbe and, over time, the association became indissoluble for audiences and actor alike. Feature film serials also developed in the first half-century of American cinema in particular with child actors like Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland often reprising variations of their previous roles. Seriality more or less became the standard form of delivery of broadcast media for most of the last 70 years and this was driven by the economies of production it developed. Whether the production was news, comedy, or drama, most radio and television forms were and are variation of serials. As well as being the zenith of seriality, television serials have been the most studied form of seriality of all cultural forms and are thus the greatest source of research into what serials actually produced. The classic serial that began on radio and migrated to television was the soap opera. Although most of the long-running soap operas have now disappeared, many have endured for more than 30 years with the American series The Guiding Light lasting 72 years and the British soap Coronation Street now in its 64th year. Australian nighttime soap operas have managed a similar longevity: Neighbours is in its 30th year, while Home and Away is in its 27th year. Much of the analyses of soap operas and serials deals with the narrative and the potential long narrative arcs related to characters and storylines. In contrast to most evening television serials historically, soap operas maintain the continuity from one episode to the next in an unbroken continuity narrative. Evening television serials, such as situation comedies, while maintaining long arcs over their run are episodic in nature: the structure of the story is generally concluded in the given episode with at least partial closure in a manner that is never engaged with in the never-ending soap opera serials.Although there are other cultural forms that deploy seriality in their structures—one can think of comic books and manga as two obvious other connected and highly visible serial sources—online and video games represent the other key media platform of serials in contemporary culture. Once again, a “horizon of expectation” (Jauss and De Man 23) motivates the iteration of new versions of games by the industry. New versions of games are designed to build on gamer loyalties while augmenting the quality and possibilities of the particular game. Game culture and gamers have a different structural relationship to serials which at least Denson and Jahn-Sudmann describe as digital seriality: a new version of a game is also imagined to be technologically more sophisticated in its production values and this transformation of the similitude of game structure with innovation drives the economy of what are often described as “franchises.” New versions of Minecraft as online upgrades or Call of Duty launches draw the literal reinvestment of the gamer. New consoles provide a further push to serialisation of games as they accentuate some transformed quality in gameplay, interaction, or quality of animated graphics. Sports franchises are perhaps the most serialised form of game: to replicate new professional seasons in each major sport, the sports game transforms with a new coterie of players each year.From these various venues, one can see the centrality of seriality in cultural forms. There is no question that one of the dimensions of seriality that transcends these cultural forms is its coordination and intersection with the development of the industrialisation of culture and this understanding of the economic motivation behind series has been explored from some of the earliest analyses of seriality (see Hagedorn; Browne). Also, seriality has been mined extensively in terms of its production of the pleasure of repetition and transformation. The exploration of the popular, whether in studies of readers of romance fiction (Radway), or fans of science fiction television (Tulloch and Jenkins; Jenkins), serials have provided the resource for the exploration of the power of the audience to connect, engage and reconstruct texts.The analysis of the serialisation of character—the production of a public personnage—and its relation to persona surprisingly has been understudied. While certain writers have remarked on the longevity of a certain character, such as Vicky Lord’s 40 year character on the soap opera One Life to Live, and the interesting capacity to maintain both complicated and hidden storylines (de Kosnik), and fan audience studies have looked at the parasocial-familiar relationship that fan and character construct, less has been developed about the relationship of the serial character, the actor and a form of twinned public identity. Seriality does produce a patterning of personnage, a structure of familiarity for the audience, but also a structure of performance for the actor. For instance, in a longitudinal analysis of the character of Fu Manchu, Mayer is able to discern how a patterning of iconic form shapes, replicates, and reiterates the look of Fu Manchu across decades of films (Mayer). Similarly, there has been a certain work on the “taxonomy of character” where the serial character of a television program is analysed in terms of 6 parts: physical traits/appearance; speech patterns, psychological traits/habitual behaviours; interaction with other characters; environment; biography (Pearson quoted in Lotz).From seriality what emerges is a particular kind of “type-casting” where the actor becomes wedded to the specific iteration of the taxonomy of performance. As with other elements related to seriality, serial character performance is also closely aligned to the economic. Previously I have described this economic patterning of performance the “John Wayne Syndrome.” Wayne’s career developed into a form of serial performance where the individual born as Marion Morrison becomes structured into a cultural and economic category that determines the next film role. The economic weight of type also constructs the limits and range of the actor. Type or typage as a form of casting has always been an element of film and theatrical performance; but it is the seriality of performance—the actual construction of a personnage that flows between the fictional and real person—that allows an actor to claim a persona that can be exchanged within the industry. Even 15 years after his death, Wayne remained one of the most popular performers in the United States, his status unrivalled in its close definition of American value that became wedded with a conservative masculinity and politics (Wills).Type and typecasting have an interesting relationship to seriality. From Eisenstein’s original use of the term typage, where the character is chosen to fit into the meaning of the film and the image was placed into its sequence to make that meaning, it generally describes the circumscribing of the actor into their look. As Wojcik’s analysis reveals, typecasting in various periods of theatre and film acting has been seen as something to be fought for by actors (in the 1850s) and actively resisted in Hollywood in 1950 by the Screen Actors Guild in support of more range of roles for each actor. It is also seen as something that leads to cultural stereotypes that can reinforce the racial profiling that has haunted diverse cultures and the dangers of law enforcement for centuries (Wojcik 169-71). Early writers in the study of film acting, emphasised that its difference from theatre was that in film the actor and character converged in terms of connected reality and a physicality: the film actor was less a mask and more a sense of “being”(Kracauer). Cavell’s work suggested film over stage performance allowed an individuality over type to emerge (34). Thompson’s semiotic “commutation” test was another way of assessing the power of the individual “star” actor to be seen as elemental to the construction and meaning of the film role Television produced with regularity character-actors where performance and identity became indissoluble partly because of the sheer repetition and the massive visibility of these seriated performances.One of the most typecast individuals in television history was Leonard Nimoy as Spock in Star Trek: although the original Star Trek series ran for only three seasons, the physical caricature of Spock in the series as a half-Vulcan and half-human made it difficult for the actor Nimoy to exit the role (Laws). Indeed, his famous autobiography riffed on this mis-identity with the forceful but still economically powerful title I am Not Spock in 1975. When Nimoy perceived that his fans thought that he was unhappy in his role as Spock, he published a further tome—I Am Spock—that righted his relationship to his fictional identity and its continued source of roles for the previous 30 years. Although it is usually perceived as quite different in its constitution of a public identity, a very similar structure of persona developed around the American CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite. With his status as anchor confirmed in its power and centrality to American culture in his desk reportage of the assassination and death of President Kennedy in November 1963, Cronkite went on to inhabit a persona as the most trusted man in the United States by the sheer gravitas of hosting the Evening News stripped across every weeknight at 6:30pm for the next 19 years. In contrast to Nimoy, Cronkite became Cronkite the television news anchor, where persona, actor, and professional identity merged—at least in terms of almost all forms of the man’s visibility.From this vantage point of understanding the seriality of character/personnage and how it informs the idea of the actor, I want to provide a longer conclusion about how seriality informs the concept of persona in the contemporary moment. First of all, what this study reveals is the way in which the production of identity is overlaid onto any conception of identity itself. If we can understand persona not in any negative formulation, but rather as a form of productive performance of a public self, then it becomes very useful to see that these very visible public blendings of performance and the actor-self can make sense more generally as to how the public self is produced and constituted. My final and concluding examples will try and elucidate this insight further.In 2013, Netflix launched into the production of original drama with its release of House of Cards. The series itself was remarkable for a number of reasons. First among them, it was positioned as a quality series and clearly connected to the lineage of recent American subscription television programs such as The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Dexter, Madmen, The Wire, Deadwood, and True Blood among a few others. House of Cards was an Americanised version of a celebrated British mini-series. In the American version, an ambitious party whip, Frank Underwood, manoeuvres with ruthlessness and the calculating support of his wife closer to the presidency and the heart and soul of American power. How the series expressed quality was at least partially in its choice of actors. The role of Frank Underwood was played by the respected film actor Kevin Spacey. His wife, Clare, was played by the equally high profile Robin Warren. Quality was also expressed through the connection of the audience of viewers to an anti-hero: a personnage that was not filled with virtue but moved with Machiavellian acuity towards his objective of ultimate power. This idea of quality emerged in many ways from the successful construction of the character of Tony Soprano by James Gandolfini in the acclaimed HBO television series The Sopranos that reconstructed the very conception of the family in organised crime. Tony Soprano was enacted as complex and conflicted with a sense of right and justice, but embedded in the personnage were psychological tropes and scars, and an understanding of the need for violence to maintain influence power and a perverse but natural sense of order (Martin).The new television serial character now embodied a larger code and coterie of acting: from The Sopranos, there is the underlying sense and sensibility of method acting (see Vineberg; Stanislavski). Gandolfini inhabited the role of Tony Soprano and used the inner and hidden drives and motivations to become the source for the display of the character. Likewise, Spacey inhabits Frank Underwood. In that new habitus of television character, the actor becomes subsumed by the role. Gandolfini becomes both over-determined by the role and his own identity as an actor becomes melded to the role. Kevin Spacey, despite his longer and highly visible history as a film actor is overwhelmed by the televisual role of Frank Underwood. Its serial power, where audiences connect for hours and hours, where the actor commits to weeks and weeks of shoots, and years and years of being the character—a serious character with emotional depth, with psychological motivation that rivals the most visceral of film roles—transforms the actor into a blended public person and the related personnage.This blend of fictional and public life is complex as much for the producing actor as it is for the audience that makes the habitus real. What Kevin Spacey/Frank Underwood inhabit is a blended persona, whose power is dependent on the constructed identity that is at source the actor’s production as much as any institutional form or any writer or director connected to making House of Cards “real.” There is no question that this serial public identity will be difficult for Kevin Spacey to disentangle when the series ends; in many ways it will be an elemental part of his continuing public identity. This is the economic power and risk of seriality.One can see similar blendings in the persona in popular music and its own form of contemporary seriality in performance. For example, Eminem is a stage name for a person sometimes called Marshall Mathers; but Eminem takes this a step further and produces beyond a character in its integration of the personal—a real personnage, Slim Shady, to inhabit his music and its stories. To further complexify this construction, Eminem relies on the production of his stories with elements that appear to be from his everyday life (Dawkins). His characterisations because of the emotional depth he inhabits through his rapped stories betray a connection to his own psychological state. Following in the history of popular music performance where the singer-songwriter’s work is seen by all to present a version of the public self that is closer emotionally to the private self, we once again see how the seriality of performance begins to produce a blended public persona. Rap music has inherited this seriality of produced identity from twentieth century icons of the singer/songwriter and its display of the public/private self—in reverse order from grunge to punk, from folk to blues.Finally, it is worthwhile to think of online culture in similar ways in the production of public personas. Seriality is elemental to online culture. Social media encourage the production of public identities through forms of repetition of that identity. In order to establish a public profile, social media users establish an identity with some consistency over time. The everydayness in the production of the public self online thus resembles the production and performance of seriality in fiction. Professional social media sites such as LinkedIn encourage the consistency of public identity and this is very important in understanding the new versions of the public self that are deployed in contemporary culture. However, much like the new psychological depth that is part of the meaning of serial characters such as Frank Underwood in House of Cards, Slim Shady in Eminem, or Tony Soprano in The Sopranos, social media seriality also encourages greater revelations of the private self via Instagram and Facebook walls and images. We are collectively reconstituted as personas online, seriated by the continuing presence of our online sites and regularly drawn to reveal more and greater depths of our character. In other words, the online persona resembles the new depth of the quality television serial personnage with elaborate arcs and great complexity. Seriality in our public identity is also uncovered in the production of our game avatars where, in order to develop trust and connection to friends in online settings, we maintain our identity and our patterns of gameplay. At the core of this online identity is a desire for visibility, and we are drawn to be “picked up” and shared in some repeatable form across what we each perceive as a meaningful dimension of culture. Through the circulation of viral images, texts, and videos we engage in a circulation and repetition of meaning that feeds back into the constancy and value of an online identity. Through memes we replicate and seriate content that at some level seriates personas in terms of humour, connection and value.Seriality is central to understanding the formation of our masks of public identity and is at least one valuable analytical way to understand the development of the contemporary persona. This essay represents the first foray in thinking through the relationship between seriality and persona.ReferencesBarbour, Kim, and P. David Marshall. “The Academic Online Constructing Persona.” First Monday 17.9 (2012).Browne, Nick. “The Political Economy of the (Super)Text.” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 9.3 (1984): 174-82. Cavell, Stanley. “Reflections on the Ontology of Film.” Movie Acting: The Film Reader. Ed. Wojcik and Pamela Robertson. 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