Archives

Interactive Documentary and Place: Portrait of a Bend of Islands

Ed Armstrong

Online interactive documentary is an emerging area of new media arts practice that I have used to explore the dense theoretical propositions related to the humanist geographical notion of placemaking.

In this exegesis, with reference to some of the key claims humanist geographers have made in terms of place as hybrid and densely networked, I shall discuss the advantages and disadvantages I have come across in making Placing the Bend to see how effective interactive documentary is as a medium.

interactive documentary and place (pdf 3.1MB)

Movement, Rest, Encounter: Experiencing Place through Instagram

Nancy Lim

The thesis seeks to explore how the mobile photo-sharing application, Instagram, participates in and augments
our experiences and perception of place. Adopting a phenomenological approach to place, David Seamon’s (1979) theory of ‘movement’, ‘rest’, and ‘encounter’ provides the theoretical framework for which I centre this thesis around. Seamon stipulated that movement, rest, and encounter were the three fundamental pillars of place. I speci cally seek to explore how Instagram participates in these aforementioned themes. In movement, I discuss the body’s use of mobile technologies and Instagram in everyday life through the notions of ‘time-space routines’ and ‘place ballets’. In rest, I examine how Instagram can instigate a sense of ‘at-homeness’, familiarity, rootedness, and a sense of belonging in place. In encounter, I explore the various ways we encounter things in place, whether in the physical world or in the virtual place on Instagram, and how that influences how we experience or perceive them. Instagram participates in and augments our experiences and sense of place in various ways – experiences as they occur in the physical place world, the virtual place on Instagram, and our overall sense of being in emplaced, or being co-present across places as enabled by mobile media technologies.

Movement, Rest, Encounter (PDF .5MB)

Making Space: Writing into an Australian Poetics of Place

Melody Newell

This creative project together with its exegesis proposes that poetry is a valuable technology in translating Australian place and space. I argue for a poetics that incorporates multiple registers, including lyric, technical and symbolic language, and that operates as a space in its own right rather than as mimetic representation. I suggest that when poetry embraces its potential as an unstable space, it has the capacity to contain a complex of historical, social, political and cultural meanings; a network of systems and environments that are inextricably bound to place.

This work maintains a local focus; however, it does not strive to achieve, or believe it is possible to achieve, a purely “homegrown” Australian voice. Instead it is hyperaware of international thinking, technologies and influences and how these voices are reconstructed and departed from, to create something new. Specifically, this critical exegesis traces the development of an Australian ecopoetics as connected to and departing from Romanticism. It discusses relevant examples of innovative local poetics, and draws conclusions about what these offer to a reader’s and a writer’s encounters with poetry in Australia.

This critical position has informed and been informed by, my creative process as a poet. Following initial engagement with criticism that called for a layered perception of place, I spent two months travelling through Australia by car. The poems exist in concert with the various inland, regional, urban and littoral places I visited, however they do not seek to represent them. The poems were crafted alongside my critical research while I travelled, in Melbourne and on writer’s residencies;
so that while they converse with particular places, they are not de ned by them. Instead these poems hope to build new spaces that are layered, fragmentary, and embrace multiple relationships with and understandings of Australian place and space.

PDF (2MB)