PARAFICTION AS MATTER and METHOD REBECCA SMITH a Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements of Liverpool John Mo
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PARAFICTION AS MATTER AND METHOD VOLUME I REBECCA SMITH A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Liverpool John Moores University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy October 2020 BIOGRAPHY Rebecca Smith is an academic and artist whose research interests include art history, contemporary art, digital cultures, performance art, politics, technological infrastructures and truth discourses. She has extensively investigated the concept of parafiction and fictioning, examining how this can be applied as the method of production and the subject matter of academic research and artistic practice. Rebecca’s art practice is media diverse, combining drawing, textiles, found objects and text to produce 2D and 3D narrative outcomes. This practice applies her academic research to inform her outcomes in producing alternative conclusions and uncovering human and nonhuman perspectives for pasts, presents and futures. Rebecca is the recipient of a Full PhD Scholarship from Liverpool John Moores University (2016). She also won the PhD Researcher Short Film Competition (2017) and was awarded the Annual Faculty Outstanding Thesis Dissertation Prize (2015) for her Masters thesis and the Annual History of Art Outstanding Dissertation Prize (2014) for her undergraduate dissertation. Rebecca has presented her research at international conferences including: RE:SOUND 2019, Aalborg, Demark RESAW 2019, Amsterdam, the Netherlands and the Association for Art History Annual Conference 2018, London, UK. Rebecca has published her research in a number of formats including: the book chapter The Legacy of the Berlin Dada Media Hoaxes in Contemporary Parafictive Acts (2020) in Sara, Hegenbart and Mara-Johanna Kölmel’s book Dada Data: Contemporary Art Practice in the Era of Post-Truth Politics (2020) published by Bloomsbury Academic the journal article Parafictions: UBERMORGEN.COM as a case study of parafictive practice conducted between 1998 and 2018 (2019) in JAWS, published by Intellect and conference proceedings for the paper Parafictions and Contemporary Media Art 2008-2018 (2019) at RE:SOUND 2019, published by Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC). Each of these publications consider the concept of parafiction in relation to modern and contemporary art within the current technological and political context. Alongside her practice and research, Rebecca has worked as a lecturer since 2015, teaching in several subject areas at undergraduate and postgraduate level including: Fine Art, History of Art & Museum Studies, Contemporary Art History & Theory, Research in Art and Design and Foundation in Art and Design. Rebecca has also worked with a group of fellow postgraduate researchers under the name of CoLab. In 2018, CoLab was funded by the Faculty of Arts, Professional and Social Studies at Liverpool John Moores University to produce a collaborative and interdisciplinary two-week programme of events, which examined and illustrated what a PhD in the art and humanities constitutes. In 2020 Rebecca commenced new projects. She is developing a podcast about art institutions in North West England in collaboration with artist and researcher Bee Hughes, funded by the Association for Art History. She has embarked on a long-term interdisciplinary project with documentary film maker Ben Evans James to curate a two-part exhibition, in Liverpool and London, examining the links between parafiction in contemporary art and documentary film. She is also working on an exhibition, One Thing to Another with artist Jane Kilford that combines the production of an archive with the application of fictioning methods, this project will produce collaborative practice and research. Rebecca intends to continue cultivating her artistic practice parallel to her academic research building upon the concept of theory-led practice with the aim of commencing a post-doctoral position with Prof. Colin Fallows in late 2020. ABSTRACT The thesis examines the different ways in which artists have engaged with parafiction in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Parafiction – a fiction experienced as fact - has become an important mode of practice within contemporary art, with this shift concurrent to the exponential growth of digital technology. The term contemporary art is applied here in an expanded sense to acknowledge the effect of digital processes and matter on art and to include practices that use technology as form or subject or a combination of the two. Parafiction appears in various materialities, both digital and physical, and could be described as having neomateriality. Parafiction as Matter and Method inevitably locates the research within the context of the digital. The research investigates how the usage of parafiction has changed since 1989 with the rapid advancement of technology and widespread access to the internet. Changes in the social and political landscape have also affected the function of parafiction in contemporary society. These conditions are not necessarily time bound or linear. Drawing upon and extending Carrie Lambert-Beatty’s concept of parafictions (2009), the research is rooted in art history and contemporary art for its theoretical frameworks. The research engages deeply with art history and contemporary art in an expanded sense to contextualise and analyse parafictions, whilst utilising an interdisciplinary approach. To augment this deep context the research has combined the following fields: artistic practice, digital cultures, media studies, performance art, philosophy and politics. By synthesising this broad range of fields the research is original and complex in its approach aiming to consider the topic at a planetary scale within the bounds of the possible. As an overarching method, this research applies fiction as a method to produce new knowledge. The research uses primary and secondary methods including the production of a body of artwork and diagrammatic reasoning to augment the theoretical proposal. The art practice is employed as a method to synthesise the theory with practice and to apply the knowledge learnt outside of its text-based constraints. The practice appears as interludes interspersed throughout the thesis, that produce a duo-linear narrative with the aim of the thesis becoming an artwork in its own right. Primary data collection included interviews with relevant artists, attending and speaking at international conferences and research visits to exhibitions. This thesis has evolved through the attendance at international conferences as speaker and audience member, peer-reviewed publication, interaction with academic peers and research visits to exhibitions. This thesis evaluates how parafiction renegotiates physical and digital spatio-temporal parameters to offer alternatives for the present, pasts and futures, for both human and nonhuman users of those spaces. As parafiction becomes matter it has the ability to converge the digital and the physical to extend the lives of artworks beyond their initial existence. It is argued that fictioning methods have the most impact within contemporary art in its most expanded sense. The research advocates for parafiction as a vital method, found within artistic practice in the twentieth and twenty-first century, which produces new information and perspectives. This thesis uniquely concludes that parafiction is matter, as material that intersects and interacts with the modularity of digital technologies. Significantly, the research has found that parafiction acts as an additional module that connects physical and digital spatio-temporal with alternative potential for pasts, presents, and futures. KEYWORDS Art History Digital Matter Artistic Practice Fiction as Method Parafiction Contemporary Art Internet ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Thomas Clarke for his support throughout this project, for enduring the anxiety and sleepless nights, for learning to stay away from my awful moods, for offering perspective and for continuing to be a silly sausage. Jane (Kilford) Smith, thank you for being my biggest supporter and inspiration, you have helped me in ways you cannot imagine and have made this possible. Mel Smith, thank you for the hours spent proof reading with patience and rigour, one day I hope there will be nothing for you to correct. Professor Colin Fallows, thank you for your friendship, keen eye and belief over the course of the research and our time working together. Bee Hughes, thank you for keeping me going through the difficult times. Thanks for all the tea, coffee, Bing House’s, jokes, Brian Pothecary universe, general silliness but most importantly thank you for being my friend, helping me to become better, both as a person and academic and inspiring greatness. Jessica Butler, thank you for the growth of our friendship over the course of our PhDs, having you in my corner means a lot. Your fierce support and perspective really helped when things were tough. I was very proud seeing you pass your Viva, with no amendments or corrections, thank you for proving that the end is possible. Jen Lynch, thank you for your unwaivering kindness, email excellence and my favourite biscuits. Thank you to Davide Landi, Sevie Tsampalla, Jon Hoskins and all my fellow LJMU PGRs past and present, working in the office with you all has kept me sane and provided me with a sense of communitity that I wasn’t expecting to gain when I started my PhD. Thank you to Dr. Emma Roberts and the History of Art and Museum Studies team for supporting my education from undergraduate level to lecturer