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SUPERTHERE: a Cartography of Queer(Ing) Failure and Ghostly Textures from a Hauntology of Long-Distance Romances of Collaboration

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SUPERTHERE: a Cartography of Queer(Ing) Failure and Ghostly Textures from a Hauntology of Long-Distance Romances of Collaboration SUPERTHERE: A cartography of queer(ing) failure and ghostly textures from a hauntology of long-distance romances of collaboration Melanie Jame Walsh Thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy College of the Arts Victoria University 2018 Abstract // This exegesis serves as an extended explanatory notation for the SUPERTHERE video collage. The collage is the final creative outcome of the SUPERTHERE practice-based research. The materials of the video collage were generated across a 6-month period of remote collaboration via digital communications technologies between a group 5 freelance artists all of whom work principally with choreography, video art, and performance. These collaborations were always undertaken remotely - across varying geographic distances - and were understood and framed as long-distance romances of collaboration. The structure of these long-distance romances involved attempts at monthly exchanges between the artists of task based provocations for the creation and exchange of 3-minute Skype video messages. The thematic of the tasks and video messages was always the long-distance romances of collaboration themselves. The romances of SUPERTHERE were initiated as a response to Claire Bishop's 2012 polemic for artistic work and research to deal explicitly with the experience of 'thinking, seeing, and filtering affect through the digital'. They were also a continuation of works within my own practice which have dealt with questions of long-distance relationships and remote artistic collaboration using everyday digital technologies of communication as their point of convergence. The SUPERTHERE research took up on Bishop's provocation by applying Mark Fisher's hauntological readings of cultural events - specifically music and films - to an analysis of the SUPERTHERE long-distance romances of collaboration. By undertaking a hauntology of SUPERTHERE via the production of the final video collage performance of the materials generated within the project, the research revealed a cartography of queer(ing) failure (after Halberstam: 2011) and ghostly textures. Through the charting of this cartography, the research determined that to become in and through the digital in acts of remote collaboration is a hauntological process. This occurs via a post-digital understanding of presence as in-motion and processual. This finding, along with the expansion of Mark Fisher's notion of hauntology into analyses in the practice-based Performance Studies context, is the principle contribution to knowledge of the SUPERTHERE research. The research employed its video collage method of analysis following the argumentation of Paul Garoian (2008) that collage can operate as a hauntological, queering strategy. The choice of a video work as the final analytical outcome of the research advances the current turn towards the medium as a valid, generative, and appropriate form of expression of scholarship (Bates: 2015). Emphasising the embodied, the performed, the sensuous, the multimodal, and the affective. SUPERTHERE deals specifically with remote digital making practices. It offers a long form practical example of this type of work by practicing contemporary artists. This unique outcome contributes to the discourse around digitally based artistic collaborative practices and their relationship to the contemporary conditions of precarity in the arts. Declaration of Authenticity // I, Melanie Jame Walsh, declare that the PhD exegesis entitled SUPERTHERE: A cartography of ghostly textures and queer(ing) failure from a hauntology of long-distance romances of artistic collaboration is no more than 100,000 words in length including quotes and exclusive of tables, figures, appendices, bibliography, references and footnotes. This exegesis contains no material that has been submitted previously, in whole or in part, for the award of any other academic degree or diploma. Except where otherwise indicated, this exegesis is my own work. Melanie Jame Walsh Monday, February 18th, 2019 Acknowledgements // I would first and foremost like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Natasha Dwyer, for her patience, her flexibility, and her support, her grounding influence, and her belief in my work as both and artist and a scholar. I am indebted, of course, to the Romances of this research project - the open minded, tenacious artists who went on this journey of experimental collaborative practice with me so generously and with such great humour, craft, and resolve. I extend gratitude to these wonderful peers for the chances that they took on our romances: Martin Hansen, Louise Trueheart, Jayson Patterson, and Allie Hankins. I also thank Sharon Smith and Elly Clarke for talking and thinking and sensing through with me time and time again. My deep respect and thanks goes to Colyne Morange my dear friend and collaborator on the first long distance romance of collaboration, A Remote Year. The final draft of this paper would not have been possible without the gracious and generous hospitality of Luna Aquatica and Vicki Britten providing me with a home away from home. Lastly, I dedicate this work to Thomas, and to romance. Table of Contents /// I // Points of Departure 1. Introduction /// Questions, definitions, outcomes, ethics, style ….. 2 // Research questions ….. 7 /// Key concepts ….. 10 // Theoretical Contexts ….. 10 / Hauntology ….. 10 / Presence/Absence ….. 17 / Queer(ing) Failure ….. 21 / The Creative Precariat ….. 36 // Formal Contexts: ghostly textures ….. 38 / The Digital ….. 39 / The Poor Image ….. 41 / Glitch ….. 43 / The Provisional ….. 44 / Collaboration ….. 44 // On Ethics ….. 49 // On style ….. 53 // A note on the online presentation of the video collage ….. 54 2. Practical Contexts /// Artistic precedents in my own practice and in the work of others ..... 57 / Far Away...So Close ..... 57 / A Remote Year ..... 59 / The generativity of limitation ..... 61 / Task based practice ..... 63 II // Points of Convergence 3. “The Thumbs Up Is Unreliable” /// A conversation with Elly Clarke ..... 66 III // Points of Possibility 4. By Design /// SUPERTHERE: expanded concept & research design ..... 85 // Romance Phase // Tasks I: design and rationale ..... 85 / Tasks & Limitations ..... 93 / Last Dances & Break Up Talks .....109 // Reflection Phase // Collage I: choosing a narrative form ..... 110 / Video editing as research analysis ..... 111 / Content collection, tagging, and clip editing .....114 / Collage narrative as a queer, hauntological practice .....119 5. Practical Outcomes /// Conditional failures, Presenting Ghosts ..... 123 // Romance Phase // Tasks .....124 / Markers of queer(ing) failure .....124 / Absences .....126 / Time .....128 / Communication .....129 / Technology ..... 133 / Desire .....136 // Reflection Phase // Video Collage II .....140 / Markers of ghostly textures ..... 140 / On collaging .....141 / The poor image .....145 / Glitch .....146 / The provisional .....148 / Collaboration .....149 6. Findings .....150 References ….. 162 Appendix A ….. 171 /// Break Up Talks i. Romance A: break up talk transcript ii. Romance B: break up talk transcript iii. Romance C: break up talk transcript iv. Romance D: break up talk transcript Appendix B………………………………………………………………………………200 /// Ethics Clearance Form “An idea, like a ghost, (according to the common notion of ghosts) must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.” (attributed to Charles Dickens, Allibone: 1876: 335) “I'll write about becoming other: vibration, selection, recombination, recomposition. Possibility is content, potency is energy, and power is form. I call possibility a content inscribed in the present constitution of the world (that is, the immanence of possibilities). Possibility is not one, it is always plural: the possibilities inscribed in the present composition of the world are not infinite, but many. The field of possibility is not infinite because the possible is limited by the inscribed impossibilities of the present. Nevertheless, it is plural, a field of bifurcations. When facing an alternative between different possibilities, the organism enters into vibration, then proceeds making a choice that corresponds to its potency. I call potency the subjective energy that deploys the possibilities and actualizes them. Potency is the energy that transforms the possibilities into actualities. I call power the selections (and the exclusions) that are implied in the structure of the present as a prescription: power is the selection and enforcement of one possibility among many, and simultaneously it is the exclusion (and invisibilization) of many other possibilities. This selection can be described as gestalt (structuring form), and it acts as a paradigm. It may also be seen as a format, a model that we can implement only by complying with the code.” (Berardi: 2017: 12-13) “In theatre, as in love, the subject is disappearance.” (Blau: 1982: 94) London Tel Aviv New York Moscow Warsaw Melbourne Berlin Glasgow 1 I // Points of Departure 2 1. Introduction to SUPERTHERE /// questions, definitions, outcomes, ethics, style SUPERTHERE is the title of an artistic research project. It is also a name for a particular imagined utopian state of relating. An ideal which, perhaps, like many envisioned utopias, is a deeply romantic one. The romantic is both futuristic and sentimental. It hopes forwards and it grasps backwards. It is a particular mode of slippery presence - radial, spectral, always dissolving at the edges. As a title... SUPERTHERE refers
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