The Aesthetics of Indeterminacy: Avenging the Imaginary of Impact
8 December 2021 at 10:00:00 pm
Convert to local time with www.timeanddate.com
Session Convenors
Dr Gretchen Coombs, RMIT University
Dr Nancy Mauro-Flude, RMIT University
Session Moderators
Dr Gretchen Coombs, RMIT University
Dr Nancy Mauro-Flude, RMIT University
Session Speakers
Dr Francesca da Rimini, University of Technology Sydney
Grace Slonim, Monash University, Art Design and Architecture (School of Fine Art)
Belinda Newick, Melbourne Polytechnic
Rarely encouraged to imagine an artistic practice without impact, art as a practice is at an impasse, in dire need of a new habitat (Lind 2021). Yet, art and culture are everywhere as never before. This condition should not be interpreted along the lines of reasoning that artists ‘value add’ to the economy, attracting holidaymakers, determining cultural policy, defining national identity and so on. Rather than seeking to attain equivalence with existing institutional procedures, we wish to make a case for an artistic slant entirely distinct from that increasingly and urgently voiced in the artistic field and the wider public sphere. How can calls for impact be destabilised – can we just ignore it – despite the fact the infrastructures to support creative practices, subcultures and experimental spaces are laid to waste?
Our roundtable invites our panel audience to take part in a workshop on indeterminacy and avenge the imaginary of impact through aesthetic exchanges around impact and value. Our topic lends itself to a conversation about ideas, hopes, and dreams, yet still animated with subversion. Please join us in: performing a hex, playing a game of chance, contemplating value propositions that shape our field.
Our first speaker, Belinda Newick, asks you bring/wear an object that conveys a memory of feeling welcome or unwelcome at a moment of arrival. We will give instructions at the beginning of the session.
THIS SESSION IS A ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION
ROUNDTABLE PARTICIPANTS WILL PRESENT ON
Island Welcome: exploring jewellery as a gesture of welcome in response to Australian immigration policy (Belinda Newick)
Choose your own arts funding adventure: a collective examination of how funding interests could influence artistic agency (Grace Slonim)
A hexecutable for insubordinate art (Dr Francesca da Rimini)
Biographies
Dr Gretchen Coombs, RMIT University
Gretchen Coombs is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Design & Creative Practice Enabling Capability Platform at RMIT. She has a PhD in anthropology and a MA in visual criticism. In addition to academic journals, her art writing has appeared in Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, and Eyeline. Most recent writing navigates a spectrum of intimate and academic, personal and public encounters with artists: The Lure of the Social: encounters with contemporary artists (Intellect 2021).
Dr Nancy Mauro-Flude, RMIT University
Nancy Mauro-Flude is based in nipiluna, country of the Muwinina people, Australia. Her expertise lies in the confluence of performance art history, theory and practice. Her artistic research is guided by the relationships between embodied cognition, machine learning, and ecological systems. Nancy’s contributions comprise performance led art making, dancing, citizen science fiction enquiry, nonfiction and scholarly writing and research, as well as her leadership of the Engineering Flora Fiction and Data Fauna studio at RMIT University and her creation of Desponias Coven a holistic computing aesthetics atelier. (http://sister0.tv).
Dr Francesca da Rimini, University of Technology Sydney
Interdisciplinary artist, writer and precarious academic researcher Dr Francesca da Rimini (she/her) lives on Kaurna land in South Australia. She has investigated the potential of digital and internet platforms since the early 1990s and is a founding member of the art collectives VNS Matrix, identity_runners and In Her Interior. Her practice oscillates between solo and collaborative, analogue and digital. Twigs, stones, video, MOOS, Etherpad, zines. Her numerous online and installation artworks return to madness, gender, sexuality, power and the prophetic voice like a wound that keeps bleeding. The international award-winning dollspace (1997) remains a touchstone in the electronic literature field.
Grace Slonim, Monash University, Art Design and Architecture (School of Fine Art)
Grace Slonim is a PhD Candidate and Teaching Associate at Monash University. Her research is focussed on examining the landscape of visual arts funding, with a particular focus on the negative space of the funding model: the work and lived experience of the projects and art makers that don’t receive funding. Grace has extensive experience across the arts sector, from her current work as Teaching Associate, to working in large institutions and experimental artist hubs. In all that she does Grace works to ensure that more art markers are equipped to pursue creative practice, particularly through access to funding.
Belinda Newick, Melbourne Polytechnic
Belinda Newick's work explores cultural hybridity, place and social engagement and maintains a diverse practice as a studio based contemporary jeweler, as an educator in and as an independent curator and writer. Newick has a BA in Art (Jewellery and 3D design). Previously in residence at JamFactory, Gray Street Workshop and Zu design, she is currently undertaking a Master of Creative Arts. Recipient of two grants international grants, an Asialink Residency in Sri Lanka 2004 and in Kerala, India 2001. Winner of 2019 Lynne Kosky Award for Contemporary Jewellery, Victorian Craft Awards. Newick is the curator of Island Welcome.