About
Methodology
Structured improvisation
Hanny Exiner, Andrew Morrish, Al Wunder, Norman McLaren, Paul Klee, and others.
Methods of improvisation within structures have been applied to drawing, painting, object making and animation: Norman McLaren's 'straight-ahead' animation; Paul Klee's 'taking a line for a walk'; the movement 'scores' of Exiner, Morrish and Wunder, used in physical performance.
Gestural responses are being made to written, visual and spoken texts of Antarctic expeditioners. Gestures made through human movement, drawing, sound, and words, combine to animate cycles and changes observed and experienced in the Antarctic landscape.
Datascape topography
Simon Pockley
Simon Pockley began Flight of Ducks in 1995, at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. It developed to become the first fully on-line PhD thesis, and continues today through on-going dialogue with its readers.
By way of a general description: the Flight of Ducks reflects its content by taking the poetics, conventions, and literary forms of exploration through landscape and applying them to a datascape. The topography of the datascape is shaped by the structural displays of a personal digital repository of texts, images and sounds...these texts are embedded in the datascape as cross referenced hypertexts.
Simon Pockley, Quakes, Quivers and Quacks: how the first ETD (Electronic Theses and Dissertations) has fared over 10 years, Melbourne, 2005
Landscape animation
Hobart Hughes
Hobart Hughes's arts practice moves between digital time-based art, drawing, sculpture, puppetry and performance. His installations involve animating Australian landscapes through the various perspectives of these disciplines.
Binary situations where contradiction is apt to osolate consciousness can often be resolved by the view that combines the two contradictory views by a third perspective.
Hobart Hughes, 2007
Bricolage and Nomadology
Stephen Muecke
Stephen Muecke has journeyed through the cultural landscapes of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. His methodology reflects traditional Aboriginal ways of knowing country through story, dance, and the making of images, maps, and other sacred objects. Aboriginal knowledge is most powerfully and effectively transmitted on location - performed/told/shown at the places where things happened. Muecke's books can evoke something of such journeys through Country.
Reading the Country (1984), reveals a journey through an Australian landscape from the perspecives of three people: Australian writer/researcher Stephen Muecke; Aboriginal Elder Paddy Rowe; French painter Krim Benterrak.
The physical layout of this book offers a sense of how the three travelers interacted with each other, and with the land.
Transcriptions of conversations, interspersed with art work, photographs, and white space, capture the pace and rhythm of the three voices. The spaces are the silences, reflecting listening.
No road, (1997) provides insight into Muecke's method of inquiry as a kind of kinesthesiology - a way to know and describe the human movement of a journey:
Words are like footsteps, but it is not the colour or form of the picture they paint that is significant, it is direction they are heading in. Just like our recognition of another person at a distance is based on an inner momementum of their bodys' movement rather than external form (Muecke, 1997).
