Under Construction seminar series: Semester 2 2009
Under Construction is held every second Thursday throughout the semester
S704, Menzies Building, Clayton
4-6pm
23 July 2009
Portrait of Self as Other: Words and Silk: The Real and Imaginary Worlds of Gerald Murnane (Australia, 1989)
A Special 20th Anniversary Screening
Presented by Director Phillip Tyndall
Words and Silk is among the greatest and most original films made in Australia – although it has yet, in its 20-year life, to receive a single screening at the Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide or Brisbane Film Festivals. Under Construction takes up the cause of this remarkable work and invites its director, Phillip Tyndall, to introduce a rare screening of his masterpiece, and take questions afterwards. Phillip worked closely with the renowned Australian writer Gerald Murnane (Tamarisk Row, The Plains, Velvet Waters...) to fashion this rigorous, two-part portrait: the first half is devoted to evoking the author’s imaginary world as evoked in his fiction; while the second half features Murnane speaking – in a highly scripted, theatrical way – about his writing process. Although the film, like Murnane’s prose, is chiselled and exacting, strange resonances and disturbances slowly creep into this mania for creating an ‘ordered universe’, and we may wonder what species of disorder is being kept at bay...
6 August 2009
General Aesthesia: Mutations of Value and Cognition in New Media Practices
Professor Helen Grace, Chinese University of Hong Kong
This paper will consider the forms and circumstances of production of digital photography and in particular, camera phone pictures in Hong Kong, arguing that a kind of mutation of value is involved in the production and circulation of these images that goes beyond conventional value systems and structures, ordering discrete objects and commodities within circuits of acquisition and collection. The very ubiquity of image capture suggests an aesthetics of the immaterial, involving the production of what we might call ‘ephemeral value’ - a form of value which exceeds the economic (though is undoubtedly enabled by it). I will discuss this by referring to the concept (in Cantonese) of 'mo liu (??) as an initial judgment of the value of camera phone pictures, suggesting that such a state represents a kind of threshold of meaning in considering digital practices.
All enquiries to Doctor Adrian Martin