ground erasure [2001-05]
A research-led PhD fine art project investigating the notion of "territory". This interdisciplinary research integrated theory and practice in an engagement with machinic spaces examining the connective territories within which the contemporary artist is operating with technology. The project developed into an interactive textual thesis including web-cast viva and a visual culmination of time-based artworks: an installation of videoworks [Speed Journeys and Tunnel Vision] having parallel screening between the Herbert Read Gallery, England and Waikato University, New Zealand (March 2005).
The senses of territoriality or belonging have become hugely contested in a contemporary world mediated by speed, virtuality and radical geo-political shifts exacerbated by capital and global spatial contexts. In Paul Virilio's terms we are confronting the "accident" - the paradoxical tensions where dismantling frontiers and a "no-distance" world contend with a menacing policed and monitored satellite gaze. Ground Erasure, a project contextualised in compounded meanings of territory, converges time, philosophy and politics in a topology of conceptual "erasures" superimposing disparate aspects of deterritorialisation.
I looked at how filmic segmentarity divides, intersects, erases, transforms our spatio-temporal perception whilst informing the philosophic aspects of our lives whereby time is synthesized through multiplicity as through the multifaceted reality of a non-human eye, '...a shimmering, sinuous, variable and contractile (perspective), like a hair of a hygrometer' (Gilles Deleuze).
Inspired from Bruno Lature's "actor-network" machine-to-human model, my art site recreated territoriality as a connective plateau - a human and machinic actor-network plane of productive flows in the spatial assemblage. As an artist operating with technology, my objective has been to devise ways of giving "materiality" and "durability" to the effects of temporality through art where the machine becomes part of its own dislocation.
