Abstract
This practice-led PhD project develops new modes of art research at the intersection of science and the poetic, where the continuity of discourse (idea and aesthetic) is shown to be porous and illusory. Relations of contiguity inform a new site of practice as installation-archive, necessitating a theory of the interlocutor as simultaneously entangled (co-dependent) and enfolded (suspended) in cooperation. These factors unfold in the project as subjective modes of temporal and spatial experiences. This apparent space time duality is expressed in this exegesis through the simultaneous presentation of two vectors of text. These contiguous vectors of text, and the presentation of visual material as a discrete document, reflect a modal approach to conceptualising and making, thus conflating exegesis and thesis. Accordingly, the writing and practice develop as modes referred to as installation-archive.
Installation-archive is a term of mine which I use repeatedly in this text. It describes an oceanic mode of art research in which scientific and poetic paradigms are simultaneously entangled and enfolded in praxis. Installation-archive is the arena where discourses meet, establishing new paradigms of installation-artwork through the lens of a fleeting reflexive archive, functioning as both frame and as a metaphor for contiguous image relations.
Intervening in site and substrate, this mode of improvisational and archival practice alludes to the possibilities of a relationship of fields unfolding in space, and contiguous places of practice. Sound, image, and structure operate as provisional relations in these fields, revealing enfolded potentialities within installation-archive. Embodied experiences and conceptualisations of this temporal field are diagrammatically bifurcated across horizontal and vertical vectors demonstrating the role of substrate as culture between the Grid and the Fold.
This modal Installation-archive is folded /unfolded and entangled simultaneously in a paling of space. The pale is referenced as a social contract whereby the porous parameters of discourse and/or sites are researched and engaged with through interlocution. This process of paling implicates the interlocutor in a somewhat onerous engagement; involving the temporary staking out of the boundaries of subjectivities, both real and virtual. Interlocution therefore, involves a willingness and awareness of a potential to move through this pale of significances and subjectivities, where the interlocutor (dialogic interpreter) and research can find (un)stable ground, as in a field or state of epoché.
The potentiality of this threading to unfold and modulate the artwork as text is delineated at the borders of narrative conventions and slips in cogency. Employing suspension of disbelief and judgement as a mode of connection to new knowledge and the unknown, anachronistic cosmological branes of time—acting as interstices between fields of trace and planes of incidence—are in turn re-traced (recovered) by the interlocutor.
