LASALLE faculty and students are prominently involved in a large variety of research activities and projects, including publication in peer-reviewed academic journals and books.
Journal and book publications
Performance Art: Actualizing Science Fiction
The article examines examples of live performance art that explore themes related to the genre of science fiction, and argues that in significant ways they make concrete and actualize the narratives of sci-fi. Works by artists including Stelarc, Eduardo Kac, Hayden Fowler, Fakeshop, Orlan, Norman White and Laura Kikauka are simultaneously political gestures, technical feats, and embodied art processes that both look forward to becoming the future and actualize a version of it in the present, live in front of us. As potently as any sci-fi novelists or filmmakers, performance artists have taken on what Braidotti calls "the visionary and didactic role" of science fiction to enact, with corporeal bodies in real time and space, a powerful "post-humanist, bio-centred egalitarianism" that estranges and displaces our world-view and establishes "a continuum with the animal, mineral, vegetable, extraterrestrial and technological worlds." (Braidotti, Rosi. 2002. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge: Polity, p. 183).
Citation:
Dixon, Steve. "Performance Art: Actualizing Science Fiction." The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction, edited by Rob Latham, Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 263-276.
The Art of Sukumar Bose: Reflections on South and Southeast Asia
The Art of Sukumar Bose (1912-1986) undertakes an incisive look at the artist, his works and context of his art production in South and Southeast Asia. The first of its kind to document and give a critical overview of Bose who was curator of paintings at Rhastrapati Bhavan (President's Home) in India through British Raj to post-independent India, the book engages through essays by various eminent scholars to place his work within art history. Bose's observations of life, people and cultures during colonial and postcolonial India and his later his sojourn into Southeast Asia emerge as both a contested yet seamless narrative of history and hope in art. This book won the ICAS Book Prize - Best Art Book Accolade, 2015. Conferred by the International Convention of Asian Scholars, University of Leiden, Netherlands.
Citation:
Purushothaman, Venka, Author & Editor. The Art of Sukumar Bose: Reflections on South and Southeast Asia. ISEAS Publishing, 2013
Hybrid Culture: Japanese Media Arts in Dialogue with the West
This book grew out of Yvonne Spielmann's 2005–2006 and 2009 visits to Japan, where she explored the technological and aesthetic origins of Japanese new-media art―which was known for pioneering interactive and virtual media applications in the 1990s. Spielmann discovered an essential hybridity in Japan's media culture: an internal hybridity, a mixture of digital-analog connections together with a non-Western development of modernity separate from but not immune to Western media aesthetics; and external hybridity, produced by the international, transcultural travel of aesthetic concepts.
Spielmann describes the innovative technology context in Japan, in which developers, engineers, and artists collaborate, and traces the Japanese fondness for precision and functionality to the poetics of unobtrusiveness and detail. She examines work by artists including Masaki Fujihata, whose art is both formally and thematically hybrid; Seiko Mikami and Sota Ichikawa, who build special devices for a new sense of human-machine interaction; Toshio Iwai, who connects traditional media forms with computing; and Tatsuo Miyajima, who anchors his LED artwork in Buddhist philosophy. Spielmann views hybridity as a positive aesthetic value―perhaps the defining aesthetic of a global culture. Hybridity offers a conceptual approach for considering the ambivalent linkages of contradictory elements; its dynamic and fluid characteristics are neither conclusive nor categorical but are meant to stimulate fusions.
Citation:
Spielmann, Yvonne. Hybrid Culture: Japanese Media Arts in Dialogue with the West. MIT Press, 2013.
No|w|here. Scenographies for SomePlaceElse
Despite Manovich’s claim that there is ‘no space in cyberspace’ (Manovich, 2001), spatial metaphors and representations are omnipresent in digital technology. Blessed with unreliable machinery, unfocussed theoretical discourses and unprecedented opportunities, twentieth century media art struggled with a coherent concept of space for a post-industrialised, post-modern modernity. The scenographies for dataspace, located in a digital nowhere between nineteenth century Panoramas and Marshall McLuhan’s famous catch phrase ‘The Medium is the Message’, failed to connect with early twentieth century developments in real-world avant-garde theatre, and its significant interfaces with spatial art practices, happenings and performances of the 1960s. This paper reviews spatial approaches during the colonisation of virtual reality within the context of diverse cultural and artistic trajectories, and argues that scenographies for dataspace were regarded only as quantité negotiable in the realm of digital technology.
Citation
Muench, Wolfgang. "No|w|here: Scenographies for SomePlaceElse." Space and Desire: Monitoring Scenography 03, edited by Thea Brejzek et al., ZHdK. With support of: Swiss National Science Foundation, 2010, pp. 154-167.
