Jill Bennett’s T-Visionarium: A User’s Guide is a comprehensive analysis of the ground-breaking T-Visionarium media art project developed by Neil Brown, Dennis Del Favero, Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel at the iCinema Centre, Sydney, in collaboration with ZKM, Karlsruhe. It reveals how this immersive interactive environment generates new insights into the workings and consumption of televisual media, extending the boundaries of both art and media studies.

Using contemporary theory to analyse gesture and emotion in art and media, Jill Bennett’s text explores the dynamics of new media narratives, demonstrating how both TV and media art operate in a transnarrative dimension where media images take on their own life. Situating T-Visionarium in terms of wider cultural shifts, the book is a ‘user’s guide’, both to T-Visionarium, and to screen culture in general.

Jill Bennett is Director of the Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics, and Associate Dean (Research) at the College of Fine Arts.

What others have said about T-Visionarium: A User’s Guide

Jill Bennett’s ‘guide’ to the kinds of discoveries possible in the complex space created by T-Visionarium opens up questions about what media art can do. Drawing in particular on knowledge of the televisual genre of forensic detection, and of affect and gesture, Bennett traces the lineaments of T-Visionarium, with unpredictable and often unimaginable results.

Associate Professor Anna Gibbs, School of Communication Arts, University of Western Sydney

The African Marketplace catalogue documents an exhibition that opened at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery in August 2002. Focusing on forms of visual culture that confound western distinctions between ‘high art’ and popular art and craft, African Marketplace traces a complex set of relationships between art and the market.

The exhibition included a range of images and objects that either have communal or mercantile origins, or respond in some way to the theme of the market: barbershop and medicine boards, originally made to order for proprietors of market stalls and shops, which have found their way onto the international art market; works by major African artists including Romuald Hazoume and Cyprien Tokoudagba, coffin-maker Kane Kwei, Freddy Ramabulana, William Kentridge, and Meschac Gaba, whose work featured in Documenta 11; beadwork, textiles and telephone-wire bowls, objects developed initially for local use that have increasingly evolved for both the tourist market and for Western art and design markets.

African Marketplace features an essay by David McNeill, deputy director of the CCAP. As McNeill points out, the objects and images included in the exhibition embody processes of cultural exchange and globalisation, but they also reveal some of the ways in which market culture in Africa presents a vibrant alternative to the ‘ free market’ of western economic rationalism.

This catalogue documents the exhibition Disobedience, held at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery in September 2005. The works presented in Disobedience register issues of social justice and protest against the brutal excesses of economic globalisation, both locally and internationally. Artists involved in the show were: Beluchi Weavers (Afghanistan), Alexander Brener and Dmitry Vilensky (Russia), Kendell Geers (South Africa/Belgium), Michael Goldberg (South Africa/Australia), Shilpa Gupta (India), Ilaria Vanni (Italy/Australia), Suzann Victor (Singapore/Australia), Gordon Bennett, Phillip George, Raquel Ormella, Dean Sewell and Squatspace (Australia). The exhibition was opened by Will Saunders, one of the two activists who painted “NO WAR” on the Sydney Opera House, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq.

The Disobedience catalogue contains essays by both the curators, David McNeill and Zanny Begg, as well as by two leading researchers in the field of art and politics: Dr Ilaria Vanni (UTS) and Dr Anna Munster, a deputy director of the CCAP.

Disobedience was one of the outcomes of the CCAP’s Discovery Project, Ethical Globalism. It was scheduled to follow the 2005 Sydney Social Forum and the demonstrations against the Forbes Global CEO Conference at the Sydney Opera House.

This catalogue documents the exhibition Prepossession, which opened at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery, UNSW, in March 2005 and travelled to Belfast in June of the same year. The exhibition, which explored conflict, place and trauma in South Africa, Northern Ireland and Indigenous Australia, was one of the outcomes of the CCAP’s Discovery Project, Ethical Globalism. Artists included in the show were: Destiny Deacon, Tracey Moffatt and Darren Siwes (Australia); William Kentridge and Jo Ractliffe (South Africa); Willie Doherty and Frances Hegarty (Northern Ireland). The Prepossession catalogue contains essays by Jill Bennett and Felicity Fenner, an interview with Doherty and Hegarty by Liam Kelly, and an essay by Professor Abigail Solomon-Godeau from the Department of the History of Art & Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara.

Prepossession was curated by CCAP directors Jill Bennett and Felicity Fenner, along with Liam Kelly from the University of Ulster, and was funded by an ARC Discovery Grant and Arts Council of Northern Ireland – National Lottery.

In Materializing New Media, Anna Munster offers an alternative aesthetic genealogy for digital culture. Eschewing the prevailing Cartesian aesthetic that aligns the digital with the disembodied, the formless, and the placeless, Munster seeks to “materialize” digital culture by demonstrating that its aesthetics have reconfigured bodily experience and reconceived materiality.

Dr Anna Munster is a Senior Lecturer in digital media theory at the School of Art History & Theory, College of Fine Arts, UNSW, and a founding member of the Centre for Contemporary Art & Politics.

What others have said about Materializing New Media:

Andrew Murphie, University of New South Wales

Still from Jennifer Deger, 'Christmas with Wawa' (2006)

Article released: Wednesday, 16 April, 2008

Jennifer Deger’s research project Digital Technologies, Mediated Futures: Envisioning Culture in Arnhem Land explores the practical, ethical and imaginative challenges of seeing the world from indigenous perspectives. By developing experimental media forms and practices with Yolngu collaborators, the project investigates the power of image and imagination at a particular – and crucial – moment in Yolngu cultural history.

Drawing on ethnographic insights and relationships developed over many years, Deger will work with Yolngu to use animation and other digital effects in ways that echo the aesthetic, social and political intensities of ritual. Focusing on the visual dynamics that infuse and enliven the production and reception of this video imagery, the project explores the ways that Yolngu actively use media to facilitate invisible presencings and sensuous mediations which work to link people and places in relationships that extend across time and space.

For Yolngu, this work offers urgently welcomed possibilities of innovation and cultural reproduction at a time of unprecedented social stress. For non-Yolngu, this work offers a unique possibility to encounter a culture that continues to insist on the power of vision in generating intercultural appreciation and respect.

Jill Bennett’s ARC Discovery Project advances the concept of practical aesthetics to demonstrate how art is of direct benefit to both the academic and wider community, furnishing concrete techniques that enable us to apprehend and understand key social and political events. It engenders an exhibition, public symposia, a workshop with student/international participation, and a book/articles, presenting Australian art in an international framework. The project extends the discipline base of art history, promoting and facilitating the use of art in other disciplines and in debates on events relating to issues of national importance (including border control, Reconciliation, and environmental disaster).

Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Ngurlu (2007)

Article released: Wednesday, 18 July, 2007

This project, which is a collaboration between the CCAP’s Senior Research Fellow Dr Jennifer Biddle and A/Prof Robyn Ferrell of the University of Melbourne, sets out to investigate Indigenous communities’ use of art to depict their traditional Dreamings. The philosophy underlying these depictions is that art is the knowledge it portrays, which in turn evokes title to land through the law of Dreaming, of belonging to ‘country’. To better understand this negotiation advances debate on issues surrounding  Aboriginal reconciliation.

One of the outcomes of Dr Biddle’s research was the Lajamanu Women’s Painting Workshop/Residency, hosted by the CCAP and held at CoFA from 13-22 March 2007. The residency culminated in an exhibition of the womens’ paintings produced during the workshop, and their performance of Yawulyu (Women’s Dreaming Ceremony). The launch and performance were attended by over 300 people, including Marion Scrymgour, the Northern Territory’s Minister for the arts. These events also coincided with the launch of Dr Biddle’s new book, Breasts, Bodies, Canvas: Central Desert Art as Experience, published by UNSW Press. The book examines the rise of female Aboriginal artists, including Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Kathleen Petyarre, Dorothy Napangardi, Rosie Napurrurla Tasman and others, and the tactile and sensory activities involved in painting. Dr Biddle argues that the recent success of women painters points to a certain ‘feminisation’ of Country, Ancestor and Dreaming that makes this art literally enlivened and enlivening. By focussing on what this art ‘does’ rather than what it ‘means’, Breasts, Bodies, Canvas breaks with a generation of scholarship that has identified these works as traditional symbolic representations of country – instead, the works are understood as material forces of culture, sentiment and politics.