Research Topics – 2012

A visual narrative is often made up of fragments, Sometimes the images that form the narrative are related visually and contextually but sometimes they are not.

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarins’ work ‘Fig.’ is an example of a narrative formed through loose visual associations:

I think that there’s something in Fig. which lets you know that you’re being manipulated. You know that the connections between pictures are almost arbitrary, or are at least very tenuous. But yet they string together a vague narrative, and as a viewer you somehow want to be seduced by it; you allow yourself to be guided through it even though you know that it’s quite tenuous. Somehow you become absorbed by the storytelling. (Oliver Chanarin.)

Such work is often most interesting when the viewer has to work at forming the narrative. How does the photographer and/or viewer construct a narrative via fragments and loose visual connections?

This research project could be undertaken by project and exegesis, or thesis.

Contact: Pauline Anastasiou (pauline dot anastasiou at rmit dot edu dot au)

This research topic examines how design can be the driver of social innovation and social entrepreneurship that brings value to business. The research topic explores design practice that is entrepreneurially focused and grounded in sustainable and socially responsible practice.

‘Business is being forced to find new ways to generate customer value, brand equity and competitive advantage. This shift will centre on finding creative ways of putting positive social impact at the heart of a successful business model. The only good businesses will be those that do good. Forget CSR, think Creating Shared Value (CSV). Think localism, authenticity and transparency. Think Social Innovation, Social Enterprise’ (DA&D 2012)

A key focus explored through this research topic is, are businesses ready for a designer who drives business growth through design entrepreneurship and social innovation.

Contact: Russell Kerr (russell dot kerr at rmit dot edu dot au)

Opportunities exist for Honours students to work on a research project directly linked to a larger research team in the School: The Circus Oz Living Archive project. This is an interdisciplinary project (bringing together media, performance, design and computer science) building prototypes for a proposed Living Archive for Circus Oz. The Living Archive is conceived as an online ecology of performers, fans, artists, scholars and audiences gathered around thirty plus years of Circus Oz performance videos.

The project is a partnership with Circus Oz, the Australia Council and the Victorian Arts Centre. (For more information on the overall project, go to circusarchive.net)

Specific possible Honours projects:

1. Circus Video: How can a live circus performance best be captured documented, recorded so it can live on in some form, beyond its immediate ephemeral reality? This project would involve unique access to Circus Oz rehearsals and performances, for video shooting purposes. Experiments are possible with mobile phone cameras, lipstick cameras attached to trapezes, etc etc
2. Inhabiting the Archive: What is the meaning of an archive now, when what was formerly locked away and carefully preserved, untouched, is now situated in a digital online environment? And what meanings can be made, what stories told, what knowledge uncovered through immersion in such an archive? This project invites immersion in the prototype of the Circus Oz Living Archive, and the development of a suite of works responding to, and potentially feeding back into that archive. Ideas of remix, collective memory, the carnivalesque, the body, performance history may become central to this investigation. This project could work within media, design or writing disciplines.
3. Curating the social archive: What techniques can be used to engage and develop conversations and diverse interactions among potential users of the Living Archive, both inside Circus Oz and those interested beyond the company? This topic is a practical real-world engagement with questions around social media.
4. Fixing the archive: The archive is broken, or at least full of holes and mysteries. This is the nature of such things. Records are incomplete or missing. Where and when was this video shot? Who is performing that tightrope act? Who made that amazing costume? In the past, discovering the answers to such questions would have occupied an isolated researcher; however, now, in various institutions around the world, new approaches are being trialled taking advantages of crowdsourcing theories, technologies and strategies. How might such an approach be trialled with the Circus Oz community, who between them hold a rich (and hitherto largely untapped) knowledge of over thirty years of their performance history.

Contact: David Carlin (david dot carlin at rmit dot edu dot au)

Essay: theatre of the brain (David Shields)

Essai = to try, to attempt. The personal essay was pioneered by Montaigne in the sixteenth century. Contemporary essay forms range from the literary to the audiovisual, graphic and photographic, hybrid and networked.

This topic, if done by project, represents an opportunity for a student in any discipline to develop their own creative practice as an essayist, within an investigation of an identified particular formal aspect of the essay.

The topic could also be approached as a thesis, for example as a focused investigation of a particular essayist.

Contact: David Carlin (david dot carlin at rmit dot edu dot au)

Research by thesis or project may investigate Touraines sociology of action theory in terms of its relationship to organisation-stakeholder consultation.

The following questions are suggestions; however students may like to explore their own inquiry.

• Can consultation between an organisation and its stakeholders to reach sustainable solutions to environmental, social or economic problems be considered a form of ‘social movement?’
• Is organisation-stakeholder consultation a form of ‘participatory democracy’?
• What are the elements necessary to ensure consultation between an organisation and its stakeholders enhance, rather than inhibit, genuine dialogue and participatory decision-making?

Background
From the 1960s and 1970s onwards, the US and Europe saw a surge of protests and demonstrations against governments, government policies, and social conventions. The people involved in these protests often cut across class divisions, and the issues involved new demands such as anti-nuclear, anti-armaments, womens movement, and movements which demand that society recognise and accept different lifestyles. From the 1980s onwards, growing environmental awareness has increased collaboration between business, governments and civil society. Forms of participatory democracy are increasingly used as local communities, countries and geographical regions seek sustainable solutions to social, environmental and economic problems.
Alain Touraine and Jurgen Habermas are among prominent European theorists in what is called social movement theory. They assert that present day collective action is not confined to negotiations and strategic calculations by social movements to gain political power. Rather, the movements involve issues of social norms and identity, and the struggle takes place in the realm of civil society rather than in the realm of politics. The social movement is a collective form of action to contest the abuses of political and economic power, and to change the political and market institutions in order to produce a better society.

For Touraine, the state, the market, and the domain of communications and media are gradually diminishing the liberty of the individual. In his view, organisations are primarily concerned with profit, and that any attempts by organisations to consult with their stakeholders is generally to maximise control, reduce conflict and increase loyalty.

Touraine sees participation in social movements as the only way in which the individual can recover liberty. In Touraine’s view, democracy must create spaces that open the way for public participation and action while preserving individual difference and diversity. This requires mutual understanding and communication: “Everything that establishes a link between difference and communication–all forms of discussion, understanding, and respect for the other–contribute to the building of a democratic culture” (Tourraine, 1997, p. 196)

Contact: Judy Lawry (judy dot lawry at rmit dot edu dot au)

For Habermas, social movements are seen as defensive reactions to defend the public and the private sphere of individuals against the inroads of the state system and market economy. Jacobson’s (2007) participatory communication model, derived from Habermas’s (1984) theory of communicative action, examines opportunities provided for free expression of voice during organisation-stakeholder dialogue, considering processes and characteristics of those initiating and exercising voice, and the quality of organisational listening. Much research into listening assumes something to be listened to — speaking, or ‘voice’, a term that has recently been taken up and regenerated by Couldry to aid us in thinking about democracy, and political/social change. Involving both speaking and listening, this term ‘voice’ recognises people’s capacities for social cooperation, crucially involving ‘ongoing exchange of narratives with others’ (Couldry 2011, p.8).

Undertaking research by thesis or by project this problem invites you to explore the impact of new technologies on ‘participatory communication’ during organisation-stakeholder consultation. Questions may include:

• Does the use of social media by organisations and their stakeholders enhance or impede effective dialogue and participatory democracy between parties?
• Are digital communication technologies used in organisation-stakeholder consultation to give voice to differing views or are they a form of ‘concealed strategic action’- the more powerful party intentionally misleading other participants into believing they could influence the decision-making process, whilst simultaneously using efforts to persuade participants to accept a decision already made? (Habermas, as cited in Deetz, 1992) ?
• Jacobson’s (2007) participatory communication model and/or actor-network theory (Latour 2005) may be used to explore the level of ‘ voice’ in digital communicative practices used by individual actors and collective groups during organisation-stakeholder consultation.

Contact: Judy Lawry (judy dot lawry at rmit dot edu dot au)

How long can a video be? While it is commonplace to consider the durational moving image through cinema or installation exhibits, what are the implications for the viewer, and indeed the idea of cinema and time, if there are works with extreme durations of 100 or even 1000 years? This research question is to consider the theoretical issues which surround slow cinema, with particular interest in the implications and possibilities that a 1000 year long video affords.

Contact: Shaun Wilson (shaun dot wilson at rmit dot edu dot au)

(Ambitious) memoir isnt fundamentally a chronicle of experience; rather, memoir is the story of consciousness contending with experience. (Patricia Hampl.)

This research question invites the investigation of the relation between experience, memory, writing and intent within memoir. It may be based upon the examination of a body of literary work, or investigate these concerns via relevant literary theories.

Contact: Lucinda Strahan (lucinda dot strahan at rmit dot edu dot au)

With iBook Author, Apple has recently presented a tool that empowers authors to integrate simple interactive content into their textbooks. Not only can it be expected that these new textbooks will be appealing to students equipped with iPads; but also will such an authoring tool become a new pedagogical alternative for teachers.

Our research partner, the English Didactics group at the Catholic University Eichsttt-Ingolstadt, Germany educates English teachers as well as investigates how language learning can be made more motivational. Together, we have identified that game design methods can positively affect learning motivation as well as learning itself, and perhaps help bridge the gap between formal and informal learning. To us, it would be interesting to see how this could be done with iBook Author. Because iBook Author lacks game-like widgets suitable for language learning, in this team research project, two students – one designer, one programmer – will be expected to plan as well as implement such an expansion for iBook Author, in collaboration with researchers and students from CU Eichsttt-Ingolstadt. This will involve (a) to conceptually design and functionally specify a game design-informed learning model for an interactive textbook for bilingual language learning, and (b) to implement and test one or more iBook Author widgets from this model, which will allow teachers to create textbook elements that will contain – potentially networked – game-like elements, supporting specific use cases in language learning, e.g. vocabulary training, and (c) to document and report on the research undertaken via an exegesis. A prototypical textbook that will embed the new widgets (to be created by CU) will be evaluated at a real secondary school in Germany, with real students.

About us: at RMIT University’s GEElab, we research how game design and game thinking can affect and alter architecture & urbanism, mobility, popular media, engagement as well as other sciences. Meet our team at www.geelab.rmit.edu.au.

contact: Steffen Walz (steffen dot walz at rmit dot edu dot au)

Can the lyric poem be conceived of as non-fiction? This research will explore and discuss the dimensions of the lyric poem and the potential the form holds in terms of non-fiction. The research may investigate a series of lyric poems as non-fiction, or it may investigate the possible relationship between non-fiction and lyrical poetry more generally. This will be by thesis.

contact: jessica dot wilkinson at rmit dot edu dot au

In A Poetics, poet and critic Charles Bernstein writes:

The mark is the visible sign of writing. But reading, insofar as it consumes & absorbs the mark, erases itthe words disappear (the transparency effect) & are replaced by that which they depict, their meaning. Thus absorption is the aura of listening destroyed in this writing: Antiabsorptive writing recuperates the mark by making it opaque.

Antiabsorptive writing slows down the reading process so that the reader sees as well as reads a text, and is made to appreciate the material qualities and textures of the work. This project will explore the concept of antiabsorptive writing, and the implications/potential that such work suggests for writers and readers. It may do this through the analysis of relevant literary texts, or through a study of Bernstein’s concept in the context of literary theory more generally. This project is by thesis.

contact: jessica dot wilkinson at rmit dot edu dot au

How does the speed of a communication impact its qualities? This research investigation will take the form of a comparative investigation into how fast, or how slow, we might accomplish a communicative goal and what the effects of this acceleration/deceleration might be? How does our readership/user/audience negotiate these extreme qualities of speed?

contact: Neal dot Haslem at rmit dot edu dot au

What might be learnt from slow practice and the deliberate creation of the time and opportunity to reflect? How might this radically reflective practice impact on one’s understandings; of practice, industry and agency? Is there a place in industry for the radically reflective?

contact: Neal dot Haslem at rmit dot edu dot au

A ‘slow’ investigation of the hermeneutic relationship between commissioning and professional agents. If one’s practice involves a relationship with other party(s), what new understandings does ‘slow’ (and the philosophies and practices that extend from it) enable us to gain into the subtleties of the practice of practice?

contact: Neal dot Haslem at rmit dot edu dot au

Historically, the production of artefacts has been the main focus of a design activity. Though in recent years, there has been a shift towards emphasising more intangible qualities that can be designed, such as experience design, enabling design or service design. The argument for this shift has been the role of design thinking in re-framing what we understand the problem to be, and that designers need to perform and address ‘wicked problems’ in a holistic, systemic understanding of a situation.

What are the challenges and opportunities involved in this shift from designing aretefacts to systems? What change is required, and by whom? Or, is there need for change at all?

contact: Yoko dot Akama at rmit dot edu dot au

The field of design proposes that design processes are powerful agents of social change when they focus on outomes that are local, humane and sustainable. These are of increasing interest to Australian social innovators, policy makers and those responsible for social services provision.

As a member of the international ‘Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability’ network (DESIS), RMIT is building partnerships with design practitioners, academic researchers, industry and public institutions to understand the contribution of design to social innovation in Australia. DESIS documents local efforts to achieve environmental and social sustainability in places and in the lives of people to use as models for large-scale change. (see desis-lab.org – forthcoming)

So what kind of models and examples are there in the Australian community? Who are initiating, leading, supporting and sustaining them? What role is design playing in these, and what impact is it having?

This topic could either be a thesis or a project. It can also be something that the student initiates themselves ie, work with their local community to design an initiative, thereby generating their own case study.

contact: Yoko dot Akama at rmit dot edu dot au

Nigel Thrift has speculated about mediated politics in the following way:

Political life in democracies is a life constantly stirred by the media. It is increasingly characterized, therefore, by individual-level cultivation of anxiety, obsession, and compulsion, against what mayand I emphasize, maybe a general increase in the level of political anxiety brought about by these developments, stemming especially, from the sheer ability to keep various anxieties, compulsions and obsessions in play, paralleled by an increased speed of response (Connolly 2002); all speed, no direction. If this heaviness mixed with speediness were analogized to a mental state, the diagnosis would be profound depressive anxiety (W. Brown 2005: 11). Accordingly, political time is reshaped. It becomes an increasingly anxious business, burrowing into more and more of the biological determinants of affect for sustenance and contentless content.
Non-Representational Theory: Space/politics/affect (2008, 250)

Marketing technologies and the use of social media in electoral campaigns, continuous polling, 24/7 media cyclesthese are some of the things Thrifts speculation brings to mind. What starting points might this offer for describing recent episodes in national, local, or international politics? This research would basically be a piece of writing around a political episode of your choice exploring how it might demonstrate or resonate with some of the themes arising in relation to slow.

Contact: Cathy Greenfield (cathy dot greenfield at rmit dot edu dot au)

One of the things that the slow draws our attention to is how communication and use of communication technologies is embedded and embodied. How can this assist us to understand how digital communication technologies contribute to the ways in which populations are governed and govern themselves?

This investigation could concentrate on digital communication technologies, or it might range across old and new media, in light of their intersections, adjacencies and competition. It could be undertaken on a number of different scales, focusing on organizational, institutional, national or cross-border/global populations. It might consider existing literature and documentation about embedded and embodied uses, or it might attempt to describe and document some of these. It would pick up on the theme of government, broadly conceived, and contribute to describing the politics of digital communication use.

contact: Cathy Greenfield (cathy dot greenfield at rmit dot edu dot au)

Narrative complexity in film might seek to excite and challenge audiences, but does it in fact slow down the experience of the story? If multiple protagonists, parallel stories or sequential narratives are used, is the audience encouraged to ‘slow down’ and really take in the story, and work out what’s going on: why does the story need to be told in this way? Does narrative complexity encourage an audience to slow down and discover the film’s themes on a deeper, more meaningful level, rather than simply get a cheap thrill from an obvious, linear plot?

This project will interrogate contemporary writings of film narrative and use case studies to illustrate ideas of ‘slow.’ It will consider audience experience and screenwriter intention. The project may also take on a creative component, in the form of a film treatment or screenplay.

Contact: Craig Batty (craig dot batty at rmit dot edu dot au)

Is reality TV real? Are the characters haphazardly the way they are, or have they been manufactured to create an appealing cast? Are the situations ones that would have occurred anyway, or have they been creatively engineered to fit audience expectations of drama, conflict and pathos? Is reality TV real, or is it no more than a work of fiction?

This project seeks to combine theories of screenwriting with analyses of reality TV texts, in order to understand how the texts have come into being. It will look at applying principles and conventions of screen fiction with ‘the real’ to see how the ‘perfect’ reality TV text might be created. It will be both critical and creative: assessing how the real is changed in order to appeal to audiences, and the implications of this, yet at the same time discovering ways of working with the real that may be useful to creative producers.

This project will cover a trajectory of of ideas, from documentary studies to reality TV studies to screenwriting practice. Like a reality TV text itself, the project will have its own journey from question (problem) to answer (solution).

contact: Craig Batty (craig dot batty at rmit dot edu dot au)

In all animation forms, the absurd and the uncanny form a contingent element of the spectator’s experiences. The machinic nature of animation gives way to a fluidly changing experience, of sometimes unexpected movements and unpleasant action. How is the uncanny connected to what Alan Cholodenko termed animation’s ‘the illusion of life’ ? This project would suit a media history, film studies or communications thesis with close textual analysis.

contact: Christian McCrea christian dot mccrea at rmit dot edu dot au

Compared to representational or indexical media, games offer virtuality as a tool for the telling of both fictive and actual situations, simulations and narrative. Games are fiction-native in that sense, inverting the usual representational form and reestablishing the stakes for mixed-media, montage and remix practices. How can games be used in the exploration of documentary purposes, either for fiction or reportage? This topic would suit research-focused students looking at famous documentary games in the past decade, or designers building a multi-faceted folio.

contact: Christian McCrea christian dot mccrea at rmit dot edu dot au

Games are often positioned as existing on a spectrum between entertainment products and ‘serious’ games. Theorist Ian Bogost noted in 2007 that “Serious games are videogames created to support the existing and established interests of political, corporate, and social institutions.” That is, they are uncritical embraces of the rich, the powerful and the loud at a time when all our political and creative energy should be used to disassemble and attack inequality. Designer and artist Mary Flanagan proposed “critical play” as a way for us to use games and games knowledge to attack that inequality. How can we re-imagine the spectrum of entertainment, the serious to have a third pressure, the critical and political? What can games’ simulation potential do for contemporary political and critical questions? This project would suit a small game on a political topic alongside an exegesis. Topics could include:

• The mistreatment of refugees / The so-called Pacific Solution
• Racism in Australia
• Political corruption
• Abortion and reproductive rights
• Assassinations of civilians by military personnel in Iraq / Afghanistan

contact: Christian McCrea christian dot mccrea at rmit dot edu dot au

Brian Castro likens writing to ‘dangerous dancing’. He suggests that writing has consequences – ‘as I write I am already being disinherited’ – and that there is a causal link between writing and the act of disinheritance – ‘I am being disinherited because I write’.

What does ‘dangerous dancing’ look like? Content? Form? How does it read?

contact: Francesca Rendle-Short francesca dot rendle-short at rmit dot edu au

In ‘Afterword’ in The Space Between, Anna Gibbs suggests that ‘it is possible to say all kinds of things if one’s words are not really one’s own’.

How do you write intimately? Is it possible to perform a ‘slow’ intervention, a slow unfolding? What sort of ‘personas’ are we talking about here? What is the measure of Gibbs’ ‘not really’?

contact: Francesca Rendle-Short francesca dot rendle-short at rmit dot edu au

In ‘Afterword’ in The Space Between, Anna Gibbs suggests that ‘it is possible to say all kinds of things if one’s words are not really one’s own’.

How and in what ways – and for what purpose/s – are you navigating this space between fact and fiction, lies and truth? To what end?

contact: Francesca Rendle-Short francesca dot rendle-short at rmit dot edu au

Helen Garner writes ‘there can be no writing without the creation of a persona. In order to write intimately – in order to write at all – one has to invent an “I”.’

Using Garner’s thoughts as a starting point, what is your invention? Why does it matter writing in this way? Does it matter at all?

contact: Francesca Rendle-Short francesca dot rendle-short at rmit dot edu au

Deleuze has described ‘affect’ as an interval, a gap, between noticing and doing where the action (the doing) is not adequate to the noticing. The larger this ‘inadequacy’ the greater the experience of affect.

1: Is this is a way to theorise those films that are recognised (positively and negatively) as ‘slow’?
or
2: Use this idea as a model to make a series of experimental interactive video or audio works that investigate the relation of affect and the interval to the idea of ‘slowness’.

contact Adrian Miles adrian dot miles at rmit dot edu dot au

A social media Still Life
Imagine a media project (using Twitter, a video blog, Facebook, Instagram, Posterous, all of them) where the quiet, banal, or simply everyday moments are documented. Every day. Perhaps the same moment, every day.

The problem: Does such a practice represent or produce an ‘acceleration’ of our experience – by choosing to share the trivial and banal ‘instantly’. Or does such a practice represent or produce a ‘slowing’ of our experience by enlarging these otherwise ephemeral moments?

Contact: Adrian Miles adrian dot miles at rmit dot edu dot au

Authenticity and Everyday Making
New technologies and platforms make it possible for all of us to have a documentary practice. What is the difference between everyday (vernacular) documentation and documentary? When does one become the other?

This question can be used to examine things like Twitter, blogs and Flickr from the point of view of nonfiction writing and making and authenticity. It can also be used as way to investigate the place and role of documentary online. Alternatively, It can also be used as a basis for a documentary project that uses everyday media and activities with an emphasis on what the problem of ‘authenticity’ is in relation to documentary practice and everyday media.

Contact: Adrian Miles adrian dot miles at rmit dot edu dot au

Multilinear ‘Style’ in Documentary
There is increasing interest in interactive documentary, from both film makers and theoreticians. Interactive documentary poses questions about documentary ethics, participation, narrative and style.

This research problem is based on investigating one of these terms. It can be by thesis or project. It could also include the analysis of a range of interactive documentaries.
contact: Adrian Miles adrian dot miles at rmit dot edu dot au

Ergodic Documentary
Espen Aarseth introduced the term ‘ergodic’ to describe any text that changes as a consequence of what the user does. What would an ergodic documentary be? Is this term a useful contribution to the study of interactive documentary?

This question provides a basis for a thesis that explores the concept of the ergodic in general, and then applies it in the context of online/interactive non fiction (whether video or in recent non fiction work on things like an iPad). It could do a study/analysis of one or more existing works from the point of view of the ergodic to investigate if it is a useful way of thinking about such work. The aim is to investigate possibilities from outside of cinema studies to help understand interactive documentary.

This question could also be used as a starting point to make one or more interactive documentary works that try to be ergodic nonfiction.
contact: Adrian Miles adrian dot miles at rmit dot edu dot au