Uncanny Bodies: an arts practice-based exploration of strategies to embody thresholds between life and death
My research explores strategies for creating artwork that inhabits an uncanny, liminal realm and that embodies thresholds between life and death. This thesis is a written commentary of this inquiry, which was made using an arts practice-based methodology that involves employing praxis and reflective processes in an ongoing, cyclical way. I combine this with Viktor Shklovsky’s technique of ostranenie and a process of not knowing, with the intention to create outcomes which are unfamiliar or strange. Drawing, painting and writing reflectively has played a significant role in this methodology, allowing ideas to be evaluated, reimagined and propelled forward. Using this approach has enabled me to examine, appraise and develop digital video, photographic and intaglio prints in the studio and in site-specific locations. My intention is to create spectral images that blur the boundaries between materiality and immateriality, real and illusion, alive and dead. I consider the “technospatial configuration” (M.Elcott, 2016) of phantasmagoria and examine the uncanniness of digital moving image in relation to my practice and to modes of spectatorship. Using projected images of the body that hover between the animate and the inanimate I investigate ways to rupture the boundaries of the spatial parameters of the gallery and the virtual space of the media screen. By collapsing the borders that divide these two spaces I aim to evoke the uncanny feeling of a phantasmagoric presence, a haunting by a body that is both here and there. Through my research I build on Kate Mondloch’s theory of “spectatorial doubleness”, lending the conversation a Barthesian perspective and a reflection on mortality. I establish a process for the creation of site-specific video installations involving the recording of a site using a video camera and the subsequent projection of the edited video back into the same room. The use of spatial and temporal deixis enables me to embody notions of presence / absence and mortality, while my written commentary brings together research on the uncanny, indexicality, the phantasmagoria of pre-cinema and the nature of the media screen in relation to video installation. This will be of interest to artist practitioners and researchers who are exploring similar terrain.
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations