ISSN: 1329-878X

Practice-led Research No 118, February 2006 Theme Editors: Lelia Green and Brad Haseman Order form Abstracts

Contents

Abstracts

Research Outputs in the Creative and Performing Arts: ‘Australianising’ an International Debate
Lelia Green
This paper positions current Australian discussions about practice-led research within international, national, historical and policy contexts and relates them to the developing pedagogical debate around performing and creative arts doctorates. Arguing that the creative industries offer benefits across the economy, it suggests that recognition for the research methodology specific to practice-led disciplines and the creative industries is overdue. The discussions in this paper, and in this theme issue of MIA, are all the more critical as a result of their articulation with the imminent introduction of the Research Quality Framework (RQF), which will allow nuanced, rigorous and internationally benchmarked evaluation of the quality and impact of research outputs. The RQF and the proposed research assessment panel for ‘creative arts, design and built environment’ herald the way for wider acceptance of practice-led outputs in the Australian research environment.

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Participatory Cultural Production and the DIY Internet: From Theory to Practice and Back Again
Darren Sharp
The free and open source software movements have inspired a new mode of participatory cultural production. The early hacker communities elaborated a sophisticated socio-technical system of network-enabled collaboration culminating in the GNU-Linux operating system. More recently, a range of do-it-yourself (DIY) media technologies have given any user with internet access the ability to become a producer in a variety of social fields. This has spawned an entirely new understanding of authorship and content production in film (machinima), games (player-producers), journalism (blogs), radio (podcasting) and knowledge production (Wikipedia). A number of social science epistemologies embrace ‘practice’ as a representational category to explain the relationship between structure and agency, such as Giddens’ (1984) and Bourdieu’s (1977) theories of structuration. Missing from most of these accounts is any engagement in practice-based research to construct knowledge about their domains. It will be shown that action research provides an important empirical method capable of extending the field of knowledge about user-led innovation. Action research provides a practice-based method to explore how social shaping occurs in the development of participatory cultural production systems.

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Visual Art Doctorates: Practice-Led Research or Research Per Se?
George Petelin
As part of a benchmarking project commissioned in 2002 by ACUADS, the Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools, I conducted a series of focus groups with candidates for higher degrees in Visual Art in Australia in order to gain some insight into how the terminology of research was understood and used by visual art higher degree students. The present paper makes use of that data and examines to what extent practice-led research can engage in a general research debate.

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Practice-Led Research and Scientific Knowledge
John Grech
Practice-led research can sometimes develop discourses that are not always consistent with the grammatical logics of academic language. However, practice-led research can reproduce and/or explain what happens when an individual encounters things and events in the world. This dynamic may thus open up innovative ways of codifying and authenticating knowledge gained from the performance of everyday life that might otherwise remain inexplicable (or seem irrelevant or disconnected within the existing structures and grammars of scientific discourse). Such practice-led research can lead to new forms of expression in order to understand the individual’s subjective experience. Thus, while practice-led research may challenge (and sometimes upturn) established methods of logic and rational argument, it also enables a researcher to develop explanations of events and encounters in the world that may otherwise not be accessible to them. Creative work can also make the impact of scientific research available to those who may not have a thorough working knowledge of scientific and academic discourses in the relevant discipline. The paper discusses these issues while focusing on a creative project/website developed through practice-led research.

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‘I Use Online so the Counsellors Can’t Hear Me Crying’: Creating Design Solutions for Online Counselling
Debra Beattie, Stuart Cunningham, Richard Jones and Oksana Zelenko
This article reviews a project which has produced creative design solutions for the development of online counselling in collaboration with Australia’s largest youth telephone counselling service, Kids Helpline (KHL). Our discussion focuses on the shape of interaction design research conducted against the dual background of young people’s multi-literacies and professional counselling practice. Existing text-based communication tools already available for Kids Helpline’s clients were integrated with graphical image-based tools, while engaging young people in problem-solving and empowerment during online counselling sessions. The paper considers the fashioning of a conducive design and interactive communication environment for distressed young people and the independent evaluation of the new site design. Preliminary results are that young people report a greater sense of control and comfort in their net-based interaction with a counsellor.

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Creative Practice as Research: A Creative Writing Case Study
Donna Lee Brien
This paper utilises a case study approach to examine practice-led research in a specific discipline of the creative arts by examining the range of research strategies utilised during the author’s doctoral studies in creative writing. This personal example is then situated within a broader context through suggestions about the contribution such creative arts-based research practice can make to the development and enhancement of creativity more generally, and an exploration of why this is important.

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Listening to the Mind Listening
Stephen Barrass, Mitchell Whitelaw and Guillaume Potard
The Listening to the Mind Listening concert was a practice-led research project to explore the idea that we might hear information patterns in the sonified recordings of brain activity, and to investigate the aesthetics of sonifications of the same data set by different composers. This world-first concert of data sonifications was staged at the Sydney Opera House Studio on the evening of 6 July 2004 to a capacity audience of more than 350 neuroscientists, composers, sonification researchers, new media artists and a general public curious to hear what the human brain could sound like. The concert generated 30 sonifications of the same data set, explicit descriptions of the techniques each composer used to map the data into sound, and 90 reviews of these sonifications. This paper presents the motivations for the project, overviews related work, describes the sonification criteria and the review process, and presents and discusses outcomes from the concert.

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Pamela Anderson, Herrenvolk and Durer: Trajectories, Intersections and Practice-Based Research
Loy Lichtman
My practice-based research in the visual arts is focused on the intersection between three moments: the blonde-haired, blue-eyed, white-skinned, straight-nosed, and symmetrical face as a look of choice evidenced in Western media which can be described as a type of personal eugenics; the antecedents to this look of choice informed by the racist ideology of Herrenvolk; and a trajectory from Herrenvolk to the informing template of Albrecht Durer’s Draughtsman Drawing a Reclining Nude as well as the drawings he produced of the body in Theory of Proportions (1528). The paper illustrates how practice-based research can lead a researcher in unexpected ways and towards surprising discoveries.

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Documentation in Performance-Led Research
Paul Stapleton
This article begins by setting the question of why practitioner-researchers engage in the practice of documentation within the context of academic research conventions. The assumption that performance requires documentation for dissemination is brought into question through reference to Caroline Rye’s provocative suggestion that documentation should be banned from the ‘practice as research in performance’ debate to bring into view transitory and provisional forms of dissemination. The article goes on to inquire into documentation’s capability to provide knowledge that is similar in nature to the contributions of live performance, and to question whether documentation and performance should be defined as oppositional practices. These concerns are then addressed through the presentation and evaluation of philosophical notions surrounding the concept of ‘liveness’, drawing on the writings of Peggy Phelan, Philip Auslander and Martin Buber. The focus then shifts to examine how audio-visual documentation may become a dialogic knowledge-producing encounter. This question is pragmatically addressed through the presentation of a documentation method which is designed to articulate provisional and divergent perspectives on creative research processes. The article then concludes by evaluating the role of documentation in mixed-mode research (drawing on the work of Susan Melrose), while pointing towards a growing recognition of the need for a new model of performance-led research validation that accounts for the corroborative relationship between performance and documentation practices.

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Assessment Practice in Fine Art Higher Degrees
Allyson Holbrook, Jennifer St George, Liz Ashburn, Anne Graham, Miranda Lawry
The study reported in this paper investigates the examination of fine art doctorates, and specifically how fine art examiners convey their assessment of the exegesis and exhibition in their written reports, drawing on 42 PhD fine art reports. Fine art examiners provided significant amounts of negative appraisal overall, little formative comment, and frequently wrote about the process of examination. Poor candidate engagement with relevant literature was identified as the key reason why examiners were harsher in their recommendations than colleagues in allied fields. The reports resonated with the ‘newness’ of examination in the field, the assessment language showed marked differences between the exegesis and the exhibition, and the relative emphasis in assessment centred on the exegesis.

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A Manifesto for Performative Research
Brad Haseman
Researchers in the arts, media and design often struggle to find serviceable methodologies within the orthodox research paradigms of quantitative and qualitative research. In response to this and over the past decade, practice-led research has emerged as a potent strategy for those researchers who wish to initiate and then pursue their research through practice. This paper examines the dynamics and significance of practice-led research, and argues for it to be understood as a research strategy within an entirely new research paradigm: performative research. Taking its name from J.L. Austin’s speech act theory, performative research stands as an alternative to the qualitative and quantitative paradigms by insisting on different approaches to designing, conducting and reporting research. The paper concludes by observing that, once understood and fully theorised, the performative research paradigm will have applications beyond the arts and across the creative and cultural industries generally.

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Talkback Radio: Some Notes on Format, Politics and Influence
Graeme Turner, Elizabeth Tomlinson and Susan Pearce
This paper presents early results from an ARC-funded research project on the content, audience and influence of Australian talkback radio. Drawing upon the analysis of data from a survey of three talkback programs — John Laws and Neil Mitchell from the commercial sector and Australia Talks Back from the ABC — the paper focuses upon two aspects: the topics canvassed and the participation of the callers. Although very preliminary, the results of this survey narrow down the kinds of questions we need to ask as we move towards more sophisticated analysis of this media format.

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Understanding ‘Community’ in ICTs and Community Broadcasting: Some Similarities and Differences
Kitty van Vuuren
This paper examines community projects funded under the federal government’s Networking the Nation program, and compares these with community broadcasting. Since the early 1990s, rural community ICT projects have enjoyed considerable government support, but now face closure as government funding dries up. A comparison with the community broadcasting sector offers some insights into the relationship between community and not-for-profit organisations and the problems associated with adopting government and business strategies in the delivery of community services.

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‘Rafferty’s Rules’: Australian Legal Dramas and the Representation of Law
Jason Bainbridge
This paper explores the problems involved in representing the Australian legal system on film and television, how these problems are addressed, and what commentary these texts are making about the practice of law in Australia. It is suggested that the formal and dress requirements of the Australian legal system make the trial process a ritual based around the reification of the lawyer and the stigmatisation of the accused — in short, a degradation ceremony — and that Australian legal dramas reflect this. But because of this lack of dynamism in the courtroom, Australian legal dramas must seek alternative sits of drama — often domestic, and invariably outside the courtroom. In this way, they present a more holistic view of the lawyer/judge’s life, reinterpreting court proceedings (and the institution of law itself) as a repressed set-up by actively displacing dramatic tension outside the courtroom, thus denying the courtroom the centrality it occupies in American representations and, by extension, American culture.

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REVIEWS

Asimow, Michael and Mader, Shannon, Law and Popular Culture: A Course Book
Bakardjieva, Maria, Internet Society: The Internet in Everyday Life
Carter, David, Darian-Smith, Kate and Worby, Gus (eds), Thinking Australian Studies: Teaching Across Cultures
Cohen, Sande and Rutsky, R.L. (eds), Consumption in an Age of Information
Collins, Felicity and Davis, Therese, Australian Cinema After Mabo
Gorman, Lyn and McLean, David, Media and Society in the Twentieth Century: A Historical Introduction
Haddon, Leslie, Information and Communications Technologies in Everyday Life: A Concise Introduction and Research Guide
Hartley, John (ed.), Creative Industries
Mäkelä, Janne, John Lennon Imagined: Cultural History of a Rock Star
Matthews, Jill Julius, Dance Hall and Picture Palace: Sydney’s Romance with Modernity
Mills, Jonathan (ed.), Barons to Bloggers: Confronting Media Power
Milner, Lisa, Fighting Films: A History of the Waterside Workers’ Film Unit
Paterson, Chris and Sreberny, Annabelle, International News in the Twenty-first Century
Rajan, Nalini (ed), Practising Journalism: Values, Constraints, Implications
Rampley, Matthew (ed.), Exploring Visual Culture: Definitions, Concepts, Contexts
Rao, Madanmohan and Mendoza, Lunita (eds), Asia Unplugged: The Wireless and Mobile Media Boom in the Asia-Pacific: The Asia-Pacific Internet Handbook, Episode VI
Spigel, Lynn and Olsson, Jan (eds), Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition
Vilanilam, J.V., Mass Communication in India: A Sociological Perspective
Virilio, Paul, City of Panic

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