“Outback and Beyond: A Live Australian Western” is a live audio-visual performance by myself and Rome-based sound artist Mike Cooper. In the show, Mike’s soundtrack of deconstructed Blues and processed electronics is juxtaposed against a live re-mix of archival footage of the Australian outback cut from films in the National Film and Sound Archive. The result is a live “Australian Western,” a meditation on Australian iconography and mythography. Despite historical and geographical similarities to the USA, Australia has no cinematic tradition of the Western. Its archive is filled with images of harsh desert lands, of hardy Colonial settlers, of burgeoning communications technologies, the railroad and the telegraph, and encounters with native peoples; yet these images do not coalesce into “the Western” as such. In this paper I will explore the notion of the Australian Western in the context of “Outback and Beyond.” Why did Australia not develop the Western in the formative years of its cinema industry? And what does it mean to propose a live Western, built from archival materials?

The unregulated speech acts enabled by the Internet create powerful new forms of resistance to, and powerful new forms of complicity with, Western Enlightenment structures of capitalism and power. Following Marcus Breen’s text, Uprising, this article examines two sites/cites where the Internet’s unregulated speech resounds simultaneously in these seemingly opposing registers: “Public Disgrace: Women Bound, Stripped and Punished in Public” – the same Internet pornography site discussed by Breen – and, the viral video created by twenty six year old Egyptian civil rights activist, Asmaa Mahfouz. I argue that, while these certainly may serve as examples of the disparate nature of unregulated Internet speech, they may also be understood as strategic responses to the Internet as globalizing sign system and to the highly gendered and racialised nature of contemporary post-colonial geopolitics.

The question of the relationship between the Internet and privatism was presented in Uprising: The Internet’s Unintended Consequences (2011a) as an aspect of contemporary life that requires detailed research and theory. In an effort to offer more analysis around the theory of privatism in an interdisciplinary context this paper draws on Sam Bass Warner’s 1968 study The Private City: Philadelphia in three periods of its growth, which traced the emergence of privatism as a uniquely American phenomenon. Drawing on Warner’s material, this paper argues that privatism theory can be considered the prevailing new modality of meaning making in the Internet era, generated through commercial imperatives from the American center and circulating outwards like so many waves in the global pool. It combines the technical structures that facilitate the flow of the Internet’s unregulated digital media together with the agency it offers users to engage with deep value flows that have constructed ideology with a United States (American) default. Privatism is elaborated within this context using critical theory to elaborate on the ideology inherent in the new meaning landscape that impact constructions of the self through “cumulative internalisation.” Using approaches associated with cultural and media studies, the paper traces the way the Internet has influenced the shift in the culture towards values associated with the confluence of ideas around the private, best described by privatism.

The relationship between nature and contemporary visual art has been a source of critical interest since conceptualist earthworks projects by Smithson and others in the sixties, and the formalist terms of conversation that emerged then have dominated the way we talk about environmental art. On the other extreme, activist art makes explicit political and pedagogical appeals for ecological causes. However, a third case of environmental artists that make public encounter a powerful aspect and catalyst of real changes in understanding our relationship to nature – exemplified here by Andy Goldsworthy and David Nash – work in a mode that creates an aesthetics and rhetoric of relation between artist, work, and public. There has yet to be a unified and sustained vocabulary with which to talk about this work, but two contemporary theorists of aesthetics, Nicolas Bourriaud and Ariella Azoulay, each provide fruitful beginnings for a new vocabulary of this body of contemporary environmental art. Bourriaud’s controversial term “relational aesthetics” – a call to art that works as a space of reconfiguring social relations — and what Ariella Azoulay calls a “civil contract” way of seeing both provide an entry into describing this work. Combining these ideas, the resulting concept of “civil relationality” can then be applied to this “third case” of environmental art, used to recuperate Bourriaud’s much-criticized ideas, and expanded to larger currents in contemporary art.

It has long been acknowledged that in Inuit society, there exists an alternation or rhythm between an intense collective religious life in the winter and a comparatively profane summer marked by smaller scale social encounters. In this way, changes in the natural world are bound together with alterations in social and affective life. This relationship between natural conditions and social-cultural distributions is discussed in Marcel Mauss and Henri Beuchat’s classic study of seasonal variations among the Inuit. Using the ethnographic material available to them, Mauss and Beuchat demonstrate a strong connection, but not a causal one, between the extreme natural seasonal changes and the patterns of social and religious circumpolar life. Focusing in particular on how this mediation between the space-time of a community and its material substratum manifests itself in religious life, this paper offers some slight revisions to Mauss and Beuchat’s idea of social morphology, by reconsidering it in light of more recent ethnographic and historical literature, on the one hand, and the theoretical work of Henri Lefebvre and Augustin Berque, on the other. Taken together, Lefebvre and Berque model a way of thinking about how physical changes in the environment take on meaning and affective tonalities for communities and individuals.

In the popular presentation of calls to “unplug,” whether in the classroom or simply day-to-day life, young people may find their images summoned as an indicator of a changing nature of literacy, communication and understanding of the world around us. However, calls to re-introduce the young to “slow” spaces may leave the real challenges to cultural literacy unharmed, or even re-enforced. This paper will briefly examine two images of the young summoned in the counter-intuitively “fast” discussion of the “slow” unplugging movement and tie these to the recurring historical narrative of a more authentic “slow” space freed from human activity though various cultural analyses by Slavoj Žižek. This will suggest that “slow” spaces may emerge as Carnivalesque eruptions rather than true spaces of cultural change. Engagement with cultural literacy will then be examined in relation to the Affective Domain of learning that produces the normalisation of values and world-views rather than mere replication of tasks, to suggest that, while institutions’ images may benefit from the presence of “slow spaces,” educators may find their actual engagement with slow learning and the Affective Domain to be an unsupported and unintegrated secondary addition to the primary “real-world” services expected by the institution and students.

The paper addresses the presentation of self in the documentary classic Grey Gardens (The Maysles, USA 1976). Drawing from the work of the American sociologist Erving Goffman and particularly from the Hungarian film theorist Béla Balázs and his outline of the facial close-up, the paper elaborates on the presentation of self on the axis of framing and performing. Instead of emphasizing the premises of authenticity and true character – as is customary in analyses of the film – the paper proposes to view Grey Gardens in terms of asymmetric communication. The paper argues that it is in the asymmetric disposition of framing and performing a self that the documentary carries out the making of the Beales of Grey Gardens into legends.