Situated Attentions was made in and with 'Footscray' in the inner west of Naarm. This is Marin Balluk Country, belonging to Wurundjeri peoples of the Eastern Kulin Nation. The digital files that make up this webpage are stored on and pulled from various locations - including on Manahoac land in 'Virginia' on Turtle Island. I pay my respect and gratitude to the Elders and communities of the First Nations peoples on whose land, water and air this work occupies, and whose resources I consume.
This project explores situated attention in and with place as a guide for the development of hybrid listening/browser-based creative works. Three experimental, hand-coded webpages produced in and with the more-than-human neighbourhood of 'Footscray' and the inner west of Naarm/'Melbourne' on Wurundjeri Country are the focus of the dissertation: Local Time, this time around, and dispersal. Examining associated fieldwork, soundwalking, foraging, gardening, audio recording, listening and experimental creative coding uncovers a narrowing of attention, from ambient to embodied, to interaction enacted with a practitioner's hands.
By paying close attention to the vital role of the attentive body of the maker, while contemplating questions and sitting with tensions of settler-colonial belonging, making-with, the ethics of place-based creative practice on stolen land, and materialities of web infrastructures, this PhD argues that situated knowledges of place are vital to careful, ethical and sustainable practice. These situated knowledges are centred on local attention as a way to refuse, make visible, and create alternatives to default modes of being in place and in the browser. The practice-based research presented here offers an assemblage of contributions to interdisciplinary communities of practice including acoustic ecology, creative audio, web design and net art.
This PhD unfolded in three key three phases, mirrored in the three chapters of the dissertation. This webpage collates key examples of relevant project work, organised in relation to the dissertation chapter titles.
The project explored in this first chapter of the dissertation is web browser-based ambient listening experience Local Time, presented as part of Avantwhatever Festival 2020.
My use of, and relationship to, clock time was explored in the essay Offset, first published on the Akadamie Schloss Solitude website.
The project explored in the second chapter of the dissertation is the 'digital sketch' this time around, a non-linear interactive listening experience that documents a series of soundwalks.
this time around was published in partnership with ADSR Zine and commissioned by Chamber Made, who invited me to be one of the artists in residence at their 2020 Hi-Viz Practice Exchange. Documentation and a reflective essay about the development of the project was published in ADSR Zine 012.
Chapter 2 writing also draws from the transcript and audio description of my December 2020 contribution to the WFMU program Radio Row.
The final chapter of the dissertation centres on the fieldwork, audio recording and web development of the 2023 web browser work dispersal.
dispersal was developed during my web residency as part of Akadamie Schloss Solitude and Liquid Architecture's Algorithmic Poetry program. I discussed the work in an interview with Lucreccia Quintanilla and Suvani Suri.