VIII. Beside, on the other side, 2019 - 2024

 

Our experience of the moving image is intimately connected to our experience of  place (Garfinkel & Rhodes, 2011).

 

Despite the emergence of new scholarship addressing how the moving-image constructs and communicates geographies, there remains an uncertainty on how best to proceed within this theoretical landscape: “discourse on film, space, and place, may be seen as a jumble of discursive waypoints that confound as much as guide our way through a critical landscape that at times resembles an interdisciplinary quagmire.” (Hallam and Roberts, 2013). Such studies, as well as being typically orientated to the urban, often referring critical discourses of psychogeography, have largely invoked a homogeneity amongst moving-image practices, negating the increasing multiplication of approaches to the medium. An area of interest, that has often been neglected from this growing discourse, is the unique, and in some senses liberated, position artists hold invoking and deforming film’s spatiality.

 

Beside, on the other side: disorientation, filmic geographies and the authoring of place, investigates how experimental film based spatial practices are addressing the representation and materiality of place. experimental film-based spatial practices are addressing the representation and materiality of place. Drawing upon practitioners such as Rosa Barba, Tacita Dean, Pierre Huyghe, Marinne Hugonnier, Lisa Rehiana, and Anne Charlotte Robertson, working at the cross-sections between contemporary art, documentary and film, we will examine how filmic heritage and the spatial vernacular of moving-image are being appropriated to forge new positions and geographies that reflect the postmodernist ‘spatial turn’ (Soja, 2010).

 

In the foreground of this PhD, lies the practice itself — a body of moving-image work. My aspiration to undertake doctoral studies stemmed from recurrent themes within my artistic practice, informed by my experience as an Australian inhabiting another island on the other side of the globe. Increasingly I have looked to the moving-image and filmic heritage as a means to expose interwoven narratives that span time and place. Combining contemporary theories of landscape with early shooting instruments, my works propose hybrid geographical positions, conceptualising spaces as fragmented and in continual flux.

 

Beside, on the other side, an online project that forms part of the doctorate is viewable online here:

www.beside.alasdairasmussendoyle.com

 

The PhD is being undertaken in partnership with aemi [artist experimental moving-image], under the supervision of Dan Shipsides, Aisling O'Beirn and Willie Doherty, and is funded through the Northern Bridge Consortium.