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Lisa Stansbie

Zeppelinbend: Multiplicity, encyclopaedic strategies and nonlinear methodologies for a visual practice

Abstract

This research draws on the notion of multiplicity, specifically as defined by Italo Calvino (1988), investigating its implications and possible uses in devising strategies to generate art works. The project uses the internet as a chaotic source of unlimited information to generate a continuing series of associations constructed into an ever-expanding digital archive as the basis for the creation of new film and material object based works, resulting in a hybrid approach to digital (immaterial) and material visual practices.

With regard to this use of the internet, notions of appropriation are articulated, with particular reference to McKenzie Wark’s (2004) notion of hacking, doubling and re-presenting new information from old or existing information. The research has also necessitated an interrogation of fictional aspects of the archive and how non-linear approaches to objects, texts and images affect the shifting, fluid relationship of the audience/user/viewer to the work. Precedents in literature, such as Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, the OuLiPo group, William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Marc Saporta and others have been drawn upon in this aspect of the research.

The submission is structured as a website/CD Rom containing distinct but interconnected areas including:

• The interactive digital archive itself;
• A series of digital, film-based and sculptural/installation art works made using systematic writing methodologies derived from the archive to create narratives that are simultaneously ‘truthful’ in source and ‘fictive’ in outcome;
• Documentation of the realisation and public presentation of these works in which questions of site are reflected upon and evaluated through the testing of ‘mobilised sites’ as they are disseminated in multiple formats using immaterial and material platforms;
• A series of hyperlinked texts critically articulating the primary themes of the research and providing the context for the art works.

The interconnection of these components is intended to enable a reader/user to move in a non-linear way through them, mirroring the associative threads enmeshed in the methodology of the entire project.