Selected Journal Articles
Denton, Andrew, and Andrew Gibbons. “Flight, Climate Change, and Dangerous Times for Art and Pedagogy: Video Essay and Digital Paper.” Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy 5, no. 1 (2020): 1-7.
Link: https://brill.com/view/journals/vjep/5/1/article-p1_6.xml
Abstract:
In his last book Chaosmosis, Felix Guattari (1995, p. 129) argues that both “intellectuals and artists have got nothing to teach anyone,” and that they produce “toolkits composed of concepts, percepts and affects, which diverse publics will use at their convenience.” In this video presentation and accompanying article, the authors explore Guattari’s claim as a provocation for visual pedagogy and play with the idea that an artist might have nothing to teach anyone in relation to the idea of visual pedagogies. And, then, what happens when an artist and a teacher talk about visual pedagogies? To open up a dialogue, they employ the cliché, ‘I don’t know much about art but I know what I like’. This statement invites thoughts on the tensions between truth-telling, disciplinarity, and affect. Here the authors take the cliché a step further within the context of visual pedagogies and meaning making. They position this dialogue with the cinematic art work, Flight (2018), which aims to give the viewer a different sensation of the world, to render the familiar unfamiliar, and to let things be (Roder & Sturm, 2017), in order to think differently.
Denton, Andrew. “Affective modes of cinematic inquiry: Oil and subjective distance in Crude (2016) and Flight (2016).” PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature 12 (2016): 195-202.
Link to PAN Editorial: https://bridges.monash.edu/articles/journal_contribution/Place_emotional_practices_geographical_perspectives/4315103
Abstract:
This article, and accompanying photo-essay, present snapshots of some of the images and thoughts that reside in and around the recently completed essayist film Crude (2016) and a companion video installation Flight (2016). The works, produced by the writer, attempt ‘essayer’ to see and hear some of the elusive signs of anthropogenic climate change through affective cinematic devices, making what is invisible visible, to evoke contemplations on the subject of ecological crisis through subjects directly or tenuously connected to human reliance on fossil fuels. They seek to agitate a space of contemplation, uneasiness and sadness by engaging with the residual and stratified signs of our collective impact on our environment. The practice-based project works from the position that another tactic for progressing discourses around anthropogenic climate and geological change might be poetic or affective modes of cinematic inquiry.
Connors, Teresa, and Andrew Denton. “In Environments: The convergence and divergence of practice.” Organised Sound 23, no. 1 (2018): 29-38.
Abstract:
This article explores our audiovisual collaborative outputs and the methods employed to negotiate converging and diverging creative directions in the production of artistic works, in the context of philosophies that influence our thinking-making processes, as well the engagement with new modes of artistic practice. A key feature connecting our collaborations is site-specific field recordings of audio and visual materials. Our work has spanned Canada, the United States and New Zealand, producing a catalogue of works that are intrinsically linked to geographic and everyday phenomena. To support our discussion of the creative process, we critique one recent work, Aspects of Trees (2013, 2015), as a case study that synthesises concerns associated with collaboration, while also illustrating the recent sharp turn in our individual practices. The outcome is a reorientation of our thinking-making procedures, including ideas of subjective experiences of time, place and the agency of human and non-human bodies.
Andrew Denton 