Author Archives: brogan

Budawangs

I envisage a project that involves myself and later others walking up into the Budawangs mountain ranges, stopping here and there for a few hours, a day or several days to form small camps and read and transcribe short books. … Continue reading

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Notes

Leibniz introduces the uncertain space of apperception. This can be related to the sphere of art and aesthetics. Perhaps it is the prefix ‘a’ that is especially pertinent? In the sense of ‘no, not, without, away from, negative’. Apperception represents … Continue reading

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Question(s)

At one level, I can conceive the aesthetic in particular terms, but then quickly discern other possibilities. I am tempted, for instance, by the 18th century notion of the aesthetic as concerned with the realm of sensible experience, but am … Continue reading

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Aesthetic Mediation

We shift now from focusing on the artistic medium as the bridge to dimensions of experience that exceed rational forms of understanding to focusing on experience itself as a medial condition. There is no longer a need to posit the … Continue reading

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Aesthetic Dust

While browsing through books on aesthetics in the UOW library, I came across Eighteenth Century Aesthetics and the Reconstruction of Art (Mattick, P. (ed.), 1993). Bound in black and covered in a thick layer of dusk, the book had only … Continue reading

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Samples

Some sample efforts at ground level studies for upcoming ‘Walking Upstream – Waterways of the Illawarra’ exhibition at Wollongong City Gallery:

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Materiality/Ideality

At the beginning of his second volume of The Philosophy of Nature Hegel writes of the nature of sunlight. Arguing against the view that sunlight is the product of material (chemical) combustion – and thus any sense of an association … Continue reading

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Ground Level Sample

Rather than attempting to map an entire creek, I am considering representing a single section of a creek in detail – at a scale of 1 to 1. Furthermore, rather than attempting to represent the selected site via a single … Continue reading

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Code 003

Code led me to think more discretely. It enabled to conceives processes and systems in modular terms. Code also enabled me to think more holistically – to consider systems as sets of choreographed entities and processes. Of course, systems also … Continue reading

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Code 002

It is quite possible, of course, that I learned nothing from code, that any lessons that I discern now are simply self-serving – enabling me to shape a productive relation to an experience that could equally be represented as one … Continue reading

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Code 001

Note to self: consider the relationship between the experience of wider social change associated with globalisation (the spatial extension, temporal speed and overall intensification of processes of flow, communication and exchange) and the experience of programming. Coding shapes a microcosm … Continue reading

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Code 000

It’s roughly five years ago that I gave up programming. I gave up in the midst of a long project that involved the recursive subdivision of regular polygons. This makes it sound like I was some expert in geometry, but … Continue reading

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Aesthetics/Motion

What is the relationship between aesthetics and movement? What kind of aesthetic receptivity does the experience of movement produce? Here my interest is less psychological than historical and cultural. My interest is in how the experience of art is anticipated, … Continue reading

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Street Insult

I really didn’t know what he was saying when I turned the corner on to Smith’s Street. He was standing just outside Domino’s – very thin, tight patterned brown trousers, straggly beard, filthy bare feet. He was yelling something at … Continue reading

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Transforming Waterways

(Short paper I gave at the ‘Transforming Waterways’ session of the Global Ecologies – Local Impacts conference, Sydney University, 23-25 November 2016) The question that I want to address in this paper is that of transformation, particularly art’s capacity to … Continue reading

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Reclamation?

I’m trying to make sense of our creek-walking, particularly in terms of its relationship to more clearly environmental restoration based activities. We have tended not to intervene in creek environments. We have walked through them. We have engaged in conversations, … Continue reading

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Several Days

Have been in Brighton for several days now.  Have roughly recovered from jet lag, even went bouldering two days ago, but this morning a slight collapse – brief episode of sleepiness. Have not yet found adequate means of describing this … Continue reading

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Jet Lag

In summary, we missed the 6am flight and had to take the next at 9:10pm.  Sat in a cafe all day with our bags.  Long, uneventful flight to Dubai.  Arrived at 5:20am.  Caught connecting flight to London at 8:30am.  Landed … Continue reading

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Excuse for Writing

Too tired to think deliberately.  I walked out into the cold morning beyond the terminal – out to a valet car park and back.  Wrong level for trees. Failing to walk down the stairs.  Recognising that we are stuck here … Continue reading

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Losing Money

What does it matter that some money is gone?  Money is always going or gone.  When we try to save it, things happen to make it go in massive, unexpected chunks.  Somebody explained the karma of money to me – … Continue reading

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Missed Flight

So we missed the flight.  Somehow thought the flight was at 8:30am, when it was actually 6am.  Our early start (3am) wasted.  Big expense buying new tickets for this evening.  Dumb, but what can we do.  Sitting in a airport cafe trying … Continue reading

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Art, Fieldwork and the Academy

Who says I’m not a writer or an architect or anything? Who has the authority to decide these things? […] Honestly, I am a fraud, I’m an outsider in all these fields, but this gives me the liberty to work … Continue reading

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On the Infinite in Painting

My concern here is not with sublime prospects. The infinite’ that concerns me here is more prosaic and technical. It is linked to George Cantor’s notion of multiple infinities. Of course I am not dealing with numerical prospects, but with … Continue reading

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Dreaming of Field Trips

I can recall being despondent one day in my early years of High School. I was sick in bed and unable to go on a long anticipated field trip to the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden (Miami, Florida). The garden had … Continue reading

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Still Thinking About Field Work

…the experimental artist who plays with the commonplace does so in the very midst of crossing the street or tying a shoelace. There is no excerpting and reenacting them on a stage, no documenting them for a show. Art is … Continue reading

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