Thursday 4th November, 1:30pm-3:30pm
Online
Please join us for the next C3P research seminar on Thursday 4th November, 1:30PM-3:30PM. As usual, the seminar is designed to encourage C3P members to share materials around their current work so we can familiarise ourselves with each other’s research and facilitate discussion around the work. This seminar will contain discussion around works by Dr Chris Comerford, Dr Chris Moore and Ren Vetoretto, Annemaree Dalziel and Samantha Lang.
Dr Chris Comerford, Dr Chris Moore and Ren Vetoretto
WandaVision and Comfort TV: the Assemblage of Content and Technique”
As the first Disney Plus serialised television event featuring the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), WandaVisionis an important contribution to the ‘experience aesthetic’ central to Disney’s marketing of its transmedia empire. We examine how the concept of ‘comfort TV’ is represented in and constructed by the relationship between narrative content and the technological strata or ‘technique’ of cinematic television in the production, distribution, and reception of WandaVision. Through an analysis of the narrative world of WandaVision, which features the concept of comfort TV as a central framing device, we consider the negotiation and subversion of the ideological values of the nuclear family with attention to the role of the family sitcom format, superhero genre and the themes of magic and mental health. In addition, we consider the technique of the human and non-human actants enrolled in the assemblage of the Disney experience aesthetic via the new streaming video-on-demand (SVOD) service, Disney Plus, and its role in the experience of fan and audience participation in the carefully managed branding and marketing strategies of a corporate media enterprise. We argue that in seeking to build a new lineage of comfort TV experiences, WandaVision combines highly nostalgic content with contemporary techniques of production and distribution that highlights the difference between traditional episodic release schedules punctuated by specific time intervals and the instant access of ‘dropped’ serialised content on other streaming platforms.
Annemaree Dalziel (PhD candidate, TAEM)
Knitting Repairs
Respondent: Jennifer Saunders
In 2020 I presented my Imperial Stockings project to a textile network in the Southern Highlands. This project uses knitted socks to recall a forgotten history of traumatic displacement in 18th and 19th century Gaelic Scotland. Constellated around ruptured bonds between people, place and culture, Imperial Stockings invites people in my community to participate in an imaginative creative practice project, exploring and mapping embodied intergenerational memory of cultural grief and trauma. After my talk, the editor of Australian craft magazine Yarn invited me to contribute a story to her upcoming Harmony edition. I needed to respond to theme in an accessible voice. This article charts the intuitive decisions and personal lived experiences that led me to choose knitting as a vehicle for this imaginative foray into a difficult past. Significantly, it reflects the hope at the heart of my thesis, that there is more to human nature than the forces currently fragmenting relationships and destroying ecologies. That we can transform the unclaimed experience of the past into a more connected way of being with each other and our lovely planet.
Samantha Lang
Sick Planet Theory
Taking inspiration from crip theory frameworks that centre non-normative bodies/minds, and utilising cripping counternarratives, “Sick Planet Theory: A Crip Manifesto for an Imagined Future,” builds a foundation for new ways to reflect upon the histories of environmental art. By countering the erasure of illness, sickness and disability in environmental discourse, this project demonstrates how creating space for chronically ill and sick bodies in environmental art allows for a more nuanced understanding of the current environmental catastrophe. Investigating the connections between environmental art, sick bodies and textile practice provides fertile ground for forcing a dialogue with works of environmental art that have not previously been interpreted through a crip disability lens. By establishing illness, sickness and crip-ness as places of power in environmental art discourses, Sick Planet Theory proposes that a crip worldmaking framework can identify oppressive structures in environmental art, legitimise crip artmaking practice and establish how the lived experience of disabled artists can redefine what it means to make environmental art in the Anthropocene.
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Chris Comerford is a Lecturer in Communication and Media at the University of Wollongong. His research analyses cinematic television, digital agency and social media pedagogies.
Christopher Moore is a Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media at the University of Wollongong. His research involves game experience design, digital media and future studies.
Ren Vettoretto is a PhD candidate at the University of Wollongong. She is currently completing a project on Netflix audience habits and the streaming revolution.
Annemaree Dalziel is an interdisciplinary artist, activist and theatre maker living in Mittagong. A DCA candidate at the University of Wollongong, she is using knitted history to open an exploration of embodied memory of cultural grief, with regional people of Gaelic Scots descent.
Samantha Lang is a queer, crip textile and fibre artist based in the Illawarra. She is currently a Master of Philosophy (Creative Arts) candidate at the University of Wollongong. Samantha’s artworks focus on finding ways to translate her experiences with chronic illness into tangible forms. Samantha works with and within the limitations of time, materials and health. Her hand-woven and crocheted forms are comprised solely of reclaimed and deconstructed garments, recycled yarns and other locally sourced second-hand materials.
Feature image: Annemaree Dalziel Imperial Stockings