'D’Arcy and the Gnomons'
Gavin Baker, Computer Science and Software Engineering
What does a mollusk called ‘head-foot’ and a Scotsman with a penchant for ice-cream have in common? The answer lies in a sunflower. Or the path of an insect as it flies toward a light. Or a Greek column. Or a pineapple. Is mathematics to be found in a textbook or a shell? When scientists model nature, are we inventing something new, or simply discovering relationships as old as the universe itself? And how can all this help design hearing implants?
'It Ain’t Over ’Til'
Alyson Campbell, Creative Arts
The absence of a curtain call, like many absences, speaks more loudly than its presence.This paper emerges in response to Brink Productions’ performance of Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis in Adelaide, October 2004. Struck by the vehement response of the audience to the failure of the actors to return to the emptied stage to ‘take a bow’, I began to ponder the crucial, liminal position of this act that has long survived the disappearance of the actual curtain itself. As a result of this informal musing, I suggest that the absent curtain call is not mere aesthetic conceit, but political choice.
'‘The Spiritual Mind’: The Neuroscience of Spiritual Experience'
Aaron Smith, History and Philosophy of Science
Neuroscientific evidence reveals that spiritual exercises can precipitate connective and transformative experiences. This article highlights the neuroscientific data which reveal that spiritual experiences are associated with the manifestation of specific brain activities in the hippocampus and amygdala. These experiences usually occur during meditation or prayer, and are characterised by feelings of well-being, connection, and temporal and spatial distortion. Meditation has also been linked with brain wave synchrony and is suspected to confer permanent changes upon long-term practitioners. Although underdeveloped, the neuroscientific evidence suggests that spiritual experience is mired exclusively in identifiable brain activity. However, although well-equipped to reveal the physiological conditions associated with spiritual experience, neuroscience is silent on the psychological meaning and impact of such events.
'The Promethean Artist: From Thief, via Metaphysical Rebel, to Cliché'
Paul Monaghan, Creative Arts/Classics
It has become a commonplace to call a great artist ‘Promethean’. But how did we get from Hesiod’s wily thief, via Aeschylus’ founder of all human culture, to Goethe and the Romantics’ creative genius with a distinctly metaphysical and rebellious edge, to Nietzsche’s necessary sacrilege, then finally to cliché where the symbolic credentials of the Promethean artist empty out into a (Romantic) commonplace? This article traces the genealogy of the transformation of Prometheus from a quasi-comic thief to creative genius and rebel, and argues that Nietzsche’s use of the inherently metaphysical Prometheus in The Birth of Tragedy paradoxically hastened the Titan’s fall into empty topos.
'‘Spinning Our Wheels’: The Inability of Traffic Policy to Change Driver Behaviour'
Rick Clapton, History
During the twentieth century, road-traffic authorities’ loss reduction policies have relied on three essential elements to reduce road deaths: human behaviour, the road and the vehicle.Within the triumvirate of traffic safety there have been huge investments to improve oads and vehicles, and to the third aspect a significant portion of the resources have attempted to influence driver behaviour. Despite this focus on the driver, motoring attitudes have changed little in the course of three motoring generations. By examining the changing traffic death reduction policies of Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the United States over the last two centuries, this paper will argue that reduction in traffic deaths has been a direct result of improved roads, vehicles and safety restraints, which have accommodated higher road speeds, rather than encouraging ‘safer’ driving practices.
'‘All Beauty Must Die’: The Aesthetics of Murder, from Thomas De Quincy to Nick Cave'
David McInnis, English
Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads album, possibly the most controversial piece of work in his oeuvre, is rarely (if ever) considered as a serious artistic work which significantly engages with any literary or aesthetic tradition. With the intention of redressing this erroneous perception, this paper develops a comparison between Cave’s album and a series of essays (‘On murder, considered as one of the fine arts’) by the Romantic author Thomas De Quincey. De Quincey’s essays are used to position Cave’s ballads in their historical and intellectual context, taking into consideration the links (in relation to the sublime and the aesthetics of murder) between Romanticism and contemporary culture.
‘Mirror, Mirror on the Wall’: The Positioning Hypothesis
Tal Azran, Media and Communications
Based on an intensive study of the United States media’s framingof Al-Jazeera, this paper argues that the emergence of hybrid Eastern-Western networks is a new cultural form that requires new conceptual thinking. Both modernist Orientalism and the post-modernist concept of hybridity are too binary to adequately interpret the transformation in the global media. Instead, this paper identifies the encounter between the Western media and the new ‘in-between’ Arab media as a ‘third space’, which borders between the colonial discourses of ‘Orientalism’ and ‘primitivism’, and the post-modern globalisation discourse of cross-cultural hybridisation.
'Camp Lite or Camp Bite? Camp as a Post-subcultural Sensibility in The Stepford Wives'
Patricia Bieszk, Cinema Studies
The notion of camp has been a site of critical contestation since its first academic appearance in Susan Sontag’s ‘Notes on camp’ (1964). This article argues against the concept of ‘Camp Lite’ and the dismissal of camp’s potential for critique due to its mainstreaming and appearance outside of the gay subculture through an analysis of the new version of The Stepford Wives (2004). The homogenised notions of the straight, the dominant and the subcultural are challenged in the reading of the film and the critical and audience responses to it.
'A Curse on Literature! A Discussion of the Eighth Lesson of J M Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello'
Elizabeth MacFarlane, Creative Arts
In the final ‘Lesson’ of Coetzee’s 2003 novel Elizabeth Costello, the title character is faced with a courtroom straight out of Kafka. She must here confront her identity as a writer and provide what is ultimately a performance of belief. My discussion uses Kafka’s precedent story ‘Before the Law’ and Derrida’s essay of the same name to inquire into what, for Coetzee, are the questions surrounding the author on the stand about the difference between the event or practice of literature and the Law of literature. And further: how does an author reconcile or embody both timelessness and transience when the pen hits the page? Coetzee has created a specific character with strangely universal motives; the discussion addresses the kinds of divides this engenders on the page and in the reader.
'Something is Rotten in Blue Velvet… An Exploration of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet via Shakespeare’s Hamlet'
Francesca Haig, Creative Arts
This article explores David Lynch’s controversial 1986 film Blue Velvet, through its unexpected parallels with Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The article lays out the narrative and symbolic parallels between the two texts, including their plot similarities, the Oedipal dramas inherent to each, their remarkably similar use of imagery and their respective use of the madonna/whore dichotomy in their treatment of women. The striking parallels between the film and Shakespeare’s tragedy are used to elaborate on the existing reception of the film, to support the argument that the film’s conclusion is a parodic, rather than happy, ending.