Cruising the staged Wonderland: Scenographic photography and the queering of space

This article attempts to introduce and define the creative practice of ‘scenographic photography’ through the exploration of a body of practice-based research completed as part of a Ph.D. at the University of Tasmania in 2018. As research, it examines how traditionally representational forms of photography and scenography can inform each other through the more performative mode of ‘scenographic photography’, an interdisciplinary neologism operating between the performing, spatial and visual arts. Throughout this article, in attempting to define ‘scenographic photography’ as an emergent field, I will concurrently explore how queer space making was used as a critical tool for the research, visualization, execution and exhibiting of this body of work. The title of the body of work – Cruising Wonderland – refers to a specific ‘beat’ site in Sydney associated with illicit encounters and the homophobic violence it engendered during the 1980s, as well as an embodied means of re-presenting such traumatic histories. Within Cruising Wonderland scenographic scale-model making is adopted as a critical tool with which to interrogate specific sites of queer trauma. The inherent ‘wonder’ and fascination associated with the art of the miniature encourages the possibility of a reparative reading not always possible via the explicit documentary tradition of photographing actual sites of trauma. Once presented the audience are required to ‘cruise’ the darkened exhibition environment, like the ‘beat’ spaces referenced in the work, with an acute sensory awareness of their surroundings, of fellow spectators and how they, as participants within Wonderland, perform and are perceived by others. This immersive approach to engaging with the work is designed to encourage a process of empathic engagement, illuminating often-invisible histories, allowing us to move towards reparation through active re-witnessing.

Preface

The Proceeding contains papers based on invited keynote speeches and oral presentations at the International Conference on Digital & Empathic Architecture & Civil Engineering (DEACE 2021) and International Student Workshop. The event was organized by the Faculty of Civil Engineering & Planning, Petra Christian University (PCU), Surabaya, Indonesia on August 20th-21st, 2021 for the international conference and August 12th-21st, 2021 for the workshop as a series of events celebrating the 60th Anniversary of Petra Christian University. The event covered several topics: ‘Structural Engineering and Materials’, ‘Building Science and Technology’, ‘Construction Management’, and ‘Architecture and Urban Development’. DEACE presented a theme: “Digital and Empathic Engagement in the New Era for Architecture and Civil Engineering”. Digital engagement can revolutionize approach to design and engineering while supporting opportunities to accommodate the implementation of advanced technology. While empathic engagement reflects not only on effectively design and build infrastructure to meet safety and other regulatory requirements, but also understanding customer essential needs. DEACE aimed to gather researchers, scholars, and practitioners all over the world to share and exchange their knowledge and breakthrough in the fields of Architecture and Civil Engineering especially toward the new era. As the event was approaching and there was no sign of the Covid-19 pandemic slowing down earlier that year, it was decided not to postpone the event but to hold it virtually instead. The conference started with plenary sessions with four keynote speakers, and followed by parallel sessions in two rooms with four sessions. Each keynote speech took 45 minutes and 30 minutes for presentation and discussion, respectively. While speakers in parallel sessions were given 15 minutes and 5 minutes for presentation and discussion. The were 30 presenters out of 159 participants in total, consist of both academicians and professionals. They came from Indonesia as well as some other countries such as China, Taiwan, Germany, Japan and Australia. Zoom video conferencing application was used in the event which served the event very well. Editor of DEACE 2021, Dr. Antoni Antoni Dr. Pamuda Pudjisuryadi List of Welcome Speech, DEACE 2021 Scientific Committee, DEACE 2021 Conference and Workshop Coordinator and DEACE 2021 Documentation are available in this pdf.

Fiction as a Means to Understanding the Dynamics of Empathy

The current study investigated whether the reflective reading of fiction can provide an experiential definition of empathy to supplement more traditional concept analyses. A secondary aim was to look at the rates of absorption (loss of time and space) relative to the rate of reported empathic engagement. Based on earlier studies on reading fiction as an engagement in a social simulation, it was predicted that because fiction is a controlled experience, reading and talking about fiction could provide a forum in which to examine actual experiences of empathy elicitation in relation to an evolving situation. A survey was conducted with 210 student participants over a three-year period. The results show that the empathetic response to narrative is affected in a variety of ways by the presence or absence of an initial sense of affinity and by cognitive input over time, that is, the changing perception of characters and the situations with which they are confronted. Adept readers are more likely to experience absorption, and those who experience absorption are more likely to be empathetically responsive to input and changes in a situation. Empathetic emotions and cognitive empathy can be experienced for multiple objects simultaneously in one situation and relate to past events and potential futures, but they also shift from object to object.

Thelma: Empathic engagement and the Norwegian horror cinema

Genre filmmaking has become very important in Norwegian cinema in the years since 2000, even to the point of certain art cinema directors like Joachim Trier creating types of horror movies. I argue that Trier’s intimate, subtle approach to the main character in his psychological horror film Thelma deepens and expands the experience of Norwegian horror.

Empathy and the ecology of musical consciousness

Consciousness, both generally and in music, has been regarded as an individual capacity or attribute, despite increasing recognition of the extended, embodied, embedded, and enactive character of the human mind, and the intersubjectivity of human experience. This chapter proposes empathy as a fruitful way to engage with the collective quality of musical consciousness. It touches upon broader and narrower conceptions of empathy, and considers the ways in which aesthetic objects, including music, as well as living subjects, can afford empathic engagement. A discussion of neuroscientific, psychological, and cultural understandings of empathy leads to a consideration of empirical evidence for musically mediated empathy, and a more speculative attempt to understand people’s ‘strong experiences with music’ in terms of empathic musical consciousness—with a particular focus on the voice. Recordings of performances by Janis Joplin and Chet Baker illustrate what it is about their voices that may afford empathic engagement and a palpable sense of intersubjective musical consciousness.

Intimate and Epic Macbeths in Contemporary Performance

The recent performance history of Macbeth illustrates two tendencies discernible in contemporary Shakespeare performance more widely: the strong, empathic engagement characteristic of theatrical intimacy in the Aristotelian vein and the vast, distancing sweep of epic as theorized by Bertolt Brecht and, later, Walter Benjamin. By considering productions by Punchdrunk, Rift, John Tiffany and Andrew Goldberg, Kenneth Branagh and Rob Ashford, and Grzegorz Jarzyna, this chapter argues that epic theatre as proposed by Brecht and Benjamin is a marked feature of immersive productions, which combine the impression of intimacy with the distancing effect of the epic. Using Elinor Fuchs’s notion of landscape theatre, it concludes that in contemporary apolitical epic theatre, intimacy can be achieved outside Aristotelian catharsis or character and even beyond the notion of humanity.