Collision: Interarts Practice and Research
Editor: David Cecchetto, Nancy Cuthbert, Julie Lassonde and Dylan Robinson
Date Of Publication: Dec 2008
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-0031-0
Isbn: 1-4438-0031-7
With very few exceptions, interdisciplinary art and interarts practices—examined as such, including the perspective of artist-researchers, and not subsumed under a singular category of performance or visual art—have, until now, been largely ignored. While it would be simplistic to think that this collection somehow rectifies the “piecemeal” status of this discourse, our wager is that this collection works towards presenting an understanding of this status as, in a certain sense, constitutive of the field.

Beginning with an introduction to the very multiplicities that compose and complicate interdisciplinary practices, then moving into questions of body/technology, location/movement, space/practice, performativity/aesthetics, this collection covers an enormous amount, while still retaining an overarching sense of unity in the context of the subject as a whole. Each of these sections negotiates a series of interrelated collisions in order to address a range of theoretical positions, as well as a variety of international and cultural perspectives. In addition to addressing the notion of interdisciplinarity and the challenges of specific interarts practices, this publication seeks to question how we might understand interarts practice in a way that does not exclude perspectives such as spirituality, law, political activism and community development, to name only a few. The inclusion of these disparate practices within this publication—itself a site of collision of the poetic, the conversational, and the theoretical—is thus not presented as an attempt to unify or normalize them, but rather as a productive charting of their radical explosion; a collision that is always a colliding.

David Cecchetto is an Interdisciplinary Ph.D. candidate in Cultural, Social, and Political Thought at the University of Victoria (Canada). David's artistic work has been presented in Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Russia, and his recent research publications include “vagrant(ana)music: Three (four) plateaus of a contingent music” (Radical Musicology, 2007), “Ethical and Activist Considerations of the Technological Artwork” in Transdisciplinary Digital Art (Springer, 2008) and “Sounding the Hyperlink: Skewed Remote Musical Performance and the Virtual Subject” (Mosaic Journal, 2009). See www.davidcecchetto.net

Nancy Cuthbert teaches in the Department of History in Art at the University of Victoria (Canada), where she is a doctoral candidate. Her current research, on the modernist fountain sculptures of Japanese-American artist George Tsutakawa (1910-1997), is focused on interrelationships between post-war public sculpture, architecture and urbanism. Her essay, “Westall’s Peasants: British Identity and the Crisis of Nation in 1799,” is included in the forthcoming anthology Us and Them: Perceptions, Depictions and Descriptions of Celts, edited by Pamela O'Neill, Tony Earls and Julianna Grigg.

Julie Lassonde works independently in the areas of physical theatre improvisation, performance art, feminist law and translation. Her publications include “Performing Law” (International Journal of the Arts in Society, 2006). In 2007, she received an Innovative Electronic Theses and Dissertations Award in Uppsala, Sweden for her interdisciplinary Master's thesis in law and visual arts. She has been on the Board of Directors of InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre in Toronto, Canada since 2006.

Dylan Robinson teaches courses in the Music Department at the University of Victoria (Canada) and is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for Research in Opera and Music Theatre at the University of Sussex, UK. His publications include “Distracting Music” (Musicological Explorations, September 2008) and “Collaboratively Knowing Music” in Ways of Knowing: (Un)Doing Methodologies, Imagining Alternatives in the Humanities, (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009). His most recent research project is on Representations of First Nations and Indigenous Cultures in Opera.

“The essays here take “collision” in its full range of significances, deftly tackling such elusive and difficult topics as the interdisciplinary sublime, melancholy and digital performance, and the phenomenology of pain. Varying from dense theoretical disquisitions to creative diary entries, the contents open up new vistas in the resurgent consideration of interarts production and interdisciplinary inquiry. Coherent even in the huge scope they cover, these essays provide a startling and provocative snapshot of the current state of interartistic thought and practice. They challenge, outrage, entertain, and engage – often all at the same time.”

Dr. Stephen Ross, associate professor, director of English Graduate Studies and Director of the program in Cultural, Social, and Political Thought at the University of Victoria, Canada

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