Circuit Breaking: Counter-narration in Situated Contemporary Image Practice

This Research & Knowledge Exchange Doctoral Project brief summarises our priority areas of research interest under the heading of: Circuit Breaking: Counter-narration in Situated Contemporary Image Practice.

We welcome all research degree applications aligned with and in response to this brief.

Lead image: Simon Clark, Teaching manifesto and reading machine #1, Beaconsfield, 2015.

The arts of storytelling are rightly foregrounded as tools for a politics of community formation and inclusion. In much contemporary art, as in cinema and theatre, images have a storytelling capacity, not least in conjunction with literary forms or other new textual forms associated with information technologies. However, whether understood semiotically or through philosophies of embodiment and encounter, images can and frequently do operate in a contrary way to impede story. In that respect they facilitate an equally important politics, for instance revealing the limits of dominant discourses, revitalising critical and oppositional discourses, and allowing marginalised communities to reappear. Echoing Gilles Deleuze, such image-practices can be thought of as ‘circuit breakers’ to established systems of communication and control. Just as the dominant ‘real’ of globalisation tends to reduce difference and delegitimating marginal voices, art’s counter-narrative image-practices have a special relationship with place, undoing the homogenised world-story. This doctoral brief calls for research into contemporary dissenting image practices, with special attention to the politics of information technology, communication and community formation. We invite proposals from practitioners with discursive, cross-disciplinary art practices whose work and research mobilises images against received conventions of communication, for new, dissenting forms of narrative that can develop a politics of radical localism. 

Projects deriving from this brief are expected to sit within the Research & Knowledge Exchange strategy and the following department.

All successful research degree project proposals must emphasise a clear alignment between the project idea and our Research & Knowledge Exchange strategy.