Suchergebnisse

1. Introduction: Are the Offences in the Resource Management Act 1991 (RMA)Working? -- 2. The Context for the Enquiry: Regulation and the RMA -- 3. Theoretical Framework: Compliance, Enforcement, Sanctions and the Criminal Law -- 4. Failing the First Test: The Offences are not Effective -- 5. Explaining the Lack of Effectiveness: Constraints and Choices -- 6. Failing the Second Test: The Offences are being used Inappropriately -- 7. Explaining the Inappropriate Use: Form versus Substance -- 8. The Offences are not Working: Implications for Green Criminology.

This paper presentation is a media archaeological investigation of the microphone. Its aim is to generate new speculations and figurations between humans, non-humans and technology, which may arrive out of the Anthropocene and its binary collapsing consequences. Specifically, I will interrogate and re-animate the microphone through its connective political, material and fictional ecologies. I will ask if microphones are agentive actors and if so, what the consequences might be? The paper's central argument is that the microphone is not merely a tool of servitude employed by human hands. Nor is it just an apparatus that facilitates the audiophile's pursuit of fidelity. Rather, the microphone is positioned as a "necromedia actant": part of a networked history of power relations and ethical consequences that can be situated amongst more sinister contexts of surveillance, parasites and horror.

This article examines the microphone and its connective political and nonhuman ecologies. A media archaeological excavation of Leon Theremin's role in the development of a specific bugging device ("The Thing") facilitates discussion throughout. Situating the microphone within a networked history of power relations and ethical consequences, the author draws upon contexts of surveillance, parasites and horror in order to ask whether microphones are agential actors and, if so, what the consequences might be.

This paper is written through the combined experience of my own artistic practice and periods of immobility during 2010-2011. With it, I aim to draw attention towards physical, mental and political states of stillness and absorption. I will show how a period of relative physical stasis impacted upon my own practice and prompted a counter project to the now dominant methodology of soundwalking. Through personal reflection, I will demonstrate how walking is not always an entitled right; how class, gender and geopolitical forces impact upon a walk; and how the methodology itself may even perpetuate a culture of pursuit and entrapment. In doing so, the paper re-evaluates the politics and aesthetics of soundwalking whilst optimistically proposing listening as a form of walking.

Since the turn of the twentieth century field recording, a practice based upon recording the sounds of a given environment, species or phenomena, has increasingly moved from hobbyist, science and ethnomusicology traditions, towards an artistic practice in its own right. Today it represents a key facet within contemporary sound art praxis and discourse, whilst continuing to cross-pollinate geographic, cultural, social science and anthropological studies. Built upon the persuasive foundations of an ecologically engaged practice, field recording - whether for science or art - is deemed an unobtrusive act of conservation or design, with little or no apparent consequences. Does this mean "the field" should be granted political, aesthetic or ethical immunity? If the extraction of sound from an environment or species may not be mining a finite resource, nor for that matter leaving a tangible footprint, perhaps we have to be more imaginative, more disruptive, even more absurd in how the practice is critically unpicked? This paper will propose a new methodological schema for field recording in light of 2008's global economic crash and its protracted socio-cultural fallout. Through personal and practice-based reflection I will draw parallels between field recording and banking bubbles; preservation and consumerism; silence and hegemony; sound and oil. Inspired by the ethnographic crisis of the mid to late 1970's, I intend to inflict a similar state of emergency upon my own practice and its broader contexts.

"One evening in early August, just before 6pm, I pressed record on a hand-held audio device and walked into Parliament Square, London. As the sound of Big Ben began to toll, I threw the recorder into the air, using each chime as a prompt. After the sixth bell strike I walked out of the square, recorder in hand and pressed stop". Mark Peter Wright, 2014. Part of an on-going series of site-specific interventions. First presented at Kinokophone, New York Public Library, 2014.

Classic period Maya rulers are often reduced to "ideal types" and are discussed in terms that would suggest they were a homogenous group of individuals cut from the same cloth. Contrary to that assumption, this study employs epigraphic, iconographic, archaeological, ethnohistoric and ethnographic data to demonstrate there was significant local and regional variation in the way kingship was expressed through artistic programs, calendrics, ritual activity, accoutrements of power, sacred warfare, the taking of theophoric throne names and titulary, and the composition and adaptation of local pantheons. The identity of each polity was inseparably connected with that of its ruler, and variations on the rulership theme served to reinforce their unique identity in the larger landscape vis-à-vis other polities. The underlying theoretical approach relies on concepts of mimesis and alterity, duality, and complementary opposition, all of which are creative acts which serve to establish a sense of Self in contrast to the Other, both human and divine. This study also examines concepts of divine kingship and deification, and argues that rulers were "functionally divine" while living and were elevated to "ontologically divine" status upon becoming apotheosized ancestors after death. As apotheosized ancestors, they took their place in the pliable local pantheon which further reinforced the unique identity of each site.