University of Canberra
Jordan Williams
Golden spaces
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Research statement
Research background
The media poem, Golden Spaces, is one of a suite of six (Unforeseeable sentences) that explore the spaces between nation, urban planning and the individual body. Golden Spaces foregrounds writings by Fredric Jameson, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Meaghan Morris and Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin. It samples images of Marion Mahony Griffin’s design drawings. The face is a metaphor for the veneer of nation that Canberra was to become; a utopia that only Walter seemed to believe might actually come into existence. It also references the ‘facialisation’ of Deleuze and Guattari, and Meaghan Morris’ use of their concept to explain the process of creating cityscapes as picturesque surfaces.
Research contribution
Golden Spaces isa creative theoretical engagement with Canberra. It asks how the city on paper became a city in place, how a utopia can ever succeed as a place of everyday life, and how is one to live in a symbol-city.
Research significance
Golden Spaces is an example of a practice-led research interrogation of the function of literature in documenting and revealing the sociopolitical consciousness of places and people through time. Media poetry enables a representational aesthetic for a cognitive mapping of place through time, by allowing an experience of place that can encompass layers of sound, image, typography and interactivity. However, it is careful to use media capabilities in the service of meaning and not for their own sake. In Golden Spaces, for example, there is no interactivity because interactivity is a metaphor for agency, and this poem reflects the lack of individual agency in Canberra’s establishment.
TEXT Special Issue No 7 The ERA era: creative writing as research
October 2010
http://www.textjournal.com.au
Editors: Donna Lee Brien, Nigel Krauth and Jen Webb
General Editors: Nigel Krauth & Jen Webb
Text@griffith.edu.au