Dartaphacts exhibitions - Southern Cross University

Dartaphacts Exhibition 2023

Welcome to the Sustainability, Environment and the Arts in Education (SEAE) Research Cluster Dartaphacts exhibition 2023.

What is a dartaphact?

"dartaphact” mixes data, art and act/ivism in processes that make the mattering “facts of experience” visible to wider publics. The concept is deliberately ambivalent about being an object (artefact) and a verb: the artful making of experiential facts. The first half of the concept – darta – (hybrid of data and art) is an explicit intervention to trouble what counts as social science data which emphasises and values the speculative process of what comes to matter through arts-based research. The second half of the concept – phact – signals the explicit posthuman ethico-political activist potential of what matter can The “ph” at the heart of the concept replaces “f” in dartaphact to register the posthuman forces of artful objects as potential political enunciators and to encourage a move away from the illusion of objective, fixed, knowable and measurable social science fact. ¹

¹ Renold, E. (2018). ‘Feel what I feel’: making da(r)ta with teen girls for creative activisms on how sexual violence matters. Journal of Gender Studies, 27(1), 37-55. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2017.1296352

Adi Brown

Concept: Curated collages from walking propositions for drawing with a camera in place (China)

Adi Brown - Dartaphacts

Mothering to transgress: Stories of gender diversity from the loungeroom to the classroom – a cross-pollination of concepts

Aleasa Kermode

Concept: This video visually presents the cross-pollination of concepts for my research-creation. Creating an explanation relying on imagery helped to share how my research emerges from and is a part of the ever-growing deep roots of philosophy, epistemology and ontology.

Alys Mendus

I've got a bag of old knickers.

Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles

Concept: Lucy’s plaster replica of their 3.8-million-year-old skeleton is data as is this passer-by photograph of my Lucy encounter at New York's American Museum of Natural History.Lucy is the earliest human ancestor and first Australopithecus afarensis skeleton ever found. Lucy is also a pre-human trace slung into the contemporary geologic era compelling humans to uncomfortably contemplate or confront post-human potentialities.

Language, testing, and locations of poverty: An analysis of news

Aspa Baroutsis

Concept: This is a visual expression of data, that artistically combines the research findings in a multi-modal format. These data are expressions of research findings, combined in a digital format, designed to raise awareness, provoke action and generate change.

Materiality of the Visual Journal

Katie Hotko

Concept: The following video, seeks to bridge the gap between the flat spaces of my thesis inquiry and the live experiences of creating the physical journals and what affordances they offer. This short video offers an attempt to explore the materiality of working with visual journals and the difficulty that working within the confines of the traditional thesis structure pose.

Kim Snepvangers

Concept: Layout and collation of text/image indicates ambiguous inter-changeability. Here, a suite of slippages using the language of condensed exchange, a lightbox juxtaposed with wooden furniture challenges linearity. Swapping everyday textual conversations, excerpted from an 1848 news-paper report about one of my Aboriginal ancestors, into contemporary tangible data actively allows new relationships amongst seemingly chance and inconsequential encounters to be valued, then collated iteratively for redeployment and display.

Lisa Siegel

Concept: This “found poem” was created from the glows that emanated from the transcript of a Collective Biography workshop with my women environmentalist co-researchers, wondering together how our collective stories reflect a movement towards/in/with the Gynocene.

Excerpt from PhD

Liz Mackinlay

TITLE: I AM WOMAN HERE ME DRAW

“I am woman hear me draw,” wrote Australian feminist cartoonist Judy Horacek in 2002, whose work draws attention to the capacity of cartoons to de/story masculinist versions of the world. Taking a critical autoethnographic approach, a series of black-and-white line felt tip drawings are presented as dartaphacts of l'ecriture feminine (feminine writing) to do the the kind of work that Hélène Cixous speaks of—writing that aims to release the subject away from the stagnant confines of phallocentric thought to create new forms of feminist post-academic writing.

Louise Phillips

Concept: A visual art response created by myself to autoethnographic poetry by Helen Hohnson on mothering in academia through gifting methodology in creating - Phillips, L.G., Johnson, H., Misra, S., & Zavros-Orr, A., (2020). Mothering bodies in unloving institutions, In L.Henderson, A. Black & S. Garvis (Eds.). (Re)birthing the feminine in Academe. (pp. 49-82). Palgrave MacMillan. Feeling-thinking-being with dried biscuit tears in the cup of tea that never gets finished.

Uniforms that hurt

Melissa Wolfe

Concept: My filmic work is not documentary, it is a creative re/active document. It is a contrived political event, data that is created by myself and the participant, camera and the viewer, in re/action. How the video makes you feel-think and ‘make sense’ matters.

clay; aches and strains — Aches and Strains - a clay-journal

Narrissa Wheatley

Aches and strains - working through clay

(Clay)making sense of a situation

Yaw Ofosu-Asare

Concept: Using a storied ethnography approach, I present a series of poems, illustrations and digital paintings as artifacts of my experiences growing up in a contemporary African society. It brings together an acute awareness of the myriad layers of the educational, cultural and socio-economic context that condition the production of these stories.

See more of Yaws images