un Projects is based on the unceded sovereign land and waters of the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation; we pay our respects to their Elders past and present.
un Projects

Matthew Shannon

Cloth of the world

The Mappa Mundi: an example from history of another internet. Although revolutionary in scope, the internet’s quest to amass knowledge into one repository isn’t a new idea. There is a lineage of both libraries and encyclopaedias stretching back to ancient times, for example the great library of Alexandria and Pliny’s Naturalis Historia, written in AD77. […]

Sophie Knezic

Doctor Doctor: The emergence of the practice-led PhD

The amalgamation of art schools into university frameworks over the past decade has meant a new development in advanced degrees; the birth of the studio-based Doctor of Philosophy (PhD). In many ways this was an inevitability, part of the increasing tertiary accreditation of visual arts/studio arts courses over the late twentieth century. In Australia, initially […]

Helen Grogan, Eugenia Lim & Elvis Richardson

Visible actions

Our conversation took place on Thursday 25 April 2013. Present were Elvis Richardson (artist, former director of Death Be Kind and editor of online blog CoUNTess), Helen Grogan (artist, curator, co-director of art space and curatorial project Open Archive) and Eugenia Lim (artist, co-director of Channels video art festival). The trio discussed tactics for negotiating […]

Harriet Kate Morgan

Conversation with a Head, Severed

Tom Ellard is a ‘musician’—a term he describes as ‘an old descriptor for a sound/video/interactive artist’. While it is hard to establish all aspects of his work briefly, Ellard is best known as founding member of electronic and industrial band Severed Heads (officially active from 1979 to 2008). For those wondering, think tape loops, discordant […]

Dan Rule

Ghost in the speakers: Interview with Philip Jeck

Mentioned in the same breath as anyone from Christian Marclay to David Shea and Grandmaster Flash, British avant-garde turntablist Philip Jeck has built an oeuvre via the act of pillaging, appropriating and manipulating a record collection that traverses a vast span of music history. But Jeck’s approach to records—and the devices he uses to extract […]

Helen Johnson

Is the research your practice, or is the practice your research?

The question of research in relation to practice is one that every artist undertaking a PhD must struggle with. Below is an attempt to lay out my own understanding of this relationship as I enter the Winter of the final six months of my PhD candidature at Monash University. For if, treating it [fine art] […]

Timothy McCool

Post-irony

Post-irony: the beginning One day, my roommate, who is not an artist, but is still interested in art, asked me to define my art practice. As I later retold our conversation to some art school friends, I noticed how I kept positioning my roommate as someone who is outside the art world, which simultaneously feels […]

Lauren Bliss

The university in the age of witchcraft

I was invited to deliver a paper on a panel of young researchers, editors and curators at Impresario: Paul Taylor | Art & Text | POPISM, Monash University, 1 September 2012, a forum held in honour of the work of the late Australian art critic Paul Taylor, founder and editor of Art & Text. This […]

Justin Clemens

No creation but through submission

Arts Research? WTF?! Who the hell would consider bringing together such antipodal signifiers unless they were a bureaucrat or a pervert or both? Under what institutional conditions could such a rebarbative oxymoron even make sense? Surely the term freights all sorts of seamy occlusions and destructions? But perhaps my surprise—even shock and horror—at the very […]

Kym Maxwell

Experience and perceptions of ‘children’s research’ and the educational turn

The child is a born researcher. —Loris Malaguzzi The term ‘educational turn’ is gaining momentum in contemporary arts theory. Artworks within the definition seek to transmit or create knowledge from and between an artwork and its participants, the knowledge often stems from other disciplines such as sociology, science, history and psychology. This desire to learn, […]

Aodan Madden & Beth Rose Caird

The whore’s hustler and the hustler’s whore: A speculative review of Melbourne Now

I feel I’m in a beautiful private garden, in the middle of the city. I look up and see all the buildings and the beautiful sculptures. On Tuesdays, when the gallery is closed, it really does become our private space. It’s that sense of privacy in a public environment that I enjoy.[^1] —Isobel Crombie Throughout […]

Anya Henis

Funny or serious? Not necessarily light material

Much of what I find funny in life emerges from the exhibitions I go to, so when the art’s humourless, I tend to feel a bit deflated. If work doesn’t have an element of humour in it, it’s hard for me to imagine the artist having any fun creating it, thus making it hard for […]

Lisa Radford

Information management: << . >> post-script: BORING BORING

1. Sampling I originally tried starting this with a quote from Kenneth Goldsmith quoting Douglas Huebler but, as you pointed out, we ended up trying to start at a dead-end. Misquoting it, re-opens it: the world is full of objects, more or less interesting.[^1] An updated notion of genius would have to centre around one’s […]

Giles Fielke

Jean Rouch: Trance memory

What are these films, what outlandish name distinguishes them from the rest? Do they exist? I have no idea as yet, but I do know that there are certain very rare occasions when, without the aide of a single subtitle, the spectator suddenly understands an unknown tongue, takes part in strange ceremonies, wanders in towns […]

Amelia Wallin

In Pursuit of Philanthropy

Two years ago, the word ‘philanthropy’ would have meant very little to many artists, particularly to those with emergent or experimental practices, however the way that we now think and talk about philanthropy has shifted. A combination of the recent rise of online crowdfunding platforms, high-profile philanthropic donations to public art institutions, such as the […]

Amelia Sully

Notes on Art Strikes, Part 1

In ‘The Artistic Mode of Revolution: From Gentrification to Occupation’, an article published in the March edition of e-flux journal about the relation between ‘creatives’ — artists, art writers, curators, artisanal brewers, bakers, and baristas (who have the social capital in Melbourne that philosophers have in France) — and the protests of the Occupy movement, […]

Scott McCulloch

The Moskulls

1 The cult of the dead was not alien to them, nor a certain respect for those who were absent. It seemed these people with their Slavic faces, fresh and cruel, slept in a photographer’s prayer-room.[^1] I’m where the light is black-orange. The city is known for its lack of Soviet infrastructure and staunch and […]

Spiros Panigirakis

Teacher, Teacher, Teacher

Whilst taking part in an MFA seminar discussion regarding Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster and using it as a model to understand an audience’s reception and production of an art experience — my thoughts became very literal.[^1] Could I have admitted to my 2002 Year-Eight metalwork class that I lacked oxy-acetylene welding experience and that […]

Jarrod Rawlins

Game on Mole: Inter-class sexual practice and playing classical music to the African diaspora

Social class (or simply ‘class’) is a set of concepts in the social sciences and political theory centred on models of social stratification in which people are grouped into a set of hierarchical social categories. — Jimmy Wales Just as I was considering it possible that the existence of the three-tiered class system I was […]

Materialism

There’s materialism and there’s materialism. Some documents.[^1] It’s as though this writer is speaking to and on behalf of a public that thinks not-knowing about Adorno, St John of the Cross, Derrida or Lacan is a responsible ignorance. As though to know that double messages could displace and even replace an image or thing is […]

Hugh Nichols

The Scaffolded Artist: Professionalisation in the supported studio

Few artists are independent. Almost all rely on or seek support of some kind. There are, however, certain artists that require particular types of support. In 2010 I became involved in a project called the Supported Studios Network (SSN). The working group that maintains the project consists mostly of artists who work within visual arts […]

Brad Haylock

Interview with Christopher L G Hill

Brad : So, Chris, let’s talk about anarchy. Or, more precisely: I was wondering if you could tell me about the ways in which anarchist or syndicalist principles inform your practice? Christopher : I’m not approaching it from a hard-line political position, but anarcho-syndicalism is definitely something I align my work with. I’m not a […]

Helen Johnson

It seems like everyone knows everyone already so let’s get to work

1 It is in the social that painting finds criticality. Painting’s particular set of constraints, its two-dimensionality, its ‘faciality’, its frontal, pictorial flatness, do not detract from this function. Painting by its nature sits apart. In this way it is predisposed to make comment. At the recent Paul Taylor symposium,[^1] someone — I think it […]

Hamish Win

Immaterial Transformations

It is often said that we live in an era of post-production, of just-in-time labour practices in which the raw materialism of an industrial era is superseded by the immaterial and affiliative labours of the entrepreneur and the consumer. We need only turn to the concurrent worlds of a multinational corporation’s sweatshops, like Apple’s subsidiary […]