Ross Gibson

Ross Gibson watches the harbour as acutely as he does the ancient land and the more recent landfall of Sydney. Over decades he has paid attention in his writing and other artistic pursuits to the aftereffects of Sydney's colonial history, its environmental silhouette, and its poetic forms.In Flooded Canyon, he uses haiku to lay down some of these contours created through deep observation of littoral zones.

'Ross Gibson's poetry is marked by the numinous, then undercut by the quotidian, the earthy, a different way of seeing.' Jen Webb, Australian Book Review Here are scrummed gangs of criminals and police, with all their lurks, quirks and argots. The underworld and its overlords: how ingenious and energetic, how ardent both sides can be. What brutes they can be too, day after day, as they track and trick each other, as they make and need each other. Ross Gibson's poignant rewriting of a found dossier of police records has some Dickens, some Dostoevsky, and some DeLillo threaded through it. The sharp local language of Christina Stead, Kenneth Slessor, Arthur Stace and Ruth Park resounds in here too.

Ross Gibson moves between scholarly and artistic worlds, writing about cultural objects and ideas, making multimedia works, films, poetry, curating in museum spaces, and creating installations, among other pursuits. This book arrives after decades of Gibson's creating and analyzing artworks, built from the traces that history has left lying around in archives, in landscapes, in objects, in peoples' bodies, in biographies, and in family histories. Memoryscopes is an examination of some particular modes of remembrance, looking at how the past has dynamism too; how it is a force always pushing and skewing the present. Gibson contends that this historical dynamism can be identified and dramatized aesthetically in ways that activate clues found in archives, artifacts, landscapes, middens, and collections; clues primed in some way for an imaginatively forensic treatment. These 'memoryscopes' are aesthetic forms already created, or that we might have to invent in order to contain, focus, and direct the forces of the past. Memoryscopes is a companion volume to Ross Gibson's Changescapes.] *** Librarians: ebook available (Series: UWAP Scholarly) Subject: Cultural Theory, History, Art History]

Ross Gibson moves between scholarly and artistic worlds, writing about cultural objects and ideas, making multimedia works, films, poetry, curating in museum spaces, and creating installations, among other pursuits. This book of essays arises from Gibson's experience over a decade of creating artworks and developing a range of theories that engage with complexity, changefulness, and aesthetic force; themes particularly germane to contemporary culture in electronic and globalized societies. A 'changescape' is a special kind of artwork - dynamic, tendency-governed, ever-reactive, and never finished - helping us to understand and accept complexity and mutability. Changescapes are everywhere in contemporary culture: as improvised music and social collaborations, in interactive and responsive multimedia installations, in adaptive simulation experiences and faux-ecological environments. Ross Gibson mixes case studies and cultural theories in this book to pose questions of how we might understand the form and complexity of changescapes, and what such work can teach us. Changescapes is a companion volume to Ross Gibson's Memoryscopes.] *** Librarians: ebook available (Series: UWAP Scholarly) Subject: Cultural Theory, Art]