Shaun Wilson

RMIT University | RMIT

Screen Thought Journal , Vol. 8. The 51 Paintings Suite (2006 - 2024) is an 18 year long term study about trauma memory and slow films intersecting metamodern affect. The project recontextualised poses of characters from medieval German plague era paintings into new locations and contexts through slow films. The developmental phase of the study oc...

Throughout the mid to late twentieth century, World War Two era Nazi Germany quickly became the centre point of the ultimate cinematic villain. Whether this be historically based or integrated into fictitious stories, depictions of Nazis in cinematic tropes have proliferated antagonist sub-genres pitted against the forces of good. This article will...

This paper will examine metamodernism in the context of an urgency of debate in defining the differences between pre-pandemic and post-pandemic structures in contemporary art by the critical term 'universal reckoning'. Discussion will argue three key points for metamodernism, which are: metamodernism was defined in a pre-pandemic context as an onto...

Magic has a long and controversial history grafted through the occult, entertainment, and cultural mythology. Its agency, when thought of as a mechanism of storytelling, reconciles an oscillation between natural and unnatural phenomena in as much as magic has historically been weaponised against “society’s most marginal members” (Marshall). Yet the...

As the first of two articles exploring how plague can be represented through allegorical art making, this article will seek to examine the logic of the metamodern to attest to ways of developing painting through a metamodernity from a topographical analysis of Boccaccio's The Decameron. As defined as a structure of feeling, metamodernism has yielde...

This article explores how creative practitioners have integrated non-fungible tokens into their practice as a conceptual framework. Where this idea differs from artists simply minting their own NFT artefacts and uploading to an online marketplace is that artists are now considering both crypto currencies and NFT art as a disruptive conceptual space...

The critical readings of Honda's Kaiju Eiga films between 1961 and 1969 are lacking in any substantial investigation into place which brings into question the neglect of place as a philosophical enquiry within Japanese screen studies. This article reflects on a gap in current research by considering how place not only has guided Honda's films throu...

This article examines the key term "fear mapping" in creating artworks from Australian artist Shaun Wilson's series Wither They May (Wilson, 2021). It draws attention to aspects of Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, Hodges' Loimologia, and the facsimile from a London Parish Bill of Mortality from September 1665 to construct a visual testament of...

From feline celebrities to viral videos, online cat pictures as a twenty-first century populous digital genre have surmounted a vacantness from research interest insofar as to represent an undervalued digital phenomenon which this paper seeks to investigate from a digital philosophical perspective that defines the genre as to what Braden terms as '...

This exhibition catalogue represents the 'Wunderkammer' (2018) series of miniature artwork by Australian artist Shaun Wilson which used the guise of hobbyist war dioramas to disrupt metamodernist notions of trauma and places. It was exhibited at the Melbourne-based ARI Noir Darkroom in April, 2018

This visual body of work from the recent 'Winter Orbit' series of video and photographic works are the response to a family death from COVID-19 and the culmination of reconfigurations of plague art made during the Black Death pandemic. It was exhibited at MARS Gallery, Geelong International Biennale 2020, and at the VPB, 77th Venice Film Festival i...

This curated exhibition catalogue documents new representations of drawing as a conceptual, disruptive, and anti-drawing aesthetic which challenged the notions of what defines drawing as 'drawing'. It was staged at the Melbourne ARI Noir Darkroom in March 2018, displaying the art of Tammy Honey, Phil Edwards, John MacKinnon, John Power, Mad Pixie,...

Climate activism in the digital space is recognised as a mechanism active since the late 1980s yet it is only in recent times that the academy is coming to terms with its presence through digital media with any serious measure of analysis and enquiry. This paper acknowledges the contributions made on the topic over its forty year digital history bu...

The recent public discussions about climate change have brought forward two key points of important discourse. The first is the resistance by climate change denialism to accept science as a means of fact-based validation into the effects of human interference within the natural world and the second is the debate on actions to reduce carbon emission...

This paper will explore the notion of digital otherness by examining creative practice in a 21st century context of art that is neither belonging to or a part of classifiable genres of the academy. It will look to the notion of otherness through art in the proliferation of the internet of things and consider a position of how memes, creative apps,...

This paper will explore the rise of AI generated fake essays and papers created with browser-based software and probe this phenomenon through questionable peer review processes from online journals. It will take the philosophical perspectives of authenticity and truth into a definition from Correspondence Theory derived at a consideration of atomic...

This paper is the first of two parts which considers the idea of Meta-Immersion in context to new narrative by examining cinematic contributions framed through Metamodernism. The design of this will consider the films Blade Runner 2049 (dir:Villeneuve, 2017), Hard to be a God (dir:German, 2013), The Turin Horse (dir:Tarr, 2011) and the VR film The...

This paper will model data into Meta-Tonic Design by a method which examines and locates meta-immersion. The data will be drawn from the films Blade Runner 2049 (dir:Villeneuve, 2017), Hard to be a God (dir:German, 2013), The Turin Horse (dir:Tarr, 2011) and the The Deserted (dir:Ming-liang, 2017) by considering the state of each artefact and how t...

This paper will reflect on the Ars Memoria tradition by establishing new knowledge in the way in which mnemonic rhetoric can be integrated into video installation evidenced through the significant 'Memory Palace 2017' (Wilson, 2017) installation. It will position these traditions in relation to the different ways of thinking about memory which will...

This paper explores the nature of alternative zombie characterisation through contemporary mainstream cinema. As Hegel laments that madness is 'a derangement of a person's individual world' (Hegel, 408 Z), 'an attempt at self empowerment where the power of the divine is experienced as either absent or irrational' (Berthold­Bond, p.152) this kind of...

This paper is the first of two that seek to propose the establishment of a new singularity for the arts defined as a Post-neomodernism by examining the first five points of the Post Neomodernist Manifesto (2015). As the micro movements of Post-postmodernism, Neomodernism, and Metamodernism have established their own positions in an after Postmodern...

The moving image has traditionally provided a catalyst for screen-based culture to develop a language that evokes a means and experience of storytelling positioned in-between the image and the viewer. However, this article will frame such a relationship by distancing the moving image from a cinematic or industrial context to instead look to the ama...

Since the advent of Photoshop, digital remixing has introduced the practice (and acceptance) of unlimited copying, which brings into question the legitimacy of authorship and an ongoing issue of memory. As Galloway proposes a notion of machines remembering in ways that are not affected by ‘the imprecision of human (social/cultural) memory’ (Gallowa...