Clarifying The State of Hybridity

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Background to the study: Clarifying the state of hybridity Exhale is a practice-led research project that utilises painting as its core but also enfolds within it a constellation of practices which employ digital transcription and hybridisation as strategies to transform media. Hybridity references the intermedial space of overlap and collaboration which comes into existence at the convergence of disparate mediums. This project manifests itself at the intersection of historic 2D media (painting, weaving and photography) and electronic interfaces (computer imaging and generation, digital video, static and moving digital projection). The ongoing interconnection between these material and virtual fields produces interblended media forms which exhibit hybridity and heterogeneous diversity. The state of hybridity is characterised by its mixed heritage, its differential condition, and location outside of established categories. Hybridity is an additive process, not a subtractive one. The process of hybridisation denotes a position of crossing over, variation and media exchange in the formation of new features. Hybridity has been described in the following terms. Hybridity inhabits the territory of the foreign (Papastergiadis, 2000:168) and “estranged” (Green in Bhabha, 1994). Hybridity is a condition of emergent identity, a site of collaborative action and transformation, and a space of surplus and differentiation (Bhabha, 1994). Hybridity is the state of representation identified by the terms of “otherness”, “beyond” (Bhabha, 1994), “inclusionary” (Meredith, 1998:5) and the “in-between” (Bhabha in Bennett, 1998:37-47). It represents a liminal location of disjunction, discordance, dislocation, and transformation. Hybridity operate... ... middle of paper ... ...rupturing of the work through slicing, perforation and weaving. My art production is an evolving continuum of creative genesis. The ongoing production process highlights the revision of work and its emergent hybrid properties. I understand my practice as a body of work from which redefined formal, spatio-temporal relationships emerge with each transformation. The total art work manifests as a continually restructured arrangement of multiple and merged visual regimes within an autonomous but evolving body of production. In my visual practice I use the terms “art work” and “project” interchangeably. The production output exists as a site of infinite potential for the actualisation of myriad hybrid presences. Deleuze indicates that actualisation is the state of convergence by which the material form is expressed by its “incarnation in a body”. (Deleuze, 2004: 127).

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