Friday, January 7, 2005

Congratulations, Dr. Leishman!

We wish to congratulate Dr. Donna Leishman on her doctoral thesis: Creating Screen-Based Multiple State Environments: Investigating Systems of Confutation:

The culmination of the research and an example of the fragital at work -- is located in the project Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw. The artwork is elucidated using critical insights from a group of twelve invited expert participants and an in-depth self-analysis. This group was invited on the basis of their interdisciplinary abilities, personal voice and commitment to my research area. The objective viewpoints of these participants was used not only to aid further understanding of the perception of the project but also to help me as the artist to extract extra arguments, complement my subjective understanding and gain additional contextual insights about my work..

The possession of Christian Shaw was published in TEKKA, Volume 1, Issue 3.

From Diane Greco's foreword:

In Leishman's reinterpretation of 17th-century Paisley, crummy grey high-rises shoot up, in defiance of all known laws of perspective, from a deep green landscape of popsicle contours. The formerly-reliable cursor hops around and changes shape alarmingly. You click on a bush; a pair of reptilian eyes opens and does not close. And although you find, after a few tries, that it is possible to remove the heads from trees, this opportunity to violate the landscape does not advance your progress. There are, in fact, no buttons or other obvious way finding devices in Leishman's vision of Paisley-- that would be too easy.