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DR DAVID CHESWORTH

 

VICE-CHANCELLOR’S POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW

RESEARCH FOCUS
DAVID CHESWORTH is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice involves sound, music composition, video and installation. His practice explores sound as a transitionary in-between force that engages with the diverse ways we sense and come to know the world through art, philosophy and science. Key to this research is an examination of how our experience is formed through contradictory framings that don’t always coalesce into one understanding. This occurs both phenomenologically, as when one frame is visual and the other is sonic, and ontologically, through competing translations and interpretations. Often in collaboration with Sonia Leber, David works experimentally in the creation of speculative, sensorial and performative artworks, where multiple framings converge and resonate in novel ways, provoking new encounters and understandings.

 
 

 

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DAVID CHESWORTH CURRENT RESEARCH

David’s current research involves the creation of artworks that seek to explore and remediate hidden, obscure or silenced auditory archives.

Indexing the Cylinder investigates notions of an Indigenous sonic archive, its contested cultural status and agency. Interdisciplinary themes include the politics of listening, technologies of audition, contestations of ownership, representation, ethics, and the role of memory, historiography and time.

Remediating lost experimental methodologies researches an archive of recordings made at the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre (1976–84). To creatively investigate numerous experimental performances where established art and music ontologies and social relations were challenged through experimental methodologies and new systems of thought that prototyped social participation and creativity.

Unseen Light draws on an archive of 120 spiritualist séances, recorded in Australia and New Zealand from 1957–1972. The research artwork will examine how the reconstituted ‘spirit’ voices serve as portals to other worlds: launching inventive heterogeneous experiences of time-slippages, circulations of ideas, and fabrications of ‘truths’. Through a range of different ontological framings, the research will articulate new perspectives on evolving human/machine relations.

 

DAVID CHESWORTH BIOGRAPHY

David Chesworth’s interdisciplinary practice involves sound, music, video and installation. Together with Sonia Leber, his works have been shown in the central exhibitions of the 56th Biennale of Venice (2015) and the 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014), and a parallel exhibition of the 5th Moscow Biennale (2013). Their mid-career survey exhibition ‘Architecture Makes Us’ was organised by Centre for Contemporary Photography (2018), touring to UNSW Galleries (2019) and Griffith University Art Museum (2019). Commissions include a solo exhibition at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (2007), permanent public art installations for Commonwealth Games (2006) and Sydney Olympic Stadium (2000). Collections include Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, and RMIT Gallery.

Performance highlights include Ars Electronica, Austria (Prix Ars Electronica Honorable Mention), Festival d'automne à Paris, Edinburgh Festival, BAM's Next Wave Festival, Bang on a Can Marathon in New York, Adelaide Festival, Melbourne Festival, and Mona Foma in Tasmania. Earlier in his career, David was the coordinator of the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre, a centre for new and experimental music. He co-founded the experimental group Essendon Airport and the independent label Innocent Records.

 
 
 

Myriad Falls (video/sound excerpt)
What Listening Knows (video/sound excerpt)
This is Before We Disappear From View (installation documentation)