Projects > Indeterminate Self - PhD Dissertation

This practice-led research project comprises artworks produced for the Grant Street Theatre Exhibition titled Indeterminate Self, and the written dissertation. The research asks two key questions: ‘can an experimental approach to the video medium challenge a conventional way of seeing and knowing when what is seen and known cannot be determined?’ and, ‘can a video art practice provide a model for a way of living when the indeterminate way of seeing and knowing challenges and renews a sense of Self?’ The artistic practice responds to these research questions by grounding the exploration of the elusive onto-epistemological relation between indeterminacy and the Self in three series of video experiments: Time Experiments, Super(im)position and Hypnagogia, focusing on three primary aspects: time, space and light and how they provide the shifting perceptual condition to evoke the indeterminacy’s nature of in-process and coexisting through the viewing experience.

The written dissertation provides a detailed investigation of the experimental outcomes and philosophical discoveries. This project identifies a predicament in the experimental video self-portrait: the equivocal relation between subjectivity and immediacy in the artist’s act of projecting and receiving perspectives of disruptive self-imagery through the video medium. It reveals an indeterminacy between to see what happens and seeing what is happening; between seeing with and without a Self, explored through artistic video experiments, using devices such as flickering light and rapid intercutting video editing method, this can induce the condition for the ‘Indeterminate Self.’ This research uses a metaphorical approach to theoretical language and definition to freely traverse between various fields of study without being determined and restricted by specific meaning attached to a particular context. These different fields of study include visual perception, theory of quantum physics, film and digital medium studies, psychoanalysis, metaphysics, and theology.

Indeterminate Self @ ResearchGate
|https://art2021.finearts-music.unimelb.edu.au/programs/phd/youjia-lu.com
|Indeterminate Self @ 2021 the Victorian College of the Arts Online Catalogue|
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