The Peter & nou Handbook: A Field Guide to an SF Practice (So Far)

Abstract

The Peter & nou Project consists of, to date, four interwoven artworks:
• Peter (2014), Single Channel Digital Video, 29:55 minutes
• nou (2018), Single Channel Digital Video, 18:01 minutes.
• Peter & nou (2018), Publication, Good Press, Glasgow, Scotland.
• www.rabbitcottontoothcottonrabbit.com (2018 - Ongoing), Website.

These four works are the focus of this thesis, along with the underpinning research of The Peter & nou Project carried out from January 2014 to April 2018. A short piece of archival footage - The Horizon Object (Video, 4:55 minutes, 2014) – is the defining attribute shared by the works of the project. The project offers a significant contribution to a recent trend in British contemporary art which David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan have called ‘fictioning’, a term which broadly refers to practices which blur the boundary between reality and fiction. There is a renewed interest in fictioning in contemporary practice and our wider culture. The emergence of phrases such as ‘post-truth’ and ‘alternative fact’ into our cultural landscape is indicative of current challenges to truth, particularly as a mechanism for asserting political dominance (McIntyre, 2018: xiv). Reality has become a relative term, foregrounding and problematising perception in everyday life. There is, therefore, a political and ethical urgency for artists to engage fictioning as a practice so that art might map out new territory, promote new perspectives and suggest alternatives to the political climate in which it is made. Through its dense weave of methodological approaches - including, but not limited to, use of the archive, science fiction tropes, the cut-up, altered states and intertextuality - The Peter & nou Project operates beyond the gallery space. The project challenges stories told by moving image, literature and biography forms. Where once such stories might have been consumed and accepted as the truth, The Peter & nou Project demands a reappraisal of such forms and our relationship to them, resulting in a calling into question of truth on both a personal and cultural level.

Date of Award	21 Jun 2021
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Cumbria
Supervisor	Robert Williams (Supervisor)