Brown Lake/Boumiera: Posthuman Screen Poetics for the Anthropocene

Abstract

This creative practice-based PhD thesis consists of an exegesis and creative works, which together investigate the possibilities of a non-traditional screenwriting poetics and filmmaking practices in response to Brown Lake, North Stradbroke Island, Queensland, Australia, with the aim of affording the lake an active voice. Since approaching the Anthropocene critically is an unsettled concept, this thesis engages with it as a connector term that brings cultural, ecological, and geological debates together, generating challenges for new creative responses. In doing so it builds upon and extends a growing body of academic inquiry that seeks to respond to the conditions of the Anthropocene using imaginative methods.

The creative component of this thesis is comprised of two ‘screen maps’: a Cinematic Virtual Reality film, Anthropocene VR (2018) and a moving image work Brown Lake/Boumiera (2021). These research artefacts engage with hyperlocal, experimental, immersive methods, to make visible the existence of non-human and human relationships, through what I term ‘posthuman screen poetics’. As multimodal forms these screen maps re-imagine the future in terms of a representational justice for all.

This exegesis focuses in particular on the works of theorists in ecofeminism, post-human knowledge, and environmental humanities to de-centre the human through screen practice. It asks, What creative strategies – through non-traditional screen practices – might an ecofeminist and posthuman conceptual framework offer for opening up new imaginaries and new subjectivities of a place as complex and entangled as Brown Lake in relation to the provocations presented by the unsettled concept of the Anthropocene?

Furthermore, it asks how might we, through screen practice and image making, activate and reanimate a greater reciprocity of care and attention between place, beings, and non-beings? It considers how Brown Lake’s body of water acts as a carrier for multiple histories – geological, ecological, and cultural – in a flow of endless events. It engages the screen idea as a mode of inquiry to connect this unsettled concept and other entangled narratives of place with relocated cinematic forms to create cartographies of an ‘otherwise’ of Brown Lake.

This thesis makes the claim that screen practice as a research methodology can articulate alternative perspectives, story structures, and screen experiences that reorientate perceptions of, and feelings about, the more-than-human aspects of place. This small act of resistance and activism within the limits of late-capitalist settler frameworks of power writes nature into the narrative as a protagonist, engaging affirmative ethics and critique with creativity.