a skin, a sea, an island, a prison

RESEARCH STATEMENT 

Synopsis

a skin, a sea, an island, a prison interrogates the racialised aesthetics of nature and the body through a layering of audio-visual composition. A white woman, dead by the lake, her body fetishised from classical paintings to Scandi-noir thrillers, serves as an entry point into how whiteness is inscribed onto landscapes. The work examines whiteness as the default category of the “human,” relegating the non-white and non-human to the margins, justifying a policing of purity through race relations and environmental exploitation. Engaging with the materiality of the digital, it layers sound and image to explore tensions between AI, human embodiment, and ecological collapse. Through vocal mimicry and visual collage, it makes visible the hidden violences of representation, unpacking who and what is considered expendable, both in popular culture and in the material conditions of our time.

Research Statement 

a skin, a sea, an island, a prison is an experimental video work that examines the racialised aesthetics of nature and the body through sonic and visual montage. The film interrogates how whiteness is constructed as “natural” and “pure” in cultural and media representations and how this informs both aesthetic traditions and ecological crises. It draws upon the longstanding fetishisation of white female bodies in Western visual culture, from Renaissance paintings to contemporary crime dramas, and extends this inquiry to consider how environmental destruction is shaped by racial hierarchies, where whiteness is positioned as the most human while everything else, both non-white bodies and the environment, is rendered expendable.

As scholars such as Bronfen (1992) have noted, the spectacle of the dead white woman functions as a site of both desire and control, reinforcing gendered hierarchies. Race and disability further complicate the ways bodies are valued, disciplined and rendered expendable within cultural, political and imperialist frameworks (McWhorter 2009; Shotwell 2016). At a time when racial violence and environmental destruction are at crisis levels, a skin, a sea, an island, a prison asks: How do narratives of purity shape our relationships to land, history and each other? Can experimental screen production create ways of seeing, hearing and understanding these entanglements?

The work was developed in response to she says, she says: geo-sonic entanglements (Preston & Konrad 2023) and was presented as part of the 83rd edition of The Ediths Responsive Roundtable series hosted by The Centre for People, Place and Planet, Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. Both projects explore the materiality of sound and the possibilities of embodied listening as a research method.

Through experiments in vocal mimicry, imitating bird calls, weather sounds and AI-generated speech, my work asks how sound can be experienced as a tactile sensation and how different sonic textures trouble the boundaries between human and non-human voices. The process of mimicry distorts these sounds, at times making them unrecognisable, creating a slippage between organic and synthetic, human and non-human. This sonic blurring unsettles fixed categories of perception, shifting how voice, agency and environment are experienced (Eidsheim 2015; Flint 2022). By positioning the AI-generated voice alongside my own attempts at mimicry, the work also interrogates the neutrality of voice, revealing the racialised assumptions embedded in machine learning, particularly in how accents are framed, and the ways in which technological mediation shapes perception (Benjamin 2019).

Just as the work explores the tactility of sound through vocal mimicry and sonic layering, it also considers how vision can be experienced as an embodied and sensorial act. The visual composition employs layering, using digital drawings, reappropriated found footage and genre appropriations to create an interplay between textures. This disrupts the illusion of a singular, coherent image. The visual layering produces a haptic quality, where images are not only seen but felt, demanding an embodied form of spectatorship.

Drawing on Marks' (2000) concept of haptic visuality, the piece encourages an intimate, tactile engagement with the screen. The competing digital textures, including hand-drawn overlays, degraded archival footage and digitally manipulated performances, resist conventional depth and perspective. Instead of reinforcing a fixed point of view, they pull the viewer into a space of material entanglement. This destabilisation of the visual field mirrors the sonic disruptions in the work, unsettling the boundaries between figure and ground, subject and landscape, human and non-human.

By treating both sound and image as material processes rather than representational tools, a skin, a sea, an island, a prison challenges the dominance of vision as the primary mode of meaning-making in screen media. Instead, it asks how sensorial engagement through sonic tactility, visual layering and the performativity of digital manipulation can reframe our relationships to race, media and the environment. If whiteness has historically been constructed as the “neutral” position from which vision is stabilised, then disrupting the coherence of the image becomes a way of unsettling its authority. This work foregrounds a mode of seeing and listening that is fragmented, embodied and relational, positioning creative practice as a site where the hierarchies of representation can be reimagined.

The video employs a fragmented, non-linear narrative structure, interweaving disparate storylines and found materials, including YouTube footage of environmental catastrophes and political speeches that “others” non-white Australians. These are situated within a traditional crime drama framework. A classic detective office scene, where a crime is analysed, is juxtaposed with images of ecological destruction, linking racial and gendered violence in Australia to systemic violence against the environment. The detective states, “We found a body,” but this statement remains unresolved. Instead, the work introduces the phrase, “We are dealing with a monster,” alongside references to “multiple perpetrators” who “have managed to elude our forces.” This language, drawn from crime drama rhetoric, is paired with archival audio from Jo Bjelke-Petersen and Tony Abbott, whose statements dehumanise Indigenous Australians and asylum seekers. As these voices speak, images of floods, fires and hailstorms unfold, complicating the question of which body, or whose body, is under investigation.

My vocal attempts at replication are framed as performance, further manipulated through reverb and mixing to extend the notion that performance is not limited to the body but also occurs through technological processes. This extends into visual manipulation, as I perform both as the dead body, later digitally altered through rotoscoping, and as the ”purity teacher,” a figure defined by the threat of punishment and disgust. These layered performances are not only enacted by my physical body but are embedded in the material construction of the work itself, where I perform the role of editor and audio mixer. The filmic text becomes a body in its own right, shaped through haptic visuality and sonic tactility. Its layered, textured surfaces do not simply depict embodiment but enact it through performance, drawing the viewer into an affective and sensorial experience. The work’s status as a site of embodied interaction is amplified, where vision, sound and digital manipulation converge in a tactile, performative space.

In thinking through this montage of elements, the work draws upon feminist ecological thought and Indigenous knowledges to challenge dualisms between nature and culture (Alaimo, 2018; Bawaka, 2019; Haraway, 2016; Plumwood, 1993; Tynan, 2021) just as it challenges a singularity of audio-visual forms. It considers nature and culture as entangled, like media forms can be, where materiality is not a static entity but one shaped through relationships, where bodies—human and more-than-human—are continuously affecting and being affected by the environments in which they exist, including through audio-visual practice. a skin, a sea, an island, a prison foregrounds the interdependence of bodies, histories, politics and ecologies with its tactic of visual and sonic enmeshment.

PEER REVIEW 1 

a skin, a sea, an island, a prison is an engaging piece of work – both as a video and in the research statement. The use of digital collaging across the audio and the visual elements makes explicit the slippages between the human, the non-human and the digital. The rich textures with a range of references from popular culture, politics and environmental catastrophe transgress any fixed genre and create a sense of the leakiness of natureculture entanglements. 

Please reflect on the potential of the submission and the way it is realised. 

The research statement clearly identifies a number of research interests and sources, which are all interesting and relevant to the work. At times some of these are only touched up and could be further explored. For example, the final paragraph notes that a skin, a sea, an island, a prison draws on “feminist ecological thought and Indigenous knowledges” and lists a number of authors. The “Indigenous knowledges” reference, especially, could be expanded upon or brought forward and given more prominence. The idea of haptic listening, extending Marks’ haptic visuality, could also be a rich site to further interrogate, especially as this is identified as a key mode of inquiry and method of research. I do understand that this is difficult in such a short statement. However, it would be good to see a bit of this unpacked in the statement.

a skin, a sea, an island, a prison is a playful response to the problems of representation, especially concerning identity, race, history, politics and the environment. It uses bricolage to bring multiple disparate images and audio sources together to destabilise boundaries and hierarchies, both aesthetically and conceptually. 

PEER REVIEW 2 

The director asks the audience, “Would you care more about our world’s problems if it were presented as a white woman’s dead body in a procedural thriller?” This is an intriguing metaphor and a question which, for this viewer, resonates strongly.

Tytler cleverly applies generic tropes to present the single-white-female’s body as the victim in an episode of CSI but quickly confuses who the real victim is. Is it Mother Earth? Is it Indigenous cultures? Society? Or is it the human race itself? Questions are posed though digital manipulation techniques such as morphing the woman’s corpse into the tree on which it rests, sonic layering of artificial intelligence voices with the artist’s own. The adaptability of the director’s central “crime scene” metaphor carries the viewer’s understanding a long, long way. After being shown imagery of environmental and cultural disaster, the police forensics report that “The body was badly damaged. Suffocated and burned.” This is followed by another detective announcing that traces of multiple chemicals present in the autopsy. “Plastics and microplastics”. The text refers to the white woman’s body, yet the subtext offers far larger application. 

The killer that the cops are hunting, the angry, twenty-something white man, exclaims, “I did not start this!” Perhaps not, but the film lays the blame at the feet of what he represents. After all, as the police officer states, “we are dealing with a monster.” Powerful stuff. 

Tytler’s film presents an onslaught of visual and aural signifiers which represent a broad series of social issues and challenges: environmental disaster, immigration policy, gender politics, entrenched racism, feminism, artificial intelligence and the abuses of the capital system. This is a dense array of topics in a short film of under five minutes duration. Is the film trying to say too much? Would the film benefit from simplification? Fortunately, the director embraces the excess of content and applies to it appropriate creative forms via sonic layering and digital collage. The audience are offered an experience of “embodiment” with the theme, rather than intellectual engagement with plot and character – and this works a treat. 

The research interrogates how whiteness is “constructed as ‘natural’ and ‘pure’ in cultural and media representations”. The researcher makes innovative use of the cinematic language, in particular crime story tropes, and challenges our narrow application of their meaning.  The work was developed in response to She says, she says: Geo-sonic Entanglements (Preston and Konrad 2023) and its kinship is clear. Preston and Konrad’s film asks the viewer to “Wake Up” and, arguably, so does Tytler’s film, using similar methods: both experiment with sonics, with digital image manipulation, with distorted images of nature, with moments of black screen and the use of accentuated female voices. 

a skin, a sea, an island, a prison exists as a prime example of how experimental screen production can create ways of seeing, hearing and understanding these entanglements. It takes the safety of our entertainment and turns it against us. 

Clearly, I found this film quite engaging and enjoyable. Its duration was just right for the content and form. The central metaphor was simple and, therefore, profound. I really do commend you with this creative output work.  

With regards to the research statement, I come from a much simpler type of academia and, therefore, at moments, I found the research statement difficult to penetrate. As a practice-led filmmaker-academic, the “narratives of purity” did resonate in the same way that the film did. You ask the question “Can experimental screen production create ways of seeing, hearing and understanding these entanglements?” My answer is “Yes” to seeing and hearing but “not necessarily” to understanding. The entanglements are at once very simple (power imbalances) and very complicated (infinite boundaries).  

With regards to the research statement, I come from a much simpler type of academia and, therefore, at moments I found the research statement difficult. So, therefore, the only feedback I would dare to offer would be to concentrate the research statement more solidly on how you have taken accepted generic traits and used them to provoke the audience’s lethargy around this century’s apocalyptic problems. 

RESPONSE TO PEER REVIEWS

I would like to warmly thank the reviewers for their generous comments and interrogation of the work. I appreciated this opportunity to engage with the comments and to get a sense of how the research is being read. I agree with Reviewer 1’s comments around an unpacking of both Indigenous knowledges and Marks’ scholarship on haptic visuality. It is true that it can be tricky with word-limit expectations, but here is my additional statement referencing these aspects:

The reference to Indigenous knowledges in a skin, a sea, an island, a prison reflects an ongoing commitment to relational modes of thinking and perceiving, influenced by the work of Country et al. (2019) and Tynan (2020). These frameworks foreground Country as co-constitutive of knowledge and experience, shaping how sound and image are approached in the work, not as fixed or representational, but as entangled and emergent. While the video does not attempt to depict Indigenous worldviews, it acknowledges that any engagement with ecology and embodiment in this place must reckon with unceded sovereignty and a history of extractive colonial logics. The notion of “situated co-becoming” from Country et al. (2019) informed my approach to layering and mimicry as processes that resist purity and singular authorship. These ideas align with feminist ecological perspectives, such as Alaimo’s (2018) material transcorporeality, Haraway’s (2016) call to “stay with the trouble,” and Plumwood’s (1993) critique of dualism, which all trouble the boundaries between self and environment, subject and object.

Similarly, Marks’ (2000) theory of haptic visuality offers a way to think through embodied spectatorship, which I extend into the auditory domain through the idea of sonic tactility. If haptic visuality invites tactile perception through the eye, then sonic tactility engages vibrational, unstable forms of attention through the ear and body. In following Marks’ proposition that haptic visuality offers an alternative epistemology, one that privileges touch over detached observation, I situate my own audiovisual layering as a process of tactile knowledge-making. The work does not aim to illustrate racialised violence or ecological loss but to generate a felt sense of disturbance and dispossession, revealing what cannot be cleanly seen or resolved. Through vocal mimicry, spanning birdsong, weather, and AI-generated voices, the work invites a multisensory disruption of boundaries between human and non-human, organic and synthetic. By layering these sensorial elements, it resists coherence and makes visible the perceptual hierarchies embedded in racialised, ableist and gendered systems of representation.

REFERENCES 

Alaimo, Stacy. 2018. “Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology.” Green Letters 22, no. 3: 331–34.

Bronfen, Elisabeth. 1992. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

Country, Bawaka, Sandie Suchet-Pearson, Sarah Wright, Kate Lloyd, Matalena Tofa, Jill Sweeney, and Laklak Burarrwanga. 2019. “Goŋ Gurtha: Enacting Response-Abilities as Situated Co-Becoming.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 37, no. 4: 682–702. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775818799749.

Benjamin, Ruha. 2019. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge: Polity.

Eidsheim, Nina Sun. 2015. Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice. Durham: Duke University Press.

Flint, Michelle A. 2022. “More-than-Human Methodologies in Qualitative Research: Listening to the Leafblower.” Qualitative Research 22, no. 4: 521–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794121999028.

Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822373780.

Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

McWhorter, Ladelle. 2009. Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge. 

Preston, Julieanna, and Felicia Konrad. dir. 2023. She Says, She Says: Geo-Sonic Entanglements. Aotearoa and Sweden. Video artwork. https://vimeo.com/803621164. 

Shotwell, Alexis. 2016. Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Tynan, Lauren. 2020. “Thesis as Kin: Living Relationality with Research.” AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples 16, no. 3: 163–70. https://doi.org/10.1177/1177180120948270.