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Randall_William_MFA_Thesis_2016.pdf (537.54 KB)

ETD Abstract Container

Abstract Header

How Methane Made the Mountain: The Material Ghost and the Technological Sublime in Methane Ghosts

Randall, William Sanford
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1460722538

Abstract Details

2016, Master of Fine Arts, Ohio State University, Art.
Methane Ghosts, a twelve-minute looping video installed in an art gallery, presents imagery of a landfill for aesthetic consideration. However, this periurban landscape was built not for scenic views, but for the impolite needs of a major metropolitan area. It is supposed to be out-of-sight, and the bureaucratic entity with which I contracted to gain access explicitly asked not to be identified. The film asks questions of the natural environment and the Sublime, while the installation asks questions of our own bodies in relation to the filmed image. This essay asks questions of institutions and the categories they set. In this essay, I consider the works of filmmakers like James Benning and Robert Gardner, the formal and material questions posed about filmmaking by critic Gilberto Perez and anthropologist David MacDougall, and the history of the Sublime in American thought, especially as related to technology and avant-garde film. This whole is framed by a consideration of my own rural agricultural childhood. Behind this fascination is a theory of the garden, a place outside traditional categories, between woods and farm, home and nature, which originally began from the first waste dumps. I consider the landfill a sort of garden, though one on a bureaucratic scale, out of reach of the individual, hidden in plain sight. Rather than explicate the minute particulars of Methane Ghosts, I have chosen instead to offer an archaeology of my thoughts during its making. So I have structured the essay as a series of fragments. Like the landfill itself, one might find such scraps and then piece together some understanding. In the scraps of this essay, certain themes occur and reoccur. Since I signed a contract, I cannot include Methane Ghosts. Instead I sketch some jobs for future work.
Amy Youngs, MFA (Advisor)
Roger Beebe, PhD (Committee Member)
Michael Mercil, MFA (Committee Member)
65 p.
Agriculture; Film Studies; Fine Arts; Landscape Architecture; Philosophy
gardens, contemporary art, filmmaking, cinema, the body, landfill, waste, urban, rural, urbanism, landscape film, sensory ethnography, documentary, landscape architecture, art and technology, empiricism

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Randall, W. S. (2016). How Methane Made the Mountain: The Material Ghost and the Technological Sublime in Methane Ghosts [Master's thesis, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1460722538

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Randall, William. How Methane Made the Mountain: The Material Ghost and the Technological Sublime in Methane Ghosts. 2016. Ohio State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1460722538.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Randall, William. "How Methane Made the Mountain: The Material Ghost and the Technological Sublime in Methane Ghosts." Master's thesis, Ohio State University, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1460722538

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1460722538
839
© 2016, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.