Faculty Member, Theory Program, Department of Fine Arts
About
Dr Leonie Cooper lectures and supervises in the Theory program in the Faculty of Art and Design, Monash University. She teaches across the fields of cinema, television, photography, digital media and supervises students undertaking HDR research in both theory and arts based research. She’s particularly concerned with the intermedial relations from which screen assemblages are generated and developing appropriate methods to articulate their material and aesthetic conditions. This approach is supported by a mode of thinking that has hybridised astronauts with media archaeologies, social networks with science fiction, mixed reality/augmented media environments with virtual worlds and space stations and, in turn, generated papers at local and international conferences - Caiia-STAR ; The Buffyverse & UTE Culture (2002); Holy Men in Tights Superhero Conference (2005); B for Bad Cinema (2009. Publications range from work on the astronaut in Stars in Our Eyes: The Star Phenomenon in the Contemporary Era (2002) to the catalogue for the Star Voyager exhibition at ACMI (Melbourne, 2011). Her Phd thesis - From Viewing Stars to Building Worlds: The Astronaut and Contemporary Screen Media - constituted the astronaut as a heuristic tool to think through the perceptual and epistemological tensions activated by transitions within screen cultures. This approach enabled her to construct a cross-media investigation of film, theme park attractions and virtual worlds in parallel to a shift in the imaginary conditions of space travel.
