Identifying the Value of the Local Through Site-Specific Contemporary Art Projects in New Zealand

This research identifies a number of tensions arising from historic and contemporary experiences of living in New Zealand. It engages with creative methodologies that fall within contemporary site-specific and socially engaged fields of artistic practice to investigate these tensions. Through writing and participating in three art projects set in Dunedin, New Zealand as case studies, this thesis reflects on ways in which these projects contribute to understandings of a particular experience of the local. Each case has involved specific sites, narratives and mediated experiences. Through undertaking practice-based and practice-led research the thesis argues that these art practices are able to contribute to our understanding of the local through the connections they make between lands, landscapes, sociality and techno-sociality. The research is predicated on an acceptance of what I have chosen to term a methodological ‘andness’: a neologism coined to highlight the connectivity between different types of information systems as they operate ecologically and in co-location with landscapes, local cultures, the internet and mobile communication. Throughout the project, metaphors pertaining to land and sea and shore are used to identify and reflect andness as it is experienced when one lives on an unstable island where boundaries are porous and movement between systems is both inevitable and fecund.