Researcher

Associate Professor Caleb Kelly

My Expertise

Media Art, Sound in Art, Sound in Music

Fields of Research (FoR)

Digital and electronic media art, Art history, theory and criticism, Critical heritage, museum and archive studies, Cultural and creative industries

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Biography

Caleb Kelly is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture. His research focuses on sound in the fields of media arts, gallery arts and music. His research has led to a rethinking of how art is listened to, historically and in contemporary practice. Kelly coordinates the research group Sound, Energies and Environments (http://see.unsw.edu.au/).

In 2009 he published his first book, entitled Cracked Media: The Sound of...view more

Caleb Kelly is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture. His research focuses on sound in the fields of media arts, gallery arts and music. His research has led to a rethinking of how art is listened to, historically and in contemporary practice. Kelly coordinates the research group Sound, Energies and Environments (http://see.unsw.edu.au/).

In 2009 he published his first book, entitled Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction, through MIT Press. He has also edited Sound (MIT Press and Whitechapel Gallery, 2011), part of the Documents of Contemporary Art series. Kelly's third book entitled, Gallery Sound was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2017. He is the co-editor of Imperfections: Studies in Mistakes, Flaws, and Failures (Bloomsbury, 2021). He has written articles for the Journal of Sonic Studies, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Leonardo Music Journal, and Contemporary Music Review.

Kelly is a curator whose exhibitions deal with strategies for the display of contemporary art that is filled with sound. Most recently he curated Material Sound for MAMA, Albury in 2018. The exhibition included six installations by Australian artists who work with sound. The exhibition, with the funding support of the Australian Council for the Arts, will tour ten art museums in Australia between 2020-2023. In 2019 he curated Materials, Sounds + Black Mountain College in the USA. He also curated a large exhibition entitled Sound Full: Sound in Contemporary Australian and New Zealand Art, at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery and the City Gallery in Wellington, NZ in 2013/2014. 

In 2015 Kelly was the Edgard Varèse Guest Professor at the Technische Universität Berlin.

 

My Qualifications

Bachelor of Arts, Art History & Philosophy, the University of Otago, NZ (1993).

Master of Arts (Hons), Art History,  the University of Auckland, NZ (1996).

Doctor of Philosophy, Creative Communications, the University of Canberra, Australia (2007).

 


My Research Supervision


Supervision keywords


Areas of supervision

Sound in the arts, sound studies, feedback/imperfection/cracked media, media art theory


Currently supervising

Current HDR Students:
  • Jim Denley  (PhD, Practice-based): Performance in weather 
  • Anabelle Lacroix  (PhD, Practice-based): Experimental sound curating
  • Sara Retalick (MFA), Sound in water
Completed Post-Graduate Students:
  • Rodney Swan (PhD): The Resistance and Resurgence: The Cultural and Political Dynamic of the Livre d’Artiste and the German Occupation of France (2016)
  • Nathan Thompson (PhD, Practice-based): Organisation and Sound: Environmental Systems in Experimental Music (2017)
  • Andrew Brooks (PhD): A Poetics of Interruption: fugitive speech acts and the politics of noise (2018)
  • Heather Contant (PhD): Electromagnetic constellations: the collectivist tendencies in radio (2018)
  • Thomas Smith (PhD, Practice-based), Generic Artistic Strategies and Ambivalent Affect (2019)
  • Justin Harvey (PhD, Practice-based), An Impossible Present: the indivisible time of video feedback art (2021)
  • Richard Keys (PhD), Expanded Approaches to Ecological Sound Practice (2021)
  • Jasmine Guffond (PhD, Practice-based): Listening Back: Sound, Surveillance and the Internet (2021)
  • Steffan Ianigro (PhD): Plecto: Investigating the Musical Affordances of Continuous Time Recurrent Neural Networks (2022)
  • Kate Crawford (MFA), Instrument V: Using electro-acoustic feedback to think about interconnection (2022)

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