Associate Professor Caleb Kelly
Associate Professor
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).
Arts, Design & Architecture (ADA)
School of Art & Design
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, Sound 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, toured seven 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.
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My Research Supervision
Current HDR Students:
- Jim Denley (PhD, Practice-based): As Weather: Improvisational Feedback, Musicking/Audio-ing
- Anabelle Lacroix (PhD, Practice-based): Experimental sound curating
- Anthea Caddy (PhD, Practice-based): Expanding Cello Performance Space through Long-throw Speakers
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)
- Sara Retallick (MFA): Listening Tank: Amplifying sound underwater to access a multisensory experience of listening (2024)