About this Event
This presentation will provide an overview of Carolyn’s Crime Scene Motel project and set the scene for her forthcoming book, A Ghost Criminology of Motels: Art, Crime and the Hospitality Industry, Emerald Publishing, 2025.
As detailed in her earlier publication, ‘Who’s been sleeping in my bed? Cheap motel rooms and transgression’ (in Michael Fiddler, Theo Kindynis and Travis Linnemann (eds). Ghost Criminology: The Afterlife of Crime and Punishment, New York University Press, 2022), the Crime Scene Motel project explores a particular social site - the cheap motel room - as a setting for crime. The project is based on Carolyn’s extensive international criminal case law research of motels, uncovering narratives of M**der, clandestine drug labs, assault, sexual violence, child abuse, robbery and fugitives’ hideouts. Through this research, she finds that the sexualised space of the budget motel room presents a conflation of intimacy, privacy and anonymity with a world of motor vehicles, transience, strangers and the uncanny.
This presentation will focus on the uncanny, hauntological elements, and her ‘non-traditional’ creative responses. Mid-century motor-hotels (mo-tels) can be seen as spent modernist dreams with futuristic Atomic Age design elements, remnants of a projected space-age that never arrived. These sites speak to the aesthetics of hauntology – a ghostly nostalgia for ‘lost futures’ (Fisher 2012), an expected but unrealized utopia, a lingering presence of the past with the promise of an impossible future. Still filled with decades-old detritus, retro motels now stand as ‘architecture(s) of anachronism’, analogue and framed by time ‘out of joint’ (Fisher 2012; Derrida 2012; Fiddler, Kindynis & Linnemann 2022). Today, these motels are vessels for decades-old accumulated human experience and, sometimes, traces of crime.
In her presentation, Carolyn will discuss her process of combining ghost criminology with her visual arts practice, to provide an example of actively doing and creating criminological responses through embodied immersion in a site of crime and the materiality of a visual arts practice. In combining ghost criminology with a visual arts methodology, she seeks to contribute to spatial understandings and representations of these private-but-shared rooms as sites that have experienced crime and remain charged with the traces of transgression.
Bio
Dr Carolyn McKay is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Sydney Law School where she teaches Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure and Digital Criminology. She is Co-Director, Sydney Institute of Criminology, 2021-2024. Carolyn is recognised for her research into technologies in justice published in her monograph, The Pixelated Prisoner: Pr*son video links, court ‘appearance’ and the justice matrix (2018) Routledge. Throughout 2021 - 2024, Carolyn is undertaking her Australian Government-funded national study, 'The Digital Criminal Justice Project: Vulnerability and the Digital Subject' and writing a monograph for Palgrave, Digital Vulnerability in Criminal Justice: Vulnerable people and communication technologies.
Carolyn also has a visual arts practice that responds to contemporary and historical criminal justice issues. Most recently, Carolyn's artwork draws on criminal case law narratives regarding crimes in retro motel rooms and she has held solo exhibitions: ‘Crime Scene Motel’ (Scratch Art Space 2022) and ‘Floating Between Couches & Motels’ (University of Sydney Law Library 2023-2024). Several pieces from her ‘Crime Scene Motel’ project were selected for the MAC Museum’s Lake Art Prize 2022, Blacktown Art Prize 2023, The Lock-Up’s COLLECT 2023 and ‘Counteractions’, Creator Incubator 2024. With her collaborator, she received the 2023 Non-Traditional Research Output Award from the Australian Legal Research Awards, a prestigious national scheme funded by the Council of Australian Law Deans. Her crime scene motel Ai ‘promptography’ was Highly Commended in the inaugural 'Prompted Peculiar' - 2023 Ballarat International Foto Biennale. She is currently writing A Ghost Criminology of Motels: Art, Crime and the Hospitality Industry for Emerald Publishing, 2025.
Image Credits: Carolyn McKay, Meth Lab Motor Lodge, 2022, indoor neon flex, UV Print, 100 x 79 cm (neon designed with Nick Creecy)
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
KW002, University of Greenwich, Park Row, London, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00