ABSTRACT
This chapter takes the form of a dialogue between Laurene and myself, who together represent a small but perhaps strategically positioned sample of the multidisciplinary diversity of this project the Circus Oz Living Archive that have been working on for the past four years. The project began with the intent to rescue the historical images and sounds on the circus's analogue videotapes from their own extinction, not because they were of any value in themselves but only because of the stories of late twentieth-century Australian culture they alluded to: stories of collective art making, gender politics, communitarian ideals, not to mention transformations in contemporary circus practice. The bricolage, Kincheloe says, exists out of respect for the complexity of the lived world. Indeed, it is grounded on an epistemology of complexity. The digital humanities, like other fields of enquiry and practice premised on the exponential proliferation of computational technologies, tends to valorise, perhaps even fetishise, the new.
