Flux density

Social Interiors (Julian Knowles, Rik Rue, Shane Fahey) are currently developing a major sound art project entitled Flux Density, in collaboration with a team of artists, focused on investigating the changing relationships between emerging digital technologies and traditional ‘obsolete’ analogue media. The project has two main components. – a curated compilation and a live performance. It is a large scale curatorial and performance project led by Social Interiors with assistant curators Joel Stern, Alessio Cavallaro and Shannon O’Neill. Presentation - International Symposium of Electronic Art. Social Interiors are one of Australia’s best known experimental sound ensembles. Project will consist of an online compilation of historic music emerging from the 80s cassette culture era, remix based works by Social Interiors, and work from new cassette labels established in a post internet era. Performance project will take place in Sydney and consist of Social Interiors in performance/collaboration with a range of well known artists. Partners include ABC Radio, ISEA, and Extreme Records.

Tristate

"This work forms part of a much larger collaborative album project in progress between Tim Bruniges, Julian Knowles and David Trumpmanis which explores the intersections between traditional rock instrumentation and analogue and digital media. All of the creative team are performers, composers and producers. The material for the album was thus generated by a series of in studio improvisations and performances with each collaborator assuming a range of different and alternating roles – guitars, electronics, drums, percussion, bass, keyboards production. Thematically the work explores the intersection of instrumental (post) rock, ambient music, and historical electro-acoustic tape composition traditions. Over the past 10 years, musical practice has become increasingly hybrid, with the traditional boundaries between genre becoming progressively eroded. At the same time, digital tools have replaced many of the major analogue technologies that dominated music production and performance in the 20th century. The disappearance of analogue media in mainstream musical practice has had a profound effect on the sonic characteristics of contemporary music and the gestural basis for its production. Despite the increasing power of digital technologies, a small but dedicated group of practitioners has continued to prize and use analogue technology for its unique sounds and the non-linearity of the media, aestheticising its inherent limitations and flaws. At the most radical end of this spectrum lie glitch and lo-fi musical forms, seen in part as reactions to the clinical nature of digital media and the perceived lack of character associated with its transparency. Such developments have also problematised the traditional relationships between media and genre, where specific techniques and their associated sounds have become genre markers. Tristate is an investigation into this emerging set of dialogues between analogue and digital media across composition, production and performance. It employs analogue tape loops in performance, where a tape machine ‘performer’ records and hand manipulates loops of an electric guitar performer on ‘destroyed’ tape stock (intentionally damaged tape), processing the output of this analogue system in the digital domain with contemporary sound processors. In doing so it investigates how the most extreme sonic signatures of analogue media – tape dropout and noise – can be employed alongside contemporary digital sound gestures in both compositional and performance contexts and how the extremes of the two media signatures can brought together both compositionally and performatively. In respect of genre, the work established strategies for merging compositional techniques from the early musique concrete tradition of the 1940s with late 60s popular music experimentalism and the laptop glitch electronica movement of the early 2000s. Lastly, the work explores how analogue recording studio technologies can be used as performance tools, thus illuminating and foregrounding the performative/gestural dimensions of traditional analogue studio tools in use."

Cybercrime attribution : an Eastern European case study

Phishing and related cybercrime is responsible for billions of dollars in losses annually. Gartner reported more than 5 million U.S. consumers lost money to phishing attacks in the 12 months ending in September 2008 (Gartner 2009). This paper asks whether the majority of organised phishing and related cybercrime originates in Eastern Europe rather than elsewhere such as China or the USA. The Russian “Mafiya” in particular has been popularised by the media and entertainment industries to the point where it can be hard to separate fact from fiction but we have endeavoured to look critically at the information available on this area to produce a survey. We take a particular focus on cybercrime from an Australian perspective, as Australia was one of the first places where Phishing attacks against Internet banks were seen. It is suspected these attacks came from Ukrainian spammers. The survey is built from case studies both where individuals from Eastern Europe have been charged with related crimes or unsolved cases where there is some nexus to Eastern Europe. It also uses some earlier work done looking at those early Phishing attacks, archival analysis of Phishing attacks in July 2006 and new work looking at correlation between the Corruption Perception Index, Internet penetration and tertiary education in Russia and the Ukraine. The value of this work is to inform and educate those charged with responding to cybercrime where a large part of the problem originates and try to understand why.

Artists and their worlds

A catalogue essay written for 'Tall Tales and Other Adventures: a University of Southern Queensland, Dogwood Crossing, Miles and Flying Arts research project.'

Frontier thinking : fear of the frock?

Stylish women, Dr Gertrude Langer, Margaret Cilento, and Joy Roggenkamp, didn't fit the mythology of modern art in Brisbane, typified by rugged artists like Ian Fairweather and Jon Molvig. Courtney Pedersen considers the place of fashion, urbanity, and women in the mid-century avant-garde.

Suedehead

An original work by New York-based choreographer Jodi Melnick performed in the Irish Museum of Modern Art. A dance for four. Four individual solos, often seen intersecting, interrupting, invading one another. Coming and going. How to be coming and going at the same time. Starting with a working process with an openness to the performers and their beautiful, sometimes jarring, one step at a time, bird by bird. It has to be like that. A devised choreography that incorporates the creative input of the cast of dancers to produce an original work.

Solo3

Solo3 is and evening of solo works collaboratively created by Jenny Roche and choreographers John Jasperse (US), Jodi Melnick (US) and Liz Roche (Ireland). It was commissioned by the Dublin Dance Festival 2008 for the culmination of Jenny Roche's residency as an artist with the festival. The three works address the role of the dancer as co-creator within choreographic practice and further examine how the dancer can inhabit multiple embodiments across various choreographies leading to a plurality of selfhood in line with post-modern and poststructuralist notions of subjectivity (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Furthermore, the oscillation of real and imagined subjectivities in performance (Emilyn Claid 2006) and the interplay of intercorporeal and intersubjective relations between choreographer and dancer (Sally Gardner 2007) are highlighted in these works.

Altered copy

In 2008, Jenny Roche commissioned Jodi Melnick to make the solo Business of the Bloom on her. Four years later, Roche re-enters this piece and draws on their many years of working together to inhabits its ideas and impulses from a new perspective. In this new 'altered copy', Roche refers to this previous work; embellishing, redirecting and abstracting moments. By reinterpreting both her earlier self and footage of Melnick dancing a reworked version of the solo in performance, Roche connects with the polyvalent nature of both interpretation and memory. This reworked version outlines the relationship that dancers have to movement traces that circulate after a dancing event. Suzanne Ravn (2009) found that dancers experienced the reapperance of movement traces from previous works when moving. Martin Nachbar (2012) writing from his first-person perspective as a dancer, describes the dancer who discerns between the past of movement that is remembered and the current moment of its performance. He outlines how past and present movement experiences cohabitate in the embodied present. Timmy de Laet (2012) identifies the emerging trait of re-enactment in contemporary dance, in which contemporary artists such as Nachbar dialogue with past choreographies to comment on the various mnemonic dimensions of dance. De Laet (2012) explains that the function of these works are not to preserve the past choreographies as might be achieved through reconstruction but to contemplate creatively issues of ephemerality and preservation of dance. Altered copy addresses this dialogue between the past and present body.

Material traces : reflecting on dance performance and the archive

How dance history should be conserved, like any other human event is problematical. This article refers to the dancer’s embodied repertoire of movement and questions how it might connect with the archive, so that the recording of dance work is not taken as fully representative of the work itself. I propose opening out the multi-dimensional configuring that is part of the creation of a dance piece in order to flesh out the bones of the archive. This could be done through engaging with the choreographer and the performers (who are often co-creators of the work) to draw a range of insights and perspectives together.

Standards that we can 'own' : Threshold Learning Outcomes for Journalism, Public Relations, and Media & Communication Studies

This paper outlines the progress by the JoMeC (Journalism, Media & Communication) Network in developing TLO (Threshold Learning Outcome) statements for Bachelor-level university programs in the disciplines of Journalism, Public Relations and Media & Communications Studies. The paper presents the finalised TLO statement for Journalism, and outlines moves to engage discipline-based groups to further develop preliminary TLOs for Public Relations and Media & Communication Studies. The JoMeC Network was formed in 2011, in response to requirements that from 2014 all degrees and qualifications at Australian universities would be able to demonstrate that they comply with the threshold learning standards set by the Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF). The AQF’s threshold standards define the minimum types and levels of knowledge, skills and capabilities that a student must demonstrate in order to graduate. The Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) will use the AQF’s threshold standards as a key tool in recording and assessing the performance of higher educational institutions, and determining whether they should be registered as Australian Higher Education Providers under the Higher Education Standards Framework. The Office of Learning & Teaching (OLT) places the onus on discipline communities to collaborate in order to develop and ‘own’ the threshold learning standards that can be considered the minimum learning outcomes of university-level programs in that field. With the support of an OLT Grant, the JoMeC Network’s prime goal has been to develop three sets of discipline-specific TLOs – one each for the Journalism, Public Relations, and Media & Communications Studies disciplines. This paper describes the processes of research, consultation, drafting and ongoing revision of the TLO for Journalism. It outlines the processes that the JoMeC Network has taken in developing a preliminary TLO draft to initiate discussion of Public Relations and Media & Communication Studies. The JoMeC Network plans to hand management of further development of these TLOs to scholars within the discipline who will engage with academics and other stakeholders to develop statements that the respective disciplines can embrace and ‘own’.

iPads in the Early Years : Developing Literacy and Creativity

Digital devices like smart phones and tablet computers are becoming commonplace in young children’s lives for play, entertainment, learning and communication. Recently, there has been a great deal of focus on the educational potential of devices like iPads in both formal and informal educational settings. There is now an abundance of educational ‘apps’ available to children, parents, and kindergarten and pre-school teachers that claim to enhance children’s early literacy and numeracy development and creativity. To date, though, there has been very little formal investigation of the educational potential of these devices. This book discusses the impact on children’s learning when iPads were introduced in three very different kindergartens in Brisbane, Australia. Chapters outline how researchers worked with pre-school teachers and parents to explore how iPads can assist with letter and word recognition, the development of oral literacy and talk around play. The book also considers the possibilities for using iPads for creativity and arts education through photography, storytelling, drawing, music creation and audio recording.

Cultural development strategies and urban revitalization

Municipal governments around the globe increasingly turn to museums, performing arts centers, arts districts, and other cultural activities to promote and revitalize their cities. While a significant body of literature examines revitalization strategies that focus primarily around entertainment and commerce, the empirical body of research that specifically investigates the role of cultural strategies in urban redevelopment is still growing. This paper first discusses the development of municipal cultural strategies in the United States, and draws from the literature to outline the characteristics of three different models of such strategies. Second, the paper presents findings from a national survey distributed to municipal agencies involved in the promotion and development of cultural activities and facilities in large and medium‐sized US cities. The survey data indicate that although most agencies are guided by a varied set of goals, entrepreneurial objectives continue to guide the development and support of cultural activities in most cities.

Whose story is it anyway? : the screenwriter as author in the process of adaptation

This project explores issues confronted when authoring a previously authored story, one received from history. Using the defection of Soviet spies, Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov as its focal point, it details how a screenwriter addresses issues arising in the adaptation of both fictional and biographical representations suitable for contemporary cinema. Textual fidelity and concepts of interpretation, aesthetics and audience, negotiating factual and fictional imperatives, authorial visibility and invisibility, moral and ethical conundrums are negotiated and a set of guiding principles emerge from this practice-led investigation.

Origins of Australian Football: Victoria's Early History. Volume 2 : A golden era begins : Football in 'Marvellous Melbourne', 1877 to 1885

This is the second volume of a five volume series that describes, assesses, and analyses football in Victoria during the nineteenth century. This volume looks at the cultural contexts of the sport in the late 1870s and early 1880s, describes the important matches played, and provides a full statistical account of this time period. This book is the first comprehensive discussion of the early period in Australian football's development.

Educating for the creative economy in emerging countries

In 1972, the United Nations (UN) Conference on the Human Environment expressed a growing realization that economic and social progress needed to be balanced with a concern for the environment and the stewardship of natural resources. The hard-to-grasp concept of "sustainable development" was first defined as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs" (World Commission on Environment and Development [WESDJ, 1987, p. 43). This definition contains two concepts: first, "human needs," with priority given to the world's poor, and, second, the environment's limits for meeting the state of technological and social organization (WESD, 1987, p. 43). At the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development (UN, 2002a), the focus on environmental protection broadened to encompass social justice and the fight against poverty as key principles of development that is sustainable. Three interdependent and mutually reinforcing "pillars" were recognized: economic development, social development, and environmental protection. These pillars must be established at local, national, and global levels. The complexity and interrelationship of critical issues such as poverty, wasteful consumption, urban decay, population growth, gender inequality, health, conflict, and the violation of human rights are addressed in all three pillars (Pigozzi, 2003, p. 3). Following the concept of sustainable development, we argue that the challenge for developing countries in contemporary society is to meet the very real need for economic development and opportunities for income generation, while avoiding the unintended and unwanted consequences of economic development and globalization. These consequences include social exclusion, loss of cultural heritage, and environmental and ecological problems.