2014 GO423 Symposium

The Game On program and the Game On Symposium supports sector building and sustainability of the local game making industry through strengthening community networks and fostering recognition of our local game making industry. The Game On Symposium – GO423 is a two-day festival focused on Queensland practitioners and community – from leaders in the field to emerging professionals and students (High School and tertiary level). With a program of presentations, debates, discussions, and exhibition around interactive screen culture and practice, GO423 promotes an understanding of the Queensland and Australian screen production industry within a broad global context.

Sensitive aunt provotype

The Sensitive Aunt Provotype was designed as part of Indoor Climate, a three-year research study of participatory design and user-driven innovation. It resulted from collaboration between two universities and five industry partners. Indoor Climate sought to understand experiences of comfort in domestic, business and institutional environments. This involved a literature review on the meaning of comfort, an ethnographic study of indoor environments, a provotyping process designed to provoke debate, and the design development of new products. A provotype is a provocative prototype. The title of the work Sensitive Aunt was derived from an analogy by one of the project partners and the colours emitted by the device represent the temperature, light intensity and air quality of the environment in which it is placed. In addition, the LED screen suggests actions to improve the indoor climate. The sensitive aunt provotype was designed to provoke conversation around different conceptions of a new product or service from the perspectives of manufacturers and design users. While both speculative design and provotypes inspire debate, speculative design focuses on the normative protocols of design industries while provotypes trigger discussion with the industry partners. Critically challenging ideas such as 21 degrees is the temperature in which people should be comfortable, provotypes combine participation and provocation and open up design to issues of refocus on usability and values.

Cube Jam (Engagement Innovation Project)

Cube Jam is a project developed in response to the new and rising marketing in large-scale interactive public screens - the Cube being a premier site. Cube Jam will be a crossbreeding ‘think-ubator’ that rides on the back of the already nationally recognised Game On program and its digital communities. Via a bottom-up, non-directive approach Cube Jam will facilitate a series of design provocations within co-located Jam Studios; studios that are focused on supporting adaptation and new ideation and concept design. These Studios will seek new combinations of skills and knowledges with the intention of discovering provotypes of possibilities in both working and production methodologies and product outcomes.

Minnie’s Bow-Toons seasons 2 and 3

Minnie’s Bow-Toons follows the adventures of Minnie Mouse and her best friend Daisy Duck as they run Minnie's Bow-tique, a specialty shop stocked only with colorful bows and bowties. In the third season Minnie, Daisy and their assistant Cuckoo Loca opens a pet grooming salon adjacent to the Bow-tique. In the fourth season Minnie, Daisy and Cuckoo Loca travel around the world, visiting cities like London, Venice and Tokyo.

FarmKids 2007 – 2008

Farmkids (styled as FARMkids) is an Australian animated comedy series about a bunch of pampered zoo animals accidentally being shipped to a dude ranch. 13 episodes aired in Series 1 and another 13 in Series 2 (2007-2008)

Secret Millionares Club

Secret Millionaires Club is an animated series of 26 webisodes featuring Warren Buffett (CEO and largest shareholder of Berkshire Hathaway) as a secret mentor to a group of kids who learn practical life lessons during fun-filled adventures in business.

Unfamiliar destinations

A score investigating issues of mobility, accessing mobility, and alternative mobility I have been working on. This score is continuing a series, called The Excentric Fixations Project, I have been working on since 20019. It is also the middle score of in a series of three processual performance scores I have been asked to develop as part of QUT’s contribution to a federally funded Higher Education Participation Program, where universities in the region partner to develop, deliver and evaluate activities that build aspiration amongst disadvantaged students. The program encourages participants to use investigations of small moments of anxiety about meeting new people, taking new paths, or trying new things, in order to imagine new ways of dealing with these issues at a larger level, in study, career, or life choices.

CultureMap

CultureMap is the mobile app for the Cultural Atlas of Australia, a digital atlas that maps the locations of more than 200 films, novels, and plays that feature Australian spaces and places. You can use the CultureMap app to find narrative and filming locations near you, you can search for your favourite Australian stories to find out where they are set, or you can search by location to discover what stories have been set there. The app also features our Mapping Ecological Themes showcase, which focuses on films and novels that foreground ecological themes or are set in environmentally sensitive areas. CultureMap is co-funded through an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant and an Inspiring Australia: Unlocking Australia’s Potential grant.

Bits and bumps: Understanding gender in contemporary physical comedy

This study investigates how the gender of a performer affects the way they produce physical comedy in a theatrical context, framed through Kristeva's theory of abjection and Butler's notion of gender as performance. As a thesis by creative work, it produced an original piece of theatre, The Furze Family Variety Hour, which featured a male/ female comic duo, where the female performer enjoyed an equal share of the punch lines. The study generates a new understanding of how the body operates in physical comedy, namely, a system of bodily registers, as well as a new understanding of the female grotesque comic body.

Temporal

An evolving meditation upon the complex, periodic processes that mark Australia’s seasonality, and our increasing ability to disturb them. By amplifying and shining light upon a myriad of mysterious lives lived in blackness, the work presents a sensuous, deep engagement with the rich, irregular spectras of seasonal forms: whilst hinting at a far less comforting background increasingly framed by anthropogenic climate change. ’Temporal’ uses custom interactive systems, illusionary techniques and real time spatial audio processes that draw upon a rich array of media, including seasonal, nocturnal field recordings sourced in the Bundaberg region and detailed observations of foliage & flowering phases from that region. By drawing inspiration from the subtle transitions between what Europeans once named ‘Summer’ and ‘Autumn’ and the multiple seasons recognised by other cultures, whilst also including bodily disturbances within the work, ’Temporal’ creates a compellingly immersive environment that wraps audiences in luscious yet ominous atmospheres beyond sight and hearing. This work completes a two year long project of dynamic mediated installations that have been presented in Sydney, Beijing, Cairns and Bundanon, that have each been somehow choreographed by environmental cycles; alluding to a new framework for making works that we named ‘Seasonal’. These powerful, responsive & experiential works each draw attention to that which will disappear when biodiverse worlds have descended into an era of permanent darkness – an ‘extinction of human experience’. By tapping into the deeply interlocking seasonal cycles of environments that are themselves intimately linked with social, geographical & political concerns, participating audiences are therefore challenged to see the night, their locality & ecologies in new ways through extending their personal limits of perception, imagery & comprehension.

Black Nectar

Black Nectar is a site-specific light & sound installation, that asks audiences to take slow, sensory walks through the inky-blackness of Bundanon’s forests at night, charting personal courses through seasons of change, animality and imagination – far beyond the blinding lights and howling tones of our contemporary existence. Gathering during a time Europeans once named as ‘spring’ audiences will leave the comfy lights and sounds of Bundanon’s homestead area, to take powerful, personal, silent journeys into the long darks of night, heading ultimately towards the place of ‘Black Nectar’. This most unusual of walks begins with impending darkness, and yet ultimately ends with the faintest, sweetest of glimmers – an en-lightening, re-sounding of our seasonal futures?

quinessence

Quintessence exhibition, Hindley Street University of South Australia Art Gallery 2003. quintessence: the pure, highly concentrated essence of something. Quintessence brings together a collection of work who express concepts through exploring a particular “essence” of future design.

Suspension points

This exhibition catalogue documents a collaborative art exhibition produced by QUT and Fordham University art students at the Ildiko Gallery in New York, December 6, 2014 to January 25, 2015. The exhibition theme related to the vagaries of communication over long distances, and the kind of creative works that could be generated via a range of media including email, Skype, message in a bottle, and Twitter.

Gentlemen Songsters

This project was initially envisaged as a compare and contrast proposition between two performances in music venues, a year apart, at the Melbourne Ukulele Festivals 2013 and 2014. The covert intermedial incorporation of scripted, theatrical elements into an ostensibly musical performance was the initial focus. However, the opportunity arose to continue the creative practice towards a performance outcome at the Queensland Cabaret Festival at the Brisbane Powerhouse in June of 2014. This expanded project was titled ‘Gentlemen Songsters’ and enabled a refinement and honing of the event beyond what was initially planned. In addition to the composition, recording and curation of original songs, this process involved two cycles of performance, videography, transcription, re-writing and re-performance. Led by this creative practice, the research investigated the potential for sonata and song cycle as influences on performance structure, in the creation and performance of Composed Theatre. This manifested as a theatricalisation of compositional processes. Performed by ‘Tyrone and Lesley’, performance personae of David Megarrity (lyricist/composer/performer/ukulele) and Samuel Vincent (composer, musician, performer), Gentlemen Songsters played at the Brisbane Powerhouse as part of its inaugural Queensland Cabaret Festival on June 13 2014

Children's literature and the environment

Fiction offers creative and imaginative scenarios and solutions that may stimulate young people to consider their own relationship with the environment. Literature for young people also offers insights into ecocatastrophe, anthropocentrism, sustainability, and other important issues. A further significance of this project is that it aligns with the cross-curriculum priority of the Australian Curriculum, namely ‘sustainability’. The 'Children's Literature and the Environment' project in AustLit includes a variety of bibliographic records (fiction, information books, film, poetry, and multimedia) relevant to children and young adults that deal with the environment in imaginative, scientific, educational, and creative ways, which culminates in an online exhibition. There are a number of components clustered around key concepts and issues, such as sustainability, urban environments, and Indigenous perspectives. This exhibition allows researchers and students to access and engage with bibliographical data on a range of literary and critical texts that provide various environmental perspectives over a significant period of time.