Fundamental sounds

Fundamental Sounds was a live, intercultural and multidisciplinary concert that presented a new synthesis of music, performance & visual arts addressing the imperative of sustainability in a new and evocative form. The outcome was a ninety-minute concert, performed at a major concert hall venue, involving four live musicians, numerous performers & large-scale projections. The images and the concert were scripted in three key phases that spoke to three epochs of human evolution identified by ontological designer and futurist Tony Fry - ‘Pre-Settlement’, ‘Settlement’ and the era that he suggests that we have now entered – ‘Unsettlement’ (in mind body and spirit). The entire work was professionally recorded for presentation on DVD and audio CD.----- Fundamental Sounds achieved a new synthesis between quality performance forms and cogent critical ideas, engendering an increasingly reflective position for audiences around today’s “era of unsettlement” – an epoch Fry has recognized that we must now move to quickly displace through adopting fundamentally sustainable modes of being and becoming.----- The concert was well attended and evoked a range of strong, reflective reactions from its audiences who were also invited to join and participate within a subsequent ‘community of change’ initiated at that time.

Knowmore (House of Commons)

Knowmore (House of Commons) is a large scale generative interactive installation that incorporates embodied interaction, dynamic image creation, new furniture forms, touch sensitivity, innovative collaborative processes and multichannel generative sound creation. A large circular table spun by hand and a computer-controlled video projection falls on its top, creating an uncanny blend of physical object and virtual media. Participants’ presence around the table and how they touch it is registered, allowing up to five people to collaboratively ‘play’ this deeply immersive audiovisual work. Set within an ecological context, the work subtly asks what kind of resources and knowledges might be necessary to move us past simply knowing what needs to be changed to instead actually embodying that change, whilst hinting at other deeply relational ways of understanding and knowing the world. The work has successfully operated in two high traffic public environments, generating a subtle form of interactivity that allows different people to interact at different paces and speeds and with differing intentions, each contributing towards dramatic public outcomes. The research field involved developing new interaction and engagement strategies for eco-political media arts practice. The context was the creation of improved embodied, performative and improvisational experiences for participants; further informed by ‘Sustainment’ theory. The central question was, what ontological shifts may be necessary to better envision and align our everyday life choices in ways that respect that which is shared by all - 'The Commons'. The methodology was primarily practice-led and in concert with underlying theories. The work’s knowledge contribution was to question how new media interactive experience and embodied interaction might prompt participants to reflect upon the kind of resources and knowledges required to move past simply knowing what needs to be changed to instead actually embodying that change. This was achieved through focusing on the power of embodied learning implied by the works' strongly physical interface (i.e. the spinning of a full size table) in concert with the complex field of layered imagery and sound. The work was commissioned by the State Library of Queensland and Queensland Artworkers Alliance and significantly funded by The Australia Council for the Arts, Arts Queensland, QUT, RMIT Centre for Animation and Interactive Media and industry partners E2E Visuals. After premiering for 3 months at the State Library of Queensland it was curated into the significant ‘Mediations Biennial of Modern Art’ in Poznan, Poland. The work formed the basis of two papers, was reviewed in Realtime (90), was overviewed at Subtle Technologies (2010) in Toronto and shortlisted for ISEA 2011 Istanbul and included in the edited book/catalogue ‘Art in Spite of Economics’, a collaboration between Leonardo/ISAST (MIT Press); Goldsmiths, University of London; ISEA International; and Sabanci University, Istanbul.

Interactive architecture

This chapter explores the development of concepts of interactive environments by comparing two major projects that frame the period of this book. The Fun Palace of 1960 and the Generator of 1980 both proposed interactive environments responsive to the needs and behaviour of their users, but the contrast in terms of the available technology and what it enabled could not be more marked. The Fun Palace broke new architectural, organizational and social ground and was arguably the first proposition for cybernetic architecture; the Generator demonstrated how it could be achieved. Both projects are now acknowledged as seminal architectural propositions of the twentieth century, and both were designed by Cedric Price.

Technical support and professional development : using remote desktops to address bottlenecks in music technology

This paper presents research findings about the use of remote desktop applications to teach music sequencing software. It highlights the successes, shortcomings and interactive issues encountered during a pilot project with a theoretical focus on a specific interactive bottleneck. The paper proposes a new delivery and partnership model to widen this bottleneck, which currently hinders interactions between the technical support, education and professional development communities in music technology.

Young children’s experience of visual displays of their artwork

The practice of displaying children's artwork in early childhood classrooms poses a number of questions about the child and his or her visual artwork. This paper focuses on young children’s experiences with the display of their own visual artwork. Following Giorgi's (1985a; 1985b) approach to conducting phenomenological psychological research, 13 children between the ages of 4 and 6 years attending an independent school outside metropolitan Detroit, Michigan (USA) participated in semi-structured interviews as a way of uncovering their lived experiences of seeing their artwork displayed. The study yielded 12 essential themes and from these three key issues and their implications for early childhood art education are explored.

Cipher cities

Cipher Cities was a practice-led research project developed in 3 stages between 2005 and 2007 resulting in the creation of a unique online community, ‘Cipher Cities’, that provides simple authoring tools and processes for individuals and groups to create their own mobile events and event journals, build community profile and participate in other online community activities. Cipher Cities was created to revitalise peoples relationship to everyday places by giving them the opportunity and motivation to create and share complex digital stories in simple and engaging ways. To do so we developed new design processes and methods for both the research team and the end user to appropriate web and mobile technologies. To do so we collaborated with ethnographers, designers and ICT researchers and developers. In teams we ran a series of workshops in a wide variety of cities in Australia to refine an engagement process and to test a series of iteratively developed prototypes to refine the systems that supported community motivation and collaboration. The result of the research is 2 fold: 1. a sophisticated prototype for researchers and designers to further experiment with community engagement methodologies using existing and emerging communications technologies. 2. A ‘human dimensions matrix’. This matrix assists in the identification and modification of place based interventions in the social, technical, spatial, cultural, pedagogical conditions of any given community. This matrix has now become an essential part of a number of subsequent projects and assists design collaborators to successfully conceptualise, generate and evaluate interactive experiences. the research team employed practice-led action research methodologies that involved a collaborative effort across the fields of interaction design and social science, in particular ethnography, in order to: 1. seek, contest, refine a design methodology that would maximise the successful application of a dynamic system to create new kinds of interactions between people, places and artefacts’. 2. To design and deploy an application that intervenes in place-based and mobile technologies and offers people simple interfaces to create and share digital stories. Cipher Cities was awarded 3 separate CRC competitive grants (over $270,000 in total) to assist 3 stages of research covering the development of the Ethnographic Design Methodologies, the development of the tools, and the testing and refinement of both the engagement models and technologies. The resulting methodologies and tools are in the process of being commercialised by the Australasian CRC for Interaction Design.

Big art small viewer : a collaborative community project

Campus Kindergarten is a community-based centre for early childhood education and care located on campus at the University of Queensland (UQ) in Brisbane, Australia. Being located within this diverse community has presented many opportunities for Campus Kindergarten. It is creating and embracing possibilities that has formed the basis for ongoing projects for children and teachers involving research and investigation. In 2002 Campus Kindergarten embarked on a collaborative project with the Art Museum bringing together these two departments within the university community.

Charmed

Charmed is a tangible interactive media artwork that explores aspects of daily life in urban environments. The work was commissioned by Experimenta MEdia Arts for the Experimenta Playground Biennial of Media Art (2007) held at Black Box Melbourne Victoria. The work also shown in Play ++ at the International Symposium of Electronic Art July - August 2008

Printmaking as an expanding field in contemporary art practice : a case study of Japan, Australia and Thailand

This thesis proposes that contemporary printmaking, at its most significant, marks the present through reconstructing pasts and anticipating futures. It argues this through examples in the field, occurring in contexts beyond the Euramerican (Europe and North America). The arguments revolve around how the practice of a number of significant artists in Japan, Australia and Thailand has generated conceptual and formal innovations in printmaking that transcend local histories and conventions, whilst paradoxically, also building upon them and creating new meanings. The arguments do not portray the relations between contemporary and traditional art as necessarily antagonistic but rather, as productively dialectical. Furthermore, the case studies demonstrate that, in the 1980s and 1990s particularly, the studio practice of these printmakers was informed by other visual arts disciplines and reflected postmodern concerns. Departures from convention witnessed in these countries within the Asia-Pacific region shifted the field of the print into a heterogeneous and hybrid realm. The practitioners concerned (especially in Thailand) produced work that was more readily equated with performance and installation art than with printmaking per se. In Japan, the incursion of photography interrupted the decorative cast of printmaking and delivered it from a straightforward, craft-based aesthetic. In Australia, fixed notions of national identity were challenged by print practitioners through deliberate cultural rapprochements and technical contradictions (speaking across old and new languages).However time-honoured print methods were not jettisoned by any case study artists. Their re-alignment of the fundamental attributes of printmaking, in line with materialist formalism, is a core consideration of my arguments. The artists selected for in-depth analysis from these three countries are all innovators whose geographical circumstances and creative praxis drew on local traditions whilst absorbing international trends. In their radical revisionism, they acknowledged the specificity of history and place, conditions of contingency and forces of globalisation. The transformational nature of their work during the late twentieth century connects it to the postmodern ethos and to a broader artistic and cultural nexus than has hitherto been recognised in literature on the print. Emerging from former guild-based practices, they ambitiously conceived their work to be part of a continually evolving visual arts vocabulary. I argue in this thesis that artists from the Asia-Pacific region have historically broken with the hermetic and Euramerican focus that has generally characterised the field. Inadequate documentation and access to print activity outside the dominant centres of critical discourse imply that readings of postmodernism have been too limited in their scope of inquiry. Other locations offer complexities of artistic practice where re-alignments of customary boundaries are often the norm. By addressing innovative activity in Japan, Australia and Thailand, this thesis exposes the need for a more inclusive theoretical framework and wider global reach than currently exists for ‘printmaking’.

Generative Music editorial

An issue on generative music in Contemporary Music Review allows space to explore many of these controversies, and to explore the rich algorithmic scene in contemporary practice, as well as the diverse origins and manifestations of such a culture. A roster of interesting exponents from both academic and arts practice backgrounds are involved, matching the broad spectrum of current work. Contributed articles range from generative algorithms in live systems, from live coding to interactive music systems to computer games, through algorithmic modelling of longer-term form, evolutionary algorithms, to interfaces between modalities and mediums, in algorithmic choreography. A retrospective on the intensive experimentation into algorithmic music and sound synthesis at the Institute of Sonology in the 1960s and 70s creates a complementary strand, as well as an open paper on the issues raised by open source, as opposed to proprietary, software and operating systems, with consequences in the creation and archiving of algorithmic work.

Soundcipher : a music and sound library for processing

SoundCipher is a software library written in the Java language that adds important music and sound features to the Processing environment that is widely used by media artists and otherwise has an orientation toward computational graphics. This article introduces the SoundCipher library and its features, describes its influences and design intentions, and positions it within the field of computer music programming tools. SoundCipher enables the rich history of algorithmic music techniques to be accessible within one of today’s most popular media art platforms. It also provides an accessible means for learning to create algorithmic music and sound programs.

Reciprocity : where art meets the community : action research in response to artistic encounters and relationships

This practice-led research project examines some of the factors and issues facing artists working in the public domain who wish to engage with the community as audience. Using the methodology of action research, the three major creative projects in this study use art as a socio-political tool with the aim of providing an effective vehicle for broadening awareness, understanding forms of social protest and increasing tolerance for diversity. The three projects: Floodline November 7, 2004, Look in, Look out, and The Urban Terrorist Project, dealt with issues of marginalisation of communities, audiences and graffiti artists respectively. The artist/researcher is outlined as both creator and collaborator in the work. Processes included ephemeral elements, such as temporary installation and performance, as well as interactive elements that encouraged direct audience involvement as part of the work. In addition to the roles of creator and collaborator, both of which included audience as well as artist, the presence of an outside entity was evident. Whether local, legal authorities or prevailing attitudes, outside entities had an unavoidable impact on the processes and outcomes of the work. Each project elicited a range of responses from their respective audiences; however, the overarching concept of reciprocity was seen to be the crucial factor in conception, artistic methods and outcomes.

Cascading appearance-based features for visual speaker verification

The cascading appearance-based (CAB) feature extraction technique has established itself as the state of the art in extracting dynamic visual speech features for speech recognition. In this paper, we will focus on investigating the effectiveness of this technique for the related speaker verification application. By investigating the speaker verification ability of each stage of the cascade we will demonstrate that the same steps taken to reduce static speaker and environmental information for the speech recognition application also provide similar improvements for speaker recognition. These results suggest that visual speaker recognition can improve considerable when conducted solely through a consideration of the dynamic speech information rather than the static appearance of the speaker's mouth region.

Impromptu : an interactive programming environment for composition and performance

Interactive development environments are making a resurgence. The traditional batch style of programming, edit -> compile -> run, is slowly being reevaluated by the development community at large. Languages such as Perl, Python and Ruby are at the heart of a new programming culture commonly described as extreme, agile or dynamic. Musicians are also beginning to embrace these environments and to investigate the opportunity to use dynamic programming tools in live performance. This paper provides an introduction to Impromptu, a new interactive development environment for musicians and sound artists.

Devising a scenographic approach in Jonzi D's Hip Hop theatre

Jonzi D, one of the leading Hip Hop voices in the UK, creates contemporary theatrical works that merge dance, street art, original scored music and contemporary rap poetry, to create theatrical events that expand a thriving sense of a Hip Hop nation with citizens in the UK, throughout southern Africa and the rest of the world. In recent years Hip Hop has evolved as a performance genre in and of itself that not only borrows from other forms but vitally now contributes back to the body of contemporary practice in the performing arts. As part of this work Jonzi’s company Jonzi D Productions is committed to creating and touring original Hip Hop theatre that promotes the continuing development and awareness of a nation with its own language, culture and currency that exists without borders. Through the deployment of a universal voice from the local streets of Johannesburg and the East End of London, Jonzi D creates a form of highly energized performance that elevates Hip Hop as great democratiser between the highly developed global and under resourced local in the world. It is the staging of this democratised and technologised future (and present), that poses the greatest challenge for the scenographer working with Jonzi and his company, and the associated deprogramming and translation of the artists particular filmic vision to the stage, that this discussion will explore. This paper interrogates not only how a scenographic strategy can support the existence of this work but also how the scenographer as outsider can enter and influence this nation.