Oddsocks at the Melbourne Fringe Festival : a methods paper for using an arts installation in promoting public health

Installation art involves using everyday objects and spaces in an unusual way to gain attention and encourage interaction. While arts-based projects have the ability to inform and provoke interest, few have focused on public health. Oddsocks was conceived as a public health installation as part of the annual Melbourne Fringe Festival, with a primary aim to raise awareness concerning the importance of exercise and foot health. Promoting such underserved public health issues creates specific challenges which have been typically under-reported. This methods paper focuses on how these challenges can be met through arts-based initiatives and arts-based inquiry.

"Recognition" : Interactive motion tracking installation with neural network agent performer

Public installation running throughout the night at Cube 37 gallery. Morphing forms are projected onto the glass front of the gallery, facing the street. Human perticipants interact with the forms whose morphology changes with the movements of the participants. When no human participants are present, a neural network based agent that has learnt how to dance from a trained dancer, takes over and the forms follow the agent's movement.

Glacial matters, detail

A cascading glacier of refuse, from ceiling to floor, greets the viewers as they step into Bozo Ink’s latest installation. Amongst other abjections fridges capture glaciated moments with perspex protrusions, and projected figures that move, wriggle and incubate inside of them. Fridge becomes womb, fridge as technological hubris, fridge is a stillborn archive. Includes the film : 'Yeti Caught in the Headlights'

Mnemonia country

Wood, DVD player and screen, spy-hole, 500 watt interrogation light, ergonomic interrogation chair, windscreen wiper motor and car battery 2x3x1.6m. Includes the film rendition.

Heteroskin

Latext skins, with lunar gravity

Retrieval

Retrieval was a site-specific performance installation which transformed five floors of the National Library of Australia in Nov-Dec 2010. Devised in collaboration with a team of 30 young performers, the production lead the audience on a quest deep into the library to retrieve priceless cultural memories before all was lost. Louise Morris working in collaboration with co-designer Matthew Aberline and the artistic team created the installed environments for the production. The production won numerous awards including Best New Project- Express Media and Best Original Work- CAT awards.

Being appropriated : the observer and the observed

Catalogue essay (1600 words, 16 pages)

Duoscope

The ambiguous representation of spatial depth in Thornton Walker’s painting The Homage creates a peculiar sense in which the ‘whereness’ of depicted objects and atmosphere cannot be ascertained by, either perspectival convention or perceptual strategies. This visual-spatial ambiguity resonates with my interested in ‘broken’ stereography. Hence, ‘duoscopy’ refers to the limitations of binocular vision when the object of perception is itself duplicitous.

Alterations

Alterations
A project conceived by Paul Carter, Professor of Design / Urbanism, Architecture & Design, that explores the theme of 'Alterations' in clothes, identities and spaces. The project is inspired by Dandenong's rapidly mutating public and commercial spaces and the multicultural communities that animate them. The project features a multi-monitor video work Loops, textile-based installation, documentary photography, and poster manifestos. Artists featured include Dirk de Bruyn, Ed Carter, Paul Carter and Soo Yeun You.

Reproduction game demo

An 8 screen stereoscopic 3D Multi-user environment set in a circular formation. Paticipants are tracked by 8 kinect sensors as they move around the 360 degree installation. Participants inherit a species upon entering. Artificial Life based entities cluster towards the human particpants of their species and their songs evolve according to the interactions.

Conversation pieces

This exhibition presented works by Australian artists Agatha Gothe-Snape, Alex Martinis Roe and Hannah Raisin and collaborative works by Catherine or Kate (Catherine Sagin and Kate Woodcroft), Scott Ferguson (Erika Scott and Brooke Ferguson) and Courtney Coombs and Caitlin Franzmann. These artists engage with ideas of contemporary feminism through processes of dialogue and exchange, exploring subjectivity, humour and intimacy in performance and installation artworks. These works are generated by physical, verbal or textual dialogues between collaborators, participants or the artist and audience; and spark a conversation about feminist art practice today.

Recognition: combining human interaction and a digital performing agent

Virtual and augmented environments are often dependent on human intervention for change to occur. However there are times when it would be advantageous for appropriate human-like activity to still occur when there are no humans present. In this paper, we describe the installation art piece Recognition, which uses the movement of human participants to effect change, and the movement of a performing agent when there are no humans present. The agent's Artificial Neural Network has learnt appropriate movements from a dancer and is able to generate suitable movement for the main avatar in the absence of human participants.