50 years of underground filmmaking in Melbourne: program 3

Program 3 of the 50 years of underground filmmaking in Melbourne, curated by Bill Mousoulis. A collection of John Cumming's films, including: Obsession, Recognition, and Sabotage. John also screened and discussed excerpts from some of his other works. The whole session was followed by discussion

Revealing Australia’s Underground Economy

This study, using currency demand model, finds Australia’s underground economy to be around 2 to 3 per cent of gross domestic product. We extend the related literature (see, inter alia, Bajada, 1999 and Breusch, 2005) in three novel ways. First, we use Austrian levels of taxes and welfare payments as the minimum levels of taxes and welfare payments. Secondly, we employ the currency demand measurement as in Cagan (1958), i.e., cash and currencies as a proportion of total money supply. Third, we use Cagan’s original assumption regarding equalities of velocities of currencies in both the legal and illegal economies in order to estimate the underground economy.

Simultaneous pattern and size optimisation of rock bolts for underground excavations

Designing a rock bolt reinforcement system for underground excavation involves determining bolt pattern, spacing, and size. In this paper, a topology optimisation technique is presented and employed to simultaneously optimise these design variables. To improve rock bolt design, the proposed technique minimises a displacement based function around the opening after bolt installation. This optimisation technique is independent of the material model and can be easily applied to any material model for rock and bolts. It is also extremely flexible in that it can be applied to any mechanical analysis method. To illustrate the capabilities of this method, numerical examples with non-linear material models and discontinuities in the host rock are presented. It is shown that the complexity of systems optimised using this approach is only restricted by limitations of the method used to analyse mechanical system responses.

A study on truss bolt mechanism in controlling stability of underground excavation and cutter roof failure

The truss bolt reinforcement system has been used in controlling the stability of underground excavations in severe ground conditions and cutter roof failure in layered rocks especially in coal mines. In spite of good application reports, working mechanism of this system is largely unknown and truss bolts are predominantly designed based on past experience and engineering judgement. In this study, the reinforcing effect of the truss bolt system on an underground excavation in layered rock is studied using non-linear finite element analysis. Different indicators are defined to evaluate the reinforcing effects of the truss bolt system. Using these indicators one can evaluate the effects of a reinforcing system on the deformation, loosened area, failure prevention, horizontal movement of the immediate layer, shear crack propagation and cutter roof failure of underground excavations. Effects of truss bolt on these indicators reveal the working mechanism of the truss bolt system. To illustrate the application of these indicators, a comparative study is conducted between three different truss bolt designs. It is shown that the design parameters of truss bolt systems, including tie-rod span, length, and angle of the bolts can have significant effects on the reinforcing capability of the system.

In the realm of the hackers

In the late 1980s, Melbourne was the hub of the computer underground in Australia, if not the world. The hackers who formed the underground were not disgruntled computer professionals or gangs of organised criminals. They were disaffected teenagers who used their basic home computers to explore the embryonic Internet from inside their locked, suburban bedrooms. From this shadowy world emerged two elite hackers known as Electron and Phoenix, who formed part of an alliance called The Realm. In the Realm of the Hackers charts Electron's journey from his initial innocent explorations to his ultimate obsession. It vividly recreates the climate of the 1980s, before there was public access to the Internet. The program takes us headlong into the clandestine, risky but intoxicating world of the computer underground to uncover not only how the hackers did it but why.

RemmbrMe

Dirk De Bruyn’s eleven-minute RemmbrME (2007) is a visually engaging film that documents in a painterly fashion the numerous gaps and intersections between analogue and digital moving image manipulation. RemmbrME is a work that critically focuses on the re-shaping of the lost material that is germane to a basic cameraless direct-on-film practice and resonates important ideas concerning the increasing fusion between analogue and digital image-making in our everyday culture.

Impact of stresses imposed on macroinvertebrate communities in two suburban streams

The aim of the project was to determine factors which explain the distribution of macroinvertebrates in two Melbourne streams both drastically affected by urbanisation. A detailed description is given of Dandenong Creek, flowing through the south-eastern suburbs, and Darebin Creek, in the northern suburbs, emphasising stream features likely, or known, to influence the drift and benthic fauna. Faunal sampling was carried out in Dandenong Creek from June 1992 until July 1993, and in Darebin Creek from February 1995 until March 1998. Physicochemical parameters were also recorded. The collected data, together with previously existing data, were analysed using multivariate analyses: non-metric multi-dimensional scaling (NMDS); analysis of similarities (ANOSIM); matching biotic and abiotic variables using BIOENV, and principal component analysis (PCA). Various biotic and diversity indices were calculated in an attempt to identify the major factors responsible for the failure of the fauna to recover from previously more seriously degraded water quality. The contribution of drift to the colonisation potential in Dandenong Creek appeared to be impacted by retarding basins, underground barrel-draining and channelization. Results also indicated that increased conductivity adversely affected the fauna in the lower reaches of Dandenong Creek. It was concluded that in Darebin Creek, high nutrient levels, as well as other pollutants, had resulted in low macroinvertebrate diversity in both the drift and benthos. If, as this study suggests, faunal diversity is a valid measure of stream health, the following factors need to be addressed for catchment-wide, stream management: lack of riparian zone vegetation (increasing bank erosion and making the benthic habitat unstable, with greater temperature variability); control of stormwater runoff (flow variability, increased conductivity, nutrient levels, sediment loads, sewage effluent, industrial discharges and heavy metals), and to modify retarding basins to increase stream continuity.

Emissions laboratory upgraded for new regulations

This article has a look inside Ford Australia's emissions test facilities, recently upgraded to meet the new emissions regulation requirements.  Other articles cover the conversion of plastic waste to commercial-grade diesel, the use of ozone in a commercial laundry and an underground wall to reduce the leaching of contaminants into the Hunter River.

A grounded theory of intuition among occupational therapists in mental health practice

Objectives: This study aimed to explore occupational therapists’ understanding and use of intuition in mental health practice.
Method: Using a grounded theory approach, a theoretical sample of nine occupational therapists practising in mental health settings participated in semi-structured interviews. Data were analysed using the constant comparative method.
Findings: Intuition was found to be embedded within clinical reasoning. From the data, intuition was defined as knowledge without conscious awareness of reasoning. The participants viewed intuition as elusive and underground, and suggested that professional experience led to a more comfortable use of intuition. Using intuition relied on therapists’ understanding of their own and others’ emotions, and intuition partnered analysis within their clinical reasoning. A grounded theory of the use of intuition in mental health settings is proposed.
Conclusion: Occupational therapists practising in mental health settings understand intuition to be an instinctive understanding of situations, resulting from their professional experience and the understanding of emotions.

Circle: orbital commutation

In exercising vision we employ strategies to perceive space and to distinguish the objects of attention. Some processes however remain invisible to us; how we process binocular vision; and how we resolve vision in motion. This work images invisible motion perspective. Revelation of invisible mechanisms of vision exposes the haptic qualities of sight and their contribution to proprioception and ʻaffordanceʼ. Figuring the ʻvortex of visionʼ also releases symbolic and metaphoric potentials. This innovative outcome of practical research develops imagery which depicts relative movement in space using the principles of motion perspective (Herschel) and optic flow (J. J. Gibson); the locative awareness of volumes in space through the dimensions of time and space presented in 2D imagery. The mural scale (3.5 metres) work presented in 'Circle', a group show of work around the idea of 'the circle' curated by Melinda Capp is derived from a large production of digital photographs made in the London Underground. In this work, the circle is associated with the orbit of the commuter which bends around the twin poles of home and employment, work and rest, circulating in an ellipse around the Ideal Life. Each traveller's path is a braid woven through gyrations of force and resistance. Optic flow, emulated with the rotating lens, tracing the moving subject, makes this visible.

Case study of e-learning experts in Malaysia : impact of social capital and social networks

This paper examines the experiences of selected academics pioneering e-learning in Malaysian tertiary institutions. It begins with an overview of the broad factors shaping the Malaysian educational environment and then proceeds to examine the experience of individual teachers and e-learning programs. It takes an in-depth qualitative approach to engaging with this case study material drawing heavily on semi-structured interviews with key actors.
Conversations with several respondents suggested that the social networks of mentor relations found in the Malaysian case studies might be aptly described as ‘bamboo networks’. Bamboo, which happens to be plentiful in the Malaysian peninsula where these case studies are based, spreads from clump to clump through a series of underground connections involving a mature clump of bamboo sending out a subterranean runner, often over very long distances that then emerge into the open as a new bamboo clump.
All of those interviewed reported that they have found it difficult to find a support base in their first years of pioneering online developments. Consequently, they tended to fall back on their peer networks linked to the institutions at which they had studied. Prominent individuals championing e-learning in the institutions where they teach tend to form small groups for information sharing and networking. They do look to their management for tacit ‘permission’ rather than direct encouragement. Consequently, the active promotion of e-learning in Malaysia can be described as being ‘middle-down’ rather than ‘top-down’ in nature. That is to say, it is mid-level teachers that inspire those below them to join in the development of e-learning programs. They are internally driven and strongly motivated. In time, their activity should produce new generations of locally developed e-learning experts but this has yet to take place in a substantial fashion. This study shows that both men and women ‘academic guanxi’, or peer networks, play a key role in the adoption of online technologies. Key early adopters become change-agents by inspiring a small network of their peers and via their guanxi networks. It was also discovered that motivation is not simply an individual matter but is also about groups and peer networks or communities of exchange and encouragement. In the development of e-learning in Malaysia, there is very little activity that is not linked to small clusters of developers who are tied into wider networks through personal contacts.
Like clumping bamboo, whilst the local clusters tend to be easily seen, the longer-range ‘subterranean’ personal connections are generally not nearly so immediately obvious. These connections are often the product of previous mentoring relationships, including the relationships between influential teachers and their former postgraduate students. These relationships tend to work like bamboo runners: they run off in multiple directions, subterranean and unseen and then throw up new clumps that then send out fresh runners of their own.

Unsung oz hysteries

The screening and funding opportunities for Experimental film in Australia has always had a problematic and underground history since the 1960s, moving through 16mm, super 8 and now digital moving image forms. One source of that history was Cantrills Filmnotes which expressed the rhetoric of a founding generation who experience the promise of a new Australian National Cinema and new film culture in the 70s, but whose mainstream product eventually left it behind. Experimental film inherited a marginal position through a lack of critical debate and because funding shifts left its identity somewhere between the fine arts and commercial cinema. It was consequently viewed as marginal to both. The general visual quality of this work meant it was perceived as apolitical, although it implicitly expressed and performed the denials and negations experienced directly by the migrant and working classes.

Through several cycles of emerging generations of artists (through such organizations as Fringe Network, MIMA and Experimenta), such artists knew more of the histories of work emanating from Europe and North America than their own, a general problem for Australian history. New underground opportunities are now arising to connect with the emerging and aspirant cultures coming out of Asia that reflect the shifts of global capital and the rise of China as an economic power. Asian work, registering a history of aspiration offers a re-integration of Peter Wollen’s avant-gardes split from the early 70s in the West. In the academy the Avant-garde’s strategies and techniques are studied, but are offered up in new work as aesthetic and lifestyle choices, rather than as the political imperatives announced implicitly or explicitly in their originating forms.