Rethinking regulatory design : The Australian National Classification Scheme review

This paper considers issues of methodological innovation in communication, media and cultural studies, that arise out of the extent to which we now live in a media environment characterised by an digital media abundance, the convergence of media platforms, content and services, and the globalisation of media content through ubiquitous computing and high-speed broadband networks. These developments have also entailed a shift in the producer-consumer relationships that characterised the 20th century mass communications paradigm, with the rapid proliferation of user-created content, accelerated innovation, the growing empowerment of media users themselves, and the blurring of distinctions between public and private, as well as age-based distinctions in terms of what media can be accessed by whom and for what purpose. It considers these issues through a case study of the Australian Law Reform Commission's National Classification Scheme Review.

Spudmonkey

Spudmonkey is an Australian feature film about a pizza delivery boy who achieves his dream of drumming in a successful rock band, only to be replaced by computerised drums. Genre: comedy Exclusive cinema release on October 30th, 2008 at the Blueroom Cinebar, Rosalie, Queensland. Spudmonkey can now be viewed online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YD7RpryDxBI

Generation workshop 2010

The Generation Workshop Program 2010, a part of the Queensland Government Unlimited: Designing for the Asia Pacific Event Program, consisted of two one-day intensive design thinking workshops run on October 7-8, 2011 at The Edge, State Library of Queensland, for 100 senior secondary students and 20 secondary teachers self-selected from the subject areas of Visual Art, Graphics and Industrial Technology and Design. Participants were drawn from a database of Brisbane and regional Queensland private and public schools from the goDesign and Living City Workshop Programs. The workshop aimed to facilitate awareness in young people of the role of design in society and the value of design thinking skills in solving complex problems facing the Asia Pacific Region, and to inspire the generation of strategies for our future cities. It also aimed to encourage the collaboration of professional designers with secondary schools to inspire post-secondary pathways and idea generation for education. Inspired by international and national speakers Bunker Roy (Barefoot College) and Hael Kobayashi (Associate Producer on "Happy Feet" film for Australia's Animal Logic), the Unlimited showcase exhibition Make Change: Design Thinking in Action and ‘Idea Starters’/teaching resources provided, students worked with a teacher in ten random teams, to generate optimistic strategies for the Ideal City of tomorrow, each considering a theme – Food, Water, Transport, Ageing, Growth, Employment, Shelter, Health, Education and Energy. Each team of 6 was led by a professional designer (from the discipline of architecture, interior design, industrial design, urban design, graphic design or landscape architecture) who was a catalyst for driving the student creative thinking process. Assisted by illustrators, the teams prepared a visual presentation of their idea from art materials provided. The workshop culminated in a video-taped interactive design chatter to the larger group, which will be utilised as a toolkit and praxis for teachers as part of the State Library of Queensland Design Minds Project. Photos of student design work were published on the Unlimited website.

Complexity, evolution, and the structure of demand

This chapter argues that evolutionary economics should be founded upon complex systems theory rather than neo-Darwinian analogies concerning natural selection, which focus on supply side considerations and competition amongst firms and technologies. It suggests that conceptions such as production and consumption functions should be replaced by network representations, in which the preferences or, more correctly, the aspirations of consumers are fundamental and, as such, the primary drivers of economic growth. Technological innovation is viewed as a process that is intermediate between these aspirational networks, and the organizational networks in which goods and services are produced. Consumer knowledge becomes at least as important as producer knowledge in determining how economic value is generated. It becomes clear that the stability afforded by connective systems of rules is essential for economic flexibility to exist, but that too many rules result in inert and structurally unstable states. In contrast, too few rules result in a more stable state, but at a low level of ordered complexity. Economic evolution from this perspective is explored using random and scale free network representations of complex systems.

Getting in the Groove : The Recording Studio Procedural Guide

This paper examines time management in the recording studio from the perspective of the music producer. The paper is presented in the form of a guide that will provide a common language to music clientele and technical personnel to help achieve the best possible creative outcome. The research for the guide combined the author's experience, literary evidence and external assessment to work towards establishing a practical industry resource. The result of the study explored how the success of any recording project can be forecast before valuable resources are committed. The feedback from the survey group was positive and some professionals recognised an immediate application for the procedural guide, which exceeded the author's expectations.

Little Birung

The field of research was contemporary indigenous theatre practice. The aim of the project was to produce theatre that remained as close and true to its source as possible, in both form and content. Little Birung is the final part of a 6-year mentorship of young indigenous artist, Megan Samardin, conducted by renowned musician and composer, John Rodgers, producer Leah Cotterell and director Sean Mee. The culminating event of the mentorship was to develop to create an original music theatre piece, composed by John Rodgers and Megan Samardin, that featured both Megan’s prodigious talent as a singer and her family’s remarkable story. Creative development consisted of extensive interviews with family members, creative development workshops (supported by both State and Federal Government) and critique and input from leading indigenous creatives such as Wesley Enoch (artistic director, Queensland Theatre Company). The challenge was to keep faith with the family and their story whilst creating a work that would appeal to national/international producers and their audiences. The result is a song cycle of 12 original songs that presents an intensely personal exploration of 6 generations of Megan’s family down the maternal line, as told through Megan’s sometimes uneasy relationship with her great grandmother, Flora. Uniquely, each of the 12 songs presents the personal response of each of the women as they confronted the often-brutal consequences of institutionalised racism and government-imposed oppression. The work was produced in Cairns in 2011 as part of the Cairns Festival to substantial critical acclaim and was an official event of Cairns Indigenous Arts Fair. A revised version was successfully presented at the Judith Wright Centre, Brisbane in November 2011. As a result of the Brisbane season, Little Birung has been invited to make a presentation at the 2012 APAM (Australian Performing Arts Market) in Adelaide. Importantly, the family and the indigenous community have embraced the work and have continued their fervent support. It has strengthened them as a family and as a part of the indigenous people of Australia.

Entertainment architecture : constructing a framework for the creation of an emerging transmedia form

This thesis investigates the radically uncertain formal, business, and industrial environment of current entertainment creators. It researches how a novel communication technology, the Internet, leads to novel entertainment forms, how these lead to novel kinds of businesses that lead to novel industries; and in what way established entertainment forms, businesses, and industries are part of that process. This last aspect is addressed by focusing on one exemplary es-tablished form: movies. Using a transdisciplinary approach and a combination of historical analysis, industry interviews, and an innovative mode of ‘immersive’ textual analysis, a coherent and comprehensive conceptual framework for the creation of and re-search into a specific emerging entertainment form is proposed. That form, products based on it, and the conceptual framework describing it are all re-ferred to as Entertainment Architecture (‘entarch,’ for short). The thesis charac-terises this novel form as Internet-native transmedia entertainment, meaning it fully utilises the unique communicative characteristics of the Internet, and is spread across media. The thesis isolates four constitutive elements within Entertainment Architec-ture: story, play, ‘dance,’ and ‘glue.’ That is, entarch tells a story; offers playful interaction; invites social interaction between producer and consumer, and amongst consumers (‘dance’); and all components of it can be spread across many media, but are so well interconnected and mutually dependent that they are perceived as one product instead of many (‘glue’). This sets entarch apart from current media franchises like Star Wars or Halo, which are perceived as many products spread across many media. Entarch thus embraces the commu-nicative behaviour of Internet-native consumers instead of forcing them to de-sist from it, it harnesses the strengths of various media while avoiding some of their weaknesses, and it can sustain viable businesses. The entarch framework is an innovative contribution to scholarship that al-lows researchers to investigate this emerging entertainment form in a structured way. The thesis demonstrates this by using it to survey business models appro-priate to the entarch environment. The framework can also be used by enter-tainment creators — exemplified in the thesis by moviemakers — to delimit the room for manoeuvre available to them in a changing environment.

Gravy

To many aspiring writer/directors of feature film breaking into the industry may be perceived as an insurmountable obstacle. In contemplating my own attempt to venture into the world of feature filmmaking I have reasoned that a formulated strategy could be of benefit. As the film industry is largely concerned with economics I decided that writing a relatively low-cost feature film may improve my chances of being allowed directorship by a credible producer. As a result I have decided to write a modest feature film set in a single interior shooting location in an attempt to minimise production costs, therefore also attempting to reduce the perceived risk in hiring the writer as debut director. As a practice-led researcher, the primary focus of this research is to create a screenplay in response to my greater directorial aspirations and to explore the nature in which the said strategic decision to write a single-location film impacts on not only the craft of cinematic writing but also the creative process itself, as it pertains to the project at hand. The result is a comedy script titled Gravy, which is set in a single apartment and strives to maintain a fast comedic pace whilst employing a range of character and plot devices in conjunction with creative decisions that help to sustain cinematic interest within the confines of the apartment. In addition to the screenplay artifact, the exegesis also includes a section that reflects on the writing process in the form of personal accounts, decisions, problems and solutions as well as examination of other author’s works.

The pomegranate cycle : reconfiguring opera through performance, technology & composition

The Pomegranate Cycle is a practice-led enquiry consisting of a creative work and an exegesis. This project investigates the potential of self-directed, technologically mediated composition as a means of reconfiguring gender stereotypes within the operatic tradition. This practice confronts two primary stereotypes: the positioning of female performing bodies within narratives of violence and the absence of women from authorial roles that construct and regulate the operatic tradition. The Pomegranate Cycle redresses these stereotypes by presenting a new narrative trajectory of healing for its central character, and by placing the singer inside the role of composer and producer. During the twentieth and early twenty-first century, operatic and classical music institutions have resisted incorporating works of living composers into their repertory. Consequently, the canon’s historic representations of gender remain unchallenged. Historically and contemporarily, men have almost exclusively occupied the roles of composer, conductor, director and critic, and therefore men have regulated the pedagogy, performance practices, repertoire and organisations that sustain classical music. In this landscape, women are singers, and few have the means to challenge the constructions of gender they are asked to reproduce. The Pomegranate Cycle uses recording technologies as the means of driving change because these technologies have already challenged the regulation of the classical tradition by changing people’s modes of accessing, creating and interacting with music. Building on the work of artists including Phillips and van Veen, Robert Ashley and Diamanda Galas, The Pomegranate Cycle seeks to broaden the definition of what opera can be. This work examines the ways in which the operatic tradition can be hybridised with contemporary musical forms such as ambient electronica, glitch, spoken word and concrete sounds as a way of bringing the form into dialogue with contemporary music cultures. The ultilisation of other sound cultures within the context of opera enables women’s voices and stories to be presented in new ways, while also providing a point of friction with opera’s traditional storytelling devices. The Pomegranate Cycle simulates aesthetics associated with Western art music genres by drawing on contemporary recording techniques, virtual instruments and sound-processing plug-ins. Through such simulations, the work disrupts the way virtuosic human craft has been used to generate authenticity and regulate access to the institutions that protect and produce Western art music. The DIY approach to production, recording, composition and performance of The Pomegranate Cycle demonstrates that an opera can be realised by a single person. Access to the broader institutions which regulate the tradition are not necessary. In short, The Pomegranate Cycle establishes that a singer can be more than a voice and a performing body. She can be her own multimedia storyteller. Her audience can be anywhere.

Creative industries and innovation in a knowledge economy

The cultural and creative industries contribute to the knowledge economy by their role in reproducing cultural knowledge and through provision of entertainment, experience and leisure goods with cultural content, for which they are widely acknowledged as suffering serious market failure problems (Baumol and Bowen, 1966; Throsby and Withers, 1979). But they also contribute to the innovation process, an aspect that has only recently been appreciated. Specifically, the creative industries are a driver of the knowledge economy by their contribution to the innovation process on the demand side of consumer uptake of new ideas and by their facilitation of consumer-producer interaction. The creative industries are, in this respect, a legitimate part of the innovation system of a knowledge economy.

Strategic aesthetics in advertising campaigns : implications for art direction education

For over half a century art directors within the advertising industry have been adapting to the changes occurring in media, culture and the corporate sector, toward enhancing professional performance and competitiveness. These professionals seldom offer explicit justification about the role images play in effective communication. It is uncertain how this situation affects advertising performance, because advertising has, nevertheless, evolved in parallel to this as an industry able to fabricate new opportunities for itself. However, uncertainties in the formalization of art direction knowledge restrict the possibilities of knowledge transfer in higher education. The theoretical knowledge supporting advertising art direction has been adapted spontaneously from disciplines that rarely focus on specific aspects related to the production of advertising content, like, for example: marketing communication, design, visual communication, or visual art. Meanwhile, in scholarly research, vast empirical knowledge has been generated about advertising images, but often with limited insight into production expertise. Because art direction is understood as an industry practice and not as an academic discipline, an art direction perspective in scholarly contributions is rare. Scholarly research that is relevant to art direction seldom offers viewpoints to help understand how it is that research outputs may specifically contribute to art direction practices. This thesis is dedicated to formally understanding the knowledge underlying art direction and using it to explore models for visual analysis and knowledge transfer in higher education. The first three chapters of this thesis offer, firstly, a review of practical and contextual aspects that help define art direction, as a profession and as a component in higher education; secondly, a discussion about visual knowledge; and thirdly, a literature review of theoretical and analytic aspects relevant to art direction knowledge. Drawing on these three chapters, this thesis establishes explicit structures to help in the development of an art direction curriculum in higher education programs. Following these chapters, this thesis explores a theoretical combination of the terms ‘aesthetics’ and ‘strategy’ as foundational notions for the study of art direction. The theoretical exploration of the term ‘strategic aesthetics’ unveils the potential for furthering knowledge in visual commercial practices in general. The empirical part of this research explores ways in which strategic aesthetics notions can extend to methodologies of visual analysis. Using a combination of content analysis and of structures of interpretive analysis offered in visual anthropology, this research discusses issues of methodological appropriation as it shifts aspects of conventional methodologies to take into consideration paradigms of research that are producer-centred. Sampled out of 2759 still ads from the online databases of Cannes Lions Festival, this study uses an instrumental case study of love-related advertising to facilitate the analysis of content. This part of the research helps understand the limitations and functionality of the theoretical and methodological framework explored in the thesis. In light of the findings and discussions produced throughout the thesis, this project aims to provide directions for higher education in relation to art direction and highlights potential pathways for further investigation of strategic aesthetics.

Creative industries in China : art, design and media

Creative industries in China provides a fresh account of China’s emerging commercial cultural sector. The author shows how developments in Chinese art, design and media industries are reflected in policy, in market activity, and grassroots participation. Never has the attraction of being a media producer, an artist, or a designer in China been so enticing. National and regional governments offer financial incentives; consumption of cultural goods and services have increased; creative workers from Europe, North America and Asia are moving to Chinese cities; culture is increasingly positioned as a pillar industry. But what does this mean for our understanding of Chinese society? Can culture be industrialised following the low-cost model of China’s manufacturing economy. Is the national government really committed to social liberalisation? This engaging book is a valuable resource for students and scholars interested in social change in China. It draws on leading Chinese scholarship together with insights from global media studies, economic geography and cultural studies.

Fashion meets journalism : mapping and evaluating Australian fashion media

This study demonstrates how to study fashion journalism from the point of view, that it is its own field of journalism, akin to other journalism beats such as politics, sports and health. There is scope here for comment on the co-evolution of fashion and journalism, leading to ‘fashion journalism’ developing as a distinct field of study in its own right. This research contributes more generally to the field of media and cultural studies, by developing the threepart producer/text/reader model, which is the standard ‘media studies’ analytical framework. The study of fashion media from a cultural studies perspective acknowledges that cultural studies has pioneered the formal study of both journalism and fashion, for instance in studies of women’s magazines; but it has not brought the two areas together sufficiently. What little work has been done, however, has allowed theorists to explore how magazines promote feminism and form culture, which acts as a step in concreting fashion’s importance theoretically. This thesis has contributed to cultural studies by showing the relationship between the corporate industry, of both fashion and media (producer), and the active audience (reader) can be rethought and brought up to date for the more interactive era of the 21st century.

CCi Submission to ALRC Copyright Inquiry

The attached report was prepared by Professor Terry Flew, Dr. Nicolas Suzor and Dr. Bonnie Liu of the Queensland University of Technology.   It was developed in consultation with Professor Stuart Cunningham, Professor Anne Fitzgerald, Associate Professor Axel Bruns, Associate Professor Jean Burgess (QUT), Professor Julian Thomas (Swinburne University of Technology), Professor Christoph Antons (Deakin University), and film producer Ms. Cathy Henkel (Virgo Productions and Adjunct Professor, QUT).

Design and Anthropology

Design and Anthropology challenges conventional thinking regarding the nature of design and creativity, in a way that acknowledges the improvisatory skills and perceptual acuity of people. Combining theoretical investigations and documentation of practice based experiments, it addresses methodological questions concerning the re-conceptualisation of the relation between design and use from both theoretical and practice-based positions. Concerned with what it means to draw 'users' into processes of designing and producing this book emphasises the creativity of design and the emergence of objects in social situations and collaborative endeavours. Organised around the themes of perception and the user-producer, skilled practices of designing and using, and the relation between people and things, the book contains the latest work of researchers from academia and industry, to enhance our understanding of ethnographic practice and develop a research agenda for the emergent field of design anthropology. Drawing together work from anthropologists, philosophers, designers, engineers, scholars of innovation and theatre practitioners, Design and Anthropology will appeal to anthropologists and to those working in the fields of design and innovation, and the philosophy of technology and engineering.