Melbourne 2006: marketing south-eastern Australian aboriginal art

The Aboriginal cultural sector is dynamic and highly valuable to the Australian economy, returning an estimated $100 million dollars annually. The majority of Aboriginal artists and art works have been perceived to be in northern Australia— eighty per cent of them are in fact in this region—but Aboriginal artists in south-eastern Australia are emerging as a strong force as they struggle for recognition from commercial and national galleries, curators, art dealers, newspaper critics, and buyers. If marketing is to be effectual, the Aboriginality of the art must be presented in a form that is understood and accepted by the audience. Thus changing public perceptions is crucial to marketing south-eastern Aboriginal art. The primary task of this article is to discuss this marketing priority for Aboriginal art and artists in south-eastern Australia, previously neglected in marketing literature. Specifically, the upcoming Melbourne Commonwealth Games are proposed as an opportunity for intensive marketing of the region’s Aboriginal arts.

Changing perceptions : marketing south eastern Australian aboriginal art

The Aboriginal cultural sector is dynamic and highly valuable to the Australian economy, returning an estimated $100 million dollars annually. The majority of Aboriginal artists and art works have been perceived to be in northern Australia-eighty percent of them are in fact in this region-but Aboriginal artists in South Eastern Australia are emerging as a strong force as they struggle for recognition from commercial and national galleries, curators, art dealers, newspaper critics, and buyers. If marketing is to be effectual, the Aboriginality of the art must be presented in a form that is understood and accepted by the audience. 1 Thus changing public perceptions is crucial to marketing South Eastern Aboriginal art. The primary task of this paper is to discuss this marketing priority for Aboriginal art and artists in South Eastern Australia, previously neglected in marketing literature. Specifically, the upcoming Melbourne Commonwealth Games are proposed as an opportunity for intensive marketing of the region's Aboriginal arts.

Spring 1883: Art Fair at the Windsor Hotel

Exhibition of three works by Patrick Pound as part of the Spring 1883 exhibition. Art works entitled: 'Spring Street' a collection of vintage postcards each showing the street the exhibition hotel is located on, the 'Collector' a collection of John Fowles' novel the 'Collector' in numerous editions, and 'The Apartment' a collage of a derelict apartment block. These works were exhibited by Hamish McKay Gallery.The brainchild of Melbourne gallerists Vasili Kaliman (Station), Geoff Newton (Neon Parc), and Vikki McInnes (Sarah Scout Presents), SPRING 1883, the exhibition took place at Melbourne’s historic Hotel Windsor from August 14-17, 2014.The fair drew on the traditions of New York’s hotel-based Gramercy Park Fair and presented the best of contemporary art practice from Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and the United States.“Providing a boutique site for dialogue and interaction between galleries, artists and collectors, the fair will create a new energy for the contemporary art market in Australia”

Cameras and body memory create new blends of performance with visual art practice

I propose that a learnt somatic experience of dance can translate into another discipline such as visual art. In my visual art practice I combine both photography, which is traditionally seen as a still medium, and performance in order to create a new form of embodiment. I have developed two series of art works of prints and video made in response to the Australian landscape. By analyzing my method of movement and photography I will describe how an embodied dance language can result in a material outcome – a series of drawings of light and movement, a body signature made possible through old and new technology. I have activated a performative state while capturing images discovering new ways of using technology reliant upon my knowledge of dance, performance and photography. Making a human size camera to make analogue prints I gained an intuitive knowledge of light – a skill that has become foundational in performance and photography. In response to space and light in the Australian landscape I then built a custom made camera that allows for the longest possible time to capture an image. I move while taking the image and use the camera as if an eye at the end of my arm. In this way I activate dance skills and embodied knowledge of space, timing and light, opening up a radical space for new thinking, making and performing.Furthermore this process engages memory and sentiment embodied through age. Many artists have responded to the unique qualities of the Australian landscape and by using a performative/photographic approach I have engaged with my own body memory. Being brought up in the landscape and training in ballet my body has acquired memories at a cellular level. My method has given memory a voice. In doing these works I have become conscious of how unconscious memories of the space and light in the landscape is a movement vocabulary activated in a way that ‘feels’ like dancing. As an ageing person this experience is profound and the resultant materialisation of the photographs and videos leave a material record of the event. The sentiments evoked through my process bridge the past with the present, the body with the mind, memory with body and space connecting disciplines in a new way.The materialisation of artworks itself continues cross-disciplinary processes using a technique that is a continuum of the performative. Through using technology I release memory of the landscape and pixel by pixel build imagery that relies on and is a part of the performative process. It is a photographic performance dance manifesting as pigment on paper exhibited a gallery context. The exhibition allows a space for the viewer to respond - re-membering the universal the act of moving. The works titled ‘body signatures’ and ‘Fly Rhythm’ become a communicative device in the gallery context.My paper through an analysis of process and methods used in making the two series will talk to several of the subjects listed and reveal a new way of connecting performance and visual art and old and new technologies.

Ontological Presentation of East-Christian Iconographical Art Domain

In the recent years the East-Christian iconographical art works have been digitized providing a large volume of data. The need for effective classification, indexing and retrieval of iconography repositories was the motivation of the design and development of a systemized ontological structure for description of iconographical art objects. This paper presents the ontology of the East-Christian iconographical art, developed to provide content annotation in the Virtual encyclopedia of Bulgarian iconography multimedia digital library. The ontology’s main classes, relations, facts, rules, and problems appearing during the design and development are described. The paper also presents an application of the ontology for learning analysis on an iconography domain implemented during the SINUS project “Semantic Technologies for Web Services and Technology Enhanced Learning”.

Sound Art and Public Engagement in the Built Environment: Reflections from an Architecture Center

This article explores the deployment of sound in architectural-curatorial and community engagement contexts through the work of PLACE, a multidisciplinary not-for-profit architecture center in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The author, who worked with PLACE and contributed to the projects discussed here, contextualizes architecture centers and their relationship with sound before examining the specific case of sound and sound art in Northern Ireland and case studies of projects delivered by PLACE. Specifically, the article evaluates two sound installation artworks and three community engagement projects for young audiences. As a means of curating urbanism and architecture, sound-art-as-public-art affords useful strategies to examine, describe or critique the environment as alternatives to traditional architecture exhibition formats. Sound’s temporality and materiality allow sound art works to exist as temporary sculptural interventions in the urban sphere, with attendant implications for public art procurement and urban acoustics. Rich territories of engagement are opened when using sound in a community participatory context.

A series of performances in 'Translating Reviews from 1990: Art Forum'

Participation in group exhibition themed around the 25th anniversary of the Elba Benitez Gallery in Madrid. My work comprised a series of performances in which I translated reviews from the magazine Art Forum from 1990. The performances took place in various locations in London, throughout the run of the exhibition, and were streamed live to an iPad in the gallery in Madrid. I made audio visual recordings of the performances via the streaming media, which located me as the performer alongside the viewers in a single split image. These recordings were then archived in a shared folder held between the gallery and me, and which visitors to the exhibition could access when a performance was not taking place. The work extends my concerns with translation and performance, and with a consideration of how the mechanism of the gallery and the exhibition might be used to generate innovative viewing engagements facilitated by technology. The work also attempts to develop thinking and practice around the relationship between art works and their documentation - in this case the documentation and even its potential for distribution is generated as the work comes into being. The exhibition included works by Ignasi Aballí, Armando Andrade Tudela,Lothar Baumgarten, Carlos Bunga, Cabello/Carceller, Juan Cruz, Gintaras Didžiapetris, Fernanda Fragateiro, Hreinn Fridfinnsson, Carlos Garaicoa,Mario García Torres, David Goldblatt, Cristina Iglesias,Ana Mendieta, Vik Muniz, Ernesto Neto, Francisco Ruiz de Infante,Alexander Sokurov, Francesc Torres and Valentín Vallhonrat.

The same river twice

This article reviews an exhibition of art works at the Institute for Modern Art that dealt with the idea of history. The review suggests that history is an unstable product of our collective imaginations and is constantly open to revisions and individual perspectives. Each of the artists deal with these issues by reinterpreting past events. The artists were Pierre Huyghe, Thomas Demand, Mike Kelley, paul McCarthy, Jeremy Deller, Danius Kesminas, Gerard Byrne, Emma Kay, and Omer Fast.

Multi-Outcome Construction Policies : Industry-Focused Research Summary

The Multi-outcomes Construction Policies research project, funded by the Cooperative Research Centre for Construction Innovation (Project 2006-036-A), sought to explore the costs and benefits of leveraging social outcomes on public construction contracts. The context of the research project was the trend towards the contracting out of public construction works and the attempts that have been made to use new contractual arrangements with construction companies to construction achieve a wide range of social outcomes. In federal and state jurisdictions it is now common for governments to impose a range of additional requirements on public works contractors that relate to broad social/community objectives. These requirements include commitments to train apprentices and trainees; to provide local and/or indigenous employment opportunities; to buy local materials; and to include art works. The cost and benefits of using public construction contracts to achieve social/community goals have, to our knowledge, not been thoroughly researched in an Australian context. This is likely to reflect in large part the relatively short history of contracting out public works. As Jensen and Stonecash (2004) explain, most previous empirical studies of contracting out have attempted to measure the cost savings achieved through privatization, as this was the focus of policy debate in the 1980s and 1990s. Relatively few studies have addressed the ability of contracting arrangements to ensure the delivery of desired ‘quality’ outcomes1, or the costs of achieving these outcomes via contracting arrangements. One of the potential costs of attempting to leverage social/community outcomes on public construction projects is a reduction in the amount of competition for these projects, with obvious consequences for average bid prices and choice. In jurisdictions, such as Western Australia and Queensland, where currently construction market conditions are already

An apprehensive aesthetic : the legacy of modernist culture

Art continues to bemuse and confuse many people today. Yet, its critical analyses are saturated with daunting analyses of contemporary art's exhaustion, its predictability or its absorption into global commercial culture. In this book, the author seeks to clarify this apprehensive perception of art. He argues it is a consequence not only of confounding art-works, but also of the paradoxical impetus of a culture of modernity. By positively reassessing the perplexing or apprehensive features of cultural modernity as well as of aesthetic inquiry, this book redefines the ambitions of art in the wake of this legacy. In the process, it challenges many familiar approaches to art inquiry in order to offer a new understanding of the aesthetic, social and cultural aspirations of art in our time.

Adaptive music techniques

There are many interactive media systems, including computer games and media art works, in which it is desirable for music to vary in response to changes in the environment. In this paper we will outline a range of algorithmic techniques that enable music to adapt to such changes, taking into account the need for the music to vary in its expressiveness or mood while remaining coherent and recognisable. We will discuss the approaches which we have arrived at after experience in a range of adaptive music systems over recent years, and draw upon these experiences to inform discussion of relevant considerations and to illustrate the techniques and their effect.

Aesthetic tensions : evaluating outcomes for practice-led research and industry

This paper explores principles of contemporary aesthetics to suggest a basis for determining qualitative outcomes of artistic works in two contexts: the arts industry and the academy setting of practice-led research. Commonly articulated measures of quality—creativity and innovation—are questioned as mere rhetoric if not framed in specific ways in the two discrete settings. The paper also interrogates generally held assumptions that a longer time to develop work and greater periods of self-reflexivity will produce higher calibre artistic outcomes. The unease produced by apparent differences in qualitative outcomes between art works created in an industry setting and those created through practice-led research is analysed through three interconnected framing devices: intention, contextual parameters and criteria for evaluation, in conjunction with the relationships between the art work, the artist and the audience/viewer/listener. Common and differentiated criteria in the two contexts are explored, leading to the conclusion that innovation is more likely to be revealed in the end product in an industry context whereas in practice-led research it may be in the methodological processes of creating the work. While identifying and acknowledging that the two contexts encourage and produce distinctive qualitative artistic outcomes, both of value to the arts and the academy, the paper recommends ways in which closer formal liaison between industry artists and practice-led artists and supervisors might occur in order to ensure ongoing mutual influence and relevance.

Ruptures in the production of girlhood : teenage flows and multiplicities [Abstract]

This paper examines the paradoxical and ubiquitous nature of Butler’s heterosexual matrix, and opens it up to an alternative Deleuzian analysis. Drawing on stories and art works produced in a collective biography workshop on girls and sexuality this paper extends previous work on the subversion of the heterosexual matrix undertaken by Renold and Ringrose (2008). The paper moves, as they do, from a molar to a molecular analysis, but extends that work by re-thinking the girl/subject in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s endlessly transforming multiplicities where “the self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 249)

Iterative intersections

Iterative Intersectioning is a body of art works that comes out of the collaboration between author and electronic artist Jen Seevinck and a community of print artists, most particularly Elizabeth Saunders (EJ) and Robert Oakman. The work shown here is concerned with the creative process of collaboration, specifically as this informs visual forms. This is through our focus on process. This process has facilitated a 'conversational' exchange between all artists and a corresponding evolution in the artworks. In each case the dialogue is either between the author, Jen and EJ or between Jen and Robert. It consists of passing work between parties, interpreting it and working into it, before passing it back. The result is a series of art works including those shown here. The concept evolves in parallel to this. Importantly, at each of her iterations of creative work, the author Jen determines a similar 'treatment' or 'interpretation' across both print artists works at that time. A synthesis of EJ and Robert's creative interpretation -- at a high level -- occurs. In this sense the concept and works can be understood to intersect with one another.

Ethnography considered useful : situating criticality

Increasingly the fields of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and art are intersecting. Interactive artworks are being evaluated by HCI methods and artworks are being created that employ and repurpose technology for interactive environments. In this paper we steer a path between empirical and critical–theoretical traditions, and discuss HCI research and art works that also span this divide. We address concerns about ‘new’ ethnography raised by Crabtree et al. (2009) in “Ethnography Considered Harmful”, a critical essay that positions ethnographic and critical-theoretical views at odds with each other. We propose a mediated view for understanding interactions within open-ended interactive artworks that values both perspectives as we navigate boundaries between art practice and HCI.