Disco Puppy

Disco Puppy is an energetic interactive installation for children (and parents) which stars three larger than life dancing puppies. The work was initially produced for the Ipswich Art Gallery and has since toured nationally.

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’.

Sustaining the sustainable? Developing a practice and problem-led new media praxis

In this chapter I introduce an ecological-philosophical approach to artmaking that has guided my work over the past 16 years. I call this ‘Ecosophical praxis’. To illustrate how this infuses and directs my research methodologies, I draw upon a case study called Knowmore (House of Commons), an emerging interactive installation due for first showings in late 2008. This allows me to tease out the complex interrelationships between research and practice within my work, and describe how they comment upon and model these eco-cultural theories. I conclude with my intentions and hopes for the continued emergence of a contemporary eco-political modality of new media praxis that self-reflexively questions how we might re-focus future practices upon ‘sustaining the sustainable’.

The Remnant

An Interactive Installation with holographic 3D projections, satellite imagery, surround sound and intuitive body driven interactivity. Remnant (v.1) was commissioned by the 2010 TreeLine ecoArt event - an initiative of the Sunshine Coast Council and presented at a remnant block of subtropical rainforest called ‘Mary Cairncross Scenic Reserve’ - located 100kms north of Brisbane near the township of Maleny. V2 was later commissioned for KickArts Gallery, Cairns, re-presenting the work in a new open format which allowed audiences to both experience the original power of the work and to also understand the construction of the work's powerful illusory, visual spaces. This art-science project focused upon the idea of remnant landscapes - isolated blocks of forest (or other vegetation types) typically set within a patchwork quilt of surrounding farmed land. Participants peer into a mysterious, long tunnel of imagery whilst navigating entirely through gentle head movements - allowing them to both 'steer' in three dimensions and also 'alight', as a butterfly might, upon a sector of landscape - which in turn reveals an underlying 'landscape of mind'. The work challenges audiences to re-imagine our conceptions of country in ways that will lead us to better reconnect and sustain today’s heavily divided landscapes. The research field involved developing new digital image projection methods, alternate embodied interaction and engagement strategies for eco-political media arts practice. The context was the creation of improved embodied and improvisational experiences for participants, further informed by ‘eco-philosophical’ and sustainment theories. By engaging with deep conceptions of connectivity between apparently disparate elements, the work considered novel strategies for fostering new desires, for understanding and re-thinking the requisite physical and ecological links between ‘things’ that have been historically shattered. 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 appropriate resources and knowledges required to generate this substantive desire for new approaches to sustainment. This accentuated through the power of learning implied by the works' strongly visual and kinaesthetic interface (i.e. the tunnel of imagery and the head and torso operated navigation). The work was commissioned by the 2010 TreeLine ecoArt event - an initiative of the Sunshine Coast Council and the second version was commissioned by Kickarts Gallery, Cairns, specifically funded by a national optometrist chain. It was also funded in development by Arts Queensland and reviewed in Realtime.

About T.I.M.

A series of short performance experiments demonstrating the creative potential of motion capture technology as a tool within performance for exploring audience behaviour and interaction. Examples highlight the possibilities for future work and give basic demonstrations of what is technically possible for the stage. Please note that people attending this performance may be videoed and motion captured for research and/or publication purposes. This work has been funded by the EPSRC c4dm platform grant.

PIPP #2 : Pedestrian Interaction Patch Project

Presented as part of the Sampled Festival at Sadlers Wells UK in January 2009, PIPP #2 continues the exploration of the first installation (PIPP #1 Leeds) and asks audiences to connect with an interactive work presented in the foyer of a major dance festival. Literally choreographing their own dances on the walls of the venue, pedestrians re-connect with the architectural surrounds generating unique memories of self.

The Silk Road project

The Silk Road Project was a practice-based research project investigating the potential of motion capture technology to inform perceptions of embodiment in dance performance. The project created a multi-disciplinary collaborative performance event using dance performance and real-time motion capture at Deakin University’s Deakin Motion Lab. Performances at Deakin University, December 2007.

Finitude (Mallee:Time)

An interactive installation with full body interface, digital projection, multi-touch sensitive screen surfaces, interactive 3D gaming software, motorised dioramas, 4.1 spatial sound & new furniture forms - investigating the cultural dimensions of sustainability through the lens of 'time'. “Time is change, time is finitude. Humans are a finite species. Every decision we make today brings that end closer, or alternatively pushes it further away. Nothing can be neutral”. Tony Fry DETAILS: Finitude (Mallee:Time) is a major new media/sculptural hybrid work premiered in 2011 in version 1 at the Ka-rama Motel for the Mildura Palimpsest #8 ('Collaborators and Saboteurs'). Each participant/viewer lies comfortably on their back on the double bed of Room 22. Directly above them, supported by a wooden structure, not unlike a house frame, is a semi-transparent Perspex screen that displays projected 3D imagery and is simultaneously sensitive to the lightest of finger touches. Depending upon the ever changing qualities of the projected image on this screen the participant can see through its surface to a series of physical dioramas suspended above, lit by subtle LED spotlighting. This diorama consists of a slowly rotating series of physical environments, which also include several animatronic components, allowing the realtime composition of whimsical ‘landscapes’ of both 'real' and 'virtual' media. Through subtle, non-didactic touch-sensitive interactivity the participant then has influence over both the 3D graphic imagery, the physical movements of the diorama and the 4.1 immersive soundscape, creating an uncanny blend of physical and virtual media. Five speakers positioned around the room deliver a rich interactive soundscape that responds both audibly and physically to interactions. VERSION 1, CONTEXT/THEORY: Finitude (Mallee: Time) is Version 1 of a series of presentations during 2012-14. This version has been inspired through a series of recent visits and residencies in the SW Victoria Mallee country. Further drawing on recent writings by post colonial author Paul Carter, the work is envisaged as an evolving ‘personal topography’ of place-discovery. By contrasting and melding readily available generalisations of the Mallee regions’ rational surfaces, climatic maps and ecological systems with what Carter calls “a fine capillary system of interconnected words, places, memories and sensations” generated through my own idiosyncratic research processes, Finitude (Mallee Time) invokes a “dark writing” of place through outside eyes - an approach that avoids concentration upon what 'everyone else knows', to instead imagine and develop a sense how things might be. This basis in re-imagining and re-invention becomes the vehicle for the work’s more fundamental intention - as a meditative re-imagination of 'time' (and region) as finite resources: Towards this end, every object, process and idea in the work is re-thought as having its own ‘time component’ or ‘residue’ that becomes deposited into our 'collective future'. Thought this way Finitude (Mallee Time) suggests the poverty of predominant images of time as ‘mechanism’ to instead envisage time as a plastic cyclical medium that we can each choose to ‘give to’ or ‘take away from’ our future. Put another way - time has become finitude.

Envisaging alternatives for practice : a study into the way concepts of sustain-ability can be explored within an interactive media arts practice

This practice-led study explores different ways the subject of sustain-ability can be addressed within an Interactive Media Arts practice. The exploration encompasses three creative projects, Charmed, Distracted and e. Menura superba. Grounded in an ecological philosophy inspired by vegetarianism and the critical design philosophy of defuturing, the work shows how such a philosophical position can guide the redirection of practice. The concern for sustain-ability within my practice, and more generally the question of Interactive Media Arts and sustain-ability, I refer to as a problématique. The objective of this study is not one of finding an answer or a truth to an instrumentally posed question, but to explore the complexities of the problématique through a program of practice and intellectual investigation. The aim being to redirect my practice and to find a renewed raison d’être for practice through a process of opening up, encountering, and discovering otherwise unknown possibilities for practice. In the context of sustain-ability, this opening up of possibilities can be considered a form of futuring. A futuring I argue is only possible if the things we take for granted as integral aspects of our being, practices and life worlds, are revealed in ways that estrange them, rendering them visible in ways that allow questioning and change.

Finitude (V03)

WHAT: An interactive installation with full body interface, digital projection, multi-touch sensitive screen surfaces, interactive 3D gaming software, motorised dioramas, 4.1 spatial sound & new furniture forms - investigating the cultural dimensions of sustainability through the lens of 'time'. “Time is change, time is finitude. Humans are a finite species. Every decision we make today brings that end closer, or alternatively pushes it further away. Nothing can be neutral”. Tony Fry DETAILS: Each participant/viewer lies comfortably on their back. Directly above them is a semi-transparent Perspex screen that displays projected 3D imagery and is simultaneously sensitive to the lightest of finger touches. Depending upon the ever changing qualities of the projected image on this screen the participant can see through its surface to a series of physical dioramas suspended above, lit by subtle LED spotlighting. This diorama consists of a slowly rotating series of physical environments, which also include several animatronic components, allowing the realtime composition of whimsical ‘landscapes’ of both 'real' and 'virtual' media. Through subtle, non-didactic touch-sensitive interactivity the participant then has influence over both the 3D graphic imagery, the physical movements of the diorama and the 4 channel immersive soundscape, creating an uncanny blend of physical and virtual media. Five speakers positioned around the room deliver a rich interactive soundscape that responds both audibly and physically to interactions.

The influence of digital technology on the performance space

Through practice-led research, TESSA SMALLHORN examines the influence of digital technology on the performance space. From the mechanisation of modernist culture to the digitalisation of present day, technology acts as response material for scenographers investigating the stage as machine. The interactive, real-time tools of digital culture encourage a systems-orientated approach that challenges user and operator alike. This article explores the studio practice and critical theory that was combined to offer a functional model of a digital stage machine.

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.

Insider comes out : an artist's inquiry and narrative about the relationship of art and mental health

Background Through an account of prevailing experiences of art and mental illness, this paper aims to raise awareness, open dialogue and create agency about art created by people with experience of mental illness. Methods This paper draws on personal narrative and inquiry by an artist with mental illness and data collected as part of a larger participatory action research project that investigated understandings of identity, art and mental illness. Result An inquiry through art raised awareness and attentiveness to the importance of choice in identity construction and exposed frequent dichotomies in art and mental illness that were negotiated to eschew prescribed social stratification. As an artist, the first author challenged values present in one idea and absent in the other, and the options and concessions available to authorise her own dialogue and agency of being an artist. Conclusion Constructing an identity is an important part of being human, the labels that we choose or are chosen for us attribute to our identity. Reflections and recommendations are offered to consider expanded ways of thinking about art and mental illness and the functions that art play in identity construction.

Medium and mode : relationships between visual experience and perception in an installation arts practice

Working primarily within the natural landscape, this practice-led research project explored connections between the artist's visual and perceptual experience of a journey or place while simultaneously emphasizing the capacity for digital media to create a perceptual dissonance. By exploring concepts of time, viewpoint, duration of sequences and the manipulation of traditional constructs of stop-frame animation, the practical work created a cognitive awareness of the elements of the journey through optical sensations. The work allowed an opportunity to reflect on the nature of visual experience and its mediation through images. The project recontextualized the selected mediums of still photography, animation and projection within contemporary display modes of multiple screen installations by analysing relationships between the experienced and the perceived. The resulting works added to current discourse on the interstices between still and moving imagery in a digital world.