Fundamental sounds

Fundamental Sounds was a live, intercultural and multidisciplinary concert that presented a new synthesis of music, performance & visual arts addressing the imperative of sustainability in a new and evocative form. The outcome was a ninety-minute concert, performed at a major concert hall venue, involving four live musicians, numerous performers & large-scale projections. The images and the concert were scripted in three key phases that spoke to three epochs of human evolution identified by ontological designer and futurist Tony Fry - ‘Pre-Settlement’, ‘Settlement’ and the era that he suggests that we have now entered – ‘Unsettlement’ (in mind body and spirit). The entire work was professionally recorded for presentation on DVD and audio CD.----- Fundamental Sounds achieved a new synthesis between quality performance forms and cogent critical ideas, engendering an increasingly reflective position for audiences around today’s “era of unsettlement” – an epoch Fry has recognized that we must now move to quickly displace through adopting fundamentally sustainable modes of being and becoming.----- The concert was well attended and evoked a range of strong, reflective reactions from its audiences who were also invited to join and participate within a subsequent ‘community of change’ initiated at that time.

Sounds of the suburb

Sounds of the Suburb was a commissioned public art proposal based upon a brief set by Queensland Rail for the major redevelopment at their Brunswick Street Railway Station, Fortitude Valley, Brisbane. I proposed a large scale, electronic artwork to be distributed across the glass fronted structure of their station’s new concourse building. It was designed as a network of LED based ‘tracking’ - along which would travel electronically animated, ‘trains’ of text synchronised to the actual train timetables. Each message packet moved endlessly through a complex spatial network of ‘tracks’ and ‘stations’ set both inside, outside and via the concourse. The design was underpinned by large scale image of sound waves etched onto the architecture’s glass and was accompanied by two inset monitors each presenting ghosted images of passenger movements within the concourse, time-delay recorded and then cross-combined in realtime to form new composites.----- Each moving, reprogrammable phrase was conceived as a ‘train of thought’ and ostensibly contained an idea or concept about popular cultures surrounding contemporary music – thereby meeting the brief that the work should speak to the diverse musical cultures central to Fortitude Valley’s image as an entertainment hub. These cultural ‘memes’, gathered from both passengers and the music press were situated alongside quotes from philosophies of networking, speed and digital ecologies. These texts would continually propagate, replicate and cross fertlise as they moved throughout the ‘network’, thereby writing a constantly evolving ‘textual soundcape’ of that place. This idea was further cemented through the pace, scale and rhythm of passenger movements continually recorded and re-presented on the smaller screens.

here/there/then/now

here/there/then/now was a practice-led research project that brought together 10 independent artists in dance, music, theatre and visual/media arts to create a site-specific program within the walls of the Brisbane Powerhouse. The purpose was to explore how to best conceive flexible performance platforms, theatricalise site-specific work and engage new audiences through forms of promenade experience that could provide open choices on how and where to view it. The sold out season of 6 performances, which took place 14-19 May 2002, presented three discrete performance installations set in intimate parts of the building, each with their own aesthetic and communicative intention, culminating in a fourth in-theatre installation, where memories of the first three coalesced and were reinterrogated. Each site thereby investigated meaning-making via the moving body and its critical relationship with space and objects, in a dramatic re-contextualisation of traditional solo dance forms, now re-articulated through interdisciplinary practices. The benefit of this approach was the creation of a layered and multimodal experience that could be both shared and subsequently critiqued by performers and audience alike.

Making sense of an everyday science text : linguistic, visual and spatial design

In this article, we take a close look at the literacy demands of one task from the ‘Marvellous Micro-organisms Stage 3 Life and Living’ Primary Connections unit (Australian Academy of Science, 2005). One lesson from the unit, ‘Exploring Bread’, (pp 4-8) asks students to ‘use bread labels to locate ingredient information and synthesise understanding of bread ingredients’. We draw upon a framework offered by the New London Group (2000), that of linguistic, visual and spatial design, to consider in more detail three bread wrappers and from there the complex literacies that students need to interrelate to undertake the required task. Our findings are that although bread wrappers are an example of an everyday science text, their linguistic, visual and spatial designs and their interrelationship are not trivial. We conclude by reinforcing the need for teachers of science to also consider how the complex design elements of everyday science texts and their interrelated literacies are made visible through instructional practice.

Music purchase behaviour : the effect of emotional loyalty on intention to purchase.

This paper explores the influence of emotional loyalty on music purchase behaviour. Specifically, it examines whether emotional attachment to an artist's music influences loyalty to that artist, and how emotional loyalty influences a consumer's decision to purchase music. Data collection involved fifteen semi-structured interviews with young (18-30) subjects recruited through non-probability convenience sampling. Findings show that consumers who are emotionally loyal to an artistes) are more inclined to purchase the music rather than download free of charge.

Technical support and professional development : using remote desktops to address bottlenecks in music technology

This paper presents research findings about the use of remote desktop applications to teach music sequencing software. It highlights the successes, shortcomings and interactive issues encountered during a pilot project with a theoretical focus on a specific interactive bottleneck. The paper proposes a new delivery and partnership model to widen this bottleneck, which currently hinders interactions between the technical support, education and professional development communities in music technology.