Friday 25 November
Registration and Opening Event, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 7-12 pm
Sound: Michael Morley (Dunedin), Simon Kong (Christchurch), Alison Isadora (Netherlands)
Image: Daniel Belton and Good Company, Iain Cheesman, Kim Pieters and Peter Stapleton, Nathan Thompson, Ana Terry, Stella Brennan, Don Hunter.
7.00 Doors and Bar Open, Conference Registrations.
7.30 Screenings
Stella Brennan: ZenDV 2003 (4 min.)
Daniel Belton and Good Company: Game 2004 (3 min.), Figures of Speech 2004 (4 min.)
Iain Cheesman: Hello is that Glenda Randerson? 2004 (7 min.), We Are Your Friends 2005 (4 min.)
8.00 Michael Morley
8.45 Screenings
Don Hunter:Tomb 2004 (2 min.)
Nathan Thompson: Naesby 2005 (8 min.)
Ana Terry Terminal: Liturgy 2005 (2 min.)
9.00 Alison Isadora
9.30 Screenings
Kim Pieters; Peter Stapleton: Plant 2005 (12 min.)
9.45 Simon Kong
10.30 Collaborative Sound Performances
Michael Morley is a Dunedin based artist working across a range of disciplines including painting, video, and sound. His recent research looks at silence; how it is defined and perceived, at silence as an auditory and a non-auditory phenomenon.
Simon Kong is an artist who works with the structure and installation of large-scale sound systems.
Based in Amsterdam, Alison Isadora is a composer interested in the possibilities of connecting music to other disciplines, and in the ways real-time electronics can assist this process.
Stella Brennan is an Auckland-based artist, writer, curator and teacher. She started the Aotearoa Digital Arts List in 2003 with Sean Cubitt. www.stella.net.nz
Daniel Belton and Good Company (Good Company Arts) produce dance theatre works and make films incorporating human movement with fine arts. The company is renowned for their unique multi-disciplinary approach, involving commissions of visual art, haute couture, new music, animation and film. www.somasongs.net
Iain Cheesman is an installation artist who works within a number of media practices: painting, sculpture, video and performance. He is a Lecturer in Drawing and Painting at the Otago Polytechnic School of Art in Dunedin.
Nathan Thompson is a Dunedin artist (currently based in Sydney) working with concepts of time, duration and sound within moving image.
Ana Terry is a Dunedin-based artist who works predominantly with installation. Her work interrogates materiality and draws on the embedded associations of her media, often working with obsolete technology.
Don Hunter works with industrial strength kinetic sculpture. His machines pursue functionality into the realm of the absurd.
Kim Pieters is an informal abstractionist painter with a long history of participation in photography, improvisational film and music.
Peter Stapleton is an experimental musician and frequent collaborator with visual artists and filmmakers. He runs the music label Metonymic and also organises the Lines of Flight festival of experimental music and film.
Saturday 26 November, University of Otago Design Studies
9am Registration and Coffee.
9.30 – 10. 15 Networked event: The Proposal in 3 acts by Avatar Body Collision; Helen Varley Jamieson [NZ], Karla Ptacek [UK], Leena Saarinen [Fin] and Vicki Smith [NZ] with guest cyberformers onsite and online.
Avatar Body Collision is a globally distributed cyberformance troupe, whose members live in New Zealand, London and Helsinki. We devise, rehearse and present live online performances using free chat software and our purpose-built web-based venue, UpStage.
10.30 – 12.30 Noise and Sound:
Zita Joyce: Spectrumscape – Soundscape
Michael Morley: Silence: What is it Good For?
Simon Kong: Acceptable Sound?
Alison Isadora: What You See Is What You Get: Performance and Interactivity in a Digital Environment.
Respondent: Danae Mossman
LUNCH 12.30 – 1.00 (The Analogue Art of the Sandwich; instruction and ingredients provided by Caroline McCaw)
1 – 2 Keynote
Steve Dietz (ZeroOne, San Jose): Digital Arts and the Pacific Rim
Chair: Stella Brennan
2.30 – 4.30 Digital Encounters:
Ana Terry: Terminal Eden
Su Ballard: Digital Noise
Douglas Bagnall: Work in Progress: Towards an Imitative Television
Mark McGuire: Three Degrees of Separation: Audio Technology and the Displaced Listener
Respondent: Michael Morley
4.45 Jacky Sawatzky (Canada): R.g.b. Online Presentation
Chair: Caroline McCaw
The R.g.b-project invites participants to interact with the environment through the concepts of the RGB-colour space, a representation of colour commonly used by digital technology. Participants are asked to go on a colour-walk, using video to document one of the three composite colours: Red, Green or Blue. The resulting clips are then input into software written by the artist. The program examines the footage, highlighting only what it ‘thinks’ is red, green or blue. If the program can’t find the specified colour, the original sound of the video-clip is heard. The discrepancy between technology’s standardisation of colour and the individual’s perception of it is the underlying concept of the R.g.b-project. For more information: www.jackysawatzky.net/Rgb
5.15 Bus trip and collection of digital footage for R.g.b- project – bring your digital video cameras and video phones…
Return from bus trip around 7.30pm.
Sunday 27 November
9.30 – 10.15 Networked event: The ‘Smoke In’ presented by Marcus Williams, in conjunction with the HOWL Festival Austria (with Dagmar Eberhardt [Graz. Austria], Monochrom [Vienna, Austria] and mathieu & molicnik [St.- Gallen, Switzerland])
The ‘Smoke In’ is a web-based performance. Smoking; with its physiological and cultural dimensions could seen as entwined with the limbic brain; that mammalian part of the mind implicated in our capacity for emotion. The ‘Smoke-In’ explores sociability under highly mediated conditions. To what degree can the intimacy of Limbic Resonance occur in an environment augmented by the hyper-real? www.van.at/howl/cyb/iso/smoke/
10.30 – 12.00 Images and Spaces:
Brit Bunkley: Virtual Public Art
Stella Brennan: Fake Interactivity and Wet Social Sculpture
Caro McCaw: Partners in Crime
Respondent: Iain Cheesman
LUNCH 12 – 1
1 – 1.30 screening of R.g.b. and live feed to Canada
1.30 – 3 Developing Networks:
Anna Munster (Fibreculture, Sydney), Melinda Rackham (ANAT, Adelaide), Steve Dietz (ZeroOne, San Jose)
Chair: Su Ballard
3.30 – 5.30 The Future – Forum on ADA.
Closing plenaries, including: SCANZ, ADA 2006 presented by Trudy Lane.
Chair: Helen Jamieson
5.30 – 730….
LAUNCH of the ADA website.
www.aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz
A new searchable and expandable site. Some bangs. Several whistles. Many thanks to Luke Duncalfe for his work.
LAUNCH of FILTER # 61 –
Magazine of the Australian Network for Art and Technology
The latest edition of Filter, #61, explores Creative Commons from new media practitioners’ perspectives. Filter is an essential guide to ANAT projects and current trends.
Closing drinks
About the Participants
Born and bred in Aotearoa/New Zealand Alison Isadora has been a performing composer (and a composing performer) practicing in the Netherlands since 1986. She has worked with Hex Ensemble, Gending, the Maarten Altena Ensemble and her own group The Electric Aardvark. Her compositions have been performed in the Pacific, Europe and North America. In the last years she has become increasingly interested in the possibilities of connecting music to other disciplines, and in the ways real-time electronics can assist this process.Ana Terry is a Dunedin based artist who works predominantly with installation. Her work interrogates materiality and draws on the embedded associations of media, often working with obsolete technology.
Anna Munster is a writer, artist and educator. She is the author of Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics (University of New England Press, USA, 2006, forthcoming) and has recently collaborated with Michele Barker on the multi-channel video and sound installation, Struck (Eyebeam Gallery, New York, 2005). She is a senior lecturer in Art History and Theory at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Australia.
Fibreculture is about critical and speculative interventions in the discussions concerning information technology, the policy that concerns it, the new media for(u)ms it supports and its sustainable deployment towards a more equitable Australia. Fibreculture is a forum for the exchange of articles, ideas and arguments on Australian IT policy in a broad, cultural context. It is concerned with the philosophy and politics of
:: new media arts
:: information and creative industries
:: national strategies for innovation, research and development
:: education
:: media and culture
www.fibreculture.orgBrit Bunkley works in public art and digital media including virtual public art, sculpture and animation. His work has been shown locally and internationally including at Siggraph; at Prog:ME, the1st Festival of Electronic Media in Rio de Janeiro; at Rencontres Internationales Paris/ Berlin, 2004 & 2005 and Ciberart-Bilbao 2004.
Caroline McCaw is an artist, designer and educator whose work connects themes of community building and the role of the viewer/reader in participatory art and design practices. Caroline teaches Digital Design at Otago University.
Danae Mossman is the Director of The Physics Room contemporary art project space in Christchurch, and is currently researching the role of sound in contemporary New Zealand art. www.physicsroom.org.nz
Douglas Bagnall used to be a filmmaker and computer programmer. Now he helps computers to make films.
Helen Varley Jamieson is a theatre maker, writer and cyberformer whose work operates at the interface of theatre and the Internet. She performs as part of Avatar Body Collision.
Iain Cheesman is an installation artist who works within a number of media practices: painting, sculpture, video and performance. He is a Lecturer in Drawing and Painting at the Otago Polytechnic School of Art in Dunedin.
Jacky Sawatzky is a performance and new media artist. Originally from Winnipeg, she spent most of her life in the Netherlands were she completed the majority of her formal training. She is currently teaching in the New Media stream at the School of Image Arts, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada. Her art practice is based on the development of situations and tools that allow a broad public to share and express their individual points of view while collaborating in a larger social context.
Marcus Williams is an amateur phenomenologist, artist, teacher and curator who lives and works in Auckland New Zealand. Fundamentally concerned with the problem of human communication, Marcus works with photography, video, installation and collaborative projects.
Mark McGuire is a Lecturer in the department of Design Studies at the University of Otago, where he has taught digital media design and theory since 1994. McGuire studied Fine Arts, Architecture, and Information Science, and is currently completing a PhD on virtual communities.
Networked artist, curator, and writer Dr Melinda Rackham instigated the -empyre- media forum. Her award winning Internet art sites and mobile phone videos are widely shown internationally, and her writing appears in diverse art and theory publications. www.subtle.net
She is the new Director of ANAT, the Australian Network for Art and Technology. ANAT brokers synthesis between art and culture, science and technology. ANAT is Australia’s network and advocacy body for artists working in screen, sound, installation, performance, literary and networked arenas; creating opportunities for connection, collaboration, innovation, research and development within Australia and internationally. www.anat.org.auMichael Morley is a Dunedin based artist working across a range of disciplines including painting, video, and sound. His recent research looks at silence; how it is defined and perceived, at silence as an auditory and a non-auditory phenomenon.
Simon Kong is an artist who works with the structure and installation of large-scale sound systems..
Stella Brennan is an Auckland-based artist, writer, curator and teacher. She started the Aotearoa Digital Arts List in 2003 with Sean Cubitt. www.stella.net.nz
Steve Dietz is Director of the ISEA 2006 Symposium, ZeroOne San Jose; an international festival of art and technology. Dietz has organized and curated new media exhibitions including Database Imaginary (2004), with Anthony Kiendl and Sarah Cook, Walter Philips Gallery, Banff Centre; Fair Assembly, web-based projects for Making Things Public (2005), with Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour, ZKM, Karlsruhe; and The Art Formerly Known As New Media (2005), with Sarah Cook, Walter Philips Gallery, Banff Centre. His interviews and writings have appeared in Parkett, Artforum, Flash Art, Art in America, Intelligent Agent and many other publications.
Susan Ballard is an artist, writer, musician and teacher currently completing her PhD in digital theory and aesthetics at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW, Sydney. Her research focuses on New Zealand and Australian artists working in an international context. She teaches Art Theory at the School of Art in Dunedin.
Trudy Lane works as a digital media designer for the art and museum industries, and as an artist collaboratively producing online works.
Vicki Smith is an artist, educator and digital story-teller presently working to assist West Coast teachers in integrating information technology into their classrooms. She performs as part of Avatar Body Collision.
Zita Joyce is working on a PhD about the radio spectrum at Auckland University. As a member of the ((ethermap collective, Zita organises the Trambience series of sound events with the Physics Room in Christchurch, and this year co-organised the re:mote festival in Auckland with radioqualia.