Darren Toft’s book Interzone comes at a crucial time for the media arts in Australia. The Australia Council

– despite vigorous opposition – has moved to dissolve the New Media Arts Board, effectively consigning the funding for electronic or

interactive works to the broader domain of Visual Arts. This bureaucratic decision is the fulcrum around which has swirled passionate debate on the identity, status and significance of media arts.

http://scan.net.au/scan/magazine/display.php?journal_id=47

Book Review: Darren Tofts, Interzone: Media Arts in Australia (Craftsman House)

by John Potts

Darren Toft’s book Interzone comes at a crucial time for the media arts in Australia. The Australia Council – despite vigorous opposition – has moved to dissolve the New Media Arts Board, effectively consigning the funding for electronic or interactive works to the broader domain of Visual Arts. This bureaucratic decision is the fulcrum around which has swirled passionate debate on the identity, status and significance of media arts.

http://scan.net.au/scan/magazine/display.php?journal_id=47

Trebor Scholz

A crisis has emerged in new-media arts education. Despite the widespread emergence of

new-media arts programs and strong student interest throughout North American

universities as well as in Finland, Singapore, Thailand, China, Germany, and Australia,

surprisingly little public debate about the goals, structure,

and topical orientation of these programs is taking place.

The works have come from a research and development grant program facilitated by BEAP with ArtsWA, showcasing 6 projects at the John Curtin Gallery as part of the 2005 Perth International Festival of the Arts.

BEAPWORKS from Paul Thomas on Vimeo.

Keith Gallasch

At the meeting convened by ANAT, dLux media arts, Performance Space, Experimenta, MAAP and RealTime at the Paddington RSL, Sydney on January 24 we hoped to hear from Australia Council staff why the Taskforce’s proposed restructuring of the organisation entailed the dissolution of the New Media Arts Board (NMAB) and why there had been no consultation with the sector and, at the time of the December press release, none offered in the future.

http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue65/7717

Bankwest Theatre, John Curtin Gallery, Curtin University of Technology

SAMEDIFFERENCE

Technology is converting human experience into data streams at ever-quickening rates. And yet we still seem reluctant to let go of our analogue or ‘old world’ ways of visualising both ourselves and the world around us. It is this dichotomy that the exhibitions and conferences presented as part of BEAP04 will be exploring and interpreting in celebrating the complex relationships between the virtual and the real.

http://www.beap.org/beap2004/

REalTime Education Feature: Anna Davis is an artist working with video, interactive technologies and performance. She is currently creating a series of sensor-driven environments inhabited by characters called a/proxy[mate]s.

http://www.realtimearts.net/article/62/7505

MESH#17: Experimenta’s signature journal Mesh is its critically acclaimed online publication, for filmmakers, artists, writers and theorists working in Australian screen and media arts culture.

http://www.experimenta.org/mesh/mesh17/index.htm

http://www.experimenta.org/mesh/mesh17/keynote.htm

New Media Art in Australia and Asia attempts to create a partial and provisional map of the complex and at times fraught terrain of “new media art” in Australia and the Asian region.

http://www.cacsa.org.au/cvapsa/2004/11_BS33_4/smith.pdf

Today's tools for today's ideas

By Sarah Walls

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