RealTime Issue 74 Special Feature: Christy Dena is a writer, industry consultant and PhD candidate at the University of Sydney.

http://www.realtimearts.net/article/74/8168

Extract from Call for papers

Conference Director: Lyndal Jones

Ten years after the heady days of Paul Keating’s Creative Nation, where multimedia became the focus for cultural and industrial innovation, there is now a prevailing notion that new technology has not fulfilled the promise of transforming Australia into leaders in either information tech-nology or new media.

The recent announcement by the Australia Council that it was dismantling the New Media Arts Board seemed, to the artists who identify themselves as New Media artists, as a betrayal of their cultural contribution over the last decade. At the same time, the ephemeral nature of the digital work that has already been created and the lack of strategies for its conservation means that the new media cultural heritage is under threat of simply disappearing. 

Vital Signs is the next event in a series of annual conferences presented by RMIT University, School of Creative Media (www.rmit.edu.au/creativemedia/conference). This year’s conference will focus on the urgent issues for New Media artists relating to both our future and our past. We are interested in bringing together the key players of new media art to discover – collectively – new ways forward. We are interested in reading the Vital Signs.

Vital Signs will feature presentations by selected speakers who are at the cutting edge of their fields. We also look forward to inviting conference papers and artworks from practising artists, academics and cultural theorists across the whole range of disciplines that are encompassed by their use of new media – including photography, writing, film, video, animation, games, interactive media, installations, music, performance and visual art. Most particularly we are interested in the works of artists who regard themselves as exclusively New Media artists. 

http://www.vitalsigns.rmit.edu.au/

Real Time Issue 68 Special Feature: Christy Dena is a PhD candidate at the School of Creative Arts, University of Melbourne. She is researching and creating cross-media works in the departments of New Media and Creative Writing. She experiments with print and chatbot technology and works as a teacher, trainer and mentor.

http://www.realtimearts.net/article/68/7933

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.

http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue66/7784

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/