positive initiatives, problematic implications

lisa gye: era, artstart & media arts responses

NY NEW FUNDING OR INCREASED R

ECOGNITION FOR THE ARTS AND THOSE WHO LABOUR IN THEIR SERVICE IS CERTAINLY TO BE ENCOURAGED AND APPLAUDED. SO ARTS PRACTITIONERS AND ACADEMICS WILL WELCOME BOTH THE RECENTLY ANNOUNCED FEDERAL GOVERNMENT INITIATIVE, ARTSTART, AND THE INCLUSION OF CREATIVE WORKS IN THE 2009 ERA (EXCELLENCE IN RESEARCH FOR AUSTRALIA) DATA COLLECTION TRIAL CURRENTLY UNDERWAY IN AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITIES. ALTHOUGH THEY ARE TARGETED TOWARDS DIFFERENT COHORTS OF THE CREATIVE ARTS COMMUNITY, BOTH SCHEMES WILL HAVE AN IMPACT ON THE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS THAT ARE OFTEN RELIED UPON TO PROVIDE A REFUGE FOR ARTS

PRACTICE IN THIS COUNTRY.

http://www.realtimearts.net/article/92/9523

curated by Daniel Kojta

Exhibition runs:               Friday 7 August to Sunday 20 September 2009

Venue: Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, 70-78 Keppel St, Bathurst, NSW

Bathurst Regional Art Gallery (BRAG) is pleased to present Showing Off, a large-scale New Media survey exhibition curated by one of Australia’s most exciting emerging curators, Daniel Kojta.

In 2008 BRAG was one of only three galleries to receive an Arts NSW grant under their Emerging Curators Pilot Program. BRAG invited Daniel Kojta, an artist and curator based in Wentworth Falls, to develop a New Media exhibition which would showcase emerging and established, regional and metropolitan artists.

Artists in Showing Off are:

Keith Armstrong, Ella Barclay, Kirsten Bradley, Cash Brown, Ben Denham, Leah Heiss, Soda_Jerk, Janice Kuczkowski, Alexandra Gillespie & Somaya Langley, Sofie Loizou, Jordana Maisie, Peter Newman, David O’Donoghue, Jasper Streit & Rene Christen, Justene Williams.

This visually and intellectually engaging exhibition will demonstrate diverse trends within current New Media Art including wearable technology, locative media and video arts says Curator Daniel Kojta.

While referencing both obsolete and cutting edge technologies, Showing Off will offer regional and metropolitan audiences a unique experience of New Media Art.

Thanks to everyone that attended the Media Arts Scoping Symposium on Saturday. We are currently in the peer review process for the papers accompanying the presentations and these will be published on this site shortly.

Thank you to the VCA and all contributers to what was a successful day.

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The explosive growth of knowledge in the 21st century has  placed a unique set of pressures on many institutions, and in particular, on those that generate, analyse, sort and disseminate information.  While the public looks to universities as places where  world’s-best practice in knowledge management is employed, these same universities are in danger of being overwhelmed – not only by the increase in knowledge, but by the just-as-rapid multiplication in techniques for capturing, exploring, and distributing this knowledge. I want to suggest that closed “Virtual Learning Environments” are not the best solution for digital-media arts education. Instead, I argue that external “user-centric web services” should be allowed to flow into the university web systems. In this way students and teachers increase their participation in the broader production (and critique) of knowledge in the media arts and other disciplines

Games art will be seen by some of the largest audiences in all of the history of art or of media. Yet as a representation of human civilization at the end of the 20^th Century and into 21^st Century there can be few media examples that so comprehensively fail to evidence the hopes, expectations, aspirations or even the existence of large sections of society.

This paper chronicles the development of RMIT’s three games programs, the attempt to provide for an industry still emerging from its modest home-base beginnings, to provide graduates with a broader art historical perspective than was then evident in the genre and to insinuate into the venture a greater respect for digital art and some of its emerging protocols.

The authors then review the first iterations of the programs, from the response of the media to their launch, through the vested interests of existing structures and disciplines. With five years of experience to draw upon we consider the development of cross disciplinary collaborations between schools, between members of staff and between students and we map the changing landscape across that period.

The authors also chart the deepening of commitment to the discipline of games evident in the evolving student body and consider both theoretical and practical protocols for developing and extending creative conceptual thinking in an on screen and technically driven environment.

It seems obvious, if you take radio out of radio art then you have a sound based art work that is not broadcasted, unicasted and/or multicasted; conversely if you take art out of radio art then you have radio …
This paper explores the idea of radio art as a media based acoustic art-form and argues that the Australian works Journal (1969) by David Ahern’s and Quadrophonic Cocktail (1986) by Chris Mann are forms of acoustic media art.
Further to this it examines the absence of radio art as a formal course of study in Australia (especially for under graduates) and argues for the need to include radio art and its vibrant Australian history to be acknowledged within formal academic institutes.

‘The translation of cinematic scene into spatial experience’: The history of the thematic ride as a unique model for new media and cinematic installation.

This research paper examines the reconfiguring and re imagining of the cinematic scene into physical experience. Practice based research leading to the development of studio works which engage the iconography and atmospheres of cinema in new spatial contexts.

Historical research examines the origins of popular cinema; the period between the Lumière brothers’s Cinématographe in 1894 and the first feature film in 1906. This is an era important to the new media discourse in which this research and studio practice finds its context. Cinema at this time had a strong relationship with the amusement park, the fairground and exposition. Illusionistic cinematic devices bore great resemblance to the carnivalesque sideshows which had existed for centuries prior. The aesthetic content of these scientific spectacles can be attributed to defining the popular ‘look’ and dark thematics of early film. This can be seen in the ghostly apparitions of the Phantasmagoria in theatres and the use of the Peppers Ghost in haunting Cabaret.

As well as detailing studio practice by Zika, this paper will examine field research undertaken to a range of historic sites throughout 2007. Through documentation and experience of more than 20 examples of the earliest immersive popular entertainments (from the period 1906-1940) it was possible to see the effects of spatial design on the way one reads a narrative.