ACUADS Conference

Diana Chester

University of Sydney

Creative Collaborations across Oceans during COVID 

This paper/presentation looks at two musically scored short films, co-composed with artists in India and the United States during the Pandemic. The paper will explore the sonic resonance of place, reconceptualized as the physical containers which serve as our constraints during lock down, as well as our obstructions for creativity and practice. By considering the new collaborative factors  that have arisen in these times, I will offer a perspective of how these types of international creative  collaborations can fuel an emerging discourse on the logistical and temporal qualities of international creative exchanges in a COVID and post COVID moment.

What is it about creativity and collaboration that draws artists together in this moment, even those who do not actively collaborate otherwise? What does this pull toward navigating creativity in moments of crisis across large cultural and geographic divides provide for artists, and can these exchanges impact other areas of shared understanding beyond the practice based work? What, if anything, can these final creative pieces reveal about the way we collaborate, our experiences of isolation and shared desire to create beyond our immediate realm, and how do we as artists and audience members “listen back” to or consume these pieces of media is the current moment when everything is ultimately virtual and received through a screen?

Katherine Moline
UNSW School of Art and Design
Changing the Rules of the Game: Subjectivity, Agency and Data

Data is on the tip of everyone’s tongue, but what does it mean and what does it want from us? This paper critically reflects on two series of creative workshops that engage participants in imagining alternatives to dominant narratives about data in relation to public surveillance (2016), artificial intelligence (2017), climate change (2018) and women’s health (2020). The theoretical ambition of these workshops, titled Myths of the Near Future (2014-2016) and Expanding Experimental Aesthetics in the Social Imaginary (2017-ongoing), is to reimagine and redefine our relationship to data with approaches that test the limits and possibilities of co-design. The research presents insights about the co-design methodology that are relevant to co-design practitioners in the service sector and beyond. The paper will first describe how the workshops misuse technologies for the purpose of collaboratively reinterpreting common fears, fantasies and phobias about data. Countering the routinisation of co-design, I propose that collaboration in co-design is difficult because it can too readily flip into its opposite, coercion. My unease about co-design’s potential to corral the agency of workshop participants corresponds with criticisms in the fields of informatics and cultural development. The omission of criticisms of co-design as a practice of colonisation in contemporary histories of art and design will be addressed through documentation of the workshops. The paper offers a preliminary account of my testing of an advanced form of co-design, ethnographic surrealism. Drawing from Michel Leiris’s exploration of subjectivity in ethnography I describe how the workshop activities, when framed within ethnographic surrealism, have produced images and narratives about data that are aesthetically charged. The paper concludes with some anti-principles that reflect on the contradictory qualities of images and feelings produced in collaborative explorations of data as an embodied medium, and that expand opportunities for reflection, co-creation, co-existence and hope.

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges the support provided by the UNSW Faculty Research Grant ‘Expanding Experimental Aesthetics in the Social Imaginary’ (2017-2020).

Keywords

ethnographic surrealism, experimental art and design research, participatory art, co-design, data

Dr Nicolas Bullot, Lecturer in Philosophy
Richard Fejo, DANT Honorary Member
Darcy Jenning, DANT Start-up Award participant
Nikita Kafetzis, DANT Member
Allyce Maree Peckett, DANT Start-up Award participant
Alex Nuynh, DANT Member
Yvette Martin, DANT Member
Sarah Pirrie, Lecturer in Creative and Digital Arts
Matthew van Roden, Lecturer in Creative and Digital Arts  

Charles Darwin University
Counting Distance Stories from Digital Arts Northern Territory (DANT) a collaborative student-centred creative network  

The Northern Territory is familiar with distance learning and engagement with diverse student needs. Remote and regional dynamics, often exacerbated by technology, weather and funding has always provided challenges. During 2020, the global coronavirus pandemic impacted on all States and Territories. Charles Darwin University for the first time went to a period of exclusively online learning with an emphasis on digital platforms. Challenging the normal locality of practice, work-home divisions were reframed through the digital discourse of online programmes.  

ARTLAB, an interdisciplinary unit of the College of Indigenous Futures, Arts and Society, established Digital Arts Northern Territory (DANT) (www.digitalartsnt.space) in late July 2020 as an interdisciplinary collective dedicated to supporting creativity and upskilling in digital communication. DANT aims to provide Charles Darwin University students with a student-led digital platform, opportunities to connect with new mentors and networks and to critically build community resilience to assuage the distress and divisions caused by the coronavirus pandemic.  

This presentation highlights DANT as a developing community collective involving collaboration between students and staff and engagement with the creative arts as a learning trajectory and ‘pandemic pedagogy’ more acute to advocacy, empathy, and partnerships.   

All contributions to this presentation have been acknowledged recognising indigenist methodologies that challenge the Western/European hierarchical divisions between the researcher and the subject studied. DANT as a community collective subvert the long-establish division in the Western/European academia between undergraduate and postgraduate (higher) education, again to deliver a more inclusive and compassionate environment for supporting academic and artistic creativity.   

Harrison See

Edith Cowan University

Dialogic Painting and Mythology: Cross-cultural collaboration amidst COVID restrictions 

This paper will discuss early findings from cross-cultural collaborative research that proposed travel to South-East Asia prior to COVID-19. This practice-led research (PLR) aimed to identify and explore emergent creativity between diverse arts practices, specifically through practices of collaborative painting. This doctoral PLR is dialogic, informed by Bakhtin’s (1981), The Dialogic Imagination: Four essays, in its approach to collaboration. An approach that frames collaboration within a social space where meaning is made collectively through mutually reciprocated utterances; utterances that in this research take on verbal, written and material forms. Findings from these creative encounters will contribute to a wider discussion of how new bodies of knowledge can emerge, transform and translate across divergent communities. A process that generates cross-cultural understanding and, by extension cross-cultural empathy.

COVID-19 has created both challenges and opportunities during this research period, with travel restrictions, material shortages and social distancing reframing how this PLR has approached cross-cultural collaboration. The difficulties of collaborating online or via congested postal services notwithstanding, this paper focusses on a series of collaborative painting encounters between contemporary painters, Harrison See and Desmond Mah. A collaboration resulting in a video titled, Intermission (2020). This video was screened periodically during July at Perth city’s Yagan Square Digital Tower Screen as part of a recent Screenwest creative grant. Contractually bound by this grant, this collaboration adhered to COVID-19 restrictions on location, participant numbers and social distancing; restrictions that lead to creative opportunities for these two painters. The resulting large-scale painting saw Mah and See draw on their respective socio-cultural iconography as they applied inks, gesso and soy sauce, reworking their own, and each other’s imagery. While painting, the two artists improvise a whimsical yet tension-filled story examining their hybrid cultural identities during a time of international crisis.

Gale Mason

Edith Cowan University

Maintaining Creative Dialogues During a Crisis 

This co-authored paper discusses reflections from an ongoing interdisciplinary forum This Is Not A Seminar or TINAS, which was established in 2012 to support practice-led and practice based Higher Degree by Research students. TINAS is co-facilitated by Dr Lyndall Adams, Dr Renee Newman, Dr Marcella Polain and Professor Mindy Blaise. Higher Degree by Research (HDR) students from the School of Arts and Humanities (SAH), the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts and the school of Education at Edith Cowan University, act as post-graduate facilitators. TINAS is an interdisciplinary community of practice (CoP) including members from performance, visual arts, creative writing and design. Sessions take place bi-weekly, with participants given the opportunity to explore a potential multiplicity of perspectives and engage in creative research dialogues. TINAS has proved to be an invaluable resource in bringing HDR students from a range of diverse creative disciplines together, establishing a CoP, and generating a vibrant exchange of ideas and experiences. In addition, TINAS provides essential support for HDR students regarding critical academic reading and writing, as well as pertinent research concerns.

However, with the recent advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, restrictions on social distancing, travel, and significantly reduced access to ECU’s campus, and therefore peers, TINAS has adopted alternate solutions to maintain operations, and importantly, student contact and support. Through digital platforms such as Zoom, TINAS has endured successfully during this international crisis. The way that these platforms shifted community engagement, created alternative and uncanny approaches to these already creative dialogues of exchange. The conditions created by the COVID-19 pandemic, has accentuated its importance within its community and the support it provides. Experiences from this unusual period are reflected on by several TINAS members, as their community engagement has been disrupted and reimagined.

Professor Susan Orr

York St John University

From Research Idea to Publication

Professor Susan Orr is a National Teaching Fellow and the Editor of the international journal Art, Design and Communication in Higher Education. She has written extensively about art and design pedagogy. She co-authored Art and Design Pedagogy in Higher Education: Knowledge, Values and Ambiguity in the Creative Curriculum published by Routledge with Professor Alison Shreeve in 2018.

In this brief overview Professor Orr will talk about her role as a journal Editor and what advice she would offer to aspiring creative educator/researchers who want to get published. This presentation will support participants to reflect on their own practice in light of creating and sharing research outputs. Susan will reflect on the journey from initial research idea to publication and will offer tips that will help colleagues get their research to wider audiences.

Professor Orr has just taken up the role of Pro Vice Chancellor: Learning and Teaching at York St John University. Prior to that she was Dean of Learning and Teaching Enhancement at University of the Arts London. In 2017 she was a member of the main Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) Panel and in 2018 was appointed Chair of the Arts Panel for the first subject-level pilot of the TEF in the UK. Susan chairs the European League of Institutes of the Arts’ Teachers Academy (see call for proposals here https://elia-artschools.org/surveys/?id=ELIAACADEMY2021).

Dominic Redfern

RMIT University

Affirmation

Taking a deep history perspective, this paper charts an evolutionary approach to the question of what art does, and suggests it as a means to work through the current anxieties that beset our species. A utopian vision of sorts, it is an approach that emphasises the significance of forms and traditions that exist beyond the academy: both pre-modern and contemporary. Drawing upon work from the intersection of biology and philosophy, such as that of Edward O Wilson, Ellen Dissayanake and Katja Mandoki, the paper emphasises the folk dimension of creative practice to reconsider our approach to aesthetic values and judgments. As a position it stresses a renewed modesty and localism in arts practice that plays against the global and spectacular trajectories that have characterised so much that has been celebrated in the age of the biennale. As such it seeks the empowerment of everyday artists to process challenges to our world and affirm our place within it.

Jacina Leong

RMIT University

Thinking with, and acting from, this place

From climate emergencies to global pandemics, to care in complex human and more-than-human worlds, amidst ongoing political, social and ecological challenges, is a weighted undertaking for contemporary curatorial practice, at once ‘globally implicated & radically situated’ [1], to critically and creatively grapple with.

Over the course of four weeks, in August 2020, and as part of the online Concentric Curriculum program (Bus Projects, Melbourne), artist-curator Jacina Leong invited a group of practitioners, whose work resonates with contemporary curatorial practice — of bringing people together to explore and respond to complex challenges through socially engaged, transdisciplinary and pedagogic formats — to re-evaluate and reimagine the methods, ethics and purposes of their practices. In doing so, this was not a ‘call for productivity in difficult times’ [2] but an opportunity to pause and reflect, to explore not only what bringing people together makes possible, but also the following sorts of questions: What are our methods and how do they shape the ethics and purposes of our work? What new forms of sociality might emerge from these moments? What are the implications of bringing people together online, as physical isolation continues? How can we use this time as an opportunity, not to return to the same habits, but to think through inventive methods ready to meet new demands and needs? What methods should we let go off? What methods do we take forward? And finally, for who do we care, what for, why and how, in and through our practices?

In this talk, Jacina explores early insights that emerged from these shared reflections and group discussions, facilitated in response to four overarching themes — Situating Presents, Curatorial Traces, Complicating Care, Possible Futures — and how, as practitioners bringing people together to explore and respond to complex challenges, we might take up the challenge to carefully ‘think-with, & act from, this place’ [3].

References [1] AusSTS. 2019. ‘AusSTS Graduate Workshop.’ http://topendsts.cdu.edu.au/aussts2020-workshop/call-for-apps2020/ [2] Haus der Kulturen der Welt. 2020. ‘New Alphabet School: Caring.’ https://newalphabetschool.hkw.de/category/caring/. [3] Osborne, Natalie. 2019. ‘For still possible cities: A politics of failure for the politically depressed.’ Australian Geographer, vol. 50: pp. 145–154. doi: 10.1080/00049182.2018.1530717.

Dr Lisa Andrew

Independent Researcher

Modified Fruit: Weaving transculture through practice

This paper seeks to address transcultural processes to make visible the position of art within an interdisciplinary practice. Addressing current theories surrounding the term transculture makes apparent that non-prescriptive practice, wonder and materiality are characteristics of an arts practice.

To sharpen this idea, I point to some similarities between transculture and New Materialism, with a focus on the theoretical critique surrounding oppositions. Theories surrounding transculture and new materialism point to an ethical and decolonising position. Transcultural processes produce misunderstandings and mistranslations, but these can be fruitful; mimicry, a form of transcultural engagement, has been regarded as an act that can be deliberate, an experiential way of learning and a way of knowing the world.

This paper positions the idea that a productive way to theorise this is to return to anthropologist Fernando Ortiz’s neologism, ‘transculture’ (1947), in which the ‘interplay of cultural forms and material conditions’ (Coronil in Ortiz 1995, p. xiii) gives rise to a processual space in which differences are negotiated through engagement, collaboration, and appropriation (Pratt 1992).Syncretic forms are the result of transcultural processes; these new forms are not only multicultural and hybrid, they also speak asymmetrically as transculture is a not so much an object as a process in which uneven forms of appropriation and their asymmetrical reception are in constant motion. In considering Art’s role within interdisciplinarity this paper draws from my experience of working at the Museum of Contemporary Art as well as on my research on the history and transculturation of the pineapple in the Philippines; I draw on the history of the transcultural agency of the pineapple as a way of visualizing how living in many countries informed my own arts practice.

Dr Tom Penney, Kate Inabinet, Christian McCrea, Jen Lade

RMIT University, School of Design

Games and Their Education re:COVID

The COVID-19 crisis has exacerbated calls for digital skilling and literacy in the arts sector. We at RMIT games reflect on our team’s experiences with games during the current crisis. We present how games education and industry practices, particularly from the independent and art-games sectors, can inspire transformation. I also reflect on my very recent work with the Australia Council of the Arts as a key advisor on digital transformation strategy, where we have looked to the games sector for guidance on how the arts can better skill, broadcast, language and encourage collaboration amongst its stakeholders. De-siloing between traditional approaches and inclusivity towards digitally-native practices are central to strategizing here broadly. Points of tension or enquiry include the following; that games require collaborative thinking between creative artists and technical systems experts, which challenge the individual centricity of practices in traditional or establishment fine arts. Games require a deep and legitimate digital literacy, rather than a taken-for-granted form of this, as was made common in the post-digital turn of the past 10 years. The games sector is seen as a current leader, politically, in the field of labour reform. Although games struggle with perceptions of sexism, the consumers of games are diverse and the producers of games are leaders in the discourses of gender diversity, non-binary representation and support for neurodiversity. Games also have an innate acceptance of digital provisioning platforms rather than a cynicism towards them. My provocation is that the fine or establishment arts look to incorporating some of these practices in a generative and adaptive way at a more rigorously structural level in order to future-proof their offerings as some international institutions have already been doing.

Madeleine Kelly

Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney

Liveliness: Can the life of the material image save forms of life?

In this paper I focus on German art historian and critic Isabelle Graw’s ideas of the living work and living history. My focus is guided by the question: How might the metaphor of the living work extend to that of the living planet? The view that images have a life of their own is a well-known vitalist projection (Hans Belting, WJT Mitchell). I sketch a way to avoid the transcendental and animistic tones cast by this projection in favour of a more hopeful view, a braiding whereby vital formations that arise by way of affinities are a particularly powerful form of non-human address. The vitality of images makes a case for the saving of image-life and planetary-life by entwining the affective with the cognitive and the immanent with the transcendent.

Throughout the paper I describe works from my Open Studio, currently on show at the Queensland Art Gallery (10 October 2020 – 31 January 2021). The project presents a facsimile of my studio, sculptural paintings, an animation, and a curated exhibition of works from the collection, and also hosts socially engaged events. Together they provide insight into my creative practice through structural and elective affinities. Affinity is a material-semiotic metaphor that allows me to show audiences how I work with homology and analogy, and mediate dialectics to form ideas through linking and pattern making. By working with affinities, I make affine-like formations that are enlivened through different painterly processes. At times they remind us that many species also form a fabric, one now contingent on a key human thread. I argue that affinities create bonds and relations that connect us to the sensing world and, by extension, sensible solutions.

ACUADS Roundtable

Please join us for a discussion with ACUADS Executive members on the advocacy work of peak bodies such as ACUADS and the challenges that lie ahead.

Led by ACUADS Chair, Professor Denise Ferris, ANU School of Art, with guests Professor Clive Barstow and Professor Andrew Norton

Professor Clive Barstow is Executive Dean of Arts & Humanities at Edith Cowan University, Honorary Professor of Art at the University of Shanghai Science & Technology China, Honorary Professor of Design at Guangdong Baiyun University China and global faculty member of Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey USA. Prior to moving to Australia in 1992, Clive taught at Middlesex University in London and the Kent Institute of Art and Design. He trained under Eduardo Paolozzi at the University of the Arts London (Chelsea School of Art) and holds a PhD from Griffith University Australia. Clive is a practicing artist and writer. His exhibition profile includes forty years of international exhibitions, artist residencies and publications in Europe, America, Asia and Australia. His work is held in a number of collections, including the Musse National d’Art Modern Pompidou Centre Paris and the British Council USA. Clive is President of the Australian Council of Deans & Directors of Creative Arts (DDCA) and President of the newly formed Sino-Australian Artists Association. He is also Director of the Open Bite Australia Print Workshop, which encourages the development of printmaking within a number of local indigenous communities. His recent exhibitions include “Tomorrow is History” at the Turner Galleries Perth WA, “Giving Yesterday A Tomorrow” at the Hu Jiang Gallery Shanghai China, “Cultural Pruning” at the Meou Art Gallery M50 Art Space Shanghai and recent publications include “Encountering the Third Space: a study of identity and hybridity through trans cultural artistic practice in Australia and China” Oxford University UK. In 2019 Clive was awarded the lifelong fellowship award by the Australian Council for University Art & Design Schools, for his outstanding contribution to art and design education in Australia.

Andrew Norton is a Professor in the Practice of Higher Education Policy at the Centre for Social Research and Methods at the Australian National University. Prior to joining the ANU he was the Higher Education Program Director at the Grattan Institute from 2011 to 2019. While at Grattan, he was a government appointed co-reviewer of the demand driven university funding system over 2013-14. He also served on an expert panel advising the government on higher education reform, particularly on financial issues, over 2016-17. Before joining the Grattan Institute, he worked for three University of Melbourne vice-chancellors as a policy adviser. He also worked part-time for The Centre for Independent Studies, as a research fellow and editor of its journal Policy. He started his higher education policy career as a ministerial adviser to Dr David Kemp, from 1997 to 1999.