research creation 2 showcase - western sydney · 2015. 12. 8. · press, prints, photographs,...

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Research Creation 2 Showcase

Thursday, 10 December 2015 Lewers Gallery, Penrith

10am to 4pm 86 River Rd, Emu Plains

Humanities and Communication Arts

Research Creations: 2 Showcase Program2

The School of Humanities and Communication Arts welcomes you to

Research Creation 2 ShowcaseWorks by Staff and Higher Degree Research Candidates from Design, Media Production,

Music and the Digital Humanities.

CURATORS ≥ Associate Prof. Hart Cohen ≥ Associate Prof. Diana Blom ≥ Dr. Abby Mellick Lopes ≥ Dr. Enrico Scotece ≥ Associate Prof. Sara Knox

We would like to thank Professor Peter Hutchings, Dean, School of Humanities and Communication Arts for his support of this event.

We would especially like to thank our hosts the Penrith Regional Gallery for supporting this event with their gallery space.

THANKS TO ≥ Lisa Clifford PRG ≥ CAFÉ @ Lewers Team ≥ Noel Burgess ≥ Lauren Oaklands ≥ Steve Tredinnick


TALKS IN MUSIC, DESIGN AND MEDIA

10:00: Dean’s WELCOME Prof Peter Hutchings

10:15–30 The ‘Other’ Creatives Katrina Sandbach

10:30–40 Where are the Sounds of Joy? Film/Introduction Bruce Crossman

10:40–45 Between sound and silence Claire Maclean

10:45–11 Domestic Interior (Reading) Fiona Wright

11:00–15 MA (Creative Arts) Maria Angel

11:15–30 The role of literature in the aftermath of political conflict Matt McGuire

11:30–45 Launch – Global Media Journal Australian Edition: Initiating Change by Design Special Issue

Alison Gill, Abby Lopes/Myra Gurney/GMJ Team

11:45–12: Foto Friendship Wendy Chandler

12:00–1:00 LUNCH

1:00–2:00 AT THE STATION


TALKS IN MUSIC, DESIGN AND MEDIA

2:00 – 15 Back to the Drawing Board Janet Saunders

2:15 – 30 Re-balancing the Mid-Later Life Depressed Brain with Choir Singing

Kirstin Robertson- Gillam

2:30 – 45 Skateparks: Place and Culture Dan Johnston

2:45 – 3 ‘Ultramarine’ (Reading) Claire Corbett

3:00 – 15 Sonic Design Research Creation Ian Stevenson

3:15 – 30 Journey to Horseshoe Bend Database Jason Ensor

3:30 – 45 Photographic Works Enrico Scotece

3:45 – 4 Modernisms, Margot and Emu Plains Dave Cubby

4:00 – 15 Ageing Creatively: Creative Writing as a Tool for Healthy Ageing

Rachel Morley

4:15 CLOSE


Program of Visual Communication and Music Exhibitions–Posters

DIANA BLOM – MUSIC POSTERResearch creation through 3 composition-performance projects – practice–based research in practice

ALISON SHORT – MUSIC THERAPY POSTERIndustry engagement: Consulting and collaborating to support music in hospitals

JOHN ENCARNACAO Skarpa /Film

NOEL BURGESS The Call of the Woodford Boy

GREG HUGHESThe Absence/#NoFilter

MICHELLE CATANZARO Capturing Disapperance

JULIANA SWATKO Photograhic Works

KENDAL MURRAY Between Rhyme and Reason

DAVID BELL Korskow Archive Project: Lewers Bequest

HAZEL SMITH (IMAGE AND CODE), WILL LUERS (SOUND), ROGER DEAN‘Motions’, A Collage of Words

MEG MUNDELL‘Mapping Intervention: Place, Writing and Experience’. ‘The Fever Diaries’

HART COHEN, JUAN FRANCISCO SALAZAR, RACHEL MORLEYNtaria Heroes (Film)


DAVID BELLKORSAKOW/LEWERS BEQUEST ARCHIVES

Gerald & Margo Lewers were two leading Australian Modernist Artists primarily working in sculpture and painting from the 1920s to the 1970s.They were a husband and wife team who studied similar artistic forms as emerging artists but their career trajectories forged very different paths. Gerald possessed an eclectic mix of talents and experience, Margo’s experimental devotion to contemporary style and influences led to innovation, which from a modern perspective highlights a certain learning theory (Constructivism). “When we look outside the modernist canon to the whole range of visual culture-illustrations in the press, prints, photographs, film-we find lots of images of modern industrial and scientific forms” (R. L. Herbert 1997).

DIANA BLOM (POSTER) RESEARCH CREATION THROUGH 3 COMPOSITION-PERFORMANCE PROJECTS – PRACTICE-BASED RESEARCH IN PRACTICE

Composition-performance projects form the basis for research creation drawing on a range of practice-based research paradigms. The poster looks at ‘The Blue Ice Cave’ for piano and toy piano, by Diana Blom from the completed project Antarctica – new music for piano &/or toy piano, with score, performance, recording, written research outcomes plus public broadcast and use as music in the film Nightfall in Gaia by Juan Salazar. The ongoing project Australia East and West – new music for viola and piano focuses on ‘Into the Sun’ for viola and piano by Diana Blom which has been performed several times, often within a lecture/recital format here in Australia and in Austria, the published score plus written research on collaborative interpretation, marketing new classical music through the concept album format, and the program note. A CD release is planned with several tracks already recorded and the recording studio versus live performance experience is an emerging topic which will be

researched in the future. ‘Triptych’, composed for contemporary classical music ensemble Halcyon (soprano, mezzo-soprano, bass, viola, percussion and piano) from the project War Letters – musical settings of WW1 letters was recently performed in two concerts, one for the public, one for schools. The project was funded through an ANZAC Centenary Grants Program. A CD has been recorded and will be released shortly and several written research topics are emerging.

NOEL BURGESSTHE CALL OF THE WOODFORD BOY

The Woodford Academy, a National Trust property, is the oldest extant collection of colonial buildings in the Blue Mountains. Built in 1834 by Thomas Pembroke as the Woodman Inn, it has changed owner and usage over it’s 181 year history to remain, relevant to the changing needs of the developing colony and resulting community who rely upon it. It became the Kings Arms, Buss’s Inn, a guest-house, a prominent gentleman’s residence and a private matriculation boarding school, before returning to become a private residence for the school master’s family and tea room for passing travellers. The house and what remained of the grounds was bequest to the National Trust to serve as a Museum. This short film focuses on John Lyons Gray who was one of 54 boys who attended the Woodford Academy and enlisted to fight in WWI. In 1917, aged 17 he served in Palestine and later published the book ‘Red Dust’, a rare personal account of war. The Call of the Woodford Boy blends the memories his time at Woodford with the imagery surrounding the former student at war, set to a narrated excerpt from his book as a reminder of the impact war has on a persons sense of place and community. This work is the latest in a series of interpretive works created with the support of the Centenary of ANZAC local grant program to help visitors to the Academy understand the impact of war on community.

Speakers


Producer/Composer: Noel BurgessDirector: Michael JoyDuration: 5 minutesWeb: youtube.com/watch?v=O0XH1HVXh40

MICHELLE CANTANZAROBOOK PRESENTATION

This practice-based thesis explores what might be discovered about a city’s being, through a phenomenological study of its most vital and dynamic alternative arts and performance spaces. Philosophy and photography are brought together to reveal and explore the networks that exist within Sydney’s alternative scene and the irregular spaces that bring it to life. This doctoral research first establishes the historical and cultural context surrounding Sydney’s alternative arts and performance spaces, before delving into the intimate and ephemeral environments that exist within these irregular spaces. The methodological approach combines Actor Network Theory (ANT), hermeneutic phenomenology and photography to expose the sensorial and tacit dimensions of these spaces through a variety of visual assemblages. My photographic practice illuminates, tracks and links the assemblages of human and non-human actors that form inside and outside irregular spaces, and connects them to the wider urban networks to which they contribute. This work seeks to capture the essence of irregular spaces beyond documentary representations and to disturb the binary logics of inside/outside; space/time; and human/non-human embedded within urban environments. In this, the research makes a practice-based, reflexive contribution to analysing the city and its spaces, particularly the discourse on ‘space’ and ‘place’. This research offers a mode of linking seminal and notable elements, patterns and associations of irregularity identified through my photographic investigation. In doing this, it aims to create a real and tangible contribution to the collective imagination of past, present and potential ideations of the city.

HART COHEN, JUAN SALAZAR, RACHEL MORLEYNTARIA HEROES (FILM)

The project developed a strong relationship to both the Ntaria School and community. Through the partner (SRC) we were to achieve our main goal of mobilising the SRC’s archival resources (e.g., genealogies, photographs) for use by the community for cultural knowledge expansion, inter-generational communication, educational outcomes for both cultural heritage and School assessment purposes and introduction to communication technologies and modes of digital storytelling. With the involvement of elders and traditional owners from Ntaria we were able to complete a collaboration and produced a community film (34 minutes) with scenarios that included accessing archives (images and genealogies) at the SRC, the historical precinct at Hermannsburg (including old school, tannery) and on the traditional lands of Mavis and Kim Malbunke at Ipolera – lands that are also linked to many of the students with whom we were working closely.

WENDY CHANDLERPROJECT: FOTO FRIENDSHIP

Foto Friendship is a collaborative creative voice, community project developed by Wendy Chandler and Tammy Burnstock. The project which began in Dili, Timor-Leste in 2014 provided high school students with cameras and encouraged them to think about and photograph their life as a way of introducing themselves to children in Australia. Each young person created and curated their own series of photographs, exploring and expressing their personal identity, life, aspirations and dreams for the future. In March 2015 the project continued in the remote, mountainous village of Hato-Builico. Here working in collaboration with Timorese film-makers Bety Reis and Gaspar Sarmento, students were taught how to use cameras for the very first time. Throughout 2015 students from Cabramatta and Winmalee High Schools created their own “foto” stories in response. There is no post in Timor-Leste


so these stories will be personally delivered to the students in Hato-Builico in January 2016. Exhibitions of the work have been held at the Head On Photo Festival in Sydney in May 2015 and at the Peace Day event at Cabramatta High School in November 2015. In January 2016 a major exhibition will be held in Timor-Leste at the Xanana Gusmão Cultural Centre, a complex in the centre of the capital Dili. Most Australian children have little knowledge of Timor-Leste, one of our closest neighbours and also one of the poorest countries in the world. Over half the population is under 18 years old. Children do not have the access to cameras or opportunities for creative self-expression enjoyed by most children in Australia. Foto Friendship aims to continue to tell stories and forge new connections.

www.fotofriendship.com

BRUCE CROSSMAN WHERE ARE THE SOUNDS OF JOY?

Where are the Sounds of Joy? takes its inspiration from Australian Gallipoli warrior, Billy Sing, and re-envisages his life through Kunqu—the mother form of Chinese opera. It reimagines the Gallipoli war from the Chinese perspective with the metaphor from Kunqu in Peony Pavilion, of a broken down garden as the site for dreaming of the ideal lover, used as a parallel of Gallipoli as broken down walls from which one dreams of escape. The work opens and closes with half-sung, half-breath sounds on trumpet alongside emergent ‘broken’ prepared-sounds on piano, and Mandarin whisperings, whilst pure percussion colours focus to war-like Peking opera gong bursts. A gentle section emerges centering the work with a subdued trumpet plunger tune, related to Kunqu melodic fragments; it sits amidst rich piano resonances, including silent-string evoked half-sounds, and eerie bowed crotales as an imagined dreaming of love. The work ends amidst half-resonances on piano and Mandarin whisperings—“shui jia yuan?” over the lingering Kunqu dream harmony.

Iqbal Barkat and Vincent Tay, interpret Billy Sing’s dream of escape from the horrors

of Gallipoli with filmic poetic lushness, utilising Peking Opera musical traditions, Australian bush and atmospheric light combined with sensual dance images across the war landscape from Chinese painter Luping Zeng. The film re-imagines Zeng as a type of modern day Billy Sing in Australia.

JOHN ENCARNACAO – WORKSTATION (UNATTENDED)SKARPA (16 MINUTES)

Film: Ryszard Dabek (Sydney College of the Arts)

Music: Espadrille – John Encarnacao (Western Sydney University), Joshua Isaac (WSU BMus Hons graduate), Brendan Smyly (Western Sydney University).

Espadrille is a free-improvising trio capable of cosmic noise, primitive grooves and slow transformations. The group (John Encarnacao, Joshua Isaac, Brendan Smyly) uses drums, modular synths, saxophone, electric guitar, an ancient Casio radio-keyboard, and various effects and found objects. Ryszard Dabek is a Sydney-based media artist who works with images (video, film, photography), collage, sound, installation, and an interest in the idea of a present haunted by spectral vestiges of modernity.

Skarpa draws from the modernist tradition of the city poem film to conjure the ghosts of twentieth century utopianism that haunt that most embattled of European metropolises, Warsaw. The film documents the largely despised relics of Socialist Realist architecture and statuary, counterpointing these with the elusive subjectivities of its inhabitants. The soundtrack by Espadrille directly informs the structure and appearance of the film, with the imagery often buckling under the weight of its unstable sonic counterpart.


JASON ENSORJOURNEY TO HORSESHOE BEND DATABASE: TOWARDS A DIGITAL SCHOLARLY EDITION

This presentation will provide an overview of the online scholarly edition of ‘Journey to Horseshoe Bend’ developed by Hart Cohen, Rachel Morley and Jason Ensor. It will discuss the digital research environment named the ‘Byala / Talking Gallery’ and unpack the decisions made by the team to enhance TGH Strehlow’s biographical memoir within the context of a wholly scholarly approach to digital knowledge building and publishing. The outcomes draw on techniques and workflows pioneered during the ARC Linkage Project ‘Deepening Histories of Place’ (Australian National University 2011-2013) and rebuilt at Western Sydney University (2015).

GREG HUGHES AND AARON HULL (AKA HU). (COMPOSERS)PROJECT 1 TITLE: ABSENCE (VIDEO EXCERPT FROM LIVE AV PERFORMANCE – FOR FORTHCOMING DISTRIBUTION).

This is the duo’s most recent AV performance work. Chance, random behaviours and qualities are introduced into the performance via custom built software that affects AV playback by reacting to the amplitude and frequency of sound, stuttering time across precomposed video. The performers must react in real-time to audio and video feedback loops. No performance is ever the same. The performance of Absence was commissioned by Chronology Arts and explores a calming of media failure across stark landscapes presented in extreme slow motion. The piece is informed theoretically by the ambiguities of media archaeology. The devices used in performance contemplate the presence in absence and absence in presence of a medium’s trace. Error, glitch, redundancy and degradation offer a non-narrative of the past. The object of study (media as analogue and digital instrument assemblage) is operated and performed as a priority alongside but sceptical of interpretation or cultural analyse of content.

Acknowledgments: Chronology Arts

PROJECT 2 TITLE: #NOFILTER

#NOFILTER 1 (35mm film, hydrochloric acid, acetic acid and sodium chloride)

#NOFILTER 2 (35mm film, hydrochloric acid, acetic acid and sodium chloride)

Greg’s #NoFilter prints are test images produced inline with ground covered in his PhD research. Archival film from Greg’s past practice is saturated in various corrosive materials. The prints are inspired by Cooke and Reichelt-Brushett’s (2015), Southern Cross University, after | image project where the material surface of archival film is intentionally degraded to question photography’s alignment with personal and collective archival memory. The findings of the Cooke and Reichelt-Brushett’s project lead them to question digital imaging technologies against the physical (analogue). The authors suggest digital archives improve preservation of material works but introduce a new set of material concerns such as storage formats, programmed obsolescence and upgrade cycles. #NoFilter asks a little more of such a linear digital context and pushes thinking the archive to digital network culture. The physical qualities of a medium and its degradation ‘presents’ rather than ‘represents’ the past in the present, but what if we emulate a medium’s trace on mass? The likes of Instagram, as a social image-sharing network, commoditise the trace of analogue photography via a set of one-click image effects. These ‘filters’ have altered as cultural techniques to form symbolic practice including the hash tag #Nofilter. The tag is a boycott of Instagram’s filters suggesting a more honest, original or ‘present’ image within the framework. Conversely, the tag is used dishonestly and any stable reality the image degradation of the past may have been able to offer is lost. The process forms what Gansing (2013) describes as a transversal and generic yet generative media archaeology practice.


Greg’s #NoFilter prints, as early work-in-progress, are a tongue-in-cheek intervention on the stability of Instagram user’s generic media archaeology.

DAN JOHNSTONCULTURE/ SKATEPARKS: TRACE AND CULTURE

Skateparks: Trace and Culture is an ethnographic study of the social and environmental interactions that occur in skateparks. A variety of visual and audio data has been collected from over sixty skateparks, spanning six countries, and the resulting material demonstrates the multitude of ways in which these youth spaces are used. From the inane to the deeply personal, recurring traces highlight the important role that the skatepark plays in youth culture. As this research demonstrates, skateboarding contains a complex set of social and cultural practices, which extend way beyond the physical act of skateboarding. Social and cultural typologies identify the depth of key moments, objects, and connections through a variety of found traces in skatepark environments. Skateparks: Trace and Culture is the visual manifestation of Dan’s Doctorate of Creative Arts, which he is undertaking at Western Sydney University. The work showcases a selection of practice-based research approaches, which demonstrates the complex relationships that occur with and within skateparks. The work will be displayed on an iMac, in the form of an audio-visual slideshow. I will be attending the research creation event, and will welcome any opportunity to speak about my ongoing work.

CLARE MACLEAN (PRESENTATION) BETWEEN SOUND AND SILENCE:

This presentation will give a snapshot of my research through the lens of an Early Researchers project, “Between sound and silence: expression of transcendence and ma in a musical work and exegesis”. The starting point of this research has been the broad sense that music, and all the arts, seem able to point to something beyond themselves,

and beyond ourselves. My research and practice explores how this ‘beyond’ – what Janet Frame refers to as the hinterland – is conceived in Christianity and Buddhism, and how it may be referred to, and perhaps embodied, in music. The concept of ma, as a place between, intersects with the idea of the beyond as a timeless absolute on a number of levels, from the possibility of music itself being an intermediary between the listener and the absolute, to the imperceptible boundary between sound and silence.

MATT MCGUIRE (READING)Matt’s research address the question: what is the role of literature in the aftermath of political conflict? He do a short reading from one of his crime novels set in post-conflict Belfast, followed by a brief talk on how his research in its various guises (academic symposium, article in The Conversation, appearances on ABC RN and Sydney Writers Festival, and academic journal articles) address this question.

RACHEL MORLEYAGEING CREATIVELY: CREATIVE WRITING AS A TOOL FOR HEALTHY AGEING

(The Writing and Society Research Centre, MARCS Institute, Family and Community Health, and the Digital Humanities Research Group)

By 2050 the projected life expectancy in Australia will be 95 for women and 92.3 for men with almost one million Australians living with some form of dementia (Access Economics, 2012). With many Australians living in Retirement Villages for two to three decades, the problem of how to develop effective strategies to facilitate healthy ageing and ward off cognitive decline is crucial, and resonates strongly with the UWS strategic research themes of Urban Living and Environment, Health and Well Being, and Education. Through the facilitation of purpose-designed creative writing workshops delivered to two aged care facilities in Greater Western Sydney between September and December 2015, Ageing Creatively explores


how creative writing can be used as a tool for promoting healthy ageing and which activities are best for improving healthy ageing outcomes. It compares different strategies for helping people in aged care to compose and then share their writing in order to determine: 1) the extent to which different creative writing processes add to the subject’s sense of wellbeing and belonging; 2) the methods that are most beneficial for subjects in terms of increasing or maintaining cognitive capacity; 3) the methods that are most beneficial for sustaining interest in the practice of writing over a sustained period of time; and 4) the best digital method of mapping common interests and building communities.

MEG MUNDELL (MULTIMEDIA)Presents a short multi-media work ‘Mapping Invention: Place, Writing and Experience’. The work talks to her PhD research examining the intersection of creative writing practice and human relationships with place. The presentation includes a short reading from the creative component of her PhD these, a novel titled ‘The Fever Diaries’.

KENDAL MURRAYBETWEEN RHYME AND REASON

Transported to a place between rhyme and reason, we’re invited to imagine ourselves in fantasy worlds; filled with an optimism of possibilities, for a host of desirable outcomes. We see ourselves in the joys of ‘rhyme’, where life is filled with playful verse, inviting patterns and an original beat. This experience is tempered by the speculation of ‘reason’, with its witty asides, and wisdom in its sensory implications.

Time is re-presented to us in the recreation of each of these small worlds as daydream, and evolves through the narratives that are implied and into which we are invited to invest our own desires as voyeurs, into the pleasurable outcomes of the stories being told. The miniature scale of the artwork, often calls up a type of longing for the viewer, to travel back to that place in our lives that is so fondly remembered, and to be in that world again. To

hold on to the things we loved and valued, or remember with wonder, in an attempt to re-experience them through our fantasies, even if it’s just for a short time. We are invited to dream and play between rhyme and reason.

KIRSTIN ROBERTSON-GILLAMRE-BALANCING THE MID-LATER LIFE DEPRESSED BRAIN WITH CHOIR SINGING: A MIXED METHODS RESEARCH PROJECT USING QEEG TECHNOLOGY.

The creative arts, including music, visual art, dance and writing are primarily emotion based activities that are mainly processed in the affective system of the brain (Kropotov, 2009).

Chronic physical and mental disorders in later life can lead to social isolation and depression. Research indicates that choir singing can be effective in reducing depression and increasing social inclusion. Studies show that brain asymmetry is associated with biological predispositions to depression and social withdrawal (Kropotov, 2009; Hammond, 2009; McGilchrist, 2010)

Nine community dwelling participants in mid-later life (age range: 50-63 yrs) joined an eight week choir therapy program as a pilot study. Measurements before and after the program included depressive symptoms, wellbeing, spirituality and quality of life, cognitive functioning and quantitative electroencephalographic (QEEG) MITSAR technology. Qualitative data recorded pre and post comments from semi-structured interviews, weekly choir responses and song analyses. Quantitative data measured depressive symptoms and wellbeing. Biophysical data measured brain wave frequencies using QEEG MITSAR technology.

The music data included the analysis of song lyrics and melodies and were compared to the quantitative, qualitative and biophysical data for triangulation.

The biophysical (QEEG) data indicated that significant reductions occurred in chronic hyperaroused symptoms of depression,


improvements in mood modulation and re-balancing of hemispheric activity. Thematic analyses showed increased socialisation, better coping skills, less pain perception, positive mood changes, improved sleep patterns and general health. Statistical data showed significantly decreased depression and improved wellbeing scores.

This presentation will use video footage of the choir singing significant songs with comparison to the QEEG and quantitative/qualitative data.

KATRINA SANDBACHTHE ‘OTHER’ CREATIVES

Western Sydney is recurrently represented through a range of negative images, and in contrast to the hip, creative and culturally rich inner city areas, the western suburbs are typically considered to be ugly, homogenous and uncreative. Yet with Parramatta’s ‘creative city’ policy in action, the newly launched Blue Mountains MTNS MADE economic cluster, and grassroots industry hotspots growing in Greater Western Sydney, there is increasing evidence that—contrary to the focus of creative place analysis—creatives don’t need cities to be ‘successful’. While gentrification and the drift to the west triggered by housing affordability can partly explain the proliferation of professional creatives in Sydney’s peri-urban areas, many are long-standing residents in pre-gentrified suburbs. What are these Other creatives like? What are their needs and aspirations? This presentation centres on the graphic design sector of creative industries, and will also explore how higher education can support creative development in Western Sydney.

DR ALISON SHORT (POSTER)INDUSTRY ENGAGEMENT: CONSULTING AND COLLABORATING TO SUPPORT MUSIC IN HOSPITALS (POSTER)

Linkage between academia and the health industry promotes opportunities of value to both sides. Previous training and experience by a music therapist contributes to a novel program bringing music into the acute aged

care area of a major teaching hospital, within a specially developed volunteers training program. The effect of such an industry engagement is evidenced by collaborative health and research outcomes. Reflective practice leads to an understanding of the importance of this consultative engagement for both the health care industry and the university, within the context of the whole community.

HAZEL SMITH (MULTIMEDIA)Showcasing here her multimedia piece, ‘Motions’, a collage of words (by Hazel Smith), image and code (by Will Luers) and sound (by Roger Dean) that investigates the fractured psychological state of victims of human trafficking.

IAN STEVENSONSONIC DESIGN RESEARCH CREATION

In this presentation I outline an approach to research creation in the sonic arts that employs a multi-method strategy that I call radical sound design. Radical sound design incorporates moments of theoretical, empirical and practical intervention. As a constructivist research model, radical sound design assumes that any research intervention produces change in the phenomena being dealt with.

Theoretical work in this model aims to examine existing concepts to understand how they might be better understood as productive of sonic reality, or to develop new concepts to transform what is audible. Empirical methods are used to examine the audible and validate predictions about practical interventions. Creative practice is focussed on responding to the context of collaborations with other artist practitioners or on developing new forms of acoustic communication.

In previous research I have been working with literary and other texts to explore how written expressions of sonic experience might highlight otherwise overlooked structures of audible reality. These texts have included interview transcripts and the works of fiction writers Thomas De Quincey and Marcel Proust. In future proposed research I aim to develop


the audible aspects of ambient, screen-based, and interactive advertising employing environmentally responsive design methods.

JANET SAUNDERS Back to the drawing board? Exploring the value of drawing in the creative visual thinking process using improvisational drawing techniques and the ipad.

Why don’t design students make rough sketches or thumbnails anymore? The demise of the rough sketch has been ascribed to the easy availability of cheap online resources, client expectation and reduced deadlines and budgets. What else is going on? My thesis will explore the value of a rough sketch or ‘process drawing’, in the initial ideation stage of the design process of Visual Communication Design students at the University of Western Sydney (UWS). Research confirms that sketching, or indeed any form of hand-eye co-ordination, can aid concentration. It helps designers think, visualize and create; encourages ‘fluency’ and leaves a ‘thinking trail’, providing insights into students’ creative processes and encourages originality. My research will analyze students’ process diaries and interview a selection of high achieving design students, design educators and award winning graphic designers, both experienced and junior, to investigate the role (if any), of sketching in the creative process. Part of my research will observe and document insights into the value of process drawing in my own design and visual arts practice, reflecting on the changing role of sketching. Using the iPad and sketch apps I aim to demonstrate, sketch and record my thinking trail. Through the use of ‘improvisational’ drawing techniques such as doodling, squiggling and other projection devices, my research aims to enhance students’ natural visual perception abilities (such as pareidolia) to encourage drawing participation and the use of rough sketching in the ideation stage.This research may add to the critical discourse in drawing research, which argues that process drawing should continue to be clarified, demonstrated and encouraged in design schools.

JULIANA SWATKO IMAGES

The images presented are my ongoing visual research into comparative observations of the natural landscape and landscapes created by design.

They intend to preserve the experience of the place by focusing on its significant or unique features. I approach photography as a painter might, utilizing the inherent qualities of the photographic medium to generate visual images that extend the traditional understanding of what the medium might be. The images are made using the photographic technique of exposure layering. The resulting images splice slivers of time and space together, producing images based in the photographic but which dissolve into dreamlike panoramas of lush colour and texture, defying the documentary nature of photography and moving instead towards the impressionistic and painterly.This method provides a more continuous, time based, experiential sense of an environment, paralleling how places are later recalled in the memory, by visualizing a compression of the significant aspects of a place and creating a concentrated representation of the experience of having been there. This work is part of a long term project, that has evolved over time and which recently has seen me reverting to principals used in other technologies to enable me to enhance the intensity of the colours and make the environments even more lush than they were in reality, resulting in a more filmic atmosphere.

The photographs are models of my own perception of the locations, presenting attention to the unique details of the various environments I was attracted to, and a sense of experiencing the environments.


FIONA WRIGHT (READING)Fiona will be reading from her collection of poetry titled Domestic Interior, written as a part of her PhD, which looks at the portrayal of the suburbs in Australian poetry, and the exploration by key Australian poets of a ‘featurist aesthetic’. She will also briefly talk to the way her poetry explicates her research and its examination of the interplay between memory, experience and place, how places become symbolic and poetic, and how this process intersects with ideas of belonging, identity, the everyday and the imaginary, the public and the private worlds.


Contact Information [email protected]

Western Sydney University Locked Bag 1797

Penrith NSW 2751 Australia

WESTERNSYDNEY.EDU.AU

research creation 2 showcase - western sydney · 2015. 12. 8. · press, prints, photographs,...

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