Speakers

Featured speakers will include:

Lizzie Muller (UK/Aus)
Lizzie Muller is a curator and writer working at the intersection of art, technology and science. She is currently researching a PhD on the audience experience of interactive art with the Creativity and Cognition Studios at the University of Technology, Sydney. She writes widely on computer based art and exhibitions, particularly for RealTime Magazine (www.realtimearts.net).  Between 1999 and 2004 she was digital arts producer for the Junction Art Centre, Cambridge, UK.  Previous projects include the digital arts festival Respond in 2002 produced in partnership with Future Physical and CUMIS and the New Technology Arts Fellowships, a series of interdisciplinary research residencies with Crucible and Kettles Yard Gallery in 2002/3.  In the field of funding and policy development Lizzie has worked for the National Endowment of Science Technology and the Arts and for Arts Council England.

Selected committee positions include Chair of the panel for the BAFTA Interactive Art Award in 2003, New Vision Working Group for Trans Europe Halles (the European network of multidisciplinary arts centres) in 2002/03 and steering group of the conference New Constellations: Art, Science and Society, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney March 2006.

Kathy Cleland (Aus/NZ)
Kathy Cleland is a curator, writer and lecturer specialising in new media art and digital culture. She lectures in The Digital Cultures Program at The University of Sydney and is currently completing a PhD investigating avatars, digital portraiture, virtual characters and representations of the self in virtual environments. Kathy writes for a number of arts and cultural publications and was guest editor of a special new media issue of Artlink magazine, “e-volution of new media”. Kathy was president of the Sydney-based dLux media arts organisation from 1997 to 2002. Her curatorial projects include ARTificial LIFE at Artspace, Auckland, NZ (1998), the Cyber Cultures exhibition series, which toured to over 20 venues in Australia and New Zealand from 2000 – 2003 and the Australian component of the St@rt Up exhibition at Te Papa Museum in Wellington, NZ (2002-2003). In 2008 she is co-curating the exhibition “Mirror States” which explores audience interactions with digital selves and digital others and will be exhibited at Campbelltown Arts Centre in Sydney and MIC Toi Rerehiko in Auckland, NZ, and “Face to Face”, a digital portraiture exhibition that will tour throughout Australia.

Mark Jackson (NZ)
Dr. Mark Jackson is currently Associate Professor of Design in the School of Art and Design and Associate Dean (Research & Postgraduate) for the Faculty of Design and Creative Technologies at AUT University.  Prior to this he has held lecturing positions at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Adelaide and at the Sydney College of the Arts, the University of Sydney.  He gained his PhD in Architecture at the University of Sydney in 1994 and was a Visiting Scholar in the Faculty of Architecture at MIT in Boston in 1996, and a Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Architecture, University of Karlsruhe, Germany in 2003-04.  He has published in the fields of design history and theory, the visual arts, film and media as well as architecture and landscape architecture.

He has had a number of film and video works exhibited internationally. His current research focus is on ethics and design cultures.
George Khut (Aus, DCA, BFA)
Lives and works in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Special interests: body-sensing and representation through human-computer interaction, experience-centred design research and relational aesthetics (including community cultural development and arts-in-health). George Khut’s research interests focus on the use of biofeedback and physiologically responsive media as tools for sensing and re-imagining the lived experience of mind-body interrelation. His interactive installation works enable participants to experience and interpret aspects of their own bodily processes, as dynamic audio-visual environments. He has a Doctorate of Creative Arts at the University of Western Sydney, School of Communication Arts, Australia. He has exhibited throughout Australia, Britain and Asia.

James Charlton (NZ)
Having immigrated to New Zealand from the UK in 1973, James Charlton gained his BFA from Auckland University, Elam School of Fine Arts in 1982. As a Fulbright recipient he completed his MFA at the State University of New York at Albany in 1986. Remaining in the United States for a further five years, he exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions throughout the USA, and was represented by Akin Gallery in Boston and John Gibson Gallery in New York. During this time he lectured in sculpture at the University of New Hampshire, Monserrat College of Art and the State University of New York at Albany. Returning to New Zealand in 1991, Charlton was part of the team that established the Visual Arts degree at ASA School of Art and subsequently became Curriculum Leader for Sculpture at Auckland University of Technology. A position held until the beginning of 2008 when he assumed the role of Programme Leader for Creative Technologies.

While his practice is clearly located in visual arts context he engages a range of physical, digital and performative approaches in an exploration into the nature of the artefact as a field of activity in which the viewer is implicated. Strategically constructing credibility within the work Charlton consistently subverts the expectations he establishes as a means of questioning the role of artwork and the assumptions of the audience.

Current research projects with interactive digital object technologies centre around the integration of digital and physical content to question the definitions and inherent nature of time-based media

Joan Farrer (UK/NZ)
Joan Farrer is Associate Professor Design in the field of fashion, textiles and sustainability and Acting Director of the TDL at AUT. Her academic experience in the UK as Senior Lecturer Research at the Royal College of Art and Senior Research Fellow at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design University of Arts London is complemented by extensive commercial expertise in the field.

Joan was London Technology Network Business Fellow, AHRC and EPSRC Peer Reviewer and a design and strategy consultant for UK premier industrial fashion and supermarket retailer’s non-food divisions, their home and overseas supply chains.

Joan has consulted in conceptual design, R&D, trends, manufacture and retail of fibre, yarn, textiles and clothing with high profile clients from the Far East, Europe and the USA. She has undertaken strategic sustainability business reporting in the fashion and textiles sector for research institutions, NGO’s, local Government, education and international industrial clothing companies focusing on multi stakeholder dialogue, life cycle analysis and post consumer issues linked to the global fibre, textile, garment production and disposal chain. Joan has co-authored and been co-investigator on funded projects supported by EPSRC, DIFD, DEFRA, AHRB and European Commission relating to ‘intelligent’ textiles, sustainability in the fashion textile sector and communication of the issues which has driven her research since the mid 1990’s. Joan has and continues to mentor staff in research and teach emerging new talent at the creative cutting edge in the fashion/textile design and R+D in the sector and welcomes the new and exciting opportunity to develop related interdisciplinary research in New Zealand.

Frances Joseph (NZ)
Frances is Associate Professor of Art & Design at the Auckland University of Technology. She is a co-director of CoLab, and was the initiator and inaugural director of AUT’s Textile and Design Laboratory. Frances holds an MFA from the University of New South Wales, Sydney, and a BA in visual arts from the University of Tasmania. Her background was in sculpture, theatre design and object animation – including puppetry and animatronics - but since the early 1990s she has been involved in postgraduate teaching and the development and management of cultural and research projects involving multidisciplinary teams. . She was head of postgraduate studies in Art and Design at AUT from 1997 – 2006. Frances has worked on the development of online teaching and learning systems and the building of digital archives and content development systems. Her own research is focussed in the area of design and research, open content development, data structuring and computational agency.

Deborah Lawler-Dormer (NZ)
Deborah Lawler-Dormer has been the Executive Director of MIC Toi Rerehiko (formally the Moving Image Centre) since 1995. In that time she has worked to promote and support a dynamic and growing culture of media-arts practice in Auckland and New Zealand. She has programmed, curated, staged and managed numerous film, video and digital media shows to support environments of innovation in which the fusion of art and technology are developed and nurtured. She has traveled internationally to Europe, the US, the Middle East and Australia staging projects involving New Zealand digital and video art practice. She was a curator and researcher at Auckland City Art Gallery; City Gallery, Wellington; Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand and Artspace and more recently received a grant from the Art Venture Programme to attend the Banff Centre’s Interactive Screen 07 Workshop in Canada in August 2007. She is a video installation artist in her own right with a First Class Honours MA in Art History from the University of Auckland.

Charles Walker (NZ)
Associate Professor Charles Walker trained as an architect at Edinburgh College of Art. He has practised and taught architecture in the UK, the Middle East and New Zealand. He has designed buildings, curated and exhibited in major public exhibitions, and published in academic and professional journals. His main research is in mapping the dynamic and complex relationships between artistic, educational, technological and professional practices. He joined AUT in 2007 to develop new approaches to trans-disciplinary education by drawing together design, computing, engineering, mathematics, philosophy, art and entrepreneurship.

David Rye
David Rye works in embedded and applied control of machinery, and in the design and implementation of computer-controlled systems. Although his background is in mechanical engineering (BE, University of Adelaide 1981; PhD, The University of Sydney 1986), he now works principally on computerised machinery, electronics, software and systems design.

Rye has conducted a number of industrial research and development projects related to automation and control of machinery, including methods for reduction of load sway in shipboard cranes; reeving arrangements for cranes used for container handling and the system design of an autonomous container handling vehicle. Rye is also internationally recognised as a pioneer in the introduction and development of university teaching in mechatronics, having instituted the first Australian Bachelor of Engineering in Mechatronic Engineering in 1990.