Performing Environments

    A conference held by CoLab, a research and development centre for creative use of technology in partnership with MIC Toi Rerehiko and AUT.

    Saturday 18 October
    10.00 am - 4.30 pm
    Room WA 224 – A Block
    Wellesley Street,
    AUT City Campus

    This conference will engage with critical aspects of art and technology projects. The conference coincides with the launch of CoLab, a new transdisciplinary research and development centre led by collaborative partners AUT University and MIC Toi Rerehiko. CoLab aims to become a national centre of excellence in the development and use of new technologies for creativity, communication and innovation.

    Saturday 18 October
    MORNING: ENVIRONMENTALLY RESPONSIVE STRATEGIES

    10 .00 – 10.30 am
    Welcome and introduction to CoLab: Deborah Lawler-Dormer (CoLab CoDirector)

    10.30 – 10.50
    Uwe Rieger is an architect and the Associate Head of Design at the School of Architecture and Planning at The University of Auckland and will discuss environmentally responsive design strategies as an interaction between landscape, people, architecture and digital information.

    10.50 -11.10
    Interactive and Performance Technologies
    Sue Gallagher: Home Body & Dead space
    Ovid’s story of Hermaphrodite will be told in light of some recent examples of hybrid performative environments that fuse house with body. These mobile structures are based on the notion of union. The presentation will then shift focus to homelessness and bodiless in a discussion of the scenographic strategies of repetition, delay, and disorientation in relation to three of Sue Gallagher’s performative video and light installation works: WAKE, SUGAR, & SPACEINVADER. These works are concerned with an extended moment of interregnum, as is experienced in grief, particularly when a disbelief in death results in a dramatic limbo. A dead space where bodies are caught in frenzied motion and ultimately caught in a space of paralysis. This paper seeks to trace the confounded unfolding of disruption and disorientation in relation to these works, in order to arrive at some understanding of dead space, nothingness, paralysed thought and suspended animation.

    11.10 – 11.30
    Listening to the Breeze – work in the AURA Laboratory
    Originally from Wales, Dr. Dave Parry is a Senior Lecturer in the Auckland University of Technology School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences And Directory of the AURA RFID laboratory. He holds degrees from Imperial College  and  St. Bartholomew’s Medical College, London and the University of Otago, New Zealand. His research interests include internet-based knowledge management and the semantic web, health informatics, the use of Radio Frequency ID in healthcare and information retrieval.

    The AURA lab, set up this year at AUT is concerned with application of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology to real-world problems. RFID has expanded from being a “super barcode” into one of the most exciting technologies for identifying, locating and possibly understanding objects. By bridging the gap between real objects and the databases that monitor them, RFID may allow a whole new set of interfaces to be created. This talk will briefly introduce RFID but mostly deal with some of the work going on in the lab especially in the medical domain.

    11.30 – 11.50
    Andrew Dento    n is Senior Lecturer in Digital Design at AUT University.  He has a BFA (film) from Simon Fraser University, Vancouver – Canada and a Masters of Contemporary and Performing Arts with First Class Honours from Auckland University.  Andrew is a filmmaker, motion graphics artist, editor and digital media researcher.

    11.50 – 12.10
    Digital Storytelling and Community Media Practices
    Alan Young     is a designer and senior lecturer at AUT and will discuss the role of new media technologies in relation to his latest community media projects including ‘Equal Service’, a DVD of oral histories of homeless people in Melbourne, for the Department of Justice as well as projects for the City Council in Glenn Innes.

    12.10 – 12.30
    Andrew Ensor

    12.00 – 1.30
    Lunch Break (Catered)

    AFTERNOON: ENVIRONMENTALY-RESPONSIVE WORKS IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE ATMOS EXHIBITION AT MIC TOI REREHIKO

    1.30 – 2.00 pm
    Janine Randerson     is a New Zealand artist and curator and will be discussing technological mediation in ecological systems with a particular focus on satellite imaging. Janine will examine these issues in relation to the exhibition atmos, which explores how technological mediations in weather may become ciphers for dialogue, critique and transformation.

    2.00 – 2.30pm
    Tom Corby     is an artist and writer whose research is concerned with relocating digital imaging processes within wider aesthetic and social frameworks. Corby will discuss how scientific information visualization practices can be used to produce platforms for critical, aesthetic and affective experience.

    2.30 – 3.00
    Jerome Knebusch     is an artist based in Paris and Frankfurt and will discuss his latest work examining the weather as an everyday part of life as well as online representations of weather as an event.

    3.30 – 4.00pm
    Lisa Benson and Douglas Bagnall
    Lisa Benson is a New Zealand artist working with a range of media from photography to object based installation. A key focus in her practice is the experimentation with light and time. In 2008 she participated in a major exhibition at the Turkish Cultural Center, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzgovina. In 2001 she completed her Master of Fine Arts at RMIT University in Melbourne. Lisa is represented by the Vavasour Godkin gallery in Auckland and has exhibited widely in New Zealand and Australia.

    Wellington based artist Douglas Bagnall is an artist and programmer, who tries to make machines to automate some of the more mundane processes of artistic production. This was not always the case; Douglas began his career in the early nineties.  His film and digital art, including The Sea (pt 3) (1996) and Random Geographical Survey (1998), has been seen throughout New Zealand at short film and fringe film festivals. His work has been shown internationally at Melbourne Experimenta in 1994 and at the Tokyo Video Festival in 1996. Bagnall was Digital Artist in Residence at the University of Waikato in 2003. Cloud Shape Classifier has been exhibited at Ramp gallery in Hamilton, Enjoy in Wellington. In 2006 the installation appeared internationally at ZeroOne/International Symposium on Electronic Arts in San Jose and later in the group show Geomatics and Ecomatics: three stories in Shanghai (2007).

    4.00 – 4.30
    Closing: Charles Walker

    5.00 – 7.00
    Drinks and Launch of CoLab