KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
DAVID DUNN
Composer David Dunn has worked in a wide variety of audio media inclusive of traditional and experimental music, installations for public exhibitions, video and film soundtracks, radio broadcasts, and bioacoustic research. He rarely presents concerts or installations, preferring to lecture and engage in site-specific interactions or research-oriented activities. Much of his current work focuses on the development of strategies and technologies for environmental sound monitoring in both aesthetic and scientific contexts.
Dunn is President, Co-Founder and Program Director of the Art and Science Laboratory and President of the Acoustic Ecology Institute, both in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His compositions and wildlife sound recordings have appeared in hundreds of international forums, concerts, broadcasts, and exhibitions. Besides his multiple books, recordings and soundtracks, he has been anthologized in over 50 journals and books. Dunn was the recipient of the prestigious Alpert Award for Music in 2005.
JAMES CRUTCHFIELD
James Crutchfield teaches nonlinear physics at the University of California, Davis, directs its Complexity Sciences Center, and promotes science interventions in nonscientific settings. He is mostly concerned with what patterns are, how they are created, and how intelligent agents discover them. He is also Vice-President and Co-Founder of the Art and Science Laboratory in Sante Fe, New Mexico where he collaborates closely with composer and artist David Dunn.
Until 2004 he was Research Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Before SFI, he was a Research Physicist in the Physics Department at UC, Berkeley. Crutchfield has worked in the fields of nonlinear dynamics, solid-state physics, astrophysics, fluid mechanics, critical phenomena and phase transitions, chaos, and pattern formation. Current research interests center on computational mechanics, physics of complexity, statistical inference for nonlinear processes, genetic algorithms, evolutionary theory, machine learning, distributed intelligence, and quantum computation. He has published over 140 papers in these areas.
http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~chaos/
About the Art and Science Laboratory
The Art and Science Laboratory is a scientific, educational, and cultural institution in Santa Fe New Mexico. It seeks to redefine the social role of art and the artist in the context of applied collaboration with focused scientific research. It aims to articulate an art of daily consequence and creative activism that is integrated with life in a utilitarian way, while promoting scientific understanding. In many ways ASL’s central interest is to transcend the categories of art and science. Rather than merely encouraging the familiar vectors of disciplinary specialization, ASL seeks to facilitate networks of interdisciplinary resocialization. It regards this interdisciplinary thinking as an historical and pragmatic necessity.
The principal areas of research and education at ASL include: electronic arts history and practice, post-cinematic aesthetics, robotics and haptics, sound art, chaos and nonlinear dynamics, bioacoustics, human and machine interface, video and web art, complex and adaptive systems, interactive and programmable space, distributed device network programming, environmental media construction and protocols, compositional linguistics, evolutionary processes, and environmental conservation and education.
DONALD BROOK
Donald Brook is Emeritus Professor of Visual Arts at Flinders University. His academic career overlaps his related careers as a practicing sculptor and as an art critic. He is a former art critic of The Sydney Morning Herald and Nation Review, and was a founder of the Tin Sheds Workshop in Sydney and the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide. His new book The awful truth about what art is is published by Artlink Australia.
PLENARY SPEAKERS
AMY BALKIN
Amy Balkin is an artist whose work involves land and the geopolitical relationships that frame it. Her projects include This is the Public Domain, an ongoing effort to create a permanent international commons, free to all in perpetuity, through the legal transfer of 2.64 acres of land near Tehachapi, California to the global public. Public Smog (2004-present) is an atmospheric park, opened through economic and political activities and gestures, such as purchasing and withholding pollution rights (NOx/CO2) in regulated emissions markets, and an attempt to add the Earth’s atmosphere to the UNESCO World Heritage List. She was a collaborator on Invisible-5 (2006), an environmental justice audio tour along California’s Interstate-5 freeway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Her recent projects include a three-day participatory public reading in Manchester, UK, and a billboard project in Douala, Cameroon. She lives in San Francisco and is a visiting lecturer at California College of the Arts and Stanford University.
Amy Balkin’s work is featured in the exhibition Urbination at Carriageworks which runs from 4 August – 3 September.
MISCHA KUBALL
Dusseldorf-based artist Mischa Kuball has worked extensively in both gallery/museum and public space contexts for over two decades. He utilizes the medium of light to explore architectural space and its capacity to shape social and political discourse. Kuball is a Professor in the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne where he founded the Experimental Laboratories Minus One.
His works have been widely exhibited at venues that include the NTT Intercommunication Center in Tokyo (2008), Hamburger Kunsthalle (2007), the Jewish Museum, New York (2002), and the Bauhaus Dessau (1992). Temporary installations of his work have been installed at the entrances of the Museum K20K21 in Düsseldorf (2005), the National Gallery in Berlin (1999), and most recently at the Centre Pompidou-Metz (2010). He has also positioned site-specific installations on bridges in Berlin and Geneva, and in/on a 23-story office building in Düsseldorf. His recent solo exhibitions include Platon’s Mirror at ZKM Karlsruhe in 2011, City Portrait at the Contemporary Art Museum in Toyota, Japan (2008), and Re: Mix / Broca II (Letters / Numbers) at the Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, Australia. Kuball also contributed two site-specific installation for détournement 2009, a collateral exhibition at the Venice Biennial 2009.
Mischa Kuball has been brought to Sydney by Artspace Visual Arts Centre where his exhibition Platon’s Mirror opens on 31 August. His exhibition, accompanying symposium and visit are supported by the Goethe-Institut Australien.
CHRIS BOSSE
Chris Bosse is an architect and an Adjunct Professor of Architecture and Research Innovation fellow at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in Australia. His architectural practice is based on the computational study of organic structures and resulting spatial conceptions. Bosse’s research lies in the exploration of unusual structures pushing the boundaries of the traditional understanding of structure and architecture with digital and experimental formfinding. Bosse was an associate at PTW architects in Sydney, where he was fundamental in developing the Watercube, National Aquatics Centre in Beijing among several other international project and later co-founded L.A.V.A., the laboratory for visionary architecture.
Bosse won an award for speculative design in the ZEROprize Re-Skinning Award at the World Urban Forum in Rio de Janeiro in 2010 with a plan to transform the University of Technology’s tower in Ultimo from into a sustainable, glowing white building. Led by Bosse, L.A.V.A. recently won the bid to design the city center for the sustainable eco-city Masdar in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). LAVA imagined an outdoor city-center based on traditional European public plazas that would encourage social interaction.
TERRY SMITH
Terry Smith, FAHA, CIHA, is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the National Institute for Experimental Arts, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney. He is the 2010 winner of the Franklin Jewett Mather Award for art criticism conferred by the College Art Association (USA), and in 2011 received the Australia Council Visual Arts Award. During 2001-2002 he was a Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, and in 2007-8 the GlaxoSmithKlein Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Research Centre, Raleigh-Durham. From 1994-2001 he was Power Professor of Contemporary Art and Director of the Power Institute, Foundation for Art and Visual Culture, University of Sydney. He was a member of the Art & Language group (New York) and a founder of Union Media Services (Sydney). During the 1970s he was art critic at these Australian newspapers: Weekend Australian, Nation Review, Times on Sunday; he continues to write for art journals and magazines throughout the world. A foundation Board member of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, he is currently a Board member of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh.
Smith is the author of a number of books, notably Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (University of Chicago Press, 1993; winner of the inaugural Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Prize 2009); The Architecture of Aftermath (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and What is Contemporary Art? (University of Chicago Press, 2009). He is editor of many other books including Contemporary Art + Philanthropy (University of NSW Press, 2007), and with Nancy Condee and Okwui Enwezor, Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, postmodernity and contemporaneity (Duke University Press, 2008). Contemporary Art:World Currents will be published by Laurence King and Pearson/Prentice-Hall in August 2011.
ELIZABETH ANN MACGREGOR
Elizabeth Ann Macgregor OBE is Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Sydney, Australia. Macgregor is committed to taking the work of the museum out to new audiences as well as attracting more visitors to the Circular Quay site. She was particularly concerned to attract the younger demographic and to engage with audiences from Western Sydney and regional New South Wales. As the MCA is the only museum in Australia dedicated to exhibiting and collecting contemporary art in Australia, she has also developed the MCA’s national profile.
Macgregor is a regular contributor to conferences, seminars, radio and television programs on arts issues. She is currently on the board of the Australian Children’s Music Foundation and the Council of Art Museum Directors. She was recently awarded the Australia Council Visual Arts Award 2011 or her instrumental leadership as the Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) and her achievements in the encouragement of Australian visual arts both at home and abroad. In 2008 she was awarded the Veuve Clicquot Business Woman Award and the Australia Business Arts Foundation Dame Elisabeth Murdoch Arts Business Leadership Award. In 2003 she was awarded the Centenary Medal for services to the Australian public and contemporary art and in 2007 she won the Significant Innovation category in the Equity Trustees Not for Profit CEO awards.
JILL BENNETT
Jill Bennett is founding director of NIEA and previously founded the Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics at the University of New South Wales, where she also holds the position of Associate Dean Research, College of Fine Arts. She is the lead researcher on a recently awarded ARC Linkage project Curating Cities (with the City of Sydney and Object) which seeks to establish how the arts can promote environmentally beneficial behaviour change and the development of green infrastructure. Her last ARC funded research project and forthcoming book Practical Aesthetics: Events, Affect and Art After 9/11 investigates real events through aesthetics. She has recently completed a Linkage project Construction, Connection, Community (with Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre and Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai) investigating the practical use of creativity in relation to cultural and urban development in the Asian region. Her previous books include Empathic Vision (Stanford UP), a study of art and traumatic events and several new media monographs. She has curated a number of exhibitions including REAL Emergency (2009) which focused on the visual culture of emergency events and Prepossession (2005) with Felicity Fenner on the politics of dispossession in South Africa, Indigenous Australia and Northern Ireland. Previous major research projects include Ethical Globalism, a study of contemporary art and politics in the context of globalisation.
PLENARY DISCUSSANTS
ROSS HARLEY
Ross Rudesch Harley is an artist, writer, and educator in the field of new media and popular culture. His work crosses the bounds of media art practice, cinema, music, design, and architecture. His video and sound work has been presented at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, New York MoMA, Ars Electronica in Austria, and at the Sydney Opera House. He is a former editor of the journal Art + Text, and has written regular columns on design and popular culture for Rolling Stone and for The Australian. An expert in the field of digital media and its impact on the arts and education, he is lead CI on three ARC projects investigating the use of digital databases and networked archives for media arts history in Australia. In 1992 he was the director of the Third International Symposium on Electronic Art (TISEA), and is co-hair of ISEA 2013. In 2008 he won the Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence for his innovative use of digital technologies in studio teaching. He is co-Director of the iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research and Head of the School of Media Arts, College of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales, Sydney.
STEPHEN JONES
Stephen Jones (born 1951, lives in Sydney, Australia) is an Australian video artist, curator, video engineer and conservator of long standing. He worked with Bush Video (1974-5) the Paddington Video Access Centre (1976-978) with Nam June Paik during his exhibition at the AGNSW in Sydney (1976) as well as providing technical support for many major exhibitions including the Biennale of Sydney and Australian Perspecta from 1976 to 1985. From 1983 to 1992 he was the video-maker for the electronic music band Severed Heads. Between 1989 and 1996 he worked as an engineer for several major video post-production and computer graphic production facilities. In 1996 he returned to making art and in 1998 received a New Media Arts Fellowship from the Australia Council. He provides technical support for artists, developing sensor-controlled systems for interactive video/DVD installations and physical immersion installations, as well as developing theoretical perspectives on interactivity, artificial intelligence and artificial life. Since 2002 he has been researching the history of art and technology in Australia. This work has lead to his book, Synthetics: Aspects of Art and Technology in Australia, 1956-1975 is to be published by MIT Press in February 2011.
ZANNY BEGG
Zanny Begg is the Director of Tin Sheds Gallery, The Faculty of Architectire, Design and Planning and works as a curator, artist and writer. She works in a cross disciplinary manner and her work revolves around an investigation of the politics of space, both in the broader globalised context and a more specific local one: she is interested in both the architecture of space and the social relationships which construct it. Zanny was invited to Hong Kong for an Australia-China Council Residency (May 2007), Indonesia for an Asia-Link Residency (June 2008), for a Performance Space Residency in Redfern, Australia (Oct 2008) and Australia Council Residency in Chicago (2010). Her recent exhibitions include Emeraldtown at Artspace, Istanbul Beinnale, Taipei Beinnal, There Goes The Neighbrouhood, Performance Space Sydney and Self Education – Self organization, National Centre for Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia.
INVITED INTERNATIONAL SPEAKERS
VICTORIA VESNA
Victoria Vesna, Ph.D., is a media artist and Professor at the UCLA Department of Design | Media Arts and Director of the Art|Sci center at the School of the Arts and California Nanosystems Institute (CNSI). She is currently a Visiting Professor at Parsons Art, Media + Technology, the New School for Design in New York, a senior researcher at IMéRA – Institut Méditerranéen de Recherches Avancées in Marseille, France, an Artist in Residence at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Bristol and director of the ArtScience center at University of California at Los Angeles. Her work can be defined as experimental creative research that resides between disciplines and technologies. With her installations she explores how communication technologies affect collective behavior and how perceptions of identity shift in relation to scientific innovation. She has produced different models for rendering abstract models of the universe tactile and visual, bringing nanoscience into the experiential realm. Her collaborators have included Tibetan Monks at the Gaden Lhopa Khangsten Monastery and Dr. James Gimzewski, nano-science pioneer. Victoria has exhibited her work in over twenty solo exhibitions, more than seventy group shows, has been published in excess of twenty papers. She wont the prestigious Oscar Signorini award for best net artwork (1998) and gave 100+ invited talks in the last decade. She is the North American editor of AI & Society and in 2007 published an edited volume – Database Aesthetics: Art in the age of Information Overflow, Minnesota Press and most recently an edited volume entitled Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts. Edited with Christiane Paul and Margot Lovejoy. Intellect Press, 2011.
ADRIAN MACKENZIE
Dr. Adrian Mackenzie is a reader and co-director of the Centre for Science Studies, University of Lancaster, UK. He is the author of three books: Wirelessness: Radical Network Empiricism. MIT Press, 2010; Cutting Code: Software and Sociality, Peter Lang, 2006; Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed, Continuum, 2002. His current research interests include: the lives of data, especially databases but also data analysis, modelling and ‘analytics.’ He is currently focusing on data as a way of thinking about ‘BioIT convergences’ across biological engineering, DNA synthesis and sequencing, clinical and research databases and visualization technologies. Currently funded research projects include ‘Technolife: A transdisciplinary approach to the emerging challenges of novel technologies. Lifeworld and Imaginaries in Foresight and Ethics’ (EU Framework Programme 7 – Science in Society). He has published articles in The Fibreculture Journal, Theory and Event, Space and Society among others. He is a guest editor for a forthcoming issue of Theory, Culture and Society on ‘Code and Conduct’.
