Eve of Dust

Eve of Dust

Eve of Dust is a collaborative performance and installation between a human and a robot. The artwork draws on both the possibilities and anxieties arising from the collaboration between humans and emerging intelligent systems personified in the robot.

Partners

Australia Council for the Arts

Investigators

John McCormick
Adam Nash (RMIT)
Steph Hutchison (QUT)

Eve of Dust is a collaborative performance and installation between a human and a robot. The artwork draws on both the possibilities and anxieties arising from the collaboration between humans and emerging intelligent systems personified in the robot. The artwork uses a Sawyer collaborative robot, an articulated 7-jointed robot arm that somewhat resembles a snake. The performance investigates the co-creative possibilites offered by collboration with non-human systems.

The work has two modes: performance mode and interactive mode. Performance mode is a collaborative duet between the robot and a professional dancer. Using a handheld VR controller to pick out points in space, the dancer is able to choreograph the robot’s movement in real time, in collaboration with the robot. The robot’s movements generate music in real time, with the rotation, position and motion of the robot determining pitch, rhythm, timbre etc. In this way, the dancer responds to and collaborates in both the robot’s movements and the generated music, creating a collaborative dance duet that is unique every performance.

In interactive mode, members of the public can play with the robot using a handheld VR controller to choreograph the robot’s movements which, as in performance mode, generates music in realtime. Inviting a playful interaction, people can collaborate with the robot to make a real time robot music and dance performance. People can respond to the robot movement and indeed will find it hard to remain passive in the unfolding duet that is unique to each person. Performed as part of Siggraph Asia 2018 at the Tokyo International Forum Japan. More information available at: http://www.wildsystem.net/eve_of_dust.html

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City of Androids

City of Androids

A child robot uses an artificial neural network and location data to recognise where it is and what it is seeing within the Melbourne CBD. Participants can wheel the child around and it will recite stories it creates based on its surrounds. Emerging intelligent systems are increasingly impactful on our lives. The research investigates shared creativity and empathy with non-human systems. 

Partners

City of Melbourne – Arts Grants

Investigators

John McCormick

Adam Nash (RMIT)

A child robot uses anartificial neural network and location data to recognise where it is and what it is seeing within the Melbourne CBD. Participants can wheel the child around and it will recite stories it creates based on its surrounds. Emerging intelligent systems are increasingly impactful on our lives. The research investigates shared creativity and empathy with non-human systems.

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Star Wars After Lucas: A Critical Guide to the Future of the Galaxy

Star Wars After Lucas: A Critical Guide to the Future of the Galaxy

Focusing on The Force Awakens (2015), Rogue One (2016), The Last Jedi (2017), and the television series Rebels (2014–18), Dan Golding explores the significance of pop culture nostalgia in overcoming the skepticism, if not downright hostility, that greeted the Star Wars relaunch. In its granular textual readings, broad cultural scope, and insights into the complexities of the multimedia galaxy, this book is as entertaining as it is enlightening.

Partners

ACMI (Australian Centre for  the Moving Image)

Investigators

Dan Golding

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away—way back in the twenty-first century’s first decade—Star Wars seemed finished. Then in 2012 George Lucas shocked the entertainment world by selling the franchise, along with Lucasfilm, to Disney. This is the story of how, over the next five years, Star Wars went from near-certain extinction to what Wired magazine would call “the forever franchise,” with more films in the works than its first four decades had produced. Focusing on The Force Awakens (2015), Rogue One (2016), The Last Jedi (2017), and the television series Rebels (2014–18), Dan Golding explores the significance of pop culture nostalgia in overcoming the skepticism, if not downright hostility, that greeted the Star Wars relaunch. At the same time he shows how Disney, even as it tapped a backward-looking obsession, was nonetheless creating genuinely new and contemporary entries in the Star Wars universe.

A host of cultural factors and forces propelled the Disney-engineered Star Wars renaissance, and all figure in Golding’s deeply informed analysis: from John Williams’s music in The Force Awakens to Peter Cushing’s CGI face in Rogue One, to Carrie Fisher’s passing, to the rapidly changing audience demographic. Star Wars after Lucas delves into the various responses and political uses of the new Star Wars in a wider context, as in reaction videos on YouTube and hate-filled, misogynistic online rants. In its granular textual readings, broad cultural scope, and insights into the complexities of the multimedia galaxy, this book is as entertaining as it is enlightening, an apt reflection of the enduring power of the Star Wars franchise. Published by the University of Minnesota Press

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Child in the Wild (ROBOTS + AI)

Child in the Wild (ROBOTS + AI)

Presentation of the Child in the Wild exhibition at the Art Science Museum Singapore, Black Box RMIT and the Horsham Town Hall Gallery.

Partners

Australia Council for the Arts

Investigators

John McCormick
Adam Nash  (RMIT University)

Child in the Wild is a work by Wild System (aka Adam Nash and John McCormick), see the work’s official website at wildsystem.net. Child in the Wild is an interactive installation that enables human participants and a child robot to co-create an immersive audiovisual artwork through the use of the robot’s artificial neural networks to enable object and image recognition. The resulting artwork dissolves the boundaries between computational and physical phenomena, dispalying an aesthetic that is a real hybrid of the physical and the digital, of human and machine learning, of natural and artificial intelligence, and of real and synthetic evolution.

It is an artwork and aesthetic that emerges from the interaction between robot, people and virtual environment, neither one taking precedence, rather collaborating on a genuinely post-digital, post-convergent artwork. Child in the Wild has been presented at SIGGRAPH Asia Art Track, Macau, China in November 2016; Singapore ArtScience Museum, ACM Creativity and Cognition Art Track Microbytes of Innovation in July 2017; Data Is Nothing at RMIT Black Box Gallery in Marck 2018.

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WITH ME – Interactive sound installation about aloneness and loneliness

WITH ME - Interactive sound installation about aloneness and loneliness

This immersive dance work focuses on themes of loneliness and being alone, placing the audience into moments of ‘alone-ness’ to physically experience the work. 

Partners

Australia Council for the Arts

City of Stonnington

 

 

Investigators

Kim Vincs (TMT)
Clare Dyson (Swinburne)

This immersive dance work focuses on themes of loneliness and being alone, placing the audience into moments of ‘alone-ness’ to physically experience the work. The performance works between the cracks of dance, lighting design, sound and audience experience. It is a collaboration between dance, sound, installation and performance and has been choreographed by Clare Dyson in collaboration with performer Gerard Van Dyck, lighting designer Mark Dyson, stage designer Bruce Mckinven , dramaturg Kathryn Kelly, sound artist Mike Willmett and original performer Brian Lucas.

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Memoryscape

Memoryscape

Memory-scapes is an exploration of Cinematic VR and location-based VR. The Creative Arts research project combines installation, multiscreen, Cinematic VR & location-based VR frameworks to research imaginative storytelling and immersive experiences.

Partners

Centre for Transformative Media Technologies

Investigators

Max Schleser

Memory-scapes is an exploration of Cinematic VR and location-based VR. The Creative Arts research project combines installation, multiscreen, Cinematic VR & location-based VR frameworks to research imaginative storytelling and immersive experiences. As an experimental screen production, the VR work will focus the construction of on story and memory-scapes. Working in the tradition of experimental filmmaking, the practice-led research project will re-define the time and space continuum formulating approaches to VR time in the context of interactive and generative storytelling.

While the idea of VR is not new and has been surfacing since the 1990s, accessible omnidirectional video cameras that integrate with standard video production workflows were launched in the last three year. The affordances and aesthetic implications of cinematic VR and location-based VR are not explored yet. Surfacing research suggests a ‘new paradigm of mobile cinematics’ and creative industries not only approach VR as an emerging technology, but as a new industry sector.

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9th International Mobile Innovation Screening & Festival

9th International Mobile Innovation Screening & Festival

The International Mobile Storytelling Congress (IMSC) will take place on 22-24 November 2019 in Ningbo, China. IMSC focuses mobile, smartphone and pocket filmmaking, mobile innovation and mobile creativity. 

Partners

MINA – Mobile Innovation Network & Association, 

Mobile Studies International (MSI) 

University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC)

 

Investigators

Max Schleser

Alongside the International Mobile Storytelling Congress (IMSC), the 9th edition of MINA’s International Mobile Innovation Screening will take place on 22-24 November 2019 in Ningbo, China. IMSC focuses mobile, smartphone and pocket filmmaking, mobile innovation and mobile creativity. IMSC provides a forum for practitioners and scholars to showcase projects and discuss changes, challenges and chances of mobile storytelling. MINA (www.mina.pro) is the longest running film festival internationally dedicated to mobile & smartphone filmmaking with a focus on moving-image arts, documentary, community engaged film productions, experimental films and emerging film production forms and formats, such as MoJo, drone videos, AR and Mobile Cinematic VR. 

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Superheroes: Creative Force, Cultural Zeitgeist and Transmedia Phenomenon

Superheroes: Creative Force, Cultural Zeitgeist and Transmedia Phenomenon

The project explores the historic, creative and artistic development of the superhero across multiple media.

Partners

ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) 

 

This research is supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council’s Linkage program (LP150100394)

Investigators

Angela Ndalianis
Liam Burke  
Ian Gordon (National University of Singapore)
Elizabeth McFarlane (University of Melbourne)
Wendy Haslem (University of Melbourne)

The figure of the superhero has loomed in the popular imagination for generations, providing a common language for understanding the diversity of lived human experience. This research project is an Australian Research Council funded Linkage project that focuses on the phenomenon of the superhero figure from its beginnings up to its contemporary manifestation. The project explores the historic, creative and artistic development of the superhero across multiple media.

Outcomes: 3 anthologies, edited journal, public events and 2 international conferences, a VR experience at ACMI – Superheroes: Realities Collide – at ACMI, and Cleverman: the Exhibition at ACMI in December 2018.

Traditional and non-traditional research outcomes have included the Cleverman: The Exhibition at ACMI; the Superheroes: Realities Collide VR experience at ACMI Screen Worlds, created by Visitor Vision; two major conferences Superhero Identities and Superheroes Beyond; the Senses of Cinema dossier on Australian Superheroes and the ground-breaking television series, Cleverman; and the edited collections The Superhero Symbol: Media, Culture, and Politics (Rutgers University Press, 2019) and Superheroes Beyond: Wider critical perspectives on a transcendent archetype (University of Texas Press, in press 2020)

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#Nucleus

#NUCLEUS

This project focuses on ecology, sustainable smartphone filmmaking, travel films & eco-tourism. 

Partners

Goethe Institute (New Zealand)

Investigators

Max Schleser

This project focuses on ecology, sustainable smartphone filmmaking, travel films & eco-tourism. A story like a plant starts with a seed, an idea that grows organically. Nucleus, the Latin word for the seed inside a fruit, celebrates local nature through smartphone filmmaking. We understand ecology as a holistic and creative concept and as part of the film project we will explore indigenous approaches towards storytelling and hope to embrace novel connections to places & people. 

In November 2019 a collaborative short film will be produced during the three-day workshop in Wellington (New Zealand/Aotearoa) and will be presented at the Nucleus Screening. Selected filmmakers will be invited to explore eco-tourism as a theme for the collaborative short-film production.  We are inspired by Kaitiakitanga and innovative approaches to sustainable smartphone filmmaking. In order to kick-start the Nucleus film project, we launched a smartphone filmmaking competition. 

We hope to document local plants & local hero’s, community gardeners & gardens, zero wasters and people who live in sync with the environment. In order to create a community and collaborative film, the Goethe-Institut will fly the winning filmmakers to Wellington in November 2019 for the Nucleus Screening and a dedicated smartphone filmmaking workshop on the theme of sustainability, eco-tourism & travel films.

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60+ Online: Enhancing Social Inclusion through Digital Stories and Social Media Participation

60+ Online: Enhancing Social Inclusion through Digital Stories and Social Media Participation

Seniors are amongst the most digitally excluded in Australia. The 60+ Online project fostered digital inclusion amongst 22 Australian seniors (64-86 years), with varied digital skills, and socio-economic/cultural backgrounds.

Partners

Telstra Digital Inclusion Index

Boroondara City Council

Knox City Council

Investigators

Max Schleser (TMT)
Diana Bossio
Anthony McCosker
Hilary Davis

Seniors are amongst the most digitally excluded in Australia. The 60+ Online project fostered digital inclusion amongst 22 Australian seniors (64-86 years), with varied digital skills, and socio-economic/cultural backgrounds. 

Within workshops, seniors were encouraged to draw upon personal and community interests to inform storyboarding and digital story development. Digital stories were generated using iPads and smartphones, and edited using Adobe Premiere Clip. Social media sites Facebook and Instagram, facilitated shared digital skills development, supported by workshop participants and researchers. Regardless of skills at outset, every senior produced their own digital story. These were showcased at festivals, City Council events, and hosted on YouTube: 

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