Archives: Events

In this seminar, I will discuss 3 things:

1. Introduce the project I am currently collaborating on which aims to modify an established and successful participatory theatrical experience called I am Echoborg (see echoborg.com) and deploy it in the ‘space’ of AI development as something like an intervention in the prevailing thinking about the ethics of AI.
2. Use our preliminary project research to paint an impressionistic picture of the role AI ethics considerations play in AI development in the UK.
3. Use 1 and 2 to offer some broader critical reflections of the state of research on AI in the UK context, which hopefully has resonances in other similar industrial, political and cultural contexts such as in Australia (3 is the furthest away on the horizon and is maybe more for the ensuing discussion).

Patrick Crogan is Associate Professor of Digital Cultures at the University of the West of England, Bristol where he teaches on the BA Hons Media Communications programme. A founding member of its Digital Cultures Research Centre, he researches aspects of digital media, culture and technology, from videogames and social media to military drones, robots and AI. He was an Arts and Humanities Research Council Automation Fellow for the South West Creative Technology Network in 2020-21. He continues that work on AI and creativity in a collaboration with a media artist, software developer and AI ethicist on the ‘Echoborg’ project

SIDE-BY-SIDE is a showcase of videogames and media artworks installed on original platforms and a browser-based emulation platform called EaaSI (Emulation-as-a-Service Infrastructure) followed by a reception to launch The Australian Emulation Network: Born Digital Cultural Collections Access LIEF project. Funded by the Australian Research Council, the large consortium includes Australian universities, GLAM institutions, infrastructure partners AARNet and OpenSLX, and collaborators at Yale University, who have led the North American rollout of EaaSI. 

This talk will investigate the potential of the performing arts to inspire the design of human-robot interactions through movement. Specifically, it will delve into what else can movement offer beyond the expression of a particular intention, emotion, or social code. Ideas brought up in second-order cybernetics and explored through the performing arts will give shape to what this alternative could be, pointing at a more embodied and relational HRI.

Irene Alcubilla Troughton is a last-year PhD Candidate at Utrecht University (UU) in the project ‘Acting like a Robot’ where she investigates how movement theory and practice in the performing arts can serve the design of human-robot interaction. She holds a cum-laude master’s degree in ‘Media, Art and Performance’ (UU), a master’s degree in ‘Theory and Critique of Culture’ (Carlos III University of Madrid) and has a background in literature and language studies.

Motion capture-based renderings of dance performance constitute a complex, but highly interesting cultural phenomenon at a time when motion recognition and haptic technologies increasingly affect society at large. Optical motion capture technologies have been used to support the analysis and transmission of movement practices. This can be understood as an alternative way to bring such practices into the ‘orbit of writing’ (Rotman 2008). In this lecture, Laura Karreman evaluates implications of contemporary practices of digital dance capture. How is dance conceived of as a type of knowledge that can be transmitted in these practices? How does motion capture invite us to know dance differently? Foregrounding the value of dancers’ embodied experiences, Karreman suggests that the pursuit to render motion data into accessible feedback calls for further investigation of topics that are typically part of the tacit knowledge of the dancer. She proposes the notion of ‘embodied computation’ to describe the role embodied knowledge can play in designing ways to make motion data speak. Furthermore, using a dramaturgical perspective, the lecture argues that motion capture of human movement needs to be understood as a site for performance that uses multiple strategies of staging. It is an invitation to reimagine motion capture as an apparatus of motion creation.

Laura Karreman is an assistant professor in media and performance studies in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Until the end of March 2023, she works at the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies at Swinburne University as part of an Erasmus+ staff mobility exchange programme. She teaches in the MA program Contemporary Theatre, Dance and Dramaturgy and the Research MA Media, Art and Performance Studies (MAPS). She is also the programme coordinator of the MAPS programme. She researches the role of embodied knowledge in dance transmission practices, the role of digitization in performance archives, and epistemological questions that relate to new notions of dance and performance knowledge. Her PhD dissertation, “The Motion Capture Imaginary: Digital Renderings of Dance Knowledge” (Ghent University, 2017), examines how dancing bodies are reimagined through emerging practices and applications involving motion capture and other digital capturing technologies. Within the research group Transmission in Motion of the Department of Media and Culture Studies (UU), she relates to topics such as dramaturgy, somatechnics and mobilizing the archive In her current research she continues to investigate the rapid growth of motion capture as a tool for movement research and animation in order to critically evaluate the cultural and ethical implications of such practices, which now often remain invisible. Recent publications include the co-edited volume Performance and Posthumanism: Staging Prototypes of Composite Bodies (Palgrave Macmillan 2021), and the book chapters “Breathing Matters: Breath as Dance Knowledge” in Futures of Dance Studies (The University of Wisconsin Press, 2020) and “How does motion capture mediate dance?” in Contemporary Choreography: A critical reader (Routledge, 2017). In 2024, she is the conference director of the 9^th International Conference on Movement and Computing (MOCO) at Utrecht University.

Entangling old world Kabuki mystique with volumetric 3D video, “IN-VOCATION たまおこし” summons the sacred power of female archetypes and deities.

In collaboration with a clairvoyant from Japan, local artists, and an international guest performer, Yumi Umiumare opens a Jujutsu 呪術 (Magic) portal to discover the colourful characters of OKUNI — an initiator of Kabuki Japanese theatre.

Evolving out of Yumi’s solo work, “Buried TeaBowl – OKUNI”, the team of mystics return to prod their collective memories and discover the many essences of the divine feminine.

Punk, playful, and exuberant, this is an intimately epic and profanely sacred ritual that incites an audience revolt of the spirit.

Join Professor Kay Cook in an informed look at Swinburne’s new Research Strategy 2025.

This is a great opportunity to discuss the main goals, challenges and opportunities that the new Research Strategy provides.

Come along for a lively and insightful discussion on the new Swinburne Research Strategy 2025 and how it may affect our future research.

Kay Cook is a Professor and the Associate Dean of Research in the School of Social Sciences, Media, Film and Education at Swinburne University of Technology. Her research explores how new and developing social policies such as welfare-to-work, child support and child care policies, transform relationships between individuals, families and the state. Her work seeks to make the personal impact of these policies explicit in order to provide tangible evidence to policy makers to affect more humanistic reform.

Her Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (2017-2020) examined the personal, practical and institutional barriers to child support faced by women in Australia, the UK and USA. This project built on Professor Cook’s gender critique of child support policymaking, data practices and implementation in order to strike a more equitable balance between women’s responsibility for managing child support payments and the social, administrative and political context in which this responsibility exists. More recently, her work has examined how economic abuse is perpetrated through banking, financial and government systems.

Professor Cook’s research has contributed to numerous parliamentary inquries and academic processes. She was an advisor on the development of the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ 2010 General Social Survey, was the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Family Studies from 2012 – 2018, a Co-Director of the International Network of Child Support Scholars, and is the current Secretary of The Australian Sociological Association.

You can join in person at AGSE301 Hybrid Meeting Space, Wakefield St Hawthorn

Or

Microsoft Teams meeting

Click here to join the meeting

Meeting ID: 456 193 307 205
Passcode: pErzMs

Preserving and Emulating Australian Made Videogames of the 1990s

Join Cynde Moya (CTMT) and Helen Stuckey (RMIT) as they present their unique perspectives on preservation of Australian made video games of the 1990s as well as the use of emulation to enable this major period of Austalian gaming history to be experienced again as it was meant to be.

This research has been supportd by multiple ARC Linkage and Discovery grants as well as a current LIEF grant to support the expansion of the Australian Emulation Network using the  Emulation as a Service Infrastructure (EaaSI) framework.

This presentation is a must see for anyone interested in how we preserve, maintain and continue to engage with digital artefacts into the future.

Dr Cynde Moya directs the Digital Heritage Lab in the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies. The Lab is a collection of working vintage computer hardware, software, games, and media art. The lab also has facilities to make disk images for use in emulators, and compare the emulated content to it running on the original equipment. This lab was originally set up by Dr Denise de Vries, and is managed by Prof Melanie Swalwell. We welcome collaborations with Swinburne teachers and students interested in learning more about hands-on vintage computing. Dr Moya is active with the Software Preservation Network, and was elected to serve on the 2021 Coordinating Committee. She also works with SPN’s affiliate projects, Emulation-as-a-Service (EaaS) and Emulation-as-a-Service Infrastructure (EAASI). She is a member of the Australian Computer Museum Society (ACMS) Collections and Cataloguing Subcommittee. Previously, she served as Librarian/Archivist, Collectons Manager, and then Manager of the Software Preservation Lab at Living Computers: Museum + Labs in Seattle, Washington.

Dr Helen Stuckey is a Senior Lecturer in Bachelor of Design (Games) in the School of Design, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. She was the inaugural Games Curator at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (2004-2009). Her research addresses game history and the curation, collection and preservation of videogames and media arts. She is currently a CI on the following Australian Research Council funded projects: LP180100104: Play It Again: Preserving Australian videogame history of the 1990s; LP180100307: Archiving Australian Media Arts: Towards a method and national collection; LE220100057: The Australian Emulation Network: Born Digital Cultural Collections Access and DP230102727:Artistic Practice in Australian Videogame Development.

You can join in person at GS711 Turing Hybrid Meeting Space, Wakefield St Hawthorn Campus, Swinburne University

Or

Microsoft Teams meeting

Click here to join the meeting

Meeting ID: 456 193 307 205
Passcode: pErzMs

Hello Fellow CTMT Members,

For our meeting on Wed 9^th August, I have put together a short workshop plan for developing new research teams within CTMT. Specifically, we’d like to put together 2 or more teams, and we’d like to frame one or both around gender and diversity equality in new media technology. This is not to pre-determine a focus, but to consider what aspects of our research might speak to these issues by means of topic, team constitution, or even an extension of existing work that extends its focus in this area. For example, what questions might we already be asking simply because of the composition of our team and how that influences what we research? What questions could we be asking? How could a focus on diversity and inclusion point us towards more interesting and significant research in the fields in which we already operate?

All are welcome, regardless of research focus, and there will be room to discuss the broader issue of research teams, and how we might productively form and re-form them to provide each other with support, inspiration and critical mass within CTMT.

I will also discuss and frame issues of team formation in relation to future grant development, with a particular focus on ARC grants from my perspective as a member of the ARC College of Experts.

Professor Kim Vincs is a Senior Principal Research Fellow within the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. Her research uses creative practice methods drawn from dance technology to develop new uses and use cases for technologies such as motion capture, volumetric capture and virtual and augmented reality. Her research includes 8 Australian Research Council Discovery and Linkage projects in movement analysis and dance technology and 50+ industry collaborations integrating scientific and artistic approaches across fields as diverse as dance, mathematics, cognitive psychology and software engineering.

Professor Vincs was Co-Founder and Director of the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies and Professor of Interactive Media at Swinburne University of Technology, and, prior to moving to Swinburne, Founder/Director of the Deakin Motion.Lab at Deakin University. She is now leading a new 3- year project funded by the Australian Research Council Discovery Program investigating the use of volumetric technologies in art, including new forms of volumetric interaction design. Professor Vincs is also a dancer, choreographer and interactive media artist with over 30 years experience in choreography and creative technology.

You can join in person at GS711 Turing Hybrid Meeting Space, Wakefield St Hawthorn Campus, Swinburne University

Or

Microsoft Teams meeting

Join on your computer, mobile app or room device

Click here to join the meeting

Meeting ID: 456 193 307 205
Passcode: pErzMs

This meeting will be an open forum to discuss the implications for the centre and researchers regarding defence research.

Swinburne is taking a more strategic approach to defence research as signalled by the appointment of Professor Saeid Nahavandi to the position of Associate Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research and Chief of Defence Innovation.

Swinburne’s approach to defence related research is framed under the banner of Detect and Protect.

There will likely be increased opportunities for researchers to contribute appropriate skills and knowledge to larger research teams across the university in service of defence.

Please join us to share in the discussion about the defence related research at Swinburne as it impacts the centre and researchers.

One of the outcomes of the meeting could be a registering of interest, skills and ideas with a mechanism for making these known to team leaders looking to address research challenges in the area.