A positive feedback loop describes a number of phenomena, natural or social, depending on who is using the term. I like to think of it as a self-fulfilling prophecy and a creatively productive one at that. As the instigator of a three-day event held at the Queensland College of Art, from 21 - 23 November 2012, I use the term to bring together in a conference creative practitioners and theorists.

This booklet provides a small window into our discussions and activities which are yet to take place as I write this brief foreword. My vision is that meaningful networks for creative arts research through collaboration will emerge from the three days’ sessions. The presentations take many forms in the process of still being written with the aid of new colleagues. You will also find within the covers of this booklet material that reflects ideas underpinning the practice of individual artists exhibiting in the conference exhibition held at Browning Street Studios in West End.

Although some of the presenters speak about collaborations they have already worked in and some of the artists show work they have produced in a team, the content of this booklet including conference paper abstracts and accompanying images reflects our intention to forge collaborations both within and beyond this first Positive Feedback Loop: Conference for Creative Collaboration. Many thanks to all who made this opportunity possible and welcome to all who will join us in the future.

Catherine Gomersall

Positive Feedback Loop: Conference for Creative Collaboration

Schedule

Wednesday 21 November, 2012

2:30 – 4:00 Refreshment Research Plenary Session Closed session

4:30 – 6:00 Positive Feedback Loop Exhibition Plenary Session Closed Session

6:00 – 7:00 QCA Fine Art Graduate Exhibition Opening

8:00 Dinner: Set menu banquet with vegan and gluten-free options, $26 per person and BYO. (Meet at 7.30 at the front of campus to travel to dinner)

Thursday 22 November, 2012

11:00 – 1:30 Hybrid Making Deb Polson (QUT) The ECOS Project Tania Visosevic (ECU) Super Dementi8: art projection as creative mourning Realizing the Material Renata Buziak (Griffith) Biochrome: Decay and Australian Native Medicinal Plants in Visual Lynden Stone (Griffith) Inculcating the viewer as creator

1:30 – 2:30 Lunch (provided)

2:30 – 4:00 Collaboration Methodologies Fiona Fell and Stephanie Outridge Field (SCU) Collaborative engagement as the paradigm for sustainable creative practice Prithvi Varatharajan (UQ) The challenges of podcasting poetry

4:00 – 5:30 Collaborative Paper Jam 2

6:00 – 8:00 Refreshment Research

Friday 23 November, 2012

11:00 – 12:30 Visual Histories Kirsty Kross (UdK) Between the Sheets: Marimekko, Ken Done and the construction of identity Chantelle Bayes (Griffith) Creating Places: developing fictional experiences with urban nature Hugo Belviso (ECU) Jekyll’s Hide: exploratory workshops for new performance

12:30 – 1:30 Lunch (provided)

1:30 – 3:30 Beyond the Body Andrzej K Pytel (House of Ezis)

Highly-Strung: projecting interiority upon itself Steph Hutchison (Deakin) A poetics of endurance within the viscous solo Kay Lawrence (Griffith) Tenuous couplings: the metaphoric use of fibre and digital media William Platz (Griffith) Live-likeness: working ‘from life’ in contemporary practice

3:30 – 5:30 Collaborative Paper Jam 3

6:00 – 8:00 Positive Feedback Loop Exhibition: Conference Closing Browning Street Studios, West End

Renata Buziak

Biochrome: Decay and Australian Native Medicinal Plants in a Visual

Art Practice

There is little general awareness of Australian native medicinal plants and their traditional uses. This information gap results from loss of Indigenous knowledge and practices; also, modern pharmaceuticals have supplemented domestic usage for many medicinal plants. This visual art research project sets out to generate cultural material that showcases selected healing plants traditionally used by Indigenous people. The project uses an experimental photographic process, the biochrome, in which plant matter and the natural processes of decay are harnessed and presented as graphic images with their own inherent aesthetic appeal.

William Platz

Live-likeness: working ‘from life’ in contemporary practice

Significant work has been done in recent years on the relevance and conceptual concerns of ‘liveness’ in new media, performance and installation. I propose extending this discourse into the life drawing studio at a time when the role and relevance of working ‘from life’ is increasingly under scrutiny. Life drawing stubbornly endures in defiance—even antipathy—of photography, digital media and televisual surveillance. I began thinking about this circumstance recently when a colleague casually mentioned that he had banned the use of ‘smart’ mobile phones in his painting classes. This was not because of ringing or pinging interruptions, but because, to his consternation, the students in the painting studios were drawing and painting pictures of models from their mobiles.

We understand the illusory nature of drawing—its particular graphic code—and yet some indefinable quality of life- likeness, or perhaps more accurately, live-likeness is—paradoxically—the defining feature of studio life drawing (and studio portraiture). Motivated study, research and work are required to reform the practice and pedagogical use of life drawing in the era of mobile screen technologies. I propose an exchange of ideas and practices concerning liveness, the use of studio models (and sitters), graphic/photographic exchanges, and networked (self-)surveillance technologies.v

Lynden Stone

Inculcating the viewer as creator

Quantum physics forces us to see that reality is a concept much broader than one simply based on our own perceptions; a world that is, possibly, much more subjective and relative than we realise and one that may be interconnected in ways that we cannot yet conceive. I find these aspects of the quantum world endlessly fascinating. Trying to indicate these aspects through visual art drives my practice.

I make paintings, installations and videos that allude to the quantum world but often involve the viewer (like the observer in a quantum system) in metaphorical acts of creation. My installations facilitate meeting points between viewer and the material object-ness of the work that serve to implicate the viewer in ‘creating’ materiality. For example, several works require the use of small apertures to view them. The act of peering closely into a peep-hole conjures the act of observation (required in the quantum world) to manifest material reality. In other works, the viewer is encouraged to engage directly with random quantum event generators, using only their consciousness, to create or affect material outputs.

By implicating the viewer as creator, I endeavour to evoke a broader understanding of reality beyond one based solely on our perceptions.

Kay Lawrence

Tenuous Couplings: the metaphoric use of fibre and digital media

Our fragile natural environment hangs in precarious balance. Humanity is an active ecological agent impacting on this volatile situation, due to our overwhelming anthropomorphic-centric behaviours. In the 21st Century it is imperative that we critically evaluate the ways in which we interact with our planet and that the relationships between nature and culture be renegotiated.

The combination of fibre-based materials and techniques with digital media is used to explore these issues. This provides a set of binary opposites which can be exploited to create tensions in works eg. handmade/machine made, old technology/new technology, unique/reproducible, poetic/rational. These tenuous couplings are metaphoric for other sustainable practices today. We need to embrace new technologies and ideas, but we must not discard all old technologies and ideas. Both should have a place in decision-making processes.

The body is central to these issues; as a tool which processes and transforms the materials and as the subject/object of works.

Kirsty Kross

Between the Sheets: Marimekko, Ken Done and the Construction of

Identity

This is an analysis of two design objects- a bedspread by the Finnish Design company, Marimekko from 1974 and a scarf from the Australian Design company, Ken Done Designs from 1985. Both are everyday objects which contain deep embedded meanings associated with the respective national images of Finland and Australia. Both nations are defined by geographic isolation and an accompanying sense of cultural inferiority. As a result, Marimekko and Ken Done Designs both aimed to create a visual alternative to the cultural hegemony of Western Europe and the United States and in doing so, helped redefine the notion of what it was and is to be Finnish or Australian. In addition, as Marimekko and Ken Done Designs were marketed and sold internationally, this new sense of “Finnish-ness” and “Australian-ness” was exported globally. However, the embedded meaning and ideology of Marimekko and Ken Done design objects were often perceived differently and falsely interpreted in different contexts. Both objects played a role in my biography in which the Marimekko Bedspread and the Ken Done Designs scarf represented different meanings for my parents and myself which were also vastly different from the original meanings of the objects. From my current perspective as an Australian

that has been living in Berlin for eight years, I look back at the bedspread and scarf and other objects from my childhood, particularly objects featuring images of fish, in order to create a sense of the social, cultural and ideological status of myself and my family within the context of postcolonial Australia in the 1970s and 1980s. The objects are featured in the accompanying Photo Essay, “Lost and perhaps even possibly Found” . The paper also contains the script “Wir sind so Glücklich- a conversation in

German with the accent of the Sydney bourgeoisie to the Melody of Kylie Minogue at Cafe le Bon Choix, Mosman, Sydney, 1988”. A performance which deals with Ken Done Designs products and their appeal to the Australian middle class in the 1980s.

Tania Visosevic

Super Dementi8: Projection Art as Creative Mourning

“The projector, the magic lantern, animates the track of life with it’s own light,

brings the imprint of life to new life on the screen.” Gilberto Perez

“The electronic image, that is, the tele and video image, the numerical image coming into being, either had to transform cinema or to replace it, to mark its death.” Gilles Deleuze

This presentation is an examination of the creative practice of live projection art.

By outlining a body of work titled Super Dementi8 I hope to perform research in-action. In short I frame the projectionist as a philosophical-physican lens-grinder with innovative capacities and the viewer as creative collaborator.

I will discuss the essence of projecting celluloid film as live cinema by presenting its fundamental ontology via a cine-philosophical application of

Gilles Deleuze. Lastly I hope to start a feedback loop to discuss the concept of “sacrificial screening” and “creative mourning”.

Fiona Fell

Consensual density

This project reveals a recent collaboration with a radiographer where the inside qualities of the work are revealed. This research in progress aims at developing interdisciplinary collaborations to achieve an integrated border-crossing art practice and new territories of exploration expanding the field of ceramics and forging new directions and links with other research fields. This work investigates the underpinnings of ceramic sculptural design and attempts to explore how materiality meets immateriality with an often-subsequent relationship with the uncanny, or the familiar becoming strange. These subversive interventions combine old and new technologies that reflect critical exchange within the context of contemporary art practice and provide a platform for creative outcomes that contribute to broadening the understanding of this area of art practice.

Fiona Fell/ Stephanie Outridge Field

Collaborative engagement as the paradigm for sustainable creative

practice

Fiona Fell will focus on case studies of multi disciplinary artist driven collaborative models while Stephanie Outridge Field will review artist/ agency/ies case studies to compare the creative potency of these two collaborative models. Their examination will include impact on ephemeral work; pre production processes to impact design process; process driven experiential installation; permanent public spaces; complex community cultural development projects using collaborative design and facilitation strategies.

Fiona and Stephanie will be the protagonists for this case study action response review of collaboration in a real world situation underpinned by current theory.

The framework of contemporary theory on collaborative practice reflected by cultural context; critical exchange; time based practices; environmental constraints in critical multidisciplinary visual practice areas will provide the structure for the joint presentation.

Chantelle Bayes

Creating Places: Developing Fictional Experiences with Urban Nature

My research looks at ways that writers may engage with natural and cultural entities in urban landscapes. Writing about urban nature involves a complex series of questions about the ways we should conduct ourselves as writers and as city-dwellers towards non-human nature. I address the potential for fiction to reconceptualise the nature/culture relationship. I focus on the potential of travel and movement, drawing on both Stuart Cooke and Stephen Muecke’s work on nomadic writing as a way to unsettle places and concepts. By moving through places, writers may be able to trace collisions, entanglements and conflicts between non-human nature and human culture and then reflect the complexity of these relationships in their writing.

Prithvi Varatharajan

The Challenges of Podcasting Poetry

My PhD project looks at how radio, and other sound technologies such as the podcast, might be used to disseminate poetry to a wide audience. I take ABC Radio National’s Poetica—Australia’s only national poetry program on radio—as my case study. One section of my PhD thesis is focused on production, and is an exploration of effective audio production methods, while another analyses listener feedback to Poetica, mapping what kinds of poetic and sonic content listeners are responding to.

In my conference presentation I describe the process of producing a Poetica program—including directing an actor or poet in the reading of poems, and the creation of a soundscape by layering music and sound effects using audio editing software. This will lead to a consideration of the challenges, posed by copyright, of making such programs available for download. In an era of the Internet, I see podcasting as an important way of extending the reach of such a program. I will reflect on alternative, more collaborative methods of production that may allow programs like Poetica to be downloaded and accessed by an online audience. For the presentation I will require a venue with audio playback facilities and a computer.

Steph Hutchison

WORK: A poetics of endurance within the viscous solo

This project developed a new approach to movement practice and performance through a solo performance that used physical paradigms of endurance and work to integrate the normally divergent movement practices of contemporary dance, circus and improvisation. This work contributes to developing dance and movement curricula relevant to contemporary hybrid aesthetics.

Through experiments of endurance in practice and performance WORK engaged in an experiment that placed my body as researcher/dancer/choreographer/perfomer/acrobat and more into the centre of my inquiry. My inquiry posed questions as to the potential or otherwise of the hybrid body in the creation of an individual idiom in dance, and challenged bodily endurance in solo performance practice.

Hugo Belviso

Jekyll’s Hide: exploratory workshops for new performance

This research project – consisting of exegesis and practical component – will explore methods of creating new performance involving Japanese ‘Butoh’ dance-theatre devising techniques and the work of American filmmaker/comic Jerry Lewis. Using Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as a departure point, I will incorporate selected ideas and methodologies both from Butoh and from the work of Jerry Lewis, with the aim of developing performance that is both engaging and immediate. This research will in turn contribute to an extension of current knowledge in the areas of heightened physical performance-making and text adaptation. In my investigation thus far, I have identified areas where both practice and its documentation could be further explored. These areas include: applying selected workshop and devising/rehearsing techniques to a set text; searching and documenting the current state of the Butoh form of dance-theatre in Australia and overseas, and how this may be useful in generating new work for stage and/or screen performance; and, discovering and further extending links made between practitioners such as Jerry Lewis, Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, and the socio-historical context of the time in which they were creating, relational to today.

The eventual goal will be to document process findings into a workbook that includes the recording of a performance showing or short film for performance makers where a set text is utilized in conjunction with heightened expression and form.

Deb Polson

The ECOS Project

In 2010 it was reported that 30-40 percent of all primary energy produced Worldwide is used in commercial buildings. Despite this, the enormous impact of building related activities and systems on natural resources are often hidden from public view.

The ECOS project is a creative team dedicated to contributing to public conversations about the importance of green energy options for urban development. We are a small team consisting of an interaction designer, programmer and graphic artist. The ECOS project team has also relied on expert consultation with energy providers, construction companies and building management organisations to finalise a design that presents an abstracted dramatisation of the relationship between environmental factors (climate) and energy consumption.

The ECOS project draws on the practice of Eco-Visualization, a term used to encapsulate the important merging of environmental data visualization with the philosophy of sustainability. Since the ECOS project has completed the production of a working prototype (image above), we are looking for experts from a range of disciplines to contribute to the refinement of the final work. We are also interested in collaborating on other projects ideas that have arisen during our research phase.

Andrzej K Pytel

Highly-Strung

This installation marks a departure from clothing-the-body as a defining context of the work. Constructed from transparent, liquid-like fabric, the work is suspended and strung as an extension of existing interior space. It is free to change its form according to the dictates of the environment that influences its static defining condition. The resultant internal tension maintaining the structure will be documented through photography to in-form the next cycle.

Cycles, repetitions and variations are the key aspects. Each phase is marked by a return to a platonic state, defined by an envelope of fabric, subjected to different frequencies and intensities. Studies begin at the body, extend to interior space and return to the surface of the subsequent envelope. Each repetition and growth builds on the previous phase incorporating outcomes that have emerged from the specifics of the new event.

The work does not seek inspiration outside of itself, relying instead on the internal perpetual motion of the system. It is the pure encounter of the envelope within its context that forces it into shape. The design-process is amplified and echoed into other realms, including clothing and architecture, blurring their limits and boundaries.