Research Forums

What happened to the techno-inspired utopias once predicted at the advent of the digital revolution? New forms of information flow and communication were meant to make our personal, social, and working lives more efficient, more equitable, and more connected. And yet, today it is commonplace to seek ways to disconnect, detether, and switch off from the daily experiences of sensory overload that leave many feeling fatigued, stressed, overworked, and worse. Meanwhile, the planet heats. Droughts, fires, floods, and more are common features in an era where natural ecosystems and the wellbeing of individuals and communities are increasingly strained.

For some, these circumstances represent a new dark age (Bridle) where 24/7 capitalism (Crary) has given rise to something worse (Wark); an age of distraction (Stiegler), of political impotence (Berardi), scorched earth (Crary), cold intimacy (Illouz), and symbolic misery (Stiegler). Where to turn in these seemingly dire circumstances?

This forum explores a variety of artistic and critical responses to the cultural conditions associated with end-stage capitalism. With references to the wellness industry, the nervous system, corporate workplace, climate anxiety, self-design and self-optimisation, this forum focuses particularly on how artists and critics variously adopt and challenge therapeutic strategies to address the maladies of our times.

SPEAKERS

Chair: Dr Grant Stevens, opens in a new window Deputy Head of School (Art), UNSW School of Art & Design

Dr Simon Willems, opens in a new window British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Reading

Dr Astrid Lorange, opens in a new window Senior Lecturer, UNSW School of Art & Design

Dr Jaye Early, opens in a new window Lecturer, UNSW School of Art & Design

Dr Anastasia Murney, opens in a new window Casual Academic, UNSW School of Art & Design

Sonic Publics addresses the public presentation of sound. Audio is installed in industrial-scaled art galleries, tower lobbies, hospitals and concert hall foyers. Taking numerous forms, from compositions accompanying light environments to music designed to comfort visitors in office lobbies, audio arts presented in this way expands and shifts contemporary notions of public and private space. Sonic publics have grown rapidly, exposed knowingly or unknowingly to audio arts through large festivals focused on displays that fill their environments with sound and light to commercial environments that have placed large-scale screens and sound systems in entrance spaces.

Sonic publics, as presented in this forum, form across situations; visitors’ unheard energies are made sonic, apps such as Spotify and YouTube present algorithmically manipulated music to the public—at once diversifying and standardising music, and synthesised music is played to children in hospitals.

This forum, with its focus on the presentness of sound, asks a crucial question: What do we gain from public exposure to sound, and how can audio be used to create urban environments that connect with the public in a human-centred manner?

SPEAKERS

Chair: A/Prof Caleb Kelly, opens in a new window Associate Professor, UNSW School of Art & Design

Dr Adam Hulbert, opens in a new window Senior Lecturer, UNSW School of the Arts & Media

Dr Tom Smith, opens in a new window Lecturer, UNSW School of the Arts & Media

Dr Pia van Gelder, opens in a new window Lecturer, ANU School of Art & Design

This forum investigates how the processes involved in producing contemporary jewellery can both activate and communicate relationships with place and associated themes of identity, home and belonging in the context of living and working on unceded Aboriginal Country. Introducing three speakers of different cultural backgrounds – each employs jewellery to reveal the intricacies of developing relationships with place, embody personal histories, and reveal diasporic cultures to collectively explore multiple connections with place in Australia.

SPEAKERS

Chair: Dr Bic Tieu, opens in a new window Lecturer, UNSW School of Art & Design

Marcia Swaby, opens in a new window Contemporary Jewellery and Object Maker

Melinda Young, opens in a new window Associate Lecturer, UNSW School of Art & Design

The vast age of the earth and the huge transformations it has undergone challenge human imagination. This forum features creative arts researchers who have worked closely with First Nations communities to make deep time tangible. Presenters will share projects in which Indigenous Knowledges, art, and science intersect to find forms of expression beyond western disciplinary boundaries. Reflecting on projects that include sculpture, virtual reality, walking, storytelling, dance, and immersive video, the speakers will discuss how creative practice enables people to experience deep time, and how that experience can influence capacity to act in the present.

SPEAKERS

Chair: A/Prof Lizzie Muller, opens in a new window Associate Professor, UNSW School of Art & Design

A/Prof Bianca Hester, opens in a new window Associate Professor, UNSW School of Art & Design

Dr Andrew Yip, opens in a new window Senior Lecturer, UNSW School of Art & Design

A/Prof Martin Potter, opens in a new window Associate Professor, Monash University

Forces of Materiality: Making Centred Research

26 April 2023

How do artists and designers engage with the transformative and relational dimensions of materials in making-centred research? This forum aims to find common ground across a range of different research methods and disciplinary fields through analysis of materiality and making processes. By referring to material resonances, methodologies including speculative, place-based and collaborative are examined in installation, painting, sculpture, performance, contemporary jewellery, and object design. Following current theory that contests a long-standing hylomorphic view of making as imposing form on matter, discussions are premised by the notion of correspondence between the practitioner and the forces of materiality.

Speakers
Zoe Veness
Nicole Monks
Consuelo Cavaniglia
Matthew Harkness
Peter Sharp

Multidisciplinary Ethical Design of Interactive Technologies: Avoiding Manipulation, Biases and Prejudice

5 July 2023

Multidisciplinary Ethical Design of interactive technologies is uncommon. Very often the design of interactive technologies as social robots, tangible interfaces, virtual reality, or similar platforms have a pragmatical mono-disciplinary approach. This leads to long-term undesirable consequences with a significant negative impact on people as previous research shows. In this forum, we aim to discuss the desirable multidisciplinary ethical design approach required for novel technologies to be used now and future years. A speculative designer, an expert in tangible interfaces and special populations, an expert in artificial social intelligence and an expert in social robotics discuss examples, possibilities, challenges, and dilemmas that we face as researchers/designers trying to avoid manipulation, biases and prejudice in our own practice.

Speakers
Eduardo Benitez Sandoval
Haider Akmal
Scott Brown
Sarita Herse
Nicole Robinson

Mique’l Dangeli in conversation with Tammi Gissell 

19 July 2023

Presented by the School of Art & Design in collaboration with the School of Arts and Media

Mique’l Dangeli, Alaskan First Nations scholar visiting UNSW, will be in conversation with Tammi Gissell, Collections Coordinator, First Nations at Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences.

Mique’l Dangeli is a dancer, choreographer, curator and activist, born and raised on the Annette Island Indian Reserve, and is of the Tsimshian Nation of Metlakatla, Alaska. She is an assistant professor in the School of Creative Arts at the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, British Columbia. Her work focuses on Indigenous language revitalization, visual and performing arts, resurgence, sovereignty, protocol, and decolonization. 

Parallel: Curating Structural Change

6 September 2023

Parallel, initiated by Verónica Tello and Salote Tawale, is a curatorial project to advance structural change at the Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA) in collaboration with culturally and linguistically diverse art communities (funded by the Australian Research Council). In this forum, Tello and Tawale will lead a conversation with the Parallel curatorial fellows, named below, who have been commissioned to advance discrete projects at or beside MAMA. Their projects embrace the concept of being ‘parallel’ – that is, adjacent to, beyond or distinct – from the structural formations typically found in Anglo/Australian art institutions. They seek to test the Parallel hypothesis: that by caring for the museum’s core operations--collecting, exhibiting and public programming—we can yield new ways to think and feel structural change. How do we move beyond the status quo of diversifying only via audience engagement or “including” artists of colour in exhibitions? How do we move beyond focussing on the visibility of diversity and toward the often-invisible processes and mechanisms that determine how structures operate and shape our encounters with art institutions? More information on Parallel can be found here: https://parallelstructures.art/

Speakers
Verónica Tello & Salote Tawale
Evgenia Anagnostopoulou
Kelly Dezart-Smith
Sebastian Henry-Jones
Ruha Fifita
Lana Kate Nguyen

AI, Art and Design: How we traverse AI, cultures and creativity

30 March 2022

As in many areas of life, AI technologies are being rolled out in creative and cultural spaces at a remarkable rate. Despite its long history and many periods of technical development, the sudden proliferation of creative AI tools has rapidly mobilised research perspectives from design through to experimental art, conceptions of knowledge production and their unexamined cultural paradigms to diverse critical, ethical and social analyses. This forum brings together researchers whose work relates to AI in different ways and seeks to chart how these debates are unfolding.

Speakers
Anna Munster
Angie Abdilla and Baden Pailthorpe
Grant Stevens

Histories and politics in art and design: How we reckon with the past

8 June 2022

Many truisms can be said about history – that it is the teacher of life, that it repeats itself, that we should learn from it. With politics, we are usually overtly cautious and often try to separate it from our scholarly selves. This forum aims to instigate a discussion between arts and design practitioners for whom both history and politics constitute a subject, a methodology or a research tool. The contemporary relevance of historical enquiry serves as a prompt for five brief presentations about practices, disciplines and identities within diverse geopolitical parameters.

Speakers
Kasia Jeżowska
Minerva Inwald
Mark Ian Jones
Astrid Lorange and Andrew Brooks
Tristen Harwood

Peppimenarti artists, artistic residencies and ethics of exchange

18 August 2022

In August 2018, Durrmu Arts Aboriginal Corporation launched the Marrgu Residency Program, a unique, indigenous-led artistic initiative in partnership with the Peppimenarti community. This residency program encourages knowledge sharing and meaningful relationship building between remote and urban communities, local and international artists, and Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural practices. The activities of Marrgu grew out of the desire of Regina Pilawuk Wilson (Durrmu Arts’ Cultural Director and senior artist) to create a space where artists, curators, researchers and other art practitioners can come together to learn, and unlearn, about each other’s mutual histories, stories and practices.

This forum will present the practices of Durrmu artists and discuss the creative projects developed through Marrgu as it continues to expand under Regina’s vision and the community’s support. The presentations will inform a conversation about the different ways that artistic production and cross-cultural exchange are expanding, the importance of new models of cross-cultural collaboration and artistic exchange, and how outcomes might be shaped to privilege long-term human relationships rather than short-lived material products and artist outputs.

Speakers
Annunciata Nunuk Wilson
Hayden Jinjar Wilson
Regina Pilawuk-Wilson
Miriam La Rosa
Associate Professor, Fabri Blacklock
Izabela Pluta

Biyani: Women Healing Women through deep listening, yarning and artistic practice

16 November 2022

The Biyani project investigated the holistic role that artistic practice plays in connecting to culture for NSW Aboriginal women, through elucidating the practice of culture and how it contributes to ‘Aboriginal Thriving’ for Aboriginal women who are the caretakers of our communities through various roles as nurturers, leaders, mothers, sisters, aunties, and mentors. Utilising Aboriginal Research Methodologies (ARM) including ‘deep listening’, ‘yarning’ and ‘artistic workshops’ the research project is co-designed with Aboriginal women as co-participants. Privileging Aboriginal women’s voices through participatory knowledge exchange, the strength-based community driven research took place over two separate ‘On Country’ workshops in Moree and Nambucca Heads and enabled Aboriginal women to thrive as leaders, while strengthening culture. The project furthermore envisions ways that policy, program, and service design can be culturally reflexive and requisite to empowering Aboriginal women. This Aboriginal Research Forum will be hosted by Associate Professor Fabri Blacklock alongside some of the co-participants where we will yarn about the impact and outcomes of the research.

Speakers
Fabri Blacklock
Aunty Zona Wilkinson
Aunty Colleen Tighe Johnson
Chels Marshall
Linda Kennedy
Jacqueline Jacky

How we innovate with others

4 August 2021

UNSW’s School of Art & Design has a strong history of innovatively collaborating with others: other academics; public institutions; private companies; other organisations and individuals; fellow species and ecosystems. Adaptive and diverse, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to collaboration, but a great wealth of practical knowledge and expertise generated through ground-up processes that is embodied by individual researchers that can inform future practice. This forum will bring together academics from across the school to look at how we innovate with others to critically unpack what methodologies have been generative in the production of diverse networks and flows of knowledge that we have created and contributed to.

Speakers
Gail Kenning
Katherine Moline
Michael Garbutt
Ian McArthur
Mari Velonaki
Deborah Lawler-Dormer

How we engage with Aboriginal Research methodologies

21 September 2021

Recently, the Australia Council of the Arts, NAVA and AIATSIS have published detailed protocols for working ethically with Aboriginal communities. Led by key principals involving: recognition and respect, engagement and collaboration, informed consent, and cultural capability and learning (AIATSIS, 2020), this forum will discuss creative projects led by Aboriginal academic researchers who engage and privilege Aboriginal Research Methodologies as central to relationality through engagement with Aboriginal communities. Through their research, they utilise Aboriginal ways of being, knowing and doing that are deeply informed by the communities they work with, opening up ethical ways of researching across the creative field.

Speakers
Fabri Blacklock
Liza-Mare Syron
Lynette Riley
Matt Poll

How we build sustainable practice

6 October 2021

The current enthusiasm for the transformation of waste-based linear production and consumption practices to circular economies includes a range of design strategies. Repair, reuse, remanufacturing and recycling offer different methods for reducing waste, pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, but these can lack the critical articulation needed for designers and industry to make informed choices for how they might transform their practices going forward. This forum gathers UNSW researchers working in fields of sustainability, design and critical craft to present their approaches to the creation or recreation of better products and systems. Topics include the history and culture of enduring objects, the ephemerality of circular designed textiles, collaborations with Aboriginal practitioners for adaptive reuse in products, and the role of digital innovation in the conservation and transformation of sustainable making and remaking practices.

Speakers
Guy Keulemans
Alison Gwilt
Stephen Goddard
Trent Jansen
Patricia Flanagan
IIpo Koskinen

How we produce multiple narratives in public domains

3 November 2021

This forum responds to recent provocations to diversify narratives within the public sphere, including physical public spaces as well as public imaginaries. At a global scale, communities are calling for greater diversity and institutional change. It is not enough that diverse narratives simply be included – but become active in precipitating change in the ways that institutions operate. This forum brings together creative researchers who are concerned with generating a multiplicity of narratives, memories, spaces and publics. The orientation of these practices includes reworking and diversifying dominant institutional logics while actively generating more diverse futures. 

Speakers
Prudence Gibson
Felicity Fenner
Astrid Lorange
Sudiipta Dowsett