Selected research grants

Dennis Del Favero

ARC Australian Laureate Fellowship FL200100004
2020
Total: $3,571,946

The Project aims to transform the traditional artistic paradigm of visualisation as the human-centred depiction of predictable events by harnessing revolutionary advances in art and technology. Through application of an advanced artistic framework, this Laureate project expects to demonstrate how globally distributed users and digital systems can collaboratively depict unpredictable scenarios such as wildfire landscapes in real time and at 1:1 scale. Anticipated outcomes include a cutting-edge platform that provides life-like experiences to understand their spatial dynamics and the increasing uncertainties they pose, for dissemination through creative industry applications to optimise engagement and impact.

Dennis Del Favero, Ursula Frohne, Susanne Thurow, Andrew Yip

Universities Australia: Australia – Germany Joint Research Co-Operation Scheme 57511643
2020
Total: $12,220

The Project aims to prototype an aesthetic framework that can address the problem in Contemporary Art and Creative Industries of archiving ephemeral artworks, such as temporary installation, media, performance and sculpture art, in experientially dynamic forms. While conventional documentary methods capture static and fragmentary aspects of such artworks, we will explore artificially intelligent (AI) digital methodologies applied to the collection of the contemporary art festival Skulptur Projekte. These can animate the artworks as 3D cinematic-scale simulations that embody their full range of spatial and temporal qualities, networked to 3D screens and VR head-mounted displays.

Dennis Del Favero, Claude Sammut, Fabri Blacklock, Carol Oliver, Susanne Thurow, Matthew Connell, Arul Baskaran

ARC Linkage Project LP180100126
2019
Total: $466,150

The Project aims to investigate the contemporary emergence of novel forms of immersive and networked narrative in museum settings. It expects to reformulate our understanding and experience of a multi-located collection and the ways in which it can be aesthetically explored. To do so, it will experimentally apply an artistic system that transforms the display, engagement and organisation of the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences’ collection across its venues. Anticipated is a demonstration of how users can explore this distributed collection in concert with a database system, with benefits that impact the aesthetic scope and scale of museum experiences.

Dennis Del Favero, Michael Thielscher, Baden Pailthorpe, Brian Dawson, Craig Stockings, Rhys Crawley, Robyn Van Dyk

ARC Linkage Project LP180100080
2018
Total: $555,195

The Project aims to explore the emergence of artistic innovations in the commemoration of war through the use of a database narrative. It expects to reformulate commemoration as a dynamic dialogue between visitors and memorial archives. To do so it will experimentally apply an aesthetic framework that transforms the display of the Australian War Memorial’s Afghanistan collection through platforms that meet the challenge of reflecting on contemporary conflict where documentation is being replaced by interaction. Anticipated is a demonstration of how users can explore collection data assisted by an interactive archive, with benefits that impact the meaning of memorial processes.

Dennis Del Favero, Maurice Pagnucco, Caroline Wake, Susanne Thurow, Lawrence Wallen, Malvina Borgherini, Kip Williams, Michael Scott-Mitchell

ARC Linkage Project LP170100471
2017
Total: $542,916

The Project investigates the emergence of novel forms of interactive aesthetics in contemporary performance design. It does this through experimental application of an artistic system that reshapes concepts of set design by integrating developments that usher in new types of collaborative interaction. It demonstrates how users can immersively model sets in real-time using their body at a 1:1 scale assisted by responsive databases.By doing so, it transforms understanding of modelling and the way it can be aesthetically explored, with outcomes that impact the scope and scale of design processes in the performing and creative arts.

Dennis Del Favero, Sarah Kenderdine, Michael Thielscher, Lewis Lancaster, Jeffrey Shaw, Jianxiong Ge, Lynda Kelly, Li Zhenhua

ARC Linkage Project LP150100318
2015-2017
Total: $310,224

At the forefront of cultural heritage visualisation, this project develops ground-breaking Australian research to resolve the fundamental challenges of narrative coherence for museum audiences. Addressing narrative coherence provides a structure for interpretation, as users navigate, explore and creatively reorganise heterogeneous datasets. The project integrates a unique heritage dataset — the Atlas of Maritime Buddhism (Atlas) — which has accumulated historic evidence for the spread of Buddhism from India to Korea through the seaports of Southeast Asia. Its pan-Asian spatially and temporally enabled sources are significantly diverse in both type and format (e.g. archaeological materials, travellers’ accounts and historic gazetteers to name a few). The aim of the research is to develop a pioneering narrative-driven deep mapping schema, an information visualisation framework for interactively exploring the narrative patterns, processes and phenomena in the Atlas. This schema investigates narrative coherence through the experimental application of the world’s first deep mapping data browser — a navigational interface developed in a 360° 3D (omnidirectional) virtual environment.

W.Tschapeller, D.Del Favero, M.Thielscher, U.Frohne, K.Kruschkova, F.Pomassi, E.Balfe, M.Wimmer

Austrian Research Foundation (Austria)
2015-2016
Total: $800,000

This project explores how interactions between,across and beyond humans and nonhumans can be experimentally embodied, aesthetically reformulated and theoretically challenged in their spatial, temporal and transversally entangled spheres. The project examines the hypothesis and potentials of INTRASPACE, a spatial transposition of the theoretical concept of “intra-action” introduced by philosopher, theoretical physicist and feminist scholar Karen Barad. INTRASPACE produces a transformative, differential and resilient space of emergence where apparatus, human bodies and digitally constructed figures become diaphanous to each other. A sensorium for embodied experiences, where architectural processes coincide with bodies of the apparatus, the virtual, the engineers, the visitors, the machines and cameras – bodies are constantly updating sites of construction. The experimental framework critically looks at the potentials of both, the digital and the human, to mutually enhance their functionality, their exposure in artificial and real spaces, their social interaction and self-perception. It offers a technical and conceptual infrastructure, a transformative disposition for equal encounters between digital, machinist and human sensoria.The resulting differentiated perspective, spanning from a single point of touch to a sensory space, negotiates the body in motion as immediate perceptive entity in relation to its surroundings.

Sarah Kenderdine, Dennis Del Favero, Michael Thielscher, Nicholas M. Nakata, Shawn Ross, Paul Arthur, Christopher Leug, Paul Bourke, Stefan Greuter, Ross Gibson, Jeffrey Shaw, Lynda Kelly, Tim Hart, Margo Neale, Drew Berry

ARC Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities LE150100081
2015
Total: $220,000

DomeLab – an ultra-high resolution experimental fulldome: This project established the first ultra-high resolution (4000 × 4000 pixels) experimental fulldome in Australia (DomeLab). This fulldome facility provides a powerful immersive dome-based video projection environment. Partners have worked collaboratively across three themes: interactive media, future museology and experimental humanities. Through the national research services AARNet and Intersect’s research data storage infrastructure, DomeLab extends pioneering research in aesthetic frameworks and frontier technologies to benefit artistic, cultural, museological and humanities researchers. DomeLab is designed as a touring system and will be installed throughout the country at leading institutions.

Jeffrey Shaw, Sarah Kenderdine, Dennis Del Favero, Neil Brown, Kwok-Leung Tsui, Tamas Waliczky, Z. Zhang, C. Cheung, Anna Hui, Ching-Chang Chieng, Xun-Li Wang, Bing Lam Luk, S.M. Chathoth, Christian Wagner, H. Lau, Pui Lam Leung, T. Choy, C. Frost, Maurice Benayoun, Harald Kraemer, E. Wong

University Grants Committee Hong Kong
2015
Total: $2,176,600

The project explores uses of Immersive Visualisation Systems (IVS) to design and implement interactive real-world scenarios in virtual reality classrooms. University of New South Wales, City University of Hong Kong and University of Hong Kong (HKU) experts in Immersive Visualisation Systems, alongside educational collaborators and subject coordinators from HKU, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong Baptist University, and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology are designing and implementing user experiences in virtual environments that are dynamic and creatively challenging, facilitating critical experimentation and practical implementation.

Steven Waller; Vinayak Dixit; Michiel Bliemer; Dennis Del Favero

ARC Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities LE130100113
2013
Total: $390,000

Travel Choice Simulation Laboratory (TRACSLab) is a world-first facility to observe collective travel choice in a realistic lab environment. It is unique due to the focus on travel choice, networked interaction and strong teaming. The findings of the lab will support a new generation of transport analysis techniques for emerging issues such as sustainability, reliability, and intelligent transport systems (ITS).

Dennis Del Favero; Ross Harley; Jill Bennett; Michael Thielscher; Neil Brown; Craig Stockings; Volker Kuchelmeister; Tony MacGregor; Richard Reid

ARC Linkage LP120200347
2013
Total: $467,493

This project explores the creation of an interactive archive of war memory through the application of dialogical systems of interaction for defence heritage. Defence heritage is valued for its enhancement and commemoration of defence personnel contributions to Australian history. Dialogical systems enable the artistic recollection of war to be collectively produced as a form of user-generated content. This aesthetic technology will enable veterans and their families for the first time to depict their personal and collective experience of conflict in a form that is interactively accessible to a broad Internet and cinematic public.

Dennis Del Favero, Jill Bennett, Neil Brown, Jeffrey Shaw, Peter Weibel, Ursula Frohne, Johnny Chan

ARC Discovery DP120102243
2012
Total: $368,000

The project investigates the emergence of an interactive aesthetics of the atmosphere made possible
through the integration of new imaging processes combining remote sensing and immersive technology.
Through experimental application of the world’s first remote sensing visualisation system it demonstrates
how visual narratives of the atmosphere can be jointly produced by users and intelligent imaging systems
through their reciprocal interaction in the representation of atmospheric data. In its explanation of the
interactive processes underlying this new genre of contemporary image formation, the study transforms our
insight into how revolutionary new technology can impact on Australia’s understanding of the climate.

Dennis Del Favero, Jeffrey Shaw, Johnny Chan, Terence Smith

ARC Discovery DP110101146
2011
Total: $121,756

ARC Australian Professorial Fellowship DP110101146
2011
Total: $353,740
APF Dennis Del Favero

This study investigates the emergence of a user-generated interactive aesthetic of landscape framed theoretically within the new processes of networked immersive digital technology. Through experimental application of the world’s first networked televisual and cinematic system it demonstrates how aesthetic imagery, such as landscape, is collectively produced by users as the outcome of interactive dialogue and the creative reassembling of cultural and scientific data. In its explanation of the interactive processes underlying this new genre of contemporary image composition, the study transforms our understanding of the way in which revolutionary new technology can impact on Australia’s visual culture, ecology and identity.

Dennis Del Favero, Neil C Brown, Paul J Compton, Jeffrey Shaw, Horace Ip, Sarah I Kenderdine, Tim Hart, Lev Manovich, Peter Weibel

ARC Linkage LP100100466
2010
Total: $628,366

The proposed research seeks to provide Australia with a long term opportunity to enhance its involvement in the billion dollar creative economy by building the world’s first immersive 360 degree interactive data browser. Research into such systems benefits society by providing a cuttingedge development in digital technology and information access that enables a creative innovation culture. Through applied research into the narrative forms that underpin museological archives, this study will ensure that Australia remains at the forefront of the growing worldwide research into interactive technology thereby assisting the global digital media industry to tackle emergent challenges.

Ross Harley, John Gillies

ARC Linkage LP0884143
2008
Total: $130,000

This project will create, consolidate and link to substantial materials (vidoes, catalogue essays, artists’ notes, resumes, stills etc) pertinent to video art in Australia. By way of a dynamic online video database and online archives, d/Archive will make available works from the 1960s-90s alongside more of the most recent video works. Acknowledging and utilising the possibilities of user-generated and participatory media, d/Archive aims to link artists, organisations and collections together by way of open-source and Creative Commons protocols. This project makes use of innovative ways of exhibiting, circulating, annotating and supplementing video works in the age of peer-to-peer networks.

Dennis Del Favero, Jeffrey Shaw

International Grants
2007-2010
Total: $132,000

The Digital Arts Edition was published by ZKM and iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema with support by the University of Pittsburgh, presenting new works by Australian and European artists. The individual works address specific challenges of interactive narrative conception and design.

Jeffrey Shaw, Dennis Del Favero, Neil Brown, Paul Compton, Maurice Pagnucco, Andre van Schaik, Craig Jin, Hock Soon Seah, Peter Weibel, Sarah Kenderdine, Tim Hart, John Fritz, Volker Kuchelmeister

ARC Linkage LP0669163
2006
Total: $519,264

The application of machine intelligence research within virtual heritage, interactive cinema and the entertainment industries, with its application across a range of new media art forms, home theatre, location based entertainment, and online education, captures pioneering cultural and economic benefits for Australia. This study integrates autonomous machine agent and interface technology with the artistic potential of digital cinema. It provides innovative ways of satisfying the voracious demand for sophisticated content and narrative enrichment in new media and of exploiting the intense global interest in digital forms of entertainment.

Dennis Del Favero, Jeffrey Shaw, Steve Benford, Johannes Goebel

ARC Discovery DP0556659
2005
Total: $224,682

The project develops a series of interactive cinematic experiments adapted from the television work of Samuel Beckett, investigating disquieting moments of co-evolving emotional and physical interchange between human participants and human-like machine agents within theatrical contexts. The experiments are to be presented in iCinema’s Advanced Visualisation and Interaction Environment, Scientia Facility

Dennis Del Favero

ARC Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship DP0556659
2005
Total: $547,266

The project investigates experimental forms of co-evolutionary relationship between machine agents and human participants in interactive cinematic environments.

Dennis Del Favero and Jeffrey Shaw

ARC Research Network Seed Funding SR0354757
2004
Total : $30,000

The Interactive Digital Media Matrix (iDMM) links national and international researchers in the fields of new media, information and communications technology (ICT), cultural theory and cognitive science. The network underscores the growing interdependence of these four cornerstone fields and their convergent role in facilitating advances in smart information use. The iDMM brings together expressive and technical resources in digital imaging, multimedia, content generation, database architecture and cultural critique. Able to embody significant depth and achievement with contributions from the most aspirant young scholars, the network will address the most challenging issues in the innovative use of digital media.

Jeffrey Shaw, Dennis Del Favero, Neil Brown, Ian Howard, Ross Gibson, Mark Gugliemetti, Adrian Miles, Scott McGuire, Nikos Papastergiadis, Henry Gardner, Pascal Vuylsteker

ARC Linkage Infrastructure LE0453517
2004
Total : $205,800

This proposal involves the acquisition of a high-resolution 240×360 degree digital video camera and three post-production facilities. The equipment will allow, for the first time, the development of truly global interactive and immersive imaging and projection systems possessing digital capture at 25FPS on a scale to match conventional cinematic techniques. It will provide Australia’s leading group of interactive cinema and new media researchers with facilities to employ globally immersive cinematic formats in the research and development of interactive narrative systems, and will allow benefits of these new systems to be realised by the cultural sector and entertainment industry.

Jeffrey Shaw

ARC Federation Fellowship FF0348346
2003
Total : $1,450,370

The Fellowship will launch a major reformulation of the key driver of new media technology, the theoretical innovation and testing of three models of interactive narrative – the polychronic, transcriptive, and co-evolutionary – as well as accelerating development of a new generation of accompanying cinematic technology. Through the design and demonstration of a range of navigable, multi-user, virtual applications that enable the recreation of cinematic meaning from a mass of digital information, the Fellowship will develop interactive technology to the stage where it can be commercially evaluated in a way likely to maximize benefits to Australia.

Dennis Del Favero, Jeffrey Shaw, Neil Brown, Peter Weibel

ARC Discovery DP0345547
2003-2005
Total: $241,954

This study investigates the role of interactive narrative in the cinematic reconstruction of televisual information. Through the design of software enabling the recombinatory search of televisual data within virtual environments, it tests the conduct of narrative transcription as a model for interactive cinematic production. The value of the study is set against the fact that while narrative is central to conventional cinema emphasis upon simulation has caused the narrative potential of digital media to be overlooked. Advancing the world’s first cinematic concept of transcriptive narrative it seeks evidence of the multi-temporal agency of interactivity as expanded within revisionist cinematic theory.

Dennis Del Favero, Jeffrey Shaw, Ross Gibson, Ian Howard

ARC Discovery DP0209550
2002-2004
Total: $122,882

The rise of digital media has led to a decline in the use of traditional single-layered narrative and the corresponding loss of a major instrument of cinematic representation. This study investigates the reformulation of narrative within digital cinema through the integration of three models of interactivity so as to produce a new emergent digital narrative form. The study tests the proposition predicted in revisionist cinematic theory that narrative, when generated as a complex of digitally interactive forms, provides the opportunity to recapture the representational significance of narrative within digital cinema, through its enactment within a multi-layered, emergent virtual space.

Dennis Del Favero

ARC Post Doctoral Fellowship DP0209550
2002-2004
Total: $187,118

Dennis Del Favero, Jeffrey Shaw, Ian Howard

ARC Linkage Infrastructure X00001590
2000
Total: $50,000

iiC_inema: The research program involves the development of new interactive immersive video technology. Its principle focus is the production of Interactive Immersive Cinema (iiC_inema) software, technologies and applications. The program will involve an international collaboration between researchers at ZKM, Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, researchers and research students at UWS Nepean and the UNSW.
Specifically the program involves the research, development and production of:

1. a set of novel demonstrators that demonstrate the applicability of the iiC_inema technology;
2. new iiC_inema technology paradigms, research methodologies and applications; international research training at ZKM for doctoral and masters research from UWS, Nepean and the UNSW.

These technologies and applications are of immense value in the fields of:
a) Cinema, b) multimedia, c) networked virtual reality, d) theories of interactivity and e) virtual space.