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News and reviews from Colab, the collaboratory of Design and Creative Technologies at AUT. 
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 Newsletter | April 2016

SPARK AND COLAB LAUNCH NEW MASTER OF CREATIVE TECHNOLOGIES SCHOLARSHIP


In mid-2016, Colab and Spark Ventures will jointly offer two $20k scholarships to study in the Master of Creative Technologies programme at AUT. Applications are invited for applied research in two areas that reflect the future-focused aspirations of the partnership between Colab and Spark Ventures, the research areas for 2016/2017 are:
  • Rapid Prototyping for the Internet of Things
  • Making Sense of Big Data
  • Consideration will also be given to other topics or areas proposed by candidates in their Research Interest Form.
Read more about the partnership at Idealog, find out more about the MCT programme and how to apply here.

EVENTS:

NICK DYER-WITHEFORD - CYBER-PROLETARIAT


Friday 6 May, 2016, 3.00pm – 4.00pm | Free
WG404, Sir Paul Reeves Building, AUT City Campus


Associate Professor Nick Dyer-Witheford is giving a public talk titled “Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex”. Dyer-Witheford argues that the combination of automation, logistical command and financialization enabled by information technology raises to a new intensity a fundamental dynamic of capitalism – its drive to simultaneously induct populations into waged labour and expel them as un- or under-employed superfluous to its increasingly machinic systems.

TECHWEEK AKL


14-22 May, 2016 | Auckland

Techweek AKL is a cluster of events that focuses on reshaping our world through design, innovation and technology. Colab and AUT are involved in several events: Get an Introduction to 3D Printing with our recent Creative Technologies grads, Catch Masters of Creative Technology student Jamie Telford present at the Magnify VR & AR Summit, hear Silicon Valley entrepreneur and in-demand business strategist at AUT City Campus, play with exclusive experimental game technology demonstrated by local innovators and AUT's Pigsty, and visit the Colab Mechatronics Makerspace on the MakerTrail.

TECH FOR NON TECH

May 16 & May 18, 2016  |  8:30am – 2:30pm | Discounted Tickets*
Industry Connect: 34 Shaddock St, Eden Terrace, Auckland.

Tech for Non Tech is an intensive short course for anyone seeking to understand the digital world. In the programme, participants learn the need-to-know concepts of web development and expand their tech terminology. They learn tools and language to help navigate the complexities of the web development process.

At the heart of this is learning how to build productive relationships with technical colleagues and teams.This is for project managers, innovation and commercialisation managers, tech CEOs (new ones), marketing and comms execs, account managers, new product owners, entrepreneurs, and anyone whose work and life is increasingly bumping into the web. Read about how Tech Non Tech was designed.

*Colab newsletter recipients will receive a 20 percent discount off the normal price of $429. Please email learn@enspiral.com for tickets and include the code #colabn

SCREEN EDGE FORUM
 

Wednesday 18 May, 2016
Sir Paul Reeves Building, AUT City Campus


The 10th annual Screen Edge Forum will feature a series of in-depth masterclasses and panels with distinguished local and international speakers.

Colab is working with Documentary Edge on the Story Edge programme stream which will include international documentarians, Keiko Bang and Tishna Molla, talking about the world of immersive story telling.

WEEK OF PLAY AND WONDER
 

May 20, 2016 | 6:00pm – 8:00pm
MOTAT, 805 Great North Rd, Western Springs, Auckland


Come along to a special free event on Friday 20th May with refreshments, talks and demos.  Play is an experience for young and old. We play when we stir our coffee. We play when we solve problems.

The Week Of Play And Wonder runs all week and over the weekend at the The Idea Collective at MOTAT during Techweek AKL. The Idea Collective will showcase games curated by AUT Pigsty, The Arcade Auckland and the NZGDA, ranging from local indie talent, students, tech, and “serious games”.

COLAB OPEN STUDIO - WINTER 2016

June 17, 2016  |  5:30pm – 8:30pm
Colab, Level 11, WG, Sir Paul Reeves Building, AUT City Campus


The studio is at the core of the Bachelor of Creative Technologies learning experience. The Open Studio event provides an opportunity to celebrate student work from the first semester in 2016. By combining different disciplines the Colab Creative Technologies programme produces imaginative, well-rounded, technically-skilled practitioners who can engage in practice within the creative industries.

Join us to see and experience works that incorporate this diversity. From fashion, games and robotics to digital fabrication, interactivity and physical computing. Check out the photo highlights from the previous Open Studio event.

CHEW IT UP


June 21, 22 & 23, 2016  |  6:00pm -9:00pm
Room WG404, Level 4, WG Building, AUT City Campus

Join us to hear presentations by Colab Postgraduate Researchers in the Master of Creative Technologies 2016 programme.

Students will be presenting snapshots of their research projects followed by a brief question and response session. This is a great opportunity for you to discover what’s happening at Colab Postgraduate level.

KIWI JAM 2016


July 22 – 24, 2016
Sir Paul Reeves Building, AUT City Campus


What is Kiwi Jam you ask? An annual, winter, shared, maker-space for NZ game-developers of any kind to meet, collaborate and compete in various global and local competitions. Anyone can join and the rules are simple. You just have to come along and make a game. It’s part game-jam and part maker space. But ultimately it’s what you make it.
 

EXHIBITIONS:

ALTER - GUS FISHER GALLERY

22 April - 21 May, 2016
Gus Fisher Gallery, 74 Shortland Street, Auckland

ALTER: Between Human and Non-Human is a group exhibition that asks important questions regarding the relationships between human and non-human, virtual and real in the context of the increasing digitization of our contemporary existence. The exhibition includes works by international artists who critically address the posthuman.

BLOCKWITH - DIGITAL ART LIVE
 

12 March - 11 May, 2016
Digital Art Live, Level 2, Aotea Centre

Last chance to catch Blockwith by French artists, Guillaumit and Yann Van der Cruyssen. Their interactive game invites players to create avatars with their own names and unique personalities.

MEDIA:

AUT GETS IN ON HOLLYWOOD'S BILLION-DOLLAR SECRET

Story, TV3, 28 April 2016

AUT is one of the first in the world to use the Motion Capture technology, Vikon-Cara. Story went to visit the university to see how they are using this product to get a slice of the Hollywood action. Watch the video here.

E-TEXTILES AND SMART FABRICS

RadioNZ, April 6 2016

Co-Director of Colab Frances Joseph, and Masters of Creative Technologies graduate Charlotte Alexander, are excited by the many possibilities of e-textiles, especially the idea of creating affordable wearable technologies that could be used in physiotherapy rehabilitation in the home. Read the article and listen to the interview here.
Creative Technologies for Multidisciplinary Applications, edited by Colab's Andy Connor and Stefan Marks, and published by IGI Global, has been released. The book features a diverse collection of relevant research for the modern world and is a pivotal reference publication for educators, students, and researchers in fields related to sociology, technology, and the humanities.

STUDENT NEWS:

Steve Rood, PhD candidate and recipient of the AUT Vice-Chancellor’s Doctoral Scholarship, is excited to be able to devote time to his research, which is focused on the future of photography as a medium.

Steve is based in Colab, and says that the innovative and collaborative environment is why he decided to complete his PhD here.

“Creative technologies balances a number of differing approaches and unifies them in a unique way. The combination of people from various disciplines – from art and design to engineering and computing – creates an open and investigative atmosphere." View Steve's full student profile here.
Master of Creative Technologies student, Arien Hielkema, has focused his research on helping those with sports related injuries. ‘Athletes, both professional and recreational, are likely to have to deal with injury recovery at some point in their sporting careers. If mismanaged, lack of motivation can work against the rehabilitation process, resulting in poor adherence to prescribed exercises’, says Arien. His project is working towards the development of a smart knee brace that will be used to explore ways of movement correction with the intention of increasing adherence and recovery times, thereby helping athletes get back into sport faster and stronger than before.

Working with TDL Senior Technician, Gordon Fraser, Arien says the knitted brace utilises electroconductive yarn, which allows for a completely integrated and lightweight design. Inflexible wiring and unnecessary components make way for soft flexible sensors that are incorporated into the brace, which are used to capture the individual’s movement. The use of smart fabric eliminates the majority of bulky hard circuitry commonly used for this type of application. The brace can be personally calibrated to an individual athlete’s recovery profile.
PhD candidate Donna Cleveland and Master of Creative Technologies student Hollee Fisher, have been selected for the Mini Textile Exhibition, based in Bratislava. This year's theme was 'Face to Face' and represented the idea of Communication. Donna and Hollee submitted two 3D felted spheres which were felted using the Feltloom before being wet felted to create the 3D shape. In representation of the Communication theme, they created a capacitor sensor using stainless steel fibres, that when touched turns on a light inside the spheres causing them to glow.
Colab Master of Creative Technologies graduate, Alexey Botkov, and his team at Frogshark have had their game Swordy Greenlit on Steam.

Alexey wrote his practice-based thesis on the democratisation of project ‘greenlighting’ giving rise to an ‘indie movement’ in the game dev industry. His qualitative ethnographic study of indie game dev culture focused on entrepreneurial strategies.
Colab Master of Creative Technologies graduate Luke Munn recently showed his work, SEO Story, at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. SEO Story is a materialized version of best practice search engine optimisation techniques, weaving keywords from Dunedin tourism websites, local landmarks, and wiki entries into a ‘natural language’ narrative. The tale explores the use of language in a space of content-farms and adwords, enticing readers into mentally activating the ‘top of mind’ terms that Dunedin seeks to embody.
Last week, BCT students in the 'Digital Skins' studio paper were fortunate to Skype with Dame Suzie Moncrieff, Founder of World of Wearable Arts (WoW). Suzie told the class that WoW are particularly excited to see the entries that the class develop this year, as Wearable Technology is a new award category, and they are interested to see how the students bring innovative elements of activation to costume that has a relationship with the moving body.
Every Thursday, the Center for Samoan Studies at the National University of Samoa runs a seminar series hosting speakers, both academic and not, from a variety of backgrounds on a breadth of subjects. During Amy Tielu's visit in April 2016 to study the origin and practice of fagogo (a form of storytelling indigenous to Samoa), she was invited to speak on her research interest: Searching for the digital fāgogo: a study of indigenous Samoan storytelling in contemporary New Zealand digital media and its role in identity formation.

Amy's quest to develop a digital storytelling language founded on indigenous principles for the purpose of negotiating cultural identity was received positively and with much curiousity. She left the National University of Samoa blessed with the opportunity to have made the first introduction to what she hopes will be a long and fruitful relationship with this and other institutions.
A creative tech company is launching a 21ft catamaran made of recyclable materials to spread awareness of waste management.

Hubbub co-founder and Bachelor of Creative Technologies graduate Martin Hill will travel to New York this week where construction will begin with the help of Kaitiaki, an environmental organisation that leads expeditions and educational workshops. Is it possible to travel the longest river in America on trash? Find out more here.

LAB NEWS:

YOUTH EMPOWERED TO TELL STORIES WITH MOBILE TECH


Screenies Children's Film Festival and MINA (Mobile Innovation Network Australasia) will join forces to engage youth in workshops from 7 to 15 years-old to make and share their stories using a smartphone, a phablet or a tablet.
 
“Young people today have in their hands powerful tools to create and tell stories. We want to give them a clear pathway to learn the craft and then see their own stories on screen,” says Janette Howe, Festival Founder/Director.
 
“We are thrilled to collaborate with Screenies and to engage with the very young – with our potential future creative leaders. It is also important for MINA to develop such national partnerships in order to foster further mobile video production development and expertise in New Zealand.” says Laurent Antonczak, MINA co-founder and COLAB Lecturer.
 

STAFF NEWS:

Colab co-director Charles Walker, has resigned. He will be leaving AUT at the end of June to take up an appointment in a senior leadership role at UTS in Sydney.

Charles has been in a leadership role at the Faculty of Design and Creative Technologies at AUT for eight years and has been a key figure in creating Colab. While Charles will be greatly missed by us all, we see this as an opportunity for future developments with our fantastic team.
Congratulations to Andy Connor and Ricardo Sosa who were recipients of 2016 National Teaching Fellowship Scheme Awards. The award celebrates excellent practice and outstanding achievement in learning and teaching in higher education. National Teaching Awards reward and celebrate outstanding learning and teaching. They build future excellence by facilitating the sharing of good practice and help raise the status of learning and teaching.
Dr Clinton Watkins' new video work lowercase will be exhibited at Starkwhite Gallery until 14 May 2016.

lowercase is a collection of video works that explore notions of real world vs. virtual space via natural objects found in remote locations in New Zealand. The perpetual spinning of such objects seeks to offer a refrain from the maelstrom of modern existence whilst offering a critical and reflective space to consider the self within increasingly uncertain times.

CALLS:

#MINA2016 IN MELBOURNE | CALL FOR FILMS & PAPERS


#MINA2016: The 6th International Mobile Creativity and Mobile Innovation Symposium & Screening @ Swinburne University, Melbourne, Australia
30 November - 1 December 2016

#MINA2016 CALL FOR FILMS:
Deadline for film submission: Wednesday 1 June 2016

#MINA2016 CALL FOR PAPERS:
Deadline for paper abstracts and presentation/panel proposals: Friday 24 June 2016
SPECIAL ISSUE ON EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION APPLICATIONS IN THE CREATIVE INDUSTRIES
International Journal of Creative Computing
Editors: Andy Connor & Jan Kruse
Paper submission deadline: 29 July 2016

This special issue solicits high-quality papers that explore contemporary applications of evolutionary computation in the creative industries. In particular, this special issue seeks to explore the interface between man and machine, where research outcomes provide insight as to how evolutionary computation can augment or support human creativity.
NIME 2016 CONFERENCE
11-15 July 2016 | Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia​

NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) is the premier conference in designing human-computer interfaces and interactions for musical performance. NIME gathers researchers and practitioners together around lectures, installations, concerts, demonstrations and workshops. 
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