EDITION #3
INNOVATION: Imagining futures
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Welcome,
MATTER – a journal produced by the team at LAI – is here with its third edition, themed Innovation: Imagining futures.
We commonly think of innovation as an expression of technological developments. But innovation is also about new ways of thinking. New ways of working. New ways of understanding.
With this in mind, we're unpacking various notions of innovation – a key cultural quality of La Trobe University.
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This edition of MATTER will take a look into methodologies of curating that privilege the relationship rather than the image, object or form; we ponder the benefits of a reduced field of operations and the inspiration that comes from limitation; and the creative impetus that comes from seemingly counter-productive error, fragmentation and glitch. We take a pathway through the image and the imagined, motherhood, machine learning, thumb pianos, prosthetic limbs, drones and investing in the labour of creative thinkers and makers.
As always, each edition comes with educational materials for all ages as we continue to pursue avenues of learning, education and research. Firm, as always, in our unerring belief in the power that comes from sharing knowledge to shape our future. Thanks for diving in.
IMAGE: Carolyn Eskdale, Mediation Photoworks (2018), digital prints on rag paper, mounted on aluminium.
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CONTENTS:
Education Resource - Digital Workshop Video: Glitches and Linguistics
Education Resource - Classroom ready resources: Innovation
Essay - Imaging and Imagining
Essays - Relationship first
Essay - When Walls Close In
Listen - Podcast: Lingthusiasm
Learn - Bendigo Tech School masterclass
Watch - Bold Thinking: Body Tech
Nest Article - Here comes the reskill revolution
From the industry - IMA's Making Art Work commissions
Support - NAVA's Artists' Benevolent Fund
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IMAGING AND IMAGINING
Experiences of art allow us opportunities to imagine. They are catalysts of imagination. They also honour and respect the power of the viewer to co-create and co-produce meaning, even beyond the direct and tangible obviousness of the present moment and the materials currently before us.
Perhaps now more than ever, when the pathways ahead of us are foggier and less clearly sign-posted, is the time for us to imagine what is beyond the physical appearance of our current reality. Let's run a line of query through this apparent imperative of innovation and sew in a thread of relation between imaging and imagining.
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EDUCATION RESOURCE:
Digital Workshop Video:
Glitches and Linguistics
This short drawing exercise explores the importance of glitches, anomalies and mistakes in innovative art-making and in linguistics. This video is an example of the children's workshops that were inspired by LAI's 2018 exhibition, The Grammar of Glitch and the accompanying panel discussion: Plastic Language: Glitch and Linguistics. Mistakes can be fruitful!
Suitable for all ages.
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RELATIONSHIP FIRST:
Before Perth based curator, arts worker and self-proclaimed ‘arts handyman’ Glenn Iseger-Pilkington started a collaboration with LAI Curator Travis Curtin, Glenn proposed an innovative methodology, which he applies to most aspects of his life – relationship first.
Glenn’s approach nurtures a strong foundation that establishes personal, creative and professional connection. The result, a sincere and genuine curatorial collaboration that generated a highly innovative project focused on the innovative practices of Indigenous contemporary artists who produce work beyond a ‘branded Indigenous aesthetic’. This original idea was explored by Glenn ten years ago in the essay ‘Branded: The Indigenous Aesthetic’ (2009). Revisiting, unpacking and updating some of the ideas explored in the essay became the impetus for the co-curated exhibition unbranded (2019).
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SCHOOL OF TECH:
Bendigo Tech School are producing some wonderful programs. Their next online masterclass series features:
#AutodeskInventor.
Join the School's Technician Matt Twin as he teaches the basics of Inventor and how to make a key chain thumb piano!
Autodesk Inventor
* BEGINNER: 4-5 pm, 4 Jun
* ADVANCED: 4-5 pm, 11 Jun
* PRODUCTION (waterjet cutter/3D printing): 4-5 pm, 18 Jun
By registering for the first session of Autodesk Inventor you are registering for all sessions in the series.
Open to all secondary school students and teachers in Bendigo! Especially well suited to VET and VCE students undertaking a senior school subject that requires the production of a high quality folio (e.g. for submission into Top Designs, Adobe Creative Suite and Autodesk Inventor. A series of intensive design software masterclasses that will assist you in going from beginner to master. Running in the first half of the school year, these classes may pay dividends when it comes time to generate your folio!
Learn more here.
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#NEST:
Innovation is often linked to technological development. When we conjure an image in our mind of innovation it is almost invariably an image of computers, electronics, drones. There's good reason for that, as much of our innovative spirit finds practical application in these forms. But before any of that can occur, innovation takes place as ideas. How can we best arm ourselves to inspire these foundational ideas?
With an uncertain future ahead of us, innovation and ingenuity is going to be more important than ever before. We are seeing an impetus for a greater reliance on and leveraging of science, data, mechanisation, and developing a stronger manufacturing sector in Australia. This might be just the right opportunity to educate ourselves in new ways of working to not only adapt to a new future, but to be the architects of that future.
Read 'Here comes the reskill revolution', from La Trobe's Nest. |
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EDUCATION RESOURCE:
At LAI learning and education is fundamental to our approach. We engage with primary, secondary and tertiary students using the prism of contemporary art to address ideas about society and the environment to help understand our place in the world.
We produce educational materials for a variety of audiences and for this edition of MATTER we have added a new resource exploring this edition's theme of innovation.
Click the image below to access:
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ESSAY:
As we live through this time of new and shifting limits the natural tendency is perhaps to focus on contracting opportunities, a kind of grieving for lost ground. But limitations can be a catalyst for new forms and new conversations.
LAI Collections Curator Danielle Smelter explores the possibilities that fixed boundaries present for innovation and whether innovation can operate to transcend our understanding of the fixity of these boundaries.
Read the full article here.
IMAGE: Emmaline Zanelli, The Cyclist (Dynamic Drill for Sustained International Connection) (2019), digital video (EXCERPT)
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L....L..L.ANGUAGE:
Making machines learn language
In 2018 LAI invited artists Katie Paine and Ross Taylor to join Head of Linguistics Professor James Walker and David Myers Research Fellow, Dr Lauren Gawne to discuss the role of fragmentation, double-take, syntax and overload in visual, spoken and gestural language. We discovered that art and language are similar in the way that they innovate and evolve through glitches and mutations over time.
For this edition of MATTER we check in with Dr Gawne and her fellow linguist Gretchen McCulloch via their podcast Lingthusiasm. In this episode, they interview Dr Janelle Shane, author of You Look Like A Thing And I Love You and person who makes AI do delightfully weird experiments on her blog and twitter feed. They talk about how AI “sees” language, what the process of creating AI humour is like (hint: it needs a lot of human help to curate the best examples), and ethical issues around trusting algorithms.
Listen here.
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BOLD THINKING:
BODY TECH – THE NEW FRONTIER FOR HUMANS?
Front of mind for a lot of us right now is health. La Trobe University has a strong commitment to health, driven by innovative research across our campuses.
It's a great time to hear about work taking place in this field, and this week's link to the Bold Thinking series is a discussion on how people with limb loss are reclaiming their freedom with the help of prosthetics. The revolution in body tech means that human lives are being restored, enhanced and re-designed into new identities.
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INDUSTRIAL INNOVATION:
Innovation is more than singular moments of revelation or development. Where we often think of the consequences that ripple out from an 'occasion' or an 'event' of innovation, causing seismic or paradigm shifts to a broader social context, we can easily omit systemic, infrastructural innovations. Much discussion is underway into wholesale industrial-oriented adaptions and restructures. In the arts, organisations large and small are looking at new models, neo-models and re-orientations.
Dynamic investment into the labour of our industry is underway in varying degrees across varying sectors. The ever-innovative Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane is a fine example in this regard with its new commissioning initiative 'Making Art Work'.
Read more here.
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