Abstract
Abstracts from the Spectra 2018 Symposium: Systemss from the Spectra 2018 Symposium: Systems Topic: Systems Science Meets Art at Bundanon Dr Nigel Helyer, Macquarie University, 62 MacGibbon Parade, Old Erowal Bay, NSW, 2540, Australia. Email: sonique1@mac.com ORCID: 0000-0002-5248-3222 Professor John Potts, Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales, 2109, Australia. Email: john.potts@mq.edu.au ORCID: 00000002-7617-2445 In this paper, Nigel Helyer and John Potts describe the findings of the research project ‘When Science Meets Art: an Environmental Portrait of the Shoalhaven River Valley’. This three-year project, supported by an Australia Council Synapse grant and ARC Linkage Grant, took an interdisciplinary approach in constructing an environmental portrait of the Bundanon region in rural NSW. Bundanon is a vast property of 1100 hectares in the Shoalhaven River Valley; it is the former home of artist Arthur Boyd; and is today the site of an artists’ retreat and education centre. Techniques of environmental science were combined with cultural history, interactive technology and contemporary art in the research project. ‘When Science Meets Art’ produced a website entitled Culturescape: An Environmental Portrait of Bundanon. This online portrait comprises an interactive environmental map, an environmental history of the region, representation of a number of walks across the site, and the documentation of five environmental artworks by Nigel Helyer, all initially installed at Bundanon. The interactive map displays environmental data of soil quality at Bundanon in sonified and visualised form. The map concerns the forensic analysis of minerals in the Shoalhaven catchment as a means to understand human occupation and modification of the landscape. It analyses soil across the site to assess the land at Bundanon for ‘footprints’ of former human activities. The user hears a sonification of the environmental data, represented as a musical piece, and sees a visualisation of the mineral data as a graphic display. Helyer and Potts document the five artworks completed as part of the research project, and describe the interactive map and website. The findings of the research project contribute to an environmental portrait of Bundanon drawing on the methods of both science and art.[1] References and notes 1. Supplementary materials can be accessed at http://… Leonardo Just Accepted MS. © 2020 ISAST leon_a_01973 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/leon/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/leon_a_01973/1887839/leon_a_01973.pdf by guest on 27 June 2021 Abstracts from the Spectra 2018 Symposium: Systems 2 Topic: Systemss from the Spectra 2018 Symposium: Systems 2 Topic: Systems Curating Entanglement: Scaffolding audience engagement in art-science exhibitions Katie Dyer, Senior Curator, Museum of Applied Arts and Science, 500 Harris St, Ultimo, Sydney, 2007, NSW Email: katie.dyer@maas.museum Dr Lizzie Muller, Art & Design, University of New South Wales, Paddington Campus, Cnr Oxford St & Greens Rd, Paddington, NSW 2021, Australia. Email: lizzie.muller@unsw.edu.au In this paper we examine experimental curatorial and interpretive strategies used to engage audiences in art-science exhibitions. We focus on two recent art-science exhibitions concerned with human futures and the impact of technological change: Human + The Future of Our Species, a touring exhibition generated by The Science Gallery, Dublin and then developed by the Centre for Contemporary Culture, Barcelona and The ArtScience Museum, Singapore (20112017), and our own exhibition Human non Human on view at the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney (2018-2019). We describe how a relatively new psychosocial method for audience evaluation called the Visual Matrix has helped us to generate insights into the audience experience of these exhibitions through a process of collective free association, and how this method can inform the curatorial process. Human+ and Human non Human aimed to engage audiences in the complex and rapidly changing discourse of the “post-human”. We examine the role of spectacle, provocation, immersion and world-building in these exhibitions. Against this backdrop we focus on our own iterative approach to curating using the Visual Matrix as a formative tool. We show how we responded to a range of audience experiences of Human+ captured by the visual matrix in our curatorial approach to Human non Human. In particular we discuss our attempt to scaffold the audience’s experience of Human non Human with an experimental piece of museum interpretation – called the “Entanglement Interactive”. This interactive combination of text, images, videos and audio – available in the exhibition space and online – maps the interplay of ideas and objects in the exhibition, but also emulates the collective associative work that audiences do in exhibitions, which is revealed in the Visual Matrix. The Entanglement Interactive included user analytics that allowed us to track the pathways audiences created between the resources it presented. In this way both the Visual Matrix and the Entanglement Interactive offer tools to capture the connections and associations audiences make between objects and ideas, and so give insights into the processes by which collective experience is formed and new knowledge created in exhibitions. Leonardo Just Accepted MS. © 2020 ISAST leon_a_01973 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/leon/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/leon_a_01973/1887839/leon_a_01973.pdf by guest on 27 June 2021 Abstracts from the Spectra 2018 Symposium: Systems 3 Topic: Systemss from the Spectra 2018 Symposium: Systems 3 Topic: Systems Aerial Pitfalls: Harnessing the power of the “good” drone. Dr. Tania Leimbach, Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney, Australia. Email: tania.leimbach@uts.edu.au ORCID: 0000-0002-8144-5065 Dr. Keith Armstrong, Creative Lab Research Centre, School of Creative Practice, Queensland University Technology, Brisbane, Australia. Email: keith@embodiedmedia.com ORCID: 0000-0002-0133-6740 Media artist Keith Armstrong’s collaborative practice has long involved intensive periods of collaboration with biological scientists and social scientists, developing art-science, creative incubators around periods of ecological fieldwork. Artist Jill Scott views such field trips as unique socio-cultural events which manifest tacit knowledge and social interactions in a given spatial environment where explicit knowledge is prioritized. Armstrong’s participation in art-science research in regional Australia (as ANAT Synapse’s 2012-13 resident at the Australian Wildlife Conservancy) sought to understand practices of reintroduction and conservation biology that aim to recreate or renew historically degraded ecological systems. He asked: How might we improve understandings of these composite ecologies that mesh cultural, biophysical and synthetic elements, leading to improved understanding of the cultural confines of traditional scientific thinking, to foreground better policies for maintaining biophysical complexity and diversity? His fieldwork built through experimenting with a range of analogue and digital surveying technologies used to extend scientific knowledge around nocturnal creatures – technologies that collectively form a part of how we envisage ‘new natures’. Whilst working with the ecological scientists during pitfall-trap survey events to survey small mammals and invertebrates he asked them to consider the broader cultural dimensions of a ‘pitfall’ – an unapparent source of trouble or danger; a hidden hazard. He later turned these findings into a series of high profile public artworks (see Figure 1 in supplementary materials). Since that time, the potential of aerial robots (aka drones) have become better understood by filmmakers, scientists and others as experimental tools within creative transdisciplinary practices. Whilst the drone’s pervasive, elevated, mobile presence has long spoken to the totalitarian control idealised by the military industrial media complex, their capabilities for flying a range of sensors beyond the ubiquitous camera continues to develop and expand in disciplines of conservation science, AgroSciences, anti-poaching and other animal and biota security contexts. As artists, scientists and other disciplinary experts continue to seize opportunities to advance social and environmental change through collaborative, speculative projects, the question of how ‘we’ might better use these aerial robots therefore becomes a key cultural challenge. This engagement also promises to play increasingly critical roles in re-designing social relations to natural systems; ultimately seeking to shift cultural conditions within the Anthropocene(see Figure 2 in supplementary materials). Armstrong’s new art-science collaboration Uncanny Valleys, conceived with field based conservation scientists, focuses upon creative, unexpected uses of existing drone based tools in Leonardo Just Accepted MS. © 2020 ISAST leon_a_01973 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/leon/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/leon_a_01973/1887839/leon_a_01973.pdf by guest on 27 June 2021 Abstracts from the Spectra 2018 Symposium: Systems 4 ways that switch focus back onto the ‘nature’ of ecological problems themselves (see Figure 3 in supplementary materials).s from the Spectra 2018 Symposium: Systems 4 ways that switch focus back onto the ‘nature’ of ecological problems themselves (see Figure 3 in supplementary materials).
