Keynotes:
Friday:
Dr Scott McQuire: Networked Cities and Public Spaces (4.30pm, 22 Vogel Street)
Scott’s research explores the social effects of media technologies, with particular attention to their impact on the social relations of space and time, the formation of identity, and the dynamics of cities. One of his investigations Participatory Public space: A right to the networked city (2012-14) explores the interplay between technology, policy, culture and user-led innovation in the context of networked public space. He is currently completing a book GEOMEDIA: networked cities and the politics of public space for Polity press.
Saturday:
Dr Keith Armstrong: Long Time, No See (9am Dunedin School of Art, Otago Polytechnic, Riego Street)
Keith will discuss the participatory project, Long Time, No See? which draws participants into an innovative arts based engagement with sustainability. Drawing on participatory practices and through the use of mobile devices, the project prompts participants through a process of thinking, mapping, talking and walking in their locality with a view to provoking grounded reflection about care and futuring. The intent is to map the intensities of shared values and commitment in a gradually expanding global network of affinity and momentum for change. This is set against and embedded into a web-based generative visualisation and sonification of massive datasets of demographic, geographic and environmental data.
Presentations:
Where we stand: (Friday)
Tuari Potiki, Donna Matahaere-Atariki, Otakou
Sean Brosnahan, Curator Toitu
Glen Hazelton, Heritage Planner, Dunedin City Council
Beginning the conversation through a snapshot of the local history of the area, specifically Vogel Street.
Zoe Roland: High Street Stories (Friday )
Documentary film and story maker Zoe Roland brings a demonstration and discussion of the post-earthquake High Street Stories project, due for release shortly before the symposium.
Christchurch Office of Historic Places Trust http://www.historic.org.nz/
https://www.facebook.com/Highstreetprecinctproject
Julian Priest: (Sunday)
Via satellite Julian joins us to talk about his work The Weight of Information an orbital artwork based on a pico-satellite scheduled for launch on December 9th 2013.
http://julianpriest.org/project/the-weight-of-information/
Papers:
Rose James – StructureSonica
A discussion of the artists current work, an aural survey of Dunedin’s warehouse precinct. An area know for its industry and commerce but one that also has a subversive side of band practice spaces, venues and raves. Using the formal language of the buildings architecture as its foundation StructuraSonica attempts to record the structural sound of the buildings.
Simon Kong – The .3rd Resistance “The Art of Revolution”
Progress report of concepts and the creation of deep multi-faceted environments.
The .3rd Resistance performance was based on a manifesto and briefing document distributed via the web. All performers, Djs, Vjs & tech crew for the .3rd Resistance were co-opted into a theatrical story line where the .3rd Resistance members were a freedom fighters caught in a time anomaly attempting to use the technological systems at the Festival to get back to the future. While present in the festival timeline the .3rd Resistance were conduction experiments and gathering telemetry data. The festival audience were also conscripted into the .3rd Resistance and were provided uniforms.
Kerry Ann Lee – The Unavailable Memory of Gold Coin Café
Discussion of the work which personally and creatively explores aspects of Cantonese urban settlement in Wellington, home-space, memory, material and loss and tells the story of a family’s connection to the city. The work will be exhibited at Enjoy Public Art Gallery, in Wellington From 11 September – 06 October as part of a small international group show exploring themes of immigration and settlement.
Sally Ann McIntyre – radio cegeste : Christchurch Radio Memorials
In a series of works conducted in the past three years, I have been attempting a response to the destruction of the city of Christchurch, a micro-Odyssean journey which has been conducted from my current home of Dunedin. This has been both a response to the fragmentation of material history and memory, and an investigation of how mobile radio can become a way of translating the city, itself a form of mobile architectural intervention. I would like to explore in a presentation how these works conduct an investigative process that explores memory, history and the city, the idea of public space, and the memorial.
Helen Moore – I’m sorry but should I remember you? Collecting and recollecting one’s thoughts in Otautahi, Christchurch.
A brief story of attempting to continue engagement with a city centre that was disappearing before our eyes is recounted through a series of digital images. The ‘ project’ I describe began as an intuitive response to living in a situation of flux where the familiar became unknown territory. Walking place became an embodied practice to engage with shifting realities and to investigate reconnection to the local in these changing circumstances. Spaces opened up, both literally and metaphorically, provoking inquiry about time, place and belonging. Can we say that history itself is disappearing? As ‘things’ change is all we have ‘in the moment’?
Kedron Parker – Kumutoto Stream
Kedron is planning a site-specific sound installation at the top of Woodward Street in Wellington, on a popular walking route used by workers to access office buildings on the Terrace. The tunnel itself is tiled, bleak and bunker-like, and runs underground, directly beneath the Terrace. He will install a soundscape in the tunnel imagining the area in its natural state, before development – just over 150 years ago – to evoke the experience of walking along the former Kumutoto Stream. Although it is not well known, Kumutoto Stream was an important feature of the area’s natural and social history. Today, it is buried under cement, and flows through a pipe to Wellington Harbour.
Kedron commutes along the route of the stream, and has found the tunnel to be a point of transition. Emerging onto the Terrace, one enters a cement world that feels disconnected from its past, disconnected from nature. By creating a soundscape in the tunnel, the work should awaken passers-by to the contrast between then and now, and the danger of how our built environments can rob us of our own vitality.