PAST EVENTS 2017
SENSOR SOCIETY WORKSHOP
DATE: Thursday 10th August, 2017
TIME: 4:30
LOCATION: Room B4.37, Caulfield Campus
Please join us for a discussion of possible research projects on digital media, from the algorithms that shape our news and entertainment environments to the Internet of Things. This is a causal discussion of actual and potential research projects across MFJ. The seminar will feature a visit from Simon Elvery, a member of the ABC’s Digital Storytelling Team who is investigating the ways in which algorithms affect our daily lives. This seminar is organised by CME within the theme of The Sensor Society, led by incoming Professor Mark Andrejevic.
BEYOND DECRA
DATE: Monday 14th August, 2017
TIME: 2:00 to 4:00
ECR DISCUSSION: 4:00 to 5:00 (catering provided)
LOCATION: Room S901, Caufield Campus
What are some of the research opportunities for early career researchers beyond the prestigious but elusive DECRA award – especially options that might have attracted less attention than the ARC schemes? And what are actual experiences and pathways for postdoctoral, research fellows or research associates beyond the typical 2 or 3-year research funding cycle? Acknowledging the diverse trajectories and experiences, what is the current lay of the land in academia, and how it can be successfully navigated by the broadly defined junior or ‘pre-tenure’ academic?
This panel seminar features a number of academics at their early and mid-career stages alongside established academics to discuss, share and exchange individual professional experiences, observations and practical tips to help identify some of the existing opportunities, focus areas and support mechanisms useful for crafting a rewarding academic career.
ECRs and PhD students are invited, as well as anyone with interest in developing a successful academic and research career.
IS ARCHITECTURE ART?
DATE: Friday 1st September, 2017
TIME:
2:00 – 3:00 (presentation)
3:00 – 4:00 (discussion)
LOCATION: Monash Caulfield Campus MADA F2.09
John Macarthur, Susan Holden & Rosemary Willink from the ATCH Research Centre (architecture, theory, criticism, history) at UQ will present an over-view and some aspects of their current ARC Discovery Grant “Is Architecture Art?: a history of categories, concepts and recent practices”.
In everyday language ‘architecture’ is distinct from ‘art’ where the latter is a contraction of ‘visual arts’, and, despite the long history of architecture being grouped with painting and sculpture in ‘the arts’, the recently established statistical domains for measuring the creative economy confirm a distinction between art and architecture.
Complicating these categorical separations, the evolution of installation art and ‘relational art’ have made architecture one of the principal topics or modes of the contemporary visual arts. At the same time, the institutional interface between architecture and ‘art’ has been made prominent through the commissioning of pavilions by visual arts institutions such as the Serpentine Galleries, the Milgrom Foundation, and the National Gallery of Victoria. This situation where administrative categories are out of step with concepts of cultural practice raises a series of issues about the functionality of architecture and visual artworks; their social value and their fungability; and concepts of aesthetic freedom and determination.
The categories deployed by schemas as different as Rosalind Krauss’ ‘Expanded Field’ and UNESCO’s Framework for Cultural Statistics nevertheless have a similarity in the constraints, perturbations and frictions that they present to the disciplinary concepts of architecture and the visual arts.
Jun 14, 2017
Symposium: Smart City - Creative City
This symposium will explore the possibilities and imaginaries generated through the intersection of two urban agendas.
The ‘Smart City’ is concerned with the application of digital infrastructure, sensors and data capture devices, and large scale computing power to previously distinct ‘social’ and governmental dimensions of urban life. Visions of the smart city have largely been built around the centralized, data-driven management of urban spaces and the flows that characterize them: of people, goods, services, and resources. Given the enterprise-driven character of these visions, the focus has been upon transport, utility management, security, and customized commerce. It has been increasingly felt amongst academics and policy-makers that we should not leave the vision for interactive infrastructures solely in the hands of IBM, Siemens, and their various marketers, sub-contractors, and engineers. Nor should we restrict the impact of these technologies on urban culture to data-driven marketing and new consumption platforms.
The ‘Creative City’ attempts to mobilise culture and creativity for city branding, urban regeneration and cultural industries growth, which also point to new forms of urban planning and governance. It has been closely associated with the “creative class” and the creative-entrepreneurial city in ways that have frequently become divisive and exclusionary, focusing on arts flagships, photogenic CBDs, and real estate profits. So too, cultural production has been reformatted under the rubric of the ‘creative industries’ in ways that foreground their contribution to economic growth. Increasingly calls have been for social justice, citizenship and the rights to the city, with a return of community and activist-focused arts activities, as well as new forms of ‘post-capitalist’ production communities.
In an attempt to broaden and re-imagine the data-driven and creative city, this symposium will explore the intersections between these urban agendas with a view to re-imagining their possibilities. It seeks to open out new possibilities for the city contained in both interactive infrastructures and new forms of cultural practice. Cultural workers of all kinds have an important role to play in crafting alternative visions for the implementation of “smart” technologies and the practices they support. These technologies are also opening new physical and social spaces of collaborative production, new kinds of economies which cities constantly seek to capture in the form of ‘creative entrepreneurship’ and similar tropes of a business language.
Is there another kind of urban culture and economy being made possible beyond the tightly controlled formats of the Smart City/ Creative City? What might that look like?
Date: 15 June 2017
Time: 9.00 - 5.30 pm
Location: Chunky Move, 111 Sturt St., Southbank, Melbourne VIC
RSVP:
https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/symposium-smart- city-creative-city-tickets-34763468470
Apr 10, 2017
Culture Economy Futures: A Symposium
Debates around the creative industries, and the ‘creative cities’ and ‘creative classes’ associated with these, have now been raging for two decades. The celebratory rhetoric associated with their early expressions have been met by empirically informed critical research. This has pointed to the economic reductionism and over-inflated expectations brought by this policy agenda; the realities and inequities of creative labour; the growing exclusion of creative producers – and suburban consumers - from the urban core; and the general erosion of any value for culture other than its contribution to jobs and growth.
Yet this critical work often forgets, or disavows, the optimistic – even utopian – impulses which gave rise to the great expectations placed on the cultural and creative industries from the 1970s onwards. Our take-downs can often forget the possibilities still (we hope) inherent in the idea of culture, and the crucial importance of thinking about the ways in which it is produced and consumed. In a world that has recently taken a turn to the political dark side but which contains immense capacities to be transformed into something human, where do we stand in relation to the question of cultural economy?
This symposium brings together leading Australian and overseas researchers and thinkers in this field. They will outline how they see the contemporary stakes in various aspects of the cultural economy. They will cast a critical an eye to the future and look at where we might go in the next decade – if given a chance. Some of this might be utopian and speculative, but perhaps out of this will come a chance to seize the initiative and develop a new program for culture, not just digging trenches for the coming onslaught against it.
Date: 11 April 2017
Time: 9.00 - 6.00 pm
Location: 271 Collins Street, Melbourne VIC
RSVP: earvin.cabalquinto@monash.edu