Victorian College of the Arts - Research Publications
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ItemMoving Songs: Repatriating Audiovisual Recordings of Aboriginal Australian Dance and Song (Kimberley Region, Northwestern Australia)(Oxford University Press, 2019)Repatriation has become almost ubiquitous in ethnomusicological research on Australian Indigenous song. This article provides insights into processes of a repatriation-centered song revitalization project in the Kimberley, northwest Australia. Authored by an ethnomusicologist and two members of the Ngarinyin cultural heritage community, the article provides firsthand accounts of the early phases of a long-term repatriation-centered project referred to locally as the Junba Project. The authors provide a sample of narratives and dialogues that deliver insight into experiences of the work of identifying recordings “in the archive” and cultural negotiation and use of recordings “on Country.” The entanglement of local epistemological frameworks with past and present collection, archival research, repatriation, and dissemination for intergenerational knowledge transmission between spirits, Country, and the living, is explored, showing how recordings move song knowledge from community to archive to community and from generation to generation, and move people in present-day communities. The chapter considers how these “moving songs” allow an interrogation of the fraught endeavor of intercultural collaboration in the pursuit of revitalizing Indigenous song traditions. It positions repatriation as a method that can support intergenerational knowledge transmission and as a method to consider past and present intercultural relationships within research projects and between cultural heritage communities and collecting institutions.
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ItemCultural precedents for the repatriation of legacy song records to communities of origin(Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 2016-01-01)Repatriation of song recordings from archives and private collections to communities of origin is both a common research method and the subject of critical discourse. In Australia it is a priority of many individual researchers and collecting institutions to enable families and cultural heritage communities to access recorded collections. Anecdotal and documented accounts describe benefits of this access. However, digital heritage items and the metadata that guide their discovery and use circulate in complex milieus of use and guardianship that evolve over time in relation to social, personal, economic and technological contexts. Ethnomusicologists, digital humanists and anthropologists have asked, what is the potential for digital items, and the content management systems through which they are often disseminated, to complicate the benefits of repatriation? How do the 'returns' from archives address or further complicate colonial assumptions about the value of research? This paper lays the groundwork for consideration of these questions in terms of cultural precedents for repatriation of song records in the Kimberley. Drawing primarily on dialogues between ethnomusicologist Sally Treloyn and senior Ngarinyin and Wunambal elder and singer Matthew Dembal Martin, the interplay of archival discovery, repatriation and dissemination, on the one hand, and song conception, song transmission, and the Law and ethos of Wurnan sharing, on the other, is examined. The paper provides a case for support for repatriation initiatives and for consideration of the critical perspectives of cultural heritage stakeholders on research transactions of the past and in the present.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableThe Ethics of Children's Participation( 2018-11-12)A keynote address as part of CONVERGE, a national sector gathering for theatre and performance practitioners who work with young people.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableCan't touch this(Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2019-05-10)Australia’s laid-back, sun-drenched beach lifestyle has been a celebrated and prominent part of its official popular culture for nigh on a century, and the images and motifs associated with this culture have become hallmarks of the country’s collective identity. Though these representations tend towards stereotype, for many Australians the idea of a summer holiday at the beach is one that is intensely personal and romanticised – its image is not at all urbanised. As Douglas Booth observed, for Australians the beach has become a ‘sanctuary at which to abandon cares – a place to let down one’s hair, remove one’s clothes […] a paradise where one could laze in peace, free from guilt, drifting between the hot sand and the warm sea, and seek romance’.1 Beach holidays became popular in the interwar years of the twentieth century, but the most intense burst of activity – both in touristic promotion and in the development of tourism infrastructure – accompanied the postwar economic boom, when family incomes were able to meet the cost of a car and, increasingly, a cheap block of land by the beach upon which a holiday home could be erected with thrift and haste. In subtropical southeast Queensland, the postwar beach holiday became the hallmark of the state’s burgeoning tourism industry; the state’s southeast coastline in particular benefiting from its warm climate and proximity to the capital, Brisbane. It was here – along the evocatively named Gold Coast (to Brisbane’s south) and Sunshine Coast (to its north) [1] – that many families experienced their first taste of what is now widely celebrated as the beach lifestyle.
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ItemCannes vs Netflix: A screen battle of blockbuster proportions(University of Melbourne, 2018)As the curtain opens on 2018’s Festival de Cannes, without any Netflix entries, there’s an economic side as well as a cultural one to this cinematic wrangle
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ItemNo Preview AvailableMishap(Unlikely, 2018)Mishap is a performative intervention that gently shifts routine activity in social space. Using a fictional 'mishap', the work highlights social relations in regulated, commercial precincts and provides an understanding of variations in human behaviour in public space. There are two audiences for this work. The first is a live audience in the streets of Shanghai and Tokyo and other sites that is unprepared for the impromptu encounter. The second is an art audience in a gallery in Eastern Bloc, Montreal that views video documentation of the performance. The live work questions how meaningful interaction can be created when a temporary artwork is shaped by the tensions of transience. The video work allows for more reflective responses.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableDoes motor expertise facilitate amplitude differentiation of lower limb-movements in an asymmetrical bipedal coordination task?(ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV, 2018-06)The motor system's natural tendency is to move the limbs over equal amplitudes, for example in walking. However, in many situations in which people must perform complex movements, a certain degree of amplitude differentiation of the limbs is required. Visual and haptic feedback have recently been shown to facilitate such independence of limb movements. However, it is unknown whether motor expertise moderates the extent to which individuals are able to differentiate the amplitudes of their limb-movements while being supported with visual and haptic feedback. To answer this question 14 pre-professional dancers were compared to 14 non-dancers on simultaneously generating a small displacement with one foot, and a larger one with the other foot, in four different feedback conditions. In two conditions, haptic guidance was offered, either in a passive or active mode. In the other two conditions, veridical and enhanced visual feedback were provided. Surprisingly, no group differences were found regarding the degree to which the visual or haptic feedback assisted the generation of the different target amplitudes of the feet (mean amplitude difference between the feet). The correlation between the displacements of the feet and the standard deviation of the continuous relative phase between the feet, reflecting the degree of independence of the feet movements, also failed to show between-group differences. Sample entropy measures, indicating the predictability of the foot movements, did show a group difference. In the haptically-assisted conditions, the dancers demonstrated more predictable coordination patterns than the non-dancers as reflected by lower sample entropy values whereas the reverse was true in the visual-feedback conditions. The results demonstrate that motor expertise does not moderate the extent to which haptic tracking facilitates the differentiation of the amplitudes of the lower limb movements in an asymmetrical bipedal coordination task.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableCapturing The Moment: an investigation into the process of capturing performance on film and The Five Provocations: a feature film( 2019-05-15)Dr Black examined alternative approaches to filmmaking. She determined that performance used as a foundation of film development enables a collaborative process that facilitates more authentic screen performances. Her findings, demonstrated in her successful feature film The Five Provocations, produced an innovative method for working with cast to develop character and story. Capturing the Moment: An Investigation into the Process of Capturing Performance on Film and The Five Provocations: A Feature Film.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableLightfilmbody(The National Portrait Gallery, 2016)Lightfilmbody was a moving image work that animated the façade of The National Portrait Gallery Canberra. The work ran for 2 weeks during Enlighten on a loop and was made as an assemblage of film strips of moving image, with each frame animating in replication of a filmstrip. The notion of the portraiture and light in painting was reiterated as an ethereal bodying of water, a fallen painting out of place and falling against the toxic concrete building. The work was montaged with immaterial animations hand painted with bold colour under camouflage and highlighted the organic and built materials of the grounds.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableColour Field Painting(Collingwood Football Stadium, 2017)Colour Field Painting was a permanent film projected onto the station side-facing wall of Collingwood Football Stadium. The work ran for six months on a loop and then again as a later work for three months. The work was made as an assemblage of the moving image, photography and a painted field of colour. The old disused building exterior was under bold camouflage. It highlighted the organic and built materials of the ground. The photography was deliberately taken on the ground, the surroundings, and the site on the anniversary day of the referendum.