School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemAmbient culture: Making sense of everyday participation in open, public space(Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020-09-25)Unlike art and performance within interior spaces like the museum or gallery, the experience of culture in an urban and networked public space presents new challenges for cultural interpretation and evaluation. In this chapter, we draw on research conducted at Melbourne’s Federation Square to discuss how the concept of ambience helps make sense of both the production and experience of public culture. The first section introduces the changing settings for culture: from an almost exclusively interior presentation to an increasingly mediated, networked and outdoor experience. The second section situates this exteriorization of culture in terms of a shifting urban environment that is increasingly interwoven with media networks. The third section describes different forms of engagement and problematizes traditional expectations of cultural experience. Finally, we conclude with a reflection on these findings and draw out implications for the theorization, cultural programming and evaluation of cultural participation in public space.
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ItemAmbient Images(The Nordic Society for Aesthetics, 2021)
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ItemWhite night: city as event(Research Unit in Public Cultures, 2015)The nature of public events are changing as cities evolve. As people move more and more around the world, and information is circulating in increasingly complex patterns and rapid rhythms, the horizons of our urban landscape are also undergoing radical transformation. Urban illumination projects, which have become popular in cities around the world over the last decade, are a particularly visible sign of the ways in which new technologies and forms of public action are being combined to produce temporary transformations of urban space. In this project we seek to examine the impact of a major public event — White Night — in the City of Melbourne. Through this event we witness a significant shift in the location and duration of artistic events as they move to inhabit the urban fabric. But the event is also conditioned by a central expectation that the public can engage and interact with art, and with each other. Is the quality of the art or the public experience more important in defining the event? Or does framing the question in oppositional terms miss the point?
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ItemArts and Cultural Precincts in the Age of Participation(Asian Urban Lab, 2016)
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ItemAmbient Aesthetics: Altered Subjectivities in the New Museum(John Wiley & Sons, 2015-07-20)This chapter focuses on the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) as a case study for the emergence of hybrid subjectivities within the new museum. Fueled by an optimistic idealism about how technology might transform everyday life, ACMI was conceived as a catalyst for new forms of cultural consciousness. The chapter casts ACMI's initial willingness to experiment with innovative representational technology as a strategic attempt to position itself as a pioneering new media institution, and to engage in alternative forms of cultural citizenship. Its early public exhibitions, for example, often eschewed chronological histories of the moving image in favor of phenomenological displays of visual knowledge and embodied new media “experiences.” In tracking ACMI's changing curatorial, architectural, and experiential directives, this chapter foregrounds the significance of the museum as a producer rather than distributor of stories, experiences, and objects. The argument proceeds with close reference to empirical audience experience research data collected from ACMI visitors, and is situated in relation to historical transformations of pedagogy as a driver for museological display. The concept of “ambient aesthetics” is, finally, proposed as a key conceptual framework for evaluating how contemporary museums might articulate a new kind of “flexible” citizenship in a transnational public sphere.
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ItemConnecting Audiences: A Manual for Large Screens(The Research Unit in Public Cultures, The University of Melbourne in association with Federation Square, Art Center Nabi & Australia Council, 2015-06)
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ItemPlanning for Urban Media: Large Public Screens and Urban Communication(IGI Global, 2015-02-28)At the same time, these changes created new challenges for city governments, citizens, and other stakeholders, namely risks associated with the digital divide, which tended to reinforce social exclusion along other social divides. As several ...