This exploratory study engages with eight case studies of music performances broadcast online to investigate the role of music in facilitating social cohesion, intercultural understanding and community resilience during a time of social distancing and concomitant heightened racial tensions. Using an online ethnographic approach and thematic analysis of video comments, the nature of audience engagement with music performances broadcast via YouTube during COVID-19 lockdown of 2020 is explored through the lens of ritual engagement with media events and models of social capital. The eight case studies featured virtual choirs, orchestras and music collaborations of various genres, including classical, pop and fusion styles drawing from European, Asia Minor, South African, West African, North African, Arabic, South Asian, and East Asian cultural origins. Five overarching themes resulted from thematic analysis of video comments, including Interaction, Unity, Resilience, Identity, and Emotion. The paper contributes important theorisation that ritual engagement and social learning fosters intercultural understanding through engaging with music both cognitively and emotionally, which can in turn shape both individual and collective identity. Online platforms provide scope for both bonding and bridging opportunities. Community resilience is supported through the sharing of knowledge, sustaining music practice during social distancing, as well as emotional support shared among audience participants, with potential wellbeing outcomes.

Artist statement In this series of works, I am making leaky paper bags. Leaky so to afford thinking about how to carry affect and how this affect is considered in the ways we breathe and take breadth. The paper bags respond to moving affect and are working with a notion of unease, how this unease is always carried with us, and how it is measured. I am considering how this affective heaviness permeates and measures what we do. Voluminously heavy and weightless, all at the same time, these paper bags made to carry anxious thoughts. To make these works, rice paper printed with oil-based inks repel the watercolour and translucent inks used to colour the papers. They are then sliced, made into long lengths and then formed into grids using archival glues. Meshwork grids are constructed, which are then formed into three-dimensional forms, and are held from the wall with pins. The meshwork is considered as a filter; the pins are holding on to a moment of movement in time, the white printed marks and grey graduated washes represent the moments of time held by the bags, leaking and holding form at the same time.

How do we build choreographic systems for dancing with those we cannot touch? In a world in which the medium of a mask and the interface of a screen are omnipresent, touching at a distance becomes a choreographic problem. Developing tools to navigate a touchless habitat engages actions of crossing thresholds - between physical and virtual, distant and near – from the perspective of cellular bodies hardwired for touch. Virtual Crossings is a network of artists engaged in cultivating distant touch through remote collaboration. Initiated by Cie Gille Jobin Geneva, this inter-disciplinary network engaged partners in Melbourne, Geneva and Auckland for simultaneous remote performance and research through a virtual architecture embodied through motion capture technology. Virtual Crossings mobilises soma-technic states as new spaces for dance to travel safely and with minimal impact.

This paper provides a perspective on how art and cross-cultural conversations can facilitate understanding of important scientific processes, outcomes and conclusions, using the Marine Ecosystem Assessment for the Southern Ocean (MEASO) as a case study. First, we reflect on our rationale and approach, describing the importance of deeper communication, such as through the arts, to the policy process; more enduring decisions are possible by engaging and obtaining perspectives through more than just a utilitarian lens. Second, we draw on the LivingData Website [http://www.livingdata.net.au] where art in all its forms is made to bridge differences in knowledge systems and their values, provide examples of how Indigenous knowledge and Western science can be complementary, and how Indigenous knowledge can show the difference between historical natural environmental phenomena and current unnatural phenomena, including how the Anthropocene is disrupting cultural connections with the environment that ultimately impact everyone. Lastly, we document the non-linear process of our experience and draw lessons from it that can guide deeper communication between disciples and cultures, to potentially benefit decision-making. Our perspective is derived as a collective from diverse backgrounds, histories, knowledge systems and values.

From the clear skies of Central Otago to the dense smog of Tehran, LungSong makes connections through our most intimate act, breathing. Using song, dance and live sampling to travel from one place to another, resisting ‘the forgetting of air’ (Irigaray 1999), breath activates shifts between dimensions. Recordings of the atmosphere’s compositional change become an immersive sonic texture, choreography takes place in the spaces between us: in-land and On Air. LungSong is a multi-sited performance event in development by the creative team Carol Brown (choreography), Russell Scoones (sound design) and Kasia Pol (performance design). Living in a world that is in a state of chaos and emergency, facing climate catastrophes and humanitarian crises, this performance research project acknowledges that as artists we do not exist in a vacuum, apart from these realities but are confronted with them daily. Our living relations through inter-disciplinary practices, anticipate a future that cannot be known in advance, but upon whose unfolding, our kinesthetic and sonic tuning towards response-ability depends. LungSong is a performance experiment towards an ethics of breathing. Transcultural, transcontextual and inter-species, it locates air as matter, inspired and exhaled in a world that is shared. Drawing on research into the exchanges of breaths between New Zealand Māori, Iranian and Argentinian dancers and musicians in Aotearoa New Zealand, informed by feminist, queer and indigenous philosophies and cut with samples from atmospheric research science taking place in NIWA @ Lauder, this performative presentation aims to open a dialogue on that most taken for granted element of performance practice, the air between us.

A deep sense of human interconnectedness with the ocean extends across history. The desire to communicate often-ineffable feelings about the ocean has inspired a diverse range of artistic responses to its moods, textures, and melancholic dimensions. In this speculative photo-essay, we present a series of images associated with a transmedial postconceptual artistic project titled Sounds of Unridden Waves. At its core, this project comprises a feature-length surf film (2021, forthcoming), without any human surfers, and an original instrumental soundtrack. In this essay, we draw inspiration from the late Romantic era to offer an alternate imagining of the project. We present images from the film’s working archive and elsewhere, juxtaposed against a sequence of historical quotations from selected artists, writers, and poets, each of whom is responding to themes such as oceanic awe, seaside locations, and formal or spiritual meditations upon relationships between nature and abstraction in art.

Strategies to support the psychosocial well-being of older adults living in aged-care are needed; and evidence points toward music listening as an effective, non-pharmacological tool with many benefits to quality of life and well-being. Yet, the everyday listening practices (and their associated specific psychosocial benefits) of older adults living in residential aged-care remain under-researched. The current study explored older adults' experiences of music listening in their daily lives while living in residential aged-care and considered how music listening might support their well-being. Specifically, what might go into autonomous listening activities? 32 Australian residents (aged 73-98) living in two Australian care facilities participated in semi-structured interviews. The results of a qualitative thematic analysis revealed three themes pertaining to "previous music experiences and interest," "current music listening," and "barriers to listening." While an interest in and access to music did not necessarily result in everyday listening practices, of those participants who did listen to music, perceived benefits included outcomes such as entertainment, enjoyment, relaxation, and mood regulation. Drawing on Ruud's notion of music as a "cultural immunogen" supporting well-being and Self-Determination Theory, theoretical implications of the findings are addressed, relating to how to create and support music activities in aged-care facilities so that they are engaging, meaningful, and promote emotional regulation, community, and well-being.

The intestinal lymphatic system plays an important role in the pathophysiology of multiple diseases including lymphomas, cancer metastasis, autoimmune diseases, and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection. It is thus an important compartment for delivery of drugs in order to treat diseases associated with the lymphatic system. Lipophilic prodrug approaches have been used in the past to take advantage of the intestinal lymphatic transport processes to deliver drugs to the intestinal lymphatics. Most of the approaches previously adopted were based on very bulky prodrug moieties such as those mimicking triglycerides (TG). We now report a study in which a lipophilic prodrug approach was used to efficiently deliver bexarotene (BEX) and retinoic acid (RA) to the intestinal lymphatic system using activated ester prodrugs. A range of carboxylic ester prodrugs of BEX were designed and synthesised and all of the esters showed improved association with chylomicrons, which indicated an improved potential for delivery to the intestinal lymphatic system. The conversion rate of the prodrugs to BEX was the main determinant in delivery of BEX to the intestinal lymphatics, and activated ester prodrugs were prepared to enhance the conversion rate. As a result, an 4-(hydroxymethyl)-1,3-dioxol-2-one ester prodrug of BEX was able to increase the exposure of the mesenteric lymph nodes (MLNs) to BEX 17-fold compared to when BEX itself was administered. The activated ester prodrug approach was also applied to another drug, RA, where the exposure of the MLNs was increased 2.4-fold through the application of a similar cyclic activated prodrug. Synergism between BEX and RA was also demonstrated in vitro by cell growth inhibition assays using lymphoma cell lines. In conclusion, the activated ester prodrug approach results in efficient delivery of drugs to the intestinal lymphatic system, which could benefit patients affected by a large number of pathological conditions.