CURATING

AFFECTIVE TECHNOLOGIES
A one-day Un-Conference
Thursday 21 July, Flinders in the City campus (Victoria Square) 9.30 4
No registration fee catered, coffee vouchers for downstairs caf

plus
Russell Fewsters immersive media experience
Walter Benjamin A Life in Translation
5 pm at Hartley Playhouse, Building D, UniSA Magill

9.30 - 10.30
Larissa - Framing Presentation (30 minutes plus 15)
10.30-1100.

break

11.00 12.15

4 papers in two streams (10 mins presentation + 5 mins

discussion)
lunch

12.15-12.45

12.45-2.00

4 papers in two streams (10 mins presentation + 5 mins

discussion)
Comfort break
Collaborative workshop
Wrap up and future plans

2.00-2.15
2.15-3.45
3.45-4.00

Author

Title

Catherine
Adamek
Simon Biggs

Sous Terre

Dark Matter

Susan Bruce
Alicia Carter
Alex Degaris
Kathryn Hummel

Daniela Kaleva

Carolyn Lake
Emma Maguire

Deb Matthews
Petra Mosmann
Ioanna Petrescu
Martin Potter

Short films capturing the personal, tactile and textural

Technology is a glittering lure: Kodaks Anagrams for a Father

Public/Private: Queer uses of technology, space and time

Scented Memento


Visuality in the transmission of cultural memory: The case of the cabaret show
Gypsy Nights

Conversations at the Australian Lesbian and Gay archives

Visibility, Mediation and Life Narrative: Reading Camgirl Lifecasts from the
Turn of the Millennium.

How a digital remix community embodies and curates memory and affect.

Thoughts on feminist objects: Faith Bandlers gloves

Objects that transmit or mediate cultural memory

Local Content Producers:
Community produced stories in the Big Stories, Small Towns project

Ruth Vasey

Lost and Trove: lateral patterns of localised history in the age of the internet

Catherine Adamek
Sous Terre
Sous Terre is a contemporary fusion of classical ballet, Philippine ethnic dance, Adelaide house-style
and vogueing conceived by Adelaide based boutique production house Adamek Anahata
Productions. In the creative development process undertaken most recently we have been
experimenting with an interactive combined media approach, working with multi-award winning
Felicity Arts. For the 2016 Adelaide Feast Festival presentation we would like to propose a 40 minute
live performance of the work. We would also like to offer a 20 minute artists talk for one of the
performances about the creative process. Sous Terre melds together gender and cultural roleplaying in the setting of an underground nightclub. True to its title which translates to Underground,
the piece investigates the idea of bohemia. Gender blurring and identity formation are themes we
were able to explore in terms of contemporary voyeurism, using real-time hand-held devices
projecting intimate moments in close-up. We also hope that the creative themes of love, longing and
conformity subliminally explored in the piece may inspire and incite positive thinking on issues such
as discrimination and marriage equality which have been receiving more media attention lately.
Inspired by Cathys and Ben's 20 year relationship with the electronic music scene in Adelaide where
they first met as dancers and performers, this work is also inspired by the subject of Cathys Phd
thesis Adelaide Dance Music Culture Late 1980s1990s. It evokes a transformational space for
dance and personal expression and will feature SA Electronic Dance Music (EDM) Producer and DJ
Tom Cotter. Background Sous Terre was developed as a 15 minute dance fusion work-in-progress in
2014 for Dance Creation -a professional choreographic initiative of the Australian Institute of
Classical Dance. Finalists were invited to work with the Australian Ballet, Houston Ballet and
Expressions dance company. Excerpts were featured at the 2015 Chinese New Year Street Party, the
2015 Adelaide Fringe Festival where it won first prize at the concept club Surrender, Paris is
Burning competition, and at an exclusive musical event in Adelaide featuring acclaimed House music
DJ Dimitri From Paris.
Bio: Cathy is an Actor/Dancer/Director and Creative Producer her award winning original dance
theatre pieces have premiered at the Sydney Opera House and toured nationally.

Simon Biggs
Dark Matter
This presentation considers the immersive full-body motion tracking installation Dark Matter,
developed by the author in 2016. Dark Matter is a fully immersive, physically interactive, threedimensional video projection environment. The artwork explores whether the body might be
perceived as an absence, inferred from physical and cultural information around it. In this context,
employing multi-agent interaction, people are proposed as emergent 'co-readers' within a dynamic
assemblage.
The artwork employs the metaphor of dark matter. Dark matter binds the universe together and it
can be proposed that society is similarly bound by cultural 'dark matter'. The proposition explored in
Dark Matter is that we exist as motile assemblages rather than stable individuals, a subset of larger
assemblages that could be considered a form of 'collective unconscious'. This concept of assemblage
is explored as cultural information and patterns that we 'don't know that we know', a generative
ontology, manifest in the artwork through multi-agent interaction with liminal visual and textual
information.
http://www.littlepig.org.uk/installations/darkmatter/index.htm

Keywords
Co-reading; generative ontologies; dark matter; hidden information; interaction; assemblage.
Bio: curator with interests in digital poetics, interactive environments and interdisciplinary research.
His work has been widely presented, including Tate Modern, National Film Theatre, ICA London,
Edinburgh Festival, FACT Liverpool, Ikon Birmingham, Pompidou, IRCAM, Academy de Kunste Berlin,
Maxxi Rome, Macau Arts Museum, Walker Art Center, San Francisco Cameraworks, Total Seoul, Art
Gallery of New South Wales and Adelaide Festival. He has spoken at numerous conferences and
universities, including ISEA, ePoetry, SLSA, ELO, and Cambridge, Brown, Cornell, UC Davis, UC Santa
Barbara, Paris8, Sorbonne and Bergen Universities. Publications include Remediating the Social (ed,
2012), Autopoeisis (with James Leach, 2004), Great Wall of China (1999), Halo (1998), Magnet
(1997), Book of Shadows (1996). He is Professor of Art, University of South Australia and Honorary
Professor, University of Edinburgh. http://www.littlepig.org.uk

Susan Bruce
Short films capturing the personal, tactile and textural
My short videos are about personal, tactile and textural moments. For my lightning talk I intend to
show a montage of my videos that capture these aspects. For example, Empty Vessels examines the
domestic (clothes on a clothesline) and the bodys relation to that (the body that fits into the
clothes). Outside In reveals the emotional side of having an illness, visually explored via disorienting
close-ups of the body.
For the final part of my 10 minutes I will present ideas from my current work in progress (a
documentary about my mother, who is reluctant to become a subject in the documentary) and
explore ways I might represent this.

Alicia Carter
Technology is a glittering lure: Kodaks Anagrams for a Father
With its release in 1965, Kodaks iconic Super 8 revolutionised domestic film cameras and signaled
the beginning of an obsession with the family home movie that continues today. But with the advent
of VHS camcorders and digital mediums in the late 1980s, the popularity of the Super 8 went into
decline. While still used as a niche medium by contemporary filmmakers and artists, the days of
Super 8 home movies are long since over.
This paper considers the home movie as a locus of personal and intergenerational memory, and the
unique and nostalgic significance of the Super 8. By contrasting films my father made of our family
during the 70s and 80s with my own use of the same camera during the mid-2000s, I look to find the
ghost of my father still present.
Bio: Alicia Carter is an emerging writer and a PhD candidate at Flinders University. Her Creative
Writing Honours thesis considered the notion of curating family stories, with specific focus on the
stories of her father. Since his death in 2015, she has been fascinated by the digitisation of his
archive of Super 8 films.


Alex Degaris
Public/Private: Queer uses of technology, space and time
Historically, queer identifying individuals have utilized networks as a means of facilitating safe
spaces, fostering community and to connect with one another. Since the dispersion of networkbased media coupled with the impact of globalization, the queer public sphere has significantly
decreased. Concurrently, queer activism, queer networking and formulations of queer identities
have migrated from corporeality into the virtual.
Using theoretical approaches from queer and feminist theory, media studies and social theory this
paper will address contemporary uses of network-based media among queer communities. An
understanding of the historical navigations between the boundaries of public and private space for
queer persons will be utilized to frame the conditions of contemporary use of network-based media
technologies. From visual arts perspective the paper will draw upon relevant practitioners and
discuss the cultural affect of new media on queer embodiment.
Keywords: queer theory, network-based media, visual art, feminist theory, new media
Bio: Alex Degaris is a Masters by research candidate in the School of Art, Architecture and Design at
the University of South Australia. Degaris has exhibited nationally and their practice and research is
situated within new media and visual arts, concerning the intersections between gender, sexuality
and network-based media.

Kathryn Hummel
Scented Memento
Scented Memento presents the southern Indian states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu as connected
sites of cultural memory, with specific focus on the eucalyptus trees that dominate their landscapes.
Brought to India in the late 1700s by the order of Tipu Sultan of Mysore (Karnataka), the planting of
the first eucalyptus seeds spread complex roots throughout his kingdom: combining photographs
and lyric narrative, I will go on to investigate the British colonial origins of the eucalyptus forests in
the Nilgiris District in Tamil Nadu, as well as the ecological, economic and social impacts of the
eucalyptus as an non-native species to India. Raising questions of history, environment and culture,
Scented Memento considers what is gained or mislaid along the path of migration; what can come
about when we unknot our roots, and what seeds we carry with us, contained in our memories, to
cast over fresh ground.

Bio: Writer/researcher Kathryn Hummel is the author of Poems from Here and The Bangalore Set.
Her diverse, award-winning poetry, fiction, non-fiction and photography has been published and
performed throughout Australia, New Zealand, the UK, the US and Asia, often in collaboration with
musicians and fellow writers. Throughout her travels, Kathryn has completed a PhD in narrative
ethnography and has been a writer-in-residence with Australian Poetry, Forever Now, 1ShanthiRoad
and the Kena Artists Initiative. Her movements can be tracked at @katscratchez and
www.kathrynhummel.com.


Dr Daniela Kaleva
Visuality in the transmission of cultural memory: The case of the cabaret show Gypsy Nights
In an age of mobility, dominance of digital communication and social media, the cabaret platform is
a unique participatory live experience that creates audience engagement on the emotional,
intellectual and social levels due to the absence of the fourth wall. This hybrid genre fuses music
with highly personal story telling by starring solo performers where the performers bodily presence,
idiosyncratic performance style and audio-visual story telling offer a spontaneous live encounter
with strong affective and cultural dimensions. I draw on the theory of visuality and my own
reflections of starring and devising the show to examine techniques of cultural memory transmission
with reference to the cabaret show Gypsy Nights. Part of the Adelaide Cabaret Fringe Festival in
2015, Gypsy Nights is an intercultural and multilingual cabaret show that traces processes of
mobility and migration and raises issues of displacement, racist behaviours and Australian refugee
politics. The analysis centres on the actors body and physical and scenographic elements of cultural
transmission.
Bio: Dr Daniela Kaleva is a musicologist, mezzo-soprano, and director and producer of opera and
cabaret. She teaches Performing Arts and Music at the University of South Australia. Danielas
research focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to music research, performance studies and
creative practice research. Her main interests are rhetorical visuality and plurimediality in opera and
theatre, and the performance and production of baroque opera. She is currently an Associate
Investigator of the ARC Centre for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100-1800). Gypsy Nights was
short-listed for the Independent Arts Foundation Award for Innovation 2015 by the Adelaide Critics
Circle.

Carolyn Lake
Conversations at the Australian Lesbian and Gay archives
The Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives," located at Parkville in Melbourne, is a volunteer-based
archive of material from a range of different sources. It is 'the only community group in Australia
that actively collects and preserves lesbian and gay material from across the country, and makes it
readily accessible'. This presentation reports on the three days that I spent in the archive, the
processes and experience of working in a queer archive, and initial findings from the materials
discovered there.

Emma Maguire
Visibility, Mediation and Life Narrative: Reading Camgirl Lifecasts from the Turn of the Millennium.
The first camgirls of the late 1990s placed cameras in their homes and broadcast their private lives
on the Internet. Known as lifecasting, this practice, along with forms like blogging and personal
webpage creation, prefigured important characteristics of todays networked media landscape:
ordinary people could gain fame and notoriety, and the public could share their mundane and
private lives on the web.
In this paper I explore how pioneers of webcam technology, camgirls like Jennifer Ringley (the first
lifecaster) and Ana Voog (who framed her lifecasting as artistic practice), explicitly engage with the

concept of being looked at: by inviting others to behold them, Voog and Ringley explore the gaze as
a framework through which they experiment with gender and embodiment. By playing with the
dynamic between audience and camgirl, Voog and Ringley compel us to consider the politics of
performance and self-presentation in a media landscape both hungry for and resistant to digital
modes of consuming private lives.
Bio: Dr Emma Maguire teaches life narrative at Monash University. She researches gender, digital
media, and auto/biography. You can find out more about her work and interests at:
emmamaguire.wordpress.com
Deb Matthews
How a digital remix community embodies and curates memory and affect.
CCMixter is a free music / spoken word online community based on the principles of creative
commons licensing. Anyone can join the community then upload, download and remix sound files
from the site, interact in the forums, post reviews and curate playlists. Many mixters are also active
on other social media platforms such as Facebook, You Tube, Instagram, Pinterest and Soundcloud,
forming multiple online connections among the community. Using two or three examples, I will
demonstrate how CCMixter embodies and curates memory and affect.
Example 1 explores how an interview on music and healing was incorporated into the remix pool.
Example 2 will discuss the community's response to the death of one of its members by considering
some of the forum posts and a tribute playlist.
Example 3 will briefly discuss in person meetings between fellow mixters.

Petra Mosmann
Thoughts on feminist objects: Faith Bandlers gloves
Faith Bandler was an activist and is remembered for her important role in the 1967 referendum on
the Aboriginal question. During the Yes campaign, she often wore a pair of white town gloves.1 In
2015, I asked the National Museum of Australia if they had anything relating to second wave
feminism in their collection. They sent me a list of objects and it tentatively included Bandlers
gloves. Recently, Bartlett and Henderson have argued that Bandlers gloves are an object produced
by a woman for feminism but imply that they do not belong in a collection of feminist things
because they are not directly connected to the womens movement.2 What does the inclusion or
exclusion of Bandlers gloves do to the narration of feminist movements? Should they be part of my
thesis, which focuses on feminist collections? If so, how should they feature?
Bio: Petra Mosmann is a postgraduate in the School of History and International Studies at Flinders
University. Her thesis explores the relationship between feminist theory, Australian feminist
collection practices, and histories.


1
See: Faith Bandlers gloves National Museum of Australia,
http://www.nma.gov.au/collections/highlights/faith-bandlers-gloves.
2

Alison Bartlett and Margaret Henderson (2016) What is a Feminist Object?

Feminist Material Culture and the Making of the Activist Object, Journal of Australian Studies,
40:2, 161-162.

Ioanna Petrescu
Objects that transmit or mediate cultural memory

Creative and cultural persistence within industrial globalisation is strikingly visible in the colourful
creations of Southern India, such as saris and street art at Pongal time in the provided image.
Mahabalipuram is the place of some of the oldest artefacts from Dravidian times (including the
Sangam period, 300 BCE 300 CE). Today traffic controllers wear pollution-tight surgical masks at
road intersections, monuments are cleaned/restored frequently and, all along the activities of
coping with the massive manufacturing industrialisation, there are festivals such as Pongal that offer
the cultural feast of traditional foods and colours. The image attached is part of a
photographic/poetic exegetical essay I am currently working on titled "Creative and cultural
persistence in the age of global industrialisation".

Bio: Dr Ioana Petrescu is a Romanian-born Australian academic and poet, who has published 3 books
of original poetry, more than 200 individual poems in literary journals, has edited numerous
collections of conference papers and creative writing, and has organised poetics symposia. Ioanas
current research focuses on ecocriticism, particularly on how industrialisation has impacted the
South-East Asian and Indian landscapes, fauna, flora, and consequently the people's creative views
on their own respective cultures under the pressure of becoming the global manufacturing hub.


Martin Potter

Local Content Producers: Community produced stories in the Big Stories, Small Towns project

Since 2008 the multi-year, multi-platform Big Stories, Small Towns documentary Project
(bigstories.com.au) has facilitated the telling, recording, archiving and dissemination of
auto/biographical narratives in Australia, Cambodia, West Papua, Malaysia and Indonesia. Big
Stories, Small Towns is a relational Project as evidenced in the capacity for multi-vocality and the
importance of social relations to the Project. Stories produced are the material embodiment of the
relationship between the filmmakers and the subjects. The Project seeks to describe multi-layered
communities and explore complex relations between people, social backgrounds, technology and
place. Recognising the intrinsic value of telling and documenting stories with the active
involvement of local people using a variety of media and technologies reveals emergent and
complex processes. In this paper I reflect on, from the perspective of a practitioner, the process of
working with small communities and non-professional media makers to facilitate their creative work.

Bio: Martin Potter is a creative director and producer of transmedia and media for development
projects including Big Stories, Small Towns (Community Champion, SXSWi), Stereopublic:
Crowdsourcing the Quiet (TED City 2.0 prize), Island Connect (US-Aid and ChildFund Sri Lanka) and
the White Building media and arts program in Phnom Penh (whitebuilding.org). He was 2012 Asialink
Dunlop Fellow and won the 2015 Vice-Chancellors Prize for Doctoral Thesis Excellence, Flinders
University and is currently Lecturer in Media Design and New Media Arts at James Cook University,
Townsville.

Ruth Vasey
Lost and Trove: lateral patterns of localised history in the age of the internet.

This unpaper is a rumination on the lateral connections that shape the outcomes of internet-based
localised historical enquiry.

Proposed by Ruth Vasey, Senior Lecturer, Department of Screen and Media, Flinders University.