Photo: The Crack Up. Image supplied by Deakin University.
Already recognised as the world’s most liveable city, Melbourne has its sights set on becoming the world’s smartest city.
From Monday 27 October to Sunday 2 November, the fifth annual Melbourne Knowledge Week, hosted by the City of Melbourne, presents over 90 events across the disciplines of science and medicine, art and culture, design and urban planning, business, technology and data, and children and family.
Spanning performance, literature, visual and sound arts, the art and culture program showcases the latest innovations and interventions in the field.
Premiering at Malthouse Theatre on Friday 31 October, The Crack Up is a 3D transmedia dance performance and the outcome of a three-year project grant from the Australia Research Council on large-scale, stereoscopic (3D) technology.
‘It challenges the current knowledge of things,’ said project research coordinator, Jonathan Homsey. ‘I feel with confidence that this technology can lead artists to start having new ideas and make the impossible possible.’
Taking its title from an essay by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack Up concerns the unravelling of one man’s reality.
‘Fitzgerald’s story anticipates the technological fragmentation of identity not as a loss, but as a means of recreating identity from assembling a multiplicity of representations of self,’ said director and choreographer Professor Kim Vincs.
‘Like Fitzgerald, the danced Crack Up asks “what is the end game of fragmentation?” Is it a mental break down or a normal state to which one must adapt?’ Vincs said.
Lead by Vincs, a team of animators from the Deakin Motion Lab have worked tirelessly to create startlingly beautiful virtual landscapes which audiences will view through 3D glasses. There is also an accompanying journey through The Crack Up app to be navigated by audiences on tablets or smart phones.
‘It’s like you get to explore the physical experience, then you have the immersive experience of the backdrop through the stereoscopic technology, then you also have the app, which is complementing what’s on stage,’ Homsey said.
‘I don’t want to give too much away, but there’s a scene where you feel like something is going to fall on your face because of the 3D technology and then I saw the coding for it and my jaw was on the floor. It’s like size eight font, pages and pages of code. It’s mind-blowing.’
The Crack Up team refer to their production as ‘transmedia’ because ‘it crosses art forms’ Homsey said.
‘You have the physical dancer and then you have the virtual landscapes and you can actually feel the object next to the dancer, so it kind of blurs the virtual and physical reality. The animation needs the choreography and the choreography needs the animation and together they are one.’
Homsey acknowledges that terms such as ‘immersive’, ‘augmented reality’ and ‘transmedia’ can lose meaning with overuse. For him, The Crack Up is powerful for the extent to which it tests the boundaries of language.
‘I feel like we don’t even have the right vocabulary to articulate how we feel when we watch it,’ he said. ‘I’ve worked with dance for a few years now and I still don’t have the right language to articulate the sheer awesomeness of it. It’s one of those things you just need to see.’
In a post-performance panel at 3pm on Saturday 1 November at Malthouse, join Kim Vincs and special guests Garry Stewart, Artistic Director of Australian Dance Theatre; Richard Mills, Artistic Director of Opera Victoria; and John McCormick, Deakin Motion Lab Research Fellow, to discuss the processes involved in creating The Crack Up, and address the wider implications of integrating new forms of digital and communication technologies into theatre processes.
Meanwhile, at the Ian Potter Art Museum, University of Melbourne, Dr Heather Gaunt, curator of academic programs and research, has been collaboratively developing Australia’s first visual art programs for students of medicine, dentistry, biomedicine and physiotherapy.
The programs address the way in which health practitioners visually produce documentary knowledge about their subjects, and responds to the perception that recent generations of health science graduates have suffered from a lack of understanding of the patient as a whole person and of themselves as clinicians with emotional needs and predispositions.
Explaining how art museums can be used to teach specific skills around diagnostic acumen, patient-centred care and the patient’s narrative and journey, Gaunt says the program ‘encourages students to think more along humanistic lines, as well as clinical, specialist ways in terms of dealing with patients’.
‘In 2012 we did a pilot with medical students who had been on clinical rounds at the Peter Mac,’ Gaunt said. ‘We brought them to the art museum and had them look at art works and practice objective and observational skills which then fed into a necessarily subjective interpretation.
‘We were emphasising aspects like the necessity to be very self-reflexive and reflective about what we were seeing and understanding the complexity of taking in visual information and how it’s influenced by prior knowledge and other experiences you’ve had.’
Gaunt mobilises a variety of artworks in her programs.
‘In the first instance, I used artworks that were hanging in an exhibition here at the Ian Potter, so I chose deliberately complex, highly narrative paintings typically that included a lot of human detail and a degree of ambiguity and complexity so that it’s not immediately obvious what is going on, you have to tease out a scenario and there could be multiple versions of what was going on.
‘But we often work with quite abstract art,’ she said. ‘Particularly, say, with the biomedicine students, where it’s not around human content, it’s really around excellent observational skills and communication ability and the ability to reason and argue around the information you gathered and to be careful about the difference between objective and subjective interpretive modes, then abstract art works just as well.
‘The parallel between an Australian Indigenous painting that is relatively abstract to our eyes, and, for example, a slide from a human cell – for the students there’s quite a direct link that can be made in terms of the visual skills that you need to happen in those contexts in terms of the degrees of unknowing and the alertness and visual awareness you need to bring out that information.’
Describing the feedback from veterinary science students in a program focused on enhancing their radiographic skills, Gaunt commented: ‘Universally, they said it was a really wonderful way to practice their skills, to practice being medical and being aware of the anxiety and concern that occurs naturally for beginning radiologists in terms of how to interpret this material.
‘I just love the work because you really feel like you’re doing something that’s important and valid and that the students generally respond really positively. You feel powerful when you’ve discovered you have the ability to look so well,’ she said.
For Melbourne Knowledge Week, Gaunt will be involved in two events including the Knowledge Week Panel Discussion on Visual Arts in Health Education on Wednesday 29 Oct 2014, 12.30 – 1.30pm, with collaborators Associate Professor Mina Borromeo (Convenor, Special Needs Dentistry), Associate Professor Clare Delany (Director of Teaching and Learning at the School of Health Sciences, The University of Melbourne and Senior Ethics Associate at the Children’s Bioethics Centre, at the Royal Children’s Hospital) and Dr Cathy Beck (Senior Lecturer in Diagnostic Imaging, Veterinary Science); and a Visual Arts in Health Education Demonstration Session on Thursday 30 October, 5.00 – 6.30pm, limited to 20 people, where Gaunt will lead participants in a visual observation and communication exercise.
From art giving to science to science giving to art, German sound artist Abel Korinsky, currently in Australia as part of in Experimenta Recharge: 6th International Biennial of Media Art, will present Big Bang a sound installation in the RMIT Gallery that investigates the possibility that of recovering historical sounds.
‘I’m developing a work which is based on the idea of what will happen if sound waves do not disappear. What will it be like if you can bring those sound waves back from the past? If you can hear the past?’ Korinsky said.
Korinsky takes his inspiration from Associate Professor John V. Corbett’s discovery of the imprint of gravitational waves from the big bang.
‘In physics, it’s possible to see the past. What would it be if it was the same for sound? What would it sound like if one day it were possible to hear the past?’ Korinsky asked.
‘Normally sound waves get weaker and weaker and go into a sound mix which is global noise,’ Korinsky said.
‘I will create a lot of white noise which is a symbol of the global noise we are living which surrounds all of us. If the audience sit in the installation, they will find out after a while voices or other sounds. And this will enable the audience to think about a sound narrative that disappears and will it be possible to bring back sound some day.
‘If you think that voices of dead persons are still there, I think that this will change our thinking of our society and of that sound will not disappear,’ Korinsky said.
As with previous works, Korinsky will incorporate visual elements into the installation. But the primary focus will be on the sound environment comprised of hundreds of thousands of synthetic sounds and field recordings.
For Korinsky, science can inform art, yet art can make a special contribution to science.
‘I think there’s a special relationship between art and science, specially in the media arts,’ he said.
‘Art can make science easier, because I think it’s more essential to listen to art or to see art and I think this central way to consume art makes it much easier to understand the fascinating aspects of science.’
On Tuesday 28 October and Thursday 30 October, 1 – 1.30pm, Abel Korinsky and Experimenta will host Lunchtime Open Studio at RMIT City Campus, 124 La Trobe St, Melbourne. Bookings available through bettina@experimenta.org.
On Wednesday 29 October, 530 – 7pm, in a panel session entitled Big Bang Sounds, Abel Korinsky will be joined by Lawrence Harvey, Associate Professor and Director SIAL Sound Studios, RMIT University, and astro-physicist, Dr Katie Mack, to discuss new findings and theories related to the Big Bang. Can the Big Bang be seen and heard today? What place does it hold in scientific and artistic discourse?
For the full program visit Melbourne Knowledge Week
