Keith Armstrong. Process and Presentation: the dual site interactive installation - Intimate Transactions.

I present 2 short documentaries that overview major developmental stages of the work Intimate Transactions, a long-term project that has arisen out of high-level professional practice. I also present a range of other key documentation materials that have formed an integral component of my practice as research methodology, tailored to hybrid, new media art making. The presentation also details processes of collaborative design, implementation and evaluation.
 
Intimate Transactions is an exciting new form of interactive installation that allows two people in separate spaces to interact simultaneously using their bodies. Each participant uses a physical interface called a ‘Bodyshelf'. By gently moving their bodies on this ‘smart furniture' they instigate Intimate Transactions, which influence an evolving ‘world' created from digital imagery, multichannel sound and tactile feedback. This shared experience allows each participant to gradually develop a form of sensory intimacy with the other, despite the fact that they are geographically separated and cannot physically see or hear each other. The work seeks to focus participants upon understanding influences and relationships within the work's ecologies.

Su Baker. You really had to be there! Experience and agency in contemporary art education.

Discussion around the creative industries and the creative economy is often bluntly focussed on pragmatic use-value: value-adding, translating cultural capital into cash. How does a tertiary art school operate in this context' This paper will develop the themes of experiential learning and agency and claim that the art school can enable participants, enact new forms of knowledge and more directly engage with the imperatives of an unknown but future-oriented cultural economy.

Chris Barker. The Changing Nature of Practice in a 'Networked Society'.

Estelle Barrett. Creative Arts Practice, Creative Industries: method and process as cultural capital.

The value of artistic research is related not only to the products of creative arts practices, but also to methodological, material and social processes through which they operate.

This paper argues that although creative arts research methods – the use of personally situated, interdisciplinary and emergent approaches – contradict what is usually expected of research,  such approaches underpin the innovative capacity of  studio enquiry and its implication for extending practice-led research pedagogy across all research disciplines.

Barbara Bolt. A Non Standard Deviation: handlability, praxical knowledge and practice led research.

Martin Heidegger’s notion of handlability builds on the assumption that our understanding of the world is predicated upon our dealings in the world. According to this perspective, we come to know the world theoretically only after we have come to understand it through handling. Through such dealings, our apprehension is neither merely perceptual nor rational. Rather, such dealings or handling reveals its own kind of tacit knowledge. This paper investigates the operations of handlability in creative arts research.

Neil Brown. Paradox and Imputation in the Explanation of Practical Innovation in Design.

This paper identifies the under-explored link between processes and artefacts in the designing relation. It proposes that it is the practical reasoning governing the relation between artefacts and practice that explains innovation in design. Opening up this gap admits a diversity of agents into the relation, a necessary ‘middle term’ that frames and extends our understanding of research into practice.

Lisa Chandler & Phil Gorbett. Design Dynamics: intersections between practice-led research and education.

The nexus between creative practice and pedagogy is explored in this paper which examines how practice-led research informed the production of an innovative educational DVD, Design Dynamics. By engaging in creative practice and undertaking reflective conversations with the design situation (Schön, 1991), the production team gained insights and greater understanding of the ‘design space’. This occurred through the dynamic processes of production and the synthesis of knowledge acquired both prior to, and through, creative practice.

Jim Chapman. The Creative Practice of Composition in a Cross-Cultural Musical Setting.

Composing music that refers to Western and African musical cultures brings with it many challenges. It throws to the foreground a need for a creative practice methodology that is suitable to the task. The methodology must identify valid references between the creative works and the musical repertoires to which the creative work refers. It must also encourage rather than dampen my creative and technical development. This study provides a framework through which analysis and creative practice inform each other. It allows a deepening of my musical language while at the same time, enables the creation of criteria to be used as a reference points for my methodology. Original works will be presented along with a discussion of my methodology and the proposed outcomes of the research.

Joanne Cys. Collaboration: experiment, mess and risk.

Collaboration has always been a problematic and even slightly uncomfortable proposition for architecture due to the contradiction of architectural practice as both individual and collective. Architecture has a chequered history of cooperation within and without the discipline due to the often minimal value placed on collective practice since medieval times and its desire to establish ownership of a clearly defined, yet elusive expertise.

In the Berlage Institute's 109 provisional attempts to address six simple and hard questions about what architects do today and where their profession might go tomorrow (2003), the 109 internationally renowned architects who offer their opinions of the future of the profession are almost equally divided between an adherence to architecture as an autonomous discipline concerned expressly with form making, and architecture as a necessarily wide-ranging pursuit with diverse specialisations. Yet despite this polarisation, almost all identify some level of collaboration as a necessary aspect of future practice and see it as a strength of the profession itself.

This paper will discuss issues of collaboration in relation to a recent creative disciplines design tournament that was held in South Australia. As an example of experimental multi-disciplinary design practice, the tournament processes and outcomes provide insight into practice-based research and also confront the premise of authorship and professional territory.

Roman Danylak and Ernest Edmonds. The Actor and the Virtual World: practice-based research as innovation in human-computer interaction.

Multimodal Interaction has created exciting new opportunities for the future of HCI. Current interfaces are, however, becoming congested owing to the easy transformations of digitised information from one application to another. For this reason, it is often difficult to clearly realise new potentials with computer assistance adding rather than reducing complexity. At the core of the problem lies the fact that the different requirements of time and space in multimodal interfaces are not compatible. The dimensional variations of image, sound, text and gesture recognition—to name but some of the data permutations possible—create complexities that are difficult to manage, especially when they operate side by side in the same machine. As such, what is required is new modelling to resolve these very difficult design issues. This paper will define a number of characteristics of multimodal interaction through the understanding that dramatic action, that is performance, is a primary human activity which the computer is now capable of amplifying as a technological extension of a spatial activity. Secondary to this is reading, the decoding of text, including images, which reactivates the body from the storage of the written. These two elements, the performed and the read, are respectively spatial and temporal forms present in computing and an understanding of their differences forms a matrix for multimodal interaction design. A discussion on previous modelling is included.

Steve Dillon. Save to DISC: documenting, designing, evaluating, and presenting innovation.

Digital media presents the opportunity for knowledge to be organised, presented and evaluated in new and more compelling ways. This paper presents creative case studies that utilise practice-led music and sound evidence as rigorous and accountable aspects of academic knowledge and content and the associated problems of evaluating non-text based work. A model of the save to DISC project is presented which documents innovative sound curriculum in schools and communities using a dynamic data base to store music education best practice examples and innovative music learning resources. It is proposed that this has relevance and is transferable to practice-led research because the focus is on evaluation through experience and explanation rather than evaluation through explanation.

Paul Draper, Matthew Hall, Jenny Wilson. Universities, Creativity and the Real World?

The University sector is yet to agree on a uniform approach for balancing the rights of student and staff creators with those of the institution, an essential element for certainty in collaborative relationships. This paper discusses pressing issues for creative practitioners and how the University might deal with intellectual property and creative practice as applied to staff, student and university collaborations.

Phil Edwards. On Being Peripatetic in a Scholarly World: some suggestions for new models of higher degrees research studies in Fine Art.

An exploration, though personal recollection of a developing research methodology and the examination of research aims as they are stated in contemporary Melbourne artist run spaces.The first part of the presentation will indicate how an awareness of research models can develop outside of an institution through the demonstration of aspects of the authors own art practice such as the instigation of alternative art spaces, collective anonymous zines and ad-hoc bands. Examples will be shown. The second part of the presentation examines collective art practices and collaborations as they are presented in some Melbourne artist run spaces with a view to suggesting research models that incorporate the possibility of the collective Phd. The position of the peripatetic artist is also considered

This paper investigates the meaning of the relationship between abstract and concrete forms of moving image, animation and sound in digital media. The dynamic integration of concrete and abstract forms in digital media is also considered.

Nancy de Freitas. Protocols and Reactions: mapping creativity in multi-disciplinary and collaborative practice.

This paper examines the generative and developmental phases of a multi-disciplinary artistic collaboration. It is a case study of an artwork in progress with a particular focus on the nature of the intellectual conversation and productive exchange that results from creative collaboration from the perspective of the principal artist. The study identifies a number of ways in which the working collaboration between artists impacts on the evolving artwork and shows that collaboration is an appropriate methodological approach in practice-based research. Within the context of a specific creative practice project, the artistic method of working and the evolutionary development of the work itself becomes the subject of inquiry.

Elizabeth Grierson. Where the Creative Arts Lie with Our Humanity? and What the Creative Arts Do for Our Society?: creative practice-based research in the culture of performance and accountability.

This paper tracks the governance of creativity and innovation in light of the creative artist whose practice-based research is curiously sidelined in officialised research culture. ‘Creativity' has been called ‘the underlying spirit of our age' (Florida , 2003) and is much heralded in policy documents that position innovation as the defining métier of the knowledge economy. However the concept of ‘creativity' is too easily conflated with economic strategies for performance in a globalised information context while the actual research practice of ‘the creative artist' is conveniently sidelined.

Michael Hannan. Interrogating Comprovisation as Practice-Led Research.

In this paper the author describes his practice of comprovisation, the making of new compositions from recordings of improvised material, and interrogates its validity within the debate about creative practice as research. Although the practice has random and intuitive elements he concludes that it is likely to produce new knowledge and is grounded in the tacit knowledge of composition technique. 

For researchers working at the nexus of the techno-scientific and the artistic, recent ontological theory that redefines the virtual condition is useful. This meta-theory is coupled with Pickering’s notion of temporally emergent practice as a “dance of agency”, where experimental goals are tuned to accommodate experience. Philosophical groundwork to underpin a hybrid methodology appropriate for practice-based new media research is outlined. It is suggested that the author’s own research presents a fractal of this more generic concern.

John Hunt. Urban Design as Practice-Led Research: the role of stakeholders in design innovation.

This paper investigates the potential for design processes in the context of urban redevelopment projects to be understood as a form of practice-led research. While collaborative design practices may readily incorporate a ‘research' dimension, the key role of stakeholder consultations in urban redevelopment raises questions about their place within the creative processes of design realisation.

The paper focuses on a major Auckland urban redevelopment project and examines the key role of stakeholder inputs in both framing the design (research) problem and in the development of innovative design outcomes. The establishment of a stakeholder reference group, and the use of discussion forums involving this group and the project design consultants as a crucial mechanism in the design development of the project, is outlined. An analysis of this forum process provides examples of the ways in which seemingly opposed positions and requirements amongst stakeholders were resolved. It will be argued that processes of collective speculation and debate played a crucial role in this regard. The paper concludes by suggesting that such processes, while taking consultation to another level, stop short of design collaborations.

Lyndal Jones. An Archive for the Web From The Darwin Translations. A Series of Eight Art Installations (1994 - 2000): on the use of propositions.

On the use of propositions takes as it’s starting point the web-archive of From the Darwin Translations, a series of artworks that utilise Charles Darwin’s theories of sexual selection to enter the feminist debate on pornography and sexual fantasy first foregrounded in the 1990s. This essay is part of a larger essay about the context for the series.  The complete essay can be found on the website. The entire archival project was submitted in May 2005 for examination as a PhD by Publication in the School of Art at RMIT University.

Simon Jones. Places In-Between: I do not have to be there to be there with you tonight. A Case Study Of Bodies In Flight's Performance Skinworks.

Using Bodies in Flight’s skinworks, this presentation explores how research questions emerge through practice-led research into performance.  It characterises these dynamics as interactive, feedback relations within a matrix of contexts, which provide, in their challenge to what constitutes knowing across communities of practice, a radical model for knowledge transfer between the academy and the creative industries – a new place in-between.

Rather than argue that arts practice constitutes research by legitimising the way the arts have utilised the research values, methods and measures imported from the hard and soft sciences, I would propose that arts practice is research because it makes available a range of emergent, enactive and enunciative tactics, strategies and logics for the everyday practice of person. This paper will explore multiplicity of embodied strategies and positions that arise from the ongoing debate regarding the relation of art and life.

If we reverse the current role of the arts as innovative expressivity, reflection and critique -- and propose instead that the role of art is to examine the construction and operation of perception, action and meaning, we arrive at an approach to spatiality and temporality that makes the practice of person a priority over the production of art. I will discuss one particular work of artists and architects, Arakawa and Gins, the Bioscleave House to explore the idea of an art ‘practice-as-research' that has been shifted to a meta-heuristic and anti-expressive level of engagement.

Susan Kerrigan. Reflecting on Documentary Video Practice.

This paper argues that by adopting a Reflective Practitioner Methodology (Schon, 1987) it is possible for a Video Documentary maker to reveal how practice informs and develops creative intuition (Bastick, 1982) by allowing the practitioner’s creative decision making process to test out the theoretical propositions of Creativity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988, 1996, 1999, Wallas in Rothenberg & Hausman, 1976). 

Helen Klaebe. Sharing Stories: collaboration, creativity and copyright.

A new dimension of creative collaboration is emerging, and this paper aims to share the journey of the KGUV Sharing Stories project so far, addressing the possibilities and pitfalls of the IP/copyright/moral rights contract. While this is a public history focussed on life-writing undertakings, the ensuing suggestions, discussion and possible solutions may apply generically to other collaborative partnerships.

Mike Leggatt. Meta-Design Approaches to Indexing Digital Media.

The contemporary burgeoning usage of digital media –- videos, audio and photographs –- and media distribution through networks both electronic and physical, will be considered in the context of a convergence of these media with a contemporary and popular interest in personal and community history. I will outline some research that seeks to develop tools for storing and retrieving audio-visual digital media whilst accommodating the perceived needs of the ‘memory worker’, both amateur and professional, whether as an individual, or a closed or open group.

Daniel Mafe and Andrew R. Brown. Emergent Matters: reflections on collaborative practice-led research.

This paper will address two threads of our research activities, firstly that they are iteratively informed by and informing of our creative practice and, secondly, that they involve the joint efforts of two research peers. Therefore, we describe this work as collaborative practice-led research. We outline some central concerns pertaining to the collaborative and practice-led nature of research and offer some reflections on our experiences of this approach in a creative arts context. As an overview of our content, we present a case study description of our collaborative project that explores Procedural Textures in animated image and sound. Both the generative techniques in the practice and the collaborative research relationship exhibit emergent properties; outcomes that provided unexpected surprises and novelty and produce more than the sum of the parts.

‘Eco-science (ecology) is not enough; Eco-wisdom (ecosophy) is needed’ (Naess, 1989b:185)

This paper backgrounds the current approach to ecologically sustainable design (ESD) while outlining the prevailing technological zeitgeist within which architecture operates.  In differentiating between ecology and ecosophy a quantum shift in attitude is explored. This allows the psychodynamics behind the act of commitment to be brought up for discussion and places the designer within a more holistic understanding of ESD.

Elizabeth McIntyre. Facilitating the Script: creative research in practice.

‘Facilitating the Script: Creative Research in Practice’ highlights the complexity of using Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s (1988, 1997, 1999) systems model of creativity in making a creative work. Through a self-reflexive account of the production methods used to produce a script, it is argued that the researcher is placed within the complex system of interaction between the individual, field and domain in the creative process.

Philip McIntyre. Creative Practice as Research: "testing out" the systems model of creativity through practitioner based enquiry.

The question: "how are messages created?'’ is only one of a number that have motivated research into communication (see Fiske 1994, Schirato & Yell 1996, Carey 1989, Cobley 1996, McQuail 1994, Mattelart 1998, Griffin 2000). It is, nonetheless, a fundamental one (Berger 1995). Using this question as a general focus, this paper will attempt to argue that without an insider/practitioner perspective on creative activity being added to the stock of knowledge available to all then that accumulated knowledge cannot be considered to be complete. Furthermore, to begin putting a framework together to allow this task to occur one should firstly be aware that academic research needs to be undertaken systematically. If it truly seeks to remedy the ignorance that exists about something and wants to have this knowledge available in a form that allows it to be readily disseminated, it needs to be exposed and tested, (DEST, 2001 & 2005). It is only then, as the arguments are presented (Popper 1959, Kuhn 1970, Feyerabend 1975, Chalmers 1982 & 1999), that it can be tested and argued and valid attempts made at explaining the truth of the matter being researched.

Sally Mclaughlin. Valuing Insight and Judgement: a hermeneutic perspective on the development of validating contexts for practice-based research in design.

The Western philosophical tradition has overlooked those forms of truth that are closest to us – assertions that draw attention to aspects of the referential wholes that govern our concerned engagement with the world – focussing instead on assertions that point to present-at-hand entities – the sort of entities that can be decontextualised from our everyday practical concerns and recontextualised in terms of ‘world pictures’ (theories). Designers, as makers, engage constantly with referential wholes – adopting and/or developing appropriate frames of reference as they respond to design situations, making judgements about the final form of design outcomes with reference to relevant referential wholes, and in the case of ‘strong’ design, bringing to the fore implicit aspects of referential wholes and/or reconfiguring those referential wholes.

Space must be made to acknowledge the truth of work that explores the potential of artefacts to deepen and broaden our understanding of ourselves, of each other and of the world. This paper is a development of a previous paper (McLaughlin, to be published) in which I argued that designers proceed by developing orientations towards a situation and that the articulation of these orientations should be considered a contribution to the knowledge of the domain. In this paper I will briefly summarise and expand on that argument by considering issues associated with the validation of such contributions as research.

Philip Neilsen. Digital Storytelling as Life-Writing: self-construction, therapeutic effect, textual analysis leading to an enabling 'aesthetic' for the community voice.

This article situates digital storytelling (DST) within a broader life-writing discourse, and while acknowledging the contested nature of the personal narrative, draws on psychoanalytic practice to suggest what could be the significant individual effects of DST. I also offer a textual analysis of some of the digital stories that were created as part of the Kelvin Grove Urban Village (KGUV) Sharing Stories project facilitated by Jean Burgess, and finally suggest details of a viable, simple aesthetic that could assist in further DST community practice, maximising the advantages DST may have over other life-writing forms, as well as highlighting the elements it has in common with them.

Maggie Philips. Falling into Value: musings on the gravity of performance as research.

The problem in this day and age lies not in the validity of practice-grounded creative research but in its failure to produce ‘discoveries' with clear economic advantages, especially given the resources required to facilitate its study/enactment. Through speculations derived from a Paul Virilio observation on the fundamental significance of gravity, precipitating a human experience of ‘falling into reality,' this paper speculates on the value and valuing of knowledge beyond limited paradigms of finance. What is the value of an unpatented concept that may be uniquely accessible through one or more of the creative arts' disciplines' What if this commonplace concept, circulating in an undiscriminating and ordinary free market, is obliterated from perception and use' Might not the human world come to a stand-still---or to be more physically correct, a conceptual lie-still' Could an interrogation of falling conducted by a group of dancers and choreographers illuminate some unthought aspect of gravity-bound existence that grounds the fabric of knowing' Falling into reality may not be a unique commodity but could it be fundamental to the very concept of value itself'

Research into and by means of creative practice stands in a perverse relation to mainstream Australian university research culture. It is conducted by scholar/practitioners from a mix of disciplines with similar concerns, but with very different institutional histories. It inhabits a series of oddly shaped and often disconnected pockets within university structures; spaces characterised by serial shifts in organisational and physical location, by unpredictable levels of institutional and peer support, and by unstable relationships, both with established fields of academic research and with professional and industry-based arts and cultural formations.

Hellen Sky. Liquid Paper 1 - Making Light of Gravity (embodiment in intelligent camera-based technology systems).

As co artistic director of 'company in space', my work has continually explored and questioned the technology which extends the relationship of the body to media, code worlds and physical architectures. Making Light of Gravity resources that body of work, It references the experience of being present as I perform and conceive work that alters my perception of where the body resides as it is extended via real time camera based(telmatic) and transmitted as data through wearable realtime motion capture systems.

Robyn Stewart. Smart Art: the mindful practitioner - researcher as knowledge worker.

This paper contends that the arts and design are improved by critical exercise as mindful practice. The creative practitioner, as methodological inventor, spawns new forms and patterns of research and practice. Their research mixes artistic, cultural, scholarly and industrial concerns in the experimental arena of the studio. These practices can become the established excellences of tomorrow as research comes alive.

Cheryl Stock. A Legacy of Innovation: contextualising an international creative practice project, Kolkata, West Bengal, December 2004.

Patrick Tarrant. Home Made: new media in the home mode.

This essay investigates the peculiar situation of a new media project which takes as its raw material the home-video archive of a deaf man gone blind. In an attempt to revive this 'lost archive', Planet Usher: An Interactive Home Movie looks to uncover enduring spaces of productivity and, in the process, to make a case for the enduring viability and importance of home modes of production.

Andrew Taylor. Research as a Dialectical Activity: writing a long poem in Rome.

Research can be a prior, extrinsic activity, and also an intrinsic part of the creative process itself. While I was writing a long poem in Rome in 2004 - a poem involving both the historical past and my own personal past - both kinds of research interacted in an inextricable dialectic, with consequences for both the poem’s form and its contents.

Robert Watson. Eyes and Ears: dramatic memory slicing and salable media content.

When we write criticism in prose, we are using an area of the brain which does not think coherently in terms of motion pictures or 3D audiovisual behavior. Taking the cue from Ryan and Bernard (2000) that the cultural researcher uses code to make sense of the world, this paper presents a coding research method that has impacted economically and culturally in Australia, and which supports the individual creativity of the writer-performer-screenmaker.

This paper is a presentation of in-progress research into my own creative and collaborative process in composition for live theatre.  The composition work covers three productions with Zen Zen Zo Physical Theatre in Brisbane, and the research aims to map the process in a manner that is applicable to all the musical pieces within the works.  Such a new awareness of process is useful to me in that it helps me to identify areas of inefficiency or potential problems, in some cases before they occur, and assists with planning the work. It is expected that the map will become refined enough to apply to all my collaborative work and to become useful for others in collaborative arts practice.