The 6th Aotearoa Digital Arts Symposium examines the critical intersections between digital materials and art practice. What is the relationship of the digital to matter? How do we forge connections beyond art practices? And, what is the role of critical discourse in contemporary art practice?
These issues will be explored through keynote presentations, discussions, artist presentations, workshops, a screening programme, and an exhibition.
Critical-Digital-Matter takes place June 26-28, at the Victoria University School of Design.
The symposium features a keynote presentation by internationally renowned sound and intermedia artist Phil Dadson, and a remote conversation with London-based media theorist Matthew Fuller via De Balie, the centre for Culture and Politics in Amsterdam.
Conference sessions include: materiality in digital art; developing critical discourse in a small digital arts community; and forging connections beyond art. A wide range of artists and researchers from Wellington and around New Zealand present current projects.
Friday June 26 is dedicated to hands on workshops including: working with Arduino, Urban Screens, copyright, and teaching practice in digital media.
A screening programme at Thistle Hall on Friday June 26, curated by Alex MacKinnon, includes films by Daniel Crooks, Janine Randerson, Kurt Adams, Nathan Pohio, Sam Hamilton and Eve Gordon, and live performances by Expansion Bay, Tim Coster (with film by Aliki Boufis), and Discomedusae (with film by Edie Stevens and Discomedusae)
In association with ADA, Enjoy Public Art Gallery are showing Strata, an exhibition of digital art curated by Siv B. Fjaerestad and including work by Phil Dadson, Mike Heynes, Stella Brennan, Janine Randerson, Damian Stewart and Giles Whitaker (June 18 - 28).
ADA, the Aotearoa Digital Arts Trust, invites artists, researchers, curators, art enthusiasts and all those interested in critical digital material practice from Wellington and around New Zealand to participate.
Phil Dadson - Digital Resonances:
In terms of pure sound, I am attracted to intricate texture; the microscopic, the unexpected, the naturally rhythmic and the adventurous; to sound atmospheres and layered perspectives, to sounds that conjure mood and imagination, that convey ideas and express the human heart and soul.
Phil Dadson
Phil Dadson is an artist working in sound, music, performance and moving image. His practice includes solo and collaborative performances, video, installations, sound-sculptures and invented experimental musical instruments. An artist imbedded in the physicality of sound, whose practice straddles the physical and the digital, Phil will be presenting work from early performances and events utilising radio to recent collaborations.
An Arts Foundation Laureate widely recognised as one of New Zealand's leading artists, Phil has performed and exhibited internationally since the 1970s. Born in Napier, New Zealand 1946, Phil studied at Elam School of Fine Arts. Travelling to London, from 1968–9 he was a member of the foundation group for a scratch orchestra, with Cornelius Cardew, Michael Parsons and others. Returning to New Zealand to continue his studies, in 1970 he founded scratch orchestra (NZ) and From Scratch (1974–2002). Phil was lecturer in Intermedia at Elam from 1977–2001.
From Scratch's innovative performances included sculptural, ritual and theatrical elements. Large custom-built instruments of industrial and natural materials were used to create a variety of non-electronic sounds and energetic rhythms. In 1998, Global Hockets, a collaborative project with Frankfurt-based group Supreme Particles toured Europe. Since 2002, Phil has continued working under the name sonicsfromscratch. Co-author of the From Scratch Rhythm Workbook, he has also collaborated on two international award-winning performance films of From Scratch with director Gregor Nicholas, has released numerous LPs and CDs and is a co-author with Bart Hopkin of Plosive Aerophones, a book on the design and construction of slaptube instruments (see www.windworld.com/emi).
Phil Dadson contributes a unique understanding of Critical-Digital-Matter, exploring materiality through resonance.
Matthew Fuller
Matthew Fuller is David Gee Reader in Digital Media at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London.
He is the author of Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (MIT Press, 2005) and Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software (Autonomedia, 2003).
He has worked closely with the artists collective Mongrel, and was a member of the speculative software group I/O/D from 1994-1997 and most recently initiated the 'Digger Barley' project shown at Futuresonic and Manifesta 7. Along with architect Usman Haque he is author of 'Concurrent Versioning City' a FLOSS-inspired quasi-licence for urban construction. He is particularly interested in the cultural effects of technology.