Abstracts for Panel Presentations: Wendy Haslem, University of Melbourne: Chromatic Frankenstein's Monsters: Traces of History in Digital Restoration

This presentation will explore the traces of time revealed in the coloured restoration of 'Trip to the Moon' (Georges Melies, 1902/Lobster Films, 2011). Teresa Rizzo, University of Sydney: Television Assemblages Television has changed significantly in the last decade from a one-way communication system controlled by industry, to an interactive medium shaped by viewers desire for participation. Where once its content was restricted to the television set, now it is spread over a number of different sites that require audience engagement such as social networking sites, fan sites, discussion forums, video and photo sharing sites, game consoles, tablets, and mobile phones. This shift has meant a dramatic shift in television aesthetics that sees the traditional separation between industry and audience, and production, distribution and consumption has been blurred. As a result television has transformed from a closed system, where industry transmits programmes into the home for viewers to tune into, to an open system or an assemblage that is continually metamorphosing into something new through the viewers engagement. An assemblage for Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari is a formation that is made up of various connections such as technology, politics, discourses, culture, the law, as well as others. However, an assemblage is not a fixed entity, since the relationship between the various connections indeed, the connections themselves are constantly changing. This means that the assemblage has the potential to produce new kinds of interactions between concepts, discourses, institutions and culture. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattaris concept of assemblages this paper lays the groundwork for a new understanding of television aesthetics as interactive and based on affective viewer participation. Erin Brannigan, University of New South Wales: Yvonne Rainers Lives of Performers: an undisciplined film One of the challenges of working with intermedial art forms is identifying transmedial models for analysis of the same. In my previous work, gesture provided a critical concept that could frame a discussion across the creative disciplines of dance and film. For my current project, Dance and Intermedial Composition, composition is the key transmedial term and transposition (rather than transformation) the central model for interdisciplinary exchange. The project seeks to reposition the discipline of dance as a major player in some of the most important developments in the arts over the past 150 years, disturbing accepted hierarchies that privilege text- and imagebased forms. This involves thinking through the experimental practice of transposing compositional strategies from one art form to another (in this case primarily dance, music, writing, film and the visual arts), but also interrogating assumptions about the source of compositional concepts and terminology. At the heart of the project is a time and place that was post-high-modernism and pre-postmodern and provides some

of the clearest and most influential examples of intermediality, such as the Neo Avant-Garde milieu in New York in the 1950s/60s. In a recent paper on Yvonne Rainer I outlined a new approach to her early film work via Neo-Dada which establishes her work as undisciplined. Lives of Performers (1972) challenges disciplinary categories by mobilizing an aesthetics of difference that owes much to the theories of John Cage, and pioneered creative methods/effects such as openness, decentering, random orders, collage, contingency, multiplicity, process-as-product, non-hierarchical orders and a complication of the art/life divide.

Su Ballard, University of Wollongong: Vital Machines in the Art Gallery. This short presentation uses a recent curatorial project to discuss how art objects contribute to understandings of liveness. Abby Mellick Lopes, University of Western Sydney: The Ontological Design(ing) of the Digital Image In this presentation I explore the ecological and social implications of the digital image by mobilizing the emerging theory of ontological design. Ontological design characterises the nature and agency of design as a fundamental human activity shaping the condition or behaviour of what is (Willis 2006, p.81). The digital image has a powerful symbolic vitality that manifests independently of how it is being resourced and reproduced. As rhetorical devices at the forefront of the digital system, images can be conceptualised as energetic and cognitive materials that are reshaping how we see and experience material environments. Mobile ICT devices have for example very quickly materialized what David Michael Levin presciently called the frontal ontology of our age, an interpretation substantiated by the prevalence of mobile screen-based engagement as a new bodily posture, a rise in immediate engagement with worldviews designed by others and attached to these new social practices that extend between online and material environments. In our extensively and intensively designed worlds, digital images are reconfiguring environ/mental intuitions, perceptions of time, scale and change.

Nancy Mauro-Flude, Tasmanian College of the Arts, Hobart University of Tasmania: Title: The Intimacy of the Commandline. Command line computing is an expressive language within a shell It is an alternative interface paradigm. My central concern is the (everyday)---- use of the computer and its relationship to our embodiment. The implementation of an executable command, a line of code, may call on a series of interrelated programmes inside a terminal or shell. (THIS SPACE)-----

The body, like any organism, is in a constant state of flux and in this sense, consider the benefits of a more processual approach to human computer interaction. The regular use of a computational interface, has deep physiological effects When operating a computer we are obliged to interface with the machine by means of our human body, its movements, organs and sensory apparatus are engaged with the mechanism by way of its operation. Douglas Kahn, University of New South Wales: Inscription and transmission Friedrich Kittler bases his historical media theory upon recording technologies and inscription--as in the title of his well known book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter--whereas a more comprehensive theory would also require attention to telecommunications technologies and transmission. Melinda Rackham, artist/curator: Attachment Attachment is an autobiographical novel exploring adoption, relinquishment, loss and identity formation. I come from a background of electronic media, so making work inside such a traditional container as a printed book feels very experimental. Betty Sargeant, RMIT: How the humble picture book informs interaction design. Digital technologies have permeated all sectors of publishing. There are increasing expectations that books will contain multimedia, interactive, multi-genre content. What once were static pages are now responsive media arenas. Digital interactive storytelling commonly fuses text, still and moving images and audio. And, as I will argue, many of these digital works continue and extend the interactive, multimedia, playful design used within print picture books. In this discussion I assess some of the media content within three book apps: The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore, The Monster at the End of this Book, and my own work, How Far is UP? This involves investigating the links between words, images, playful design and multimedia. In conclusion, I propose possible future directions for highly interactive, multimedia digital books, assessing how these works have the potential to either strengthen or weaken the evolution of literature as an art-form. I also highlight the ways in which picture book making practices may inform digital interaction design, specifically within works that include animation, spoken audio and text Ben Judd, University of Western Sydney: Writing the City - Locative Writing and Social Media. Continuing advances in hand-held and wireless technologies have altered the way that we experience the landscape with devices such as mobile phones functioning as digital intermediaries between the body and its environment. Cities can now be seen as interfaces containing digital, interactive narratives that are accessible via the screen

of the mobile phone and anchored to public spaces through locative technology. By reflecting at the work of Walter Benjamin, Jason Farman and Villem Flusser, this paper looks at how handheld devices such as smart phones are creating a new form of flanerie. Walking through the city has become an act of digital inscription through locative features found on social media sites and GPS technologies that allow users to check-in, situating the body in time and place. Looking at theories of affect and space in the works of Kathleen Stewart and Nigel Thrift, this paper suggests how social media and mobile computing are creating an embodied and performative mode of writing using only the mobile handset and social media.