The Feedback Chamber project sat within a larger 3 day event called ‘The Great Escape Festival’. In it’s third year, the festival was a major music + arts event with 10,000 participants, situated within The Newington Armoury in Sydney. As Arts Manager, I was responsible for the curation and delivery of a diverse (and robust!) arts program – working alongside the Mixed Industry (Mi5) festival and production team which included curators, artists and installation assistants.

The Feedback Chamber project offered a chance to shift focus from the larger scale of the festival to the production of single venue or ‘room’. Acting as both curator at a conceptual / spatial level and (most importantly) as an artist /co-collaborator, this project placed me in unfamiliar territory. It tested my practice and methodology within a completely new context – providing unexpected outcomes and valuable insights.

It is in this project that I first discovered that a creative armature could shift in format depending on the circumstances – or could simply be the altering of spatial and experiential conditions of a room (in this case, light and acoustics) in which invited sound artists could respond to. The project underscored the value of seeking out other artists as co-collaborators – despite the risk of making the project vulnerable to failure in a very public arena. It provided the opportunity for artists to transform a space and engage with the audience in ways far beyond what was initially thought possible from a curatorial perspective. It is here that I learnt that mutual trust between curator, curator as artist and artist are key.

As curator and artist within this room context, I was able to investigate ways to engage with the festival participant on an empathetic and intimate way – as both an observer of other artists work and as a performer creating new sound works – reading and responding to a room and it’s occupants (like designing with spatial and emotive elements) in real-time. In this way, the project provided immediate feedback on the successes and failures of these investigations, making this the most potent and emotionally satisfying project within the Masters ‘Ephemeral Laboratory’ research.

Making as play

This is an ongoing self-initiated project, inspired by weekly visits to the Rotary Sunday Market – a flea market located within a car park in suburban Camberwell. Running for over thirty years, the market has become an institution for anyone selling and/or looking for the strange, the bargain or the collectors item. It has also become a social hub for a diverse cross section of the community.

The market has provided a regular venue and context to collaborate with my partner, Ceri Hann – a Melbourne based sound and public arts practitioner. It also provided a constant in terms of location and conditions (with the exception of the weather), to source materials, make and draw on complimentary social processes already underway within the market, engaging with this community beyond being a fossicker.

While drawing on the notion of play / make in public spaces from other projects, this project has both reinforced my methodology in terms of sourcing and collating of raw materials, but also assisted in developing new methods in the creation of temporal environments where people could feel inspired to source and/ or make their own pieces. I found that the use of humour also goes a long way here – as does working with and subverting the familiar (like our shopping trolley studio).

The most influential aspect of this project was exploring the dynamic between the temporal and the constant. By working outside my area of making expertise and assembling wearables that would only last a few weeks, the project initially pushed against my architectural sensibilities of making an exquisite object and instead shifted the focus to simply exploring the way an object could embody an idea and mediate a conversation. This opened up a new understanding – devaluing the physical object and valuing instead the ephemeral event shared by maker / observer; seller / buyer.

The project provided an opportunity to work on a range of scales – from the assembly of small objects as if they were small 1:1 models to be worn on or near the body, to utilising the object as a mediator for conversation, to the establishment of a broader social network – pieces providing a mode of interconnection between wearers – moving far beyond the physical space of the marketplace. In this way, the ‘Public Assembly’ project became part of the community of temporal market stall holders while creating a new community of people wearing our jewellery pieces.

The ‘Ephemeral Laboratory’ seeks to create a methodology for myself and other practitioners working within the field of ephemeral architecture.

It tests the proposition that a robust armature can be developed to act as a common methodological device in the design, curation and orchestration of a diverse range of temporal engagements with participants and other practitioners within a variety of public realms.

It explores how this framework might redefine the notion of authorship by exploring different models for creative collaboration within a range of contexts – with particular focus on establishing conditions that can encourage outcomes that are unexpected – often going beyond an author’s expectations.

This enquiry draws on my personal practice – a body of work which has departed from the conventional notion of architectural practice over the past ten years to include projects that cut across a range of scales: urban curation; education; design management; installation and social intervention.

Four key and distinct project areas and scales of operation have been identified and critically examined:

- Urban (City)

- Campus (Institution | Corporation)

- Room (Black Box | Gallery)

-Object (Making as Intervention)

This studio investigated ‘pop-up’ and temporal design as a platform to encourage a range of engagements within the public realm. The studio acted as a live laboratory using the RMIT City Campus as a representation of the broader city context of Melbourne. Here we conducted hypothetical and real (1:1 scale) experiments that explored the relationship between the individual, the city and temporal spaces; insertions; overlays and events.

The aim of the studio was to develop a process, language and a conceptual underpinning for a temporal [bottom-up] practice which could be tested in a final project – situated within a commodified or community context within RMIT University. This challenged the Interior Design student to question the social and spatial amenities provided by the educational institution of RMIT University and to feel empowered to offer alternatives within an environment they had assumed was beyond their control.

“In the current debate over the use of public space in cities, temporary uses are seen as tools of empowerment: revealing the possibilities of space.” from Temporary Urban Spaces

The prospect of teaching a design studio within the School of Interior Design at RMIT offered a great opportunity to test the robustness of the creative armature or methodology I had been developing within my practice within a new and pedagogical context. Two timescales of different temporal qualities were apparent in this project – one: the temporal overlay of a teaching strategy for the duration of the semester; and the second: hands-on experiments as teaching tools of a few hours duration.

My role within this context was one of responsibility – establishing outlines, keeping attendance and feedback records and maintaining a right of care – answerable to both the subject coordinator and student expectations.Conceptually, it offered the chance to explore the four shifts in scale (urban, campus, room, object) within my practice and apply them within an intensive 14 week project – in a way, completing the circle – or suite of projects explored within the Ephemeral Laboratory.

It also allowed me to develop teaching tools to impart this design methodology to other designers. The most powerful of these tools was the creation an unfettered zone for play and experimentation via hands-on workshops and the engagement of external practitioners as collaborators to share their knowledge within this context.

The contemporary glass box extension / meeting room to Northcote Town hall provided the perfect ‘eye’ to the Melbourne skyline. It is here that a projection for the annual ‘Northern Exposure’ Festival was installed – intending to create a discourse with the city and the civic precinct of Northcote. The projection reflected the city’s past and it’s potential future – in particular: the rectification of a fundamental infringement – Native Title via the layering of the ANTaR thumbprints gathered during the project install.

The installation also explored the parameters of an immersive experience for the viewer:

A sound piece was incorporated and contained within the projection room: recording the sounds of contemporary Melbourne with a vox populi of people’s ideas of how they would change Melbourne to make it their ideal city.

…and

The intent was also to have the Treaty Supporters Scroll in the projection room for viewers to participate by providing their thumbprint – their shadows casing onto the projected beyond, proving that one can effect change on the future plans of their city.

Six Hundred Thousand Acres has two interlocking conceptual frameworks:

THUMBPRINT

Recognition of Northcote as the site of the 1835 treaty signed by John Batman & the Wurundjeri Tribe – for 600,000 acres – marking the commencement of the ‘compromisation’ or infringement of indigenous land rights within the Victorian region. The project install during May | June was also aligned exactly with the same time frame it took John Batman to travel from Tasmania to signing the treaty – which occurred just one day before the Northern Exposure exhibition opening on June 8. The installation responded to these events by incorporating and promoting the ANTaR (Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation) Treaty Supporters Scroll – where non indigenous Australians could ’sign’ their support with their thumbprint. Within the projection, the thumbprints layer one on top of the other – creating a potential critical mass of change

BLUEPRINT

Even though Batman’s treaty was declared invalid, it was key in the establishment of Melbourne. As Batman states in his journal: “about six miles up, found a river of good water and very deep. This will be a place for a village” It was this ‘village’ that was to become Melbourne.

Two years later, Robert Hoddle was instructed by Governor Bourke to survey and layout the town. Northcote, due to it’s elevated aspect, became instrumental in the surveying of the city and the setting out of the North | South road (High Street). So, despite being located on the city fringe, Northcote was intrinsically tied to the future vision of Melbourne, as a place of dreaming the future city. The installation responds to this notion by layering historical maps of Melbourne from 1835 to present day – like ghostly blueprints.

During the month of October, the Platform Gallery at Flinders St Station is set to transform into a virtual map of Melbourne. Showcasing ten artists whose practice interrogates the urban fabric, the exhibition will reveal sites for individuals and groups to creatively and temporarily intervene with the city.

www.interventionistguide.org

The Interventionist Guide is an exhibition which applies the principles of a flexible armature within a curatorial context – both framing my Masters research and providing a context for my ongoing practice. The intention of this project is to establish structures both organisational and physical which could provide or highlight opportunities for risk taking by way of public acts of creativity.

The project works on a range of scales – from the broad context of mapping the city, to the city interpreted within display cabinets and A5 sized zines within the subterranean Platform Gallery. It also engages with a range of artistic practitioners whose work ranges from the intimate wearable to the sound walk.