News

New Factual Storytelling – One-day Symposium

Ann Harding Conference Centre, University of Canberra
University Drive South Bruce, ACT 2617
Australia 
Friday, 10 April 2015 from 9:30 AM to 6:00 PM (AEST)
UC DocLab at the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research is delighted to host a one-day interdisciplinary symposium on New Factual Storytelling.

The symposium is particularly focused on emerging nonfiction media forms that expand the repertoire of practice and broaden our theoretical understandings of innovative uses of interactivity, locative and mobile technologies, multi-screen storytelling, mobile reality storytelling, participatory documentary storytelling, and ‘beyond the screen’ factual storytelling practices.

The symposium welcomes documentary and interactive media practitioners from across fields of social sciences, humanities and arts. Screening of works using interactivity and other innovative practices will complement scholarly discussions about new trends in factual storytelling. Working in panels, each panelist will have the opportunity to present a 10-minute proposition to the panel to stimulate open conversation.

The Centre for Cultural and Creative Research (CCCR), University of Canberra sponsors the symposium.

Primary themes include:

- Factual storytelling in multi-screen environments;
- Database documentaries and narrative fragmentation;
- Participatory documentary practices, diversity and inclusion;
- Geo-spatial mapping and storytelling;
- Augmented reality and ‘beyond the screen’ practices;
- Mobile ‘reality’ stories;
- Documentary activism, social media and community creation on- and offline;
- User-generated and user-curated stories;
- Embodiment and expanded cinema using factual material;
- The body as a source of factual storytelling data, intimacy, privacy;
- Factual storytelling through web-series;

In addition to panel submissions, public attendance is welcome (registration required).

Please register at Eventbrite

Panel participants:

Adrian Miles, RMIT
Dr Adrian Miles is Senior Lecturer and currently the Program Director of the Consilience Honours lab at RMIT. He is the leader of the Documentary node of RMIT's nonfictionLab. Adrian does research on hypertext media, networked interactive video, computational nonfiction, and interactive documentary. He undertakes theoretically inflected digital projects. Adrian's research interests include interactive nonfiction, pedagogies for new media, and digital video poetics - with a Deleuzean cinematic inflection.

Ana Sanchez Laws, UC
Dr Ana Sanchez Laws is Assistant Professor at the University of Canberra teaching Arts and Design. One strand of her research focuses on the use of new technologies to address contested topics in museums and issues of diversity and social inclusion in museums. She has written a book on these issues, Panamanian Museums and Historical Memory (Berghahn Books 2011). A second strand of research deals with the creation of digital artifacts to communicate cultural and natural heritage. Her second book Museum Websites and Social Media will be out on sale in October 2015. Her interactive documentary/serious game Angie Against the World is part of the national collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Panama and has been exhibited in Argentina, Costa Rica, Germany and Panama, and her poetic documentary Navigator was exhibited in the Barcelona Biennale, Centre Pompidou and Matadero Cinema Madrid.

Dawn Tuffery, Waikato Institute of Technology
Dawn Tuffery has a passion for animation, particularly stop-motion. She focused on this while completing her postgraduate study, and produced the short films Swing and Greensplat, which both screened in the NZ International Film Festival. Dawn has taught stop-motion animation at tertiary level and at workshops, and currently works at Waikato Institute of Technology in Hamilton, New Zealand.

Dean Keep, Swinburne University
Dean is a researcher/artist who teaches across a range of media disciplines including digital video and audio, digital imaging, convergence cultures and multi-platform narratives. Dean's research has a strong focus on mobile media cultures/practices, digital ethnography and memory studies. Dean's creative practice involves the use of heritage and emergent media technologies to examine the ways in which visual media may inform our understanding of historical time, place and personal/cultural memories. Dean is currently a PhD candidate at the School of Art, Australian National University, Canberra.

Gemma-Rose Thurnbull, University of Queensland
Gemma-Rose Turnbull instigates collaborative photographic projects that examine ways in which the integration of collaborative strategies and de-authored practice can catalyse social change agendas and policies through image making and sharing. She has collaborated with street-based sex workers, elderly people who have suffered from abuse, and children. In each of her projects, issues of power, othering, objectification and alienation are unavoidable. She is currently doing a practice-based PhD at The University of Queensland, Australia and was a Scholar in Residence in the Art and Social Practice Masters program at Portland State University from 2013–2014.

Jane Macknight, North Otago Museum and Forrester Galleries
Jane Macknight is the director of a regional museum and art gallery in NZ. Jane is leading a redevelopment combining art gallery, museum and archive on one site. A particular challenge is a major rethink of the museum stories and storytelling methods. From 2010–2014, Jane was a Curator at the National Archives of Australia, producing Traversing Antarctica: an Australian Experience and Design 29: Creating a Capital. In this time Jane explored a range of alternatives to traditional top-down, one-voice delivery methods, including single and multi-touch multi-interactive screens, film, sound and augmented reality delivered by iPad. Jane has worked as a ‘storyteller’ in cultural heritage institutions since 1999. 

Kamilla Bergsnev, Independent Artist 
Kamilla Bergsnev has a bachelor in Organisational Psychology from University of Bergen, and has undertaken courses at the Australian National University at master level on the topic of cellular neuroscience. Kamilla is the director of Timeless Timetrap, a documentary project about severe brain stroke.

Magali McDuffie, UC
In her PhD, Magali privileges the voices of Nyikina women, and looks at how three sisters, Lucy Marshall, Jeani Wabi and Anne Poelina, have influenced cultural actions and economic and self-determination initiatives at a local and national level. Through filmed interviews and narratives of their lived experiences, spanning 80 years and three generations, Magali looks at how the three sisters have responded and adapted to different waves of government policies, and at their increasing political role in the current context. 

Maria Posse, University of Sydney
Maria Posse studied Visual Arts, Literature and Documentary Film and obtained an MFA in Film, Video and New Media from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago in 2001. She has worked as a videographer and producer in Colombian local TV and as video artist and writer. She has taught in several universities and has directed long documentary projects that involved the participation of specific communities to address issues of colonisation, translation, sustainability, nationalism and cultural hybridity. Her work has been exhibited in museums, screened, broadcasted in national TV and has participated in International Film Festivals in the US and Europe. Currently Maria is a PhD candidate at Sydney College of the Arts and a Lecturer at the National Centre for Cultural Competence at the University of Sydney.

Patrick Kelly, RMIT
Dr Patrick Kelly is a Lecturer at RMIT's School of Media and Communication. He has worked as a writer and digital producer within the film, television, and online media industry since 2006, and currently serves as co­-director of Critical Animals creative arts festival. His teaching and research investigates traditional and contemporary image­-making forms and methods in the current technological age.

Peter Humble, UTS
Moving back and forth between image and sound, what links Humble's work is a focus on materiality – in his work, the photographic emulsion and the audiorecording standing in for a specific time and place. Originally trained as a musician, a kind of musical thinking underpins his work. 

Simon Cunich, UC
Simon Cunich is an Australian documentary filmmaker and television producer. He works as a freelance director, cinematographer and editor of documentaries, short films, television commercials, music videos and online videos; including educational, advocacy and promotional multimedia content for non-government organisations. Simon specialises in telling stories about human rights, development, social justice and environmental sustainability. He works in Canberra and Sydney, travelling interstate and internationally for projects, and collaborates with cinematographers, editors, animators and composers.

Stephen Barrass, UC
Stephen Barrass is an Associate Professor in Digital Design and Media Arts at the University of Canberra. His thesis on Auditory Information Design is among the most influential works in data sonification, and other contributions to the field include design patterns, psychoacoustic methods, acoustic sonifications, and the open source Mozzi sonification synthesiser. Stephen’s practice-led research has been curated for exhibitions in Bonn (1999), Melbourne (2003-2006), Seoul (2006), Siggraph Teapot Exhibition in Boston 2007, Experimenta Under the Radar at FACT in Liverpool and the ICA in London 2007, the International Symposium on Electronic Arts (ISEA) in Singapore 2008, Sydney (2010-2011), Barcelona (2010), Budapest (2011), Canberra (2010-2011), and Sweden (2011). His work ZiZi the Affectionate Couch is now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania. 

Tim Sherratt, UC
Tim Sherratt is a digital historian and cultural data hacker who has been developing online resources relating to archives, museums and history since 1993. He works between the academy and the cultural sector as Manager of Trove at the National Library of Australia and Associate Professor of Digital Heritage at the University of Canberra. He blogs at discontents.com.au and answers to @wragge on Twitter. 

Vanessa Berry, Macquarie University
Vanessa Berry is a writer, visual artist, and creative cartographer. She is currently researching literary nonfiction and experimental cartography for a PhD at Macquarie University. She is the author of two memoirs, Strawberry Hills Forever (Local Consumption Publications, 2007) and Ninety 9 (Giramondo, 2013). She is the author of the Sydney exploration blog Mirror Sydney, which documents lost, forgotten and overlooked aspects of the city and suburbs.

Zohar Kfir, Independent Artist
Zohar Kfir is a MontrĂ©al-based media artist working with experimental video, interactive art and installation. She holds a MFA from Concordia University’s Studio Arts Programme and a MPS from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). Her artistic practice deploys non-linear narrative to cover a wide range of topics; from poetic meditations to documentary interventions. Zohar has shown her work internationally in galleries and at video festivals, including Transmediale; NYUFF; FACT Liverpool; 56th Oberhausen Film Festival; SIGGRAPH2014 Art Gallery and ISEA Dubai among others.