SPIN 2005

Next up is Robyn Stewart from the University of Southern Queensland, speaking on the practice-led researcher as a mindful 'knowledge worker'. (And I just lost my first paragraph, I'm afraid. Bugger.) She notes that there is no practice without an informed theory. Practitioner-research is a form of hybrid practice, then, which aims to capture and reflect the processes of artistic or design practice. It metamorphoses theory into practice, and studios function as experimental laboratories of practice in this context. Robyn points to creative work by Shelagh Morgan as an example here.

The research approach here is eclectic and breaks many boundaries; it is multifaceted. It creates intentional meanings through rigorous planning, documentation, and design. The process involves both artistic and scientific elements with elements of bricolage, perhaps reflecting a contemporary postmodern impulse of reconnecting with existing antecedents - we cannot break with tradition unless we are familiar with that tradition.

We start the next session with John Hunt, speaking on urban design as a form of practice-led research. He defines urban design as the design of the public realm, and focusses on the example of a site located on the Auckland waterfront. The project follows from an earlier redesign project in the site, which caused some degree of public controversy. Different approaches to the urban redesign project emerged from the initial call for project idea submissions (from the general public, not only from architects).

John describes this process in itself as a form of practice-led research within the criteria set by the city council. Judging on the submissions were representatives from a number of stakeholders (from political, economic, and cultural bodies as well as design professionals). Several themes emerged from the process - a distinctive character, a people-friendly environment, a pleasant and efficient transport interchange, and the arts and heritage aspects involved. In the stakeholder consultation and comment process large shifts in the submissions' character occurred; comments fed back into redeveloped submissions.

Up next is Keith Armstrong, presenting on his interactive installation Intimate Transactions. This project has developed over the last four years; it is a dual-site installation by the Transmute collective with a number of additional interdisciplinary collaborators, using image, sound, and tactile elements. It was shown in various stages over the last few years in a variety of venues in Brisbane, Sydney, Glasgow and Doncaster. Now it's going to be dual-sited between Brisbane and ACMI in Melbourne before heading overseas again.

And we're back for the next session, in the multimedia arts space the Block on the Creative Industries Precinct. The presentations in this session will be by my colleagues Patrick Tarrant and Keith Armstrong, and blogging them will be an interesting experiment as they're largely multimedial and it's very dark in here.

Patrick opens with his project Planet Usher, billed as an interactive home movie. It is based around 20 years' worth of home video films created by his brother Peter who is deaf and gradually losing his sight as a result of Ushers syndrome. The project was always also devised as a creative practice as research project.

Finally for this session we're on to Allison Richards from the University of Melbourne, speaking on 'perversity as method' in practice-led research. She suggest that the advent of such research is an inherently paradoxical activity for universities, and follows on from some other paradoxes and historical accidents in the field. While some disciplines (e.g. music, art history) have been represented in universities for a long time, others have only recently joined arts programmes, and not all of these have traditionally had an active research culture, so that the pressure to engage in research has in some cases been an external rather than an intrinsic one. The scramble to engage in research has led to some interesting positional shifts, then - and have occasionally also led to the wholesale importation of existing modes of discourse into newly established university discourses (e.g. dance disciplines which are placed in applied science departments).

Next up is Jondi Keane from Griffith University, speaking on practice-as-research and the 'realisation of living'. He suggests that such practice may need to re-positioned away from traditional arts models (which attempt to find emergent and pre-adaptive conditions for the purpose of finding new possibilities), but also away from possible science-based models (which transcribe the organism in action within a prefigured solution space, using the laws of probability).

The key question here is the position of the observer inside or outside art. Cognition is embodied and distributed, and so the activities of practice as research need to consider anti-utopian, anti-teleological, and anti-expressive qualities. He runs through a number of images to underline this point, many of them apparently by a group called Reversible Destiny. Anti-utopianism appears in a refusal of architecture to build utopian spaces, while anti-teleological approaches have much to do with a reconceptualised presence and identity, again through architectural practices (and Jondi uses the Bioscleave House project in East Hampton, Long Island as an example here). Anti-expression is pursued through the development of procedural rather than functional spaces, for example through playing with perspective. In other words, Jondi concludes, the innovation of practice-as-research signals a reconstitution of knowledge: anti-utopian approaches critique the faculties of reason; anti-teleological approaches re-examine what constitutes border identities and their rules of judgment; anti-expressive investigations emphasise the heuristic benefits of the research for 'organism that persons'.

Some good conversations in the lunch break, including with my colleague Christy Collis here at QUT, whose mum apparently also reads my blog - hi! Christy and I will share some ideas about approaches to teaching with technology and teaching media studies in a non-historicised format soon.

A conference like SPIN also opens up some very interesting questions - will I choose the sessions I see based on their blogability? In this session, I have - I'm in a session with relatively traditional scholarly papers... First up is Joanne Cys from the University of South Australia, presenting on 'Collaboration: Experiment, Mess and Risk'. She begins by discussion collaboration in a professional context (here, architecture), and notes the increasingly blurry disciplinary boundaries which might in turn blur the lines of what is and isn't collaboration. Architecture is problematic here as it has placed relatively low value on collaborative practice for some time. The common view is that 'those secure in the knowledge of their own field make the best collaborators.'

I'm spending the next three days at SPIN - the Speculation and Innovation conference. Not a long way to travel as it's literally just held outside my office door here at QUT. The subtitle for SPIN is 'applying practice-led research in the creative industries', and so it's mainly dealing with the question of recognising creative practice as research - an important issue for the Creative Industries Faculty in particular, but beyond this for creative practitioners throughout Australia and the world.

We're now starting the first keynote session which will set the theme for the conference; it will be delivered by Arun Sharma, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research & Commercialisation at QUT after an official welcome by Rod Wissler, Director of Research and Research Training. Arun speaks on competitive advantage in the globalised research environment. He notes that from the perspective of commercialisation of research there exists a hierarchy of impact, which determines the public governmental perception of researchers - and he also reminds us that internationally this impact will be determined increasingly in the Chinese, Indian, and Japanese markets. Success and impact in cutting-edge fields also determines the quality of life for a country's population, of course - and these fields now stretch well beyond pure science and technology. Australia in particular may not be able to compete in these fields alone, given the current economic climate. It may need to seek its successes in innovation rather than manufacturing and service, for example - exploiting what Arun calls its domain knowledge in the fields where it is a leader (he mentions mining management software and bionic ear implants for example) but leaving other fields to those countries which are leading there.