Transformations Seminar Series — 2004-2006

Place: Bundaberg CQU Campus
Date: 5th November, 2004

There is an impasse in the way we think about non-metropolitan areas in Australia, and their relation with the forces that are currently reshaping the world. The impasse involves a stubborn refusal to think beyond the centre/periphery model that places the metropolis as the source, and the periphery as the beneficiary of change. The effect of this type of thinking is to lock regional domains into a passive, recipient mode of existence, or alternatively as the space of a recalcitrant ‘other’, a place of difference that exists only as a means of identifying the ‘normal’ self of the centred metropole.
This seminar is designed to draw out the kind of conceptual tools needed to submit such centre/periphery models to critique, thereby opening up the potential in regional domains for change, but change based on an interlinking with the forces of change that operate on a global scale.

These concepts may be focussed around ideas of the virtual, the network, the image, issues of representation, aesthetics and arts practice, narrative interventions, media constructions of community and regionality, questions of history and the institutionalisation of memory, global-local interconnections.
Drawn from a range of disciplines and areas of research and other experiences, these concepts will need the critical and analytical power to submit values and received ideas to scrutiny, and to generate new arrangements and assemblages of ideas and various mediated experiences. The seminar will focus on (i) submitting the existing idea of the ‘bush’ as the historically established motif of regionality to critical scrutiny, and (ii) to exploring new and imaginative ways of redefining regionality through the employment of technologies in media and art.

Program

Time		Presenters	Topic
8.45 – 9.00	Registrations
9.00 – 10.00	Keynote	Assoc. Prof. Darren Tofts Swinburne University of Technology	f2f 2 url & b ond: space/time and the dissemination of community
10.00 – 11.00	Panel Discussion Brief discussion paper by each panel member (5-10mins), followed by discussion.	Chair: Phillip Roe Panel:       Darren Tofts       Warwick Mules       Terry Maybury	Where’s the Bush now? The future of the bush in the context of global information and communication technologies. What is or was the idea of the bush and how does it function in these times and in this environment? How do we think regionality and technology together, and what do these ideas mean in the Bush? Does this constitute a break(s) with the past, and how does the cultural ‘memory’ of the bush function now, and how does it enforce or enable continuities amidst discontinuities. How do regional communities engage these issues? Local-global interfaces Culture, technology, economy Technological futures
11.00 – 11.30	Morning Tea
11.30 – 1.00	Film		One Way Street: Fragments for Walter Benjamin Directed by John Hughes Details @ Ronin Films
1.00 – 2.00	Lunch
2.00 – 3.00	Presentations and Panel Discussion	Chair: Warwick Mules Panel: Grayson Cooke and Dea Morgain ("Desert Island" ). Phillip Roe ("Virtual Badlands: Preliminary Sketches" ).	Can we re-imagine the bush? Alternative visions of regional communities. Regional communities as visual fields. How do artistic practices of region, community and technology contribute to changed conceptions of region, community and technology? How can we approach artistic practices and new media sensibilities in relation to regional communities and landscapes?
3.00 – 3.30	Afternoon tea
3.30 – 4.30	Listening and Discussion		Regional Soundscapes (work in progress) Regional communities can also be aural fields. This sound track is composed firstly as soundscapes from central Queensland with which there is then a musical engagement. What are the effects of these different technologies of sounds on senses of space, place and time in a regional imaginary?
4.30 —	Wine and Cheese