The development of camera phones in the mid-2000s has generated new ways of making mobile art. Wa... more The development of camera phones in the mid-2000s has generated new ways of making mobile art. Wayfaring, co-presence and mobility are concepts through which mobile media art can be reimagined. Our ability to easily document our movements through everyday life has shifted how we think about film and photography. This is the background for the creative practice research discussed here. This chapter asks: “What new forms of creative expressions are emerging and in what ways is creative practice research engaging with them?” The authors cast themselves as digital wayfarers whose online and physical worlds are entangled in urban and coastal places to research some of the creative possibilities to photographers, artists and writers presented by the extreme accessibility of smartphones. In this chapter, the focus is on the making of creative works.
This thesis was scanned from the print manuscript for digital preservation and is copyright the a... more This thesis was scanned from the print manuscript for digital preservation and is copyright the author. Researchers can access this thesis by asking their local university, institution or public library to make a request on their behalf. Monash staff and postgraduate students can use the link in the Reference field.
New migrants confront multiple problems related to accessing appropriate health services and info... more New migrants confront multiple problems related to accessing appropriate health services and information on arrival in a new country. While research has examined the extent and impact of these problems, much less is known about the role of digital technology, particularly social networking sites, in supporting or undermining the health of migrants. Scholarship on migrant health has yet to engage with the role digital channels play in providing migrants with an alternative means to communicate about health issues that concern them. Yet emerging studies show that migrants are increasingly seeking information about health issues online, either by conducting a Google search on their symptoms or posing (often anonymous) questions in online discussion forums (Ayers et al 2013, Bhandari et al 2014). Further studies demonstrate that the phenomenon of 'Googling' symptoms, what we call asking Dr Google, appears more acute among new migrant and ethnic communities often confronted with concomitant issues in the new homeland. In our focus on new migrants in Australia, we ask what happens to the value and nature of health and medical information when it is circulated in this context. We show that for new migrants access to healthcare is not only restricted by cultural, linguistic and financial constraints, but that the process of migration itself can transforms how new migrants conceptualize their own health and place in the community. Such ways of examining the modes in which health information is transmitted in multicultural environments necessitates new approaches to understanding the social networks of migrants and the changing role these networks play in shaping the ways people think about their own and family's health during migration and resettlement
The rate of change in mobile media over the last decade has been huge. In 2005, a fellow academic... more The rate of change in mobile media over the last decade has been huge. In 2005, a fellow academic in new media told me that mobile phones were only good for voice conversations and texts. He gently suggested I was wasting my time with my experiments with the camera and the screen because it was a toy and a gimmick, and that no one would ever watch movies on mobile phones. This chapter will reflect on how these changes have impacted on creative practices and will open out ways of imagining futures for mobile media and creative practices with smart mobile devices. It will draw together how ethnographic approaches with smartphones and other mobile devices can extend creative practice research into new directions including augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR).
This chapter explores what can happen when creative practice research meets ethnography. While et... more This chapter explores what can happen when creative practice research meets ethnography. While ethnography has a long and proud history, creative practice is a relative newcomer as a research methodology. Often creative practice research in the screen production areas is obsessed with representation. Filmmaking, photography and screenwriting suggest representational research strategies with a strong focus on artifacts as texts. Over the last decade there has been a push in creative practice research toward research that emphasises the experiential. Ethnographic writing strategies provide useful alternatives and additions to reflection on process as a way of constructing knowledge. Ethnographic approaches capture the nuances of the experiential, affective and sensory aspects of everyday life. This chapter argues that there is much to be gained from mingling creative practice research with ethnographic approaches to research.
ABSTRACT We are living in a moment where new types of visuality and vernaculars are emerging. For... more ABSTRACT We are living in a moment where new types of visuality and vernaculars are emerging. For many of us sharing of objects such as photos and video has become a part of our daily routines. The sheer volume of videos and photos uploaded to social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram provide ample evidence of our desire to document and share our most ordinary moments. Details of our lives are out in the open through the entangled zones of smartphones, networks and geography. In this paper, I explore some of the entanglements of video and photography have with life our lives, both physically and through social media, and how these might be understood within a broader context of emplaced visualities through a short and sharp digital ethnography of how creative practitioners who participate in social media groups use photographs and video.
This article asks how educators at tertiary level might attempt to address gender diversity behin... more This article asks how educators at tertiary level might attempt to address gender diversity behind the camera in student productions. The 2020 Australian Screen Production Education and Research Association (ASPERA) report Diversity On and Off Screen in Australian Film Schools outlines the results of a national survey measuring levels of gender diversity behind the camera in Australian university capstone (major project-based) screen production units. The survey results reveal that, while close to even numbers of male and female students are completing capstone projects in screen production departments and film schools in Australia, crew roles are highly gendered. A gendered skew is most pronounced in the roles of cinematographer and sound designer (male dominated), and producer and production designer (female dominated). We argue that an investigation of this subject calls for an examination of the specificity of the tertiary screen production environment. The crewing of student pr...
In this chapter, I discuss how writing in social media spaces takes on a performance as well as a... more In this chapter, I discuss how writing in social media spaces takes on a performance as well as a social dimension. There is an oscillation between people, poems and words in Twitter hashtag streams and in Facebook groups. The act of writing poems or posting visual images such as photographs becomes performance as well as communication. People who participate in online poetry networks get to know each other through each other’s words and images and come together to improvise with digitally co-present others. There is a relational aesthetics at play. This chapter will include some research data from an article previously published in Text Journal http://textjournal.com.au/oct11/berry.htm. In that article (Berry 2011), I explored implications of social media for literary creative practice and how it may encourage participation in creative practice communities and move creative writing into new areas and forms. Here, I also present previously unpublished material drawn from a participatory art project using Twitter which I directed in a gallery space in 2013 to further explore the performance dimensions of writing in social and mobile media spaces.
This report was commissioned by the Australian Screen Production Education and Research Associati... more This report was commissioned by the Australian Screen Production Education and Research Association (ASPERA) and conducted by its Research Sub-Committee, for the beneft of the ASPERA community in Australia and other screen/media education and research communities internationally. It provides an overview of current working environments of screen production practitioner-researchers in Australian universities, and how the frameworks for research reporting and evaluation within them impact on these working environments. The project was conducted through analysis of national research reports and guidelines (e.g., Excellence in Research for Australia, The Watt Review), and interviews conducted with staff working either directly in the screen production research discipline, or in broader research reporting, evaluation and mentoring roles.The report highlights that environments for creative practice research vary greatly across universities. Despite concerted efort and attention given by un...
This document describes how the Australian Screen Production Education and Research Association (... more This document describes how the Australian Screen Production Education and Research Association (ASPERA) recognises, and therefore measures, research quality in screen production. The aim is to provide a set of guidelines and principles that can assist those who undertake and evaluate creative practice research in screen production to determine various levels of 'excellence'. While advisory, not prescriptive, the document acknowledges that universities are increasingly focussed on 'quality' research, and that the discipline of screen production can benefit from a set of shared understandings about what this quality might look like.While this document has been created with an awareness of the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) guidelines, it provides an independent view of how excellence in screen production research is understood and reviewed by peers in the discipline. It is important to note, therefore, that the project was driven by the ASPERA community an...
In early 2012, I was invited by Pilbara Writers group in Karratha to make a poetry map for the Pi... more In early 2012, I was invited by Pilbara Writers group in Karratha to make a poetry map for the Pilbara region when they saw the Poetry 4 U website (http://poetry4U.org ) where poems are pinned to geographic locations. I visited the Pilbara June 17 – 23, 2012 to commence the poetry mapping project with members of the Pilbara Writers group. By walking with video when writers took me to their favourite places I was able to document visceral intersubjective experiences of these places, of being there together, so that I could empathically share the writers’ sense of landscape. This paper discusses what happens when a hodological approach is taken to explore connections and flows between poetic expressions, places and landscapes.
Any computer game with a strong story has difficulty balancing the tension between narrative and ... more Any computer game with a strong story has difficulty balancing the tension between narrative and agency. Strong narrative usually results in weak agency, and strong agency can weaken narrative structure. Narrative improvisation, adapting the story based on player reactions, is a difficult task for a game designer. Narrative improvisation, however, is regularly practised by the human game masters (GMs) of tabletop roleplaying games. As the first stage of building a game master agent (GMA), this paper examines the moment in which GMs decide if and how to alter their storyline due to player action. GMs were interviewed to discover their reactions when players make unexpected choices. Ten themes emerged from analysis of the interviews, we examined these themes to determine the thought processes that took place in the GMs’ minds, and we represented the processes as flow charts. These decision charts are a first step in the construction of a GMA that could assist in the development of more responsive interactive narrative in computer games.
Creative Mobile Media II: Making a Difference provides an overview of the edited collection and o... more Creative Mobile Media II: Making a Difference provides an overview of the edited collection and outlines its structure in the three sections: Story-making, Making spaces and Making change. This introduction frames the book theoretically and illustrates the continuation from Creative Mobile Media in an Age of Smartphones. While our previous volume focused on creative projects as inspiration for debates relating to aesthetics, space and place, knowledge and stories and the self, Creative Mobile Media II explores how smartphones may influence to social change and can further expand the definition of creative practices relating to the field of screen media. Story-making can contribute to formulating democratic processes and equity, which are imperative to create change and challenge traditional models of media production and consumption.
Aura explores a variety of themes related to the narrative constructions of family histories whic... more Aura explores a variety of themes related to the narrative constructions of family histories which have been derived through the medium of photography. Using old and recent photographs, the thirteen artists in this exhibition have produced works comprising a variety of mediums - from digital photography and new media to installation - through which they explore the rather complex narratives of their own families.
This chapter elaborates on the creative dimensions of mobile media practices point at prospects t... more This chapter elaborates on the creative dimensions of mobile media practices point at prospects to further expand the field of creative arts and design. It contributes to existing debates around co-presence in networked media and the impact of smartphones on our understandings and interactions with space and place; emergent socialities associated with social media to contextualize the notion of 'sharing' and how this concept is replacing 'community'; the aesthetics of mobile media; and how storytelling shapes and is shaped by mobile media.
The development of camera phones in the mid-2000s has generated new ways of making mobile art. Wa... more The development of camera phones in the mid-2000s has generated new ways of making mobile art. Wayfaring, co-presence and mobility are concepts through which mobile media art can be reimagined. Our ability to easily document our movements through everyday life has shifted how we think about film and photography. This is the background for the creative practice research discussed here. This chapter asks: “What new forms of creative expressions are emerging and in what ways is creative practice research engaging with them?” The authors cast themselves as digital wayfarers whose online and physical worlds are entangled in urban and coastal places to research some of the creative possibilities to photographers, artists and writers presented by the extreme accessibility of smartphones. In this chapter, the focus is on the making of creative works.
This thesis was scanned from the print manuscript for digital preservation and is copyright the a... more This thesis was scanned from the print manuscript for digital preservation and is copyright the author. Researchers can access this thesis by asking their local university, institution or public library to make a request on their behalf. Monash staff and postgraduate students can use the link in the Reference field.
New migrants confront multiple problems related to accessing appropriate health services and info... more New migrants confront multiple problems related to accessing appropriate health services and information on arrival in a new country. While research has examined the extent and impact of these problems, much less is known about the role of digital technology, particularly social networking sites, in supporting or undermining the health of migrants. Scholarship on migrant health has yet to engage with the role digital channels play in providing migrants with an alternative means to communicate about health issues that concern them. Yet emerging studies show that migrants are increasingly seeking information about health issues online, either by conducting a Google search on their symptoms or posing (often anonymous) questions in online discussion forums (Ayers et al 2013, Bhandari et al 2014). Further studies demonstrate that the phenomenon of 'Googling' symptoms, what we call asking Dr Google, appears more acute among new migrant and ethnic communities often confronted with concomitant issues in the new homeland. In our focus on new migrants in Australia, we ask what happens to the value and nature of health and medical information when it is circulated in this context. We show that for new migrants access to healthcare is not only restricted by cultural, linguistic and financial constraints, but that the process of migration itself can transforms how new migrants conceptualize their own health and place in the community. Such ways of examining the modes in which health information is transmitted in multicultural environments necessitates new approaches to understanding the social networks of migrants and the changing role these networks play in shaping the ways people think about their own and family's health during migration and resettlement
The rate of change in mobile media over the last decade has been huge. In 2005, a fellow academic... more The rate of change in mobile media over the last decade has been huge. In 2005, a fellow academic in new media told me that mobile phones were only good for voice conversations and texts. He gently suggested I was wasting my time with my experiments with the camera and the screen because it was a toy and a gimmick, and that no one would ever watch movies on mobile phones. This chapter will reflect on how these changes have impacted on creative practices and will open out ways of imagining futures for mobile media and creative practices with smart mobile devices. It will draw together how ethnographic approaches with smartphones and other mobile devices can extend creative practice research into new directions including augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR).
This chapter explores what can happen when creative practice research meets ethnography. While et... more This chapter explores what can happen when creative practice research meets ethnography. While ethnography has a long and proud history, creative practice is a relative newcomer as a research methodology. Often creative practice research in the screen production areas is obsessed with representation. Filmmaking, photography and screenwriting suggest representational research strategies with a strong focus on artifacts as texts. Over the last decade there has been a push in creative practice research toward research that emphasises the experiential. Ethnographic writing strategies provide useful alternatives and additions to reflection on process as a way of constructing knowledge. Ethnographic approaches capture the nuances of the experiential, affective and sensory aspects of everyday life. This chapter argues that there is much to be gained from mingling creative practice research with ethnographic approaches to research.
ABSTRACT We are living in a moment where new types of visuality and vernaculars are emerging. For... more ABSTRACT We are living in a moment where new types of visuality and vernaculars are emerging. For many of us sharing of objects such as photos and video has become a part of our daily routines. The sheer volume of videos and photos uploaded to social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram provide ample evidence of our desire to document and share our most ordinary moments. Details of our lives are out in the open through the entangled zones of smartphones, networks and geography. In this paper, I explore some of the entanglements of video and photography have with life our lives, both physically and through social media, and how these might be understood within a broader context of emplaced visualities through a short and sharp digital ethnography of how creative practitioners who participate in social media groups use photographs and video.
This article asks how educators at tertiary level might attempt to address gender diversity behin... more This article asks how educators at tertiary level might attempt to address gender diversity behind the camera in student productions. The 2020 Australian Screen Production Education and Research Association (ASPERA) report Diversity On and Off Screen in Australian Film Schools outlines the results of a national survey measuring levels of gender diversity behind the camera in Australian university capstone (major project-based) screen production units. The survey results reveal that, while close to even numbers of male and female students are completing capstone projects in screen production departments and film schools in Australia, crew roles are highly gendered. A gendered skew is most pronounced in the roles of cinematographer and sound designer (male dominated), and producer and production designer (female dominated). We argue that an investigation of this subject calls for an examination of the specificity of the tertiary screen production environment. The crewing of student pr...
In this chapter, I discuss how writing in social media spaces takes on a performance as well as a... more In this chapter, I discuss how writing in social media spaces takes on a performance as well as a social dimension. There is an oscillation between people, poems and words in Twitter hashtag streams and in Facebook groups. The act of writing poems or posting visual images such as photographs becomes performance as well as communication. People who participate in online poetry networks get to know each other through each other’s words and images and come together to improvise with digitally co-present others. There is a relational aesthetics at play. This chapter will include some research data from an article previously published in Text Journal http://textjournal.com.au/oct11/berry.htm. In that article (Berry 2011), I explored implications of social media for literary creative practice and how it may encourage participation in creative practice communities and move creative writing into new areas and forms. Here, I also present previously unpublished material drawn from a participatory art project using Twitter which I directed in a gallery space in 2013 to further explore the performance dimensions of writing in social and mobile media spaces.
This report was commissioned by the Australian Screen Production Education and Research Associati... more This report was commissioned by the Australian Screen Production Education and Research Association (ASPERA) and conducted by its Research Sub-Committee, for the beneft of the ASPERA community in Australia and other screen/media education and research communities internationally. It provides an overview of current working environments of screen production practitioner-researchers in Australian universities, and how the frameworks for research reporting and evaluation within them impact on these working environments. The project was conducted through analysis of national research reports and guidelines (e.g., Excellence in Research for Australia, The Watt Review), and interviews conducted with staff working either directly in the screen production research discipline, or in broader research reporting, evaluation and mentoring roles.The report highlights that environments for creative practice research vary greatly across universities. Despite concerted efort and attention given by un...
This document describes how the Australian Screen Production Education and Research Association (... more This document describes how the Australian Screen Production Education and Research Association (ASPERA) recognises, and therefore measures, research quality in screen production. The aim is to provide a set of guidelines and principles that can assist those who undertake and evaluate creative practice research in screen production to determine various levels of 'excellence'. While advisory, not prescriptive, the document acknowledges that universities are increasingly focussed on 'quality' research, and that the discipline of screen production can benefit from a set of shared understandings about what this quality might look like.While this document has been created with an awareness of the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) guidelines, it provides an independent view of how excellence in screen production research is understood and reviewed by peers in the discipline. It is important to note, therefore, that the project was driven by the ASPERA community an...
In early 2012, I was invited by Pilbara Writers group in Karratha to make a poetry map for the Pi... more In early 2012, I was invited by Pilbara Writers group in Karratha to make a poetry map for the Pilbara region when they saw the Poetry 4 U website (http://poetry4U.org ) where poems are pinned to geographic locations. I visited the Pilbara June 17 – 23, 2012 to commence the poetry mapping project with members of the Pilbara Writers group. By walking with video when writers took me to their favourite places I was able to document visceral intersubjective experiences of these places, of being there together, so that I could empathically share the writers’ sense of landscape. This paper discusses what happens when a hodological approach is taken to explore connections and flows between poetic expressions, places and landscapes.
Any computer game with a strong story has difficulty balancing the tension between narrative and ... more Any computer game with a strong story has difficulty balancing the tension between narrative and agency. Strong narrative usually results in weak agency, and strong agency can weaken narrative structure. Narrative improvisation, adapting the story based on player reactions, is a difficult task for a game designer. Narrative improvisation, however, is regularly practised by the human game masters (GMs) of tabletop roleplaying games. As the first stage of building a game master agent (GMA), this paper examines the moment in which GMs decide if and how to alter their storyline due to player action. GMs were interviewed to discover their reactions when players make unexpected choices. Ten themes emerged from analysis of the interviews, we examined these themes to determine the thought processes that took place in the GMs’ minds, and we represented the processes as flow charts. These decision charts are a first step in the construction of a GMA that could assist in the development of more responsive interactive narrative in computer games.
Creative Mobile Media II: Making a Difference provides an overview of the edited collection and o... more Creative Mobile Media II: Making a Difference provides an overview of the edited collection and outlines its structure in the three sections: Story-making, Making spaces and Making change. This introduction frames the book theoretically and illustrates the continuation from Creative Mobile Media in an Age of Smartphones. While our previous volume focused on creative projects as inspiration for debates relating to aesthetics, space and place, knowledge and stories and the self, Creative Mobile Media II explores how smartphones may influence to social change and can further expand the definition of creative practices relating to the field of screen media. Story-making can contribute to formulating democratic processes and equity, which are imperative to create change and challenge traditional models of media production and consumption.
Aura explores a variety of themes related to the narrative constructions of family histories whic... more Aura explores a variety of themes related to the narrative constructions of family histories which have been derived through the medium of photography. Using old and recent photographs, the thirteen artists in this exhibition have produced works comprising a variety of mediums - from digital photography and new media to installation - through which they explore the rather complex narratives of their own families.
This chapter elaborates on the creative dimensions of mobile media practices point at prospects t... more This chapter elaborates on the creative dimensions of mobile media practices point at prospects to further expand the field of creative arts and design. It contributes to existing debates around co-presence in networked media and the impact of smartphones on our understandings and interactions with space and place; emergent socialities associated with social media to contextualize the notion of 'sharing' and how this concept is replacing 'community'; the aesthetics of mobile media; and how storytelling shapes and is shaped by mobile media.
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