Category Archives: Media Studies

New Short ‘Snooze Time’ by Matt Harris is Going Off

The new Short Film ‘Snooze Time‘ by English and Media Studies Tutor Matt Harris is ‘going off’ and causing a bit of a stir. The short, which can be accessed via Vimeo, has already been seen 140,000 times and received 1,920 ‘likes’.

The buzz seems to have been partly due to a short review of the the 7 minute film by Jeanette Bonds, a writer and independent animator living in Los Angeles and Co-Founder/CEO of GLAS Animation. Jeanett’s review was recently posted on the website ‘Short of the Week‘ which gave the short a 4.5/5 star rating. Snooze Time is written by Matthew (Matt) Harris and directed by Ivan Barge.

Dr. Matt Harris teaches and tutors in the School of English and Media Studies at the University’s Albany campus, where he was nominated for Lecturer of the Year in 2010. His writing has been published widely, from academic articles in Landfall to creative writing in Poetry New Zealand, Trout, Southern Ocean Review, Kokako, and many others. His previous nine-minute film, entitled 43,000 Feet, premiered at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival in New York.

Congratulations Leleiga for scholarship win!

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Leleiga Taito reads her work at a recent Creative Writing Student Writers Read event at Massey Wellington campus.

Congratulations to Expressive Arts student Leleiga Taito who has just been announced as the winner of a $5000 scholarship to research safety communication on Mt Ruapehu in 2015.

Leleiga is currently finishing her final year of the Bachelor of Communication (Public Relations and Expressive Arts), and will start postgraduate studies (BC Honours) in 2015. Her Honours research project (supervised by the School of English & Media Studies and co-funded by GNS and Massey University through the Joint Centre for Disaster Research) will be a real-world life-saving project that looks at how to improve safety awareness for mountain users, particularly about the risks of lahars and avalanches.

Leleiga will have the opportunity not only to investigate practical safety communication challenges in depth, but also to develop creative multi-media solutions to the communication challenge. She has past experience of similar projects during her Bachelor of Communication (BC) studies, and will now extend these skills in-depth with her Honours research.

Leleiga’s prior study achievements include creative writing, digital media production, media releases, strategic communication plans, and service learning for community organisations. For example, she created an awareness campaign for the New Zealand Breast Cancer Foundation in her second year of the BC. She says “Through my research I discovered that breast cancer education and prevention messages were not reaching Samoan women. I conducted a mixture of qualitative and quantitative research methods to establish why women in this culture were not receiving these messages. After compiling the information that was gathered I then made suggestions on what appropriate communication strategies could be put in place. I also implemented tactics, where I created four pieces of collateral to encourage Samoan women to have mammograms. One of the communication materials was a web video with Winnie Laban sharing her experiences with breast cancer.” You can see Leleiga’s excellent breast cancer awareness video assignment, with compelling personal interview testimony from Winnie Laban, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzoX3Nd97so&feature=youtu.be

During her Honours year Leleiga will, under the supervision of her research report supervisor (Associate Professor Elspeth Tilley from the School of English and Media Studies) prepare a comprehensive qualitative investigation of mountain user culture and the communication norms and needs that exist around safety issues. She will have the opportunity to research in the field, living at Mt Ruapehu to gather data during the ski season. Part of her reporting for the research project may also take the form of a creative output (such as a short documentary film) that could in itself provide a useful way to respond to the research challenge by building awareness of relevant safety issues and responses.

Associate Professor Tilley said Leleiga’s success was indicative of the value of the public relations/expressive arts combination in a communication degree. “Most real-world research problems or workplace communication challenges are multi-faceted, and need both a scientific and a creative response to generate understanding and solutions. I think we are really seeing, with the success of our Bachelor of Communication students who all have both a business and a humanities preparation, just how valuable this is for the next steps after a three-year degree, whether that step is further study or the workplace.”

Associate Professor Tilley said study of Expressive Arts (which can include diverse combinations of different digital media production, creative writing and theatre papers) was proving particularly useful for students. “We live in a multi-modal world. Seldom is any public communication these days just a written brochure or poster. Inevitably there are multi-media and social media dimensions. And the work that students do in learning scripting, dialogue, filming, directing, lighting, editing and a whole range of production, post-production and performance-related skills in Expressive Arts sets them up really well for this kind of work after graduation.”

Leleiga’s scholarship includes $5000 for fees and stipend, plus additional coverage of direct costs of her research including accommodation and other research expenses covered at Mt Ruapehu. Other BC students have also been involved in the wider research project – click here for a previous story about the project and click here for a link to a Radio New Zealand story about the project.

Arts on Wednesday – Binge Culture Collective

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This audaciously inventive and interactive show, titled ‘For your Future Guidance’, was nominated for Most Original at NZ Fringe, and runner-up for Fringe of Fringe in Auckland.
Reviewers have said it shows Binge’s “commitment to creating daring, unpredictable performances that challenge conventional distinctions between ‘real’ and ‘staged’ performance”. Binge Culture Collective have been described as “one of the country’s most exciting, direct and original theatre companies”. Don’t miss it.

Wednesday 8 October, 12:30-1:30 in the Theatre Lab 5D14.
Tea, coffee and biscuits provided.

Also, take a look at our Facebook page: www.facebook.com/WellyArtsWednesdays

Mega-month of activity for August research roundup

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Associate Professor Joe Grixti’s book Terrors of Uncertainty has been re-released, along with other classic humanities texts, as part of the Routledge Revivals series

From Gothic and horror fiction to e-waste and the grand successes of The Naturalist, it’s been another very busy month for EMS research and scholarship – check out our news in this latest Research Roundup!

• Dr Erin Mercer co-edited a special issue of M/C – A Journal of Media and Culture on the Gothic, and published an article on the difficulties faced by contemporary New Zealand writers attempting to use the Gothic genre without reactivating colonialist tropes of haunting Maori, skeletal remains and a Gothicised New Zealand landscape. In the issue’s editorial, titled ‘Gothic: New Directions in Media and Popular Culture’ Dr Mercer and co-editor Dr Lorna Piatti-Farnell of AUT discussed the continuing importance of the Gothic mode in contemporary culture and how that mode is constantly evolving into new forms and manifestations. They argued that the “multi-faceted nature of the Gothic in our contemporary popular culture moment is accurately signaled by the various media on which these special issue essays focus, from television to literature, animation, music, and film. The place occupied by the Gothic beyond representational forms, and into the realms of cultural practice, is also signaled, an important shift within the bounds of Gothic Studies which is bound to initiate fascinating debates. The transformations of the Gothic in media and culture are, therefore, also surveyed, so to continue the ongoing critical conversation on not only the place of the Gothic in contemporary narratives, but also its duplicitous, malleable, and often slippery nature”. Check out the special issue at http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/showToc/current along with Dr Mercer’s article on Supernaturalism and Settlement in New Zealand Gothic Fiction – tantalisingly titled “A deluge of shrieking unreason” at http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/846

• Dr Radha O’Meara and Dr Alex Bevan were co-organisers of a symposium entitled Loops and Splices: Changing Media Technologies, on August 1st 2014. The symposium explored a recent turn in media scholarship that uncovers the overlooked and under-examined media technologies that contribute to historical and contemporary practice. Papers looked at how different media technologies have functioned in relation to historical and social practices, aesthetic traditions and specific cultural moments. Keynote speaker Prof Ian Christie (Anniversary Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck College, University of London) presented on ‘Denying depth: uncovering the hidden history of 3D in photography and film.’ English and Media Studies staff were also well represented as presenters at the symposium (more below). You can see EMS staff member Dr Sy Taffel’s blog about the symposium at http://mediaecologies.wordpress.com/

• Dr Sy Taffel presented a paper entitled “ArchEcologies of Ewaste” at the Loops + Splices Symposium. The paper explored how media archaeology and media ecologies can be complementary methods in examining a range of issues pertaining to materiality and the damaging effects of the toxic digital detritus that we discard. He focused particularly on ewaste in New Zealand, where there currently is no mandatory (or even free) nationwide ewaste collection scheme, unlike in the EU where the WEEE directive mandates that all ewaste is recycled in high tech local facilities. More than 80,000 tonnes of ewaste annually enter New Zealand’s landfills, adding noxious elements like mercury, arsenic and lead to the soil and water table. Dr Taffel argued that ideas from media archaeology (a way of exploring past technology with a view to creatively reassembling and reusing technology rather than seeing earlier products as obsolete) combined with media ecologies (a reincorporative model of cyclical technological redesign) could point us towards a new age of ‘repair’ ethos, where waste was reduced and new designs resulted from the creative clash of old and new. You can see Dr Taffel’s presentation at http://prezi.com/iap-xqlsvb2o/archecologies-of-e-waste/

• Dr Kevin Glynn presented on “Technologies of Indigeneity: Māori Television and Convergence Culture,” a research focus that has emerged out of his Marsden-funded project working with Dr Julie Cupples (University of Edinburgh) on ‘Geographies of Media Convergence: Spaces of Democracy, Connectivity and the Reconfiguration of Cultural Citizenship.’ Dr Sy Taffel reports on his blog that “the paper focused on New Zealand media representations of the Urewera raids of 2007, and a more recent case where Air New Zealand, who prominently feature Maori iconography in their branding, terminated an interview with a woman for having a ta moko (traditional body markings), which they claimed would unsettle their customers. The paper explored impacts associated with the introduction of Maori TV and social networking software such as Facebook and Twitter on the ability of Maori to represent themselves and partake in mediated debates surrounding cultural identity”.

• Dr Allen Meek presented at Loops and Splices on “Testimony and the chronophotographic gesture.” The paper addressed the role of gesture in Holocaust testimony. Specifically it looked at some sequences from Claude Lanzmann’s long documentary film Shoah. Dr Meek argued that most scholarship has tended to discuss this film in terms of the transmission of the trauma of the Holocaust from the survivor to the viewer. Instead, he drew on the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s essay on gesture to develop a different reading of Shoah. Agamben argues that photography and the moving image have taken the autonomy of human gesture away from the individual person. When human gestures and movements are recorded they become a form of visual information that can be used for purposes of political control and economic exploitation. Dr Meek’s paper showed how Holocaust testimony forms part of a larger history of recorded gesture in the cinema that we need to consider if we are to understand its relation both to the Nazi system of power and to our recording and viewing of testimony today.

• In other recent research highlights, Associate Professor Joe Grixti’s book Terrors of Uncertainty: The Cultural Contexts of Horror Fiction has been re-released as part of Routledge’s ‘Revivals’ series of classic and important books. Routledge Revivals is a programme designed to reissue a wealth of out-of-print and unavailable titles written by some of the leading academic scholars of the last 120 years. To date, the programme includes titles by the likes of Sir Andrew Motion, Hermione Lee, Zygmunt Bauman, Karl Jaspers, Malcolm Bradbury, Simone Weil, Emile Durkheim, Charles Kindleberger and W. Arthur Lewis, now along with our own Head of School of English & Media Studies, Dr Grixti. Terrors of Uncertainty covers horror fiction from Frankenstein and Dracula to Psycho and The Chainsaw Massacre, illustrating how horror fiction has provided our culture with some of its most enduring themes and narratives. In selecting the text for reissue Routledge notes that: “Considering horror fiction both as a genre and as a social phenomenon, Joseph Grixti provides a theoretical and historical framework for reconsidering horror and the cultural apparatus that surrounds it. First published in 1989, this book looks at shifts in the genre’s meaning – its fascination with excess, its commentaries on the categories and boundaries of culture – and at interpretations of horror from psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology, cultural and media studies”. Terrors of Uncertainty brings together a provocative range of perspectives from across the disciplines, which combine to raise important questions about the relationship between fiction and society, and the way in which we use fiction to resolve or evade our fears of uncertainty. Available in both hardcopy and e-book at: http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9781138794511/

• Essential New Zealand Poems: Facing the Empty Page was recently published by Random House featuring work by a number of staff and PhD students from the School of English and Media Studies: Dr Ingrid Horrocks, Dr Jack Ross, Tim Upperton, Sarah-Jane Barnett, and Aleksandra Lane. Ingrid Horrocks and Aleksandra Lane were named by reviewer Philip Matthews in the Dominion Post as two of half a dozen of “the best of a new and younger generation” of poets to whom readers should “Pay attention now and in the future” (Your Weekend, Dominion Post, 5 July 2014, p. 27). For more information, go to the publisher’s site at http://www.randomhouse.co.nz/books/siobhan-harvey-harry-ricketts-and-james-norcliffe/essential-new-zealand-poems-9781775534594.aspx

• A launch event for Essential New Zealand Poems – Facing the Empty Page held at PNCC Library on 7 August featured local poets Johanna Aitchison (former Visiting Artist and Tutor) and Tim Upperton (Tutor and current PhD stuent) in conversation with Harry Ricketts, poet, academic editor, reviewer and cricket writer. Johanna, Tim and Harry discussed and read from the recently published ‘Essential New Zealand Poems’ edited by Siobhan Harvey, Harry Ricketts and James Norcliffe (another former Massey University School of English & Media Studies Visiting Artist).

• A creative essay by Dr Ingrid Horrocks which forms a key part of Maddie Leach’s collaborative conceptual art project if you find the good oil let us know, features until September as part of the Walters Prize exhibition at the Auckland Art Gallery. See our previous post on this fascinating artwork and Dr Horrocks’ involvement here.

• Associate Professor Lisa Emerson along with Massey colleagues from Education and Communication ran multiple workshops in the lower North island for tertiary teachers on Literacy in the Transition to Tertiary Education. These presentations are based on their research, funded by the government’s Teaching and Learning Research Initiative (TLRI) fund, on transitioning into tertiary study through academic literacy development, and were supported by Ako Aotearoa.

• Dr Thom Conroy launched his book, The Naturalist, on Friday 15 August – the book then spent several weeks at Number One in the NZ Bestseller list. See previous post here. See also: Thom’s interview with Kim Hill, available at: http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/20145074/thom-conroy-channeling-dieffenbach

• Senior Tutors Joy Green and Tim Upperton launched their books as part of the Kete Series – Manawatu Poetry at the PNCC Library on Poetry Day – Friday 22 August 2014. This series, published by HauNui Press features Joy’s and Tim’s poetry collections as well as that of Leonel Alvarado, School of Humanities. See more here.

• Dr Thom Conroy spoke on the Intersection between History and Fiction in Historical Fiction at Te Papa, 28 August.

• On August 25, two final-year undergraduate Bachelor of Communication students from CoHSS participated, with Associate Professor Elspeth Tilley, in an applied communication research project involving collaboration with Massey’s Joint Centre for Disaster Research, the Department of Conservation and Geological and Natural Sciences. The project, which involves gathering data on Mt Ruapehu to help understand and improve lahar warning and mountain safety communication effectiveness, was reported on Radio New Zealand’s Our Changing World Science and Environment program, see more here.

• Associate Professor Angie Farrow won won ‘Best Drama Script’ for her new play ‘Leo Rising’ at the Auckland Short and Sweet Festival 2014.

Arts on Wednesday Wellington – Ben Fagan

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Ben Fagan, performance poet, is funny, thoughtful, moving, and he has honed his art in fierce slam competitions where he’s taken out multiple prizes and awards. He will be performing at Arts on Wednesday on September 10 in Wellington.

Here’s what others have to say about him: “Ben Fagan is that rare kind of poet who combines well-developed linguistic agility with intelligence, thoughtfulness, and a mile-wide streak of humour – both light and dark, as needed. His performances are laugh-out-loud entertaining and deeply thought-provoking, and I’m always delighted to see his name on an open mic list.” (Laurice Gilbert, President, The New Zealand Poetry Society). “His conversational tone and understated performance style place him somewhere between a prophet and an everyday Kiwi bloke – a dangerously charming combination.” (Ali Jacs, New Zealand National Poetry Slam Champion 2012) High praise indeed – so check out Ben Fagan for something completely different to everything you thought you knew about poetry!

See more at www.facebook.com/wellyartswednesdays

Book strikes right anti-colonial note

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A book by an English & Media Studies staff member has been described as “a powerful statement of anti-colonialism” by an international reviewer.
In a review just published in Ariel: A review of international English literature, Associate Professor Elspeth Tilley’s 2012 book White Vanishing is called “a valuable document within the arena of Australian cultural historiography”.
White Vanishing is a longitudinal critical survey of a prevalent trope within Australian culture, the ‘lost in the bush’ myth. The book argues for reading this mythology (popularised in movies such as Picnic at Hanging Rock) differently to literal or nationalistic interpretations, by focusing on its often overlooked racial, gendered and colonialist ideology.
The reviewer, Australian fiction writer Giulia Giuffrè, notes White Vanishing is “well researched and thorough in its survey of the literature in and about the topic,” containing “a great deal of useful material and thought-provoking arguments” as well as insights that are “perceptive and shaming”. It is also, Giuffrè notes, something of a “juggernaut”.
Dr Tilley, surprisingly, agrees with the latter criticism. “Absolutely, it’s a warship of a book – and in a way it had to be. It’s putting an argument that although not controversial within particular academic circles is not likely to be at all popular with many Australians. It’s suggesting that the common characterisation of Australian culture as favouring ‘fairness’ might be better understood in terms of fairness of skin than fairness in treating others. If you’re going to make a critique like that you need your evidence thoroughly marshalled. So my aim with the book was to put the supportability of the argument beyond doubt – and then elsewhere in other ways I can have the liberty of perhaps expressing it in more subtle terms.”
Dr Tilley also agreed that the book was inherently anti-colonial. “Absolutely the book has a political stance – everything is political, including academic research and, as I point out in the book, creative writing, film, theatre and media. My argument is that any kind of creative or discursive output is enhanced if it recognises its political stance consciously, rather than pretending neutrality.”
Dr Tilley said that, since the book’s publication, she had noticed some shifts in public understanding of the ‘lost in the bush myth’ in Australia. “There have now been some fantastic artistic and creative deconstructions of the myth, particularly in the theatre. Sisters Grimm’s The Sovereign Wife used parody to skewer the ‘lost in the bush myth’ in ways that were much more entertaining than my book – but culturally speaking, we need both forms of engagement with our mythology, the detailed deconstruction and the lampooning, and each contributes to the possibility and the interpretation of the other.”
White Vanishing is published by Rodopi and available at: http://www.rodopi.nl/senj.asp?BookId=CC+152

Post-script! Another review of White Vanishing (in the journal Critical Race and Whiteness Studies) has just been published and is available at: http://www.acrawsa.org.au/files/ejournalfiles/212Iyer20141.pdf Reviewer Sumedha Iyer of The University of New South Wales says White Vanishing is “engaging and rigorous in its analysis, and does a great deal to fill the epistemological gap in disappearance mythology in Australian literature. Even for readers who are not au fait with literary textual analysis or whiteness theory, Tilley’s book makes it easy to trace the insidious and enduring inheritance of the white vanishing trope in terms of its origins in the oppressive function of colonialism.”

Research round-up – from ‘Harry’ to the Holocaust, EMS research is diverse and defining

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Oscar Kightley as Harry Anglesea in the 2013 TV3 crime drama ‘Harry’.

Six English & Media Studies researchers took advantage of the Winter teaching break to present their research at key international conferences from Oslo to Australia last month, on topics ranging from Facebook to forgiveness.

Dr Brian McDonnell presented a paper to the New Zealand Studies Association’s “Across the Pacific” conference in Oslo. The theme of the conference was New Zealand and the Pacific, and Dr McDonnell presented on “Harry: New Zealand’s First Polynesian-centred Television Crime Drama”. His talk analysed the TV show Harry, directed by Chris Dudman and broadcast as 6 1-hour episodes by TV3 in 2013. It featured Oscar Kightley as the eponymous Harry Anglesea, a tough detective with the Major Crimes Unit in South Auckland, as well as Sam Neill as Major Crimes Unit boss Jim ‘Stocks’ Stockton. Dr McDonnell spoke about the genre links between this show and well-known overseas examples, such as Cracker, Prime Suspect, Luther, Forbrydelsen (Danish: The Killing), The Wire, Wallander and Underbelly. He explored the genesis of Harry, especially the role of its creator and producer Steve O’Meagher, and how it broke new ground by having a Samoan protagonist.

Dr Sy Taffel presented a paper called Antisocial|Asocial|Associations: Mapping the Social in Social Media to the Australia and New Zealand Communication Association conference in Melbourne. The paper, which is being published in the peer reviewed conference proceedings, argued that media have always been social structures, so queried what’s new and different about the types of social connection made by social media? Dr Taffel used a unique combination of political economy, software studies and actor network theory approaches to answer this question, and argued that each approach reveals overlapping ways in which social media commodify and monetise social ties such as community and friendship. A particular focus was on Facebook, which famously claims in numerous marketing materials to be making the Web more ‘social’. Dr Taffel challenged the assumed meaning of the ‘social’ in ‘social media’, exploring existing definitions of the terms alongside the range of online content the term is understood to refer to.

Dr Allen Meek presented a paper to the ‘Future of Past: Representing the Holocaust, Genocide and Mass Trauma in the 21st Century’ Conference in Melbourne. The title of the paper was “Media, Trauma and Biopolitics”. Dr Meek argued that modern biopolitics, which attempts to control society at the level of biological life, provides an important perspective for understanding trauma as a model for extreme historical events. He explored the idea that while the Holocaust is commonly understood as a trauma for modern society, this can stop us from being able to see Nazi racial politics as an extreme version of something intrinsic to modern forms of power.

Dr Kim Worthington presented a paper at the Australasian Association of Literature ‘Literature and Affect’ Conference in Melbourne entitled “Confronting a forgotten past: Shame, guilt and blame in Jaspreet Singh’s Helium”. In interpreting Singh’s haunting 2013 novel, Dr Worthington’s paper engaged with the philosophical work of Paul Ricouer, whom she argued understands remembering and forgetting as not simply involuntary processes, but as ones that are often consciously willed and manipulated for political purposes. Her paper explored the complex relationships between memory and forgetting and the emotions of shame, guilt and blame. “Inevitably,” Dr Worthington said, “this also involves questions about the (im)possibility of reconciliation and forgiveness in both personal and national contexts.” The paper argued that what is needed for forgiveness and healing in dealing with historial trauma is more than a rational assessment of past (inherited) crimes: an emotional confrontation is also necessary, and Singh’s work suggests literature can provide this.

Dr Kevin Glynn presented a co-authored paper at the Institute of Australian Geographers/NZ Geographical Society Joint Conference held in Melbourne. Written with Julie Cupples of the University of Edinburgh, the paper was entitled ‘Reframing Indigeneity: The Difference an Indigenous Broadcaster Makes.’ It explored two incidents: police “terror raids” on Tuhoe in Te Urewera in 2007, and controversies over public pronouncements by Air New Zealand in 2013 about a company policy that prohibits employment of people with ta moko. Using these case studies to look at the differences between mainstream and Maori Television Service coverage, the paper argued that both events revealed contestation between competing visions of national identity, belonging and participation. While mainstream media trafficked heavily in racialised discourses of terror and securitisation in relation to the Urewera raids, Maori Television coverage drew upon grassroots counterdiscourses and counterknowledges that depicted the situation in the Ureweras very differently. By the time of the Air New Zealand controversy, Maori Television had developed around itself an active participatory culture of digitally engaged audiences making avid use of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. The paper explored the forms of indigenous citizenship active within this new media environment to assess the contribution an indigenous broadcaster can make to challenging the epistemic violence inflicted through colonisation upon indigenous ways of knowing and being.

Dr Philip Steer presented a sole-authored conference paper at the ‘Prosaic Imaginary: Novels and the Everyday, 1750-2000’ conference hosted by the Novel Studies research cluster at the University of Sydney. Entitled “Strategic Banality: The Work of the Prosaic in Novels of Early Settlement,” Dr Steer’s paper explored the generic instability of the early colonial Australian novel, specifically its tendency to veer from narrating the vicissitudes of settler life to detailing agricultural production and other concerns more commonly associated with political economy. He argued that the strategic assertion of colonial banality across a range of registers functioned to assert the Britishness of Australian settlement. That is, if the colony’s suitability for the British subject was most immediately conveyed through the portrayal of characters’ achievement of a settled, rural lifestyle, this was complemented at a societal level by the statistical assertion of the colonial capacity for steady, regular economic production. Paradoxically, therefore, asserting the prosaic nature of settlement can be seen as one of the most audacious and wide-ranging strategies of the colonial novel.

New creative activism paper launching 2015

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Massey University’s School of English & Media Studies will lead the way in Aotearoa/New Zealand arts education by launching a new paper in creative activism in 2015.
Launching simultaneously at Wellington and Auckland campuses in first semester 2015, 139.333 Creativity in the Community will immerse teams of students in the art and science of creative communication for social change, with guidance from experienced Expressive Arts educators. Students will be able to make a film or documentary, stage a collaborative community theatre event, use creative writing, or combine all of these, to work with a community group on a real issue.
Wellington course coordinator Associate Professor Elspeth Tilley said “communication activism pedagogy is an emerging trend internationally. It involves teaching students to apply their creative communication knowledge and skills to work with community partners to promote social justice.”
“We are seeing increasing application by social justice groups in Aotearoa of the power of the arts to drive change – for example Women’s Refuge is working on a giant statue of Kate Sheppard made up of the voices of people who want to stop domestic violence, and Greenpeace has been staging performance art all over the country with a lifesize polar bear. Not to mention the amazing work that theatre practitioners, such as the group Te Rakau Hua o Te Wao Tapu Trust to name just one, have been doing for a long time because of the recognition of the power of theatre to change lives.”
The Creativity in the Community course will equip students to plan, implement and evaluate these kinds of applied arts projects, giving them hands on experience in delivering creative activism but also requiring them to understand the ethical and managerial dimensions.
“Our Expressive Arts students already have a strong foundation in devising projects that use creative writing, theatre and multimedia by the time they reach third-year (see for example at left a student multimedia/theatre performance addressing issues of identity and binge drinking, from Wellington Creative Processes students 2014). This paper enables them to capstone that training by taking it to the next level, working with a community partner.”
Dr Tilley said there was a strong research and scholarship base behind creative activism that students will connect with in ‘Creativity in the Community’ to understand how to make their arts interventions effective and compelling.
“Internationally, students have worked on issues such as gender inequality and violence, ethnic and racial prejudice and discrimination, and health disparities and issues affecting those who live in poverty. Our students will research their communities and team up with local NGOs to choose projects that respond to genuine need. We know that this benefits the students as well as the communities, as service learning has been proven to develop skills in teamwork, project management, risk assessment, communication, professionalism and a host of other competencies that will ensure our students hit the ground running when they enter the workforce. A big plus of creative activism pedagogy is that it also develops students as engaged citizens who feel empowered to use their voice effectively to create a better world.”
Dr Tilley will coordinate Creativity in the Community at Wellington, while at Albany campus it will be led by Dr Rand Hazou, a specialist in applied and documentary theatre who has international research links with social justice theatre projects, as well as strong connections with theatre-for-social change groups in the Auckland region.
“We are really looking forward to launching this project and seeing the students’ learning come to life in real social change,” Dr Tilley said.

Links:
139.333 Paper Information for 2015: http://www.massey.ac.nz//massey/learning/programme-course-paper/paper.cfm?paper_code=139333
Bring back Kate campaign: http://www.3news.co.nz/Kate-Sheppard-statue-nears-completion/tabid/423/articleID/354173/Default.aspx
Theatre as a tool to transform: http://artsaccess.org.nz/theatre-as-a-tool-to-transform

Cinephile: Simon Sigley

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Transnational Film Culture in New Zealand is a niche publication, written because its author loves film. Film was the most important medium of the 20th century, Simon Sigley says, “a protean cultural phenomenon with huge industrial and aesthetic ramifications”, and he is fascinated by its changing cultural status in his native New Zealand, the more so because for around a decade he lived in a country where film has always been given its intellectual due: France. A film viewed in the cinema, the environment for which it was crafted – is special. Nothing, says Sigley, compares with that visceral, embodied experience of cinema, that moment when lights dim, the chatter stops, the sound swells and the movie begins.

See more at: http://definingnz.com/cinephile/#sthash.JavN9hOg.dpuf

Loops + Splices Symposium: Changing Media Technologies, August 1st

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All scholars and practitioners interested in film and media are welcome to attend the Loops and Splices symposium on changing media technologies on Friday 1 August at Victoria University of Wellington.

The symposium has been organised by Media Studies lecturers Radha O’Meara and Alex Bevan with colleagues from Victoria University. It will feature a keynote presentation by Professor Ian Christie from University of London’s Birkbeck College on the history of 3D in photography and film, as well as presentations by Massey Media Studies lecturers Kevin Glynn, Sy Taffel and Allen Meek.

http://www.victoria.ac.nz/fhss/about/events/symposium-loops-and-splices-changing-media-technologies

Attendance is free, but attendees should register by emailing Kathleen Kuehn before the end of July:
Kathleen.Kuehn@vuw.ac.nz

Symposium Programme

Schedule: 1 August 2014 Hunter Council Chamber, Hunter Building, Victoria University of Wellington

9.30-10.30am OpeningPlenary

Chair:MiriamRoss

ProfessorIanChristie(BirkbeckCollege)

“Denying depth: uncovering the hidden history of 3D in photography and film”

10.45-12.15 PanelOne:Archaeologies,Bodies,NewTechnologies

Chair:KathleenKuehn

AllanCameron(Auckland),“Facing the Glitch: Abstraction, Abjection,and the DigitalFace”

JulieCupples(Edinburgh)andKevinGlynn(Massey),“Technologies of Indigeneity: Māori Television and Convergence Culture”

MaxSchleser(Massey),“A Decade of Mobile Moving-Image Practice”

SyTaffel(Massey),“Arch/Ecologies of E-Waste”

1.30-3.00pm PanelTwo:AmateurPracticesandEverydayLife

Chair:RadhaO’Meara

RosinaHickman(Victoria),“A pastora lparadise?: Landscap eand early amateur filmmaking in New Zealand”

O. RipekaMercier(Victoria),“Screen(ed) Culture in the 48 Hour Film Competition”

MinetteHillyer(Victoria),“Formulas for the Interior: Homemovies, television and the practice of real life in public”

DamionSturm(Waikato),“Smashing and bashing as affective commodity-spectacle? Televisual technologies in the Australian T20 Cricket Big Bash League”

3.15-4.45pm PanelThree:MediaLoops,AestheticHistories

Chair:MichelleMenzies

AllenMeek(Massey),“Testimony and the chronophotographic gesture”

MichaelDaubs(Victoria),“What’s New is Past: Flash Animation and Cartoon History”

KirstenMoanaThompson(Victoria),“’Now Isn’t Simply Now’: A Single Man and the Color Image”

LeonGurevitch(Victoria),“Cinema Designed: Visual Effects Software and the Emergence of Design”

4.45D5.15pm ClosingPlenaryPanel

Chair:KirstenThompson

Ian Christie and OrganizingCommittee

The symposium committee would like to thank

Adam Art Gallery, New Zealand Film Archive, School of English, Film, Theatre and Media Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Victoria University of Wellington, School of English and Media Studies at Massey University, and the Visual Culture Group of Victoria for generously supporting the Loops+Splices symposium.

Symposium Organising Committee

ProfessorKirstenThompson:Kirsten.Thompson@vuw.ac.nz DrMiriamRoss:Miriam.Ross@vuw.ac.nz

DrKathleenKuehn:Kathleen.Kuehn@vuw.ac.nz DrAlexBevan:A.L.Bevan@massey.ac.nz

DrRadhaO’Meara:R.OMeara@massey.ac.nz MichelleMenzies:michelle.menzies@gmail.com

Ian Christie (Birkbeck College,University of London)

Denying depth:uncovering the hidden history of 3D in photography and film

If stereoscopy has been a more significant and continuous presence in modern imaging media than is conventionally recognised, why has it been consistently marginalised by photographic and film historians? After its huge popularity in the second half of the 19th century, there were expectations that stereo moving pictures would follow. Yet even after practical display systems emerged in the 1930s, resistance has continued,often fuelled by a mixture of economic and psycho-aesthetic justification.What’s the problem?

Ian Christie is Anniversary Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a curator and broadcaster. He wrote and co-produced a BBC TV series The Last Machine, presented by Terry Gilliam, in 1994; and the exhibitions he has worked on include Eisenstein: His Life and Art (1988), Spellbound:ArtandFilm (1996) and Modernism:Designing a New World (2006). A Fellow of the British Academy and Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge University in 2006, with a lecture series entitled ‘Cinema Has Not yet Been Invented’, he is especially interested in mediaecology and archaeology, and in audiences-the subject of his most recent book.

Symposium Web Page

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