OCEAN aims to facilitate collaborative research by design with a focus of improving the human environment. It has produced work ranging from exhibitions of Performance-oriented Design to publications on 3D Audio and Sound-Art. Its diverse group of members hail from a range of countries from Italy to Israel and Australia to the United States, but are based mainly in Oslo, London, Sydney and Istanbul.

She has performed audio/visual work with artists like Chris Caines, Shannon O’Neill and Ben Byrne. She has curated collaborative performance events like Semaphore and is also Co-Director of the Firstdraft Gallery.

In many of her pieces a live physical presence central to the work, where the audience’s movement and interaction with the installation directly affects the space. In Potential Energy, where a line of sensors on the wall set into movement the line of chains opposite, the audience functions as triggers. In The Real Thing, a large-scale kaleidoscope where the viewer’s body not only triggers the installation but becomes the content for it, the work literally cannot function without the presence of an audience, as it is their body that is captured as an image, processed and projected as the kaleidoscopic content shifts and changes with the person’s movement.

She has collaborated with performers, writers, video artists and sound artists like Talia Linz, Eva Mueller, Young-Ah Noh, Matthias Erian, Muse Me and Nick Mariette, and participated in residencies ranging from CarriageWorks in Sydney to the Transmediale: Digital Culture Festival in Berlin.

The global political climate is rapidly changing, shaped by phenomena such as globalism, terrorism and violence, migration, displacement and postcoloniality. Researchers at the CCAP are investigating cultural responses to each of these issues, identifying in particular the new forms of visual art emerging in this global context. The CCAP encourages research in both the theory and practice of art, and it runs a program of exhibitions, conferences and publications addressing diverse forms of political and social engagement.

The Centre facilitates the formation of research clusters, comprising staff and postgraduate students, and of national and international networks that bring together those working at the cutting edge of art and politics. The CCAP has links with a number of international institutions and its members are currently working on collaborative research projects with scholars in South Africa, China, Germany and the Netherlands.

Screenshot from ‘Assemblage for Collective Thought’ VJ and networked remix project. Performed at International Symposium for Electronic Arts and ZeroOne, San Jose, USA, August 12 2006.

Dynamic Media: Innovative Social and Artistic Development in New Media in Australia, Britain, Canada and Scandinavia since 1990 is an international, ARC funded project that provides information for Australians to more extensively implement dynamic media within a social context. Based at the Centre for Contemporary Arts and Politics at UNSW’s College of Fine Arts, the project is a collaboration between Anna Munster (CoFA/CCAP), Andrew Murphie (Media, Film & Theatre, UNSW), Brian Massumi (University of Montreal) and Adrian MacKenzie (Lancaster University).The project focuses on the international strategies for social use of dynamic media, and will form the basis of an online database that will profile and be accessible to Australian artists, arts organisations, new media researchers and social innovators. This study highlights the innovation of Australian artists and researchers in the development of dynamic media and positions these internationally.

Centre for Contemporary Arts and Politics, College of Fine Arts, UNSW