Newsletter

5 May 2005

Management Committee Meeting

The Management Committee met on Wednesday 27 April. Attending were Graeme Turner, chair, Elspeth Probyn, Chris Gibson, Chris Healy, and John Gunders, secretary. Mick Broderick was unable to attend, being on study leave in the UK.

Both Graeme and John talked about the seeming slowness in setting up Network activities, and pointed out that this was largely due to the delay with the Network Agreement. A benefit of this however, is that it has allowed us to set up the central systems and processes with more consideration. Ways of adding value to the Network website were considered.

The meeting discussed ways of appropriately running the seminar on cultural geography and anthropology to be held in conjunction with the Annual Meeting. Graeme stated his intention to travel to the various nodes and centres to talk to participants and postgraduates during the year.

The meeting talked about processes for the addition and retiring of participants. It was suggested that applications for membership should be tied to a specific existing or proposed project, and must be sponsored by those people already working on the project. Such applications would be subject to the approval of Management Committee, and ratification at the Network Annual Meeting, as would applications to opt-out of the Network. Processes for the removal of participants will be discussed at the Annual Meeting.

The role of postgraduate participants was also discussed. It was pointed out that such members have privileged access to Network events, and also a consultative role in driving the agenda of the Network, and the ECR-PG node in particular. While postgraduate events, such as the travelling masterclasses would not be exclusively for postgraduate participants, these members would form the basis of the group of invitees.

Two formal proposals from node convenors were discussed and approved: Liz Jacka’s (Cultural Histories) proposal to set up a National Television History group, and the establishment of a register of television history researchers; and Sue Luckman and Fran Martin’s (ECR & Postgrad Development) proposal for a professional development day before the CSAA conference in November, and a travelling masterclass.

Management Committee will meet again in August, and then again just before the Annual Meeting in September.

Proposal for inter-node workshop

Chris Gibson, Stuart Cunningham, and Christy Collis would like to receive feedback on the following proposal for a two-day workshop. If you have any questions or comments, please reply to Chris directly: ChrisG@fbe.unsw.edu.au

Creative Articulations: A Two-Day CRN Workshop co-hosted by the Cultural Technologies and Cultural Geographies Nodes

Proposed date: Tuesday 27 and Wednesday 28 September or Saturday 31 Sept and Sunday 1 October (the two days before or after the CRN annual network meeting at UQ: a good opportunity to assemble network members while they are in town)

Proposed venue: QUT Creative Industries Precinct, Kelvin Grove

Day One: Creative Articulations Round Table

The key question that this round table seeks to address is: what are the methodological challenges that we face when we work to combine cultural and media studies and economic and cultural geographies? This question will be focussed through a consideration of the increasingly important project of mapping the development of ‘creative places’ and creative segments of the economy. As this interdisciplinary research field grows in size and momentum, its methodologies are increasingly topics of debate and discussion. What are the emerging norms of creative place analysis, and what are their limitations? How can quantitative and qualitative analyses be combined meaningfully to produce accounts of specific creative places or creative segments? Richard Florida’s work has raised the level of interest and activity in creative places mapping and indexing projects; what questions and issues have been generated in response to his methods and strategies? This one-day round table brings together a productively diverse range of researchers to discuss the theoretical and practical possibilities for the development of interdisciplinary methods for accounting for creative places. Rather than using the traditional conference model, this workshop will run as a focussed round table: invited participants (from the cultural geographies and cultural technologies nodes) will be asked to prepare answers to four or five key questions; their responses to these questions will be the material of the event. Participants will also be given reading packs before the event in order to trigger focussed discussion. Possibilities for the questions are as follows:

How do we define creative places?
Are the same ‘mapping’ or indexing methodologies relevant to both metropolitan and non-metropolitan places and creativities?
What are the common trends in spatial distributions of creative employment, business activity, trade and exchange networks? (clusters, agglomerations, networks, issues of geographical scale, hierarchies of production centres, dispersals, etc)
How are creativities embedded in place, both quantitatively and qualitatively? (e.g. creative industries and the city sense of place; attention to cultural specificities; links to urban and regional social and demographic change; cultural districts; planning dimensions)
How can the methodological approaches of geography (particularly cultural geography’s qualitative methods) be articulated to the quantitative methodologies of creative place indexing and accountancy?
The round table will ask participants to address the specific case studies with which they have dealt in their own research: what problems have they faced in conducting their research? How have they dealt with these problems? What can we learn from each others’ approaches and experiences?

Possible Outcomes:

Special Issue of Intl Journal of Cultural Policy or Environment and Planning A (Environment and Planning) or Environment and Planning C (Government and Policy)
This one-day round-table event will serve as the precursor to a larger forum event proposed for mid-2006, when the International Geographers’ Union conference will be taking place in Brisbane.

Day Two: Articulating Creativities Symposium and Showcase

The second day of the event shifts from articulating methodologies for analysing and planning for creativities, to consumer-driven creative articulations, particularly in TV.

Television is changing. New technologies allow programming to be delivered independent of the broadcast stream. DVD publishing drives a resale of content out of the broadcast market, reinvigorating old programming and sometimes giving recently deceased programs a new lease on life. Access to the digital spectrum offers more bandwidth for broadcasting, opening the potential for multi-casting, greater interactivity and new broadcasting modes. These developments are indicative of a shift in the composition of television as a service, a product and an activity. “Television” may no longer evoke a broadcasting relationship, positioning viewers at the mercy of networks and mass audience economics. Audiences can access content independently of the networks, an activity challenging established business models and legal understandings of content usage. Technologies providing easier compression and distribution of video content enable alternative, independent ‘broadcast’ networks to open up. Similarly, “television” no longer signifies essentially disposable content, designed for transmission. Official and unofficial, legal and illegal methods promote collecting and archiving content. Audience behaviour has shifted towards access, production and distribution activities; television “users” now make up a greater percentage of the audience of television “viewers”. This symposium explores the emerging shape of new television. It examines the shifting industrial structure of broadcasting, the new opportunities offered to both broadcasters and audiences to produce, distribute and access content. It considers the application, regulation and possibilities offered by P2P networks and BitTorrent file, looking at the potentials these technologies offer incumbent broadcasters, content owners, audience members and independent producers.

This debate seems to pursue two strands. One is about the changes to the industry and one is about participatory media and the new potentials for vernacular and ‘user’ creativity. For want of better terms at the moment we’ll call them the “industry strand” and the “participatory culture strand,” although there is much cross-over between the two. A preliminary list of potential participants includes:

Industry reps – either from CTVA or the networks.
Creative Commons lawyers such as Prof. Brian Fitzgerald.
Chris Anderson – ed. Wired Magazine and author of the Long Tail argument. Anderson also discusses the and television as a long tail medium
Stuart Cunningham, Tom O’Regan, Jock Given on the future of digital broadcasting.
John Hartley
John Caldwell particularly to comment on the changes in the US, his old models/new industry arguments and to reflect on how the situation resembles an extension of the arguments he makes in Televisuality.
Leila Green and Robyn Quin have done some interesting work on Australian internet usage that describes the practice and purposes of downloading.
Daniel Meadows, Jo Tacchi, someone from ACMI in Melbourne on participatory culture and the potentials DST offer for new networking.
The session should also include discussion about participatory media, perhaps including someone from an organisation such as the Participatory Culture Foundation. They could talk about the DTV project they’re working on to bring internet TV to full screen, watchable modes as well as Blog Torrent, designed to make video publishing easy like blogging.
It would be good to consider television archiving methods as well.

The second component of this day involves a Showcase which highlights some of the emerging technologies under discussion at the symposium:

It would be nice to include the work of Aristarkh Chernyshev, the maker of wacky new televisions. See here: http://shining-tv.com/ Chernyshev’s work (things such as the teleblaster)) challenge the notion of the television itself. He enables people to take control, to distort and to change the way they watch television by making the television either more or less intrusive. This is enabled through is special televisions and also through the use of a ‘shine box’ which runs the video processing for the project.
The YIRN and Kelvin Grove Village are good for on the ground DST projects. Perhaps we could get some material from Wales as Well and the BBC.
Machinima
Moblogging
Current TV, which is a participatory television cable channel.
PVRs – it would be good to get some hacked PVRs in (there is a community of Australian users who break imported TiVos to work in Australia).

Possible Outcome:

Special issue of MIA, or a publication through QUT’s ACID Press

Events

Discourse Theory Summer School

The Third Annual Discourse Theory Summer School will be held at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand between 21 November and 9 December 2005.

This summer school will provide an advanced learning forum for academic staff, postgraduates, researchers in the public and private sectors, and practitioners interested in the theory and practice of discourse. The school will draw upon phenomenology, post-analytic philosophy, post-structuralism, and psychoanalysis.

The three one-week courses are independent of each other, so you are invited to enrol in any combination:

Week 1 Introduction to Discourse Theory (21-25 Nov), Dr Alejandro Groppo, Universidad Nacional de Villa Maria & Universidad Católica, de Cordoba, Argentina

Week 2 Psychoanalysis & Discourse Theory (28 Nov-2 Dec), Dr Yannis Stavrakakis, Essex University, England

Week 3 Critical Theory & Discourse Theory (5-9 Dec), Dr Mark Devenney, Brighton University, England

For more details, including course outlines, cost & online enrolment, go to: http://www.vuw.ac.nz/conted/discoursetheory or contact:

Peter Kitchenman, Convenor,
ph. 00 64 4 463 9488
email peter.kitchenman@vuw.ac.nz