Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Wednesday 19 May
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
Multimedia books and academic wikis, music and sound publishing, and the world of computer games: technological change has extended reading and writing well beyond the book.
Chris Meade, the author of an Arts Council England report on the technological possibilities of literature, discusses his own experiments with musical, graphical and digital fiction; the ANU’s Adrienne Nicotra explains how educational wikis might replace text books; novelist and programmer Paul Callaghan demonstrates the role narrative plays in today’s computer games; and the poet/composer Klare Lanson explores the intersection of music and text.
Featuring
Klare Lanson
Over the past 20 years, performance poet Klare Lanson has worked as a writer, visual arts curator, director, truck driver, editor and also pays bills by working in the IT industry.
Her poetry and multi media practice is motivated by her past work in the visual arts, technology, anxiety and the politics of the every day. Her unrequited relationship with technology stems from building old school websites in the mid 90s to working on numerous collaborations over the years, including the renowned Hypersense Project which explored different ways of interacting with the computer to produce sound.
On stage, Klare works with poetry, sound and live art performance. She fuses her words with electronic music, moving imagery, mobile film and thinks a lot about technology. Klare has over 200 performances under her belt, including the This Is Not Art Festival, Overload Poetry Festival, Melbourne International Arts Festival and the Melbourne Writers Festival. She released an independent album ‘Every Third Breath’, completed an artist in residency at FRUC in France and went on to perform in London, Berlin and New York. She also toured New Zealand as part of 13% punk, and performed for the Wellington Fringe Festival. Her poetry is published on radio, web and for the page.
Klare has just stepped down as co-Editor of Going Down Swinging, an Australian literary anthology of poetry, short stories, comics and spoken word. She is currently working on a new body of work that continues to interrogate technology and our immediate environment. For a snapshot of her past performance work, visit her website.
Chris Meade
Chris Meade is Director of if:book LONDON. Chris has an M.A. in Creative Writing & New Media and his digital fiction In Search of Lost Tim was described by the Independent on Sunday as “a jeu d’esprit and just possibly the future of fiction.”
He was Director of Booktrust from 2000–2007, running the Bookstart scheme and a range of book programs, and Director of the Poetry Society (UK) from 1994-2000, where he set up the Poetry Cafe in Covent Garden and the lottery funded Poetry Places project, described by Andrew Motion as “a modern miracle”. In the 1980s and 90s he worked in Sheffield and Birmingham libraries, promoting Creative Reading and ‘Imagination Services’.
Chris is the author of The Thoughts of Betty Spital (Penguin 1989) and a past winner of the George Orwell award for his play ‘We Two Boys’.
Adrienne Nicotra
Adrienne Nicotra, Senior lecturer in the Research School of Biology, ANU is one of the founding Editors of PROMETHEUSWiki, a new Wiki based site for PROtocols and METHods for Explanation and Updated Standards in ecology and environmental plant physiology.
PROMETHEUSWiki will pioneer new approaches to Peer-to-Peer collaboration by combining the best of Wiki technology with the strengths of peer review and editorial oversight. Science moves most rapidly when the majority of researchers uses similar methods and can easily repeat and build upon each others' discoveries. In light of a changing climate, there is an especially strong need for standardization.
Traditionally information about protocols has been communicated either through conventional scientific peer-reviewed publications, which are slow and formal, or through word-of-mouth interactions and protocol sharing between specific lab-groups, which is inefficient in what is now a global field. PrometheusWiki seeks to build a new method of communication about methods within the research community, which combines fast and informal wiki-based interactions, along with editorial review and reputability.
Paul Callaghan
Paul Callaghan is a freelance writer, game developer, and co-director of the Freeplay Independent Games Festival.
Through over 10 years in game development, Paul has been a programmer, designer, writer, and teacher, and has spoken about writing for games, the essence of play, what education can learn from game development, and the fundamentals of game design at regional technology and creative events.
His current interests include cross-media storytelling, the expressive power of mechanics, and developing support mechanisms for the local independent games community. Paul has also written short stories, comics, short films, too many articles to count, and is currently working on his second novel.