Podcast Program of Create World 2008

Watch the Episode, or right click links 1-3 below to download:
The Three Professors

1. Small version for iPods 320×240 pixels (45.5 mb)
2. Large version for iPods 640×480 pixels (81.5 mb)
3. Landscape Version 16:9 HD 640×352 pixels (81.8mb)
4. YouTube high quality version (embedded below). Hint: click on full screen button on the bottom right of the video – it looks good enough to show people

This episode is a little different from the others in the Create World 2008 Podcast Program. This 8 minute vodcast (video podcast) episode explains the character of Create World and provides a rich visual record of what happened at Griffith University in Brisbane Qld on the 7-10 December 2008.

We asked Professors Roly Sussex (UQ), Paul Draper (Griffith) and Phil Long (UQ) to reflect on the special character of Create World, and have brought you their subsequent discussion against the background of some 124 shots of this great conference, provided to us from hundreds taken by Stephen Johnston (ECU), editor, and Paul Godfrey (ECU), photographer, of the AUC magazine "Wheels for the Mind".

You can access this episode in different file formats and sizes. You can watch it on Youtube by clicking below, download it from the Podcast Program site by right clicking the links above, or have an iPod friendly version delivered to your computer as part of the program subscription.

Now we know a lot of you who attended Create World 2008 will enjoy the memories but we would like to encourage you to do much more with this episode.

Share the Wisdom and Promote Create World: Help your colleagues at your institution learn more about the knowledge and wisdom emanating from the conference. Set up a "brown-bag lunch" meeting or informal think-tank, where you can talk about ideas from Create World that may be of benefit to your institution. Use this episode as an introduction to the conference and then choose clips and ideas from any of the other 23 episodes in the Create World Podcast Program to explore those things that, as Roly Sussex says in this episode, "might take you to new places, and bounce you from where you are now to where you want to go next"

To help those who would like to run these meetings we have available a stand-alone player, for Mac OS only, which runs this presentation in an uncompressed stunning full screen mode. …. it’ll get their attention. It is a chunky 435 mb so please email Allan Carrington and we can work out how to get a CD to you.

Share your creative ideas: Help others who attended Create World 2008 by sharing with us how you use this presentation, and the other content in the Podcast Program, to disseminate your Create World learnings to your colleagues. Please contribute your ideas and experiences by commenting on this blog or better still, record your thinking on the comment board. Be part of the wisdom – and make Create World 2009 an even better experience.

Listen to the Episode:
The importance of being earmarked

In this podcast episode Brett Murray (WAAPA, Edith Cowan University) talks to us about the crafting of an interactive theatre piece. What were the challenges involved in creating music from an ‘interactive set’? Indeed, what is an ‘interactive set’? And why did Brett decide to work this way, and how did the creative team respond to working in an indeterminate environment where randomness was such a key issue? Listen to this episode and find out ….

Listen to the Episode: Topology: the music of speech

Topology are interested, amongst many other things, in the musicality of speech, and at Create World 2008 four members of the the group – John Babbage, Christa Powell, Bernard Hoey and Robert Davidson – rammed home to us how powerful the music-speech connection could be with a series of pieces blending video, digital speech audio and wonderfully accomplished live performance on good old fashioned analogue instruments. They started off with this number, incorporating the famous Martin Luther King speech:

Not so surprising perhaps that a great orator like Martin Luther King should be so amenable to musical interpretation (and presumably only Topology’s preference for historical rather than contemporary speech is preventing them from doing something similar with Obama). But what about something more home grown for us Australians? Gough Whitlam after the dismissal perhaps, on the steps of Parliament House? Not at all musical you think? Well, try listening to the following sample, you might change your mind. (For more of this, go to Topology’s The Big Decision website.)

Well may we say (click player buttons to play, pause or stop)

After their exhilarating Create World performance, Topology discussed their work with Allan Carrington. They talked a bit about the speech, intonation and music nexus, but they also enlarged on the role of music in human life generally, seeing music as opening us up to senses and feelings in ways that complement our thinking selves and help to make us fully human.

Listen to the Episode:
Live performance with digital cinema

Long-time colleagues Steven Maxwell and Brad Jennings founded Markwell Presents in 2002 and are now producing cinematic performance with various dance and theatre groups in Australia. In this podcast episode they talk to us about ‘cinematic theatre’ and the challenges of seeking to blend live, embodied performance with digital media.

‘Cinematic theatre’ as a concept does not have to include digital material, though. The concept is more broadly concerned with the bringing of film theory and film aesthetics into the space of the theatre, thereby seeking to expand the theatrical experience and the range of theatrical expression. (See for example Ebrahimian 2004.) You can do this with good old fashioned analogue film, of course, but digital technologies make it that much easier and affordable.

One wonders what the knock-on educational effects of this convergence of live performance and recorded material might be. Already struggling to make your powerpoint presentations more interesting? Worried that you have too many bullet points and too few graphics? What will happen when you have to have not just slides but whole movies running on the screen behind you during your lectures? That will make a difference to your lecture preparation time, hey?