Research for Responsive Media

  Rare Earth Proposity Studio Bridge8 Shanghai.

RARE EARTH is a research LAB and integrated exhibition project under development by Ian McArthur, Brad Miller and Prof. Richard Goodwin at the College of Fine Art (UNSW) in Sydney in collaboration with Donghua University (Shanghai) and Tsinghua University (Beijing). It is scheduled to happen in September this year 2011 in Shanghai.
In a globalised, interconnected yet schizophrenic world, opportunities for creatives from east and west to collaboratively engage in dialogue and practice that experientially deconstructs cultural difference particularly within art and design education contexts is quite rare, and although online spaces in principle allow and encourage us to inhabit digital space together, there are complex challenges to effective communication that can limit understanding. The College of Fine Art (COFA) at The University of New South Wales has constantly pushed boundaries between creative disciplines and cultures in its engagement with China. In particular Porosity Studio and The Collabor8 Project (C8) have provided art, design and architecture students from COFA, Donghua University, CAFA, Tsinghua, important opportunities to occupy and explore this seemingly elusive common ground in the city and online with a Rare Earth Flickr account..


RARE EARTH simultaneously, engages and celebrates this vital creative reflexivity by dynamically engaging with the research of Brad Miller and his networked Interactive Media Platform Augment_me to combine new and retrospective content, generated by undergraduate and postgraduate art and design students during our LAB. The project constructs itself as a series of lectures and intensive workshops facilitating content development for a dynamic immersive environment drawing on a live database (Flickr) comprised of collaborative interdisciplinary outputs of artists, designers, architects, teachers and learners engaging in an exploration of the city as a plastic entity. RARE EARTH is a laboratory where student will explore and test their concepts at the scale of the city and within the interstitial digital space of the network. Through this process RARE EARTH participants become more equipped to deconstruct the common misperceptions that hold humans apart. By showing students themselves in otherness they not only share their realities they also realise the fundamental commonalities all humans experience. The outcomes transform perceptions of difference into cultural literacy preparing them to make constructive interventions as creative practitioners in an interconnected world.

 

Rare Earth screen capture with new displacement mapping interface feedback mechanism