2022

A Safer Place? Stories from the Emergency Department

Eight experts with lived experience guide us through a virtual reality experience of a hospital Emergency Department [ED]. They describe the scenarios of mental distress that led to their admissions, along with their experiences of waiting rooms, ED beds, and hospital procedures—and their insights into what can be done to address the shortcomings of emergency care.

This creative project builds on underpinning research, led by Renata Kokanović and her team, working with 17 people accessing the ED for mental health care. The aim of the initial project was to enable staff to understand ED processes from the perspective of those with lived experience. The full stories can be accessed via the Health Talk Australia website: https://www.healthtalkaustralia.org/mental-health-care-in-the-emergency-department/overview/

• Script editors: Gail Kenning, Jill Bennett, Volker Kuchelmeister
• Immersive media design: Volker Kuchelmeister
• Sound design: Alex Davies
• Production/design team: Volker Kuchelmeister, Jill Bennett, Gail Kenning, Alex Davies, Melissa Neidorf
• Research team: Renata Kokanović, Nicholas Hill, Critical Mental health group, RMIT
• Natasha Swingler, Peter Rolfe, Richard Pilkington, Sue Walker and other anonymous participants

This work is additionally supported by R&I Capability Research Funding, RMIT University

Exhibitions:
2023: Siggraph Asia 2023 XR, Sydney Exhibition Center, Australia.
2022: Felt Experience and Empathy Lab (fEEl), RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.

2019

Change was our only Chance

Change was our only Chance by artist collective Time’s Up creates a world in the year 2047. By inviting you to step into this world, they make it possible to experience a potential future. This version of the future tells of the paths that humanity took in the 2020s, what decisions were made on a political and economic level, how climate change defined and influenced our future. How can we face these developments today with positive impulses as a collective, rather than lose heart faced with the problems of this world and freeze with fear?

More exhibition photographs available <here>

Exhibitions:
2019: Vienna Biennale, AIL – Angewandte Innovation Lab – Franz-Josefs-Kai
Date: 02.09.2019 – 27.09.2019

2017

Parragirls Past, Present

Parragirls Past, Present is an immersive experience presenting former residents’ visions of Parramatta Girls Home today. This landmark narrative digital media project is the first of its kind to screen in UNSW EPICylinder, the world’s highest resolution 360 degree 3D cinema. As an encountner with living memory, this work offers rare insight into the impact and experience of institutional care in contemporary Australia.

Creative team
Parragirls: Writer/Narrators Bonney Djuric & Jenny McNally; Narrators Lynne Edmondson Paskovski, Gypsie Hayes & Denise Nicholas.
Art Director & Production Design: Volker Kuchelmeister.
Sound Design/Editor: Alex Davies
Writer/Editor: Lily Hibberd
Co-producers: Jill Bennett, Bonney Djuric, Lily Hibberd
Created with Parragirls and new media artists Lily Hibberd,  Alex Davies and Volker Kuchelmeister.

Exhibitions:

2019: Today is not Tomorrow: PTSD Understories, Umbrella Studio, Townsville, Australia
2019: Art after Hours. The Big Anxiety virtual reality station., Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, Australia
2019:Horizon Festival. Deconstructed breakfast, Festival Central, Maroochydore.
2018: 360 Vision, Create NSW, Carriageworks Sydney, Australia
2018: Co.Lab. Landcom and UrbanGrowth NSW, Sydney, Australia
2018: Beyond Festival, ZKM Centre for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany
2018: Adelaide Film Festival, Adelaide Australia
2018: Haifa International Film Festival, Haifa, Israel
2018: Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF), Melbourne Australia
2018: International Symposium on Electronic Arts (ISEA), Durban South Africa
2018: IX Symposium on Immersive Experience, The Conquest Of Reality, SAT Society for Arts and Technology, Montreal, Canada.
2018: Revelation Perth International Film Festival, Perth Australia
2018: South By Southwest Festival (SXSW), Austin USA
2018: Australian Heritage Festival, Parramatta Girls Home, Sydney, Australia
2018: Sydney International Film Festival, Sydney Australia
2017: Check-in Lounge, Parramatta Riverside Theatre, Parramatta.
2017: International Initiative for Mental Health Leadership & International Conference, Hilton Sydney, Australia
2017 Growing Up Digital, invited by NSW Mental Health Commissioner, Town Hall Sydney, Australia
2017: The Big Anxiety Festival, UNSW EPICenter (Expanded Perception and Visualisation Interaction Centre), Sydney Australia.

This project has been assisted by the Australian government through the Department of Communication and the Arts’ Catalyst—Australian Arts and Culture Fund.
Parramatta Female Factory Precinct Memory Project is supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW and is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

Catch The Tiger

Designed to test how we react to changes in our environment, and to our own fluctuating anxiety levels, it is a multi-sensory physical game that you will experience with four other players. Played in the visually striking “Tiger Room”, the game is inspired by a traditional Chinese puzzle, combined with geometry informed by George Hart’s mathematical study of orderly tangles.

Creative team
Original concept: Iain (Max) Maxwell (Supermanoeuvre) and Mari Velonaki (Creative Robotics Lab, UNSW).
Puzzle design and manufacture: Iain (Max) Maxwell and Oliver Bennett (Supermanoeuvre).
Game and interface design: Mari Velonaki (Creative Robotics Lab, UNSW).
Sound design and composition: Alex Davies (Creative Robotics Lab, UNSW).
Hardware and software design and implementation: David Rye (Australian Centre for Field Robotics, University of Sydney), Michael Gratton (Creative Robotics Lab and Computer Science and Engineering, UNSW) and Andrew Haig.
Experiment design/psychology: Katsumi Watanabe (Waseda University).
Mental health design advisory: Katherine Boydell (Black Dog Institute) and Jill Bennett (National Institute of Experimental Art, UNSW).
Commissioned by: Jill Bennett (National Institute of Experimental Art, UNSW).
Hosted by: The National Facility for Human-Robot Interaction Research.

Exhibitions: 2017: The Big Anxiety Festival, UNSW National Facility for Human Robot Interaction, Sydney, Australia.

Only the Air, Only Each Other

Director: Greg Ferris, Sound Design, Alex Davies

Running Time: 6:03

Only at the Air, Only at Each Other is an experimental virtual-reality exploration of in-between spaces, in this case the Bates Motel from Psycho – motels being the spaces between starting points and destinations – and the space between life and death …

Exhibitions: 2017 Edinburgh International Science Festival, Summerhall, Edinburgh

2016

And the Earth Sighed

Artists Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewsky. Spatial sound design and composition Alex Davies.

Detailed information about the project is available here and video documentation is available here https://vimeo.com/18688743

Game On

Using electric muscle stimulation to control real people as game characters, Game On explores violence in modern entertainment and the ethical challenges faced by society as technology advances to a point where the level of realism in ‘games’ becomes indistinguishable from reality

Creative Team:
Concept and production: Michaela Davies
Electronics & hardware: Leigh Russell
Max/MSP programming: Alex Davies
Set fabrication: Ed Horne
Costume making & design: Michaela Davies
Sound Design: Michaela Davies
Custom EMS device: Richard Allen
Joystick fabrication: Damian Martin, Odd Studio
Installation and damage control: Reuben Alexander
Boxers: Lea Spratt-Simpson, Mark Simpson, Tenley Gillmore, Claire Conroy, Sam Pettigrew, Matte Rochford, Kerri Ambler and Louise Maloney.

Detailed project information is available here and video documentation of the work installed at Cockatoo Island, Sydney Australia here: https://vimeo.com/113065440

2010

Subsoma

Subsoma explores human interaction with the environment in a performance where movement in the human body is controlled by seismic activity. Subsoma speaks to human reliance on data, its transmission, interpretation and impacts, highlighting both the utility of information and the lack of agency we have in respect of global systems. 

Creative Team:
Concept and production: Michaela Davies
Max/MSP programming: Alex Davies
Seismic Data translation: Stock
Custom EMS device: Richard Allen
Performer: Michaela Davies and Kerry Ambler

The Vinyl Rally

“Insights into the violent tendencies of mind and body are invited in this kaleidoscopic work with its wordless narrative. Tension is heightened by sound and the pitches, chords and tones produced by slack and taut strings…again the metaphor of entrapment. The action escalates and becomes hyperbolic, allowing no space for the tension to be broken. The woman lets out occasional screams as if being raped in the most horrible of circumstances…until only a rasping breath is audible. The sound gets inside you and reverberates through your organs, like bats, not butterflies, rising to the throat, making you feel sick.”
http://www.realtimearts.net/article/72/8305

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 Work, Rest, Play, (Escape)

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Imperial Slacks collective formed in 2000 in Surry Hills, Sydney in response to a need to continue the activities of the artist run space Herringbone Gallery. The collective is made up of resident artists and friends from the studios that surrounded the exhibition space. The Imperial Slacks collective ran the gallery until late-2002, supporting curated exhibitions, sound events and performance projects from local and international artists. During that time, the group exhibited annually, producing 18 is enough, Imperial Alliance, Positive Overkill and Period (an exchange project with Blaugrau artist run space). The gallery project terminated with Slacking Off, opening up the live-in spaces for an expanse of mini-exhibitions from invited and resident artists.
Work, Rest, Play (Escape) is the collective’s first collaboration since leaving the Surry Hills space.

WORK, REST, PLAY (ESCAPE) – Artspace, Sydney, Febuary, 2004
Imperial Slacks collective present an environment that questions the possibilities and failings of collective and alternative living. A key objective of this theoretical Imperial Slacks kibbutz-Hilton is the synthesis of work, rest and play into one stream of delimited activity. These various social modes will be networked through a perverse arrangement of natural, domestic, sporting and recreational materials. The “Slackers” speculate upon a design for living that will physically and symbolically suspend the function of these familiar materials and relationships in order to offer new hybridised and esoteric formations. This constructed environment is intended to continue a development of its own language, rituals and beliefs against a variety of conflicting forces external to the group.
The potential for this model of creative cohabitation to nomadically uproot and fragment is a great disappointment to utopian thought, Vogue Living, Ikea, Better Homes and Gardens (and our mums). In doing so, the model escapes its own physical and social architecture in favour of new manifestations: at worst, another institutional “test site,” at best, a group pod somewhere else, sometime soon.

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 2003

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 Lightning District

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Artists: Time’s Up

I developed sound for Lightning District whilst working with Time’s Up during an exhibition in Stralsund . The project is an acoustic carpet formed by the various paths of the public that induces an audio stroll and distracts from goal-oriented striding. Full project information here

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Anchortronic

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Anchortronic is a Time’s Up audio project in cooperation with the music label Staalplaat. It is dedicated to experimental electronic music exploring the bounds of the 5.1 surround delivery format on DVD. I composed 2 tracks on the compilation, and subsequently performed at a surround sound concert at Garage Festival, Germany.

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2002

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BodySPIN

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Artists: Time’s Up

Working with Time’s Up in 2002, I developed sound for one of the new virtual worlds in BodySPIN, Pulse Race.

SPIN is a three meter diameter trackball that one walks inside of.As the trackball rotates beneath your feet,the motion is taken over to a virtual space and projections of that space are cast upon the translucent walls of the ball.The effect is one of taking a stroll inside a virtual space.There is no forward,there are no goggles or other impediments,freedom of movement in spite of the space restrictions sets SPIN apart from other interfaces.The rolling motion is used to control navigation in a virtual space -the expression walk-through obtains real meaning at last.

BodySPIN aims at researching behavioral patterns in a simulated environment that incorporates the user ´s body rather than trying to overcome it.Clients begin their experience in BodySPIN in the central world, the Inverted Reality System, where they start to move and to get used to this new way of walking. From this space there are portals to other environments.The bodily functions breathing, heartbeat and degree of muscle activity are used in order to obtain an overview of the biomechanical state. The resulting values are used to control aspects of three specially programmed environments; Pulse Race,Brain Maze and Breath Surf.

Breath Surf
-the users breath frequency triggers a series of waves inside the dome,the aim being to catch a wave and surf on it.
Brain Maze
-brain activity and skin resistance decide upon the complexity of a maze that is being generated inside the dome,an „alert but calm state “will make it the easiest to pass.
Pulse Race
-With every pulse of the user’s heart, the end of the tunnel leaps away. The tunnel grows in beats, each section heading off; up and down, left and right. Moving steadily forwards without undue exertion allows the user to catch their heart.

Detailed project information is available here

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2001

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Triclops

Performance with Triclops International comprising of custom build sound machines at What is Music? Festival February 23, 2001, Sydney, Australia (video will be available shortly!)

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Ben Blakeborough operating one of the instruments, a jet engine during the performance.

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