Creativity and artistic inquiry—“bringing something new into the world, at times by severing, isolating, reconnecting, or testing the breaking point” (Hansen, 2018, 37–38)—has been increasingly recognised and validated as research within Australian universities, since the Dawkins reforms of 1989-94. This recognition was cemented through the work of scholars and practitioners in conjunction with the Australian Research Council and Department of Education, Science and Training to develop a framework (implemented in 2010) that was ‘suitable’ for the evaluation of artistic research. With the dissolution of the Excellence in Research Australia (ERA) framework and questions and fears about what process might replace it, there is a perceived need to showcase the strengths of artistic research and place it front and centre in current and future discussions. In this session leaders from a diversity of artistic disciplines provide perspectives on the place of artistic research in the Australian university ecosystem.
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Speakers
Professor Neal Peres Da Costa FAHA (Chair)
Neal Peres Da Costa is Associate Dean Research and Professor of Historical Performance at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney.
Winner of a Fine Arts ARIA (2008), he is world-recognised for his performance on historical keyboards. His monograph Off the Record: Performing Practices in Romantic Piano Playing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) is a ‘go-to’ text globally, and he has published a suite of influential book chapters and practice-led recordings.
Neal is lead chief investigator on three prestigious Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Projects and is a member of the ARC College of Experts. Neal performs and records regularly with some of Australia’s finest historical performance industry partners including Ironwood, Bach Akademie Australia, and the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra (ARCO) of which he is also Artistic Advisor.
Professor Roger Dean FAHA
Roger Dean is a composer/improviser, and research professor in music cognition/computation at the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University. His research folds into his creative work, through machine learning, computational models and defined algorithmic approaches. He has more than 100 journal articles in music science, as well as 220 in biochemistry, his former field. His publication output also includes 17 books (h-index 84, >28000 citations). He directs the creative ensemble austraLYSIS, which has performed in 30 countries. With Will Luers and Hazel Smith, he received the international Robert Coover Prize of the Electronic Literature Organisation (2018). He has performed as bassist, pianist and computer artist in many contexts: from the Academy of Ancient Music and the Australian Chamber Orchestra to the London Sinfonietta, and from Graham Collier Music to duets with Derek Bailey and Evan Parker. His creative work is represented in over 70 commercial recordings and numerous radio and online digital multimedia pieces. His current research concerns improvisation; pitch, timbre and rhythm generation and perception; music learning in older adults, and music computation. Previously, Roger was a full professor of biochemistry in the UK and then an academic CEO for 18 years, first as foundation Director of the autonomous Heart Research Institute, Sydney, and then as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Canberra.
Abstract: Testing the Breaking Point: the importance of empirical humanities and the contributions of music and intermedia
Abstract: Testing the Breaking Point: the importance of empirical humanities and the contributions of music and intermedia
The cyclic model of practice-led research and research-led practice seems to have helped many creative artists to articulate the research implications of their practice, and some to create artistic works as a result of their own prior research developments. I argue that these processes are both critical for the optimal development of creativity at large (in and beyond the arts), and for artistic enquiry in our universities. For example, somewhat linear ‘chain of thought’ reasoning (now central in many machine learning AI processes) can be supplemented by decidedly non-linear improvisatory steps, that spring particularly from traditions of musical, dance, theatrical and visual creation. Similarly, AI’s ‘reinforcement learning’ is well-named in that it does not have this degree of potential divergence but rather depends on less changeable ‘policies’. In the creative arts, the non-linear outputs might be tested both for novelty (a concept that can resist social and temporal backgrounds, for example by computational implementation) and for user-affect and perceived meaning more broadly. In the empirical humanities, the outputs might be tested against gathered digital data or tested live in controlled conditions of (experimental) comparison. The sum of these non-linear procedures is critical for maximising novelty output, and hence potential creative utility output. By appreciating this, workers in empirical humanities, science and elsewhere, can potentially enhance their contributions, especially when working in collaboration. From a cultural perspective, this sum can clearly enhance social cohesion and intercultural exchange. From an economic one, it can not only provide innovation that has practical, social and commercial value, but also provide evidence and arguments that can inform organisational and political processes.
Associate Professor Erin Brannigan
Erin Brannigan is Associate Professor in Theatre and Performance at the University of New South Wales. She is of Irish and Danish political exile, convict, and settler descent. Her publications include Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), Choreography, Visual Art and Experimental Composition 1950s -1970s (London: Routledge, 2022) and a companion monograph to the latter, The Persistence of Dance: Choreography as Concept and Material in Contemporary Art (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2023). She has published various chapters and articles in film, performance and dance journals and anthologies and regularly presents on dance for ABC Radio National. Her research project Precarious Movements: Dance and the Museum (2020-2024) with Tate UK, National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of NSW, Monash University Museum of Art, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Shelley Lasica and Zoe Theodore produced an online sector resource, precariousmovements.com, and an anthology Precarious Movements (Melbourne: NGV, 2024).
Abstract: Precarious Research: serving the institution or serving the art?
Abstract: Precarious Research: serving the institution or serving the art?
A recent ARC Linkage funded project, Precarious Movements: Choreography and the Museum (2021-2024), led through the University of NSW with industry partners Tate UK, the Art Gallery of NSW, National Gallery of Victoria, Monash University Museum of Art, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts and independent Shelley Lasica, delivered outcomes across commissioned creative case studies, an anthology with NGV Publishing, and a sector resource. These were honoured with awards and critical acclaim and exceeded our expectations around scope and impact. Behind, between and around research design and acquittal was the broader issue of how artists and institutions engage with each other and associated matters of visibility, power, agency and economics. This became a layer of the research that spread beyond the terms of the official partnerships, emerged tentatively and unexpectedly across the project, and was the context that shaped every element of our work. While acknowledging the, by now, indisputable strengths of artistic research regarding the Australian university ecosystem, this presentation raises some complex cultural and community-related matters as we aim to place it front and centre in current and future discussions.
Professor Julian Meyrick FAHA
Professor of Creative Arts at Griffith University and Literary Adviser for the Queensland Theatre. He has directed over 40 theatre productions, written the histories of five Australian theatre companies, and published numerous articles on Australian arts and cultural policy, including 90+ pieces for The Conversation. He was Literary Manager at the South Australia Theatre Company 2013-2019, Associate Director and Literary Advisor at Melbourne Theatre Company 2002-07, and Artistic Director of kickhouse theatre 1989-98. He was Deputy Chair of PlayWriting Australia 2004-09, and a member of the federal government’s Creative Australia Advisory Group 2008-10. Julian was General Editor of Currency House’s New Platform Paper series and also a board member of Northern River Performing Arts 2019-23. From 2013-2021, he was Lead CI for Laboratory Adelaide, an ARC project studying the problem of culture’s value, and from 2012-19, Lead CI for the AusStage performing arts database. His latest books are Australian Theatre after the New Wave: Policy, Subsidy and the Alternative Artist (Brill 2017), What Matters? Talking Value in Australian Culture, co-authored with Robert Phiddian and Tully Barnett (Monash Publishing 2018), Australia in 50 Plays (Currency Press 2022) and Theatre & Australia, (in Bloomsbury Publishing’s Theatre And series, 2024).
Abstract: Knowing Time: the unsettling journey of researching interwar drama in Australia
This paper considers the role of drama as a device for conceiving and reckoning the consequences of human action in time. Its focus is the Australian premiere of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard at Melbourne’s Comedy Theatre in 1938. Directed by Dolia Ribush, a Russian-speaking Jewish immigrant from Latvia, it was the second show of the Ribush Players, a theatre company that attracted support from a wide range of Australian artists and intellectuals, including AA Phillips, Vance and Nettie Palmer, Basil Burdett, Betty Roland, Clem and Nina Christensen, and Douglas Stewart. My research journey into this company began in 2019, on the cusp of the covid pandemic and its aftermath. The Ribush Players staged The Cherry Orchard on the verge of the Second World War. Anton Chekhov wrote his last play immediately before the 1905 Russian Revolution. The Cherry Orchard is preoccupied with what Francois Hartog in Regimes of Historicity calls “three modes of memory”: the presence of the past, the presence of the present, and the presence of the future. Time flows unevenly across these modes in the coruscated actuality of human lives, including my own, as a researcher. In exploring the consequences of our choices—in which drama, as a form of storytelling, is adept—the past may draw nearer, the future move further away. Or change valency, from source of inspiration and hope, to object of guilt and dread. As the frailty of hindsight and foresight is explored in The Cherry Orchard (and other plays) the limits, paradoxes and impacts of human action in time are revealed. The result is new knowledge, but of an apophatic kind. We know more by understanding how little we know.
