What's On at UWA

The Artifactory is Perth's manifestation of the world-wide phenomenon of hackerspaces; free-form communities of "Makers" that band together to build their own robotic CNC tools, explore cutting edge DIY fabrication such as 3D printing, share electronics and crafting skills, and generally build useful and creative stuff. Now 2 years old and 25 members strong, this creative collective of engineers, artists, artisans and technologists are based in a warehouse in Osborne Park where they run training days for topics such as computer-aided design and machining, talks and lectures by guest Artists and Scientists, and regular meetings of minds and manufacturing to produce a bewildering range of Artifacts.

Funded purely by member subscription, open to all, The Artifactory promotes curiosity and experimentation in all directions.

Jenna Downing is a visual artist interested in the ethics of technology, socio-political illustration and high-tech design. She is an honours graduate of the School of Art at Curtin University. SKoT McDonald is an audio & music technologist as CTO of UK-based software house FXpansion, and part-time Eccentric Gentleman Inventor. He studied automated music transcription and machine listening at UWA's Computer Science Department.

The Austrian-based classical Mandelbrot Duo team up with Western Australian Indigenous performer Richard Walley for the premiere of a new work for violin, cello and didgeridoo especially commissioned for the UWA WINTERArts Festival 2011 and to coincide with NAIDOC week. This collaboration brings three world-class performers together in concert, and bridges traditional Western European arts with the ancient traditions of the original custodians of the land. The artists will be composing and rehearsing new works in the Gallery from 11am-1pm July 5-8, on view free to the public. This is an exciting opportunity to see the performers working in the space and to gain insight into the composition process. These works will then be performed in concert at the Gallery on Sunday 10 July at 7.00pm, with an artist’s talk at 6.00pm. This event is proudly presented by the UWA School of Music and UWA Museums. * Tickets to Sunday’s concert are $45/$30 concession. Bookings through [email protected] or phone 6488 2054

"I am a choreographer and dance artist because of my interest in the capacity of art to makes sense of the world around us and the capacity of imagination to dream up the future. I hope, in some small way, that my art practice can contribute to the transformation of our world. This vision has led me to a constantly diversifying practice, across multiple disciplines and diverse communities. At SymbioticA I would like to share, through video and conversation, my recent body of works including Wintering, a work currently under development and inspired by an artist-led voyage to the High Arctic in 2010, The Futures Project, a work I recently created during a 2-month residency at Taipei Artist Village, and Accidental Monsters of Meaning, a durational installation performance that was presented at the WA Museum earlier this year."

Aimee Smith is a choreographer and dance artist inspired by the capacity of art as social specimen, art as beauty, art as social commentary, art as communicator, art as celebrator, and art as transformer. Since graduating from the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts in 2004, Aimee has been creating, performing and collaborating on contemporary dance works and installation environments, in both Australia and overseas. Her choreographic works include Accidental Monsters of Meaning (2011), Breakings (2010), Courageously Heroic Gallantry (2007), Refund Policy (2007), and Alpha.Beta. (2006), for which she has received numerous nominations and awards including Most Interesting Australian Artist in the 2007 and 2010 Dance Australia Critic’s Survey and the 2007 WA Dance Award for emerging artist. Alongside her choreographic practice Aimee works as a performer, teacher, community arts practitioner and is completing her masters in sustainability, constantly searching for ways it intersects with art.

Celebrate Bastille Day early with the 62nd Australian Intervarsity Choral Festival Choir!

This will be a concert not to be missed, featuring the Australian premiere of the Desenclos Requiem coupled with beautiful music composed by Fauré, Alain and Poulenc. The choir will be accompanied by the Fremantle Chamber Orchestra and will be conducted by Dr Richard Swann.

Tickets will be available through BOCS Ticketing ($45/$35) or at the door.

Songs are a universal medium of communication, able to cross borders of language, culture and class. As songwriters we can share the personal and the universal, from our own unique perspective. Like other forms of writing, songwriting is both instinctive and reflective, a talent to be released and a craft to be honed. Singer-songwriter Craig Sinclair presents a half-day workshop aimed at helping novice and experienced songwriters express their unique voice through songwriting.

Experience a unique and extensive showcase of visual arts from established and emerging WA artists. Artists and art lovers will come together to share their common interests and explore the styles and techniques of today's established and emerging artists. Supported by some of UWA and Perth's most talented musicians with an array of gourmet foods and picnic baskets available.

The visiting classical Mandelbrot Duo team up with Australian indigenous performer Richard Walley for the premiere of a new work for violin, cello and didgeridoo especially commissioned for UWA WINTERArts 2011 and to coincide with NAIDOC week.

The collaboration brings together three world class performers in a concert set amid a most powerful exhibition of Aboriginal desert art, which breathes with the timeless spirit of the desert country.

Artist talk at 6pm.

Tickets $45/$30 concession Tel: 6488 2054 or email [email protected]

Proudly presented by the UWA School of Music and UWA Museums.

The history of Modern Europe presents a multitude of disturbing contradictions. The Old Continent has engendered the most uplifting visions of human potential and the darkest dystopias in human experience. It has laboured to produce its colossal social, cultural and artistic heritage and has unleashed unimaginable destruction on itself and throughout the world. For better or worse this paradox lies at the centre of Europe's historical imagination. Making sense of it pushes the historian's craft to its limits.

Between 11-14 July 2011 historians hailing from a wide variety of locations and institutions will come together in Perth. In the beautiful settings of the campuses of the University of Western Australia and Murdoch University they will discuss, argue, and share research findings and pose the infinite questions studying the history of Europe demands.

This conference will concern itself with the contradictory nature of Europe in modern times.

Focused around the theme of identity of place and origins, this concert by Austrian-based performer-composers The Mandelbrot Duo is a rich and engaging journey into the imaginative worlds of sound.

Southern Oceans Suite explores the oceanic region of the southwest coastline Australia, evoking its appearance, sounds, lifecycles, inhabitants and journeys that take place through it.

Galaxy explores the origins of life and the universe, spanning the stars, cosmic evolutionary forces, galaxies and the planet itself.

Artist talk at 6pm.

Tickets $45/$30 concession. Tel: 6488 2054 or email [email protected]

Proudly presented by the UWA School of Music.

A delicious luncheon at the University Club of Western Australia will be the setting for a literary discussion with author Ian Reid, who will give an insight into his bitter-beautiful historical novel The End of Longing - a thrilling and lyrical novel about a confidence trickster, a restless woman, and their travels.

Ian Reid is a widely published writer with seven literary and historical titles to his name. Originally from New Zealand, he now lives in Perth where he is Winthrop Professor at UWA and an Emeritus Professor at Curtin University.

The event is open to both University Club Members and the general public. Ticket price includes a drink on arrival, a two-course luncheon and presentation by Professor Ian Reid.

For further information please contact Jessica Wright on 6488 4286 or via email [email protected]

University Club Members $55/ Guests $65 Tel: 6488 8770.

Presented by The University Club of Western Australia and UWA Publishing as part of WINTERArts 2011.

What is “value”? What is “goodness” and “badness”? What does our only scientific theory of life have to say?

The mathematical logic of game theory shows that cooperation can evolve, as does the adaptationist logic of biology. Both kinds of logic rely on the assumption of optimality. In mathematical games, “agents” maximize “utility” through the optimal (rational) analysis of costs and benefits; in the adaptation game, organisms maximize fitness through the optimal allocation of limited resources to the most pressing adaptive problems. “To allocate” means “set apart for a purpose.” The consensus in affective neuroscience is that emotions are about nature’s purpose; they make animals “want” to do what they need to do to enhance fitness. The biological capability to have a “purpose” implies the existence of value in nature. To illustrate, I’ll focus on the idea that art is “the synthesis of feelings and ideas” (as someone once said).

E/Prof Jim Chisholm received his BA with Honors in Anthropology from Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT. and his MPhil and PhD in Anthropology from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ. He taught anthropology at the University of New Mexico, human development at the University of California, Davis and human biology at the University Western Australia. He uses the principles of evolutionary ecology, life history theory, sexual selection theory, and parental investment theory to investigate the role of early psychosocial stress and attachment history in the evolution and development of theory of mind and the capacity for culture and the development of alternative reproductive strategies and their implications for health and health inequalities. He is currently writing a book about the role of emotion in the evolution of culture.

Artists operate within both the miniscule contexts of cells and molecules and the vastly larger macrocosm of human experience. While scientists ponder higher dimensions and the existence of multiple universes, the scope of knowledge encompasses once inconceivable reaches of space and time. Art is no longer confined to this world or even, to this universe.

For more than 30 years, Joe Davis, a research affiliate in the Department of Biology at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has created art both physical and conceptual using diverse scientific and artistic practice.

His research and art includes areas of molecular biology, bioinformatics, "space art", sculpture, radios, prosthetics, magnetic fields, and genetic material.

As an educator Davis has worked in the MIT graduate architecture program (Master of Science in Visual Studies) and in undergraduate painting and mixed media at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Davis has exhibited in the United States, Canada and at Ars Electronica in Austria.

A public lecture by Professor Terry Smith, FAHA, CIHA - Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory, Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh.

The lecture is based on Terry Smith’s new book which argues that, in recent decades, a worldwide shift from modern to contemporary art has occurred. This has not, however, been a uniform change from one phase or style in the history of art to another. Rather, artists everywhere have embraced the contemporary world’s teeming multiplicity, its proliferating differences, and its challenging complexities. Diversity--the contemporaneity of difference--not a convergence towards sameness, Smith argues, is what makes today’s art contemporary.

Today, the Kyrgyz Manas is one of the most celebrated epic heroic poems in the world. At the turn of the new millennium it was appointed a UNESCO ‘Masterpiece in the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Mankind’, signaling its global importance. It sits alongside Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, or the South Asian Mahabharata and Ramayana, and although it is much less studied it is arguably much more extensive (in one particular version it has 500,533 verse lines – twenty times the length of the Iliad and Odyssey put together). This seminar documents the lengthy process of constructing a jointly authored book with one of the most celebrated contemporary Kyrgyz epic reciters, Saparbek Kasmambetov. Despite the acknowledged importance of the Manas, this is the first attempt at a collaborative project of this sort.

A free public lecture by Professor Lyndel V. Prott, Honorary Professor, University of Queensland.

Appreciation, accumulation, devastation? The love of beauty has inspired many great collections of works of art.

Source countries are today increasingly articulate about the damage inflicted on their cultural heritage by the clandestine excavation of their antiquities and the theft of their art works from museums, traditional communities and places of worship. These activities, they say, are inspired by the demand of collectors in wealthy countries. How far are these complaints justified? Is the damage as serious as they claim? What responsibility do collectors, including museums, have to prevent their interest in other cultures damaging the continuance of artistic traditions in those cultures and the exploration of ancient cultures in those lands?

This presentation will discuss current international developments in the efforts to hinder damage to other cultures from the high demand for such objects and to facilitate the return of some of the objects felt to be most painfully lost to their countries of origin.

All welcome, no RSVP required.

Music for Cello and Piano with Guest Artists Niall Brown, cello and Isabelle Trub, piano

Following more than ten years of concerts, it has become clear that cellist Niall Brown and pianist Isabelle Trub have created something quite special in chamber music that the press have unanimously recognised. Their eloquent and refined interpretation of the great masterpieces of the repertoire as well as their enthusiasm for contemporary works enables them to cover three centuries of musical composition with ease.

3 - 8 August 2011

A festival of old and new music for 1-12 cellos spanning 3 centuries

Old meets new in an exciting festival of music composed for the cello, ranging from baroque works written in the early 18th century through to world premier compositions by UWA resident composer, Chris Tonkin, and UWA student composers. This festival will take the listener on a musical odyssey through time, timbre, texture, tone and techniques.

The cellos wide range of performance possibilities will be explored and exploited, with little-known early works performed in new ways, and newly composed music heard for the first time, developing and diverging from traditions and conventions of the past. In addition to scheduled events, there will be student guerrilla cellists performing around the UWA campus in selected venues during the festival week, embodying the Universitys Cultural Precinct.

Specialist performer Geoff Gartner will workshop UWA student composer pieces, as well as presenting select works from the repertoire, and give composers advice about writing for cello.

As a musicologist Gartner specializes in the American experimental scene with a particular emphasis on Fluxus and intermedia. A committed advocate of the avant-garde, Gartner has premiered countless pieces and enjoyed working relationships with many leading composers, including Thomas Ades, Dominik Karski, Helmut Lachenmann, Rosalind Page, Damien Ricketson and David Young. He regularly performs with many of Australias elite contemporary music ensembles.

Dorothy Ellen Ransom Prize in Composition and Pauline Steel Prize for Solo Cello

Students competing for the Pauline Steel Prize for cello will play newly composed works for solo cello by UWA student composers especially for the Old Cello/New Cello Festival in this combined lunchtime concert and competition. The Pauline Steel Prize is awarded annually to the undergraduate student who gives the best performance of a nominated work for solo cello. Guest artists Niall Brown and Geoff Gartner will serve as co- adjudicators for the prize in 2011.

Accompaniment with Guest Artist Isabelle Trub, piano

Trub has also been closely associated as an accompanist with the International Menuhin Music Academy in Switzerland, Freiburg Hochschule and Villa Musica in Germany, Hindemith Foundation in Switzerland and more recently Youth Music Australia. Trub is currently teaching piano at the University of Adelaide.