Milledge, Russell, Holdsworth, Jason, Youdell, Rebecca, Saunders, Zane, Mills, Nicholas, Meeks, Arone, and Inoui, Tai (2013) Lodestar. [Creative Work]

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Abstract

Lodestar is a performance installation concerned with interpretations of intercultural dialogue in northern Australia. The audience explored the theatrical space, much like they might explore a gallery of visual objects. The audience situate themselves to experience the work from different view-points within the auditorium, traversing the installations, while the performance episodes unfolded.

The audience expectations met with the experience of a theatrical world constructed scenographically and sensuously with representations and enactments of a world created by the artists based on ideas of the fantastical and wondrous.

What is Lodestar? A 'lodestar' or guiding star is used in celestial navigation and metaphorically represents a guiding principle. You use a lodestar to help you find your way.

Critical thinker Walter Benjamin (1940) proposed the organizing principle of a constellation to describe place and history. By drawing on Benjamin and other theories, the concept of the constellation becomes a multi-faceted metaphor that suggests negotiating the politics and time of place without fixing or limiting it to a linear concept.

Lodestar explores imagined terrains with a lens on the contested psychologies and motivational implications of the Australian landscape. A process of mutual tolerance, vernacular and physical dramaturgy was a key to coalesce artistic disciplines and to describing imagined or magic geographies. Lodestar revealed the liminal terrain of shared environments in the microcosm of Australia’s far north.

Research Statement

Research Background	Lodestar is framed as a performative experience and occupies an intermedial zone between performance, sculpture, image and cinema. Media arts development in the form of human interaction with augmented and mediatized spatial environments has interdisciplinary value for the creative arts, information technology and human computer interface research. Engagement with an indigenous consultant, informal and formal discussion, and using the critical methodology of action research informed the process.
Research Contribution	This project contributes to the creation, delivery and performance of creative work. The project contributes to the development and innovation of software products specifically the Isadora and Max MSP visual programming platforms. Sophisticated human movement motion tracking, choreographic augmented technologies and cinematic effects create an immersive scenographic world. The performance strategy seeks a response to interactivity and performed human movement intending to invoke the audience participant to reciprocate with their own human movement and in so doing generate a particular effect through the work.
Research Significance	Lodestar has been presented as a in-progress creative development at the Centre of Contemporary Arts Cairns, Funded by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body, the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland. The creative development has been a 2-stage process to create a new work, with the first development stage in January 2013 and the second development stage in October 2013. Three work-in-progress performance showings 9 - 11 October 2013 were held at the Cairns, Centre of Contemporary Arts.
Item ID:	31300
Item Type:	Creative Work (Other - NTRO)
Media of Output:	Multimedia
Event Details:	Lodestar Centre of Contemporary Arts, Cairns, QLD, Australia 9-11 October 2013
Keywords:	performance, choreography, media design, media arts, visual programming, creative arts, intermedia
Related URLs:	http://www.bonemap.com http://vimeo.com/64395632
Funders:	Australian Government, Australia Council for the Arts, Cairns Centre of Contemporary Arts
Date Deposited:	02 Dec 2014 02:47
FoR Codes:	19 STUDIES IN CREATIVE ARTS AND WRITING > 1902 Film, Television and Digital Media > 190299 Film, Television and Digital Media not elsewhere classified @ 100%
SEO Codes:	95 CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING > 9501 Arts and Leisure > 950104 The Creative Arts (incl. Graphics and Craft) @ 100%
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