ISEA2024 Art Event Overview

Constellations is a curated selection of emerging technology artworks, hosted at bespoke facilities within the QUT campus ecosystem. Constellations recognises the micro temporality of the Everywhen and the potential for conceptions of time and space that go beyond Western Epistemologies. Constellations showcases 98 artists across 7 mini programs, highlighting cultural and technological diversity in order to navigate this unfolding digital future. We trace multifarious lines of flight, such as XR performance outside traditional frameworks; VR/AR applied to cross modal perception; motion tracking and body sensors; screen arts that engage with critical planetary perspectives; and, award winning abstract and narrative computer animation from some of the world’s most experimental and groundbreaking directors.

Constellations presents:

Animation Screenings (in partnership with Ars Electronica Animation On Tour and SIGGRAPH Asia 2023) with films by Ina Conradi & Mark Chavez, Ayoung Kim, Jonathan Armour, Junha Kim, Jieyuan Huang, Wang & Söderström, Dorian Rigal Minuit, Maxime Chudeau, Ryotaro Sato.

Bespoke Screens Program with Nathan Shafer, Tiare Ribeaux, Qianqian Ye, Chantel Bates, Rewa Wright & Simon Howden (UnCalculated Studio), Martin Jarmick, Creative Impact Lab, Sarah Waterson, Van Sowerwine & Isobel Knowles, Noorua Tapuni, Gregory Bennett, Kellie O’Dempsey, June Kim, Rem Rungu Lin, Koo Yong En Ke, Leixin Luo, Felix Ng.

Video Arts Program with artworks by Desna Whaanga-Schollum, Liliana Conlisk-Gallegos, Pasha Clothier, Clinton Watkins, A. Bill Miller, Alex Lee, Terhi Marttila, James Cunningham, Hannen Wolfe, Annique Goldenberg, Rafe Sholer, Enrico Piazza, Suzon Fuks.

Installations with artworks by Dennis del Favero, Jill Scott, Keith Armstrong, Claire Tracey, Rewa Wright & Simon Howden (UnCalculated Studio), the ”Speculative Futures” Student Contest (partnership with ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Committee).

XR Program featuring HagoromoXR (live with acclaimed Noh performer Ryoko Aoki, and The Amplified Elephants  aka. Jay Euesden, Katheryn Sutherland, Robyn McGrath, Natalie Walters, by Jonathan Duckworth (RMIT) James Hullick (JOLT Arts) , Shigenori Mochizuki (Ritsumeikan University), Ross Eldridge (RMIT).

WebXR on the Styly platform, curated by Dr. Alison Bennett and Dr. Rewa Wright, with artists Silvia Alberti, Wannaporn Chujitarom, Linda Loh, Avital Meshi, Anna Jacobson, Ray LC, Sabine Julien (aka Taara Minds), Andrea Artz, Xingzhi Shi, Carla Knopp, Anne Yoncha, Estella Hu, Yamin Xu. Jae-Eun Suh, Amanda Stojanov, Mingyong Cheng, Byeongwon Ha, John Tonkin, Tanuja Mishra, Nhu Bui, Weilu Gi, Robyn Backen, Megan Beckwith, Meichun Cai, Juliette Séjourné, Peter Williams, Karen Ann Donnachie, Brian House and Sue Huang, Margot Tidey, Chanee Choi, Jisu Kim, and Iyer Ramya.

VR program with interactive artworks by Megan Beckwith, Stephanie Andrews, Josh Harle, Alison Bennett, Lucas Horta, Nirma Madhoo, Alex Lee, Amala Groom & Andrew Burrell, ISEA VRChat team (Ben Coles, Anna Melands, Nina Phung, Anan Putra Adimas)

Constellations program is curated by Dr. Rewa Wright for ISEA2024, the International Symposium on Electronic Art which brings together scholars, artists, and scientists from around the world to explore the intersection of art, science, and technology.

Honohono is an exhibition that explores healing herenga (interconnectedness) ancestral ties and our kuleana (responsibilities) to the environment. Leading with an indigenous framework it explores boundaries and their malleability: the skin as a permeable surface between ourselves and the elements as extensions of ourselves the borders that prevent us from entering lands where our ancestors walked and heard bird songs the borders that keep our ancestral artifacts behind glass to be preserved yet inaccessible.

This gathering of artists and artworks is the culmination of a public diplomacy creative exchange with Kānaka Maoli/U.S. lead artist Tiare Ribeaux. This Leonardo Creative Impact Lab utilised community-driven processes and expanded media art projects to address the challenge of climate change. Local artists have explored climate change in Aotearoa New Zealand using indigenous methodologies interwoven with their personal creative practices. Ribeaux facilitated these interdisciplinary collaborations drawing on her own media art practice and Hawai’ian cultural heritage.

ISEA 2024 animation selection features 13 innovative short films from juried and curated artists from around the world.

QUT Creative Industries Precinct Kelvin Grove
27 and 28 June. The ISEA2024 Screen Arts program presents a series of curated and juried works, from artists Desna Whaanga-Schollum, Rafe Sholer,  James Cunningham, Hannen Wolfe, Annique Goldenberg,  Suzon Fuks.

Data, Bodies, Space shows an intriguing mix of different animation art practices, dealing with the “glitches” of our digitality-virtuality-reality condition. The selected shorts fast-forward to a future which is fascinating and frightening at the same time.

In The Needlecast Rhapsody we witness a technology that can upload humans to distant locations in the galaxy. Moirai–Thread of Life also shows a journey to different cosmic dimensions and touches on quantum physics to explain notions of fate. Posthuman Hospital and My Mind As/Is Your Memory, My Body As/Is Your Substance take one to a nightmarish posthuman dystopia, whereas Rehousing Technosphere gives a more hopeful look into a new planetary ecology in a more-than-human future in which the digital is omnipresent yet endued with haptic and sensual properties. La Limite est une facade depicts a mesmerizing journey of fluidity and metamorphosis with a poetic approach, whereas CIRCVS MAXIMVS and Interchange feature a humorous take on virtual, computer-animated worlds and their relationship with the “real” world, highlighting the entanglements of power and control.