Explore this selection of the thought provoking, inspiring presentations from Conflux Bendigo 2022 available to you free and on demand, so you can stretch your creativity at the time and place that suits you.
LightADL: A New Home for Creativity in Performance, Arts & Hospitality
LightADL is a not-for-profit organisation and registered charity designed to be a beacon for creativity while maintaining a focus on the wellbeing of its people. It is a space where creativity, technology and hospitality blend to create breathtaking, innovative experiences. Co-Founder Nick Dunstone showcases this cutting edge facility that aims to equip performers and artists with access to ever-evolving immersive technologies, facilitate unique collaborations and underwrite the risk inherent in trying something truly new.
A New Copernican Revolution: 5 Trends Towards the Future of Live Performance
We used to think of the artwork as being the centre of the system. But now, increasingly, it’s the audience at the centre. Join David Berthold, Director in Residence at NIDA, to hear about how people now expect to interact with the art, to be a creator as much as a consumer, and how this will impact how create in the future.
Artist-in residence: An Embodied Adventure
In 2016 Amaara Raheem found herself on the edge of the North Pacific Ocean, in Vancouver’s port, walking toward an enormous freighter – the Hanjin Geneva – steadying herself to climb up a huge metal ladder and step through a silver cargo bay door into a world invisible to most. Amaara was participating in '23 Days at Sea': a travelling artist's residency, aboard a cargo ship, sailing from Vancouver to Shanghai. It was this passage - complex, challenging, humbling, life-changing - that led to Amaara's ongoing research into artist-in-residence programs offered all over the world. Amaara Raheem is a Sri Lankan born Australian dance-artist, researcher and writer. For her, movement includes a wider mobility where bodies and things circulate around the world, swirling in a stream of ever-mutating, emergent networks. In this performance-lecture Amaara will speak about historical and contemporary practice of artists' residencies, as well as share stories, insights and approaches from her own embodied adventures in-residence.
A Journey from Sector to Government: Confessions of a Creative Bureaucrat
12 months ago Sam Strong had just directed the world-premiere stage production of Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe. Shortly after that record-breaking production closed, he commenced as Executive Director of Creative Industries at Creative Victoria. Exploring creativity in the private and public sectors, Sam’s address will draw out the key learnings of his transition from award-winning artist to public sector leader. He will expose the role of ambition in creativity, unpack what contributes to effective advocacy and really influences policy, and argue why we should all prioritise creative self-care.
The Medium is the Message - The Role of Technology in Storytelling
In 1964 Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan claimed "the medium is the message". Nearly 60 years later advances in digital technology have given cause to re-examine this claim. The integration of technology into live performance is exciting, but what role does the technology play against what is really important - the story? And what if that story is written by AI? Join this esteemed panel to explore the role that technology can and should play in what is at the heart of all art - the story.
New Models for the Music Industry
Seismic shifts in technology have opened up the playing field for music making, distribution and consumption. And then the advent of COVID ground live performance and touring to a sudden halt, causing an industry wide crisis and subsequent pivot. Yet the core business model – how people get paid and can sustain themselves – has not really changed since the beginning of this industry: musicians need to perform to make a living. There is a huge opportunity for Artist Led change as the music industry enters a post COVID world. So what are the opportunities and what stands in the way? Join this dynamic, passionate group of industry experts as they discuss a bold way to rebuild the musical landscape.
The New Frontier of Live Music
An examination of how the vital worth and complex nature of live music in regional Australia may be presented in the 21st century. Mick Trembath sees the entire landscape for regional music changed in a way that affords huge potential for the performance and experience of live music. Many old models for live music practice are now virtually redundant. New models are rarely being examined, implemented or acknowledged. Join Mick as he looks at big ideas and alternate practices for the next frontier of live music.
'Sounding Out' the Climate Emergency
Internationally acclaimed audio documentary maker Kyla Brettle has spent twenty years creating detailed soundworks exploring the affect and effect of audio-based media. As the urgency of the climate crisis escalates within a frenetic globalised media ecology, she asks, how can audio-based media support political action and place-based engagement? Drawing on a range of creative audio examples, her own work and that by others, she discusses the potential of creative nonfiction soundwork for contributing to profound sociocultural and personal change.
Crisis or Opportunity: The Future of Publishing
The business of books, magazines and their digital equivalents were thoroughly stress-tested through the disruption of the pandemic. While Covid-19 brought untold loss, grief, and isolation, the publishing industry found ways to thrive as audience reached for this essential vehicle for information, entertainment, education, escape, transformation. This panel featuring some of Australia's most trailblazing editors, publishers and authors will be diving deep into the future of publishing- traversing questions from the viability of printed books and bookstores, magazines versus podcasts, the important work on diversity, equity, and inclusion in the industry, the shifting roles of publishers and marketing and everything in between.
Exploring Artistic Identity
Join queer creative John Richards, aboriginal artist Troy Firebrace and disabled artist Sara McQueenie as they explore about how labels impact their artistic practice. What does it mean to have your artistic practice framed through the lens of one aspect of who you are? Is this something to be embraced or shunned? Is it a constant challenge or does it open doors to opportuniites that might otherwise not be available?
Because The Night: A Case Study
In a landmark production of unmissable storytelling and in the midst of extended COVID Lockdowns and restrictions, Malthouse Theatre launched an immersive theatre work on a scale never seen before in Australia. An entire world was constructed to explore. Audience followed the royals through the palace, roamed the length of a town on the cusp of the digital age, or sifted through the drawers of a single desk. The audience was a silent witness in the halls of power on a pivotal night in history. They moved, they ventured deeper, listened closer, because the night would soon be lost—and all its secrets with it. Join Sarah Neal Co-Artistic Director of Malthouse Theatre as she walks you through the creation of this innovative theatre work and the opportunities that it has opened for ways of devising and experiencing live theatre.
Working for IT vs Working for YOU
Rethinking creative careers for sustainability and self-care in a COVID-normal world
Measuring Cultural & Creative Value
The status of arts and culture is often the ‘difficult child’ in conversations around quantifying it's worth relating to policy making, funding and perception. This is in large part related to the difficulty in measuring the community value of a beautiful artwork or a provocative documentary. As Arts strategist Julia Shultze stated back in 2013 ‘we have opted for a proxy measurement of value, the number of tickets sold, the number of visitors and their multipliers, the profitability of organisations and so on. These are important tools, but not sufficient to capture the public value that accrues from engagement in cultural activities.’ Christian Leavesley and Abe Watson convene for a passionate conversation on the state of things in 2022, where the problems might lie in current structures and policy, and they will profer their passionate ideas for pathways forward in measuring the economic, cultural and intrinsic value of arts in Australia.
Radical Collaboration for Thriving Creative Careers
In order to create we need to be vulnerable, open, risk-taking and courageous, allowing authenticity and originality to reign. As creative entrepreneurs growing a business, the opposite can often prevail with scarcity and deep competitiveness running deep. So how can we cross this divide to maintain the freeflowing creativity and creation whilst developing and growing our creative careers. The answer is radical collaboration. As Toby Bender, Director of the luminescent ‘Just Another Agency’ will unpack- embracing collaboration to grow your business without being combative to other creatives is an essential strategy for creating creative success.
Playing the Future: Speculative Design X Urban Play
Blending knowledge from landscape architecture and game design, public art and creative technologies, the impact of playful urbanism on social wellbeing is explored in this in depth presentation with Urban Play Scholar Troy Innocent. Why are creatives are best placed to restart our society after lockdown? What is tactical urbanism and how can it reshape cities? What are innovative strategies for digital placemaking that work with media architecture? What are some other ways of being in the world through mindful walking and urban play? How do we reconnect neighbourhoods by building hyperlocal economies and communities?
In Conversation with Karen Webster
Karen Webster is the Dean and Principal of LCI Melbourne, the Australian campus of the globally renowned tertiary design institute of the LCI group. Karen is one of Australia’s best-known creative industry figures and has been actively engaged as an advocate, academic and leader in the Australian design Industry for over the past 30 years. She has held senior positions in academia for over 25 years at RMIT University and the Whitehouse Institute of Design. From 2005 to 2010 Karen took on the role of the Director of the L’Oréal Melbourne Fashion Festival. Karen has held numerous Board positions including a founding board member of the Melbourne Fashion Festival plus the Australian Fashion Chamber, Victorian Design Week, Australian Design Alliance, Balletlab, Melbourne Spring Fashion Week, the State of Design Festival, the Design Research Institute, the Media Code of Conduct Working Group on Body Image for the Victorian State Government, the Commonwealth Positive Body Image Awards Advisory Panel, the Council of the Textile and Fashion Industries of Australia and as part of this role has was appointed the Chair of the Australian Fashion Council. Karen was the 2012 inductee to the Fashion Hall of Fame awarded in Melbourne..
Creativity in Crisis: Rebooting Australia's Arts and Entertainment Sector after COVID
Culture is an inescapable part of what it means to be human. We can no more imagine a life without the arts than we can imagine a life without language, custom, or ritual. Australia is home to the oldest continuing cultural traditions on the planet, and some of the world’s most renowned actors, musicians and artists. But while we have a proud story to tell, the future of Australian culture looks increasingly uncertain.
Join Ben Eltham, lecturer in cultural and creative industries and a writer who has been exploring Australia's cultural life for two decades as he provides a series of recommendations that would reboot the creative sector after the crisis.
Navigating The Metaverse
Non Fungible Tokens, the Metaverse, Blockchains, VR, AR and all the bright, shiny, new things! Where do creatives fit in this fast moving world, where are the opportunities, where are the entry points? Four brave creatives who have ventured into this unfolding territory via film, music, visual art and more will be dissecting the essentials of what the Metaverse is and what opportunities, challenges and curiosities it could present for creatives.