Public Art
CAST’s engagement with public art seeks to apply the principles of social practice, bringing about change in the public domain with ambitious local, national and international art projects. Building inter-disciplinary teams with expertise in art, architecture, design, sound, science and education, these projects reach out into communities while stimulating critical dialogue within and beyond the university.
Research Projects
Research Theme Leader
Fiona Hillary
Fiona Hillary is a Melbourne based artist working in the public realm. Her passion lies in site specific practices and the human/non-human relationships that reveal themselves across time. Exploring scale through publicly shared moments of awe and wonder to more personal and intimate encounters, she asks us to consider who and what we are in the process of becoming? Working with site, neon, sound, human and non-human companion species, her work has shifted from a permanent incursion in the public realm to focusing on more temporary, fleeting encounters in and of the everyday. Coinciding with Professor Rosi Braidotti’s recent Melbourne visit Fiona curated Posthuman PUBLICS, a laboratory of posthuman convergences for RMIT’s Project Space.
Fiona has made and curated permanent, temporary, collaborative, performative works for a range of commissioning organizations. Her most recent work reverberating futures will be launched with Deakin University’s Imaginarium Project in the coming months. 37°57'02.5"S 144°38'02.0"E was an immersive sound and light experience commissioned for Treatment: Flightlines at the Western Treatment Plant. Fiona curated the 10th Anniversary of the Gertrude Street Projection festival in 2017, ‘Unfurling futures’. ‘a place for gathering’ is a permanent, neon and sound work made in collaboration with Landscape Architect, Sarah Haq in Noble Park, commissioned by the City of Greater Dandenong.
Fiona is the Program Manager of the Master of Arts – Art in Public Space at RMIT University. She is a Research Lead in the School of Art research group Contemporary Art and Social Transformation. Fiona is currently a co-editor on the Journal of Public Space with Luisa Bravo and Maggie McCormick – Art and Activism editions. She sits on the Curatorial Advisory Committee for the Gertrude Street Projection Festival. She is a member of the Algae Society, a global collective of interdisciplinary researchers. Fiona is completing her PhD at Deakin University.
fiona.hillary@rmit.edu.au
Research Team
Martine Corompt
Current Work:
Martine Corompt & Camila Hannan
The Waiting Room
Premiering at the newly restored Capitol Theatre Melbourne (one of Melbourne’s original Picture Palaces), and short-listed for Melbourne’s Rising festival, the Waiting Room evokes an early 20thC Picture Palace revue with a contemporary twist. Combining cinema, (video & animation) live experimental music (The Overtones Ensemble), theatre and an audience mobile phone orchestra, The Waiting Room considers and elaborates on the notion of waiting (waiting for the main event) as an event in itself. Through a variety of gestures and motifs, the notion of how and why we wait in our lives, becomes the substance of the artwork.
martinecorompt.net
Image: The Waiting Room, Mock Up, Martine Corompt & Camila Hannan, 2020
Dominic Redfern
Current Work:
For Experimenta’s 2020 Triennale Life Forms Dominic is creating a multi-screen video installation based on cyanobacteria, the single celled algae that created the conditions for complex life to arise on earth 800 million years ago. He has created a number of installations around urban waterways, looking at the relationship between human and non-human histories. Still working with water but taking a deep dive into pre-history the work, first forms, looks beyond human life to the history of all multi-celled life forms. Cyanobacteria, when left to their own devices, slowly build up sedimentary forms known as stromatolites (sometimes called living fossils). They once covered large areas but can only be seen in a couple of places in the world today. The installation will combine laboratory footage of cultivated cyanobacteria and location recordings of the stromatolites of Shark Bay, Western Australia to create an image of the origins of all life in pre-Cambrian earth and show the simple beauty of this very rare environment.
dominicredfern.net
Image: Dominic holding a 4 billion year old stromatolite from the Pilbara. He was lucky enough to have access to the world’s best collection through the generosity of the Western Australian Dept. of Mines
Philip Samartzis
Current Work:
Cloud Affects
Cloud Affects is an architectural and sound installation by Roland Snooks and Philip Samartzis that draws attention to the scale, accelerating growth and subsequent ecological implications of computation and ‘the cloud’ – a metaphor for the internet.
Commissioned by the Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne with the support of RMIT University School of Architecture and Urban Design, RMIT University School of Art, Boeing, and The Hugh D. T. Williamson Foundation. Sound work supported by The Bogong Centre for Sound Culture, Creative Victoria, the High-Altitude Research Station at Jungfraujoch and Gornegrat, the Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology at the Zurich University of the Arts, and the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Press
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/studying-switzerland_this-is-what-the-changing-alps-sound-like/45440370
bogongsound.com.au/artists/philip-samartzis
Image: Glacial Melt, Eiger, Switzerland (2019) by Philip Samartzis
Andrew Tetzlaff
Tetzlaff’s practice engages with ways in which we look and know. He focusses on how intangible phenomena, such as pressure, gravity and light, can both mark and can be understood through material. Using both curatorial and studio practice-based approaches, his works draw out nuanced entanglements and ecological complexities. Tetzlaff is interested in how a finished work might not propose itself as a representation or visualisation, but rather an instantiation--as a structure which enables a particular encounter for the viewer, like a pane of glass onto which the small interrelationships of the world might condense and become visible.
Image: Andrew Tetzlaff, Strategies to Slowing a Fall (detail), 2019, digital print on fabric, stone, felt, ~150x150x30cm, Photography by Christian Capurro
Kit Wise
Current Work:
The STEAM Horizons professional learning initiative found its genesis in a group of Arts education/industry collaborators wanting to make visible and celebrate outstanding STEAM education practice happening across Tasmanian DoE schools. The express purpose of the STEAM Horizons pilot professional learning event was to showcase practice and allow teachers to get a sense of the various shapes STEAM pedagogy and practice is (organically) taking across the Tasmanian education context. Arising from a University of Tasmania (UTAS) College of Arts, Law and Education (CALE) Hothouse Grant Scheme, academics working across the Schools of Education and Creative Arts and Media brokered a wider professional learning collaborative project with the Tasmanian Department of Education (DoE).
kitwise.com
Image: Phone images of delivery – Louise Wallis
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cast@rmit.edu.au
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