The Qian painterly voice

My research explores my Chinese background experiences of immigration to Australia within the visual domain of Ba-Gua energies dialoguing with selected European painterly influences (especially Jenny Saville) related to Australia, painterly and new ink tradition methods, contemporary Chinese and Chinese-Australian painting unified by Ba-Gua spiritual ideas, through a methodology utilizing impasto and line informed by Chinese and European Romantic opera, all expressed within a contemporary version of Yan Li-ben’s emperor imagery, especially related to Qian or heaven. In this work and others in the folio, I use Chinese Ba-Gua (Qian) and Confucian philosophy to explore Chinese and Western artistic influences and Ba-Gua energies dialoguing with Chinese-Australian visual influences and Peking Opera and contemporary Australian music. I explored the artistic influences that have contributed to the extended sensation or synaesthesia of my painting across the tactile, sonic and optical fields. I drew across sources from ancient Chinese Emperor paintings and ink tradition alongside contemporary British and Australian layered paint and anatomical techniques, as well as draw from Renaissance masters. In addition, this research explores the contemporary themes, which have also influenced my work including intercultural contemporary Australian music. The originality of this approach in my cultural artistic fusion is that the Daoist-like movement of spirit and body (Chou, “Wenren and Culture”2004), expressed within Ba-Gua philosophy, becomes a kinetic unifying factor across a Chinese multi-artform practice. My creative folio included paintings and films which provide evidences for an analysis of both the common point of visual dialogue and cultural realities within these Chinese-Australian confluences towards expression of my artistic identity or voice, which I describe as Qian ‘painterly voice’. This ‘painterly voice’ has five main areas of investigation: firstly, English painter Jenny Saville’s intersection of painterly impasto and Chinese calligraphical line; secondly, the techniques of impasto and line related to Peking opera and Italian lyric opera; thirdly, ancient Chinese painter Yan Li-pen’s iconic emperor series extended to Australia; fourthly, the intersections of the Chinese multi-artform practice where calligraphically line, watercolour suggestiveness, and painterly impasto layering work as synergies and counterpoints to contemporary Australian composition within several music-theatre works; and finally, Ba-Gua ideas into contemporary Chinese artistic ideas in China (Qian and family order within Zhang Xiaogang) and Australia (Chinese-Australian Lindy Lee’s exploration of Zen Buddhism). Ultimately, this research examines how each of these factors culminates in my own personal philosophy and Qian ‘painterly voice’

Enabling effective tree exploration using visual cues

© 2018 Elsevier Ltd This article presents a new interactive visualization for exploring large hierarchical structures by providing visual cues on a node link tree visualization. Our technique provides topological previews of hidden substructures with three types of visual cues including simple cues, tree cues and treemap cues. We demonstrate the visual cues on Degree-of-Interest Tree (DOITree) due to its familiar mapping, its capability of providing multiple focused nodes, and its dynamic rescaling of substructures to fit the available space. We conducted a usability study with 28 participants that measured completion time and accuracy across five different topology search tasks. The simple cues had the fastest completion time across three of the node identification tasks. The treemap cues had the highest rate of correct answers on four of the five tasks, although only reaching statistical significance for two of these. As predicted, user ratings demonstrated a preference for the easy to understand tree cues followed by the simple cue, despite this not consistently reflected in performance results

Towards a community of artists’ books: Extending international knowledge and debate in the field of artists’ books through practice-research

ABSTRACTTowards a community of artists’ books: extending international knowledge and debate in the field of artists’ books through practice-researchThe field of activity in artists’ books – artworks in the form of a book - has evolved over the last sixty years into a significant, international contemporary arts practice.Many artists, especially those new to the field, search for the means of situating their practice and extending their knowledge. Artists seek answers on how and where they can connect with other practitioners, increase their knowledge of, and place themselves within the international field. They need to know how and where they can learn to create, market, exhibit, contextualise and sell their work to the public. These needs have informed the development of the research question: How can practice-informed, participatory research develop and extend knowledge and debate in the international field of artists’ books?This question is predicated on the needs of a wide range of artists’ books practitioners, and many others with whom their practice is interwoven: librarians, researchers, students, curators, educators and the public. The following DPhil commentary offers a post-rationalisation of some of the issues and solutions for connecting artists’ books internationally, based upon my research and the network hub I have established at UWE, Bristol. In the text, I reflect upon my contribution to new knowledge through offering examples of artistic and curatorial practice, research and publications that have raised awareness in relation to specific interventions in Australia, Brazil, Europe, Iraq, South Africa and the USA.This DPhil submission discusses the research aims outlined within the narrative, under the heading Connecting Artists’ Books - The Findings, in relation to the evidence submitted in the accompanying portfolio of publications. The portfolio includes samples of authored books, edited publications, published articles and artists’ books created. These have been collated under the related headings of: practice, reporting on the field, curatorial, artefacts.I will use the following commentary to explore and analyse the contemporary position of the artist’s book, in order to reflect upon how its creators and audiences have been rhizomatically interwoven into my research investigations and how the participants have benefitted. The analysis outlines contributions made to new knowledge through some of the interventions I have made as a practitioner, publisher, curator and writer.It identifies examples of themes of practice discovered, revealed and connected through these interventions and their impact upon the field of artists’ books today

Thinking the Interior: Atmospheric Envelopes and Entangled Objects

This paper presented at SITUATION Symposium will focus on two works by the British artist Martin Creed: Work No.227, The lights going on and off (2000) and Work No.200, Half the air in a given space (1998). I will consider the artist's deployment of air in these works as both a material and a metaphor that might enable a productive engagement with thinking about interior spaces in relation to broader questions concerning ecology and the environment. Creed's works will be situated in relation to Peter Sloterdijk's writings on air and atmosphere. SITUATION is an event – symposium, exhibition and a series of city occupations – initiated and arranged by the RMIT Interior Design program. SITUATION brings attention to the designing of interiors as a practice engaged in spatial and temporal production; a practice that works in the midst of social, cultural, historical and political forces; a practice open to contingency, chance and change; a practice engaged with singularity and specificity. SITUATION highlights ideas of ‘event’ and the eventful nature of interiors, lived space-time compositions in constant change; atmospheric compositions as distinct from artefacts; ephemerality; uniqueness; one-offs; a multiplicity of experience. The event aims to contribute to the discipline of interior design at an international level by focusing on these key characteristics of practice, the kinds of research this produces and through this articulates, fosters and advocates opportunities for future practice

Participatory analytics for transport decision-making

This thesis investigates the design and evaluation of several software platforms that facilitate participatory outcomes in transport decision-making across operational, local and strategic scales. These platforms act as instruments to explore aspects of the research question: "How can urban dashboards be contextualised, designed & evaluated in a way that is sensitive to the changing role of digital democracy, immersive technologies and the increasingly collaborative nature of planning?". The concept of participatory urban dashboards is introduced, followed by process of participatory analytics. This process involves bringing more people on board with both using the dashboard (e.g., together or collaboratively) and allowing a more general audience of citizens or stakeholders to make sense and validate what is displayed. The research is applied to the city of Sydney, Australia. Sydney is a growing, global city with a wide variety of transport infrastructure ambitions and a strong, open-data ecosystem. Sydney’s transport system underpins the case studies of the operational, local and strategic digital artefacts assessed in this research. Participatory analytics outcomes as a result of interacting with these digital prototypes are evaluated. This will, in turn, help direct research and real-life applications and development of these tools. Further, it aims to build on research gap calling for further understanding of context-specific, user-centric design and evaluation of these participatory analytics tools

NEUVis: Comparing Affective and Effective Visualisation

Data visualisations are useful for providing insight from complex scientific data. However, even with visualisation, scientific research is difficult for non-scientists to comprehend. When developed by designers in collaboration with scientists, data visualisation can be used to articulate scientific data in a way that non-experts can understand. Creating human-centred visualisations is a unique challenge, and there are no frameworks to support their design. In response, this thesis presents a practice-led study investigating design methods that can be used to develop Non-Expert User Visualisations (NEUVis), data visualisations for a general public, and the response that people have to different kinds of NEUVis. For this research, two groups of ten users participated in quantitative studies, informed by Yvonna Lincoln and Egon Guba’s method of Naturalistic Inquiry, which asked non-scientists to express their cognitive and emotional response to NEUVis using different media. The three different types of visualisations were infographics, 3D animations and an interactive installation. The installation used in the study, entitled 18S rDNA, was developed and evaluated as part of this research using John Zimmerman’s Research Through Design methodology. 18S rDNA embodies the knowledge and design methods that were developed for this research, and provided an opportunity for explication of the entire NEUVis design process. The research findings indicate that developing visualisations for the non-expert audience requires a new process, different to the way scientists visualise data. The result of this research describes how creative practitioners collaborate with primary researchers and presents a new human-centred design thinking model for NEUVis. This model includes two design tools. The first tool helps designers merge user needs with data they wish to visualise. The second tool helps designers take that merged information and begin an iterative, user-centred design process

Prototyping Models of Climate Change: New Approaches to Modelling Climate Change Data. 3D printed models of Climate Change research created in collaboration with Climate Scientists

Prototyping Models of Climate Change: New Approaches to Modelling Climate Change Data, identifies a gap in existing knowledge on the topic of 3D Printed, three dimensional creative visualisations of data on the impact of climate change. Communication, visualisation and dissemination of scientific research data to the general-public is a priority of science organisations. Creative visualisation projects that encourage meaningful cross-disciplinary collaboration are urgently needed, from a communication standpoint and, to act as models for agile responsive means of addressing climate change. Three-dimensional creative visualisations can give audiences alternate and more direct means of understanding information by engaging visual and haptic experience. This project contributes new knowledge in the field by way of an innovative framework and praxis for the communication and dissemination of climate change information across the disciplines of contemporary art, design and science. The focus is on projects that can effectively and affectively, communicate climate science research between the disciplines and the general-public. The research generates artefacts using 3D printing techniques. A contribution to new knowledge is the development of systems and materials for 3D printing that embody principles of sustainable fabrication. The artefacts or visualisations produced as part of the research project are made from sustainable materials that have been rigorously developed and tested. Through a series of collaborations with climate scientists, the research investigates methodologies and techniques for modelling and fabricating three-dimensional artefacts that represent climate change data. The collaborations and the research outputs are evaluated using boundary object theory. Expanding on existing boundary object categories, the research introduces new categories with parameters specifically designed to evaluate creative practice- science collaborations and their outputs

The 45th Australasian Universities Building Education Association Conference: Global Challenges in a Disrupted World: Smart, Sustainable and Resilient Approaches in the Built Environment, Conference Proceedings, 23 - 25 November 2022, Western Sydney University, Kingswood Campus, Sydney, Australia

This is the proceedings of the 45th Australasian Universities Building Education Association (AUBEA) conference which will be hosted by Western Sydney University in November 2022. The conference is organised by the School of Engineering, Design, and Built Environment in collaboration with the Centre for Smart Modern Construction, Western Sydney University. This year’s conference theme is “Global Challenges in a Disrupted World: Smart, Sustainable and Resilient Approaches in the Built Environment”, and expects to publish over a hundred double-blind peer review papers under the proceedings