Electronic music is here to stay – or is it?

Musical composers frequently make use of new technologies in instrumentation. Whilst orchestral traditions remain strong and the instruments viable, what of the works of composers of electronic music where the sound sources have fallen into disrepair, obsolescence, or modern technology has changed the sound so that it bears no relation to the original? Beyond collections of manuscripts and recordings, the practicalities of the re-performance of electronic music compositions have not been widely discussed, and no methodology for archiving the artefacts for re-performability exists. In time, as greater importance is placed on these works, the issue will become more difficult to retrospectively resolve

The world from Malarrak: Depictions of South-East Asian and European subjects in rock art from the Wellington Range, Australia

This paper investigates contact histories in northern Australia through an analysis of recent rock paintings. Around Australia Aboriginal artists have produced a unique record of their experiences of contact since the earliest encounters with South-east

Contesting the psychiatric framing of ME / CFS

ME/CFS is a medically contested illness and its understanding, framing and treatment has been the subject of heated debate. This paper examines why framing the condition as a psychiatric issue—what we refer to as ‘psychiatrisation’—has been so heavily contested by patients and activists. We argue that this contestation is not simply about stigmatising mental health conditions, as some have suggested, but relates to how people diagnosed with mental illness are treated in society, psychiatry and the law. We highlight the potentially harmful consequences of psychiatrisation which can lead to people’s experiential knowledge being discredited. This stems, in part, from a psychiatric-specific form of ‘epistemic injustice’ which can result in unhelpful, unwanted and forced treatments. This understanding helps explain why the psychiatrisation of ME/CFS has become the focus of such bitter debate and why psychiatry itself has become such a significant field of contention, for both ME/CFS patients and mental health service users/survivors. Notwithstanding important differences, both reject the way psychiatry denies patient explanations and understandings, and therefore share a collective struggle for justice and legitimation. Reasons why this shared struggle has not resulted in alliances between ME and mental health activists are noted

Indeterminacy of Instrumentation Over Time: Digital Curation of John Cage Instrumentation

Whilst historically informed performance normally makes use of instruments of the era from which the composition was written, the20th century may not be able to be interpreted in this manner due to the high risk of technological obsolescence of specific electronic instruments. The risks of not understanding what is required in re-performance of any technology-based piece of music are significant, with the potential that’s ome works may be lost, living on only as scores and recordings, if those are made and preserved. The speed at which technology developed in the20th century and is developing in the 21st century requires action to be taken contemporaneously to the act of composition, as even the space of 50 years can lead to obsolesence of hardware and software. This paper takes a technical look at the digital curation issues of electronic instruments and sound sources used by John Cage, and the issues of preservation and re-performance of his pieces in the year that would have marked his 100th birthday

Who wants a trautonium must build one

The man most associated with the development of the Trautonium, Oskar Sala, stated “Wer ein Trautonium will, muss sich eins bauen” – “Who wants a Trautonium, must build one”. With only a limited number of the instruments ever made, today if you wish to learn the instrument or perform the works composed for it, first you must build your own. This paper looks at the beginning of the journey to research and build a modern Trautonium, and the implications for the preservation of non-commercial electronic musical instruments to allow them to remain in active use

ICA-AtoM, Archivematica and Digital Preservation: Workshops and Tutorials - iPRES 2014 - Melbourne

ICA-AtoM is an open source, web-based archival description software application that is based on International Council on Archives standards. The first version of it was released in 2008 with funding from a variety of organisations including UNESCO, World Bank Group Archives, the Dutch Archiefschool, the Direction des Archives de France and the United Arab Emirates Centre for Documentation and Research. In 2013, the State Records Office of Western Australia (SROWA) has invested in further development of the software, chiefly to include support for the Australian Series Registration System as well as simple preservation workflow. These additions to ICA-AtoM will be completed in the middle of 2014 and made freely available as part of the open source package to any archives wishing to download the software. This work has aligned the Australian Series Registration System within an international standard ISAD compliant system, and will go some way to eventually bringing the two together. This workshop will provide an overview of using ICA AtoM with special attention to archival description using the Australian Series Registration System; ingest into the complementary Archivematica digital preservation system and attaching digital objects to AtoM. The workshop is open to the public

We could play that last century: Archiving digital 20th century digital performing arts in Western Australia

The launch of the Western Australian New Music Archive presents an opportunity to reflect on the materials that have been collected for it, and what materials could be included into collections such as this for the future to increase the possibility that works created by Western Australian composers since 1970 will be re-performed in the future. What need is there to preserve the electronic instruments of the 20th and 21st century? This paper used a recent example of a Western Australian artwork, and interviews with Western Australian composers of electronic music who have been active in the late 20th century to demonstrate some local challenges and successes in the preservation of digital artworks and compositions within 50 years of their creatio

'Ancient Mariners' in Northwest Kimberley Rock Art: An Analysis of Watercraft and Crew Depictions

The first Australians are believed to have arrived by boat some 50-60,000 years ago with the northern coastline of the continent a likely beach-head. The prospect of intact or even partial remains of ancient watercraft turning up in the archaeological record is remote. The expansion and contraction or the coastline over the last 60,000 years means that early landing sites would have been inundated as sea levels rose and fell, and the organic materials, perhaps wood or other plant material, from which such early watercraft would have been constructed have long since rotted away. Rock art assemblages from Australia's north then, represent the most likely record of venturesome mariners, who may have reached the coast over the millennia since initial occupation, or of watercraft constructed by Aboriginal inhabitants settled in coastal regions

Continuity and Change in the Anthropomorphic Figures of Australia's northwest Kimberley

One of the largest concentrations of rock paintings in Australia is found in the rugged Kimberley region in the northwest of the continent. A temporal sequence of visually distinctive figurative styles is presumed to span periods of cultural change and major climatic events. As the nature and course of these changes are poorly understood, this paper investigates the relationships between continuity and change in the stylistic attributes of the selected anthropomorphic figures in the rock art assemblage. Some previous Kimberley rock art researchers have argued for an abrupt discontinuity in the art assemblage between the Wararrajai Gwion (the most recent of the Gwion styles) and Painted Hand Periods (formally Clothes Peg Figure and Clawed Hand Periods respectively), while others have argued for more gradual change. Based on the study of 204 rock art sites from 15 site complexes, which included a total of 7,579 motifs and 3,685 identifiable anthropomorphic figures, we identify the core characteristics of anthropomorphic figures in each of the established stylistic periods and show that there is no evidence to support notions of an abrupt discontinuity of art through time. Rather, attribute preferences changed gradually, existing as clades of variation rather than discrete units, with identifiable threads of continuity and periods when certain attributes (core characteristics) are preferentially adopted. A quantitative analysis supports our interpretation