Cultural Enterprise: The Balance of Survival

Bart Pigram will share his personal cultural journey and business entreprenure in the Cultural Tourism Industry. He will explain and demonstrate how Aboriginal Culture and Language is practiced in the modern world, and how it can be manifested within the Tourism Industry. Bart will also explain how he has been able to balance cultural values and practices with responsibilities of Western Society. He will conclude to highlight the increase of the demand of Aboriginal Tourism in Broome and the Kimberley region and stress that unfortunately the demand is greatter than what is actually availible. This is a great industry opportunity for Indigenous people to take advantage of and expand for their enterprises

Dance as a Practice of Listening to Country

Dalisa and Rachael will discuss the cultural, ethical and artistic concerns in the intercultural practice lead research which underpins the four productions Marrugeku has created in Broome, Burning Daylight (2006), Buru (2010), Gudirr Gudirr (2013) and Cut the Sky (to premiere 2015). The presentation will focus specifically on the company’s Listening to Country dance and dramaturgy research lab conducted in June 2013 and hosted at Nulungu Research Institute. We will expand on this embodied research process, conducted both in country and in the studio, and how it is leading to the upcoming production, Cut the Sky

Marrugeku’s vision for contemporary dance in the Kimberley

Dalisa Pigram and Rachael Swain will explore how contemporary dance can articulate a productive, if unsettling dynamic between the past and the present in the Kimberley, while activating innovative approaches to cultural renewal through dance. This lecture examines how experimental practices in the creation of dance on country are working to re-inscribe the present so as to reimagine the future for Aboriginal people and intercultural processes of the region. Using case studies from recent works created in Broome and touring throughout the Kimberley and the world, Marrugeku’s co-directors will describe Marrugeku’s vision for contemporary dance in the Kimberley

The Story of Lustre: Shedding light on how a community based exhibition evolved

A pearl of a story - Hear about the evolution of Lustre: Pearling & Australia, an exhibition originating from a creative partnership between Nyamba Buru Yawuru and the WA Museum, and partly funded by the WA Department for Culture and the Arts under its Emerging Curator program. The curatorial team talk about how the exhibition evolved, with its key focus on merging the Aboriginal story of pearling and the significance of pearlshell with the history of European pearling in WA

Periscope Tower

10Up is a design competition organized by The Young Architects Forum of Atlanta (YAF Atlanta). Modern-Atlanta (MA) hosts an annual celebration of architecture and design with a week of events in and around the US. In 2010, MA invited YAF Atlanta to create a competition for a temporary outdoor installation, open to professionals and students in the fields of architecture, industrial design, landscape architecture and urban design, which would act as a beacon for the event week. Taking on the task of designing a rapidly deployable temporary installation on a limited budget and a limited plot (the buildable area is no more than a 10’ x 10’ footprint), we proposed a tower of foam. The Periscope Tower is a research output in the domain of algorithmically controlled robotic fabrication, a subset of emerging techniques of mass customisation and file-to-factory processes in the construction field. It represents the production of new knowledge in three ways. It is the first example of a post-tensioned structure constructed almost entirely from polystyrene foam at this scale. Second, it is the first architectural project to deploy a robotically mounted hotwire cutter paired with three-dimensional modelling software. Third, the project utilized custom written software that directly generates robot instruction code, eliminating the need for construction or shop drawings and enabling an empirical feedback loop between formational processes and material properties. By combining these three areas of new knowledge, the Periscope Tower demonstrates the design potential and real-world practicality and use value of the fabrication and algorithmic design techniques in terms of speed of assembly, weight, and relative affordability. The Periscope Tower was the winner of the 10Up competition in its inaugural year

Ribbed tiled vaulting: Innovation through two design-build workshops

Traditional tile vaults are typically constructed springing off from walls or straight arches built from support element to support element on falsework. From these, the vault's surface can be built in space with minimal or no guidework. Built on previous research and focusing on continuous surface expression and fully representing three-dimensional equilibrium surfaces in compression, this research explores the design potential of three-dimensional networks of structural ribs, made possible by new funicular form-finding approaches. This new structural typology for tile vaults was investigated and tested through two intensive, design-build workshops in Australia, the first at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) in October 2012, and the second at Monash Art Design & Architecture (MADA), in May 2013