ArtzElectro focuses on creative works that combine different electronic media, and works that
combine electronic media with real-time performance. It aims to encourage interdisciplinary
collaboration between new and traditional methods of production.
Prior events have drawn on local, national and international contributions. This concert is of
mainly students’ works. It includes contributions from Computer Graphic Design, Screen and
Media, Computer Science, Dance, and Music; and contributions from students from the newly
established Bachelor of Media and Creative Technologies degree.
This BMCT degree has enhanced further dialogue between creative and performing arts on
campus, allowing for more integrated creative outcomes. We look forward to continuing work
as the graduate degree programme begins.
Ian Whalley, Director - ArtzElectro
Four works from CRPC301 of the BCMT
Looking Glass
Dancer - Courtney Newdick
Isadora - Joseph Callanan
Design team - Helen Kuy & Daniel Thorpe
Soundtrack & Camera Work - Chrisna Swart
(3 min)
Looking Glass is a creative project ‘looking’ inside the busy lives of creative students balancing
many different aspects of their journey through the University; a journey in which each aspect
leaves an impression on their lives. This performance uses the program ‘Isadora’ as well as a
mixture of graphics, dance movements and music to represent the typical obstacles a student
would encounter throughout their degree. The work plays with the aspect of a person in realtime, looking back at the four main elements and how they once affected her. The silhouette
on screen is a representation of how encounters with the four elements may have appeared
to her at the time; an exaggerated and tunnelled view of the experience. The dancer on stage
looks back and relives the experiences, including a journey of networking with many different
people and exposure to many creative technologies and practices. All this has culminated into
a wealth of valuable knowledge and life experiences to carry forward on our future journeys.
The River Waikato
Jun Huang, Darren Cederman, Oliver Stewart & Derek Flint
(10 min)
Water, and in particular, the flowing of water by way of rivers, has been the focus of spiritual
beliefs for thousands of years. The Indians regard the River Ganges as sacred and is
worshipped as the goddess Ganga in Hinduism. The Jordan River has huge biblical importance,
with Jesus Christ being baptised there; and the River Nile has been the lifeline of civilization in
Egypt since the Stone Age.
Here in New Zealand, the Waikato River is worshipped by Maori, and in particular Tainui, who
regard the river as the source of their mana (pride). The river has flowed for thousands of
years through the countryside and towns of the North Island, uninterrupted and undeterred.
Using sound and images, the river is represented in 2D and 3D images along with an
interactive element to show the progress the river, from its source at Mount Ruapehu to its
final meeting with the Tasman Sea at Port Waikato. The music starts off slowly and serene, as
the river water is formed off the mountain, pure and clear, gradually winding its way from
Taupo through the Waikato basin towards Hamilton. Here the music changes to represent the
change in the river. With industry using the river, it has become more polluted and therefore
the mood changes. Finally, as the river reaches its final destination of the Tasman Sea at Port
Waikato, and the music becomes fuller and richer, representing the widening of the river and
the climax of its journey.
Fractured
Choreographers - Abbie Shaw & Zildjian Robinson
Performed by - Abbie Shaw, Jenna Walmsley & Zildjian Robinson
Soundscape Composer - Stacey Cooper
Film and Editing - Dips Narayan, Kate Barry, Miguel Efondo
Production Management - Jenna Walmsley
(6 min)
Fractured is a piece that combines elements of pre-filmed footage, music and live dance to
depict the emotion of fear. These elements were integrated with the aim of stirring feelings of
discomfort, anxiety, distress and panic within the audience. The composer of the soundscape
set the pace, structure and shape for the piece while sounds and compositional methods were
explored to build an event that the audience subconsciously would recognize as fear. The film
crew and performers then worked simultaneously to produce and combine content that
followed the direction of the music and complemented the mood of the piece. The filmed
footage takes the audience through three stages of fear, while the dancing on stage depicts
the emotion being felt in response to events on screen.
The Dividual: A Portrait of Ourselves
Annalie Tennant, Brad Griffiths, Olivia Graves, Rowan Thorpe, Moehau Hodges-Tai,
Jullienne Abellanosa
(5 min)
The initial concepts for this short film originate from our involvement with new technologies
and reliance on numbers and codes. Digital technologies are being developed and distributed
at an alarming rate, providing us with instant access to social media, formal accounts, videosharing networks, trivial games and applications. Our contemporary lives are caught in the net
of these technologies, with numbers and passwords shaping who we are. We seek to explore
this world and what it means to our identity a group of people and as individuals. The work
challenges the audience to think about our reliance on technology and the amount of
information that we make available to the new digital world. Our aim was to create a film that
profiled the contemporary ‘Dividual’ masked as a Hacker, whilst analysing the intricate ways in
which we communicate via means of digits. The Dividual combines still and moving image
alongside an original soundtrack; we use these audio and visual features to create a portrait of
ourselves that is distinct yet familiar.
SQUID!
Creator - Daniel Trainor
Soundtrack - James Kemp
Recent Student Works
H is For…
Directed by Daniel Trainor
(5:58 min)
H is for… is a visual essay and provocation inspired by the film maker Peter Greenaway’s belief
that “cinema is dead, long live cinema”. Narrated through the birth, death, then re-birth of
Foal, who is possibly an avatar of cinema itself, this film attempts to expose the tyrannies that
brought the demise of modern cinema. It also offers a something of the sensual power and
suggestion possible in the medium, stretching beyond a reliance on novelistic narrative
structures. A selection of Greenaway’s quotes interspersed through the work, signalling
questions that this visual essay engages with as it maps possibilities of a new future.
Wayfinder Part 5
Graphic Rendition - Tristan Dennis
Poem - Ross Nepia Himona
Waka tail constructed from Waka Te Toki a Tapiri, Auckland Museum Website
(1.17 min)
From the class Computer Graphic Design 242, this assignment tasked students with presenting
spoken words in a visual form as “kinetic type”. This began by first gathering information
about an author of the poem or piece of writing that they had selected, that was intended to
inform the development of the visual design of the work. The finished product uses a
combination of image and typography to convey an interpretation of the poem. It applies
knowledge of typography, layout and animation to create a work that is sympathetic to both
the message of the poem and the poet.
(s)tone(s) orbit
Composer and visuals – Jenny Spark
Cello - Jenny Spark, Yotam Levy
Video source material – public domain
(12 min)
This piece explores two contrasting views: the universal and the human. These views can be
both contrasting and complementary, and are embodied in the binary nature of the piece. The
first view is represented by a spacious “A” section which attempts to tease out the potential in
single notes, single pitches, and pairs of notes and pitches. The main idea is the primacy of the
single sound, the constant returning to (or orbiting around) the origins of things. A quirky,
angular and oftentimes macabre “B” section, reminiscent of the Western circus music
tradition, represents the second view. In one sense, it hints at the comedy of the human
standpoint from a cosmic perspective. The two sections are interlocked and material from
each often appears within the other. I have tried to use this interlocking and ‘bleeding’
between the two ideas as a vehicle for development of the themes. Each is transformed and
transfigured within the context of the other.
(1:43min)
This animated short follows SQUID! as he is plucked from his bottle on a shelf and forced to
take a surreal and unforgiving path. Documenting the metamorphosis that takes place when
exploring unfamiliar territories, SQUID! is colourful but with an underlying dark presence.
Utilising Yuriy Norshteyn's multi-layered glass technique as seen in the stop-motion film
Hedgehog in the Fog (1975), a depth is added to the otherwise two-dimensional paper-cut out
environment. Influenced by the Kiwi ‘number 8 wire’ attitude, we constructed our animating
space out of domino boxes and glass from cheap photo frames. Animating within each small
glass layer, the process resulted in a few cuts to the hand and a great respect for Norshteyn's
intricate style!
Terroir
Sonic Composition - Teresa Connors
Visuals -Shannon Harris.
(6.45min)
Terroir, which comes from the French word terre (“land”) and loosely translates as “a sense of
place,” is an abstract portrait of personal geography as well as a formal investigation of digital
media. Captured entirely on an old cell phone, the raw data used to create Terroir was
collected by Canadian filmmaker Shannon Harris over a two-year period while commuting
across Canada for various jobs. The camera records a landscape in constant motion, but due
to the rudimentary technology the image fractures and oscillates between figurative and
abstraction. Married to the painterly visuals is a sonic composition generated solely from the
personal voice messages left during this time period. From this data, an allegory emerges
based on the notion of communication and distance, technology and intimacy, an innate
human need for community and love, and the contemporary means by which it is achieved. It
is a personal journey and geography of modern life, in which people seem to be constantly ‘on
the move’, filtered through the technology of the cell phone.
Silent City Cinema
Director - Yayu Zhu
Silent Film (7.50 min)
In this film, the city acts as metaphor and context for the development of cinema. The classical
cityscape is the birthplace of film, suggested with the fleeting impressions of film posters
projected on the buildings. The modern city has a stronger reference to changes in cinema as
we see the beginning of colour and new approaches to cinematic aesthetics.
Finally, the postmodern city is cinema itself, with the division between the cityscape and the
cinematic becoming entirely blurred. The work is constructed through a series of hand drawn
images that have been animated through After Effects. It has been designed as a silent film
with the hope that the sounds of the city itself are suggested by the numerous elements such
as cars, buses and helicopters that inhabit its domain. The film is a play on the process of
filming, using a combination of hand drawn techniques and contemporary post-production
effects, to suggest the range of possibilities that cinema now offers any film maker.
This is Christopher
Composer – Jenny Spark
Electroacoustic work (7:30 min)
This is a piece about the human voice, learning, and family relationships. In 1982 my Nana and
two-year-old cousin Christopher recorded a tape to send to me across the Tasman. In it you
can hear Christopher learning how to speak from Nana, as she teaches him nursery rhymes
and songs. Over repeated listening of the tape, certain musical ideas stood out to me - in
particular, imitation, repetition, rhythm, rhyme, and melody. I have tried to weave these ideas
together to create a journey that reflects one we have all gone through: the process of
learning to speak. The only sound materials used are those of the human voice - the 30-yearold tape, and my own voice.
Cementerio de las Almas
Director, animator and sound design - Jordan Browne
(4.30 min)
Cementerio de las Almas is a stop motion short film which explores the idea of onscreen
realities and the manipulation of animated time and space through both traditional and
contemporary methods. The story follows a hospitalised protagonist and their journey
through strange new worlds.
noxia
Created by - Sina Marie Solås Taugbøl, Olivia Graves & Chloe Palmer
Music - Stephen Ulrich
(3.44 min)
noxia features the brief life of a curious clay ball whose playful interaction with the concept of
mimicry brings about its demise. This short film was created from an introduction to stop
motion animation involving shooting digital still images then compiling and editing the frames
together, allowing for the life given to the clay ball and the objects it engages with. The set is a
single card box, built up with wire, papier-mâché, glass, paint and clay. Lighting, composition
and visual tone, along with a musical collaboration with New York-based artist Stephen Ulrich,
were used to create a strange and unusual world for the clay ball to discover. Ulrich worked on
the music based on sections of the film as we completed and sent them to him. He aimed for a
low-fi, organic sound, based on a curious theme that would then constantly thwart our clay
ball. This reflected the intention of the film - presenting an environment in which the concept
of anthropomorphism is explored through notions of jovial curiosity contrasted with murky,
shadowy and (ultimately) destructive surroundings.
RGB
Producer/Director - Andrew Denton
Choreography - Jennifer Nikolai
Motion Capture Artist - Shea Melville
Music -Teresa Connors
(3.30 min)
This motion-capture dance film is an experiment with the basic colour building blocks that
make up a digital image, and the raw movement data derived from and responding to the very
humanistic art-form of dance.
It is the first in a series of explorations in the medium by this creative team. RGB uses
movement vocabulary that speaks directly to motion capture and moving image technology.
Because the subject of the work is dance and performance the aim of the artists, the work has
a human fragility and subjectivity within its construction. In an effort to transcend the digital
aesthetics intrinsically built into the work due to the technology, or create a tension between
performance and technology, it uses motion capture in such a way as to drive a virtual camera
or cameras. The final moving image, camera composition and camera movement, is literally
composed from data derived from the choreography. This initial exploration of motioncapture dance is intended to be high energy and engaging while challenging the audiences’
sense of space and time.
Tracking Forward
Composer - Jeremy Mayall
Video Accompaniment - Dan Inglis
Viola - Adam Maha
(7 min)
Tracking Forward is a work originally inspired by the composer’s love of Blues music. Music
Blues music tells stories of lonely journeys, catching rides on the trains, and often powerful
sadness. This piece aims to explore this soulful sound through the solo viola combined with
the sounds of blues harmonica and electronic manipulation. Tracking Forward was composed
as part of a PhD portfolio exploring the possibilities of hybrid genre composition. This piece
aims to exist between the boundaries of blues music, 20th century chamber music,
soundscape and electronic dance music.
Operational: Luke Jacobs, Jenny Spark, Kim Johnson, Kylie Nicol, Brad Thompson, staff of
the Gallagher Academy of Performing Arts
Material Coordinating: Ted Nannicelli (CRPC301), Simon Liang (Computer Graphic Design),
Ian Whalley (Music), Bevan Yeatman and Lisa Perott (Screen and Media). CRPC301
Lecturers: Bevan Yeatman, Lisa Perrott, Ann Hardy, Adrian Athique, Martin Lodge, Alistair
Swale, Donna Campbell.
Poster image: NA0H
Back Cover Image: Teeming. Designer - Olivia Paris + Keith Soo
Front Cover Image: From An Interpretation of Speed series by Nicholas Vanderschantz. The
series explores movement and the perceived unrelenting momentum of our daily grind as
captured or created by the photographer. The works explore focus, colour, and abstraction
and are often purposeful exemplars of serendipitous image creation. These images serve as
a means to interpret the effect of time on one’s being while allowing the observer to
contemplate the speed of their own beings and consider how or if their lives fit within the
frame in which they are viewing.
Programme Notes: Provided by creators