Speakers
Ben Byrne
Ben Byrne is a Sydney based laptop musician, curator, radio producer and writer whose work traverses musical performance and improvisation, composition, radiophonics and sound theory. He is project coordinator of the UTS Music.Sound.Design project and is undertaking a phd at UTS.
Peter Blamey
Peter is a Sydney-based musician and sound artist working with whatever comes to hand, with the aim of emphasising the material aspects of sound. Lately this has led to a backhanded combination of systematic and improvised methods for working with mixer feedback and saturation, the sounds from which then shuffle, spike, catch, fray and perforate each other before or during their trip to the speakers. He is currently completing his phd at the University of Western Sydney, exploring the sine tone and contemporary music.
Mitchell Whitelaw
Mitchell Whitelaw is an academic, writer and artist with interests in new media art and culture, especially complex generative systems and digital sound and music. Mitchell's background is in music and the visual arts (by way of an interdisciplinary first degree in the Faculty of Creative Arts at Wollongong University). After teaching at Wollongong with Frances Dyson, he became more interested in art and cultural theory and continued to develop creative work in digital sound and image. He began postgraduate study at the University of Technology, Sydney, in 1996, working with Douglas Kahn on a research project exploring art, emergence and artificial life. He completed a PhD in 2001, moving the same year to Canberra to take up a position at the University of Canberra. Mitchell's writing has appeared in journals including Leonardo, Digital Creativity and Contemporary Music Review. In 2004 his work on a-life art was published in the book Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life (MIT Press, 2004). Other recent highlights include a catalog essay on creative data sonification for Sonic Acts X (2004). His current work in theory and practice spans generative art and sonic and visual data-aesthetics. Mitchell is currently a Senior Lecturer in the School of Creative Communication at the University of Canberra.
Caleb Kelly
Caleb Kelly produced his doctoral thesis at the University of Canberra in Australia. His thesis is about cracked and broken media in 20th century experimental music. The thesis focuses on the use of manipulated, broken and destroyed objects for the creation of new sound and compositional devices in experimental music particulary through the use of turntables and CDs. Caleb Kelly also produced a regular sound event in Sydney called impermanent.audio, evenings of electronic experimentation in new audio practices and has featured both local and international musicians. He has also involved in the local experimental music festival 'What is Music?'
Robin Fox
Robin Fox makes us listen to image and look at sound. His cathode ray oscilloscope, the device that translates a digital sound file into an analogue visual display, permits this. The two dimensions - sound and image - communicate via the common denominator of electrical current. Left and right signals of the audio input are mapped onto vertical and horizontal axes of a visual display within a square field defined by four electromagnets. When there is no sound, the point of light is at rest in the centre of the screen (like a dead heartbeat). When the hisses, beeps and static scratchings of the sound composition are fed into the oscilloscope, excited geometric patterns of light scribble and weave simultaneously around the x and y coordinates of the screen producing an apparition of sound life. Heightened states of tension are built by Fox between hyperactivity and a kind of fractured stillness with things never tending to rest. Many of the images that evolve in the work could only be generated by overloading the digital sampling system employed by the artist and by using frequencies above and below the audible limit for human beings. Fox's materials are sound, numbers, frequency, amplitude and phase relationships.
James Hurley
James Hurley was the first Australian, and one of only a handful of audio professionals in the world, to attain Digidesign Certified Pro Tools Expert status. He is also one of the world's leading Digidesign certified instructors and maintains knowledge of Digidesign technologies via annual re-certification at Digidesign headquarters in San Francisco. James has worked extensively in the Australian film, radio and music industries as a composer, sound designer, producer, sound mixer and DigidesignTM technician. Recent credits include his role as music editor for Lucky Miles (SAFC, FFC 2006). In 2003, James helped establish Australia's first Digidesign authorized Pro School at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), giving Australian audio professionals, or those wanting to break into the audio industry, the chance to gain certification in Pro Tools - the most widely supported audio production system in the world. When not training, he manages UTS' Media Production Centre.
Julian Knowles
Julian Knowles is a composer and performer, specialising in new and emerging technologies. His creative work spans the fields of composition for theatre, dance, film and television, electronic music, sound and new media arts, popular music and record production. Since the mid 1980s, he has established himself as a leading artist in the area of electronic and new music, achieving significant critical praise and international recognition for his performances and recordings. In recent years, Julian's music and audio/visual work has been presented at events and venues such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Experimental Intermedia in New York City, the Seoul International Performance Art Festival, What is Music?, the Sydney Biennale, Melbourne International Film Festival and the Sydney Opera House.