BOLD Ideas for Creative Social Networking

To further open the conversation about women's empowerment and global collaborations using new networking technologies, this chapter problematizes some prevalent ideas about creativity and social networking, notes suggested change that carry anti-feminist sentiments throughout the world, and suggests a number of ways that women and men can all benefit from an opening of queries about innovative ways of working together online. With the suggested expansions, the authors welcome more inclusive and invitational discussion about future digital media research and development.

Digital Media in the Classroom

The purpose of this chapter is to highlight the engagement, social connectivity, and motivation to learn observed in two classes of students, one a grade 9/10 information technology class, the other a grade 3 class of learners classified with learning disabilities. The common factor in the two classes was the way the teachers were rethinking literacy for the 21st century learning by simultaneously engaging students in an event of creating computer programing to address a competition task whilst also addressing curriculum demands. The chapter explores the way the teachers were learning to develop the conditions for emergent learning systems in their classrooms as the first steps to reform the current education system. Drawing on complexity theory, the authors suggest that these students are offering two microcosmic examples of where global systems are heading. The goal of the chapter is to help shift school teaching from its present disconnect between the real world outside students' classrooms and the contrived, dated world of typical school-based curriculum practices.

Making It for the Screen

We are immersed in a culture of spoken media, written media, and now irrevocably, digital screen media. Just as writing and speaking skills are keys to functioning in society, we must consider that the world increasingly demands proficiency in “mediating” as well. Doing anything less leaves this powerful medium in the hands of a relative few. By offering instruction in what digital screen media is, how it is effectively created, how the Internet continues to alter communication, and how this all informs everyday teaching and learning, digital media literacy can become more broadly understood and accessible. This chapter follows a program developed by the Rosebud Institute and looks at how—using simple, accessible technology—people can become more digital media literate by creating screen products themselves. The creation process also enables deeper, more authentic learning, allowing us all to communicate more effectively, to self-assess more reflectively, and to thrive in a screen-based world.

The Earth Sciences and Creative Practice

The Anthropocene is being suggested as a new geological age replacing the Holocene and is a description of a time interval where significant conditions and processes are profoundly altered by human activity. Artists interested in the earth sciences are using digital media to provide audiences with ways of understanding the issues highlighted in discussions about the Anthropocene. These artists are harnessing data through visualisation and sonification, facilitating audience participation, and are often working in art-science collaborations. These activities demonstrate a transdisciplinary approach that is necessary for confronting the world's most pressing problems, such as climate change. After a discussion of the opportunities provided by visualisation technologies and an overview of the Anthropocene, this chapter explores the following interrelated themes through examples of creative works: (1) nanoscale, (2) geology and deep time, (3) climate, weather, and the atmosphere, (4) extreme places – beyond wilderness, and (5) curatorial practice as environmental care.

Sound Image and Resonant Animated Space

Animation is a synthesis of ideas that often encounters unpredictable, illogical, and imagined domains. In those animated worlds, recorded sound is now part of a coalition of two sensory forms mediated through hearing and vision. Sound has therefore been embedded in the audio-visual toolbox since the successful synchronisation of sound and picture. Sonic elements now contribute significantly to how animators might shape their films and express ideas. These animated worlds also often represent deeply rooted expressions of the interior mind of the artists and animators themselves. This chapter explores the relationship of sound to image in the evolutionary and increasingly variable animated forms that are currently proliferating. It aims to focus on sound as being the primary channel that is best able to reflect those interior ideas within a range of animated media. The exploration seeks to do this through tracing proto-cinematic ideas in the art of the past and animation practice that researches the sonified and animated image using musical and figurative metaphors.

Be[ing] You

This chapter discusses the one-to-one interactions between participants in the video performance In[bodi]mental. It presents personal accounts of users' body swapping experiences through real-time Head Mounted Display systems. These inter-corporeal encounters are articulated through the lens of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and his work on the “Mirror Stage” (1977), phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1968) and his writings on the Chiasm, and anthropologist Rane Willerslev's (2007) research on mimesis. The study of these positions provides new insights into the blurred relationship between the corporeal Self and the digital Other. The way the material body is stretched across these divisions highlights the way digital media is the catalyst in this in[bodied] experience of be[ing] in the world. The purpose of this chapter is to challenge the relationship between the body and video performance to appreciate the impact digital media has on one's perception of a single bounded self and how two selves become an inter-corporeal experience shared through the technology.

Exploring Liminal Practices in Art, Technology, and Science

This chapter interrogates the notion of the liminal in relation to the virtual and the imaginary through a consideration of the field of art, science, and technology and current creative practices in virtual worlds and avatar-mediated space. In particular, the art project Meta-Dreamer (2009) is considered through the manifestation of the avatar as digital object. In its attempt to explore the experience of “living between worlds,” it reflects the concerns of contemporary arts practice exploration of time and space relationships. The art project is re-examined in light of key arguments in the provocative text Liminal Lives (Squier, 2004) that advocates a new approach to the liminal in light of current biomedicine and the shifting and emergent qualities of contemporary human life.

Smart CCTV and the Management of Urban Space

This chapter briefly describes the proliferation of CCTV over the last few decades with particular reference to Australia and discusses the limits of the technology. It then focuses on new image interpretation and signal processing technologies, and how these advanced technologies are extending the reach, power, and capabilities of CCTV technology. The advent of “Smart” CCTV has the ability to recognize different human behaviours. This chapter proposes a typology to assist the application and study of Smart CCTV in urban spaces. The following four typologies describe different human behaviours in urban space: 1) Human-Space Interaction, 2) Human-Social Interactions, 3) Human-Object Interactions, and 4) Crowd Dynamics and Flows. The chapter concludes with a call for future research on the legal implications of such technology and the need for an evidence base of risk behaviours for different urban situations and cultures.

Using Virtual Environments to Achieve Learner Outcomes in Interprofessional Healthcare Education

The use of simulation in the training of healthcare professionals has become an essential part of the educational experience. Students and practitioners need to learn a variety of technical, interpersonal, and clinical judgment skills to be effective healthcare practitioners. Virtual simulation can provide an effective training method to facilitate learning and can be targeted to develop specific skills in the area of Interprofessional Education (IPE). This chapter reviews the literature around simulation techniques and outlines a development process that can be used to develop virtual simulations to meet a variety of learning objectives including IPE. Specific issues and solutions are also presented to ensure a successful educational experience.

Transposing, Transforming, and Transcending Tradition in Creative Digital Media

How can digital media technologies, contemporary theories of creativity, and tradition combine to develop the aesthetics of computer-based art today and in the future? Through contextualised case-studies, this chapter investigates how games, information technologies, and traditional visual and storytelling arts combine to create rich, complex, and engaging moving-image based artworks with wide appeal. It examines how dramatist and interactive media artist Maureen Thomas and 3D media artist and conservator Marianne Selsjord deploy creative digital technologies to transpose, transform, and transcend pre-page arts and crafts for the digital era, making fresh work for new audiences. Researcher in digital aesthetics, creative cognition, and play behaviour Dr. Phillip Prager examines how such work is conducive to creative insight and worthwhile play, discussing its remediation of some of the aspirations and approaches of 20th-century avant-garde artists, revealing these as a potent source of conceptual riches for the digital media creators of today and tomorrow.