General Information

Artist: Chris Bowman
Technologists: Shigeki Amitani and Alastair Weakley
Exhibition dates:  27 April – 16 June 2007
Open 10am – 5pm daily
Free with entry to the Powerhouse Museum

|GEO| Landscape.01 is an interactive artwork-in-progress that will transport you to Sydney’s newest architectural attraction. The Brickpit Ring Walk - an elevated circular walkway at Sydney Olympic Park - is a viewing platform set inside the old brickpit at Homebush Bay. Visitors to the ‘Ring’ have recorded their impressions of this historical, ecological and architecturally significant site. Through the mediums of text, sound, photography, video and GPS (Global Positioning System) co-ordinates, |GEO|Landscape.01 explores time and space as trace experiences combined to create a layered virtual environment. This early prototype explores how video sequences, selected narratives and site-specific information can be captured across two or more locations, then reconstructed by groups or individuals to create personal or collective narratives.

Utilizing two interfaces designed as virtual programs, |GEO| seeks to enable visitors to control their own virtual journey around the Brickpit Ring Walk. Central to the visitor’s experience is the ability to navigate the Ring, exploring the dialogue between representation and abstraction. 

Acknowledgments

The |GEO| Landscape project is generously supported by the Australasian CRC for Interaction Design (ACID), the Creativity and Cognition Studios, the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, UTS, the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, and Sydney Olympic Park. The Creative and Technical team with to thank all of the above for their generous support.

Collaborators

The project is lead by Chris Bowman in collaboration with Alastair Weakley and Shigeki Amatani, and in close liaison with Professor Ernest Edmonds, Matthew Connell, Zafer Bilda, Lizzie Muller, and Deborah Turnbull.

Chris Bowman
Chris is an artist, writer, director and teacher who works with film, and convergent media display systems. Chris has directed award winning films "Caged" 1983 (Uberhausen Film Festival) and "Passages" 1985 (J Walter Thompson Award). In addition Chris has an international profile as a production designer with over thirty film and television productions to his credit.

Since 1992, Chris has taught in the Visual Communication Program in The Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building at The University of Technology Sydney. He is an active member of the Creativity and Cognition Studios and Centre for Digital Design at UTS. Chris has co-ordinated various multi-disciplinary, cross-institutional and industry based research projects that explore visualisation and interaction in virtual environment systems for museum and public spaces. In addition, he is currently researching how dramatic narrative systems can be mediated through immersive modes of interaction for networked 3D (stereoscopic) and 2D display environments. Chris has been the recipient of funding from the Australian Film Commission and the Australia Council for the Arts.

Alastair Weakley
Initially trained in Design & Technology at Loughborough University, Alastair worked for 11 years in industry as a product designer. He returned to the University in 2000, gaining an MSc in Information Technology and joined CCRS in 2002 as a research associate.

Since arriving at University of Technology, Sydney in the Spring of 2003, he has been pursuing full-time PhD research submitting his PhD in 2006. The subject of the investigation is broadly concerned with the provision of Web-based support for groups of people engaged in creative work. Alastair's early investigations in this area centred around the concept of an online scrapbook aimed at assisting its users in assembling, organizing and sharing useful resources. A system was developed as part of Alastair's MSc project and future work will build on the experiences gained while developing and testing that prototype.  Since submitting his PhD, Alastair has worked as a Senior Research Assistant for the Creativity and Cognition Studios at the University of Technology, Sydney.

Shigeki Amitani
Shigeki started his academic career in creativity support from his MS course at AI Laboratory, University of Tokyo, including 1-year study at Norges Teknisk-Naturvitenskapelige Universitet (NTNU). He has concentrated on the development of creativity support tools, based on microscopic analysis of human cognitive processes.

The focus in his Masters course was on the process of musical composition and the development of representation to support the process. His PhD dissertation concentrated on a method and a system for supporting the process of knowledge creation in order to apply theoretical frameworks to real world design problems. He is now trying to integrate the results of his previous works and extend them to artistic field. Shigeki is currently a Postdoctoral Research Assistant with the Creativity and Cognition Studios at the University of Technology, Sydney