conVerge - Partnerships

Partnerships - Paula Dawson

Welcome everyone. I'll just begin by saying that I've experienced a range of partnerships over the duration of my art practice and I don't believe that one particular model is always appropriate. But first, I will speak about the different types of arrangements that I have had previously.

My first collaboration was with CSIRO - and I have to say that without the CSIRO I wouldn't have an art practice in high technology. It was completely due to their culture of intellectual generosity and their eagerness to share that enabled me to develop a high-tech art practice.

Later on, I was fortunate enough to team up with a patron. That patron became the industry partner for the CSIRO and paid the CSIRO to support me. Consequently, within a decade the roles had altered in the partnership relationship. I can speak about that more in the discussion but could I have the first video please. This video is in the archive project as part of the Adelaide Biennial. It's a project that I actually made primarily for scientists - a collaboration with the Australian Museum based on a paper by the Social Anthropologist Bruno Latour where he compares relativism and relativity. Two models of looking at reality as a type of system - one by comparing things which can be put in categories by being abstracted and others that have a kind of unique system all to themselves.

Audio Visual Voice of Bruno Latour in "All Days are Nights" To study Einstein's argument we first need to define some basic tools for studying texts. One of the most elementary operations of narrative is what Semioticians call 'shifting out'. For example, Agatha Christie writes "Henry Perious arrives at Paddington Station at nine o'clock on Christmas Eve. She asks the reader to shift their attention away from her, the author, also called the annunciator to a new actor while operating elsewhere at Paddington Station at a different time, nine o'clock on Christmas Eve. These three types of shifting out can be written separately or together by the author as many times as possible. Naturally the actors or actants which are shifted out in this way - need to be human actors it could be anything. For instance in phrases like 'that train arrived at seven o'clock' or 'scientific progress has always been valued everywhere', the three processes of shifting out are easily recognisable. 'Train' and 'scientific progress' are actors like any others. In fact a type of shifting out is taking place right now in this film. I am in fact an actor who is standing in for the real person Bruno Latour, the author of the lecture I'm giving.

I'd like to go back and explain anecdotally my first major partnership which really made the world of difference to the potential for further partnerships/collaborations in myant practice.

In the 1970's the CSIRO research scientists knew that all I had wanted to do for the five years previous (from going in and visiting them) was to make holograms of rooms - architectural structures - and that it wasn't technically possible to do that in Australia.

When the World Optics Conference was held in France, Dr W.H Steele (Head of the Optics Section at the CSIRO) asked them would they have an Artist In Residence at the Laboritoire de Physique et Optique, Besancon. Because France has a strong acceptance for the mutuality of arts and science, they agreed. The Laboritoire in Besancon had just made the world's largest hologram and they wanted to broaden the appeal of their research via an artistic collaboration - they took the real Venus De Milo from the Louvre to the laboratory and made a hologram of it. They were just extremely proud of that achievement and wanted to continue their tradition of working with artists. They ended up saying yes so I paid for myself to go to France. It took me a while to raise the money - I wrote to them to say I was coming but I didn't actually tell them a date. I found out that they had a huge job on to holographically compress all the information about the checklists on a Concorde flight deck. And Professor Nicole Abischere my mentor teacher, had invented a technique whereby you can store a lot of holographic information in the same place - where if you shine a light on it from a different angle you see a different image. This was a brilliant invention which was unpublished and being used to make the holograms for the Concord control panels.

And so for three months during this time, I went to the lab every day hoping that I could make a hologram of a lounge room and I found myself turning on the laser, mixing up chemicals, making the coffee and watching a lot of scientists grapple with the technical problems of fitting the componentry behind the images of the Concord checklist.

A year after returning to Australia and with help from Ken Scarlett (Director of the Griffin Gallery), I went back to Europe to make the hologram I had set out to make on my first residency. AGFA agreed to make the world's largest holographic plates for me. I would have to say, making the hologram of the lounge room was the most gruelling and traumatic experiences of my entire life but it actually did work in the end. AGFA had made four holographic plates for me - only one worked, the last one. That hologram turned out to be a one-off and the world's largest of its type. It was also a different type of hologram visually because the volume of space was clearly defined behind the image and that had never been done before. So inadvertently I had set up the technical benchmark in this type of hologram. And it really set my course. After that doors were open to me and I was technically able to accomplish large scale work because of that achievement.

So I think it's really important for there to be opportunities for young people to develop their ideas. Things were quite different in the 70s - doors of technical and academic institutions were open in an informal way and artists had a little more latitude. I'm concerned that young students coming up out of art school aren't given the same kinds of opportunities that we had to actually explore. I would like to see young artists assisted to have access to technical resources even if they can't define what they want to do.

Recently I've been fortunate enough to be awarded a large ARC Grant to research the use of darkness in traditional Italian painting and putting it into a hologram. Through the ARC research model, I have been able to introduce Amy Rush a student at the College of Fine Arts at the university of New South Wales to the processes of making a holographic artwork. From her documentary video which shows glimpses of the process of making the hologram at the Australian Defence Force Academy set against her musings on the potential of holograms within the historic context of imagery one gets a sense of the position of aspiring young media artists.

I think that is all I really wanted to say except to reinforce the need for people to be given opportunities in some formal way so they can explore technology domains that would otherwise be beyond their scope. Thank you.