Ocean residency-visit to Te Whare Hera and Pulse – part 1

Learning from Making, Learning by Collaborating

As I move in to the last 4 months of my ANAT Synapse residency, I am turning towards further workshops and shaping my artistic responses with esteemed artistic colleagues, and workshopping 3D musical ideas with design volunteers from Swinburne.

Over the past three months, alongside my time in the Lab at Swinburne with the scientific team led by Richard, I have also been busy with very rewarding, creative collaborative guest residencies, exploring and experimenting with our ANAT Turbulent Trajectories materials as part of Dr Gabby O’Connor’s Ocean Collab Lab in Te Whare Hera (Wellington, New Zealand), and co-creating Pulse: A love song to a bleeding ocean with colleague Susan Bamford Caleo for Hope Punk Climate Festival at La Mama in Melbourne, Australia.

I’ll share more about Pulse in the next blog post “part 2″…

Bringing the Work into the Room

Both guest collaborative experiences have afforded me the opportunity to bring my ANAT residency sound-art experiments and compositional ideas ‘into the room’, and to have esteemed artistic colleagues offer their responses and interpretations to the developing body of work, offering new directions and an extended sonic vocabulary.

Indeed, more than bring the sound and compositional ideas ‘into the room’, at Te Whare Hera, I could play with and to the sea, its bubbles and waves! The studio directly overlooked the sea, at the very end-point of the harbour.

Over five inspiring, incredibly beautiful days, developing compositional material for Turbulent Trajectories, and observing how long-time colleague and friend Dr Gabby O’Connor develops visual experiences that engage audiences (children and adults) with oceans and oceanography, I absorbed her unique and deceptively simple approach.

These observations reminded me of the power of clear storytelling. For inviting audiences to create and respond to scientific information does more than encourage engagement, it deepens their knowledge of science and nature, and the power of arts. In other words, encouraging audiences to actively make and respond to scientific information doesn’t simply effect engagement, it brings actual, tactile, understanding. Understanding of science and nature, and of how art and arts-making can seamlessly bind information to curiosity, imagination and feeling (emotion).

Images from my guest residency at Dr Gabby O’Connor’s Ocean Lab Collab, Te Whare Hera, Wellington, NZ