Care-full projects

The lab will encompass diverse forms of research, practice, and engagement at scale to address the complexities of urban conditions.

To ensure rigour in our often playful, open, and co-creative approaches, we will embody – as well as possible – care as a matter of concern; its ethics and logic will guide our conceptual, methodological, and translational undertakings. We are decisively moving away from the technocratic vision of smart to the impact-driven vision of care; from empathy-based design to compassion-based; from expert model to participatory, and; creative process to re-creative, thereby ascertaining foresights for inclusive, sustainable futures.    

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CreaTures: Creative Practices for Transformational Futures

CreaTures is a three-year EU H2020 Transformations project (2020 - 2022) bringing together 11 European partners including universities and research centres, NGOs and creative art and design organisations. Creative practice has already demonstrated transformational potential in the area of social cohesion and environmental citizenship, but it is often fragmented, poorly resourced and badly understood. The CreaTures project focuses on collaboration, reflection and direct engagement as keys to transformation demonstrating the power of the creative practices to move the world towards ecologically and socially sustainable futures. CreaTures’s objective is to produce an open-access framework to support practitioners and policy-makers in guiding positive change. The project works around 3 interconnected efforts: An Observatory, identifying and mapping existing, fragmented and often hidden transformational creative practices; a Laboratory, supporting new experimentation and direct engagement with diverse stakeholders, including members of the public, by mounting several different scales and types of creative production, and; an Evaluation phase, testing new and existing creative practices in a systematic and concerted way for their impact.

Weaving Data

How can we challenge the legitimate, normative, mainstream, always-already, existing data to see and demand data otherwise? This project, conducted in collaboration with A.Prof Andrea Botero (Aalto University) explores other-ways of living with data, or feral data, that might help us imagine many different more-than-human futures centred on social and ecological justice and care. Our inquiry mobilises the experiences, artefacts, and expressions of data by expert indigenous weavers in Tabanoc (Colombia) and Gunditjmara Country (Australia) respectively.

Secret Project (working title)

This experimental interactive work invites people to meditate on, feel, and share their connection with their surroundings and one another. Their contributions become part of a growing digital body of collective voices from different places around the world and integrated recursively and in real time into an evolving more-than-human soundscape, which can be experienced online or in an immersive installation environment.

Open Forest

Open Forest is a collective, experimental inquiry into different forests and more-than-human dataflows. The project explores how forests and forest data can be produced, thought of and engaged with otherwise, in co-creative ways that consider perspectives of diverse forest creatures and reach beyond techno-solutionist perspectives. The Open Forest activities are distributed across different locations, including Finland, Australia, the Czech Republic and Colombia. The project has been initiated and grown by the Open Forest Collective: a multi-disciplinary group of forest-curious researchers and creative practitioners experimenting with participatory, co-creative approaches to engaging with more-than-human futures.

Feral Map

Feral Map is an open online map that brings together different creative practices questioning the dominant extractive, technocentric rendering and legitimising of particular algorithmic futures. Building on its initial development drawn upon Melbourne Urban Forest data (as part of the More-than-Human Dérive project), it invites people to engage with their surroundings in creative, unfamiliar ways and share their experiences in the form of stories, using different kinds of media, sensory impressions, and personal expressions. The Feral Map has been evolving to entangle with such stories or messy data from different creative projects, including Open Forest and Secret Project).

Polyphonic/Melodic Motions

This somaesthetics-driven project co-creates with artists from Fog Theatre in Melbourne an interactive platform for real-time kinetic audiovisual performance by artists with intellectual disability. Funded by the Department of Social Services and Australian Council for the Arts, it challenges the existing standardised technologies to creatively embrace unique differences, aided by machine learning; enable new collaboration and engagement opportunities, and; will result in an accessible guide for doing similar artistic projects to ensure the long-term impact.

More-than-Human Dérive

More-than-Human Dérive engages people in playful ways of driftsensing and listening to the ‘voices’ and perspectives of urban forests and both encounter the city and imagine its futures in new ways. This co-creative project is in collaboration with the Melbourne Knowledge Week, Aalto University, and EU Horizon 2002 CreaTures project.

Three-Tier Garden: More-than-Human Choreographies in the Post-COVID City

This project addresses fractures caused by the pandemic such as prolonged physical and social isolation, unexpected loss of kins’ lives, disturbed sense of normality, and loss of economic and social stability. It takes place at the community garden at Het O-tje, an artist-led housing, to explore design opportunities for individual and collective post-traumatic growth by strengthening the sense of belonging and grounding through "mutual choreographies.”

Co-designing the Early Childhood Early Intervention (ECEI) Support

There are various challenges currently being experienced by families and practitioners in the implementation of the National Disability Insurance Scheme’s (NDIS), Early Childhood Early Intervention (ECEI) program for young children with a developmental delay or disability, and their families. In partnership with a major non-profit, Brotherhood of St. Laurence, this project applies co-creative methods of research and practice to explore how we might improve services for the assessment of support needs and goal-setting procedures.

BeeScapes

BeeScapes is a hybrid art installation offering audiences to experience the world as if they had specific features of a bee’s sense through Virtual Reality (VR). The sensory-rich immersive experience will help increase human sense of interconnectedness with nature and inspire us to act on the urgency of threats to life on this planet. The project is supported by Creative Victoria and and the City of Melbourne Arts Grants Program.

Care Futures Beyond Data

This project investigates the perceptions, practices, and aspirations around emerging care systems, especially those using electronic health records and big data, among the members of public and professionals in related fields in Japan. The project employs creative methods to generate nuanced insights into current dynamics and engage different stakeholders to imagine future cyberphysical systems of care that are meaningful to local contexts.

Living Alone in the City

The rise of single person households is a historically unique phenomenon, which poses significant societal implications for many countries around the world. This project takes a digital ethnographic approach to examine everyday lives of people living alone in urban environments, focusing on their perceptions, experiences, and aspirations around living alone, home, and self-care.

Pleated Parallax

Pleated Parallax is an exhibition of twenty new textile, video and augmented reality works, questioning the binarization of the physical and the digital. The works use and combine processes of machine embroidery, marbling, digital printing, machine knitting, hand pleating, augmented reality and projection, to explore ‘materiality’ that converges at physical/digital junctures. Created in collaboration with Specialty Pleaters and supported by Arts Grant from the City of Melbourne.

Translating Ambiance: Restorative sound design for urban soundscapes

The project expects to produce innovations in the area of urban soundscape design by using an interdisciplinary approach that combines biophilic design, ambiance theory and sound art installation practices. Investigating new techniques for the creation of sound art installations, it hopes to advance the effectiveness of urban renewal initiatives.

The Post-Human Chorus: The future of the voice

This practice-based PhD explores the impact of emerging developments in AI voice production, considering the voice as a site of transformation and analysis. Through a series of experimental creative works, this project speculates on the impact that the integration of machine learning with voice synthesis into everyday technology, communication and culture may have across the personal, social and political ecologies.

Design Provocations for Co-creative Eco-social Future-making

The COVID pandemic revealed and widened existing ecological and social fractures, highlighting the urgent need to re-imagine futures beyond human-centred and technocratic visions. This practice-based PhD investigates how surrounding environments are experienced by different people and other-than-humans, and co-creates a set of speculative design provocations that can help guide and inspire eco-social developments towards care-full futures.

Entangled Futures: More-than-Human Worldmaking in Creative Practice

This practice-based PhD is part of the EU H2020 Creative Practices for Transformational Futures project, and investigates how transformative space might be created through and around creative practices to foster a sense of shared agency between humans and other-than-humans in reconfiguring or reimagining futures.

Being Keepers

This practice-based PhD explores how a series of public artworks can nurture resilience for those experiencing uncanniness during periods of change and re-organization in the midst/aftermath of extreme experiences. Drawing on personal experience as a transnational voluntary evacuee to Australia from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, the project brings together Ikebana practice and environment-collaborative temporal architecture to explore new ways of understanding security, survival, and wellbeing.

Arts as Public Pedagogies: (Trans)formation of Hong Kong Subjectivity

Since the handover from Britain to China in 1997, and under the tightening grip of the Beijing government over Hong Kong’s socio-cultural, economic and political life, the city has been experiencing a redefinition of its identity, and the evolving subjectivity of its citizens. This research project investigates how artist-activists and arts as public pedagogy inform a subjectivity that is contemporary, globally-focused, locally-identified, and unique to Hong Kong.

Creative Care: Designing resources for those who have experienced trauma and their trusted others

This PhD study applies a Research through Design (RtD) methodology to explore how we might design resources that engage those who have experienced trauma and their trusted others to express their changing care needs and actions throughout the post-trauma journey, so that beyond simply coping they might experience post-traumatic growth.

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Acknowledgement of Country

RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business - Artwork 'Luwaytini' by Mark Cleaver, Palawa.

aboriginal flag
torres strait flag

Acknowledgement of Country

RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business.