photos of the event can be found on the Documentation section of the TransAcoustic website, and also at http://www.flickr.com/photos/aliak_com/tags/transacoustic/

TransAcoustic Festival Seminar - Stella Brennan session - Stella Brennan
TransAcoustic Festival Stella Brennan seminar held at the Auckland Art Gallery Auditorium on Saturday 10th December 2005. Presentation of her paper "Visual Musak - from Lava Lamp to Screensaver"

Visit http://www.archive.org/details/20051210_auckland_transacoustic_festival_... to listen to a recording of the Stella Brennan session

http://www.transacoustic.org.nz/

http://www.stella.net.nz/

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http://www.transacoustic.org.nz/

[quote]
Trans-Acoustic is a four day Festival where the centuries-old desire to fuse sensory impressions together was given an experimental platform.

Image generated to sound is now common practice, however TransAcoustic Festival examined the unique interface that results from the transformation of image or optical information into sound.

"There is only one place in the world where light and sound affect each other mutually in a way that goes well beyond any technology or physics: in human perception. This is where the synaesthesia of sound and vision comes into being."
Heike Helfert

Seeking to underline the acoustic perspective in a predominately visual culture, the Festival offers an inspiring synaesthetic experience to the public with seminars, performances and screenings on the 8th, 9th, 10th and 11th December 2005 at The Kenneth Myers Centre and the Odeon Lounge.

Although interest in synaesthetic experiences peaked in the early 20th century, people had been thinking about combining music and colour for a long time. Pythagoras, who wanted to mathematically order the universe, is responsible for dividing western music into octaves. He also found ratios for harmonic relationships, which he tried to apply to colour theory. In the 1600s, Isaac Newton divided the colour spectrum into seven colours to match the musical scale, and also experimented with harmonic relationships in colour.

Early abstractionists including Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee were particularly interested in representing music in their paintings, and kinetic sculptor and film-maker Len Lye often spoke of composing figures of motion in the same way that music is composed.

Cinema provided artists with a sympathetically temporal medium. Experimental cinema history is riddled with abstract films that try to replicate musical form, including characters such as Lye, Norman McLaren, Oskar Fischinger and the Whitney brothers, a legacy that continues in contemporary music videos and VJ culture. Not to forget colour organs and the psychedelic light shows of the 1960s that spawned today’s stadium rock presentations.

Although most synaesthetic activity at this stage had been an unrequited infatuation with sonic form from the world of optical experience, James Whitney tipped the balance with films that married the two, refracting light from a swinging pendulum onto unexposed film to generate both images and sound. Similarly, experimental composer Steve Reich made music by swinging a microphone over a speaker to create sweeping feedback. Avant-garde composers also experimented with visual scores as a way of loosening the relationship between composer and performer.

Translating linguistic and scientific information into sound is an area of exploration that has become increasingly common in the last few decades. Although pinging radars and blipping heart machines are familiar examples of translating data into sound, many more applications are now being found where, through sonification, activity that might be imperceptible visually can be tracked aurally. In the creative industries, sonification is particularly apparent in computer gaming where the sonic experience needs to correspond with the players actions, resulting in generative and interactive compositions such as Amon Tobin’s soundtrack for Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory.

The Trans-Acoustic Festival is a timely opportunity to consider new ways of using our ears to reconsider the experiences usually intended for our eyes.

Excerpt from essay by Andrew Clifford
contact info@transacoustic.org.nz for information

[/quote]

Film Australia is celebrating 60 years of documentary with preview clips online.

See our News page for the latest annnouncement.

In 1945, the Australian National Film Board was established to produce documentary films and in 1946, Stanley Hawes began work as the first "producer in chief" of what was to become Film Australia.

Today, the Film Australia Library is one of the largest and most historically significant sources of archival, documentary and stock footage in the country.

We offer:

* an extensive online database, with preview clips being added during 2006
* a constantly expanding collection of more than 5000 titles, from the late 19th century to the present
* specialist library services for the documentary sector

The Library manages a collection of film, video and sound recordings and photographs in which the Commonwealth of Australia holds copyright.

The collection is constantly being updated with footage from each new National Interest Program production

This unique record is available to both local and international producers.

Highlights include:

* people – how they have lived, worked and played for more than a century
* events – from royal tours to centennial celebrations
* locations – in Australia, Asia, Europe and the Americas, from the outback to the city
* Australian native plants and wildlife
* industry, agriculture and transport
* immigration and multicultural Australia
* a vast amount of material from the First and Second World Wars, the Korean War and Vietnam
* a world-renowned ethnographic film collection from Australia and Papua New Guinea (see note below)
* classic films from Australian film pioneers such as Bert Ive, Stanley Hawes and John Heyer
* early works of acclaimed filmmakers including Gillian Armstrong, Jane Campion, Chris Noonan, Phillip Noyce, Bruce Petty, Fred Schepisi, Dean Semler and Peter Weir

Tapes can be supplied in all formats, quickly and efficiently.
Finding the footage you want

There are three ways to find the footage you want:

* Use our website to search the online collection and make an online order enquiry about specific footage you choose.
* Fill in the online form or email, fax, or call the Library. Using your brief, our researchers will provide you with an initial assessment free of charge. Fees will apply for more in-depth research.
* Or make an appointment to do the search yourself on site at Lindfield, using our database to search the entire collection. (Private viewing facilities are also available on site. See Film Australia Studios - Location for how to find us.)

For some titles, preview clips will be available online. Alternatively, a preview tape with timecode will be sent to you by courier or post. Selected footage can be transferred to a master tape by quoting the timecodes you require.
Need more information?

See What to Do for an explanation of the online collection, search hints and details of our online order enquiry system and registering as an online member.

Check our Library FAQs for more details about the Film Australia Library and how it works.
Film Australia Stills Collection

In addition to film, video and sound recordings, there are more than 100,000 still images in the Library and it's growing all the time.

You can browse our online photo galleries to get a taste of this extraordinary collection.

Then go to the Contact FA Library page and fill in the online form or email, fax, or call the Library, and our staff will help you find the right image to suit your needs.

Important note and Indigenous warning

The Film Australia Library contains over 500 titles with Indigenous content. We respect Indigenous cultural restrictions and use specific procedures and guidelines to manage the use of this material.

To many communities, it is distressful and offensive to depict persons who have died. Indigenous communities that may be affected are warned that this online database, including some preview clips, may contain such scenes.

Many of the films in the collection are records of their time, with language use and attitudes that reflect that period in history. The earlier films were made for Commonwealth government departments as part of their information programs and so reflect government policies and priorities of the day. The views expressed in these programs do not necessarily represent the views of Film Australia.

Contact the Library for further information.

visit http://www.filmaust.com.au/library/ for more information

We are based at the School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media at Birkbeck, University of London and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board. The substantial government funding for our project indicates the level of interest in creating an historical framework for this period. CACHe began its work in 2002.

CACHe is investigating the early days of the computer arts in the UK from their origins in the 1960s to the 1980s, when the first personal computers began to be used. The project intends to archive, document and contextualise the computer arts. Its principal goals are to recover this history and confirm its cultural and aesthetic legitimacy.

CACHe aims to:

* Recover the work of leading pioneers in the field of digital-based art in Britain
* Identify artists, works, events and publications
* Document the contributions of artists, researchers, authors, academics, institutions and publications
* Collect material to create a permanent national collection based on a number of archives, including that of the late John Lansdown, co-founder of the Computer Arts Society and a pivotal figure in this field during the 1960s-1980s
* Construct a critical and historical context for the computer arts
* Enable access to this research through an online database, books, videos/DVDs and other materials

CACHe's work includes tracing and contacting people associated with the field during this period, or their families. In all cases, we are trying to build up a comprehensive picture of the digital arts in the 1960s and 1970s in the UK and cross-reference them to international developments.

visit http://www.bbk.ac.uk/hosted/cache/index.htm for more information