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Melinda Rackham | |
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| Nationality | Australian |
| Alma mater | College of Fine Arts |
Melinda Rackham is an Australian writer, artist and curator. She is currently an adjunct research professor at the University of South Australia. [1]
| |
Melinda Rackham | |
|---|---|
| Nationality | Australian |
| Alma mater | College of Fine Arts |
Melinda Rackham is an Australian writer, artist and curator. She is currently an adjunct research professor at the University of South Australia. [1]
Rackham studied sculpture and performance at the College of Fine Arts in Sydney, graduating in 1989 with the Sculpture and Alumni prizes. It was here she was first involved in Australian artist-run initiatives, initially as Co-Director in 1987 (with Adrienne Doig) of ArtHaus laneway gallery in Darlinghurst, New South Wales, then as a member of Ultimo Project Studio Collective in Ultimo and Glebe in Sydney.[ citation needed ]
In 1995, while completing a Master of Arts in Women's Studies at the University of Wollongong, Rackham became one of the earliest Australian curators of internet art. [2] In collaboration with Louise Manner, Ali Smith and Sandy O’Sullivan, Rackham produced the 1995 exhibition WWWO: Wollongong Worlds Women Online – an Australian online women's group exhibition, featuring the first or early digital works from 30 Australian women including Francis Dyson and Mez Breeze. [3] [4]
In 2000, Rackham's carrier won The Mayne Award for Multimedia, [5] part of the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature. In an interview with Eugene Thacker in CTheory, Rackham speaks of dealing with the body at a molecular level "infectious agents... steaming open protoplasmic envelopes, penetrating cellular cores, crossing species boundaries, and shattering illusions of the discrete autonomy of ourselves" [6] [ better source needed ] In a paper analysing carrier for the academic journal Biography, scholar Tully Barnett connects the carrier to posthumanist theories, and describes it as "a biopoiitical web-based work that sets out to destabilize users' traditional or conventional notions of the body." [7] The work is "a text- and image-based multimedia work that invites the reader to navigate through a narrative of infection and illness." [7] Darren Tofts describes carrier as "a work that interprets the body as a navigable zone or space of ethereal strangeness." [8]
Rackham's artworks were widely exhibited during the first wave of internet art (1995–2003) being included in seminal exhibitions like Art Entertainment Network, Beyond Interface, ISEA, European Media Art Festival, transmediale, Perspecta99, Biennale de Montreal 2000, and Biennial of Buenos Aires 2002.
She is founder and producer the online media arts forum, –empyre–, from 2002 as part of her doctoral thesis on Art and Identity in Virtual Reality Environments. [9] -empyre- featured in events at NTT InterCommunication Center Tokyo, and documenta in the Documenta 12 magazines project (2006). [10]
Building "empyrean" – one of Australia's first multi-user virtual reality environments, Rackham explored the conception of electronically mediated environments as "soft skinned space", and encouraged users' to explore their relationship with their avatars. [11]
Two of Rackham's internet artworks are included in N. Katherine Hayle's Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary [12] – a book designed to help electronic literature move into the classroom along with the CD "The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1".
In April 2003, Rackham was invited to be the inaugural Curator of Networked Media at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne and from 2010 to 2012 was co-curator for Australia's Royal Institution. [13]
She was Director of the Australian Network for Art and Technology [14] from 2005 until 2009. [15] She fostered the development of wearable technologies – producing the re:Skin Masterclass, and curating Coded Cloth exhibition of wearable technology at Samstag Museum in 2008. [16]
As an adjunct professor at RMIT University,from 2009 to 2012, Rackham continued to curate and write on the emerging art and cultures manifesting across networked, responsive, biological, wearable and distributed practices and environments. In 2010 she curated "Dream Worlds: Australian Moving Image", [17] platforming artists on the 27 meter long public screen in Beijing's exclusive Sanlitun Village and large screens in Xian, and examined the cultural impact of media arts in China and Hong Kong.
After researching and writing the monograph Catherine Truman: Touching Distance published in 2016, [18] she took a sabbatical and lived part-time over a period of two years on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) lands.
Rackham was appointed Adjunct Research Professor [19] at UniSA Creative, University of South Australia, where, since 2017, she researches and publishes on the arts, environment and feminism. In 2019 she completed a suite of essays [20] for Cyberfeminist sheroes VNS Matrix which are published on their Web Archive.
CoUNTess: Spoiling Illusions since 2008, co-authored with Elvis Richardson, which documents the origins and evolution of the CoUNTess project; exposes gender asymmetry in the Australian artworld with statistical data; and proposes interventions for a sustainable future, was published in June 2023. [21]
Rackham was an active member of the adoptee advocacy group IDentityRites [22] from 2014 to 2017. She served on the Steering Committee,[ citation needed ] which commissioned "The Space Between", [23] a commemorative public artwork in recognition of the long lasting effects of forced adoption practices in South Australia, located in Grundy Gardens along Adelaide's River Torrens, unveiled on 14 July 2016. [24]
With IDentityRites, Rackham co-authored and co-produced a volume of poetry and prose, "ADOPTED", [25] in 2017, [26] and in 2018 she featured in Heather Waters' documentary film on the lifelong effects of adoption, titled You Should be Grateful. [27]
Electronic art is a form of art that makes use of electronic media. More broadly, it refers to technology and/or electronic media. It is related to information art, new media art, video art, digital art, interactive art, internet art, and electronic music. It is considered an outgrowth of conceptual art and systems art.
Speak, published in 1999, is a young adult novel by Laurie Halse Anderson that tells the story of high school freshman Melinda Sordino. After Melinda is raped at an end of summer party, she calls the police, who break up the party. Melinda is then ostracized by her peers because she will not say why she called the police. Unable to verbalize what happened, Melinda nearly stops speaking altogether, expressing her voice through the art she produces for Mr. Freeman's class. This expression slowly helps Melinda acknowledge what happened, face her problems, and recreate her identity.
Cyberfeminism is a feminist approach which foregrounds the relationship between cyberspace, the Internet, and technology. It can be used to refer to a philosophy, art practices, methodologies or community. The term was coined in the early 1990s to describe the work of feminists interested in theorizing, critiquing, exploring and re-making the Internet, cyberspace and new-media technologies in general.
Richard Bell is an Aboriginal Australian artist and political activist. He is one of the founders of proppaNOW, a Brisbane-based Aboriginal art collective.
VNS Matrix was an artist collective founded in Adelaide, Australia, in 1991, by Josephine Starrs, Julianne Pierce, Francesca da Rimini and Virginia Barratt. Their work included installations, events, and posters distributed through the Internet, magazines, and billboards. Taking their point of departure in a sexualised and socially provocative relationship between women and technology the works subversively questioned discourses of domination and control in the expanding cyber space. They are credited as being amongst the first artists to use the term cyberfeminism to describe their practice; according to artist Anna Couey they outright coined the term along with Sadie Plant .Their first use of the term cyberfeminist was in 1991.
The South Australian Living Artists Festival is a statewide, open-access visual arts festival which takes place throughout August in South Australia each year.
Australian feminist art timeline lists exhibitions, artists, artworks and milestones that have contributed to discussion and development of feminist art in Australia. The timeline focuses on the impact of feminism on Australian contemporary art. It was initiated by Daine Singer for The View From Here: 19 Perspectives on Feminism, an exhibition and publishing project held at West Space as part of the 2010 Next Wave Festival.
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev is an Italian-American writer, art historian, and exhibition maker who served as the Director of Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea in Turin in 2009 and from 2016 to 2023. She was also the founding Director of Fondazione Francesco Federico Cerruti from 2017 to 2023. She was Edith Kreeger Wolf Distinguished Visiting Professor in Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University (2013–2019). She is the recipient of the 2019 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence. She is currently Honorary Guest Professor at FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern, Switzerland. She has lectured widely at art and educational institutions and Universities for the Arts, including the Goethe University, Frankfurt; Harvard University, Cambridge; MIT, Boston; Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Dehli; Cooper Union, New York; The Courtauld Institute of Art, London; Monash University, Melbourne; Di Tella University, Buenos Aires; Northwestern University, Chicago, and UNITO, Università di Torino, Turin.
Amanda McDonald Crowley is a New York-based Australian curator and arts administrator who has created exhibitions and events focused on new media art, contemporary art, and transdisciplinary work. She has served as the executive director of Eyebeam Art + Technology Center in New York City and as the artistic director at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska.
The South Australian Literary Awards, until 2024 known as the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, comprise a group of biennially-granted literary awards established in 1986 by the Government of South Australia. Formerly announced during Adelaide Writers' Week in March, as part of the Adelaide Festival, from 2024 the awards are announced in a dedicated ceremony in October. The awards include national as well as state-based prizes, and offer three fellowships for South Australian writers. Several categories have been added to the original four.
Linda Dement is an Australian multidisciplinary artist, working in the fields of digital arts, photography, film, and writing non-fiction. Dement is largely known for her exploration of the creative possibilities of emergent technologies such as the CD-ROM, 3-D modelling, interactive software, and early computing.
Julianne Pierce is an Australian new media artist, curator, art critic, writer, and arts administrator. She was a member of the groundbreaking group VNS Matrix. She went on to become a founding member of the Old Boys Network, another important cyberfeminist organisation. She has served as executive director of the Australian Dance Theatre and is Chair of the Emerging and Experimental Arts Strategy Panel for the Australia Council. Pierce was executive director of the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) from 2000 to 2005, based in Adelaide, and was Executive Producer of Blast Theory from 2007 to 2012, based in Brighton in the UK.
David Olatunde Aradeon was a Nigerian architect, urban planner and curator.
Kathy Rae Huffman is an American curator, writer, producer, researcher, lecturer and expert for video and media art. Since the early 1980s, Huffman is said to have helped establish video and new media art, online and interactive art, installation and performance art in the visual arts world. She has curated, written about, and coordinated events for numerous international art institutes, consulted and juried for festivals and alternative arts organisations. Huffman not only introduced video and digital computer art to museum exhibitions, she also pioneered tirelessly to bring television channels and video artists together, in order to show video artworks on TV. From the early 1990s until 2014, Huffman was based in Europe, and embraced early net art and interactive online environments, a curatorial practice that continues. In 1997, she co-founded the Faces mailing list and online community for women working with art, gender and technology. Till today, Huffman is working in the US, in Canada and in Europe.
Virginia Barratt is an Australian researcher, artist, writer and performer. She is currently writing a PhD at Western Sydney University in the Writing and Society Centre. Barratt's doctoral research focuses on panic, affect and deterritorialization, explored through performance, experimental poetics and vocalities.
Josephine Starrs is an Australian artist who creates socially engaged art focusing on human relationships to new technologies, nature and climate change. Her video and new media work has been exhibited in Australia and at international art exhibitions. She was a Senior Lecturer in Media Arts at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney until 2016.
Nicholas (Nic) Folland is an Australian artist and arts educator based in South Australia.
Megan Cope is an Australian Aboriginal artist from the Quandamooka people of Stradbroke Island/Minjerribah. She is known for her sculptural installations, video art and paintings, in which she explores themes such as identity and colonialism. Cope is a member of the contemporary Indigenous art collective ProppaNOW in Brisbane.
Francesca da Rimini is an Australian artist. With Josephine Starrs, Julianne Pierce, and Virginia Barratt she co-founded VNS Matrix, and the four artists coined the term cyberfeminist in 1991 to describe their art practice. Da Rimini has been working in new media since 1984.
Angela Louise Valamanesh is an Australian visual artist, especially known for her ceramic art and sculpture that are based on forms found in the natural world. Based in Adelaide, South Australia, she is also known for her past large-scale public art collaborations with her husband Hossein Valamanesh. Her work has been represented in several solo exhibitions and many group exhibitions, and are held in public and private collections around the world.
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