What is successful public art today?: exploring how contemporary public art and memorial design shapes public engagement, perceptions and behaviour. Much public money is invested in public art and memorials. The research explores critical questions of value: what the public enjoys about such artworks, if and how artworks contribute amenity to public spaces, and whether recent artworks engage effectively with social memory, identity and politics. The research situates local practice within intern ....What is successful public art today?: exploring how contemporary public art and memorial design shapes public engagement, perceptions and behaviour. Much public money is invested in public art and memorials. The research explores critical questions of value: what the public enjoys about such artworks, if and how artworks contribute amenity to public spaces, and whether recent artworks engage effectively with social memory, identity and politics. The research situates local practice within international trends, to inform Australian designers, policymakers, art patrons and public space managers about recent innovations in technology, craft, creativity and critique, so they can create and choose public artworks and memorials which engage with the potentials of contemporary arts practice, the complexities of contemporary culture, and the diversity of social behaviour in public spaces.Read moreRead less
Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience through Film. This project develops a new interdisciplinary framework for understanding cinema’s unique power to evoke ethical experience via audiovisual means. Combining philosophy with film analysis, it moves beyond the prevalent view that cinema merely illustrates moral situations, and challenges the long-held suspicion toward film’s manipulative aesthetic power. This project proposes instead a model of cinematic ethics: an investigation of how c ....Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience through Film. This project develops a new interdisciplinary framework for understanding cinema’s unique power to evoke ethical experience via audiovisual means. Combining philosophy with film analysis, it moves beyond the prevalent view that cinema merely illustrates moral situations, and challenges the long-held suspicion toward film’s manipulative aesthetic power. This project proposes instead a model of cinematic ethics: an investigation of how cinema evokes ethical experience through emotional, cognitive, and aesthetic engagement. This project will advance the emerging interdisciplinary field of film-philosophy by highlighting film’s under-recognised potential to enhance ethical understanding, and thus to promote greater social awareness and intercultural communication.Read moreRead less
Migration and mobility: the question of childhood in Chinese and European cinema since 1945. This project will produce a comparative account of the migrant and mobile child in postwar film, researched in China and Europe. It will contribute deeper knowledge of how childhood has been valued in key societies since 1945, and will bring new energy to international and domestic debates on the status, image and experience of migrant children.
The reformulation of war art as a dialogical interactive narrative. This research uses visualisation technology to explore new ways to communicate and understand the collective experience and personal memories of war. It aims to strengthen Australia's leadership in media arts, facilitating the active participation of defence personnel in the creation of a world-first interactive archive of war stories.
Animating the study of visual communication. This project aims to inform how dynamic colour signals broker information exchange by connecting stimulus design with perception through space and time. Biological studies of colour signalling have largely proceeded via static terms that underestimate the true fluidity of natural contexts. This project aspires to animate the field using innovative approaches such as programmable nano-drones to reveal how flashing colours are perceived under diverse vi ....Animating the study of visual communication. This project aims to inform how dynamic colour signals broker information exchange by connecting stimulus design with perception through space and time. Biological studies of colour signalling have largely proceeded via static terms that underestimate the true fluidity of natural contexts. This project aspires to animate the field using innovative approaches such as programmable nano-drones to reveal how flashing colours are perceived under diverse viewing conditions. The knowledge advances are expected to generate new intellectual paradigms and models, and have significant scope for bio-inspiration in areas such as telecommunication, information processing and the optimal design of visual displays.Read moreRead less
The nature and consequences of environmentally-generated phenotypic variation in natural populations. The ambient environment can generate both heritable and non-heritable variation in individual traits, but the role of such variation in evolution is poorly understood. This project will use a powerful model organism, the Australian neriid flies, to elucidate the evolutionary implications of environmentally-generated variation.
Visual cosmopolitanism, national identity and imperialist ambitions in garden spaces. Visual cosmopolitanism is an ideal created through the global movement of art forms. This project will contribute to current debates about the globalisation of art by tracing the concept back to artistic practices and aesthetic theories of the enlightenment through a focus on experience within the eighteenth-century garden.
Understanding collaboration between the arts and sciences. This project aims to undertake a detailed examination of how the arts and sciences can work together to address the complex challenges of contemporary life. This will be addressed by undertaking the first cultural history of the experiment. Experimentation is common to the arts and sciences, and thinking about the long history of experimental practices in both fields will help build a bridge between them. This project will examine in de ....Understanding collaboration between the arts and sciences. This project aims to undertake a detailed examination of how the arts and sciences can work together to address the complex challenges of contemporary life. This will be addressed by undertaking the first cultural history of the experiment. Experimentation is common to the arts and sciences, and thinking about the long history of experimental practices in both fields will help build a bridge between them. This project will examine in detail past and present collaboration. An expected outcome is the development of models to support solving of complex contemporary problems. It will also raise awareness about the importance of the arts to knowledge-making practices.Read moreRead less
Drought effects on soil carbon and nitrogen cycling mediated by rhizosphere processes. There is much uncertainty about how drought caused by global warming will affect agricultural sustainability in Australia. This project will provide new knowledge about plant-soil interactions affecting carbon and nutrient cycling and will make predictions about long-term soil carbon storage and agricultural productivity in response to drought.
Bridging the gap between crop pollination services and pollinator health. Insect pollinators play an integral role in the quantity and quality of production for many food crops, yet there is growing concern that in agricultural landscapes, the limited availability of floral and non-floral resources might be contributing to global pollinator health declines. This project will synthesize global datasets, develop new methodological tools and conduct new, targeted empirical work to develop an integ ....Bridging the gap between crop pollination services and pollinator health. Insect pollinators play an integral role in the quantity and quality of production for many food crops, yet there is growing concern that in agricultural landscapes, the limited availability of floral and non-floral resources might be contributing to global pollinator health declines. This project will synthesize global datasets, develop new methodological tools and conduct new, targeted empirical work to develop an integrated approach to pollinator resource management with the explicit objectives of maintaining both wild pollinator health and to support crop pollination service delivery in modified systems.Read moreRead less