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This article is underpinned by the hypothesis that if Australia is to reassess and improve its relationship to and use of rivers and river systems, then more holistic ways of understanding rivers, and strategies for representing and communicating this understanding, must be developed and brought together. Held over two days in August 2019 at the Lismore campus of Southern Cross University, 'Speaking With the River' was an interdisciplinary symposium exploring the capacities of creative research practice to develop new understandings of rivers and river systems as simultaneously environmental, cultural, historical and economic phenomena. In this article, we bring together the voices and disciplinary insights from the symposium and the rivers of Northern New South Wales, and we reflect on the way that riverine language ran throughout our discussions and ideas, providing a connective model of confluences and conjunctions for the interdisciplinary enterprise we were engaged in. This article presents perspectives on rivers and river systems from law, history, art and science, exploring common ground and common purposes. Developing a legal framework for recognising the rights and 'voices' of rivers, that is informed by Indigenous knowledges, historical contexts, and scientific understanding, and that employs artistic innovation in representation and translation, is to us the ultimate goal of such an enquiry. While this paper does not undertake the formal steps of developing this framework, it provides the necessary background and instantiates its elements and working methods within the context of the Richmond River in Northern New South Wales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we detail a project that seeks to expand the ways in which the concepts of gesture and spectromorphology can be understood and applied in audiovisual projects. We argue that understanding spectromorphology in visual domains requires consideration of the wavelengths of light that give us an image. In this project, the complex interaction between clouds and solar radiation becomes the medium for understanding this concept of visual spectra. Invalid Data W.E.S.T. is a collaboration between media artist Grayson Cooke, audio engineer Ian Stevenson, and the experimental improvising group Wilcox, Encarnacao, Swanton Trio (W.E.S.T.), comprising three Australian composer-performers: Felicity Wilcox (piano), John Encarnacao (guitar), and Lloyd Swanton (bass). In this project, a multi-camera recording of W.E.S.T. in studio performance is combined with Cooke's exploration of creative uses of satellite data. Satellite images of clouds rendered using infrared light are intercut with in-depth, multi-camera footage of W.E.S.T. captured during improvisation. The resulting audiovisual meditation draws parallels between spontaneous artistic processes, collaborative creation, and environmental phenomena. In this article, we explore how concepts of gesture and spectromorphology shaped the conception, production and post-production phases of the project, and how these concepts can be used to enhance the production of audiovisual work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What can an image do? And what can we do with images? These are broad questions, and need narrowing in any case, just as a concept of "the image" needs defining. After all, we live in a culture of images, they explode across our screens and public spaces in so many forms that any discussion of the image is reliant on context to be useful. This paper addresses these questions within the context of media art: the aim of this paper is to explore ways in which artistic enquiry and production can contribute to the discourse around environmental issues, particularly within the context of the Anthropocene, where humanity's influence on global geological and atmospheric conditions is understood to constitute a new geological epoch. I will explore my Old Growth project as a way of thinking through this problematic. The Old Growth project is a series of three video works that explore the effects of anthropogenic climate change and resource extraction, through a kind of material allegory or media analogue, whereby photographs of a series of sedimentary or accretive environments are subjected to chemical degradation. Across the three works, the project conducts both an environmental critique and a material enquiry, by using photographic media and corrosive chemicals to "materialize" environmental degradation along different channels than the documentary record. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are surrounded by archives, archives personal and national; our externalized memories and their material placeholders line our shelves and attics, just as they crowd the vaults of our national repositories. But how do we relate to archives as material memories? What do we gain in their preservation, and what, paradoxically, might we lose? For good reason, archival materials are conserved and preserved in order to ward off dissolution, of both the things themselves and their memory function. But what does archival preservation prevent us from feeling, seeing and doing? What creative possibilities might be released when the archive is dissolved? In this article, we discuss our art–science collaboration, after | image. This project is about personal and material memory and about archival preservation and dissolution; it features time-lapse macrophotography of photographic negatives being chemically and physically destroyed. The negatives come from Grayson Cooke’s studies in photography at high school – this archive has been stored in his parents’ attic for 20 years, nominally ‘preserved’ for posterity but degrading nevertheless, as all material objects do. The submission of a personal archive to chemical destruction not conservation, and to a digital recording of this destruction, highlights the crux of the project’s enquiry and introduces its affective charge. Why destroy the archive, why commit archival treason? Because in doing so, you can make it live again. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Outback and Beyond is a live audio-visual performance and collaboration between myself and Rome-based sound-artist Mike Cooper. It is a live remix of films and images from the National Film and Sound Archive and the State Library of South Australia, accompanied by Mike Cooper's live soundtrack of lap-steel guitar and deconstructed Blues, and a libretto recounting the adventures and misadventures of Charles Todd, the engineer who built the Overland Telegraph from Darwin to Adelaide in the 1870s. It is a meditation on the images and myths that form Australia's national identity, and on methods of contesting the formation of that identity. In this paper, I explore the implications of the live archival remix that underpins the project; implications in terms of how the project works with archival materials in a performance context, but also in terms of the enquiry the project conducts into archival practice itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the role of the Western genre in Australian cinema, with particular consideration on whether the similarities in colonial history between the U.S. and Australia extend to how each of them has used the Western and its iconography. It discusses the history and development of the Western in Australia and the use of the Western and its iconography as part of the revisionist strategy through a discussion of the live audio-visual performance project "Outback and Beyond."

'Kellerman: EXPANDED' was a live audiovisual performance and improvisation, specially produced for the Seventh International Small island Cultures Conference in the Whitsundays (June 2011). It was a 'live cinema' remix project, in which footage from films featuring and about Australian champion swimmer and silent film star Annette Kellerman was mixed live against a soundtrack made up of songs about the Whitsundays and tracks by sound artist Mike Cooper. Annette Kellerman was an Australian performer who achieved fame as a synchronised swimmer in the London and New York Hippodromes in the 1910s and, later, as a silent film star. She spent a year in the Whitsundays in 1933/34, performing at resorts and appearing as a mermaid in a series of quasidocumentary films about coral reefs. In this performance, undersea footage was mixed in with the Kellerman films to produce an undersea fantasia, a meditation on the expanded temporality and fantasy of the island paradise. Audience members were invited to interact live with the performance, by submitting silentfilm intertitles as blog comments, which were mixed into the performance via RSS feeds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]