[ISEA2011] Paper: Deborah Leah Lawler-Dormer – MIC Toi Rerehiko: Collective hybrid arts projects

Abstract

MIC Toi Rerehiko is a leading contemporary creative media, interdisciplinary arts and live performance centre in Aotearoa, New Zealand. MIC Toi Rerehiko nurtures innovation through cross-disciplinary collaboration. Our         programme includes exhibitions, live performances, festivals and screenings, residencies, professional and conceptual development opportunities.

Our current programming stream is divided in to four key delivery areas that enable hybrid arts practice across multiple platforms:

  1. MIC Exhibition: a venue based exhibition programme
  2. MIC Live: technical and physical performance events
  3. MIC Screen: projection, monitor, website and mobile phone based works
  4. MIC Learning: workshops, research and education.

As a public organization and sector leader, MIC Toi Rerehiko’s development has reflected the integration of creative research and the development in emergent technologies with hybrid artistic practices. We engage and promote the interface between artistic practices, communities, education and industry.

Toi Rerehiko evokes the conceptual heart of MIC Toi Rerehiko where the collective collaborative and discursive energies of both the organization and the practitioners are encapsulated, through the flow of ideas, expressive arts, inspirational thinking, innovation, playful enquiry processes and intercultural engagement.

This paper will examine a number of interactive and collaborative artistic projects initiated through MIC’s programme, shared public community projects and research groups with university partners. Various collaborative projects feature artists working with scientific, cultural and disciplinary communities including artists projects by: Raewyn Turner, the Visualisation Unit, Marcia Lyons. These projects reveals the development of new local artistic practices, especially in the rapidly growing area of practice that roughly follows a path from pure disciplinary practice, through multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary to interdisciplinary (of boundaries between and across disciplines) and, in the more complex work hybridisation (artists working at the precipice of cultural, social, political and scientific frontiers, with emerging technologies). This is often driven by the artists desire to move from individual projects to collaborative and collective projects. In the areas of technical innovation these hybrid art projects are looking at experience design, integration of sensors, rapid prototyping, mobile phones, GPS devices and custom built software. They involve exploratory development of participatory practice, interactivity, experimental and improvisational practices.

  • Deborah Leah Lawler-Dormer, Moving Image Centre Charitable Trust (MIC Toi Rerehiko), New Zealand