Dr Mark Billinghurst

Director, Human Interface Technology Laboratory New Zealand, based at Canterbury University

Dr Billinghurst has a wealth of knowledge and expertise in human computer interface technology, particularly in the area of Augmented Reality (the overlay of three-dimensional images on the real world)

Dr Billinghurst has achieved several accolades in recent years for his contribution to Human Interface Technology research. He was awarded a Discover Magazine Award in 2001, for Entertainment for creating the Magic Book technology. He was selected as one of eight leading New Zealand innovators and entrepreneurs to be showcased at the Carter Holt Harvey New Zealand Innovation Pavilion at the America's Cup Village from November 2002 until March 2003. In 2004 he was nominated for a prestigious World Technology Network (WTN) World Technology Award in the education category and in 2005 he was appointed to the New Zealand Government's Growth and Innovation Advisory Board.

Professor Mark Burry

Professor of Innovation (Spatial Information Architecture), at RMIT University

Professor Mark Burry has published internationally on two main themes: the life and work of the architect Antoni Gaudí in Barcelona, and putting theory into practice with regard to ‘challenging’ architecture; he has also published widely on broader issues of design, construction and the use of computers in design theory and practice.

As Consultant Architect to the Temple Sagrada Família since 1979, Mark Burry has been a key member within the small team, untangling the mysteries of Gaudí’s compositional strategies for the Sagrada Família, especially those coming from his later years, the implications of which are only now becoming fully apparent as they are resolved for building purposes. On February 18 2004, in recognition of his contribution to this project, Professor Burry was given the prestigious award ‘Diploma I la insignia a l’acadèmic corresponent’ and the title Senyor Il. Lustre by la Reial Acadèmia Catalana de Belles Arts de Sant Jordi and he was recently awarded an Australian Research Council Federation Fellowship.

Dr Jonathan Fulcher

Head of Native Title Practice, Minter Ellison

Dr Fulcher is the head of Minter Ellison's Native Title practice, which incorporates Native Title Solutions (a division of Minter Ellison Consulting). He has extensive experience in negotiating native title and cultural heritage agreements in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland.

Jonathan acted for Ergon Energy on the provision of the powerline to Century Mine in north-west Queensland. Prior to that he was an integral part of the State of Queensland's 'Right to Negotiate' team for the Century Mine, which helped to negotiate one of the largest and earliest successful agreements with native title claimants over future acts affected by the right to negotiate provisions of the Native Title Act.

His integral involvement in acting for Gladstone Area Water Board on its successful negotiation of an Indigenous Land Use Agreement (ILUA), was nominated for the Premier of Queensland's 'Bridges to Reconciliation' Award. This ILUA, in relation to the raising of Awoonga Dam near Gladstone, Queensland, was the first agreement achieved for a commercial enterprise under normal commercial pressures.

Other clients include Port of Brisbane Corporation, Comalco, Sea World, Anglo Coal, Bluestone Nominees, Gladstone Area Water Board, Curragh Queensland Mining, Queensland Energy Resources Limited and government bodies. He is an Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Law, Griffith University, Australia.

Brett Leavy

CEO Cyber Dreaming PL, Principle Designer 'Digital Songlines'

Australian Indigenous Virtual Heritage

In the past, Indigenous knowledge was recorded and preserved by mostly traditional means. With the advent of new media technology, digital recordings are now stored in databases or published through a variety of other means, such as digital audio broadcasts, books, journals, newspapers like the Koori Mail and in films and television produced and directed by Indigenous and non-indigenous film-makers. 

Digital recording is considered contentious because Indigenous knowledge exists historically, geographically and conceptually as self-contained traditional practices. It is embedded and deeply associated with the landscape, the relationships of communities to their country and the way traditional knowledge reinforces this association over time, custodianship and transferral through kinship, language and teaching. For Indigenous media the purpose of recording the culture reaffirms these connections to country as well as providing a mechanism for confirming this identity. Current media technologies for the representation of this knowledge embody assumptions that are based on worldwide scientific approaches to knowledge classification, sorting and recoding.

This presentation explores whether Indigenous knowledge should be objectified and commodified in this fashion. It is currently the foundation of critical debates amongst Indigenous people, industry, researchers and government as these stakeholders strive to balance this practice with present day sustainability of Indigenous communities.

Professor Jeffrey Shaw

Australian Research Council Federation Fellow, and co-director of the Center of Interactive Cinema Research, UNSW

Jeffrey Shaw was the co-founder the Artist Placement Group in London (19966-1989), of the Eventstructure Research Group in Amsterdam (1969-1979), and founding director (1991-2003) of the ZKM | Institute for Visual Media Karlsruhe. At the ZKM he initiated, supervised and curated a seminal artistic research program that included the artintact series of CD/DVD-ROM publications, the European eSCAPE and eRENA projects, the MultiMediale series of exhibitions, over one hundred artist-in-residence productions, and the invention of new creative technologies such as EVE, PLACE and the SPHERECAM. In 2001 he co-curated the FUTURE CINEMA exhibition at the ZKM Karlsruhe, ICC Tokyo and KIASMA Helsinki, with a catalogue published by MIT Press. Other seminal new media exhibitions that he conceived, curated and produced at the ZKM include Bitte Berühren (1992), NewFoundland (1993), NewFoundland II (1995), Current (1997) and Surrogate (1998)

In 2003 Jeffrey Shaw was the first artist to be awarded an Australian Research Council Federation Fellowship. He established and is the Director of the iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, where world leading aesthetic and technical research into immersive interactive narrative systems for distributed and situated intercommunication is being undertaken.

ABSTRACT: Contemporary practices in New Media Art offer a large spectrum of perceptual experiences that forge new levels of heightened perception based on innovative methods of conveying and exchanging information with a general public. Operational strategies include the augmentation of the real with the virtual by moving the space of representation outside the frame and thereby enacting an optical coalescence of factual and fictional situations; the virtual reformulation of the real by the digital reconfiguration of multi-modal registrations of real world situations; inhabiting the virtual by kinaesthetically engaging the physical body within spaces of immaterial representation; and the conjunction of the real and the virtual through the reformulation of narrative as a situation of user navigation. In his keynote for VSMM, the internationally renowned new media art pioneer Professor Jeffrey Shaw will elucidate the conceptual and technological strategies he has recently developed, which offer radical new opportunities for interactive cinema, cultural embodiment and industrial training.