I am a film maker, interactive media artist and writer currently living in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
My background is in both motion picture production and videogame development. I am currently lecturing in Digital Screen Production at Griffith University's School of Film, Media and Cultural Studies.
My films include
BIT (about the Bureau of Inverse Technology group) 1992, video, colour, made for SBS TV, 7 minutes
Tatlin (about the constructivist artist) 16mm, colour, 1990 (animated puppet film) 1 minute
Puppenhead, 16mm, b/w, 1990 (animated puppets and live actors combined, set in the 1930s) 7.5 minutes
Otherzone, 35mm, colour, 1998 (combines lives action with computer animation) 15 minutes
With my partner Molly Hankwitz I have formed a research collaboration called Archimedia
Archimedia investigates themes related to EMU, particularly media, communications, architecture and urban planning. Among works created by Archimedia are films, including "A Secret History of Brisbane"; a film about the battle between developers and the community in Brisbane, Australia.
Urban Strechnology Kit
"Urban Strechnology Kit" is a short 'infomercial' which in a slightly mocking manner adopts the conventions of the industrial sales video to promote the use of low cost, miniature video cameras to record the process of moving through urban space. The project is heavily influenced by the theory of the derive or 'drift' by the leader of the Situationist International political art movement of the 1950s Guy Debord. The video was made to exhibit as part of an installation staged at Artspace gallery, Wooloomooloo in October 2001 as part of a group exhibition called "Model Citizens".
Games Experience
Between 1992 and 1994 I worked as a producer at Beam Software producing video games for the international Sega and Nintendo videogame markets. This experience proved invaluable in terms of my later research into electronically mediated urban space.
Migration and my Personal History
I arrived in Australia in 1973 from the United Kingdom. I had lived with my family in California in San Diego for twelve months in 1969 and 1970. By the time I had reached teenagerhood I felt a very strong sense of the transience of life which migration and movement brings with it. The experience of moving instilled in me a sense of fascination with what it means to live in an unfixed, semi-itinerant way. The experience of migration is often very stressful for those that undertake it, but also very empowering at the same time. The possibilities of life seem greatly intensified when one's own sense of geospatial fixity has been problematised. The constraints which experiencing a single city (and the parochialism brings with it) are removed. The experience of one city melds the the experiences of as many others one encounters. The similarities and differences between cities becomes a subject of inquiry. Learning to move through one's current city is a necessity of every newcomer. Learning to make use of its facilities is also crucial. One is only as 'at home' in a city as much as one is allowed to feel at home, by the attitudes of those who live there, and by the ease with which services and facilities can be made available.
In my late twenties and thirties I traveled often. I spent eight months traveling through Europe in 1989. I visited Germany with a short film in 1991. In 1992, 1994, 1995 and 1998 I visited the United States, on each visit making and reinforcing friendships with artists film makers, architects, writers, painters and academics. I became part of a film culture in San Francisco. I met my wife there in 1998. Now she and I have once again experienced the stresses and elation associated with trans-national migration. San Francisco plays an important role in the EMU project. It was there that I first saw a coin operated terminal that set itself the task of providing basic communications services to the cities inhabitants, many of whom are itinerant, poor and in need of such services.
EMU is about migration and community. It is about cities. It is about communications. It is about enabling people to obtain access. Access to information pertinent to where they are. Access to other people like themselves. Access to the Internet. Access to views of the world which fuse the realm of information and data exchange with the physical views of the urban sights around them.
What about a city which is in every city, an electronically delivered set of civic services which anyone from any culture could use? What might such a city system look like? How might it function? These are the questions which EMU sought to address. This document is the working project notes and findings of a period of research which spanned seven years.
David Cox articles and essays relating to EMU
