about
The Critical Animals Creative Research Symposium is an annual 3-day conference that takes place over the first weekend in October, in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia, as part of This is Not Art. Critical Animals musters together artists that seek out postgraduate research, practice-led development and/or quasi-intellectual conversation, to devour the critical contexts for the experimental and emerging arts and media practices in the This is Not Art program.
This year Critical Animals continues to grow with over 60 artists programmed in 25 tantalising events and a dozen installations across 3 days. Our Animals come in many shapes and sizes: writers, artists, poets, performers, teachers, academics, students and thinkers, and most, a combination of these.
The composition of the festival has been an organic process, with similarities and shared preoccupations emerging in a few key areas: gender, performance, contemporary poetics, and the intersection of arts practice with the personal and everyday, with lived experience: pop culture, community, trauma. There will be papers, panels, experimental forums, discussions, roaming performance installations, static installations, a depot for collecting and collating risks, readings, artist presentations, a poet’s breakfast and an all-in dinner. Not to mention the multitude of cross-programmed events as we share artists across the other This is Not Art festivals.
While the symposium focuses on the 3-day model established in 2008, Friday 2 – Sunday 4 October, it would be remiss of you to miss our opening salvo, Biographical Bathing, a site-specific poetry reading/soundwalk presentation at the Newcastle Baths on Thursday night, or the thought-provoking waste-based bookend to the festival, Artist as Family’s Artist Talk about their Lock-Up residency and exhibition, AIR.
For many academics this is the beginning of their conference experience and Critical Animals provides a well supported environment for those stepping out on the research symposium circuit. Critical Animals is a breeding ground for long term networks and partnerships which are formed between artists, audience, festival coordinators and the This is Not Art festival at large.
We thank all our artists for their involvement and invite everyone to join in this wonderful, growing festival.
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Thanks:
Ange Clunes and the entire This is Not Art crew; our program coordinators Scott Brewer, Astrid Joyce, Astrid Lorange and Nic Vogelpoel; Keri Glastonbury; the University of Newcastle, Queensland University of Technology, Newcastle City Council and Copyright Agency Ltd; and of course, Christina Robberds and the Octapod.
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Directors’ bios
Britt Guy:
Britt Guy thinks all the time. She thinks performance is the best way to make sense of what she thinks. She thinks in aesthetics, theories and emotions. She thinks she and her work is serious but sometimes without thinking she is funny. She has used her thoughts before to work on festivals in programming and production management. She thinks technology is grand, but she also thinks that sometimes a cup of tea does the job. She thinks buzzwords such as cultural capital and creative industries are just code so that the economy can put art in a business category. Although she’s open to another take on her thoughts. She thinks identity, landscapes; politics and the occasional glass of wine make her feel. She currently thinks about her honours project, a performance installations without performers, but she is still thinking on that.
Aden Rolfe:
Aden Rolfe is a Melbourne-based writer, curator and radiomaker, who works across poetry, collage and cultural studies. His writing has appeared in Overland, Cutwater, and the forthcoming collection, Best Australian Poetry 2009 (UQP), and he was commended for the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, 2009. He has had radioplays and sound collages broadcast on ABC Radio National, and formerly wrote for theatre and webcomics. In 2005 he published Palimpsest, a collection of rewritten works by 13 writers, and in 2006 he co-curated the group installation Edit Metropolis for the Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity conference. Aden’s interests traverse poetry and poetics, fictocriticism, bricolage, narratology, installation and radiophonics, and he keeps his fingers in as many of these pies as he reasonably can. He is the only person still interested in psychogeography. He thinks about crows too much and has a soft spot for ibises. He is currently starting a small business as a copywriter, editor, proofreader and general linguistic mercenary. He has been involved with This is Not Art since 2003 and Critical Animals since 2006.
