Critical Animals :: This is Not Art

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.

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:

Simon Sheridan and the entire This is Not Art crew; our program coordinators present and past — Scott Brewer, Ella O’Keefe, Astrid Joyce, Astrid Lorange and Nic Vogelpoel; Brittany Guy; Keri Glastonbury; the University of Newcastle; Macquarie University Faculty of Arts and Department of Media, Music and Cultural Studies; University of Technology, Sydney; Newcastle City Council; and of course, Christina Robberds and the Octapod.

Directors’ bios

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.

Sarah Caufield:

Sarah was born in Vancouver, but now lives in Melbourne. She has a soft spot for fledgling and emerging art, and figures that more often than not, words fall short of conveying true meaning. But she’ll analyse and ponder anything of interest to try to make sense of it all. She enjoys being a facilitator to spread the goodness of others, and has done so as a photographer, radio broadcaster, arts editor, cultural producer and active explorer in the arts and idea-sharing wherever she is. Sarah’s been involved with community media since 2001, producing and hosting radio shows in two continents, including Across the Planet for 3MBS and Triple R’s 2009 bike podcast Along for the Ride. She’s bound to have her camera nearby at all times, has a passion for music from the fringes, gets nostalgic when it rains, and is constantly learning more about cultural theory, [inter]national patriotism and identification, food politics and holistic health. She can also make a mean quinoa salad.