Stories Without Borders: Innovation Artists in Focus

Emerging technologies enable not only stories to be told in different ways, but also open spaces for new voices to be heard. This panel discussion focuses on three diverse new projects from Australia and Aotearoa (New Zealand) that cross not only geographical borders, but also rethink the potential of documentary in an increasingly networked world. These works are both specifically local while also bearing witness to the universal themes of home, identity and culture, while also illuminating the generative possibilities of co-creation.

Michael Beets discusses his live documentary, Those Left Waiting, which puts cameras in the hands of refugees in camps around the world to give an intimate first-hand account of their lived reality. Angie Abdilla takes us inside The Tracker Data Project, which brings together Adam Goodes’s data from the football field with Indigenous Traditional Knowledges and protocols to rethink the potential of AI. And Tanu Gago discusses his and collaborator Jermaine Dean’s use of AR and installation to explore Pacific cosmology and queer Indigenous identity in Atua. 

 

Image Credit: Those Left Waiting, Michael Beets, 2021