Project Proposal

Tukutuku panels between the poupou in many wharenui are a beautiful series of patterns, the holders of memory and complementary to the story told in the kowhaiwhai, and whakairo that also decorate the walls and roof. They are complex patterns of single or crossed stitches that reveal their information to those who can look beyond the seemingly random pattern.

A black-and-white photograph of two unidentified Māori women working on tukutuku panels (woven panels) inside Rangiātea, the Anglican church at Ōtaki on the lower west coast of the North Island of New Zealand taken by Walter R Oliver around 1947 and its negative measures 5 cm x 7 cm. Accessed from TePapa Image Collection.

QR or Quick Response codes are also holders of information to the discerning viewer or those who have the technology to unlock the code embedded in the pattern of squares. This can be a scanner or reader usually on a late generation mobile phone or tablet.

This project proposes to take the craft of tukutuku and to create panels that are accessible via QR readers to be installed around the city. The first stage would be to explore the tukutuku panels of the Owae marae to hear their stories and to understand how these are told. Through researching the meaning and gaining an understanding of patterns and themes used locally it is hoped the memories are shared as well the objectives for the iwi, and the environment around them.

The information gathered will then be situated online and a QR code created to access this, referencing the world wide web as the biggest repository of ‘woven information’ [Tukutuku-Ao-Whanui].

The final stage of the project will be the creation and installation of the QR/Tukutuku within the city and environment of Taranaki. The act of creation of the work in public space will serve to engage the local community in conversation about issues of environmental impact locally and to seek to build connections with the future and creative solutions.

The artist would prefer to work through this process alongside manu whenua of Mankorihi pa and as a workshop with local youth. Ideally exploring the possibility of creating the QR codes with enough coding information but also flexible enough to emulate in some manner the patterns of environment or environmental dislocation they refer to.

For more information please see: Pattern Recognition Project Page

Vicki Smith is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, digital storyteller and community agent using a range of creative tools. She is one of a global collective of artists who began performing through networked environments in the last millenia and is co-creator of UpStage (a realtime online performance environment) that is ‘made in NZ’ and internationally acknowledged especially through the annual festivals she co-curates.

Vicki is an observer, explorer and navigator siting one of her current works on an 11 metre sailing vessel – Kiritea. She has always been interested in how digital spaces can be site and tools for exploring traditional technologies. Through her online activities, she is part of an arts and education community that is global.

Aroha Timoti-Coxon is a weaver who currently lives in Hokitika, she is Ngai Tahu (Te Runaka o Makaawhio). In 2004 Aroha spent two months working on the Tukutuku panels at Te Tauraka Waka a Maui. She has taught at most of the local schools (including the ICARUS project Raraka Wanaka). Aroha has also taught Tuahiwi Marae, and wanaka with high school rangatahi over the christmas holidays 2008 – 2009. Aroha has taught at staff at Department of Conservation as well as the Driftwood and Sands Symposia. Vicki and Aroha have worked on several projects together since first meeting at a Raraka Wanaka (Weaving workshop) that Aroha ran through Karoro Learning in 2008.

Project Proposal

This work will emerge out of a conversation between interested members of the Maori community and artists, Kate Genevieve and David Montgomery, and consider how members of this community situate themselves in the second decade of the 21st Century.  Kate will bring to this conversation her research into experiments devised within contemporary neuroscience to explore the neural bases of time perception.  The resultant installation will explore Maori notions through technology associated with contemporary neuroscience’s explorations.

Gather – proposal image

Through Gather they intend to explore marginalised traditional ways of experiencing time as opposed to the West’s clock time, using the engaged bodily experience of participants.   The immersive environment seeks to manipulate participant’s experience of subjective time by using animated visuals and soundscapes that respond to the audience’s real-time heart beat in the space.  Through combining bio-sensor technology with multi-sensory and haptic exploration of the botanical gardens, the intention is to destablise the body’s normal experience of time and its sense of being separate from the environment.

The film footage will incorporate patterns from the plant life of the site and, drawing upon David Montgomery’s expertise as an experimental film maker working with natural specimens, create experimental animation from the Park’s vegetation.  The visuals will incorporate leaves and plants from the Botanical Gardens, and draw on local knowledge of the gardens and the different plant species from across the globe that thrive together.

Background

As Artist in Residence at the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex, UK, Kate Genevieve has been collaborating with scientists investigating consciousness and the subjective feelings of presence and embodiment, and researching the methodologies and technologies science is using to approach subjectivity.  Her work within the centre has used immersive visuals as a means of investigating presence through the bodily experience of participants, often incorporating particular experiments into narrative performances.  An example of this is the interactive performance, NO PLACE, a walking meditation on presence within constructed environments that extended and pushed at the techniques of the “rubber-hand illusion”.

Recently Kate has been working with pulse-sensor technology to respond to the Centre’s work on how increased interoceptive awareness correlates with heightened feelings of presence.  This work led her into a particular interest in considering how bodily experience effects temporal experience.  With reference to experiments probing the neural correlates of time perception, as found in the research of neuroscientists Patrick Haggard and David Eagleman, Kate is now beginning to explore heart-beat responsive immersive environments to explore how heart beat feedback effects time perception.

The Gardens interestingly represent one instance of the blending of indigenous New Zealand culture and British culture, both in its history and its botanical life.  Gather seeks to respond to this site through incorporating the plant life of the Botanical Gardens into the visual experience.  Experimental film maker David Montgomery developed an animation technique using found objects, such as flowers, leaves, shells, and seed pods, while studying Digital Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida.  As Artist in Residence at the Exploratorium he created animated loops from the flowers of the Pohutukawa tree and conducted initial research which he will develop through Gather into the links between particular flowers and trees and Maori folktales.

Aims

Whilst contemporary western brain science and philosophy is key to Gather, the aim of this art practice is to widen out neuroscience research from its focus on standard western experiences of time and subjectivity.  Their attempt is to take neuroscience research into the world, into places not represented within science studies: outposts, islands, places and communities distant from the lab and the FMRI machine.   We hope that this effort towards cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary dialogue might suggest directions for returning science, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, “to the site, the soil of the sensible and opened world such as it is in our life and for our body…”[Eye and Mind].

Gather will be installed within the Pukekura Park Bandstand, a constructed and symbolic site that represents the spread of a Victorian mode of formalising and containing nature and experience. Installing Gather within the bandstand, that curiously British ornamental construction scattered round the globe in the Victorian era, involves a serious attempt to broaden and perhaps undo a production focussed, urban, industrial understanding of time and space that the bandstand signifies.

Exhausted by identity politics that lead to fixed binaries – western/non-western, art/science, male/female, technology/nature – their working processes seek out common ground.  This work is born from and results in communication and collaboration and will use digital technologies to create multi-sensory experiences that facilitate and suggest alternative (rather than new) ways of being in spaces.  The exact set up of the performance must emerge out of specific meetings, conversations and exchanges between groups of people and sites during the residency.