Atkins Labcast
Hosted by Kate and Paul Atkins, the third generation owners of the oldest photo lab in Australia. A podcast about living with and loving photography. From philosophy to technicalities, for amateurs, artists and professionals, we talk about it all.
Atkins Labcast
Atkins Labcast Episode 55 - Ian Gibbins
Paul interviews video and electronic music artist, poet, and scientist Ian Gibbins. The conversation touches on environmentalism, memory, how our vision system works and all things art.
Ian Gibbins; https://www.iangibbins.com.au
The Taken Path: https://www.iangibbins.com.au/projects/the-taken-path-a-durational-project-carrick-hill-2025-adelaide-festival/
Physalia: https://vimeo.com/903237124 (Portuguese Man O’ War)
and furthermore (indexed): https://vimeo.com/708043875 (newspaper text on city walls and windows)
MAGPIE: https://vimeo.com/735315663
The Bilgestruck: https://vimeo.com/780950931 (invented language and AI background, but all the water animation is real!)
floodtide: https://vimeo.com/287607315 (my most widely screened video about climate change, with nearly every scene composited from multiple sources, including many around Port Adelaide)
G'day listeners, welcome to episode 55 of the Atkins Labcast. In this episode I sit down with Ian Gibbons. Ian is a retired neuroscientist and professor of anatomy. He's also a published poet. And for sport... He translates poetry. Think about that. He also writes electronic music and is a video artist. Ian's knowledge of anatomy was super helpful in this episode because we talk about how the human vision system works, which is absolutely mind-blowing. One of his more recent art installations was here in South Australia at Carrick Hill. It addressed memory, experience, context and recording. We dive into all of that. The heart of Ian's work has been how we humans live within our environment. Ian's an optimist. And while he offers some sobering facts about the state of our climate, he acts positively and has some great advice for us artists. Anyhow, sit back and enjoy this time with Ian. Well, I'm sitting here on the beautiful Kaurna land with Ian Gibbons, who's a friend that we've... Been circling one over a few years because we were part of a similar group exhibition at Port Adelaide. And I went to Ian's, I suppose it's his most recent physical exhibition called The Taken Path at Carrick Hill. And I sat in an artist talk. I was personally carried away by the idea of going back to the same place, walking the same path every month for a year and documenting that with a... art research partner, so you both had a different opinion. Tell me a little bit about The Taken Path and how it came about. Yeah, thanks Paul,
SPEAKER_01:it's great to be here, apart from anything else. So The Taken Path was a project that was originally conceived by my artist friend and colleague, Catherine Truman, and she's from the Grey Street Workshop, which is just celebrating their 40 years, with a big exhibition at Jam Factory, which opened last week. Put a little plug in there. So Catherine and I have been working together on a range of projects since 2008, which originally on a project that was started by the Arts and Health Program at Flinders Medical Centre.
SPEAKER_00:Are you both from Flinders originally?
SPEAKER_01:No, no, no. So I was at Flinders for 30 years from 1984. Catherine's an artist. She's an independent artist. Okay. And she's been interested in many different aspects of how we perceive the world through our body. And so she's a jeweller, so she works with her hands and she's very interested in the craft aspects of art and how the world's mediated through the body, both sensory input and then through the the things that you make as a maker, how you use your hands, how you create something from your lived experience. So we've been working together for a long time on many different projects. And she had been artist in residence at Carrick Hill a few years ago. And she was there for quite a while and she made a wonderful set of work as
SPEAKER_00:an exhibition. We should say to listeners, Carrick Hill is a house, one of the stately homes of Adelaide, and it was handed over from the, what was the family? No. Well, it doesn't matter. We'll cover that up later. Cover it up later. I'll put it in the show notes. But Carrick Hill was donated to the state, and it's now a place which has performance spaces in it and gallery spaces, and it's a tourist attraction. Yes. And a beautiful– and an art-filled garden and all this sort of thing. Yes. And, yeah,
SPEAKER_01:I'll expand on that definition after we've introduced the relation to Catherine. Yeah, so– So Catherine was artist-in-residence at Carrick Hill, and coming out of that, a few things coincided at the same time. So both Catherine and I have been heavily involved with an organisation called ANAT, Australian Network for Art and Technology, which has originated in Adelaide, but it's a national organisation. It's been going for quite a while. And indeed, Catherine was an ANAT member artist in residence in my laboratory at one stage at Flinders. And then I'd been working behind the scenes at ANAT in various ways on and off for a long time. Anyway, she had a project that was funded by ANAT at Carrick Hill. Maybe it was funded by Arts SA. And then we got ANAT sponsorship. I can't remember the details there. And we ended up being part of a joint project that was coordinated out of Uni South Australia and ANAT, coordinated by Deirdre Feeney, who's an artist at UniSA. And it was called A Partnership for Uncertain Times was the project. And it's a group of artists, one of whom is Catherine, And Catherine and I had been talking about all sorts of different things for a while. And she said, why don't we do this project at Carrick Hill? And we didn't have much of an idea about what we wanted to do. We went up there one day and wandered around and talked about it. And I don't actually remember how we got the idea to do this project. this regular walk down the path at Carrick Hill.
SPEAKER_00:When you say regular, it was identical, the walk.
SPEAKER_01:The geography was the same every time. So to explain to the listeners, so Carrick Hill is this sort of stately house. It's in the foothills of Adelaide, luckily for me, not very far from where I live. And it's a really interesting environment for, physically and culturally. So physically, as I said, it's on the foothills and on the eastern side it goes uphill to some remnant grey box forest, which is one of the woodland environments of the Adelaide Hills.
SPEAKER_00:It's quite authentic, isn't it? Especially now they're taking the olives out. Yeah, yes. It's like if you could imagine what the Adelaide Hills, you squint and imagine nothing being there, you'd get that picture. And actually across that face zone there is very... Kind of well kept to some extent.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's right. So that same woodland is almost continuous from the back of Carrick Hill past Brownhill Creek area, and it goes onto the Mitcham hill face zone round past Windy Point and then to our place. So across the road from me is some of that grey box woodland where we live in Bel Air. So that's sort of the top end of the– Carrick Hill Estate. Then there's a path which goes down from there, down towards the house. And it's on either side, there's like an avenue of eucalypts and she oaks and a few other types of trees. And it goes down into a really well-maintained garden. into the house, and then on the other side of the house, you head down towards the city. And it goes down through, again, another very well-maintained patch of garden.
SPEAKER_00:Manicured. Manicured. We're talking– Absolutely manicured. If there's not a– there could be a hedge maze at one time in there, but there isn't. But it's that English constraint, you know, heavy– Yes. Very much we've bought our little slice of England and dumped it here in the foothills.
SPEAKER_01:That's exactly right. So there's not a hedge maze, but there is a hedge. Yeah. And the hedge is a critical part of the environment there because it- Defines the edges, really. It defines the edges, yeah. It defines the edges of the highly manicured gardens.
SPEAKER_00:Right onto the grey box natural environment. It's quite a shock, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah, so as you go up towards- But as we came to realise, even that step from the rose gardens inside the hedge, going up towards the grey box forest, and there's an archetypal old grey box tree at the end of the path, which we thought it was dead, but it's actually not. It gives the illusion of being dead. natural, but it's not actually. So the trees all along that path have been planted. They're all nice, neat rows. And then, as you said before, the actual grey box area up the back there, it's been, had to be sort of reclaimed in many ways from weeds, feral trees, olives and things like that. And as you go down the other side, down towards the city, when you look at the old photos of the Carrick Hill estate, that's changed incredibly over 20, 30, 40 years. years because on the city side of the of the hedge as you head down the hill towards the city and that used to be all um orchards fruit orchards and things like that and most of those have been pulled out so just just nice lawns there but there's still this avenue of which is lined by pencil pines, like Lombardi, Italian pencil pines. Yes, you could be in Tuscany. Absolutely, yeah, yeah. And then you get down to the end of the path down there and then across the roads are these big spiffy houses and then it's the
SPEAKER_00:city. Yeah, so that idea of that path, I know a lot of your work is around, you know, there is an element of climate change and you've very much got the scientist look around on the world. And, you know, some of it can be quite dark because reality is, you know, the climate tipping points and all this sort of thing. But what I was very interested in is this idea of repetition of going down the same path and what you remembered of the path and what photography did as far as your memory of that journey went. And then how over the, over that period of a year, what did you kind of, What did you pull out of it all? We pulled out an
SPEAKER_01:immense amount. How long have we got? The repetition was something, as I said, that just evolved very early on in the conversations between Catherine and me. And we got the idea to film it separately and So I used, I used
SPEAKER_00:my. So her perspective and your perspective, her iPhone, your DSLR.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. No, it wasn't a DSLR. It was actually a Canon video. Yeah. Right. And. So two different ways of seeing two different people. Yes. Yeah. And then we, although we walked the path mostly on the same day, we didn't do it at the same time. So that was for various reasons. First of all, we want to get nice, clean images of. Without each other. Without each other. Secondly. Catherine was really busy with things actually at Carrick Hill when we started. Right, right. And as a follow-up from her residency, she had meetings and things and then she had other things on. And occasionally, I mean, it was just after COVID and I think each of us got sick at different times and couldn't be there at the same time. So, and that actually matters when you come and look at our recordings of the walk. So we decided that... unless we sort of fell over or dropped the camera or something like that, which did happen, we wouldn't restart and re-record it. We'd just keep going and not be distracted by things happening to the side of us or ahead of us as much as possible. And so when you look at the, first of all, when you just look at Catherine's and my videos from the same day, they might have been taken an hour or so apart. And so you can see the differences in the shadows, for example, or if it was a rainy or cloudy sort of day, the lighting would be quite different between hers and mine. And then when we came to make the final video, the 12 months worth of videos, there were differences. We obviously noticed differences in the way the actual video was being processed by the iPhone compared to my camera. which was enhanced by the fact I don't have any upgrades that were to the iPhone over 12 months, but the video codec changed halfway through, and that really changed the way the videos looked.
SPEAKER_00:But did you spend time grading them to belong to each other?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I did minimal grading, but I had to do some, not least of which because the iPhone went to the high dynamic range default, And at that time, my video software didn't automatically adapt for that, so I had to do that by hand, which is okay. But then within a month or so, the software, next update, could handle the HDR.
SPEAKER_00:Gosh. You don't think about things about such a long project. I mean, you could have kept from upgrading any of these things, couldn't you? It just
SPEAKER_01:happened.
SPEAKER_00:Catherine
SPEAKER_01:didn't realise it. It just meant the phone– she got a phone one day– you know, just upgrades overnight or something.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. And she wouldn't
SPEAKER_01:think twice about it. And then there were things like, you know, the way in which the image stabilisers worked in the phone compared to the camera. And then plus what I could do post-processing,
SPEAKER_00:which I did a little bit. That's a one-level view of what happened, you know, this technical thing, which is an interesting story in itself.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. So when people look at the two, at the resulting videos, They think that Catherine's must have been done with a professional camera because it looks sharper. Oh, that's terrible. It's not actually. No. It looks sharper.
SPEAKER_00:You were projecting these on… 40-inch screens?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, these are on big screens. They were 72-inch screens. 72-inch screens.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so big screens. So big enough to really, and yes, I did notice the resolution, but there's a trick that happens with the AI chips, or not even AI chips in her phone because it wasn't even upgraded to that image processing.
SPEAKER_01:But so the iPhone optimises image processing image sharpness by colour contrast, whereas my Canon video camera optimises via just pixel resolution. Yeah, right. And so the Canon actually looks a softer image and less contrasty than the iPhone image. And then we did a bit of smoothing, a bit of... I had to match... made the final displays of these 12 months worth of videos. The only processing I did a lot of was to match the timing so that when Catherine and mine were running, we were in the same place on the path. Of course. At the same time. So I had to speed them up and slow them down. Of course. And I all recorded at 25 frames a second. But again, the way in which the actual single frame images look on the phone compared to the video camera are completely different. And that's to do with shutter speeds and f-stops and the actual encoding codec. And so once that level of processing was done, differences between the two video inputs were much more noticeable after that than just looking at the raw file. So if I just ran my file next to Catherine's, we did a bit of colour balancing, a bit of colour grading, you almost couldn't tell the difference. But once you start playing with them, the differences got magnified and we decided to leave that. I could have got rid
SPEAKER_00:of it. Yeah, no, I found them interestingly similar yet different. That's right. As far as that exercise goes. Did you experience a view with it as a, like you've been learning staring at microscopes your entire life. Optics is the thing you understand. And did you find that the difference between Catherine, who, yes, she's a visual artist as well as a jeweller. Did you find that difference as well was something that you both were sort of wrestling? Was she happier with what was done? Were you more frustrated?
SPEAKER_01:We were completely happy with it. And it comes back to where we all started. It was look at the idea of the repetition. Yeah. And the idea that the experience is necessarily mediated. Right. And we thought, okay, for these, we caught, Catherine ended up calling them the controls, like you would in a scientific experiment. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in lots of ways, we ended up, treating the whole experience as sort of like an extended experiment like you would in a lab so when you when you when you do an experiment in a lab almost any sort of science you come up with the idea you do a few trial runs and then you sit okay this is the protocol this is what we're going to do and you decide we need this many repetitions and then you stick to your protocol and you stick to your number of repetitions unless something really starts to tell you this isn't working and you're just wasting your time, which of course happens, but most of the time it doesn't. And so we set up our protocol. We said we're going to walk these paths as straight as possible. We're going to do it each once, one day a month for 12 months. We're not going to be distracted by anything as we go. And we see what happens. And we had a vague idea of what would happen, but we But in the end, we got much, much more out of it than we predicted, which means it's a good experiment. So one of the things we got out of it was how much your conscious experience misses in even doing the same thing over and over again. You think your unconscious experience doesn't miss it? it misses a lot less. But how do you access that? Well, it's one way, it's a really good question. And one of the way you access it is through your body. And so what I mean by that is one of the really subtle things that we noticed and we really loved about the project was how the ground changed from one month to the next. And was really really important because when you're walking down a kilometer or so whatever it is down a path which is um mostly unpaved um it's either on just just a graded track or something looking at the back of your phone and you're looking at the and you're looking at the screen this little screen the size of of your phone and it's even smaller on my yeah on my my camera um and you have to concentrate on that because if you don't concentrate on the screen and concentrate on keeping the end point of where you're walking to in the middle of the screen, the house or the... Oh, you drift off. Like you would track off if you weren't concentrating that. And I was using a mechanical stabiliser on my big camera and that'll wobble off all over the place if I didn't concentrate on keeping that straight, like a steadicam thing. And so I'm concentrating on keeping... the Steadicam oriented correctly and then keeping the camera straight. And Catherine's walking down holding her phone, keeping on it. So you can't look down at your feet. If you do, your camera's going to go over somewhere. And so you're feeling the path with your feet. And I said right at the start, we kept filming unless you fell over. And interestingly, the first one or two times, Both of us slipped on various parts of the track. Right. But after that, we didn't. And we knew exactly. So that's your unconscious
SPEAKER_00:memory. Yeah,
SPEAKER_01:yeah, yeah. So we could walk down these steps, these stone steps, holding the cameras, basically without looking by the time we'd finished it. And then we noticed things like the sound of your footsteps changes at different times of the year. Or we knew where we were on the path because of the change in the sand. You went from the gravel to some grass. Down on the track, on the downhill side going down towards the city, there was about halfway down the track, there was a big rut that had been eroded out just by rainwater runoff. And we both knew where that was and knew where not to stand. Yeah, right. So we took a trip on that while walking down. We didn't talk about that until afterwards. Yeah, yeah. Looking at the film, said, oh, yeah, yeah, I know exactly where that is. But then the other thing that came out of all of the repetition was was how much work goes on behind the scenes at a place like Carrick Hill to keep it spic and span ready for the public. So we were almost always there outside public hours, either on the days that they were closed so they could do all their maintenance work or get there early before the doors opened. So you saw that energy behind... The display. And that was absolutely incredible. And that was another theme that we came, spent a lot of time on. But one of the consequences in terms of the repetition, the body sense of where we were, what we were experiencing, was that there's a lot of building going on at the time. There's just normal maintenance, but also they're making a new building. Oh, right. A new function centre. Yeah. And so there was a path which crossed our path that the construction trucks used. And that... that caused some degree of, not quite havoc, but we had to walk around it. And we really had to be very alert to the changes in the environment while we're trying to maintain our fixed path. And that was a fantastic experience. That was very good. And then the other thing with being there out of hours was, as we just said, the huge amount of work that goes on behind the scenes. And we got to know the people who worked there really well as part of that. And that was a big story which we were, at Caracool, we're very pleased that we picked up on that.
SPEAKER_00:So did it feel like the place was a real performance? Like the place itself, to be what it is, is a high energy performance? Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which says a lot about environmentalism and the efforts we put in to maintain this facade.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:It's a fabulous colonial facade. That is a beautiful house.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. Well, people are amazed, you know, that the house was built in the 1920s or something rather than the, you know, 1800s or something like that. And the Haywoods, that was the
SPEAKER_00:family. That's it, the Haywood family. They owned John Martins? Yeah, yes, that's right. So one of the big department stores here in Adelaide, like David Jones and– Yes, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so– and they had quite a– openly declared agenda, what they wanted to do, to make this house to represent some of the great things from the old country, from Britain, but also to be a haven for artists. So the whole thing's a construction. And what we really got to understand was that the general public coming in, like I would have three years ago, you don't notice much of that. You can notice, you know, if you go to one of the exhibitions that's in the house or just go for a tour of the house, I mean, it's a beautiful building and all sorts of interesting and somewhat bizarre art there. In a way, if you're alert to it, all the various contradictions and layers of different elements of culture are all there, ranging from, you Degrees of merit. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And that crazy main hall with a staircase. And every other room is, they're nice rooms, but they seem not to scale for this grand staircase and all that sort of business. Doesn't it? It's odd. Yeah,
SPEAKER_01:well, the actual building itself is not that big. Yeah. And one of the things we did for making some of the stuff for the video for the exhibition was was I made a little animation of the path that we took so you could see where we were along the
SPEAKER_00:path. Yeah, yeah. And to
SPEAKER_01:get that to scale, I actually just went to the aerial photos of the estate and just traced them out basically to animate it. But looking at that, you see that some of the houses just across the road from Carrick Hill, they're twice the size of the actual Carrick Hill house. So some, you know, it's pretty... pretty rich suburb around there, and that some of the houses are actually significantly bigger than the Carrick
SPEAKER_00:Hill house itself. Oh, that's interesting. So tell me, the next step that I want to ask you about is how similar, like with the 24 frames a second that both cameras work, how are eyes, and I know you understand this, so I'm asking, you're a scientist, you can explain these things. How are eyes doing that same job of imprinting on our visual system Are we seeing a frame-by-frame view of things in some ways? That's a really good question, and I
SPEAKER_01:was actually looking it up last night for another reason. Really? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. How lucky. Yeah, yeah. So the answer is the classic science answer. No, no. No, no, people do know this. This is stuff which is well known. So the thing about– vision is that it's impossible to see everything at once so as i'm sitting here in in the building here and i'm looking at you your face fills my visual field of what i'm concentrating on we're what two meter and a half apart or something like that and if i'm looking at you i stare at you i fix my eyes on your nose say I actually can't focus on your eyes when I'm looking at your nose. Yes. Or I look at your right eye. I can't actually focus on your left eye.
SPEAKER_00:It takes a bit
SPEAKER_01:to get
SPEAKER_00:to realise you're doing this, doesn't it? Yes, yeah, yeah. You have to notice your lack of depth
SPEAKER_01:of field. Exactly right. And it's not just the depth of field. It's the area of your visual field which has actually got high resolution. Okay, right. And so it turns out that your eye is pretty much built like a– conventional camera so it's got a lens and which and the cornea the clear surface of the front of the eye they together work as a as a lens system and they focus the light back onto your retina which is equivalent to your your film or your ccd yeah whatever you've got your sensor your detector um it's a pretty crappy quality lens and it's really only sharp in the middle with terrible um distortion around the edges They call a good boker, don't they? Yeah. But then the other thing is that the important thing is that the resolution of the retina is not uniform across the whole visual field. And so if you think of the receptors, the receptor system as being like pixels, which they sort of are, It's sort of like sensors in a, think of the sensors in a CCD or a CMOS chip or something. Then the density of the receptors is way, way, way, way higher right in the centre of the field compared to the ones around the edge. And then, and the nature of the sensors is different. So right in the middle of your field, they're, They have high resolution, and they see colour, three-channel colour. It's basically RGB colour. So they're the cones. Cones, yes. Cones for colour, that's how you do it. A little mnemonic to remember it. Right. And then… Rods for racing? No. You only got an option, so you only need to get one right. When I was teaching, I used to use mnemonics like this all the time, so I could remember them and tell the students. Yeah. So around the outer part of the retina, you've got the rods mostly, and they're at much lower density, so much lower resolution, and they basically only see monochrome. They're not colour sensitive, but they see much lower levels of light. They work in low light, and the way they're wired into the cells of the retina, they're particularly tuned for picking up motion. So it's like we've got motion detectors around the outside and a high-resolution camera on the inside of that visual field.
SPEAKER_00:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:And so then– but it doesn't feel like that. No. As I'm talking to you now, I'm not concentrating on that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It feels like I've got this big visual field which goes– I stretch my arms out to– Almost 180 degrees. Yeah, so it feels like it's almost 180 degrees. If you're back on a 35-mil– lenses it's equivalent to about a 15 or 17 millimeter wide angle lens is the is the field of view yeah but the bit which is in focus is equivalent to about a 400 mil telephoto really well that's the difference okay um so and our brain's doing the rest and the brain does the rest so so what what happens is that you're as you as you're looking around it you're scanning the scene in two different ways so first of all your eyes are doing these little jerky movements they're called saccades which means a little jump and they happen every um let's say it's about every every 40 milliseconds or so so milliseconds are thousandths of a second so many times a second your eyes are just jumping around and if you ever look at a video of someone's eyes up close or look up someone's eyes, you see these little jerky movements. Yeah, yeah. And so what happens then is that, and that's controlled by bits of your brain which are completely subconscious. You can't control your saccades. Auto, is there a term for that? There is, but it's not autonomic. Right, right. You might be thinking that, but no, there's special bits of your brain. There's two... Three main circuits of your brain interact to make these saccades. And then the other thing is that through an unbelievably complicated process, which I don't think anybody really understands, or you know, which bits of the brain are involved, is that different things take your attention. So as I noticed as I was talking to you, I was actually looking out the window at the trees out there, but not actually taking any, not really paying any attention to the trees, but Because I was actually thinking about what I was trying to say. And then I thought, geez, I better look back to you. But in the meantime, I just saw then a car move at the corner of my eye. I couldn't have told you what sort of car it was because my rods saw it. But I quickly looked over and I saw it was a panel van of some sort. I sort of know what sort it was. But now I look back at you and I... As I look back then, I thought, oh, there's a picture behind. She's got some writing on it. Can I read that writing? No, but I look over quickly. It says, danger, 440 volts alive. So this is going on all the time. And so your brain, your visual system of your brain is stitching together all these little snapshots. And it feels like you're embedded in this panoramic visual scene, which you then can navigate. Lots and lots of things have to be coordinated to do that, not least of which you have to encode all these bits of a visual scene into a 3D map of the world within which you are centred. Of course, yes. So one of the things, we take it absolutely for granted. As I'm looking around the place, I know how far away I am from you. I know the door's over there and the window's over there without looking. Whoa. I know my car's parked out over there because I haven't been here so long. I didn't walk so far that I'd forgotten where I parked it, which might have happened if I wasn't paying attention. And I parked in a car park, say, four streets down, met someone I hadn't seen for a long time, talked to them while I came here. By the time I got here, talked for you for a little while, Jesus, where did I park the car? We've all had that experience. So that's when you get distracted, your attention gets diverted, and you don't actually file away this critical bit of place versus time information. So one of the reasons that neuroscientists know about this sort of stuff is that sometimes people have brain injury or a stroke where some part of that processing gets broken down. And Any part of what I've just described can fall apart. So you get some people who can't assemble all their little bits of imagery, visual imagery, into an integrated scene. Some people can't see anything that moves in the scene. So they live in a terrifying world where they don't see trains moving into a station until the train stops. They don't see a car moving until a car stops. They don't see someone walking towards them until they stop and start talking to them. There are people who lose the ability to locate things within space. They can still see them, but they can't locate them in space. Sometimes it's one side of the visual field. They can't see things on their left side or sometimes a certain distance. And different bits of the brain are processing all of these different bits of the visual field. It's really amazing.
SPEAKER_00:It's amazing that
SPEAKER_01:it works.
SPEAKER_00:And you think about the next thing when we're trying to write software and systems to navigate like we do. autonomous driving and all these sorts of things. You think about all these things we discuss are an essential challenge in all of that. To some extent, obviously, you don't need the noticing is limited. We're not trying to remember this, that and the other. We're trying to avoid accidents and all that kind of a thing.
SPEAKER_01:But you notice a huge amount of stuff, which is one of the reasons why things like generative AI for making– imagery and why automatic AI-driven visual systems like for autonomous cars or something like that have so much trouble. So as we sit here in your office here and we look out the window for the viewers, we're looking at over, listeners, we're looking at over a street, there's some cars parked there and some trees across the road and there's a few houses there. And as we... And as we look at it, there's a tree over there. And we can see it's got all these different branches and hammy leaves on it. I don't know. We can't count them. Yep. But we can recognise all these different leaves on it.
SPEAKER_00:Yep, yep.
SPEAKER_01:And we can say, whoa, there's all these different branches and that one's been cut off by someone with a chainsaw at some stage in the past. And we look at all these cars out here and this one's got... um different sort of headlights to that one and and those ones are probably leds and that one's probably a an arc lamp and then there's an old land rover over there and that land rover's got a canopy which is probably made out of fiberglass and that tree over there is going to lose its leaves but the one further down the street isn't and that's just we could talk just look at that scene for probably three hours trying to
SPEAKER_00:describe it in words and then the light is changing so there's a whole nother layer happening
SPEAKER_01:There's all sorts of stuff happening and we have automatic colour correction, automatic white balance going on in our brain, which every photographer knows about. So an AI system knows nothing of that. All an AI system knows is if you see this particular pattern of pixels, there's a high probability the pattern of pixels next to it is going to be this. It doesn't know they're leaves, doesn't know they're trees, doesn't know it's a car, and then you try and assign language to it. So the language-driven... AI image generators. And the limits of language. Yeah, yeah. But again, they're just working on probabilities. They don't know anything. A
SPEAKER_00:lot of your art at the moment has involved AI, generative AI, to help create videos, haven't they? Yeah, there's a reasonable amount now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How are you getting on with it? Have you got a good relationship with
SPEAKER_01:it? Yes, and I've... generally chosen not to use it. So fairly early on in the piece, I started using mid-journey, which is one of the first of the really highly developed degenerative...
SPEAKER_00:Was that what Beyond the Flood Tide was done in, mid-journey?
SPEAKER_01:No. The one I used mid-journey for was... What was it called?
SPEAKER_00:Bilge. Bilge. Yeah, yeah. That was when we first started talking about things. So I've got to speak to Ian a bit further. Yeah, so
SPEAKER_01:Bilge was one of the collaborative art projects at Port Adelaide created by Tony Kearney. Yeah, so for that I used Midjourney to generate the backgrounds and It's a very early version of Midjourney. They look like drawings or paintings rather than real objects.
SPEAKER_00:But I find that even now real objects, I mean, because I've got a very picky eye on that sort of thing, I do struggle with it. It's not great. It's not great. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:But there are some amazing things. But I cancelled my Midjourney subscription earlier this year. I wasn't using it. And I... And going back to the environmental concerns, the energy usage of these things is unbelievably big. We haven't worked out how to negate that. No, not at all. On the other hand, all of the video processing software these days has got, they call it AI-mediated tools, AI tools. It's not actually... artificial intelligence in the big sense of the word. I prefer to call it machine learning. And I use those sort of tools all the time now because they just make things so much easier. So automatic rotoscoping. It's
SPEAKER_00:actually hard to avoid, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, you can't do it. And you can do things in an afternoon which would have taken you a month to do by hand. I've done rotoscoping, animating masks, and it takes forever. But, you know, like... from a few months ago the current version of um of final cut pro which i use it's got an automatic um they call it magic mask you just run your mouse over the bit you want and and it follows it incredibly well through through quite complex scenes and you can just manually tie it up um so that's machine learning and that's using it's not generating stuff out of nowhere or out of the cloud. It's using a set of algorithms which have been trained on real world examples to fix your picture. And I like that. And then there's another software platform called Runway. And that has a mixture of tools which can work with your own video, but also which can do scary things like making deep fakes. So I could just take a still photo of you and then apply that to my face talking and be you speaking with my voice. I've seen it done. It's incredible. It really is amazing. And it's easy to use, but it's also usually easy to pick too.
SPEAKER_00:Well, that's right, thankfully at the moment. Thankfully at the moment. Your most recent piece that's been released, Visalia, is that how it's pronounced? Visalia, yeah. Visalia. I can see– What's being used there to put it together, to create that sort of animation that's happening?
SPEAKER_01:I did all that. You did it all? Yeah, so there's no AI in any of that. There's no machine-driven stuff in the sense that there's no– There's no machine manipulation of the
SPEAKER_00:images. I can recognise some tools. I can see the cropping tool appearing sometimes. You know, there's a little lightened box in the foreground at one stage that focuses on whatever's going past in the river and all that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's right. So physalia, just for people listening, physalia is the Portuguese man of war. It's a big jellyfish thing. And I have no idea where I got the idea for this from, but I sort of had imagined that what if physalia, being endangered, fought back. So the English name for Fazalia is the Portuguese Man of War. And the Man of War was these big battleships, sailing ships that the Portuguese Navy used. In fact, everybody ended up using them. So the big sort of galleons with rows of cannons, two rows or three rows of cannons and three masts of sails. They were the Man of War. I thought, what if, you know, Fazalia decided... decides to fight back to the humans. And they're such strange creatures. They're colonial, related to corals and jellyfish and things like that. And they've got these terrible stings. If you get stung by them, they do you a lot of damage. So that was the idea behind it. And I actually didn't have any images of... of the Portuguese Man O' War that I could use. I don't like using stock photos. I like using my own stuff. So I thought, but most people haven't seen them, and who knows what they might evolve to in the future. So I thought, I'll make some. And so there's three or four different versions of Visalia in different scenes. So some of them I animated from just clumps of seaweed. Yeah. And then I morphed them, took different pictures of them and then morphed them from one to the other, animated the morphs, lit them and made them look sort of semi-3D. And then one of them was a flower bud, I think, that I did the same thing to, Odo, of a flower bud. But then one of them was generated algorithmically. So using a little program I've got, which generates clouds of points. And you just play with the parameters on this. It's all driven by equations. And they'll make this cloud of points change shape in some sort of way. And then you can, having made that raw model, then you can introduce lighting and things onto it to give it a 3D effect and animate how it changes over time. So I did all of that. And then all of the scenes... The actual background scenes are all composited from combinations of stills and footage. A lot of them were taken around Port Adelaide, some around other places. I just had my film library.
SPEAKER_00:So do you think that with the art that you're making, music is a big thing for you? Spoken word poetry is a thing for you. So for you, the idea of like, it's time on top of imagery, really, because it takes time to play the music, to say the words. So you're bringing people into this little world for this section of time. And that's really important to you because most of us, and a lot of the listeners are still photographers. And so they're used to let's take something to tell the story and then they hope that the whole story gets in there. Have you ever been tempted down that path of still work or has everything you've been done has been involved with animation and video over the years?
SPEAKER_01:Two parts to that. The answer is yes to still. So when I started, I do a lot of macro photography. And I've been doing macro photography since I was a student. So since 1975 or 6, I got my first macro system. And I'm now on my one, two, probably fourth version of a macro system I use. And...
SPEAKER_00:That's all still stuff. Are we talking something more than the normal macro, microscopic? No, it's just standard. One-to-one
SPEAKER_01:type of a thing? Yeah, it's sort of one-to-one macro. Yeah, yeah. So insects and spiders and plants and stuff like that. So natural history stuff. And so I've done a lot of that and I used to give talks around town on sort of the biology of spiders, illustrative of my own pictures. I'm part of a natural history group. in Adelaide at the moment when we all share pictures and information about animals and plants and things. So it's one of the good things about being retired. I've been able to get back to my zoology roots and go back and relearn about insects and spiders and the interaction with plants. I got really interested in all of that. So that's always been part of it. In our science work, we were a lot of microscopy. So that was awesome. um still imagery in a way and i'm it's a good thing to say i think that uh my collaborators and i we were well well really well known for the quality of our images and though we often used to get you know cover pictures on the journals because they we'll use that for the cover of the next next issue if you don't mind yeah thanks so it's like you know getting cover picture on a any magazine yeah so that was good so we've We sort of had the eye, developed the eye that we had for that. And I do a lot of still photography in a landscape and stuff like that. And a lot of my own, a lot of my videos use stills in them as part of composites. And it's a real trick making composites to get all the lighting matched up to, quite often I'll take, if I have something in mind, I'll take a, a panorama either with my phone which has an automatic or i manually take a series of pictures if i want high res i'll take a series of pictures with it
SPEAKER_00:it's like your brain's working yeah yeah
SPEAKER_01:yeah and i'll take a series of images across the scene and then and stitch them together and then then then i can use them as a as a background that'll move and i'll put parallax effects in and so that gives it feeling of depth and match the lighting and the and saturation. You like a challenge. Yeah, I do that. But the other really, really important thing that's said at the start of that is something that never really occurred to me until someone else mentioned it in an online discussion at one of the video festivals a few years ago. And that is these sort of videos that I make in common with Others in the genre, either poetry videos or a lot of video art, they exist entirely within their own little time frame, that four and a half minutes or whatever it is that they run for. They take everything of your attention, don't they? linear narrative or time-based link to the to the rest of the world and so to make that make that distinction i mean a typical movie say or episode on tv show or something like that it they the narrative structure is somehow tied to real time in the world. Now, it might not be continuous. It's very rare, in fact, you know, that the 90 minutes of a movie is actually 90 minutes in real time narrative. Very few movies, and those that are, they're a nightmare to make. Yeah, I don't know how they even make them. They're hard to do. So that's very rarely the case. But you know when you've... in your film that have a flashback and you know it's gone back four years or it's do you have a a dream sequence and they're looking imagining the future or something like that if there's too much of these dream sequences or unhinged flashbacks people get really find them very difficult and there's filmmakers who have done that like elaine renee for example um in the 70s 80s last year at marion bard is the classic example of that um where the times just time frames just don't exist um so So in many ways, these little videos that we make, they're sort of self-contained in their own little time span. And lots of ways, that same comparison is between a lot of poetry and traditional narrative. So one of the things about a poem written on a page is that it exists on its own terms for the duration of the poem. And it might generate all sorts of ideas in your head. It might generate all sorts of reflections thoughts, emotions, ideas. But you can't do anything else with it. It's there. And if you try and tell someone what's the story in this poem, it's usually pretty hard without actually just reading out the poem again. Whereas if you have a book, you can give a summary of the book. You can give a praise to the book. It's going to miss out all sorts of stuff. You can give a log line for a movie of 100 words explaining what the movie is, and that gives people an idea. If you've got a four-and-a-half-minute poem, poetry video and you want to explain it in three lines, which they always ask for in the festivals, you go, oh, I don't know what to do. And it's really hard. So I usually just end up putting a quote out of it. Yeah. An
SPEAKER_00:aria.
SPEAKER_01:A little bit of that.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So you actually can't, it's very hard to give a verbal description of a video art piece in the same way it's very hard to give a written description pricey or summary of a poem. Now, sometimes you can give a summary. If they've got a story, you know, like Walsing Matilda or something like that, you can say, you know, this guy goes down to Billabong and he does that sort of thing. But if you try and imagine a poem, you know, say T.S. Eliot or something like that, The Wasteland, give a summary of that in three lines. It's not going to work. So that's what you said is a really, really important observation. And I think it It helps define the difference between video art in a general sense and other
SPEAKER_00:types of filmmaking. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's fascinating. And I know I at times have struggled with it because, you know, you actually have to stop and watch it. And unlike the Carrick Hill work, you're not going to sit and watch the entire thing. Well, someone would have. You would have. Actually, we didn't. You never saw the whole
SPEAKER_01:thing? Well, yeah. Until we installed it in the gallery, we'd never seen it in that format. Of course, I've only got two screens at home, so I couldn't do six screens. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And to see the two in real time. At real size, we couldn't do
SPEAKER_00:that. Yeah, no, that is a good point. And, you know, to some extent that is any exhibition because when we hear seeing work on a bench, it's so different than when we see it hanging in the wall in the space with the sound and all that sort of stuff. It really– it makes it. So, yes, in some ways you're creating, you know, something that takes people's attention and commanding it for that period. With video art, do you ever struggle with the idea– it exists in that player. So is the player a part of it? Is the screen that it's seen on, do you consider that as the art? Because I know a lot of your work is seen and shared amongst your, you know, the online video artist community. I said online. They're online. So if they're having a festival, someone could be in Spain, someone could be, you know, and you're seeing on your own different browsers sitting in your own rooms. Is that an issue for it and how do you think about that? It is an
SPEAKER_01:issue and you have to think about it. So one of the simple things for me, I generally have these days, I have all of the text of the poem, even if I'm saying it, it's all on screen in some way or another. I see. And that's to help people with English, not as first language, because a lot of the films are shown in festivals where people don't speak English and they're international festivals. And then equally, sometimes I have to do subtitles because in another language, Spanish or French or Greek or whatever. Who's doing that translation? I do some of them.
SPEAKER_00:Translating poetry, you and I have talked about this before. Like there is no greater insanity than trying to make poetry translate. Yeah, it's okay doing your own.
SPEAKER_01:I'm not talking about doing it. I'm talking about grabbing the Iliad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know how people do that. So I'm a bit of a language nerd. If I hadn't have been a scientist, I would have done languages. So at school I did Latin, French and German at school and I was good at them. And if I hadn't have got a PhD scholarship– to go and do zoology after my honours year in science, I would have gone back and done languages. And I was already doing poetry workshops and stuff with people at Melbourne Uni back then. So I've always loved language and languages. And so I know French and German well, well enough. I can speak German. And so I could do my own translations of those. And I... and I've done bilingual poems in French and English a few years back as part of another project. So one of the things then is having text on screen, and it's got to be legible on screen.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, sorry, I distracted from where we're coming from. We're talking about how people are seeing.
SPEAKER_01:How people are seeing it, yeah, yeah. So one of the things then is that you have text on screen so people can read along. And I often distort my voices. I use machine voices. And in a poem like Visalia, I used a made-up language. Yeah, you have made-up languages. The one in village was, yeah, wonderful. Yeah, that was another made-up language, yeah. So that you have to have the text on screen so people can read it. And it has to be legible. So
SPEAKER_00:it's got to be big enough to be read. Does it not turn it into a reading piece, though, as a viewer? I don't want to watch movies that are subtitled or the kids like subtitles because they like to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But watching and reading, I find it takes me away from the effort and the vision. It can
SPEAKER_01:do. So I actually put a lot of effort into designing the text on screen. So it's not just subtitles. And so many of my– Many of my pieces are actually text-based, so the text is driving the imagery. Some are entirely text-based, animated text. That's basically what the video is. In other cases, one which is done really, really well is called And Furthermore Indexed. And for that... Furthermore Indexed. Indexed, yeah. So for that piece, for the original text... I got the daily newspaper that day, the advertiser, whatever day it was, and in the newspaper at the top of each page it has it says it's news or sport or commentary or whatever. I took all the news pages, took every example of and, the word and, and took the next word. and this and sport and his and cars, and dropped out all the these and ands and stuff and put them in alphabetical order. And it gave this, and this and that. And it became this incredible, like a dictionary snapshot of the news of that day. And then to make for the video of that, I took mostly still images from all around town And then projected, looking like these texts were projected onto the walls and windows and street furniture and stuff like that around Adelaide. And I got the idea from that from visiting Greece a few years ago and going to the old ancient Greek church. forums and open spaces where they had texts, essentially newsletters and public notices chiselled onto the stone in a public place. So in a piece like that, the text absolutely drives the video. So that's one important thing. That's got to be legible on a reasonable size, just standard size screen. I'm not aiming for phones, but So that's the important thing. Then having said that, size matters and it's really fantastic seeing the videos in a real cinema on a big screen, which I've been fortunate to have seen that several times now because the size matters and it goes right back to where we started talking about visual fields and the visual experience. So... If you're sitting in front of, on your desk, you've got your desktop sitting in front of you, like we're looking now, looking at your laptop there. 13-inch. From where I'm sitting here, the size of that screen is about the size of my concentrated visual field. Right. And even though I'm sitting on my desk, even a reasonable-sized monitor like a, you know, 18-inch monitor or something like that, that basically fills your visual field sitting at a normal viewing distance. So you can pretty much see the whole video at once. Your eyes move around it, but you pretty much experience the whole thing at once at that distance. When you go into a cinema and you've got a standard-sized cinema screen, and if you're like me and you like to sit down near the front, so it completely fills your visual screen. Yeah, yeah. You can't see it all at once. No. And so your vision, your attention necessarily has to focus on different bits of the screen. And you might miss something. You might miss the text on the screen. You might miss some critical bit of animation over there. You might miss the transition from this bit, which is how it should be. It's much more reflective of real life. And if you bring the loop, close the loop again, one of the things at Carrick Hill for that exhibition was that when we started thinking about how to use that space, I realised that the shape of the gallery, which was long and narrow, was perfect for trying to emulate this experience of not being able to see everything at once. And I realised that if we separated the screens out along one of the walls, we could make it sit up in a way it was impossible to see all the screens at once. And that was something Catherine hadn't really thought about particularly until we got Until we sort of, we're getting near the end, but it was always in my mind. And someone who visited, who I know, said that, oh, it was really annoying. You couldn't see it all at once. Good. I like the idea. I really do. So what it meant is that, for people listening, one of the ways in which the video was set up at Carrick Hill, there was four cameras. screens which had sort of um they were completely different sort of views of the carrick hill walk compared to the to the standard ones we've been talking about earlier and um and things moved from one screen to the other as text appeared on one screen and not another and that loop was about an hour long so If you actually needed to watch that, you would have had to sit there for four hours to watch them all properly. And then you would have missed the transitions from one screen to another. So that was very deliberate that we did that on purpose. And it's relatively rare... or video installations to try to deliberately emulate that experience. That's one of the things I researched a bit before we did the show.
SPEAKER_00:That is interesting because it is a real metaphor for how we live in the world and we don't see everything. We can't be a part of everything. We kind of feel like we're missing some things but we live our little snippet of it and we see our little snippet and it's kind of Nice that you're not trying to jam into the viewer's face some direct point of view of yours. You're letting them discover that on their own.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, exactly right. And so when, and that's the same, but that same thing applies to the poetry and the videos, the way I write. I mean, a lot of what I write, and I suppose the way that gets translated into videos, it's, you know, It's obscure in some sense, in the sense that a lot of the time it's not obvious necessarily the detail of what I'm talking about. And that's a deliberate decision by me
SPEAKER_00:because... But, I mean, everything you've done... science is so attempts to be so binary and this is it yes or no yes or no you know or shades but also language is about community everything you've done is about being as clear as possible and you're now telling me the obfuscation is the plan
SPEAKER_01:well yeah it's not obfuscation in in and of itself i don't i think making things obscure just for the sake of it and that's fine for a game but uh trying to solve crossword puzzle or something but um but it's it's actually it's my attempt to bring back, to try and emulate another aspect of experience, of our experience. And it's sort of the other end of what we were talking about earlier. So we're conscious of all sorts of things around us. But then there's all this subconscious stuff going on, this assembling of the visual field. Plus there's all this other stuff going on. So as we're sitting here now, until I mention it, I bet you hadn't thought about what you were doing with the middle finger of your right hand. No. Here it is. You're holding it against your face and you hadn't thought about that. Now I'm thinking about it. Now you're thinking, how did that get there? So how did it get there? I have no idea. You have no idea. No. So it's happening all the time. And so while we're concentrating on the world, while we're concentrating on interpreting it, concentrating on talking about it, concentrating on understanding someone else, meanwhile your body's charging your head, keeping you alive, stopping you from falling off your chair, keeping you walking in a straight line, keeping you breathing.
SPEAKER_00:So is this where your science background spent a lot of time working in? Yeah, absolutely, yes. So these are the processes that the body does. We haven't really done anything about your background, but you're a scientist working at Flinders University originally, and you've worked in the field of? It was neuroscience. Yes.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So
SPEAKER_01:we're... The part of the nervous system we were most interested, we spent most of our time on, was the nerves that connect between the spinal cord and the internal organs, the gut, the heart, lungs, reproductive system, iris of the eye, and also the skin. and blood flow to the skin and sweat glands and all those sorts of things. So the nerves which send information from the brain through the spinal cord out to those organs and also the nerves which respond to changes in the internal conditions of those organs and then send that information back to the spinal cord. And we did all sorts of things on all sorts of different ways over 40 years on those sorts of nerves. But then I also taught just about every aspect of the nervous system as well to medical students and doctors biomedical engineers and things like that. And as part of that, I really had to come to grips with how the rest of your brain works. And I was teaching anatomy as well too. And a lot of what I taught was how you move. Everything from the molecules in your muscles, which make them contract, through to the parts of your brain which generate the ideas of movement.
UNKNOWN:Wow.
SPEAKER_00:Wow, that's amazing. It was
SPEAKER_01:amazing. Yeah, it was good. It was fantastic.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I could see the foundation. It was a
SPEAKER_01:real privilege, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I could see the foundation for where your curiosity has led you to now. So, last question. What's next? What is dragging you forward with all this wonderful foundation?
SPEAKER_01:First of all, it's just been a huge privilege, life I've had, but I have to acknowledge that. So, I mean, I I was incredibly fortunate to go through university at a time when university became free. It wasn't when I first started, but it came free. There was a fantastic film at the History Festival last week about the draft resistance movement here in Adelaide in the 70s. And when I was growing up in Melbourne, I was just behind. I was like I was a year behind having to decide what to do about registering for the draft and everything when... The Whitman government came in and dropped all of that. So I went through university. I was paid to go to university. I had a scholarship and stuff. It was fantastic. So that was a huge privilege.
SPEAKER_00:What a beautiful thing.
SPEAKER_01:And, you know, it's just so disheartening to see the state of the place now compared to then. And then I was incredibly fortunate. Do you have any hope for the future of that? No. I'm hopeful, but not optimistic. By nature, I'm an optimist. I think you are. And I generally find good things in people and good things in the state of the world. But I'm not
SPEAKER_00:hopeful, though, at the moment. It's messy, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. Things move to chaos, don't they?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:That's the Big Bang, you
SPEAKER_01:know. Yeah. So I feel I've been very privileged to have, and I had a good job. I was lucky at Flinders. It was a fantastic working environment for most of the time I was there. It's still a good place, but it changed a lot over time as well. It was absolutely fantastic when we were first there. We were lucky to be in a period of science during the, 80s and 90s in particular, there was massive scientific revolutions, huge changes, advances in knowledge and technology, which completely changed the way in which science was done, including, especially neuroscience, and that's still going on. There's work coming out now, the last few weeks even, that was unimaginable, even five years ago, let alone when I retired 11 years ago now. So what's next? All that's by way of saying, at one point level, if I never did another thing again, I'd be happy. You could do that. I can't sit down and do nothing. If I suddenly get hit by a truck on the way home or something.
SPEAKER_00:No, you're satisfied. I get that. But you're not sitting down anywhere.
SPEAKER_01:That's
SPEAKER_00:a beautiful thought.
SPEAKER_01:More and more, my creative work is getting more tightly tied back to environmental science in different ways. The science has always informed it in a way, partly the sort of notion of what's going on in your head and all the subconscious processing and trying to emulate that in an audiovisual form. But more directly, too. So, for example, earlier it was about jellyfish crabs. striking back uh i made one which is another one which has been very successful at magpie where i transcribed the song of a magpie um and made the soundtrack to that what was that
SPEAKER_00:called just
SPEAKER_01:called magpie
SPEAKER_00:yeah
SPEAKER_01:yeah
SPEAKER_00:and something about preening i saw on your site
SPEAKER_01:yeah preening's have a different one yeah right right but that wasn't the magpies no the printing hasn't done so well for some reason but magpie's done really well and it's it's it's been an idea and so i transcribed the um I recorded and transcribed the song of the magpie, just at the back, and took some footage. I had various footage of magpies around the garden and then turned it into like a digital animation, which looks like sound waves. It's actually derived from the underlying images of the magpies. They've got a fabulous song. Absolutely fantastic. So this goes... And it says, oh, that sounds like a blues. And so I transcribed and then... then arranged it as a blues with electric guitars and drums and stuff going flat out. And that's done really well. But in the end, it's about the magpies, the story is about the magpies, you know, fighting for their territories to save their territory and save their song. I did another one recently, which hasn't been released yet, but about the salination of water where I nearly got arrested.
SPEAKER_00:What?
SPEAKER_01:Good. I was up on the salt flats up the other side of Port Adelaide, and I just wanted some footage of the salt plains. You're
SPEAKER_00:not allowed to be there or something.
SPEAKER_01:No. Part of it's on a commercial salt harvesting, but it was no offence. I was there filming away, and some guys go, what are you doing here?
SPEAKER_00:You
SPEAKER_01:know.
SPEAKER_00:That was all right. Well, you weren't there to shove
SPEAKER_01:it up. It all got resolved easily in the end, but it was tense for a while.
SPEAKER_00:You say I'm an artist, do you? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Oh, there you go. Yeah, yeah. But you're also doing a talk about the warming in the Gulf, aren't you? Yeah. You're part of that. So our little Spencer Gulf has had unusually high temperatures and we've had some algal blooms and some fish die-offs and… confused sharks and all sorts of things haven't we
SPEAKER_01:yeah that's right so that's that's happening um wednesday uh next week 20 20 no it's not 20 something i remember um that's interesting because that came out of the natural history group i'm on online a facebook group called south australian nature tears and i experienced the effects of the algal bloom firsthand so i got windsurfing down and big waves and big wind and on what turned out to be the uh the first weekend of the bloom we'd been windsurfing at uh out on one of the outside reefs at victor harbour in in endeavor bay and on the way home i my eyes were really sore and i had to actually pull over and wash my eyes because i could barely see
SPEAKER_00:like you've been in a public pool
SPEAKER_01:yeah yeah just like that and i had conjunctivitis so i thought oh yeah and i It seemed worse than that. And then when I got home, people were talking about the next day being sick and the foam being washed up on the beaches around at Middleton. And so I had that experience. And then during this natural history group, there's people there who are professional marine biologists and they're putting up reports talking about these microorganisms and things. And someone mentioned something about the toxins these things make. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. And I looked them up and it turns out some of the toxins anyway are neurotoxins, which we used to...
SPEAKER_00:Attack the nervous system. Yeah,
SPEAKER_01:yeah, yeah. And so some of those, when I looked them up, I thought I know exactly how those things work. And we used to use similar types of toxins in the lab as experimental tools. And so I said something to one of the people, you know, these things are incredible and toxins. And I know that it's easy for me to find out about the chemistry of these toxins, which turns out people here don't know, not many people around here know about. So going, really closing a loop, going back through natural history, which I started off with, Zoology. I did postdocs in pharmacology departments, how all these drugs work and interact with the cells and how their concentrations change with time. We learned all that stuff. And here I was coming back now in an environmental issue which is really bad. It's 100% due to global warming and for which there's no easy answer.
SPEAKER_00:No.
SPEAKER_01:Unless in the short term, how to fix this. You can't fix the bloom.
SPEAKER_00:No, no, no. No.
SPEAKER_01:Well, okay. So that's what you're doing next, right? Yes, I'm doing that. And so more of– I think more of the videos I'm working on will– I'm trying to bridge sort of between documentary and– and experimental poetry filmmaking. And there's a well-known genre in writing called creative nonfiction.
SPEAKER_00:Yes.
SPEAKER_01:That's a great genre. Yeah, it's really fantastic. And people do make– there is a genre out there in film land called experimental documentaries. And this magpie one has popped up in a– a couple of viewings in that category, a couple of screenings in that category. So I'm working more towards that. I'm really trying to integrate some actual science in an easy way and the creative stuff and plus environmental message, which is important. But then on the other hand, I'm also making, I'm trying to make a sort of a crime story poem as well. I went through a phase about eight years ago writing crime poems. And we just recently had a- We nearly got arrested, so- Yeah, yeah. That was well before that. So I like reading crime books amongst all the- They're easy to read. Amongst all the experimental fiction stuff I read. And I like watching thrillers and stuff on TV. And so I went through this phase of writing these sort of mutant- crime poems so so this one's called um interview and it's and it's about it's and it's the cop asking the questions to to to this person who's done something bad yeah right and giving and the cops giving the um giving the interview a really hard time you know what Which way do you tie up your shoes? Left before right or right before left? What sort of knot do you tie on your tie? Tell us about that cut on your lip. Tell us about the screech of ties. Tell us about the keys. And so I'm trying to work out how to film that.
SPEAKER_00:How cool. Well, that's great. Hey, look, thank you so much for your time this afternoon. It's been a lot of fun. I can't wait to see. Every time I bump into you, there is something going on that I feel. And I don't feel we're– I mean, I'm sure you're feeling taxed with your optimism, particularly what's going on with the Gulf and the climate. I mean, any scientist would be just– but the reality is we're here. We're not here to– we're here to look at things in a positive light and move on and try and do what we can do. And I don't know anyone who tackles that with such intelligence and grace.
SPEAKER_01:Well, thank you. It's a real pleasure to come and get the chance to talk about this stuff and I hope people will enjoy it. And I think for this one final word about artists and action, you know, trying to get things changed, people often say, oh, the art does no good. You know, you're preaching to the converted, you never change anybody's mind, who matters. That may be true, but it's equally important to, to generate the camaraderie within the communities. We're not doing this by ourselves. I'm not the only person in the world making films about the environment and poetry and music and endangered species. There's lots of people doing that, and that's a really important thing to know. So you build your internal community strength so you can then go out beat up the rest of the world. Yeah,
SPEAKER_00:the message is much more pervasive when there's more people saying it in a coordinated way and all that sort of stuff.
SPEAKER_01:So thank you. Thank you for the opportunity here. A
SPEAKER_00:pleasure. Thanks, Ian.
UNKNOWN:Thank you.