Creative in Residence

Elisa Lee and Adam Hinshaw are a creative partnership formed in the mid 90’s era of CD-Rom multimedia. Together they collaborate to create innovative and interactive digital media projects. Their complementary skills in interaction design, visual communication, systems design, and software development make for a strong creative, conceptual, and technical partnership. Their work has been exhibited at Kaohsiung Design Festival, Taiwan, Art Futura, Barcelona, the Sydney Design Festival, Vivid Sydney and the Chinese Museum of Digital Art, Beijing.

Their residency was centred around the Library Retrieval System (LRS), UTS Library’s state-of-the-art underground storage system, which stores books, journals, and objects in 11,808 steel storage bins, hidden five stories below Alumni Green. The artists posed the questions: what happens when you visualise the interaction between organic human behaviour and a rigid mechanical storage system?

11-808 is a playful visualisation of the movements of books and objects requested and returned from the LRS. Each time an item is moved we see its “catalogue card” fly in or out of the bin where it is located, with the bin adopting the colour of the subject area that the item belongs to. The colours build up on the sides of the display, showing the accumulation and order of all transactions for the time period. Current LRS activity is overlaid in real-time, as items are requested and returned. Over sixty minutes, the visualisation displays LRS activity across the last three hours, twenty-four hours, three days, one week, two weeks and four weeks, with the vantage point shifting every four minutes. The visualisation displays the title of objects, their subject category, and the time in which they are requested, building an intriguing picture of how the LRS is being used. Learn about the artistic process through the 11-808 blog post.

11-808 : Visualising the UTS Library Retrieval System from Elisa Lee on Vimeo.

Dr. Chris Caines, Senior Lecturer in the Media Arts & Production Program at UTS, works at the intersection of cinematic practices and transformational new technologies with an interest in what these hybrids can add to the art of storytelling.

Chris' residency was inspired by his belief that the fundamental elements that make up the notion of the University are embodied in its library. He insists the rest of the institutional structure is in a continual process of either disseminating from or adding to the idea of the library.

Chris created three video works during his residency titled Fog Warning, Flowers and Read me first, all accessible through OPUS, the University’s digital repository. Fog Warning takes the most basic cognitive tool, the use of narrative – the fragments of voice that we use in the dialogues that we have with others and the monologues we conduct with ourselves – to depict the elements embodied in the University library. On display in the Library is a digitally printed contact sheet, from the video Fog Warning.

Flowers from chris caines on Vimeo.

Read Me First from chris caines on Vimeo.

Fog Warning from chris caines on Vimeo.

Chris Gaul is a designer and artist who works with everyday objects to create moments of mindfulness in everyday life. Chris studied Visual Communication Design and International Studies at UTS and went on to teach in the UTS School of Design.

In 2012, Chris became the UTS Library’s first Creative in Residence. The program was initiated to assist the Library during a period of change, as it prepared to store 80% of the physical collection in the Library Retrieval System (LRS) and planned for the new Library building (now UTS Central).

The UTS Library Spectrogram reinterprets the Dewey Decimal System as a palette of colours with each colour representing number ranges from the system. The Spectogram was implemented as an interactive tool for searching the UTS Library’s online catalogue, allowing the user to then refine search results by subject area. The outcomes of Chris’s residency were showcased in his exhibition Shelf Life, which also included the Library Frequency Tuner and the Call Number Telephone. Find out more about his residency via his blog.

Library Frequency Tuner from Chris Gaul on Vimeo.

Shelf Life from Chris Gaul on Vimeo.

Call Number Telephone from Chris Gaul on Vimeo.