This lunchtime panel discussion will invite two leading creative researchers to reflect on how they hold together the ecological and technological in their practice.

This panel will feature Dr Rewa Wright & Dr Rebecca Najdowski, chaired by Dr Alison Bennett

What if the ecological and technological were not oppositional concepts but held together as congruent and entangled?​ Dr Rewa Wright and Dr Rebecca Najdowski are creative researchers working in expanded photography whose practices investigate the interrelated dynamics of ecological and technological realms. These artists are doing more than using technological mediums to reflect on ecological themes. Their work demonstrates the interrelated systems that constitute the ecological and technological. ​Working in the context of a climate emergency, their works invoke invite us to re-conceive our place within ecological systems.

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DR REWA WRIGHT
Rewa Wright is a media arts and computational design researcher with a collaborative and transdisciplinary practice, encompassing exhibition, performance, publication, presentation, and community engagement. Working with various modes of analogue and digital art since 1998, Rewa has over 20 years of experience in various aspects of motion-based and sonic media, including live performance, music, digital design, and virtual image creation. As an intra-active media designer, experimental media artist and inverse technologist, research is both traditional and practice-based. Rewa’s projects weave together emerging technologies, Indigenous justice, clean blockchains and digital healthcare. An ecologically conscious researcher, she commits to ensuring her techniques and methods are sustainable, create positive social impact in both local and global communities, and respect Indigenous knowledge systems. Her Māori heritage (Ngāi Tawake/Te Kaimaroke/Te Uri o Hau hapu of Aotearoa/New Zealand) is a strength, and affords the capacity to draw on ancient non-Western knowledge from an embodied as well as a scholarly perspective. Rewa’s extended reality installations have been included in the SIGGRAPH Asia Art Gallery (2019), Ars Electronica: In Kepler’s Gardens (2020), the Aotearoa Digital Arts Symposium (2022), the Queensland Extended Reality Festival (2022), and several iterations of the International Symposium of Electronic Arts (ISEA). She is Senior Lecturer in Creative Practice (Film, Screen & Animation) at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. 

DR REBECCA NAJDOWSKI
Rebecca Najdowski is an artist who considers how humans, imaging technology, and more-than-human nature are entangled. Najdowski is an academic at RMIT School of Art, Program Manager of the Bachelor of Arts(Photography) and Co-Director of the IF_LAB.

Please see RMIT Imaging Futures Lab (IF LAB) for more information.

Image: Dr Rewa Wright, Contact Zone, 2018