National Institute for Experimental Arts (NIEA)

Cultural ecology and sustainable urban environments

Symposium
27-28 July 2010

Sydney Opera House
Utzon Room
http://www.niea.unsw.edu.au

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Symposium 27-28 July 2010, Utzon Room, Sydney Opera House (with drinks and project launch: 27 July, 6pm, Opera House Marquee)

Bookings through Sydney Opera House http://www.sydneyoperahouse.com.

Updates and blogs: http://www.niea.unsw.edu.au. Pre and post HotHouse events can be followed on a dedicated HotHouse website to be launched in July 2010.

HotHouse brings together a diverse group of creative thinkers, each with visionary ideas for transforming urban environments. It seeks to cultivate a new cultural ecology in which the arts play a key role, working with the planners and users of city spaces to address urgent environmental problems.

HotHouse advances the proposal that we no longer curate art but curate space. Taking the city as a venue it replaces the traditional idea of ‘exhibiting’ art with a practical vision of art as a catalyst for social and environmental change.

The guiding principle of HotHouse is that of micro-change and universal, networked participation. Micro-change does not mean small change but networked or interconnected change with vast potential for expansion. The HotHousing process is designed to stimulate new projects, connections and local/transnational community collaboration.

Participants in HotHouse include design thinkers such as Bruce Mau who has spearheaded community-driven projects for large-scale sustainable change in both North and South America, Tony Fry, Director of Team D/E/S and founder of the EcoDesign Foundation, and Adrian Parr (University of Cincinnati); artists/designers Janet Laurence, Dan Hill, Allan Giddy, Mathieu Gallois, David Trubridge, Carbon Arts, Makeshift and Digital Eskimo; new media writers such as Mark Pesce, one of the early pioneers in Virtual Reality and co-inventor of VRML; and international curators such as Hou Hanru (San Francisco Art Institute), pioneer of exhibitions that operate in everyday city spaces, and Michaela Crimmin (former director of the UK RSA, Art & Ecology Centre) leading international environmental art curator.

HotHouse is an initiative of the National Institute for Experimental Arts [NIEA] at UNSW (Director, Jill Bennett; Chief Curator, Felicity Fenner) in association with Object: Australian Centre for Craft and Design and the City of Sydney.