2007
Video
Artists’ Statement:
This work is one of several collaborations with the Orchid Ensemble. Dulic and Newby drew their inspiration for the video from Orchid’s CD “Road to Kashgar”. The Winged Horses is one of the songs on the CD, evoking a story from 138BC. The emperor Wudi of the Han Dynasty sent his general Zhang Qian to contact a western tribe to solicit help to fight invaders from the north. After 13 years of arduous journeys, adventures and misadventures, Zhang Qian returned with news of a stronger and faster breed of horse to help in the wars. Thought to be of celestial origin, these now extinct horses were the compelling motivation behind the opening of a permanent route to the west of China and beyond. (Length: 4 mins)
“From a Dream”
2011
Video
Artists’ Statement:
In 2011, media artists Dulic and Newby created an installation titled “Gold Mountain Dream”, co-presented by the Flicker Arts Collaboratory and Orchid Ensemble and the Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre. This work explores the themes of diaspora and cultural conflict through interactive media arts, live music, spoken word, and backed by life-stories collected from numerous insightful interviews from different generations of Chinese Canadians. It starts with the local Chinese community but expresses a shared experience of all immigrants from different cultures, acting as a bridge between communities. From a Dream is a short video created by Dulic from elements of the original installation, which included abstract images drawing materials from Chinese calligraphy, brush painting, Chinese dance, Chinese opera, and videos and photos from museum collections. The themes of water and fire represent the duality of ying and yang, the elements in much of the Newby and Dulic’s works. (Length: 8 mins)
Bios:
Dr. Aleksandra Dulic teaches at the department of Creative Studies at University of British Columbia in Okanagan where she also directs the Centre for Culture and Technology, an interdisciplinary arts-research center. As an artist-scholar, Aleksandra works at the intersections of interactive multimedia installation and live performance with research foci in cross-cultural media performance, interactive animation and computational poetics. She has received a number of awards for her short animated films and interactive media works. Her work is widely presented in exhibitions, festivals, conferences and television broadcasts across Europe, Asia and North America. These works include films, animated media performances, interactive computer installations and software tools for interactive animation.
Kenneth Newby is a media artist, composer-performer, educator, interaction designer, and audio producer whose creative practice explores the use of technology to enable the creation of media performances, installations and experiences that are rich in aural, visual and cultural nuances. His research interests center around the exploration of the creative forces latent in an emerging poetics of computational art and includes the development of new media diffusion techniques for performance and exhibition, augmented reality systems for museum experience design, and generative systems for the composition and performance of music and visual art. Kenneth is currently focused in two long-term projects. One is the ongoing development of the Flicker Generative Orchestra — a computer- aided composition system for the composition of contemporary classical music. The second is Becoming World — a project in generative visual art in collaboration with Aleksandra Dulic. In addition to his art practice Kenneth has worked professionally as research faculty in media arts at Simon Fraser University and the University of the Fraser Valley. He has also worked as an interactivity consultant for Pixar Animation Studios, and as a Sound Artist and Audio Software Developer for Electronic Arts. He is currently a Research Associate at the Center for Culture and Technology at the University of British Columbia.