Executive Director, Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) http://www.anat.org.au

Dr Melinda Rackham is the Director of the Australian Network for Art and Technology. ANAT is Australia's leading cultural organisation working at the intersection of art, research, science and emerging technologies to generate new creativities and enrich culture & industry.

For over a decade she has engaged with emergent practices as a pioneering net artist, a writer, curator, media consultant and cultural producer - exhibiting, presenting and publishing globally.
Melinda was the first Curator of Networked Media at the Australian Centre for Moving Image, and in 2002 she established -empyre-, one of the world’s leading online critical theory forums.

Her current interests lies in the new breeds of creativity emerging from interdisciplinarity, and the intertwining cultural, aesthetic, technological and conceptual shifts in networked, distributed, multi-
user, game and portable platforms.

Day 2: Saturday 4th October, Session 1: Art, Art Technology and public space

'our space''

Screen spaces designated for creative expression in our culture are generally neatly delineated, corporately packages, copyright protected and demographically assigned. Content and interaction on gallery, mobile and TV screens, game arcades, cinemas, LED tickers or singular monolithic displays is arbitrated by curators, funders and politicians.

Increasingly artists are routing around this filtering system and inserting their work directly into public space with architectural projections and screenings; hijacking web cams, advertising screens, mall LEDs and CCTV; and engineering massive sky projections. These often temporary and impromptu pockets of screen diversity and complexity, contrast and tension, poetics and surprise, augment, enrich and invigorate our public spaces.