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Tāmaki Data




Raurau Mai (Living City) immersive gallery, Auckland Museum



AUCKLAND WAR MEMORIAL MUSEUM
Raurau Mai (Living City) gallery, Tāmaki Herenga Waka: Stories of Auckland Gallery


All Tomorrow’s Futures was the foresight and project consultant on Raurau Mai (Living City), an immersive data installation created by data designers OOM and sound designer Marco Cher-Gibard. Raurau Mai forms part of Auckland War Memorial Museum’s (AWMM) newest gallery: Tāmaki Herenga Waka: Stories of Auckland, opening March 2021. 

Raurau Mai draws upon diverse environmental data sets from across Tāmaki (Auckland) to tell stories of a changing people and place, and to consider futures of Tāmaki. The installation creates data portraits of ‘the many Aucklands’, illustrating the varied ecosystems of the Tāmaki Region. Using data as a mirror held up to the city; Raurau Mai reflects the interconnectedness and rich complexity of Auckland as a confluence of people and place.



Workshopping museum data futures


How might a museum’s relationship to data change over time?

To commence the design phase of Raurau Mai (Living City), All Tomorrow’s Futures joined OOM to lead an onsite workshop at AWMM focused on data futures. The workshop explored the concept of data and its pasts, presents and futures. Exploring ‘the Future’ as plural, and futures as spaces of potential, the workshop posed the questions: “what are the multiple, contested futures of data that exist in the present?”, and “what might data become in the future?”

The purpose of the workshop was to explore the historical context of data visualisation and reflect upon the museum’s changing relationship to data. We interrogated initial ideas around temporality and possibility, and unearthed emerging issues around the capture, analysis and use of data. Questions around data sovereignty were explored, particularly ownership of data relating to Indigenous lands and waterways.

One exercise involved creating speculative ‘data artefacts’ from a future AWMM, to consider ways the museum might use data in the future. We encouraged workshop participants to reflect upon how they felt about the data futures these artefacts represented. We asked whether these uses of data aligned with the museum’s current mission, or whether they raised ethical questions.

From this workshop All Tomorrow’s Futures worked with OOM and the AWMM team to redefine the project brief. We situated this project in an understanding of how AWMM’s relationship to data has evolved over time, articulated desired visitor outcomes around data-driven experiences, and devised metaphors, framing devices and design principles for working with data in creating this unique installation.

Raurau Mai (Living City) opens to the public in March 2021 and will be on permanent display.

Foresight and Project Advisory: Ana Tiquia / All Tomorrow’s Futures
Collaborators: OOM Creative; Marco Cher-Gibard
Client: Auckland War Memorial Museum


How does data feel? How do we feel about data?

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Workplace




Where and how might we work in the future? Collapsing the boundaries between home and workplace.
Photo by Agniezka Chabros



MELBOURNE KNOWLEDGE WEEK
20 – 26.05.2019


WORKPLACE is a participatory live artwork and installation that invites members of the public to apply for a future job.
 Commissioned by the City of Melbourne for Melbourne Knowledge Week 2019, WORKPLACE fostered citizen and worker engagement in future imagining and created rich, public conversations on the future of work. Using a playful and inclusive approach, WORKPLACE asked workers what the relationship between labour and capital might look like in an age of increased automation and invited them to share their desired futures of work. By examining our current relationships with work, WORKPLACE asks what alternative possibilities might exist.


WORKPLACE, Melbourne Knowledge Week 2019. Photo by Agniezka Chabros

What might a workplace look like in 2069? Where will work be situated, how might it be valued, and who will perform it?


WORKPLACE framed the ‘job interview’ as ritual, melding the visual language and performative aspects of an office interview with that of a tarot reading. Channelling both an employer and fortune teller, we created interactions with audiences that challenged the power dynamics between employer and potential employee; fortune teller and fortune seeker. Instead of receiving a forecast of work futures, audiences were invited to share their future hopes and anxieties and explore their desired futures of work. Each participant walked away with a Future Work Contract – an automatically generated document based on the participant’s desired future of work. Each personalised contract formed a personal ‘demand on the future’ and an illustration of the future work arrangements imagined by each participant.



Future job interview. Photo by Agniezka Chabros

Members of the public were invited to take part in a 20-30 minute interview, purportedly to determine their ‘future work readiness’. These semi-structured interviews were based around seven work tarot cards: The Hourglass explored hours of work and length of work week; The Eye addressed surveillance in the workplace; The Circle explored workplace inclusion and exclusion; The Cog asked questions about the future of automation; The Scales discussed how labour is valued and remunerated; The Precariat explored precarity in the workforce. The Heart card explored futures of care – visitors are asked who or what they think should care for the young or elderly in the future.



Work tarot reading. Photo by Agniezka Chabros

Each interview was closed with the ritual of signing the contract, stamping it as ‘FUTURE READY’ and shaking each participant’s hand to seal the deal.




Future Work Contract (FWC) signing. Photo by Agniezka Chabros

“I’ve kept my future work contract from three months ago and wanted to say thank you for empowering me to look at work from a different
perspective.” – participant, WORKPLACE




Receiving a Future Work Contract (FWC). Photo by Agniezka Chabros

Lead Artist: Ana Tiquia
Graphic Design: Corey James
Interior architecture and design: Colby Vexler & James Taylor
Costume design: Annie Wu / Articles of Clothing

Commissioned by City of Melbourne

workplaceproject.net
 

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Schooling Food




Photo by Tobias Titz



MONASH UNIVERSITY – MATTHESON GALLERY
19.2 – 1.03.2019

All Tomorrow’s Futures worked with Monash University’s Faculty of Education to translate Australian Research Council project ‘Children as health advocates in families: assessing the consequences,’ into an exhibition for educators and policy-makers. 


How can we translate research into an experience for educators and policy-makers?


This Australian Research Council funded study generated several academic papers, but the research team wanted their findings to reach non-academic audiences who could put these into action. The researchers wanted to translate findings from their study into a format that would engage school teachers and health policy makers, and spark different conversations about health and food education at schools. The study had generated hundereds of hours of audio-visual research artefacts as the researchers had equipped children with iPads to understand what they learned about food at school and their experiences of food at home. We decided to develop an exhibition to bring these children’s stories to life in a visual and experiential way.


Photo by Tobias Titz



All Tomorrow’s Futures worked with the research team to identify opportunities for development and presentation of an exhibition as a non-traditional research output. We brokered relationships between the Faculty of Education, MADA (Monash Art Design & Architecture), and the Sir Louis Mattheson Library at Monash, using collaborative curatorial approaches that brought researchers together with designers and the library collections team to co-design exhibition frameworks and concepts.



Photo by Tobias Titz

Schooling Food brought stories from real family dinner tables and lunchboxes to life. This highly successful exhibition provided a window into the often unseen food lives of families. Schooling Food went on tour to Monash University’s Peninsula campus and was presented at Federation Square as a part of the Little Food Festival – an immersive food festival for children hosted by the Sandro DeMaio Foundation.

Production and Curatorial Advisory: Ana Tiquia / All Tomorrow’s Futures
Client: Monash University

Project Lead: Dr Deana Leahy, Faculty of Education, Monash University
Project Research Fellow: Dr Sian Supski, Faculty of Arts, Monash University
Design Direction: Warren Taylor, MADA, Monash University
Design and Graphics: Zach Beltsos-Russo
Special Collections: Dr Anne Holloway, Special Collections Manager, Sir Louis Matheson Library

schoolingfood.com

‘Children as health advocates in families: assessing the consequences’ was a study led by researchers at Monash University, University of Wollongong, and The University of Melbourne.


Photo by Tobias Titz

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Heartfelt




HEARTFELT live performance, Village Underground, London. Photo by Benjamin Ealovega



SACCONI QUARTET – VILLAGE UNDERGROUND, LONDON; LICHTFIELD FESTIVAL; BRISTOL OLD VIC, UK
10.06 – 23.07.2015

Robotics. Interactive lighting. Beethoven.

Ana worked with the Sacconi Quartet to commission, produce, and lead the creative development of HEARTFELT: a radical re-interpretation of an iconic Beethoven string quartet which dissolves the boundaries between audience and performer. Heartfelt connects performers and audiences by translating ECG data from performers’ heartbeats into an immersive lighting design, and haptic, handheld technology.


HEARTFELT at the Village Underground, London. Photo Benjamin Ealovega

HEARTFELT is fully immersive performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet in A minor, Op. 132  combining sound, light and touch. Upending traditional presentations of quartet music, in HEARTFELT audiences are invited to hold haptic devices which pulse with the live heartbeat of a quartet performer. Bathed in a lighting design that responds to both live music and the quartet’s ECG heart rate data, audiences can stand, sit or circulate around the quartet to view the performance up close or from afar.  

This innovative performance project grew out of an artist collaboration Ana fostered between London’s Sacconi Quartet, Britol-based robotics studio Rusty Squid, and interactive lighting designer, Ziggy Jacobs-Wyburn. Heartfelt was the recipient of an Arts Council England Grant for the Arts and was performed at the Village Underground (Spitalfields Festival), Bristol Old Vic (Bristol Proms) and the Lichfield Festival.



Testing an initial prototype of a ‘heart’ device. Photo by Benjamin Ealovega


“What does it feel like to be a musician?” Developing Heartfelt through prototyping and testing

HEARTFELT was developed iteratively through cycles of creative development and testing. Using a collaborative and audience-led model, Ana worked with the Sacconi Quartet to design a process that brought the quartet, robotics, and lighting collaborators together with test audiences to develop the work. Though prototyping and performance workshops the experiential elements of the performance and its design for emotional resonance and impact was developed and refined.



Final wooden, handheld, haptic, ‘hearts’ that transmit performer ECG data to audiences. Photo Benjamin Ealovega

The initial collaboration between Ana, the Sacconi Quartet, and concept for Heartfelt grew out of Hack the Quartet, a two day hackathon produced and hosted by Watershed’s Pervasive Media Studio in July 2013 in association with The Sacconi Quartet, Bristol Old Vic and Universal Music Arts and Entertainment as part of Bristol Proms.

Artists: Sacconi Quartet
Collaborators: Rusty Squid; Ziggy Jacobs-Wyburn
Creative Producer & Commissioning: Ana Tiquia
Project Manager: Emilie Giles
Artist Management: Ikon Arts
Original Robotics Concept: Silas Adekunle
Funded by: Arts Council England

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The Inversion




Image by Ana Tiquia



MOD. – Museum of Discovery, University of South Australia
30.09.20


The Inversion is a lecture-performance and ritual exploring human-plastic relations amidst peak plastic: a phenomenon marked by its imperceptibility, unknown potential for toxicity, and uneven effects. As plastics steadily accumulate in every living system on Earth, The Inversion asks how humans can engender good relations with plastics, our “toxic progeny”[1], and how material engagement with plastics might help us to think time, agency and futures differently.

The Inversion grew out of a virtual artist residency with MOD. from August - September 2020. Originally conceived as a gallery residency that would explore with visitors the material, temporal and ethical entanglements we share with our everyday objects; due to Covid-19 restrictions these explorations were relocated to the home. Hosting an online open call for people to nominate an object of significance they ‘couldn’t live without,’ several objects were shortlisted for materio-temporal research, including a small, plastic promotional toy in the shape of a dog.
       Image by Ana Tiquia
Screenshot – The Inversion



Can we future with plastic waste?


The Inversion evolved from month-long exploration of the material origins and futures of plastics through research and exploration with single-use and waste plastics encountered in the  home. The Inversion explores the potential of plastics as ‘space-time travel companions,’ inviting participants to contemplate their material and temporal entanglements with plastic discards before collectively releasing them in a group ritual. The Inversion created a ritual space on Zoom where participants could consider the materio-temporal dimensions of plastics and their accumulation through multi-sensory engagement with plastic waste and guided visualisations that journey from the fossil origins of plastics to futures of polymer and additive accumulation in soil, ocean, atmospheric and endocrine systems.

Developed within a domestic space and designed as a ritual that participants would join from their respective homes, The Inversion centres the home rubbish bin as a site of transformative potential. The Inversion asks whether we can reassign plastics from ‘bin’ to ‘kin’ [2] proposing an intervention and new ritual practice by up-ending a bin to create an ‘altar’ that elevates and exalts plastic discards, rather than concealing and ‘binning’ them.

The Inversion ultimately asks us to reconsider disposability, recognise plastic’s enduring qualities, and ask what implications the mass production, use and fast disposal of plastics has for Earth inhabitants and descendents.
 

Image by Ana Tiquia



Artist: Ana Tiquia
Commissioned by MOD.


[1]  Davis, Heather. "Toxic Progeny: The Plastisphere and Other Queer Futures." philoSOPHIA 5, no. 2 (2015): 231-50. 

[2]  Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016.
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