INFO PACK

Click HERE to download our latest About Next Wave info pack (900kb pdf, updated 27 Aug 2008).

2010 Next Wave Festival

The next Next Wave Festival will run from 13 to 30 May, 2010. It’s theme is NO RISK TOO GREAT. Jeff Khan, Next Wave’s Artistic Director, recently announced the new theme for the 2010 Next Wave Festival, and it’s manifesto:

NO RISK TOO GREAT

Next Wave Festival themes throw up a challenge to artists and audiences alike. Here, Jeff Khan presents the background that underpins the new theme:

“The 2010 Next Wave Festival will explore the role of risk in a risk-averse culture. Under pressure to conform, we have all become experts in micro-managing our own behaviour. But is this self-surveillance distracting us from the bigger risks, the more un-manageable ones which are increasingly – and radically – changing our world? Just what does “risk” actually mean in these volatile times?

“In a wider culture of risk management, how prepared are we to make decisions that are brave, courageous or transgressive? Where is the line between our own personal, moral and ethical worlds, and the codes and principles which circulate in the broader context of contemporary culture? What is our capacity to draw, hold or cross this line? What are the real risks of our time, what are the risks worth taking, and what is our role as individuals, and as artists, in relation to them? How can we act boldly and imaginatively, in art and in life?“

DOWNLOADS
The 2010 Next Wave Festival Theme Manifesto.

The Theme Announcement Media Release.

Kickstart

Kickstart is Next Wave’s major developmental activity, assisting young artists across artforms to develop new work in a supportive environment. Taking place in the non-festival year, Kickstart projects are developed with a view towards inclusion in the 2010 Next Wave Festival and respond to the Festival’s theme, NO RISK TOO GREAT.

Kickstart participants undertake a program of workshops covering all aspects of project development including creative development, budgeting and marketing as well as receiving ongoing administrative support and professional advice from the Next Wave staff during the Kickstart period. The 2009 Kickstart program culminate in a developmental showing of the work-in-progress to peers, stakeholders and other Kickstart participants.

Kickstart 2009 Particpants

The following seventeen Kickstart 2009 particpants and groups are developing work for the 2010 Next Wave Festival:

Brown Council (NSW)
Katherine Beckett (NSW)
Nicole Breedon (VIC)
Ashley Dyer (NSW)
Rachel Feery, Ed Gould and Lisa Stewart (VIC)
The Sisters Hayes (VIC)
TAPE Projects (VIC)
Alisdair Macindoe (VIC)
The Restaged Histories project (QLD)
Rob McCredie (VIC)
Bennett Miller (WA)
Jessica Olivieri and Hayley Forward with the Parachutes for Ladies (NSW)
Hannah Raisin (VIC)
Peter Reid (VIC)
Eddie Sharp (NSW)
Fiona Bryant and Kate Stanley (VIC)
George Egerton-Warburton (WA)

2008 Next Wave Festival

ABOVE: The Age covers the 2008 Next Wave Festival.

CLOSER TOGETHER. 15 – 31 May 2008

The rhetoric of global culture tells us that we are being brought closer and closer together. By media, communication technologies, the free market and other snappy buzzwords which signify somewhat less transparent systems. But how close are we, and how much do we really know about each other?

The 2008 Next Wave Festival explored new ideas of closeness and its conflicted nature: as a catalyst for connectedness, community and exchange, but also of claustrophobia, confrontation and invasion. The collapse of the private sphere into the public and the increasing tendency to live out our personal lives in very impersonal arenas. The demise of public space, as a concept and a reality…where is the space for vulnerability, intimacy, privacy and exchange in an increasingly globalised world? What is the potential for genuine, unexpected connections, and what might they look like?

The 2008 Next Wave Festival’s Opening Night, Federation Square, Melbourne.

Free Play

Free Play: The Next Wave Independent Game Developers’ Conference was held on Saturday the 18th of August 2007 at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne. More than 300 people came along and hear alsmot 30 speakers present a series of lectures and workshops. This hugely popular conference catered for independent and DIY game developers, game modders and mappers, creatively frustrated professionals, game development students and digital artists from every state in Australia.

(To read the Free Play wrap for 2007 click HERE.)

Free Play’s aim is to bring together these communities in a forum that is financially reasonable, with a program developed by the communities themselves.

Free Play is for Independent Game Developers…
Presently there is no real world forum specifically for Australian independent game developers to share skills, showcase their work, initiate new projects, discuss and strategise. Professional developers’ conferences cover things like programming for proprietary development systems and working with licensed IP. By contrast, the needs of indie developers tend towards open source game engines, distributed project models and shareware distribution.

Free Play is also dedicated to Australia’s vibrant community of young people, from game modders to character skinners, who don’t have the desire or the resources to create a stand–alone game by themselves, but who instead find a platform for their art and ideas through game modification. Young people working in the world of fine arts have grown up with videogames and are increasingly adopting game development technologies and techniques into their art practice.

Visit our Free Play 2007 blog HERE.

Other Activities

Next Wave’s Sweet Work

Next Wave presents its popular free artist workshop program SWEET WORK in Mildura this March, and we are looking for participants.

SWEET WORK is Next Wave’s free series of workshops for young artists designed to promote new ideas, collaborations and projects. Outcomes in Mildura will happen as part of the 2009 Mildura Wentworth Arts Festival on in March 2009. ( SWEET WORK was last held in Bendigo in August 2008.)

A selection of recent Next Wave artists will lead a unique collaborative workshop program designed to assist local artists to create new artwork through innovative collaborations across art forms. These free workshops, for artists aged 30 and under, will give participants the opportunity to work together with the goal of producing new hybrid work.

WHO CAN APPLY

SWEET WORK is open to artists from all artform backgrounds including visual arts, theatre, dance, new media and beyond, with a view to generating an idea or a proposal for a new collaborative artwork, performance or intervention for the Mildura Wentworth Arts Festival in March 2009.

DETAILS

Workshops: Saturday 28 February & Saturday 7 March, 10-5pm
Location: Church of Christ Hall, 125 Deakin Avenue, Mildura
Outcome Event: Results of your work will be presented at the Perry Sandhills, Mildura, Sunday 8 March, as part of the 2009 Mildura Wentworth Arts Festival.

INTERESTED?
Send an email to Paul Davis at Next Wave to register your interest and/or for more info.