INFO PACK

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

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 upcoming Festival’s theme.

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 will take place prior to August 2009 and will culminate in a developmental showing of the work-in-progress to peers, stakeholders and other Kickstart participants.

Sign up to our Pegboard e-newsletter, at the bottom of this page, to get info about Kickstart 2009 when it’s announced.

The following sixteen Kickstart projects developed work for the 2008 Next Wave Festival :

post:	Mish Grigor , Zoe Coombs Marr & Natalie Rose
ROGUE:	Holly Durant & Harriet Ritchie
Objects in Space:	Kel Glaister & Tamsin Green
Makeshift Open Office:	Karl Logge & Tessa Rapaport
The Conversation:	Sam Routledge & Halcyon Macleod
Dynamic Space Services Esky:	Christie Petsinis & Keg de Souza
Spilt Second:	Matthew Kneale
Agents of Proximity:	Amy Spiers & Victoria Stead
The Tent:	Matthew Prest

The following Kickstart artists developed solo and curated projects:

Sebastian Moody	Kerrie-Dee Johns
Hiromi Tango	Timothy Edser
Keith Lim	Willow Weiland
Danielle Freakley

Regional Kickstart

Next Wave receive funding from The Australia Council and VicHealth to support a Regional Kickstart initiative in 2007 that assisted artists living away from major city centres. The following people were part of that program:

• Roderick Sprigg (WA)
• Carly Preston (VIC)
• Ellen Coyle (VIC)
• Trevor Flinn (VIC)
• Pip Stafford (TAS)

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.

Applications for the 2010 Next Wave Festival will be open in early 2009. Sign up to the Pegboard, below, for the latest Next Wave news as they happen.

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 SWEET WORK: free development workshops for young artists in central Victoria.

Bendigo choreographer and dancer Megan Beckwith will present SWEET WORK, a workshop and mentor program for young central Victorian artists.

Working with other 2008 Next Wave Festival artists, Megan Beckwith will deliver a unique program designed to assist local artists collaborate across art forms.

This free series of workshop for artists aged 30 and under will give participants the opportunity to discuss working together with the goal of producing new work.

SWEET WORK will connect artists from diverse backgrounds and art forms, with a view to generating an idea or a proposal for a new collaborative artwork or performance for the Growing a Fringe Youth Arts Festival in Bendigo in mid September, 2008.

SWEET WORK
Free. This August, in Bendigo.

DOWNLOAD
Click here to download an info form that outlines how to attend the workshops.

CONTACT
Tamara Marwood, Next Wave’s Associate Producer – Regional Projects tamara@nextwave.org.au

MEDIA RELEASE
Click here to download a media release for this project (pdf).