ANU School of Art students on show
Graduating student Sian Watson's Drongo.
An exhibition celebrating the works of more than 130 ANU School of Art graduates opened on Friday.
The 2015 Graduating Exhibition is the culmination of years of study in art practice, art history and art theory, showcasing works from the School's eight separate workshops.
Janis Lejins, who is completing the Visual Arts honours part of his double degree, created the installation known as Doric Stacks, consisting of 16 LED lighting strips encased in polypropylene columns - stacks - that visually pulsate or change colour in reaction to real-time data from various interactive sources.
Some of those sources are from sites such as Twitter, where the system can gauge the current emotional sentiment of the twitterverse, while other visual reactions are from more local sources, such as the heartbeat of a person standing in front of a nearby computer.
Janis, who has a photography background, says the idea behind his work is to take information that dominates the day to day and make it physically accessible in a visual way.
"This is the first artwork that I've created that happens in real time," he said, adding that the Twitter stack reads between 10,000 and 20,000 tweets at a time and analyses the overall mood of the social medium, transforming that mood into a colour value.
Other stacks represent datasets of different sources such as the price of gold or sea surface temperatures in the Arctic.
Another work analyses data from closed-captioning taken from ABC News 24.
"I wanted a good mix of virtual data and creating a work that can bridge the gap between the web and the individual. This idea of a networked world means we should have networked art that bridges that space between the sublime and the physical," Janis said.
Sally O'Callaghan, who is an honours student graduating with a Bachelor of Visual Arts with a major in painting, created works based on busy public spaces.
"For me, I was quite interested in public spaces and how people move within these spaces, particularly airports and shopping centres and places like that," Sally said.
"Visually, within systems in painting, such as perspective and illusionary techniques, I learnt to address how that happens in the real space."
Sally says the works shown in the exhibition have built upon her work in embroidery and painting.
Supporters of the School of Art had a special preview of the exhibition. Financial support of these patrons enable the students to undertake further career opportunities such as exhibition placements in private art galleries or scholarships to continue their studies.
The exhibition runs through to Sunday, December 6, 2015.
Preview a selection of the works online in the School of Art's Graduating Exhibition 2015 catalogue.