Chatty Bench Festival acknowledges the Turrbal and Yuggera people as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which this work was made. We acknowledge all the people of the lands that make this work possible. We recognise the continuing connection to lands, waters, and communities of all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. We pay our respect to Elders, past, present and emerging, and commit to standing with our First Nations people.

CBF CMVP continues in the legacy of Chatty Bench Project as it emphasizes the participatory creation of place-based digital stories towards community advocacy and social justice activism. It differs in that it moves away from the screen of the smartphone and superimposes these stories onto building facades as visual projections. In projecting these digital stories, it intended to continue in the vision of Chatty Bench Festival where “everyone’s story” is visible in the public space. The project aimed to tackle issues of social isolation experienced in the neighbourhood of Kelvin Grove by building providing the community with opportunity of creative digital making and placemaking to enhance the community spirit of KGUV. The project facilitated by artists Kavita Gonsalves and Kofi Oduro, Montreal-based creative coder, involved workshops where KGUV community members contribute digital media made generated via a smartphone about their experiences of living, working, and studying in Kelvin Grove. They were further invited to learn and contribute creative code where the digital stories were visually patterned and contorted (like those seen in music festivals) with open-source live-coding tool Hydra. CBF CMVP took place on 4thDecember 2021 as the finale event of the Chatty Bench Festival. In the creation of a collective digital immersive experience of KGUV (the place), community members came under the stars to break bread, have conversations, meet an old friend, and laugh over the silly, fun, and sad digital media under the night sky.


The completed work can be seen here.

DIGITAL MEDIA CONTRIBUTORS

6th Nov Community Media Workshop

Agapetos Fa'aleava

Aimee Hourigan

Ashwin Nagappa

Chris Shan

Daniel Brown

Georgina B

Heather Bourke-Bashar

Katie Barrett

Jade Adlem-Marton

Sadhvi Krishnamoorthy

William Yao


Festival videos

Jade Adlem-Marton

Kavita Gonsalves

CREATIVE CODE CONTRIBUTORS

TECHNICAL SUPPORT

Jonathan "Jonno" Harris

Nigel Oram

CONCEPT & DELIVERY TEAM

Kofi Oduro | Creative Producer

Kofi Oduro (Illestpreacha) is a Creative Coder & Experience Enhancer, who merges an array of mediums to provide unique experiences that promote discussion, reflection, and interaction. With over 10 years of performance, event production and audiovisual output globally, he takes inspiration from creative endeavours that are not normally seen together to create a harmonic experience for audience and users alike. His artistic practice is an observation of the world around us that he puts into artworks for others to relate to or disagree with. Through Videography, Poetry and Creative Coding, He tries to highlight the realms of the human performance and the human mind in different scenarios. These situations can be described as social, internal, or even biological, which we face in our everyday lives. Adding music and visuals often helps to perceive one's own feelings, and to highlight the different subtleties that make us human. With a dose of technology, there is an endless range of progress in human creative endeavours.

Kavita Gonsalves | Creative Producer | QUT Design Lab

Kavita just wants to play. She combines art, design, communities, technology and participatory processes to collaboratively produce guerilla placemaking projects. She is pursuing a PhD at QUT Design Lab, Faculty of Creative Industries, Education, and Social Justice, at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. In her research, she explores how marginalised communities can use creative technologies to engage in radical placemaking. Her work has been exhibited at various global conferences and festivals.