News Items: June 2005

Congratulations to Mark Havryliv who has won a $1,000 prize in the University's inaugural Trailblazer competition.

Mark is a Master of Creative Arts (Research) student who is exploring sound in the digital world.

Mark's proposal was an electronic game he has developed in which strategy is controlled by sounds played on a musical instrument instead of using conventional electronic game controllers. His 'proof of concept' was a creative work performed in last year's Sonic Connections using music-controlled graphics software he developed for the X-box.

He was first runner-up the innovation competition which is open to researchers and students at the University of Wollongong and, with a prize-pool worth $14,000, is designed to foster ideas and inventions.

The competition is in collaboration with UniQuest, The University of Queensland's commercialisation company.

From 78 entries submitted campus-wide, 17 were invited to give five-minute presentations. From these finalists eight were selected by a panel consisting of Uniquest (Uni of Queensland's commercialisation unit), a private venture capitalist and a UoW research panel headed by Professor Joe Chicharo.

Making Waves
Creative Writing student John Purvis recently had a radio play aired on Australia's only nation-wide radio fiction forum titled Five Uneasy Pieces.

The work developed in last year's Writing for Sound subject,
which provides students with an opportunity to create texts for performance or assembly in a recorded format and examines radio drama, documentary and other audio art texts.

Five Uneasy Pieces is described as a puzzle linked by messages on an answering machine. A fragmented story of emerges from snippets of communication - ‘real' moments – and a sequence of imaginary encounters.

The narrative takes places in the mind of a man who is considering the development and dissolution of a relationship. Each of the five parts contains an essential emotion representing five stages of the affair.

Airplay is Radio National's weekly program of new Australian radio writing and performance.

Airplay's half-hour dramatic fictions experiment with form and explore a wide range of subjects, genres and styles, aiming to offer programs which are innovative and engaging.