About This Is Not Art (TiNA)

The Lock-Up continues to be a key venue for the TINA festival and sub festival Critical Animals.  

This Is Not Art (TiNA) is a national festival of new media and arts organised in Newcastle each year over the October long weekend. Since its humble beginnings in 1998, it has become a leading independent contemporary arts festival in Australia. TiNA is dedicated to the work and ideas of artistic communities not generally included in other major Australian arts festivals or institutions. The program includes the festivals Electrofringe, the National Young Writers’ Festival and Crack Theatre.  

Each year TINA is developed by Octopod in partnership with arts collectives and organisations from across Australia and will deliver new works from a variety of backgrounds such as experimental music, design, performance, dance, media and writing.

Beyond the exhibition, Critical Animals will host a symposium at The Lock-Up and explore the theme of Possible Futures. Festival events include panels, presentations, readings, forums, artist talks, performances and exhibitions, covering such diverse topics as the nexus of art and technology and interactive dioramas. 

Philjames, Dream of Electric Sheep,2014, oil on vintage hand coloured photograph, image courtesy and © the artist

Collapse Display

3 October – all weekend

Collapse Collective spent several months of experiments and research considering how we know, neuroses, the experience of pain, confirmation bias and love. See their results in an exhibition that uses words, costumes, the body, records, drawings and maps.

Featuring: Collapse Collective (Sarah Kaur, George Rose, Tara Cartland, Emily Stewart, Emma Jones, Sophie Lamond).

Collapse Collective is a ragtag group of girls who make art and reject restrictions. Working across disciplines, sharing ideas and embracing mistakes. Currently Collapse is experimenting with scientific and cartographic methods within their creative practice.

Artist Mobile Matchmaking

3 October 2014 9:00am

Can an app designed to quench our amorous urges, be subverted to create fertile creative collaborations? This digital intervention uses tinder/grindr to facilitate artist hook-ups during the three-day festival. Co-presented by Critical Animals and the National Young Writers Festival.

Featuring: Jonty Bell. Running online all weekend!

Tinder Poetics

3 October 2014 10:00 am – 12 noon

A Burroughs-style cut-up poetry workshop, using text derived from the poetics of online-dating. Co-presented by Critical Animals and the National Young Writers Festival.

Featuring: Jonty Bell.

Collapse Panel

Friday 3 October, 12:30pm – 1:30pm

Collapse will reflect on their research and their exhibition for Critical Animals 2014. Collapse members will reflect on their own personal experiences and consider how their work grew with and reacted against each other. Their investigations used maps and research to consider emergency, the body, the self and our ways of knowing about the world.

Featuring: Collapse Collective (Sarah Kaur, George Rose, Tara Cartland, Emily Stewart, Emma Jones, Sophie Lamond).

Collapse Collective is a ragtag group of girls who make art and reject restrictions. Working across disciplines, sharing ideas and embracing mistakes. Currently Collapse is experimenting with scientific and cartographic methods within their creative practice.

The Virtual and The Actual

3 October 2014 1:00pm

Join this panel of thinkers as they discuss the production of the future, by weighing the roles of actuality, virtuality, entropy and rhythm.

Featuring: Beau Deuwaarder, Amy Ireland, Jake Moore, Francis Russell.

Reading Circle: Affect Theory

3 October 2014 3:00pm

In this special TiNA edition of the Australian Experimental Art Foundation’s critical reading group, join us to read and reflect on affect theory in local and international contexts.

Featuring: Adele Sliuzas.

What’s the point? A discussion of artistic and academic communities

3 October 2014 3:00pm

In a time of climate change, political turmoil and war, what do the arts have to offer us? What is the value of community arts? In partnership with University of Western Sydney.

Featuring: Professor James Arvanitakis, Katherine McLean, Dr Joanna Winchester, Maree Freeman.

Being In-Between

3 October 2014 4:00pm

How does one approach entering a new discipline, or stepping into the next stage of a career? This panel of researchers, writers, and artists discuss the merits, pitfalls, and uncertainties.

Featuring: Rosanna Stevens, Kate Andrews-Day, Philjames, Sophie Lamond.

The Future’s Knot – Exhibition Launch

3 October 2014 6:00pm

Join us for the opening of The Future’s Knot, Critical Animals’ official exhibition at The Lock Up. Featuring: Baden Pailthorpe, Benjamin Forster, Giselle Stanborough, Jonny Niesche, Josephine Skinner, Kylie Banyard, Marian Tubbs, Philjames, Pia van Gelder, Tristan Deratz.

Curated by Peter Johnson.

Beauty and the Grey Beast, Surprising Tales From Prison

4 October 2014 12:00pm

This workshop, facilitated by Off The Record, encourages a conversation around the impacts of creative and cultural programming on inmates at Junee Correctional Centre. It’s about humanising the demonised and the power of art to create an environment where change is possible if you want it.

Featuring: Julia Mendel & Off the Record.

Creative Transformations and Conjurations

04 October 2014 3:00pm

How can creative practice catalyse transformation? Four panellists explore the potential to conjure new forms of personal, mystic and political experience through artistic expression.

Featuring: Danuta Raine, Danae Killian, Jacinta Dennett, Zoe Dzunko.

Converged Futures

04 October 2014 5:00pm

The future is interactive. Join three artists/technologists/storytellers as they share their thinking and works, exploring the boundaries of technology and questioning modern aesthetics and structure. In partnership with the University of Newcastle.

Featuring: Julian Fleetwood, Tim Buchanan, Ryan McGoldrick.

On pirates, surveillance and democracy

05 October 2014 12:00pm

Join James Arvanitakis to discuss his new book on piracy: end of innovation or access to free stuff? And, does piracy fund terrorism? In partnership with University of Western Sydney.

Featuring: Professor James Arvanitakis.

The End of Art

05 October 2014 12:00pm

Claims of ‘the end of art’ have been made throughout the history of western culture. This panel will assess these claims and ask, do art and aesthetics have a future?

Featuring: Jason Childs, Eddie Hopely, Brenton Lyle.

Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction

05 October 2014 3:00pm

From live writing to iPhone gallery guides, discover if digital technologies expand the diverse possibilities of creative arts and writing, or whether our impressions are dulled by all the noise.

Featuring: Julian Murphy, Matthew Taft, Freya Wright-Brough, Emily Stewart.