Welcome to the No Boundaries site. Not just the web site… but the ACTUAL site.
Tucked between the rear of The Joan, and the Penrith Westfields is an area with lots of potential. To some it may seem like a nice bit of lawn you might notice on your way to the shops, but we have defined this space as the exciting place to be the site of our major public event in September. Take a little flight over it and see what you think!
One of the ideas when we began talking about No Boundaries, was using the internet, social media and all that jazz to start to connect to our audience!
Our big questions were… how many people with disability use email, facebook, google+… how many people in Penrith use these tools to connect up? Will using these to connect with our audience mean a better, or worse result for people with disability? So many questions… and so this social media excursion is one more experimental and developmental stage of our process!
Today we started our facebook page and started looking for subscribers and likers. We’re actually a bit shy because the project doesn’t have many friends yet, and we’re still meeting people and working out what the mini projects will actually be. So to start with we’ll probably be a bit quiet… then as things start to hot up we reckon there will be more noise and action.
If you are NEW to facebook then this might be an interesting journey for you too, to investigate how we go and learn from it. If you would like to find out more about it then get in touch 🙂
So… check us out…. here’s the embed of our activity feed below (which will grow as we add posts, and people “like” us!)
The Penrith No Boundaries project team received official notice this week of two successful funding applications. The first was from the Australia Council for the Arts, through the Community Partnerships new projects fund. The second was from Arts NSW, for Creation and Presentation. The team were excited as this now means that we have the resources to begin working with the community of Penrith on the project.
“This is just amazing!! It speaks volumes for the journey we have undertaken over these last two years and the calibre of you all. The implications of receiving this funding are so positive for the sector. ” said David Cretney… and we all felt proud and excited to be beginning to work together at last.
A special mention goes to Robyn Brookes for her dedication in bringing together all of the elements of our funding applications and getting everyone’s input.
And now we need to start acknowledging our sponsors and partners… 🙂
This project is supported by the NSW Government through Arts NSW. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.
At the International Day for People with a Disability, presented by Penrith Council, we introduced ourselves to the community and shared some of the ideas about the No Boundaries project. We showed some of the short “digital portrait” films made as part of our pilot project, exploring how to show individual perspectives of Penrith. Also at the event, we invited you to participate and interact with us as we projected some live camera images and invited members of the group to dance with us. This has been our first experience meeting and playing with individuals from Penrith and exploring the many talents and interests.
On 16th November 2011, David Cretney, Joe Ibbitson and Cindi Drennan presented a session providing background to the No Boundaries project at the Conversations Connections Communities Seminar held in Ryde NSW.
The background includes some of the work and research in community and cultural mapping, undertaken by Penrith Council.
Copies of this reference material are provided below as pdf and powerpoint slide.
CCC conference presentation as an acrobat pdf document
CCC conference presentation as a powerpoint pptx document
The NO BOUNDARIES Project. This project involves six months of creative content production that occurs in the Penrith LGA, involving people with a disability working collaboratively with digital media practitioners. The project is led by Cindi Drennan, acclaimed projection artist involving story development for animated projection sequences, the activities during the process engage artists through social networking and community engagement. The final presentation is a high profile Public Art Performance. A large-‐scale spectacular Projection event that transforms a public space in Penrith into an immersive and illuminated performance space.
Our No Boundaries team (Cindi Drennan, Brendan O’Connell, Daniel Kojta and David Capra) met last week to plan how we would work together on a common goal for a few days in November, as a pilot project of No Boundaries (a long term project to explore and support disability services of Western Sydney through an artistic process that engages with individual people from many walks of life).
For our pilot project we have decided to create multimedia portraits of unique people who live in Penrith and the Western Sydney region.
The process will involve making multimedia portraits about a number of individual people, who live in or are connected to the area (as a first criteria) and who are hidden from public view (as a second criteria).
Continue reading
A multidisciplinary arts team worked with the Penrith and the Western Sydney community to create a series of public multimedia arts projects, leading to a large scale projection event that involved many individuals in Penrith to have input and participation.
The public event was held on 21 and 22 September 2012… and the content was created in workshops and creative activities.
In this section of our web site, we have put our thoughts and experiences about the making of this project. This blog reflects the process, collaborations, research and offers various opportunities for the community to be involved, learn new skills and discover new forms of expression and uniqueness. As you read below, the most recent posts are at the top, and the more you scroll down the older the posts will be. We hope that as we learn about creating new types of artwork for and with Penrith people with disability, that what we write will be useful and interesting to others.
The initial conversations about this project were about how to involve people with a disability in Western Sydney to have input and engagement with a large scale projection arts project (which we envisage will involve mapped projection on the Dame Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre in Penrith NSW)
We realised that many of the ways that we assume that individuals and community members can be involved in a project such as ours, are by attending meetings, sending emails, or just bumping into each other in the street; we felt that there may be barriers to many people in the community to be able to do this – just the very people we want to have input from.
So to create a project that removes the boundaries to participation, and offers many ways for people to have input, has been our goal. As this is a new type of multimedia project, our work will involve trying our concepts out, and then revising and improving our plan.
“No Boundaries” is a long term project, that will involve multimedia practitioners (artists with skills in animation, video, sound, etc) working directly with people in Western Sydney, to create a multimedia project that can be appreciated by many.