Artist Statement:

“The floor is lava” (a children's game to navigate room as if the floor was molten lava) transforms

the way the players think of space and how they practice it. It produces new modes of engagement

through the reconstructed utility of objects in the environment: a form of role-play-research to

discover a different world from the constituent parts of the old.------Josh Harle

Dr Josh Harle is a multidisciplinary researcher and new media artist with a background in Computer Science, Philosophy, and Fine Arts. His research investigates the virtual spaces generated by emerging technologies, our encounters with the world through them, and their social and political impacts.

His work takes established and emerging capture technologies (e.g. laser scanning, photogrammetry, drone image-capture) and re-appropriates them as expressive mediums, altering their outcomes to introduce an affective element normally absent. The resulting works embrace rather than hide their performative origins, and reflect the contingency of the creative process.

Harle has exhibited locally and internationally, including for Vienna Art Week, Organhaus, Chongqing, and Today Art Museum, Beijing, and locally for solo and group shows at Firstdraft, Verge Gallery, the International Symposium on Electronic Art, AGNSW’s Contempo program, and Brisbane Powerhouse’s ‘IRL: Digital Festival’. He has written for the Journal of Artistic Research, the Runway Journal for Australian Experimental Art, and Das Superpaper and presented at the National Experimental Art Forum, Perth, Transmediale, Berlin, the National Institute of Experimental Art Conference, and Spaces of History / Histories of Space conference UC Berkeley.

In 2015, Harle was Australia Council ECAP resident artist with UWA’s Centre for Rock Art Research and Management and the iVEC Advanced Visualisation Lab, working with rangers at Murujuga national park, Pilbara to explore the development of culturally appropriate digital reconstructions of Indigenous rock art sites. In 2016 Harle was a MuseumsQuartier, Vienna resident artist and Research Fellow, hosted through the Research Institute for Arts and Technology. He is a co-editor of an open-access collection of essays entitlee ‘Decolonising the Digital’, showcasing examples of culturally diverse digital media practices in Australia.

Dr Josh Harle is a Visiting Fellow at UNSW Art & Design, and the director of the Tactical Space Lab.