Crash course in Creative Research
Join us! TT is pleased to announce three fee-free sessions designed to explore what creative research is and does, to clarify your direction, and to get you ready for a transdisciplinary praxis-entwined PhD. Attend our tried and trusted proposal development workshop to hone your ideas and get one-to-one feedback on your draft proposal. Give yourself the luxury of allowing your ideas the time to unfold and emerge from reflection on your practice. Begin to prepare for your doctoral project now.
Info session: May 3, 4–5pm UTC
Session one: May 10, 2025, 4–5:30pm UTC
What is Creative Research? An online round table and primer.
Session two: May 17, 2025, 2–4:30pm UTC
Entwining the Threads: An online research proposal development workshop (eight places).
Session three: May 19–May 30, 8am–4:30pm UTC
One-to-one feedback on your draft proposal (choose a 30-minute slot).
Find more information here.
Open Window Talks
We invite you to attend our next Open Window, a series of online public talks that allows the outside world to connect with the Institute’s internal, topic-based intensive sessions.
Sound and Space with Mary Edwards
May 31, 3–4pm UTC
Spaces and places speak, hum, and bellow with echolocation. Much like architecture or our physical beings, the natural environment exudes intonations and wordless music. Entire scores exist in the depths of the ocean, waiting to be transcribed from a body of water to a body of sounds that convey and express the harmonies and dissonance in our everyday lives. How do we seek out the conversations at the intersection of these ideas? How can sound unearth or revitalize hidden or obscure histories, stories and events within places, bodies and containers? How can we play with a recollection of events paired with addressing environmental exclusivity?
Mary Edwards is a composer and environmental sound artist whose interdisciplinary practice encompasses themes of temporality, impermanence, nostalgia and the natural world that recur throughout her work. She is interested in the invisible architecture and the emotive, historical, cinematic and spatial properties of sound that are simultaneously intimate and immense. Her catalogue includes Fathom, a site-related soundscape launched during the 2023 World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE) Conference; Listening Pasts/Listening Futures and Conservation/Conversation, both for Atlantic Center for the Arts; Endeavour: A Space Trilogy for the NASA Expedition of Dr. Mae C. Jemison, an ambient operetta commemorating the American astronaut’s orbit around Earth; The Call in the Limitless Space, a permanent interactive installation for Wa Na Wari/Seattle based on reclamation of natural and architectural spaces in the city’s Central District; Everyday Until Tomorrow, a conceptual “Library Music” soundtrack for TWA Terminal 5 at JFK airport.
Modes of Negating, Negativities and Affirmation’s Crucial Critique with Antonia Pont
June 1, 11pm–12:45am UTC
In this talk, Antonia Pont will consider various modes of negating from philosophy and how we might practise “unknowing” to allow for emergent intimacy with our negating habits and their traces. How do we (tend to ) resist, how do we (tend to) comply, how do we tantrum, or even how might we sometimes decide?
Antonia Pont (PhD) is an essayist, theorist, poet and yogi living in Naarm (Melbourne), Australia. Her research considers time, transformation, stability and desire, and recent works include: You Will Not Know In Advance What You’ll Feel (Rabbit Poets Series, 2019) and ‘On Leadership’ (The Lifted Brow, 2020). Her essay on envy appeared in LitHub in 2019, and A Philosophy of Practising (Edinburgh University Press) is out in October 2021. She teaches from undergraduate to doctoral level in writing, literature, creative arts and theory at Deakin University, and since 2009 has led the yoga community, Vijnana Yoga Australia.
Alternative Reality Gardening with Maggie Buxton
May 31, 10-11pm UTC
In this presentation, Dr Maggie Buxton offers a critical analysis of Alternative Reality Gardening—a project facilitated by her company, AwhiWorld in Whangārei, New Zealand. The initiative explored the intersections between digital arts, ecological sustainability, and social innovation. Dr Buxton will discuss the methodologies and outcomes of merging traditional and emerging technologies in creative practices through a retrospective examination. This analysis will include a review of the diverse contributions from local and international artists, scientists, space researchers, farmers, psychotherapists, and others who collaborated. Highlighting the project’s role as a catalyst for social ínnovation and transdisciplinary practice, the talk will also examine the broader implications of such innovative approaches for academic research and artistic production. Attendees will learn how transdisciplinary strategies can challenge conventional perspectives and foster novel solutions to contemporary global issues.
Dr Maggie Buxton is a transdisciplinary practitioner, creative entrepreneur, and social innovator with over thirty years of experience at the intersection of social change, technology, and creative practice. Holding a PhD from AUT-Colab focusing on augmented and geo-locative mobile technologies, Maggie is committed to fostering resilience and innovation across global communities.
RSVP: To attend an Open Window Session, please sign up here. Find this year’s complete program here.
About TT
Since 2004, TT has been generating space for creativity, experimentation, and radical thinking in every form. We champion self-directed, curious, flexible and socially engaged creative researchers working independently or collectively. We award PhDs for transdisciplinary work in all fields on your terms.
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