Fish-Bird: Funding

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Fish-Bird is a collaborative art/science research project that was funded in the first round of the 'Synapse Initiative'. The Synapse Initiative is an agreement between the Australian Government's arts funding and advisory body, Australia Council for the Arts, and its research funding and advisory body, Australian Research Council (ARC).

The first step in the process was to apply to the Australia Council for a Synapse Grant. Under this competitive grants scheme the Australia Council acts as an 'indusrty partner' in the second step of the process, which was to apply to the ARC for a Linkage Project Grant.

The ARC's Linkage Grants bring together academic and (usually) industry researchers to work on a specific research project of interest to all parties. The 'industry partners' provide cash and/or in-kind support to the project to augment the ARC grant.

We gratefully acknowedge the financial and in-kind support of the Australian Research Council, The University of Sydney through its Australian Centre for Field Robotics, and the industry partners to ARC Linkage Grant LP0349069:

• Australia Council for the Arts;
• Australian Network for Art and Technology;
• Artspace Visual Arts Centre, Sydney;
• Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney;
• Patrick Technology and Systems.

Precursor Work

Fish-Bird is both an artwork and a sophisticated state of the art distributed robotic system. Its realisation required deep collaboration between an artist and robotics researchers over a three year period. Before committing to the ARC project, the collaborative team worked together on a smaller-scale project. The mechanism for this project was a 6-month residency for Mari at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics, and the project was Embracement. In retrospect this period was extremely valuable as it allowed researchers from very different backgrounds to establish a common language (!!), to explore philosophical positions and to establish individual and shared goals.

The residency period was also used to frame and write the ARC application, a process that is considerably more involved than the equivalent Australia Council application.