Thursday 24 August 2017

Australia Summer 2017 Inventory

37 days
14 planes
3 hotels
4 airbnbs
2 public lectures at art schools
1643 photos on Sony 6000
3 Libraries and Archives
8 Museums
Too many Pokemon walks
3 Legendary sightings in Kununurra ( Celebrity Tree Park) 
Too many meltdowns by parents and child
3 illnesses
So much good food in Fitzroy
No Footy games, (cross between Rubgy and Basketball)
One four wheel drive
Backwards driving mostly by me, once on the wrong side of the road.
1 pink lizard sleeping too close to me to get a good night sleep
1 zoo
1 animal sanctuary
4 wallaby road sightings in one night
1 wombat road kill (not due to my driving)
Oysters by the dozen in Hobart (strictly kosher style) 
Incredible warm hospitality, reunions with old friends and new friendships established.
Unbelievable jet lag.
And one nice family photo
END






Charting Port Davey

This map shows the photos we shot on the ipad and charts our boat route which took us from Melaleuca in the east to the Breakseas in the west, which are the small islands on the east perimeter of Port Davey. Our captain/pilot Hugh took us to the outer most reaches but our small craft would have capsized if we had attempted to go beyond the Breakseas. Next major landmass south is Antarctica!

Port Davey


 On the second last day of our Australian journey, we took a single propeller airplane into one of the most isolated parts of Tasmania (and the world) --Port Davey and Bathurst Harbour in the Southwest Conservation Reserve.  Most people don't go there this time of year but there was a break in the weather so we went for it and chartered a plane with Par Avion.  We just had to see the remote places where Critchley Parker Jr. dreamed of making a Jewish refuge and where he died for the cause in 1942.   I've never landed on a deserted runway- kind of eerie that our only connection to the world was through our pilot Hugh's radio.  Critchley Parker Jr. and Caroline Isaacson proposed this site to Steinberg when the Kimberley plan was stalled due to Australia joining WWII.  Here are a few shots from the day including a visit to Critchley Parker's grave site which is so secluded in the bush that we almost missed it. We shared this amazing experience with the famous Tasmanian landscape photographer, Martin Walch.




Tuesday 15 August 2017

SOCA Lecture, University of Tasmania

Thank you Lucy Bleach and Bill Hart for inviting us to present our project at the School of Creative Arts, University of Tasmania. Special thanks to the brilliant painter Megan Walch and her husband Jeremy for inviting our son Sacha to their house for a play date with Felix so that we could focus on our lecture. The crowd was so generous and thrilled with our project! So happy we came to this beautiful part of Australia, not that all parts aren't beautiful, but there's something other worldly about this place, the light, the winds, the people, so hospitable and warm. We'll see if we can make it to Port Davey- weather depending...
Left to right, Megan Walch, Louis Kaplan, Bill Hart, Melissa Shiff and Lucy Bleach.

Saturday 12 August 2017

Breakfast with Arnold Zable

 "Fascinating and imaginative work, and, inevitably controversial."
   Arnold Zable on "The Imaginary Jewish Homelands of I.N. Steinberg"

This morning we had breakfast with the highly acclaimed novelist Arnold Zable, former president of PEN Melbourne. The meeting was magical as we had much common ground including being and creating as secular Jews. The dialogue ranged from our mutual interest in Melech Ravitch and his family to his work with Aboriginal artists in Warmun and how Australia is moving toward a model of mutual exchange of knowledge and wisdom.  We also found out that both of our sons have an obsession with game design although his son is about 16 years older than Sacha.  He gave us so many interesting insights into Yiddish Melbourne from a secular Jewish perspective.  Given his amazing work on the plight of refugees and asylum seekers to Australia, it is obvious why our project has so much resonance for him. 

Friday 11 August 2017

Poster for our next Lecture at School of Creative Arts, Hobart, Tasmania


Public Lecture at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne University

Yesterday we gave our first public lecture on Imaginary Jewish Homelands at the Victorian College of the Arts at the University of Melbourne. There was a crowd of over 100 people comprised of art students, professors, curators, as well as one of the most prominent writers in the literary scene of Australia, Arnold Zable. Zable is known for his work on migration and human rights. We're having coffee with him tomorrow.

 Federation Hall, one of the nicest venues we've ever lectured at. 
 Our host Professor Sean Lowry
Curator David Sequeira welcomes the audience to the Imaginary Jewish Homelands event. 
 Melech Ravitch House on the big screen
 Question period
Independent curator/artist Kevin Murray who astonishingly grew up in the small town of Kununurra where we were based in the Kimberley and where Steinberg envisioned the Jewish refuge.

Monday 31 July 2017

Landscape Photographs I've been making...

Photo Credit: Sacha Kaplan-Shiff
This was the territory that Steinberg was considering for his Jewish place of refuge.  This is an arial photograph I made on July 31st on our way to Purnululu National Park. You'll notice that the land is lush and that agriculture is floushing, just as Steinberg predicted.


The landscape of the Kimberleys about one hour southwest of Kununurra.

Victorian College of the Arts Lecture Announcement, Melbourne Australia. Art Forum Series.

To view a larger image of this poster, please click here




Saturday 29 July 2017

Here we are at work on the Great Northern Highway near Wyndham, Western Australia. That's me taking the photo in the reflection of the ipad and Louis is holding the ipad. Steinberg thought that Wyndham might one day be the centre of his refuge for the Jews but it never was to be. The only industry there today is a shipping port for ore from the local mines. Kununurra has eclipsed Wyndham since it was founded in the early 60's after the construction of the Ord River diversion dam and the success of the irrigation scheme.

Friday 28 July 2017

Durack Homestead

Here's Louis standing at the gate of the Durack Homestead. Michael Patrick Durack was going to sell his 7,000,000 acres to the Jews for their refugee settlement.
 The Durack Homestead was transplanted to higher ground when Lake Argyle was created. This is the largest man made lake in the southern hemisphere.
 Here is a family photo of the Durack patriarchs.
And finally here is the map of the Durack holdings I photographed in one of the rooms at the Durack Homestead. I used a different version of this same map as the ground on which to lay all of our digital models.

Thursday 27 July 2017

Evidence of Steinberg's Plan in Kununurra, Kimberley Western Australia

Today when leaving lunch at the Pump House restaurant (an actual pumping station in the day) we found evidence on this historic timeline ( see image above) of Steinberg's Kimberley Plan and specifically his vision to irrigate the Ord River Valley. A bit hard to read on this plexi-glass so I'll transcribe: "1939: The Freeland League, seeking land to resettle European Jews threatened by the rise of Nazism produced the first plan to realize the Ord irrigation scheme by damming the Ord River. The proposal is well received by the Western Australia government but not the Commonwealth."
This was our first day in Kununurra which is a town of about 6000 people and was not in existence during Steinberg's visit to these parts in 1939. However, as the plaque explains, Steinberg was prescient in proposing the irrigation of the Ord River and he made photos of the river on his tour which I've used in the Museum model for our VR world.  

Saturday 22 July 2017

Melech Ravitch's Star Theatre Revisited in Darwin Australia

Today we found the relics of the Star Theatre here in Darwin. This is the site that Melech Ravitch photographed in 1933 and the last of the 90 photographs that he took on his journey across Australia. If you look closely you can see the faint outline of a star on top of the  building that bears an uncanny resemblance to the Mogen David. Ravitch thought that this was a sign that a Jewish settlement was destined for the Australian Northern Territory. Ravitch predates Steinberg and soujourned to these parts via weeks and weeks of travel by train and mail truck. What a crazy poet he was. He was part of the Yiddish literary scene in Warsaw with contemporaries such I.B. Singer and helped to give him his start. We are making a virtual pavilion in his honour as part of Imaginary Jewish Homelands to mark his importance to the Kimberley plan. 

Wednesday 19 July 2017

Lunch with Tony, Caroline Isaacson's Grandchild



Our time in Melbourne couldn't be more fulfilling. First we see Critchley Parker's diary and now we're having lunch with the donor, Caroline Isaacson's grandchild, Tony Isaacson. Tony offered to take us to see Critchley Parker's homestead an hour outside of Melbourne. Tony is an avid bush walker and has visited Critchley's grave site at Port Davey. If the weather is good then we aim to visit Port Davey on the Tasmanian leg of our journey in about 3 weeks from now.

Tuesday 18 July 2017

Missing Diary FOUND! Progress on Tasmanian Leg of Project.

The entrance to the State Library of Victoria where the diary was recently donated



When the Kimberley Plan was stalled, Critchley Parker Jr. and Caroline Isaacson redirected Steinberg to Tasmania as a possibility for Jewish settlement and specifically the western part of the island at Port Davey.

Critchley Parker was a righteous gentile who was in love with a Jewish woman - the journalist Caroline Isaacson.  In January 1941, Parker organized an expedition to Port Davey with Steinberg, Isaacson and scientists to survey the land to see if it was viable for a Jewish refuge in order to save European Jews from the Holocaust.  Parker returned by himself the next year and he died on the site, leaving behind a diary with visions of Le'Corbusier buildings and a stadium to hold the Tasmian games. The diary was given to Caroline Isaacson after having been found next to his body, however, it went missing for decades.  

Just one week before our departure we were notified by the The State Library of Victoria's Greg Gerrand (who is the coordinator of collections) that Tony Isaacson (Caroline's grandson)had donated the missing diary upon the death of his father.

The State Library of Victoria had a transcription of the diary but the original had been thought to be lost. Just two weeks before leaving on our trip to Australia, Louis found out that both Peter Isaacson and his sister Joan had past away in April of this year.  This made us feel like our timing was off because it would have been nice to meet the children of Caroline Isaacson.  However, our timing couldn't haven't been better because it turned out that Peter Isaacson had the diary all along.   Tony's donation happened just a few days before our departure to Melbourne and then on our second day we were able to see it.  So instead of working with the transcript that was made in 1997 (as we had expected), we got to inspect the original! It sent chills through me to see Critchley's handwriting and knowing that these were his last words.

Friday 7 July 2017

It's all about the Gear

Just bought two camera bags for the big trip as well as two 360 cameras. One for stills and one for video- can't wait to get to the Kimberleys to start making content for our VR worlds. 

Friday 2 June 2017

Hololens



Today we tried the Hololens at Microsoft in Mississauga Ontario ( about a 40 minute drive west of Toronto). I went in feeling quite skeptical about all the hype I had heard but left feeling like this might be the perfect HMD ( Head Mounted Display) for our project especially if we can use it in situ on the very land that Steinberg proposed for a Jewish refugee settlement. I couldn't help but get excited about travelling to the Kimberleys, donning the Hololens and seeing all of our models in situ. The perfect device on which to view all of the content we've been making over these last two years. Unlike the HTC Vive, this device allows you to see reality with added virtual content- true mix reality. For our purpose this is really fantastic, however, there are a ton of questions to be answered. Will the device work outside? Theoretically is should if it can scan trees or some other visible marker in the landscape that allows it to position you in the world. One major problem is that it won't work in daylight- liken it to how hard it is to work on a laptop or other device while in sunlight. However, we could use it at dusk. A lot to think about... The beauty of it is that it is untethered and we can do video capture of exactly what our eyes are seeing. The field of view doesn't include peripheral vision so there's still a letter box that augments appear within but with the right lighting the rectangle does seem to vanish, or at least it diminishes. We'll see if this is the one to use or if the HTC Vive is the way to go. In either case it will take a fair amount of development in Unity. More as it happens...

Thursday 25 May 2017

Australia, Summer 2017

We've plotted our trip to Australia this summer. We'll arrive in Melbourne on July 16th, head up to Darwin on July 20th, then head to our research site in the Kimberleys which is a town called Kununurra with a population of about five thousand. This is the centre of Durack cattle country, the seven million acres which was to be sold to the Freeland League. We'll stay in the region for two weeks to document the landscape, making 360 video for the backdrop of the virtual reality world,  test out some augmented reality and of course to meet some of the residents of Kununurra. I wonder how many have heard of the plan to turn this region into a Jewish refuge during WWII. We'll find out! After our leg in the Kimberleys we return to Melbourne to do research at the Victoria State Library and then we travel to Hobart, Tasmania to do further research on Critchley Parker Jr. and his idea to settle the Jews in Port Davey. More as it happens...

 

Wednesday 1 March 2017

Imaginary Jewish Homelands Contribution to be included in collection Introduction to Digital Humanities: Religion

We are pleased to announce that Imaginary Jewish Homelands will be one of the featured projects in Introduction to Digital Humanities: Religion edited by Professors Chris Cantwell (Wisconsin-Milwaukee) and Kristian Petersen (Nebraska) to be published by De Gruyter in Berlin in 2018.

Our proposed essay will review the development, technical specifications, and the results (both realized and in process) of our two research-creation projects in digital art and humanities that use the emergent technologies of augmented reality and virtual reality to stage counterfactual histories and to explore failed Jewish homeland plans that arose in response to religious persecution.  In the first project Mapping Ararat (2011-14), we created an AR walking tour to take visitors on a journey that images and imagines what would have happened if Major Mordecai Noah’s 1825 plan to transform Grand Island New York into a “refuge for the Jews” had succeeded.  In this current phase, we are exploring the so-called Kimberley project of I.N. Steinberg and the Freeland League that took place against the backdrop of World War II and the Holocaust (1939-1943).  We review how this charismatic leader (who was a religious Jew) almost succeeded in securing a homeland for Jewish refugees in Western Australia. Tapping into Steinberg’s collection at the YIVO archives in New York, we are using these materials to texture the 3-D architectural models of our virtual Jewish homeland (from its refugee tents to its institutional buildings/structures) that one can navigate using the Unity gaming platform.