Living Data

Voices from the Southern Ocean/
Co-creators

Disclaimers, Copyrights and Citations

Voices from the Southern Ocean/Index 2019 2020 2021 2022

The songlines are such an important part of our mental and spiritual structure.
They are lines of energy that run between places, animals and people.

Uncle Max Dulumunmun Harrison, 2009

Dr Lisa Roberts
Art-maker, Animator and Interactive author

My heritage is Aboriginal Australian and European. Since working in Antarctica I recognise Antarctic krill as my totem and myself as a global citizen with responsibilities for the Ocean. I met my partner in Antarctica and followed him to Sydney. Here I embarked on Aboriginal Studies at Eora College, and a PhD in New Media Arts at the University of New South Wales. These explorations led me to reconnect with my Aboriginal family and to recognise the primal forms in art and data as languages of relationship. Like many First Nations Australians dispossessed of cultural knowledge, I work to reconnect the different ways of knowing through art and science, that together sustained Aboriginal Australia for tens of thousands of years.

I created Living Data as a program to explore the similar and different ways we respond as artists and as scientists, to disruptions in natural cycles of climate change. I am Artist in Residence in the Faculty of Science at the University of Technology Sydney and Visiting Scientist (a.k.a. Artist) at the Australian Antarctic Division. I am grateful for the support that has come through these institutions for Living Data to continue sharing and growing knowledge.

Lisa Roberts17 July 2019