Keynote: Peter Blamey

Chair: Charles Martin

Keynote: Peter Blamey
  • Friday 2025-06-27 14:30-15:30 AEST
  • Location: Kambri Cinema
  • Type: plenary

keynote title

Novel Interactions with Materials and Energies/Entangle Me in Noise

keynote description

This keynote, rather than a traditional lecture, is instead made up of realisations of several interrelated performance works. These works all explore the experiential capacities of small-scale and local energy sourcing in relation to environmental and artefactual forms of light, where sound, alongside its aesthetic aspects, functions as an indicator of physical processes in action. Using everyday materials and simple, open-form performative strategies that place performer and device on an equal footing, these works both play on and with the possibilities for realising, rethinking and relating to the immaterial energetic aspects of our environment.

bio

Peter Blamey is a Sydney-based artist, living on Gadigal land. His practice is often sound-focused and accomplished with a minimum of means, and includes performances, videos, recordings and installations. Broadly speaking, his work explores (amongst other things) the interconnected themes of energies and residues, often through reimagining our encounters with everyday technologies and the physical world, as well as our experiences of energy generation, use, and waste.

Peter has performed extensively over the last twenty-five years, including appearances at innumerable experimental music and arts festivals, including Dark Mofo, What is Music?, Liquid Architecture, Electrofringe, Avantwhatever, the Biennale of Sydney, Cementa, ACMA, and ISEA, along with countless other shows. He has collaborated with a range of local and international artists, including Jim Denley, Dale Gorfinkel, and Kusum Normoyle (in the duo Hard Hat), and is currently one third of the group Sodium Tail. Some time ago Peter completed a BA (Hons) Comm at the University of Technology Sydney, before receiving a PhD from the University of Western Sydney in 2008 for research on simple acoustic phenomena and post-Cagean experimental music.

In 2014, Peter took part in the Instrument Builders Project, a collaboration between Australian and Indonesian artists, resulting in exhibitions in Yogyakarta and at the National Gallery of Victoria. Between 2020 and 2022, his work was included in the touring exhibition Material Sound (Qld, NSW, Vic, Tas), curated by Caleb Kelly. His work has also been exhibited in venues large and small, including Artspace, UTS Gallery, SCA Gallery, SNO projects, Firstdraft, SCALA, 55 Sydenham Rd, ICAN, China Heights, and Serial Space (all NSW), Bus (Vic), West Space (Vic), CACSA (SA), and the Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center, Asheville, NC (USA).

photo caption

Peter Blamey, live, Tempe Jets, Tempe, NSW, 2022. Photo: Nick Dan.