DR PIA EDNIE-BROWN

contact: pia@rmit.edu.au

Project Involvement

    Liveness Manifold
    Material Potency
    Plasticity
    Architectural Composition - Emergence and Vitality
    Contaminated Life
    The Shower
    Cultivating Life
    The Biospatial Workshop

Dr Pia Ednie-Brown is a senior lecturer in the Architecture program and a research stream leader at SIAL, teaching design and theory, and supervising Masters and PhD candidates. She has a research practice, Onomatopoeia, involving art-architecture installations, animation, sculpture, creative writing and theoretical analysis. She has completed a PhD (The Aesthetics of Emergence) drawing on the work of this practice, while utilising radical empiricist frameworks to generate a new model of composition related to contemporary design process and its relations emergence theory, aesthetics, ethics, embodiment and affect.

This doctoral research is currently being extended into an exploration of sustainability practices through a multi-disciplinary project, the Biospatial Workshop. In 2007 this involvied three subjects: Contaminated Life, Cultivating Life and Contagious Life. Each explored an approach to sustainability in terms of 'transformability' – relating to the need to understand all substances and objects as transformable into other things (rather than become waste) as well as the need to transform our ways of living (rather then 'sustain' current living practices).

Her papers have been published in journals such as Daidalos and the Architectural Design Academy Editions. She has been a jury member for architectural design reviews at Melbourne University, Deakin University, Curtin University (WA), the ETH (Zurich) and Columbia University (NY).

Pia studied at UWA, and moved from Perth to Melbourne mid-1995. For the duration of 1999, she was part of a cross-disciplinary research team at RMIT's Interactive Information Institute (Icubed). This group was awarded the 2000 BHERT Award, for "Outstanding Achievement in Collaboration in Education and Training." In 2000, Pia commenced research and development for the new program approval of the SIAL Graduate Certificate. She has facilitated a series of visiting scholar events and workshops at SIAL involving quests such as Brian Massumi, Erin Manning, Natalie Jerimijenko, Stelarc, Marcelyn Gow, Chris Perry and Alisa Andrasek.

Prior to RMIT, Pia had worked in architectural practices in Perth, Melbourne and London. In 1990 she started an art-architectural practice and public gallery in Perth with five others. During this period she tutored architectural design part-time, co-produced an arts radio show, undertook postgraduate studies in fine arts, joined the board of management of the Perth Fringe Festival (Artrage), curated exhibitions and exhibited sculptural works. In 1996, she collaborated with Gina Moore on the animated film, ‘The Story Continues', which was awarded first prize for excellence in the Metropolis short film festival (WA).

Postgraduate Supervision includes:
Adele Varcoe, Martina Mrongrovius, Romaine Logere, Mike Hornblow, Hellen Sky.

Publications include:

Pia Ednie-Brown (ed) (2008), Plastic Green: designing biospatial futures, RMIT Publishing (forthcoming, December)

Ednie-Brown, Pia (2008). 'Plastic Super Models', Fibreculture Journal, Issue 12: Models, Metamodels and Contemporary Media, Andrew Murphie and Gary Genosko (eds), http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue12/

Ednie-Brown, Pia and Mewburn, Inger, (2006) 'Laughter and The Undeniable Difference Between Us', in Hamilton, Jillian (Ed.) Intimate Transactions: Art, Exhibition and Interaction within Distributed Network Environments, Australian Centre for Interaction Design, Queensland University of Technology.

Ednie-Brown, Pia (2006) 'All-Over, Over-All: biothing and Emergent Composition', Programming Cultures: Art and Architecture in the Age of Software, Helen Castle, Michael Silver (eds), Architectural Design Academy Editions, No 182, Vol 76, no 4, London, July/August, pp 72-81.

Ednie-Brown, Pia (2006) 'CONTINUUM; a self engineering creature-culture', Collective Intelligence in Design, Helen Castle, Chris Perry and Chris Hight (eds), Architectural Design Academy Editions, No 183, Vol 76, no 5, Sept/Oct, London, pp 18-25.

Ednie-Brown, Pia (2006), ‘Rising Out of the Affective Sea: architectural composition, emergence and discursive conflict’, Contested Terrains, Society of Architectural Historians, Australia New Zealand.

Ednie-Brown, Pia (2005), ‘Processual Consistency’, Drawing Together: convergent practices in architectural education, Refereed proceedings, Third international conference of the Association of Architecture Schools of Australasia (AASA)
Editors: Kathi Holt-Damant and Paul Sanders

Ednie-Brown, Pia (2001), 'Diagramming Innovation-Scapes', Politics of a Digitial Present: An Inventory of Australian Net Culture, Criticism and Theory, Hugh Brown, Geert Lovink, Helen Merrick, Ned Rossiter, David Teh, Michele Willson (eds), Fibreculture Publications, Melbourne, pp. 197-203. link

Ednie-Brown, Pia (2001), 'The Will to Animation' in Architecture and Animation, Bob Fear (Ed.), Architectural Design Academy Editions, Vol 71, No 2, London, pp. 64-73. download PDF

Ednie-Brown, Pia (2000), 'The Texture of Diagrams' in Diagrammania, Daidalos issue 74, Berlin, pp. 72-79. download PDF

Ednie-Brown, Pia (1999), 'Falling into the Surface' in Hypersurface Architecture II, Stephen Perrella (Ed), Architectural Design Academy Editions, vol 69, no. 9-10, London, pp. 8-11. download PDF