For more than a decade, Jane Ursel from the University of Manitoba in Canada has been collecting data on Canada’s first specialised court for family violence.

Ursel is the director of Resolve, a research centre on family violence and violence against women. “It was set up by the federal government in 1992, following the massacre of 14 women at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal in 1989,” says Ursel, currently a visitor in the UNSW law school. The women – mostly engineering students – were killed by a gunman who blamed feminism for the failures in his life.

Ursel recently presented the findings of her study Assessing the impact of specialized courts on processing of family violence cases: a Canadian case study as part of the UNSW law faculty’s seminar program.

“Prior to the creation of the special court, family violence matters, and in particular spousal abuse cases, didn’t get treated very seriously by the courts. Since the court was established, conviction rates have increased and there’s literally been a revolution in sentencing.”

According to Ursel, victims of family violence are now more likely to call the police and report crimes. “That suggests a greater confidence in the justice system,” she says. “The message about family violence has changed dramatically from not being a very serious issue that nobody really wanted to deal with, to becoming a very serious issue with very serious consequences.”

Ursel is in Sydney to observe the operation of the new sexual assault court for children.
“Among the cases that we hear are child abuse cases so I would like to be able to set up a system

where we can compare our data and results,” she says. “I’m curious to see what impact these courts will have in Australia.”

Jane Ursel

First we had the DJ, then came the VJ and now the University’s centre for interactive cinema research, iCinema, brings us the TJ – the television DJ.

T_Visionarium is an interactive immersive virtual environment or playground for our TJ. It will be on show as part of the EU’s prestigious Capital of Culture festival to be held in Lille, France from this month until March next year.

How does it work? The TJ enters an inflatable dome, 12 m in diameter and nine metres high, in the centre of which is a mobile video projector. She places a position-tracking device connected to stereo cable-less headphones onto her head, and by moving her head is able to steer the projected image anywhere over the dome surface, thereby surfing from one TV channel to another.

Using a remote control the TJ selects keywords, such as blue, laughter, faces, running, hectic, machinery or dialogue. T_Visionarium then automatically retrieves for the TJ and her audience all the sequences from all the TV channels that correspond to the particular keyword.

“For this prototype we recorded a 24-hour sample of broadcast television over 48 channels in Europe,” says Shaw. “This large database of audiovisual data that is distributed over the entire projection surface of the dome allows itself to be continuously reorganised according to the different content criteria that the user chooses.”

By moving her head in different directions the TJ transfers between the different channels, building new narratives in an audiovisual collage.

“It’s experiencing TV in a completely new format because we can view these moving images independently from their original semantic context,” says Shaw.

“Re-working material that is already out there and giving it a new artistic formulation is a process that we particularly enjoy because of the accidental combinations and emergent meanings that result.”

T_Visionarium will arrive in Australia at the end of 2005.