NEWS & EVENTS

SPARK 07: Free to the Public for the first time

For the first time in its nine-year history, Wintec opened it's doors for free to Spark 07, our annual week-long international festival of media, arts and design and as a result has drawn audiences of over 2,000.

In the past, Spark has been a predominantly student focused event, with some paying guests.  However, this year Wintec’s CEO Mark Flowers and the festival organisers saw the potential to grow Spark into a more accessible and widely recognised festival that is now free to the public. Wintec significantly increased its funding for the festival this year, which ran from Monday to Friday, August 6 – 10, 2007.

Spark 07 sprang to life with a more diverse and entertaining programme than ever before – there was something to suit everyone, from contemporary art, music, design, journalism, filmmaking, movie screenings and digital storytelling to live shows and music gigs.

Each presenter spoke with passion about their life and their work.  Presentations took place in the mornings at Wintec’s Media Arts Moving Image Studio on Collingwood Street in Hamilton.  Other free events took place across Hamilton City, at the Waikato Museum, the Victoria Cinema, the Rialto Cinema, and the Ward Lane Function Centre.

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First major book from Ramp Press Lake of Coal: The Disappearance of a Mining Township by David Cook has been short-listed for the Montana Book Awards 2007 

The book, Lake of Coal: the Disappearance of a Mining Township, tells the story of Rotowaro, once a mining township on the Waikato coalfields west of Huntly.  Situated in the path of an opencast mine, it was entirely removed in the late 1980s to access coal for the Huntly Power Station. The destruction of this community is the subject of Lake of Coal, a 20 year photo-documentary project by New Zealand photographer David Cook.

Originally initiated by the Waikato Museum of Art and History this groundbreaking book is a complex weave of photographs and text, a multi-layered work of social history that tells the story of Rotowaro from the point of view of the tangata whenua, the workers, their families, management and the photographer himself.

Lake of Coal puts a human face on the economic realities of the late twentieth century and asks the questions: What does coal mining mean on a local level? What happens when a community loses the ground beneath its feet?  This is one of the richest photographic investigations of location and 'place' that has been carried out in New Zealand.