Aaron Burton is a lecturer in Media Arts, Digital Media, and Media Communications. He has wide-ranging industry experience from independent filmmaking to producing digital content for daily news to art installations and exhibitions. His creative media-arts practice includes numerous prizes and exhibitions, such as; 2012 Colombo Art Biennale, Hatched 07 National Graduate Show (PICA), Brisbane Airport Fresh Cut 2009 (IMA), and the inaugural Jeremy Hynes Award 2009 (IMA). Burton is a practice-based researcher with foundations in personal documentary filmmaking and photography. His doctoral research titled 'Provenance in Personal Documentary: My Mother's Village' traverses scholarly work in media art, art history, cultural studies, and ethnography. My Mother's Village (2014) is a feature length documentary film that revisits a series of ethnographic films made in Sri Lanka in the late 1970s by Burton’s parents, and results in a fascinating intergenerational study across three transformative decades from civil war to globalisation, and a reflexive meta-narrative on how the act of representation has similarly transformed. Burton’s interest in experimental ethnography extends to a collaborative documentary film with professors Stephen Muecke and Michael Taussig titled ‘Sunset Ethnography’(2014), in which the filmmaking attempts to enact unconventional ideas around ethnographic fieldwork. Burton’s current research explores visual representations of the Anthropocene and environmental crises. He is currently exploring the potential of unmanned imaging technologies to provide a non-anthropocentric and trans-disciplinary narrative to our place within the natural environment.
