The personal/professional website of Jonathan Cooper (aka Doctor Dada)

View my new website at www.doctordada.com.

I was trained in art education at Alexander Mackie College of Advanced Education (now the College of Fine Arts, University of NSW), Australia. Since joining the Art Gallery of New South Wales as a Museum Educator in 1982, my work included the delivery of educational services to many different types of audiences – including interpretative performances – and the production of didactic exhibitions, printed material and videos. In 1997 I worked on a joint interactive multimedia project for distance education with the State Library of NSW and Charles Sturt University, Australia. In 2001 I was appointed Manager of Information, with primary responsibility for the Art Gallery’s website and regular publications. In November 2010 I was appointed Senior coordinator of online programs, responsible for creating online content related to the Gallery's education and public programs. In 2013, I left the Gallery to become a freelance consultant on art and museum education.

My interests include computer programming (with LiveCode), mathematics, Esperanto and the relationships between faith, the arts and everyday life.

Why ‘Doctor Dada’?

In the mid-1990s, I created two interactive performances at the Art Gallery of New South Wales: Doctor Dada's Time Machine and Just Jack the Garbage Man. In Doctor Dada's Time Machine, I became a 'mad scientist' who invited visitors to travel back in time imaginatively to the studios of famous artists. In one part of the performance, one member of the audience, acting as a nineteenth century academic painter, and another, acting as an Impressionist, would argue about what makes 'good art'. In Just Jack, I assumed the character of a garbage collector whose calling in life is to arrange junk on the floor of the Art Gallery so that the 'authorities' (i.e. director, curators and cleaners!) would treat it as a work of art rather than junk. To achieve this, the styles of various paintings and sculptures nearby were studied and copied. The audience was invited to help and by so doing, learnt first-hand some of the principles of composition.

Since that time, when I was asked to do a presentation for fellow museum educators or trainee guides, I was often asked to do a 'Doctor Dada', meaning something that involves the audience in a fun, imaginative way, including the junk-on-the-floor routine. Then, before long, Doctor Dada became a kind of alter ego for me.

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Contact me

Email: dd@doctordada.com
Tel: +61 2 4365 4809