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A Map of a Dream of the Future (AMDF) is my new contemporary art project, commissioned for the Junction 2010 Australian Regional Arts Conference. Based around a collective re-imagining of Tasmania’s future, it aims to stimulate, document and express the thinking of a generation of young Tasmanians about climate change and island sense of place. It is a public installation, an online environment, and a State-wide community-based art and education program.
 Map of a Dream of the Future - concept 1 Through workshops and an artistic education kit distributed to Tasmanian schools, young Tasmanians are invited to envisage how they want their lives and communities to look in response to climate change.
The results – images, stories, ideas and detailed statistical data – are collected and displayed as part of a virtual online future Tasmania, as designed by its young people.
The project is presented to the public as a contemporary art installation that uses sophisticated data-visualisation to map young people’s dreams about the future. The installation is both a surreal and beautiful experimental garden, and a huge three-dimensional graph that shows the spread of young Tasmanians’ thinking about climate futures.
For more information about the project, check it out here: A Map of a Dream of the Future
I’m excited to say that the CRACK performance art and experimental theatre program I commissioned and curated as part of This Is Not Art (TiNA) has taken on a life of its own. In 2009 Crack will appear at TiNA as a fully-fledged festival in its own right, led by the eminently capable David Finnigan and Gillian Schwab, along with Thomas Henning of the Black Lung Theatre and Whaling Firm. Crack is a national festival and forum for Australia’s theatre and performance artists, and promises several days of inspiring performances, panels, workshops and several godawful experimental messes to boot.
Just as exciting is the news that the Spat+Loogie and Willoh S Weiland piece Newcastle Pie-off that was commissioned for the 2007 Crack program will be remounted as part of the MCA in Sydney’s 2009 Primavera exhibition.
Where it started: Crack 2007. After organising the 2007 festival within an inch of its life, I commissioned four performance collectives and four writers to disorganise, crash, remix, subvert or disrupt the festival in any way they wanted. The end results were a superb mixture of clever intervention and utter psychosis, giving festival-goers (and directors) a slightly harrowed look as they waited for the next act of total weirdness.
“Ingeniously anticipating criticisms that TINA might have become dangerously institutionalised or formulaic, a number of artists were tasked to perform interventions designed to disrupt the efficiency of the festival. Dressed in beige military get-up, collaborative group Brown Council took aim at TINA’s ambiguous identity, instituting their own splinter event, the This IS Art Festival. Throughout the weekend they could be found (clipboard folders in hand) inspecting presentations and workshops for signs of legitimate “art.” But perhaps the most wildly disruptive interventions were the terror(art)ist antics of Melbourne’s Black Lung Theatre. Ambushing one unsuspecting panel discussion, two performers raided the stage and gaffa-taping, stripping, urinating and urine drinking ensued. Whether or not this organised anarchy was entirely successful in every instance, it was indispensable as an affirmation of the healthy future of TINA. It seems to me that any festival that is conscientiously concerned with its own undoing is not in danger of forfeiting its life-force anytime soon.” – Dominique Angeloro, RealTime Arts 82, December 2007.
I’ll post up some images and a PDF of the program book here when I get a chance to make a low-res version.
Role: program initiator and curator 2007, 2008; festival founder 2009.
Website: Crack: experimental and independent theatre and performance art festival
Grab your elephant gun and go hunting for the elusive Open Office for an Editorial Committee. It’s a herd of nomadic furniture, a portable, self-powered, open-air magazine office, manned by trusty Voiceworks staff and open to all. Submit work now for inclusion in the NYWF 07 anthology, then work in the office to help select, edit, design and print the thing. Find out what goes into making a magazine by petting one in the wild!
Open Office for an Editorial Committee was a collaboration with Makeshift (the amazing Tessa Rapaport and Karl Logge) and the writers, editors and designers of Voiceworks Magazine, in particular Ryan Paine and Marc Martin. We joined forces to create a nomadic, open-air magazine office operating for 3 days as part of This is Not Art / NYWF. Staffed by the Voiceworks crew, the office set up shop in Newcastle’s Civic Park each afternoon of the festival, inviting the public to actively participate in producing and publishing the NYWF 07 anthology. On the final day, the office was converted into its own unique stall at the Zine and Independent Press Fair, where it distributed copies of the finished anthology.
   
Part performance, part collaborative magazine publication and part public sculpture, this living installation attracted a range of curious visitors interested in taking part in (or just observing) various aspects of the publication process, from producing their own submissions at purpose-built typewriter and cut-and-paste stations, to selecting content and organising layout at the picnic/conference table.
Audiences were also drawn into engaging with the space by the interactive nature of the office itself, consisting of a collection of hybrid objects clustered together in the dappled sunlight, shifting and changing configuration as new participants joined in, sprinklers were turned on, winds picked up, or production of the zine progressed to a new stage. These ambiguous, DIY objects were hand-made by hijacking familiar everyday artefacts (BBQs, trolleys, suitcases, picnic tables etc.) and transforming them into (mostly) functional travelling workspaces that enable a different way of using the city and its shared public spaces.
Role: collaborative commissioning of the concept, project management.
Partnership between: myself, the NYWF, Makeshift and Voiceworks. This project was assisted by Next Wave and the Australian Government through the Australia Council.
Website: @ Makeshift
Thanks to: Makeshift for photos and text.
| pen Office for an Editorial Committee was conceived of in collaboration with the National Young Writers’ Festival, who in early 2007 invited us to produce a nomadic, open-air magazine office operating for 3 days as part of This is Not Art. Staffed by a team of capable young writers, editors and designers from Voiceworks magazine, the office set up shop in a cosy corner of Newcastle’s Civic Park each afternoon of the festival, inviting the public to actively participate in producing and publishing the NYWF 07 anthology. On the final day, the office was converted into its own unique stall at the Zine and Independent Press Fair, where it distributed copies of the finished anthology.
Part performance, part collaborative magazine publication and part public sculpture, our living installation attracted a range of curious visitors interested in taking part in (or just observing) various aspects of the publication process, from producing their own submissions at purpose-built typewriter and cut-and-paste stations, to selecting content and organising layout at the picnic/conference table. |
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 udiences were also drawn into engaging with the space by the interactive nature of the office itself, consisting of a collection of hybrid objects clustered together in the dappled sunlight, shifting and changing configuration as new participants joined in, sprinklers were turned on, winds picked up, or production of the zine progressed to a new stage. These ambiguous, DIY objects were hand-made by hijacking familiar everyday artefacts (BBQs, trolleys, suitcases, picnic tables etc.) and transforming them into (mostly) functional travelling workspaces that enable a different way of using the city and its shared public spaces.
Open Office for an Editorial Committee was a collaboration between NYWF, Tessa Rapaport & Karl Logge (Makeshift), Voiceworks and Urchin. This project has been assisted by Next Wave and the Australian Government through the Australia Council. |
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 Read about Open Office in The Program |
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Hola! I’ve started posting more travel writing to Nomadology in the last few weeks, with a lot more coming. I’ve spent the last five months on the road, in NZ out bush then in Thailand, Laos and Cambodia with my brother Tim. Stories are over here, and photos are here.
And now that I’m back in Melbourne I’ve got two big new projects on the go. I’m now running the Asialink Literature Program, responsible for sending amazing Australian writers on residencies to different Asian countries, as well as jacking up book and author tours, publishing and translation projects, exhibitions and the like.
And I’m super excited to have landed a 15-month commission working as lead artist on a large-scale installation project for the 2010 Australian Regional Arts Conference in Launceston. It has a working title of A Map of a Dream of the Future, and centres around Tasmanian sense of place, climate change and resilience. We’re still in the conceptual stages at this point and don’t have a web presence yet, but it’s taking shape very quickly – over-excited details will be up here in the next couple of months.
In 2007 and 2008 I had the pleasure and privilege of co-directing the Australian National Young Writers Festival, the country’s biggest, rowdiest and most rigorous meeting of young, emerging and experimental literary minds. The NYWF takes place as part of the This Is Not Art (TiNA) festival, which adds independent musicians, journalists, artists, performers, activists, nerds and lovers-of-ginger-beer to the mix. It’s a combination of cutting-edge performances, panels, collaborations, experiments, workshops and parties. It’s unique because it’s aimed at an audience of creative practitioners, and not passive consumers. There are no spectators, with thousands of people making the pilgrimage from all over Australia for a five-day creative bender. Most of the guests and audience are in the 20-35 age bracket; far from the seas of white hair, book signings and celebrity author worship you might expect, the NYWF is a DIY, hands-on conversation between equals.
 Image by schizophonia The NYWF in 2007 featured 95 events and 230 guests, among them novelist Alice Pung, graphic novelist Shaun Tan, journalist and writer Anna Funder, freelance guru Anna Krien, Melbourne’s brilliant Black Lung Theatre, Sydney’s Brown Council and Post, Charles Firth from The Chaser, award-winning indigenous Darwin artist Chayni Henry, Adelaide columnist Clementine Ford, playwright David Mence, Young Novelist of the Year, Tasmanian Danielle Wood, Puberty Blues author Gabrielle Carey, senior Australian historian Henry Reynolds, blockbuster writer James Phelan, poet Judith Beverage, Brisbane artist Krista Berga, poet Sam Wagan Watson, and hundreds more.
It was a huge job curating this many artists and projects, but the results were utterly worth it. We explored the politics of telling other people’s stories, ran a literary journalism boot camp, put senior journalists in a room with the anarchist activists they write about in their papers, ran a huge DIY academy and NYWF 101 workshop series to get people making and doing on the spot, hooked up with international literary artists via video link, put on plays in local cafes, threw a massive balkan gypsy wedding party, read steamy late-night erotica, staged the country’s biggest independent press and zine fair, exhibited graphic art and comics from all over the country, and helped people stop writing their first novel.
Link: full NYWF 2007 program
Link: fully NYWF 2007 artist list
 Photo by Aggy K Some highlights from our 2007 program were:
Shaun Tan Masterclass: so well attended we had to change the venue and format to allow everyone access. Shaun presented on his creative process in conversation with Nicki Greenberg, the ethics and politics of representation in his work (Untold Stories), and spent the rest of the weekend hanging out with audiences and working on a series of collaborative panels with other artists upstairs in the Festival Club.
Smarter than your Average Bogan: White trash is the new black. From cashed-up bogans to Howard’s battlers, everyone wants a bit of bogue up ‘em. Join some of Australia’s most articulate white-trash they discuss stubbies, alcoholism, sluts, unions and other finer points of bogan culture. This one involved drinking UDLs, flashing tits, and a hugely heated discussion of class, pretention and self-image in Australian writing. Unlike anything she’d ever seen at a writers’ festival, Anna Funder wrote a great column about it in The Monthly.
Speechless: Spoken word gets mashed with sound and lights at the NYWF cross-platform performance showcase. From cross-dressing sound poetry bunnies to full-frontal audience intimidation, join Australia’s most innovative show-offs as they push the boundaries of what can be done with a microphone. Sam Wagan Watson and rising NT star Leah Flannigan got things going with intimate poetry and song, while Perth’s Tomas Ford tried to literally make love to the audience.
Independent Press and Zine Fair: Bring your wallet, your picnic blanket and cool things to swap down to Civic Park for Australia’s largest Zine and Independent publishing fair. Be delighted by table after table of amazing home-grown writing, illustration, comics, zines, badges, posters and more. Kick off with the spoken word champagne breakfast at 11am. Share your skills and learn some new ones at the DIY academy. Be punished for your writing sins with the Bad Writing PinÃta of Cathartic Shame. Or just bask in the sunshine and enjoy the afternoon of free entertainment on the Zine Fair stage.
Artextart Exhibition: Far from the bleak expanse of the blank page, words are spilling from the mouths, canvases, screens and speakers of contemporary Australian art. NYWF and Electrofringe present a nation-wide exhibition of visual, installation and sound art which takes and transforms the word. Discover the madness of life in a Darwin housing commission, find desire in the erasure of old books, control your world through Braille or lose yourself in the sound of words under extreme pressure. Come explore the intersection between language and form as we highlight the vibrancy of this exciting movement in contemporary art.
Mega Mega Launch: See the Festival Club transformed into the biggest small press showcase in the Southern hemisphere – and possibly anywhere, ever! Thirty-five publications will be launched at lightning speed: upstairs, downstairs, even under the stairs. Expect champagne, giveaways and spotlight-grabbing shenanigans. Run in the style of an award ceremony, this was a rapid-fire celebration of a huge range of exciting new books from around Australia’s vibrant independent and small press publishing scene. Amazing to see that many proud publishers and writers together in one place to cheer each other on.
Shooting the Messenger: Writing is a powerful expression of resistance. Presented by Sydney PEN, this discussion features authors who have experienced direct censorship. It looks at the current state of press freedom both internationally and closer to home, and what happens to dissenting voices in Australia. One of the closing sessions of the festival, this was highly anticipated and well attended, with extensive discussion from the floor. With sobering stories of direct experience from Abdul Hekmat and Mohsen Soltany Zand, plus clear analysis from Sarah Maddison, it gave excellent insight into how people have dealt with censorship in their own lives.
Radio Locus: Radio Locus is an immersive, site-specific sound project, generated through a series of recording, writing and editing workshops and broadcast via a swarm of custom-built micro-radios. Enter the field, write and record work on site, considering location through the lens of words and sounds, or the inverse. Recordings to be edited to contribute to the audio Pool and used for the Radio Locus broadcast mix.
CRACK: Melbourne’s anarchic Black Lung Theatre joins twisted Sydney geniuses Brown Council, Spat+Loogie and Post with four emerging writers to fulfil a highly dubious mission: disrupt the NYWF. Expect daily attacks on the smooth running of the festival – it could be fake discussion panels, fire-alarm evacuation dances or visits from the anti-terror squad. Except it won’t be. But when the volatile mix of theatre, video and sound finds you, you’ll know about it. This was one of the absolute highlights – I’ll post the specifics of this one on this blog.
Open Office for an Editorial Committee: Grab your elephant gun and go hunting for the elusive Open Office for an Editorial Committee. It’s a herd of nomadic furniture, a portable, self-powered, open-air magazine office, manned by trusty Voiceworks staff and open to all. Submit work now for inclusion in the NYWF 07 anthology, then work in the office to help select, edit, design and print the thing. Find out what goes into making a magazine by petting one in the wild! Again, another highlight that deserves its own entry. Stay tuned!
 Photo by Schizophonia  Photo by Comics Lifestyle Co-workers and partners in organisational crime: Kelly-lee Hickey, Tom Doig, Brea Acton, Laura McKay, Kelly Chandler, Rachel Morley, Andrew Morgan, Jadan Carroll, Brigitte Lewis, Tom Rigby, Ianto Ware, Kate Patterson
As well as working on curating the festival, running the organisation, sourcing its funding, overseeing its marketing and promotion and looking after a whole bunch of staff, I also built us a great big fat website. Just for something to do on the weekends!
Some more photos: search for This Is Not Art on Flickr.
Recreate your own highly subjective and strange version of the CLEAN sound installation online … using my custom-built audio mixing tool! The audio engine takes a couple of hundred samples of the raw audio used in the project and, using an audio mixing interface, allows you to play with the sounds of Melbourne during the 2006 Commonwealth Games. Explore stories from the street, fanfares and race commentary from past sporting glories, cleanups, protests and a whole bank of random ambient sounds recorded in Melbourne’s late-night laneways. See the image below for an explanation of how it works. For more about the CLEAN Project, see the main entry here.
Link: Clean Audio Engine v1.0
NB: audio samples are from raw recordings rather than the final processed clips used in the actual installation; the sound clips are also fairly large so requires a quick connection to work properly. Feedback welcome on how it runs for you – it’s a bit of an experiment with using Flash to deliver audio.
What are your neighbours doing late at night, behind closed doors? Come spy on them! In an eccentric perversion of Australia’s home security obsession, Insecurity System uses home security technology to reveal a suburban house’s darkest and most ridiculous secrets. Glimpse heaving flesh, overhear heated arguments, witness crazy parties or stumble across international terrorism conspiricies…
Insecurity System explores those great Australian traditions of ‘being a good neighbour’ and ’spying on your neighbour’ in the new global context of being alert and extremely alarmed. Using home security technology to expose rather than protect the artist’s own house, it pits our desire to see – raunchy voyeurism and political surveillance – against our desire to remain protected and invisible.
How it worked: I conducted a kind of benign surveillance on the house about a month before the show. We set up cameras outside in the street and filmed through the window, taking in everything from boring domestic scenes (as most surveillance actually is) to staged seductions and dubious late-night soldering sessions. The footage was then subtly manipulated and edited together, then projected onto screens in the windows by a row of projectors inside the house. The effect was that what you saw from the street, at least to start with, looked real. The proportions, scenes and characters were exactly what our voyeuristic audience were used to seeing through our windows, only this time made strange.
Insecurity System was in many ways an attempt to create dialogue in our neighbourhood about the community we live in, and an excuse to talk to our neighbours. On a domestic level, people constantly stop outside our house and stare in through our windows. It’s right on the street so it was logical to put on a show for them. IS was also staged around a time of increased surveillance and policing of the Coburg and Brunswick Muslim communities, and a wider international context of nation-states becoming increasingly concerned about their neighbours (e.g. bombing of Lebanon, war in Iraq). We mixed all of these elements into the work, and spent the show itself out in the street talking to and documenting the responses of passers-by.
The show was partly for its festival audience, but mostly for the locals who walk past the house every night.’
Website: Insecurity System
Awards: Melbourne Fringe Festival 2006 Visual Arts Category – Highly Commended; Melbourne Fringe Festival 2006 Visual Arts Touring Prize.
Reworked as: Insecurity System II in Adelaide, on North Terrace opposite the State Library.
Thanks to: Claire Slattery, Laura McKay, Stephen Mushin, Teya Deller, Tom Doig, Col Johnson, Amy Spiers, Victoria Stead, Asha Bee and Ben Fox.
Factory 7 was one of those things that occurs when the right mix of people, at the right time, in the right space, go ‘pop’. From its humble beginnings as a giant concrete factory with a pool of mouldy water in one corner, to providing a home to some of Melbourne’s most vibrant musicians, designers and artists, it was an amazing space to be a part of.
Tucked away down a laneway in East Brunswick behind the building that’s now 3RRR, it was rented from an elderly Polish gentleman by a bunch of RMIT graduates, friends and family including Jim (Spoonbill) and Jack (owner of bar 303) Moynihan, Stephen Mushin and Tom Anderson. I moved in around the end of 2004 and had a studio until 2006, and was lucky enough to share the space with the likes of Nadiele Kolb and Teya Deller of fashion label Since Grey, musician, sound artist and industrial designer Jim Moynihan aka Spoonbill, film-maker and graphic designer Jonathan Chong, music video director Anto Skene, scientist and sculptor Jodie McCleery, industrial designer / puppeteer / mad inventor / educator Stephen Mushin, industrial designer, illustrator and skate guru Richard Keddell and many others. Being surrounded by that many people who were all making, doing and creating without a second thought was a pretty important experience for me, fresh off the boat from NZ that I was!
 
In summer we’d all sit around in our undies with fans and spray bottles. In winter you’d find us at our desks with puffer jackets, fingerless gloves and a heater clamped between our knees. As well as dozens of projects, it’s played host to some legendary parties including the massive ‘Factory 7 does Miami Vice’, which featured a disgusting danceoff throwdown battle to the death between some of Melbourne’s indy magazines. (Note for posterity: writers, editors and designers can’t dance. We won because we cheated and roped in friends Anna Lumb and Marawa Ibrahim!)
 
It all came to an end when we rearranged the space and set up computers in the rooms that had previously been bedrooms. Jim’s monitors flickered so badly he thought they were broken, bought some new ones and thought they were broken too. The shop sent them back saying there was nothing wrong with them and advised us to get the place tested for electromagnetic radiation. A guy from the power company came in, took one look at the reading and said “you guys have to move out.” Radiation levels were 100 times the world health authority recommended safe limit thanks to unshielded power cables running through the slab. But because the Australian legal limit is 1000 times the recommended WHO limit, there was nothing we could do. Goodbye Factory 7 …
If any ex-F7 crew have photos or stories, let me know. I thought it’d be good to archive it!
Photos of a Factory 7 party featuring the Shapeshifter DJs.
Shapeshifter are one of New Zealand’s best-loved bands, with a world-wide following for their jazz-influenced live drum & bass. I’ve partied to their music for years, and it was an honour to be invited to build them a website. In creating a web presence for them, I worked with the twin concepts of their organic, shifting, instrumental approach to their music, and the hard-edged, technical drum and bass aesthetic that holds it all together. To that end, the website is a kind of organic layout engine, with a library of shapes, textures and colours being recombined on the fly to create a different look each and every time you visit. Laid over the top of this shifting background is the majority of the content, its contrasting colours and hard-edged, angular feel intended to capture the digital element in their sound.
Oh, and it’s also a great big pile of shifting shapes.
Client: Shapeshifter Music
Online: 2005 – current.
Website: shapeshifter.co.nz
 CLEAN was an ambush-style audio installation, bringing the dirty side of Melbourne to life in the midst of the sparkling white 2006 Commonwealth Games. As part of the 2006 Next Wave Festival, CLEAN explored what it means to scrub up a city in the name of sport.
From 15 March- 2 April 2006, CLEAN took the roar of the crowd, the breathless excitement of victorious athletes and the sparkling spokespersons’ speeches out of their official context, and hid them amongst the bins and cobbles of one of Melbourne’s best-known laneways. A cluster of hidden speakers in Hosier Lane celebrated the stories of the homeless, embarrassing doping scandals, fierce protests and the drunken revelry of tourists alongside sound-bites, speeches and anthems.
The material for CLEAN was taken from several months of lurking in the central city, working with the incredible Urban Seed and their Credo Cafe, getting to know the locals, recording their stories and keeping track of the police and security movements as the Games approached. The soundscapes of Australia’s Olympic and Commonwealth Games glory we used to juxtapose life on the street came from the ABC’s sound archives, going all the way back to the 1930s.
CLEAN aimed to stimulate dialogue amongst locals and visitors alike on what kind of a city people want to live in. CLEAN contrasted who was placed on a podium with the people who were swept under the carpet.
As part of the ‘clean-up’ of the city, we also took the liberty of wallpapering a significant chunk of Hosier Lane. We covered the famous graffiti with a custom-made pattern featuring a royal golden crest made from the bodies of athletes, over a deep red background containing drawings of unutterable filth.
 CLEAN project wallpaper sample For CLEAN we also created a 30-minute broadcast work, commissioned by the ABC Features and Documentaries Unit and broadcast nationwide on JJJ and Radio National’s The Night Air during the Commonwealth Games. I’ll post it up here when I get a chance to dig it out of the archives and turn it into an mp3.
The hardware for the project was generously hosted by Andy Mac of City Lights fame.
Role: Concept, artistic direction, web design, project management
Genius guru collaborators: Stephen Mushin, Jim Moynihan aka Spoonbill.
Funding from: Next Wave Festival, Australia Council for the Arts, ABC.
 Disembodied voices in Hosier Lane  Victorian Police playing with the CLEAN project's motion sensor triggers. Continue reading CLEAN Project 2006
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