furtherfield blog

I was discussing with a friend the vitality of the postcolonial debate, the viability of a discussion where we looked into many of the wars of today as remnants or consequences of the colonial rule, the division of the world by a few super powers and the control of strategic resources. Not only oil, but drinkable water, harbours, metals, food, woods. By mail I got a letter from some Palestine activists. They belong to Al Awda, an organization working for the right of return and supporting Palestine children in the refugee camps. They had received a letter from some Canadian activists who wrote about the Algonquin nation and their struggle with the Canadian law. The Algonquin don't want let their lands digged for uran and other metals, they feel they are the caretakers of the land and not the owners.

This morning I finished translating the last text for a catalogue for an exhibition in Berlin. A group exhibition. A special group exhibition: a "family" exhibition. Working on the catalogue texts, I was amused and intrigued by the different ways in which the authors attempted to come to terms with the idea of "family" and an entire five-person family of artists exhibiting their work together.

As more and more personal memories began floating to the surface of my mind, though, I began to wonder if it really does justice to this group to consider them as a more or less isolated phenomenon, a kind of anomaly, without the context in which they live and work. Because the reason why I translated these texts is that I share that same context, and working on these texts made me more aware of how important this context is.

this evening i've been enjoying the lunar eclipse, amongst other things. here in brisbane we saw it as a beautiful deep dark orangey-red colour, i have never seen such a bloody moon before! it was obscured from time to time by cloud but for a lot of the evening it was very clear. soon after 9pm it started to go back to normal, with the brilliant white contrasting dramatically against the blood colour. apparently it wasn't so colourful everywhere - my brother in karamea said there was a shadow but no red.

My 16 year-old sister got her exam results this week. She did brilliantly well, and the whole family were celebrating with her this weekend. Everyone was jubilant, especially as she had often been told by her teachers that she wasn't trying hard enough, that she was going to fail (particularly in sciences) - which she eventually aced.

Someone brought out the newspaper and triumphantly pointed out her school, which came number 4 in the league tables of state schools for GCSE results. I then heard her speaking about the other students in her class. She knew what each of them had got, and rattled them off: 'Alistair got 5 A's, 3 B's and a C, the same as Corrie and James, Ellie got 7 A*'s and two A's, the bitch...' then finally this degenerated into 'She got 2 more A*'s than me, but she's got a huge arse, and I know I did well and everything, but all my friends did too and they're thin!'. I should point out that my sister is a beautiful size, perfectly normal and healthy for her age.

inane story on the radio -- dancing around the pop-media-has-discovered-the-promotional-hype-of-ubiquitous-computing-research (still?) -- about the installment of sensors on house plants that will send wifi info about their condition.

who sets up this network? who maintains it? who interacts with it? when and why is it interacted with? under what conditions is it necessary to interact with it? or is it ever necessary to interact with it? those people who are so interested in spreading digital networks somehow forget the necessity of deployment, installation, configuration, and, especially, maintenance. not to mention the actual (life-)time necessary to interact with the data being gathered, tweaking it if necessary or even possible to a form that is understandable and useable to the idiosyncratic self, NOT the generic Everyman (who is the Grail of the data collectors).

*

Struggling home along the trolley-wobbling pavement of Green Lanes in North London. Dank, gray skies and chaotic, always-divergent, multicultural masses are in sharp contrast to the rarefied air of the mountains of Banff. Where friendly participants clustered around shared interests, to learn, exchange and muck about together. This rare pleasure is very sweet but probably has to be temporary, because the point is to make connections with difference, across distance and then to maintain and explore the creative potentials of those connections...No?

i've always fancied the idea of a tail, and last night my dream came true. out with a group of artists on our ponies for a gallery crawl, i was secretly admiring and coveting the impressive long black swishing tail of one of our company, nonnatus. after some time i plucked up the courage to compliment him on his appendage, which it turns out he made himself, and he generously offered to give me one. i leapt at the opportunity & promptly attached it to my pelvis. (second) life is so much more fun with a tail. however it detaches every time i wear my pony, & when i dismount i have to reattach it, which is pretty annoying.

Calls for support have been circulating around various related mailing lists for several weeks now, and I hope that many, many people will sign the online petitions calling for the suspension of §129a proceedings and the release of those imprisoned in Germany: open letter
The charges against Andrej H. are especially outrageous and clearly pose a threat to the freedom of academic research and political engagement, and a wave of protests has responded accordingly. I wholeheartedly support these efforts on the basis of my own political convictions, but also for personal reasons.

Marc and I are here in Banff for Interactive Screen 0.7- User Friendly is Not Enough.
The mountains are huge, and all around us, the food is excellent and the programme is an ambitious exploration and critique of web 2.0 by curators, artists, software-developers, game-developers, entrepreneurs, lawyers. A full programme of talks runs alongside an 'intensive' workshop for 14 scholars developing new projects with the support of their peers.

brisbane's winter is so benign, comparable to a mild dunedin summer; we eat dinner on the deck every night and most days are clear blue skies, t-shirt weather. i wonder why more people don't have solar panels on their rooves, there's so much sunshine. in the mornings and evenings i smell smoke from the controlled burn-offs - attempting to avoid devastating bush-fires that are actually part of the environmental cycle; the seeds of some trees can't germinate without the intense heat of a fire.

Well after my long absence due to the (not uncommon) convergence of biological and digital dysfunction it is good to be back and very heartening to discover that the recent hack is as annoying to everyone else here as it to us. Thanks for your solidarity FFbloggers!
Well it's mixed... the usual... of feeling like a simpleton/mug for 'allowing' it to happen and then a dogged drudge approach takes over, resigning oneself to endless conversations with other grafters in our loose team, who heroically maintain a positive mental attitude in the face of trawling for digital needles in code-haystacks. We do like to keep our processes reasonably open so that more of us can experiment with new tech- it's the whole point of things- but then so many people are involved in sorting things out when it goes wrong.

i've been waiting for this blog to get its style formatting back before i post but i realise it's a bit silly to wait. the default blue links, times font and uncomplicated white background are refreshing and slightly nostalgic. remember back in the old days when just about all links where blue and underlined? the content is still the same, without the packaging : )

i'm back in brisbane and have been blissfully horizontal for large amounts of the last week: long sleep-ins, lying on the grass reading, lying on the grass examining the clouds, lying underneath piles of small boys, lying in the spa and sauna at the korean baths ... mmmm. alas, it can't last. before i've had time to get bored, i've got to get vertical again. that's right, i'm enrolled in full-time studies! i remember vaguely, something about cyberformance?

Flickr says Celeste considers me a friend
Twitter says Celeste left her didgeridu in Vienna
Flickr says Celeste likes my picture
irc says the didgeridu was found in Vienna

How many bits and pieces of communication have to be collected, how many moments of a day and stray thoughts need to be exchanged for two people who just met to become friends?

The log files for this blog show that various dubious, non-approved "users" attempt to log in over and over and over again, every day, all day long. If comments were permitted from anyone, with or without an account, approved or not, it is not difficult to imagine how quickly this blog would be overrun with garbage. As it is, the garbage is – just – kept at bay.

Could it have been one of these obnoxious purveyors of garbage that felt pissed off at being kept at bay and decided to cause more serious damage in retaliation? I somehow doubt that the garden variety spammers who show up in the blog log files would bother to make that much effort, but the wanton wastefulness of indiscriminate spamming has often made me angry enough that my imagination quickly spins a lurid tale of gratuitous destruction. The kind of destruction I would like to inflict on disruptive purveyors of garbage.

To ask this question, one is actually asking two simultaneous questions. The first of the two is: "What are the differences between performance art and the performing arts", and the second being "What is the difference between performance art in the physical and in Second Life?" To draw these distictions is to make addressing the issue much more manageable.

QUESTION 1: The Difference between Performance and Performing

UpStage V2 has been launched & so far it's all good, i am feeling pretty tired but satisfied : ) the exhibition looks great & the festival promises to be an amazing day.

You can pop in on the exhibition any time by going to http://upstage.org.nz:8084/stages/babayaga - this stage is live in the gallery during opening hours (NZ time, 9-5 monday to thursday, 9-7 on fridays & 4-7 on saturdays) for the next two weeks.