Just a little thing.

This is a sketch for a larger work, The Mountain Eater, that hasn’t happened yet.

It (the sketch) is going to be in a show at Constance ARI called Constantly Inflight, a show of recent work by board members and staff, past and present in both the ARI’s incarnations: Constance AKA Inflight.

It’s just a little thing about 33 x 23cm (framed), watercolour over inkjet printed on watercolour paper and I’m putting it up for a silent auction to raise money for the gallery. So if you like it a lot – BID ON IT and help out a gallery, run mostly by volunteers, that offers you great new and experimental art to see for FREE.

The show opens on Saturday July 12 Thursday July 10 and continues til 2 August with the auction taking place on opening night. Lots of really interesting artists have sat on the Constance/Inflight board over the years which should make for a cool show and possibly some art-shopping bargains.

Yum. Art bargains. Come on over.

AIR BHS 2014

Me grades 7 and 10. Got older. Wore more eyeliner.

Matt Warren and I have just completed a 6 week residency in Burnie (accompanied by now 4 year old Arthur) as a part of the AIR program developed by arts@work in partnership with the Australia Council for the Arts.

Burnie is the town where we were both born and raised and Burnie High School (where we ‘resided’) is the school we both attended through grades 7 – 10. I completed in 1986, Matt in 1987.

There’s a blog we’ve been keeping (and will continue to keep) – Room Fifty Eight where you can check in on our North West Coast exploits. We went focussed on the project as a hauntological one and I’m excited by the edge of nostalgic environmentalism that our hauntology has developed. Ideas were explored both singularly and in collaboration with a view to developing new material, hence us returning to Hobart with much to still be completed or realised. But it’s been fertile. You could grow quality spuds in our brains right now.

If you haven’t checked it out, please do.

We are so thankful to arts@work (Wendy Morrow in particular), Burnie High School and our NW contingent of family and friends who all combined to make it so easy for our small family to be there and for Matt and I to take a happy stab at collaborating again. It’s been great.

The Pickup Artists – till June 1

It has been very remiss of me not to post about this show (among other things). It’s been a big project (in cahoots with the marvellous Mish Meijers) and we are both very proud of it. It’s an art-manifestation of our quest for contact with paranormal entities and features a collaborative sequence of works as well as individual artists ‘rooms’ in the gallery at Contemporary Art Tasmania. There is a work that screens at night on the front of the building as well. If you’re in Hobart and have the opportunity, it’s on till June 1. Get in there. Neenish.

(documentation coming soon for those of you from elsewhere…)

STAB

It’s finally finished! Thanks to all involved: band, lads/dancers and Nancy the Dance Mistress.

Allow me to present STAB, the single from M.0.1.0.‘s album 1.0-SYMPT0MS to be released June 28, 2013 on vinyl via Rough Skies Records roughskiesrecords.blogspot.com.au/, cassette via Sonoptik  & download/CD-R via M010 Music .

Video by ME!

If you’ll be in Hobart on Friday you should DEFINITELY come to the album launch, 9pm @ The Brisbane Hotel.

What fun we’ll have…

Winter like a MOFO

If you check in here with any regularity you might remember earlier this year I participated in the incredible MONAFOMA (or MOFO) festival (that we are so lucky to have here) for the first time as a part of the No Mates Ensemble. It had been a long time since I had done any live performance and that was a real hoot, so when I was invited to take part in the third incarnation of Sound to Light, a kind of blind-date collaboration project, I thought I’d like to try doing something live again and this time I wanted to do some spoken word. After making that bold decision, the stakes for this rose somewhat with the announcement that THIS Sound to Light would be staged as a part of the considerably more high-profile DARK MOFO, the inaugural dark twin to our usual Summer event. So eep. A slightly bigger step than I was ready for but I’m diving in.

My blind date is musician, composer and electro-savant Rod Berry and with us both dreading the coming Winter it seemed our meetings were full of sniffles, common cold remedies, soup recipes and whatnot. As a result what has developed is a performed incantation of protection against the coming big freeze, collaged and extracted from siginfiers of warmth and comfort: soups, knitting patterns, Beach Boys songs.

I’ve been working on a system that will randomise my cut-up text and feed it back to me like an autocue. First I designed an app, but it turned out I was not able to actually install it without paying an annual developers fee to Apple. $99US per annum. As someone with little to no interest in developing apps for distribution, my response was: sod that and BOOOOOOOO.

But I’m liking the perfomance aesthetic of the phone which is considerably different to, and I think perhaps a little more ‘present’ than, laptop performance so I’m sticking with it and have translated my app instead into a phone-scaled website. I’m getting really interested now in the idea of developing my own  ‘performance tools’ (something musos have done for a long time) and have designed it so it will cast a warm glow over my face as I recite the generated incantation. This gif here is kind of a mockup of an early draft design and it’s ended up not too dissimilar.

In the meantime Rod’s having fun with Fair Isle and I’m getting really excited as we start to pull it all together. The event will happen @ Salamanca Arts Centre (Hobart) and Fed Sqare (Melbourne) with a bit of the old web simulcast between the two locations , Saturday June 15, 6pm.

Maybe see you there? MOFOs?

AAA

I’m currently referring to this experiment as Arms for Animating Architecture. I think these limbs are calling out to anthropomorphise a building somewhere with their twinkle-fingers and superpowers projected up nice and large.

The twinkle-fingers, sadly, are possibly a little too subtle in movement to read through the animation… I dunno, what do you think?
Bigger movements from now on in anything destined for overpainting I think…

Vanitas revisited

In an interesting turn of events since beginning work on my video archive I was contacted in February by Berlin-based Dane, Jens Christian Madsen about using an older work of mine, Vanitas 100 (from 13 years ago!!! Is that possible!?!), in a clip for his band/project Tjaere+Fjer‘s song Faking It All.

As a video within a video it will appear without Jamie Kiffiak’s deliciously soporific voiceover, but it’s quite exciting to think something from so long ago has some life. I was intruiged by the directors synopsis and am really looking forward to seeing the finished piece which must be in production AS I TYPE!

I made it while living in Vancouver, Canada in 2000 and there are a lot of things I would do differently now, but I still like the 100 freakishly differing self-portraits taken with a Nintendo Gameboy camera and anyone who’s really UP with everything I do will recognise Jamies script as having been re-used for 2011’s A Pack of Lies and indeed was the concept model for ALL the scripts from that work.

You can hear Tjaere+Fjer’s latest release II including Faking It All here.

This is a video for an earlier track Away which I quite dig too. Retro sounding electronica with 80’s mumbles.