it’s a little blog, just new, but there are lots of beautiful things on it, lovely ideas that make me hold my breath and can’t wait to do things and make things, let’s do this and that, let’s run headlong down the side of a hill, let’s read things and swap them word for word, tell eachother ideas, how do i find that out, let me see, show me whatcha got, leap this way, follow me i have an idea, lick my brains, are we there yet?

Wednesday 2nd April
Struggling on the streets and in the courts: The G20 Defence Campaign
7pm Newtown Neighbourhood Centre

Thirteen people arrested and charged with riot following the G20 protest in Melbourne in
2006 have resolved to fight the charges. Desperate to get convictions, and try to divide
the defence campaign, the Victorian Director of Public Prosecutions had offered a deal to
all 23 people charged with riot - to plead guilty in return for a guarentee that there would
be no custodial sentence.

In a shock decision Akin Sari, one of the protestors, has been sentenced to two years and
four months jail (with a non-parole period of 14 months) after pleading guilty to 9 charges
including assault and riot.

Solidarity is hosting a discussion Wed 3rd April about how the courts are being used to curtail civil rights,
and how ‘drop the charges’ campaigns have been used by previous movements to defend
the right to protest.

“It refers to a practice in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s when dissidents who wanted to bring banned Western music into Russia would go to hospital trash cans, secure already exposed X-ray film and then press a master disk onto the X-rays to make floppy records,” Cadava said. “They were called ‘music on bones’ because the grooves were on images of chest cavities and spinal columns.”

Music on bones, some audio to listen to, somehow related to Eduado Cadava’s “small book on the relation between music and techniques of reproduction, memorization, and writing.”

…and we’ve got plenty of mushrooms! It’s a saga that has gone on for years. About a leaky roof in a rented house and supremely recalcitrant real estate property managers. Have a look at this darling video my intrepid flatmates made…

the crazy 15 year old* leak in our house

hmm, living on borrowed time anyone?

*When a roof repairs person comes round to your house to inspect a leak, and says “Hmm, I remember fixing a leak in this roof…15 years ago”, what springs to mind? Hope eternal? Granted, it may be a different leak in the roof, but still…

is lonely and terrifying. and silly. why do i have to run around this confusing campus with a pink form for recalcitrant heads of schools to sign, on the first day, where the admin people all sign in exasperation, or look at me funny when i ask for room locations? Important people whose names I can’t remember correctly, directions i forget as soon as i’m told, I don’t think I’ve felt this out of water ever. It’s a very new feeling. I’m feeling it very keenly.

I’m reeling a bit at today’s intro lecture to interactive multimedia. It’s a deep end with a stack of returning 2nd and 3rd years all seemingly fluent in actionscript and flash, and boy am i scared of asking a silly question! However, the lecturer seems well versed in dry computer humour and dad jokes, which is heartwarming, and i think this will be an interesting subject.

Now I’m going to get all industrious and mature-age on yo asses, and post some things I’ve found from homework links, like this artwork using generative grammar software:

Echelon

This work was made in response to a call by Metamute (London) for Jam Echelon Day 2001. It simply employs all the words stored in the Echelon system in a program that automatically generates texts using whatever dictionary it has available.

Whenever a user moves their mouse over a text it will automatically re-write itself as a new text. It will then e-mail that text to a random e-mail address (this last e-mailing component of the work is currently disabled, but will be enabled by the artist at the appropriate time - the effect will be to flood the net with echelon sensitive messages at the rate of hundreds per minute, depending on user interaction).

Echelon is the worldwide signals intelligence network run by the US National Security Agency and the UK Government Communications Headquarters in collaboration with Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Echelon uses large ground-based radio antennae in the United States, Italy, the UK, Turkey, New Zealand, Canada, Australia, and several other countries to intercept satellite transmissions and some surface traffic, as well as employing satellites to tap transmissions between cities.

Echelon is reportedly capable of interecepting large portions of the world’s communications, including phone conversations, email and SMS. It uses dictionaries to search for keywords that various security services consider to be of interest. Under the ECHELON system, a particular station’s dictionary computer contains not only its parent agency’s chosen keywords, but also a list for each of the other four agencies. Each station collects all the telephone calls, faxes, telexes, emails, internet traffic and other communications that pass through it and compares them against this list of keywords.
- Simon Biggs, artist’s statement

and this one too!

Mitozoos: Mitozoos is an interactive artificial life model created with the objective that through experimentation and play participants will understand tgohe relationship between genetic code and life. The work presents an interface that allows participants to create virtual organisms, called ‘mitozoos’, essentially encoding their DNA, and then witness the evolution of those organisms in a simulated, biological universe.