What started out as a flippant suggestion shortly before class 2 days ago has suddenly turned into an impossible task. In my enthusiasm to challenge vb to match me post for post, I forgot the overwhelming stupor that engulfs me during assingment deadline, and then, all these myriad other things to do! So, I must concede defeat, but I will promise, like vb did, to be back soon, and report on all these “myriad things”. Like, the protein folding game, for instance.

dogtired. my eyes are scratchy and it’s one of those 1.18am sitting up on the couch moments. a couple of glasses of wine and some marvelling at the pretty sights that rage is throwing up for general viewing. I think The Killers are turning out to be the Mardi Gras float they always wanted to be. Intriguing, the singer is costumed in a red bodysuit, part astronaut, part american footballer, part, well, he has a lot of feathers, enough to be interpreted as part amer-indian influence, rather than some general gaudery. Also, there’s plenty of other americal colonial references with cowboy hats etc in the video, but it’s all a bit too fashionably random to be anything like politically conscious or maybe, um like political analysis?
Yinka Shonibare does it so much better.
Tonight I came home in a downpour. I’ve been volunteering at the MCA for a week, for a Blast Theory gig called Rider Spoke. I realised today that pronunciation changes everything. io’ve been putting the emphasis on the first syllable, - Rider Spoke - but when I hear Ju say it - Rider Spoke - somehow it sounds a little more profound, a little more emphasis on this idea of the rider, and what they have to say. Rider spoke quiet stories between the streets, and the listener heard something between the stories, something unsaid, but covered up by something else.

Another profound thing is that Laika has found a mouse. Which is great, and entertaining for her, but rather inconvenient as it’s 2am and she’s barking. dear reader, I’ll leave you here, and try and calm the furrchild down, and shoo the mouse to relative safety.

I remember reading once that it is still not understood how the giraffe manages to pump an adequate blood supply all the way up to its head; but it is hard to imagine that anyone would therefore conclude that giraffes do not have long necks - Robert Solow

Quoted in Mankiw, G. (2006) “The Macroeconomist as Scientist and Engineer”. Available at: So, everything is possible. there remains an imperative to dream like a giraffe. i wonder how big a giraffe’s heart is? hmm, that would be definitely procrastinating. oh, they are beautiful and noble animals, with their piny blue drool swaying in the breeze.

A quick list of intriguing and/or useful things (not my most eloquent post):

one: The international children’s digital library!
I have read 1 book so far: The Blue Sky which is heartbreakingly beautiful and not one of those stories about making everything nice and happy for the children.

two: An online collection of 19th century concealed hearing devices! Curiously, while there are timelines up to the present of the development of hearing device technology, and histories of clinical institutions for the deaf, there’s no links to any deaf culture sites. Like, it’s all down one path of medical research, patents and breakthroughs, and no acknowledgement that people might create their own communities or solutions for living outside of a medical discourse.

three: quintura - a visual search engine that builds a word cloud as you search. nice.

four: base camp - a free web based project management tool. I might be getting more exicted about the tools than the content though.

five: web directions south - good resource spot for web tools and skillz.

six: palabras_ digital archive, community collaboration project, beautiful interface, counterhegemonic design.

look what google is doing now!

http://www.project10tothe100.com/index.html

from metadata harvesting to ideas harvesting under the charity rhetoric of helping people!

oh my!

maybe I should enter.

Enjoying the recombinant aesthetics of blood and piss - a personal, monthly observance - bends my mind to situations where this is ok(in private toilet cubicles; in the comfort of your woan home; bdsm play parties;) and where it is not (in public; as commercially compeditive art; enjoying). I hasten to add that I don’t mean this monthly bleeding is a divine right, a special woamnly thing. It might be a regular physical occurence for me, but lots of other people deal with this as work, in their social lives, daily bodily functioning, as queer desires, as consequences of violence, midwifery, various medical and or spiritual practices…the list could be as long as my arm (runs down my leg).

I’m not sure i’m a very good storyteller - each step of the way I like to shine a torch down other paths, wonder if they ever hook up again, imply whole other journeys with a syllable. Writing a report for uni yesterday reminded me of the shimmeringness of dreaming and how I like to think and dream while I’m reading. This is the quality that I want my writing to have, except I have a lot of psychological blocks to writing assessments these days and really struggle to complete simple assignments.

But…a recent art exhibition opening for “Avatar”, (at the Australian Centre for Photography) included an installation called “Havidol”, a spoof on lifestyle marketing of medication, featuring lots of images of conservative happy shiny white heteros with clean hair and teeth, and tennis. My younger sister made a surprise appearance as their interactive performative art - dressed as a Prozac nurse in trendy stilettos doling out mints from a large glass jar with a dental mirror. She works for ACP so her role may have more to do with the actual gallery’s value added production effort than part of the official artwork. I grimace when I think about this work, because it was boring and the kind of culture jamming that is no longer contentious, and there’s my sister having a ball dressing up and embodying a gentle critique of the feminised history of the nursing profession, and codes of feminine conduct in today’s late capitalist world.

Shortly after seeing her, I met a fine arts lecturer who made the unfortunate social gaffe of admitting her concerns that young artists today are discovering (20 year old) new media technique/ performance art as though they are the first to do so: “and you think, are they doing it for the right reasons?” An odd thing to say, but certainly related to what I was thinking. New media art history perhaps hasn’t been old enough to warrant codifying and retrieving “lost history”; indeed, perhaps they don’t want to be historicised or drawn into a grand narrative; the stuff and value of temporal artworks is often the inability to record them in halls of of the academe…maybe it’s even zooming ahead and can’t wait for academics to catch up?

Anyway, more platitudes later. For now, a provocative epithet: There is nothing so practical as a good theory, from a curiously named conference site: Balisage

Sometimes a simile becomes incredibly popular, and seems to crop up everywhere. Like this one “holding back the ocean with a broom”, a feature of Mark Scott’s (ABC’s managing director) contributions to the 20/20 debates & fora. From Axel Bruns’ blog Produsage.org

A similar thing surfaced a few weeks ago, different friends described difficult tasks as akin to “pushing shit/water up a hill with a broom/ fork”.

Reminds me of the old favourite “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic”. There’s something nice about getting all poetic on impossibilities and difficulties.

A little walk I took a couple of years ago…

Night time

I went out walking and the cats watched me
All through the back of Newtown along the trainline
On top of terrace walls and under cars
Their heads turned silently or not at all
And I strolled, marvelling at the orange light
And purple dimples of the clouds.
(more…)

gee, sometimes i feel like i came down in the last shower… but look at this! it’s really exciting, or hopefully at least it will be endearing to people who saw it the first time it came out and did the rounds…

They Rule allows you to create maps of the interlocking directories of the top companies in the US in 2004.
The data was collected from their websites and SEC filings in early 2004, so it may not be completely accurate - companies merge and disappear and directors shift boards.

from the friendly neighbourhood newmedia filter

so, like, i’m new to video games, but this one is beautiful! and i have to share it straightaway! you start out like a little strip of salmon bone hieroglyph, and you float around and get quite lost. you also eat things, which changes your shape and how you view the world, and, well, it’s about flow…via detritus