City Talks 2013 – What Creative Life do You Want for #Sydney? [#geekgirl]

[Via @AliaK]

What creative life do you want for Sydney?

Great cities’ reputations are built on their cultural life and Sydney is no exception.

From the museums, galleries, theatres and concert halls to street art, small bars, shops and hole-in-the-wall venues – some of the best things about Sydney are bound up in its cultural life.

How can we inspire an even richer creative culture? How do we support creative people to live and work here? And how can we encourage people to go out to shows or invest in local work?

Hear from Carol Coletta, CEO, Artplace America, about how Artplace changed culture and creative communities across the US and what Sydney could learn from the experience.

A panel of creative leaders and innovators will debate the opportunities and practical steps we could take to inspire a more creative Sydney.

Tell us what creative life you want for Sydney.
sydneyyoursay.com.au/creativecity
#creativecitysyd

MC: Adam Spencer
SMH INTRODUCTION: Sherrill Nixon, Director, Sydney Newsroom Operations, Fairfax Media
GUEST INTRODUCTION: Richard Roxburgh
WELCOME: Lord Mayor Clover Moore
KEYNOTE: Carol Coletta, CEO, ArtPlace America

DISCUSSION PANEL
Marcus Westbury, Founder and Director, Renew Australia
Nicole Durling, Senior Curator, Museum of Old and New Art (MONA)
Katherine Hough, Director, Arts Tasmania
Louise O’Donnell, Digital Director, Seed Production
Charles Firth, CEO, Manic Studios and co-founder,The Roast

Wednesday, 10 April 2013
6.30-8pm
State Theatre, 49 Market Street, Sydney

Transport
Rail: Town Hall Station or St James Station
Bus: George, Druitt and York Streets
Bike: Valet bike parking located on Pitt Street near the corner of Market Street from 5.30–9pm

Accessibility
Auslan interpreter services and live captioning for this event can be arranged on request. For these or other access enquiries please contact the City of Sydney on 9265 9333. This venue is wheelchair accessible.

Podcast
You can also watch a podcast of the event soon after here.

Visit sydney2030.com.au for information on our sustainability projects.

The Perils of #Doublethink [#geekgirl]

“How are you to imagine anything if the images are always provided for you?

Who here read ’1984′ last year?…[Doublethink is] …to deliberately believe in lies while knowing they’re false. Examples of this in everyday life: “Oh I need to be pretty to be happy. I need surgery to be pretty. I need to be thin, famous, fashionable.

Our young men today are being told that women are whores, bitches, things to be screwed, beaten, shit on and shamed.

This is a marketing holocaust. 24-hours a day, for the rest of our lives, the powers that be are hard at work dumbing us to death. So, to defend ourselves and fight against assimilating this dullness into our though processes we must learn to read: to stimulate our own imaginations, to cultivate our own consciousness, our own belief-systems. We all need these skills – to defend, to preserve, our own minds.”

#femalepressure: An Urgent Call for #Female Representation [#geekgirl]

“Let’s be frank – enough is enough. femalepressure believes there is no justification for more male-dominated music events. We need – and paying audiences deserve – invigorating and entertaining diversity!

Festival curators, sponsors, label owners, journalists: Give more opportunities to women!
Female festival curators, sponsors, label owners, journalists: Don’t try to be the better men by only taking ‘risks’ on established, male artists! Give more women a chance!

We look forward to your response and positive developments in this cultural sector in the future. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions regarding this issue.

Here’s to a brighter future for the arts.”

The Perfect #SXSW Troll [#geekgirl]

Like any major hybrid cultural event that jumps the shark and decides to evolve into what’s essentially a hipsterised parody of itself, #SXSW has been inverting from its original incarnation for years and sequentially de-evolving into a muddled coolhunting mess. So when AllThingsD reported on this glorious play containing yams and oily-networking-sycophants, it just had to be applauded:

In the weeks leading up to SXSW, a series of mysterious packages started being sent out to companies of import and some journalists. The contents included a set of instructions and one single, neatly wrapped object: A yam.

Those who received the yams in the mail — from “Yamtrader.com” were pitched on a new startup that, basically, sold itself as “an online marketplace for yam enthusiasts and traders.” It was absurd.

Yet attendees were encouraged to bring their yams to South By, where they could be traded in for a $50 AmEx gift card.

What they found when they reached South By on Sunday morning wasn’t a booth full of potato lovers. It was Tri-Net.

What is Tri-Net? It’s a 25-year-old cloud services company that deals with HR, payroll and IT backend issues for smaller startups, who may have a good idea for a company, but have little backend business acumen. It’s pretty big, too; it’s home to more than 1,500 employees, and works with upwards of 7,000 clients.I get it… IT and payroll services are about as exciting as attending an enterprise conference after taking a Xanax. So you have to resort to guerilla, somewhat unconventional marketing tactics to get noticed on occasion.

But Tri-Net did them one better. Theirs is a sort of meta-commentary on startup marketing on the whole, a tongue-in-cheek gesture on the stupidity of some single-serving companies that are appearing out of Silicon Valley these days — much less with millions of dollars in venture capital funding. By contrast, something difficult to market may prove more useful; it’s why the hottest topic in the Valley these days is indeed the enterprise (even if it is boring as hell).

A number of folks were taken in by it, with mixed reactions. “We have gotten feedback in both directions,” Breitweiser said. “Some thought it was really funny, while some were upset that we were fooling them.”

Governing City Futures Conference :: UWS, Sydney 16 – 17 August #cities #design #conference

Events

Governing City Futures Conference :: UWS, Sydney
16 – 17 August 2012 :: Registrations now open

This conference asks: What is the future of the low density city? What are its prospects in a context in which ecological and population pressures make the infrastructure that under-grid such cities no longer sustainably, if it ever was? In the wake of these intersecting pressures, how are alternate futures for this urban form to be imagined and governed? How are its populations to be managed? Individual lives conducted? Resources circulated? How do these questions impact of relations of gender, ethnicity, and class and those between City and Bush? In addressing these questions this conference will bring together international and Australian academics, politicians and other expert speakers and commentators in the fields of cultural studies, urban sociology, urban infrastructure and population to discuss the future of the low density city in an era in which climate change and the prospect of population increase operates as a major challenge to established forms of urban life.

http://www.uws.edu.au/ics/events/governing_city_futures_conference

Public lecture: Jon Rose, VIOLINS TO FENCES – A Life of #Experimentation in #Music (July 27) #Melbourne #geekgirl

Jon Rose, VIOLINS TO FENCES
A Life of Experimentation in Music
At one end of the continuum is the violin – iconic, an instrument of perfection, a bastion of western culture; at the other end is the fence – metaphor for duality, the instrument of our species’ desire for control, ownership, and exploitation.

For most of the last forty years, Jon Rose has explored the musical possibilities of the string and the wire in all sizes and situations. In this lecture he connects the radical with the traditional, and the unique experience with the commonplace, in a practice of music that has led him into previously unexplored sonic worlds and sometimes into confrontation.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Jon Rose performs on the global stage at the sharp end of experimental, new and improvised music. Central to that practice has been ‘The Relative Violin’ project, a unique output, rich in content, realising almost everything on, with, and about the violin – and string music in general. Most celebrated is the worldwide Fence project in existence since 1983; least known are the relative violins – over 20 home experimental string instruments, created specifically for and in Australia.

DATE AND LOCATION:
Date: Friday 27 July 2012
Time: 6.00pm
Location: Village Roadshow Theatrette – State Library of Victoria, 328 Swanston Street, Melbourne (Australia)
Cost: This is a free public lecture.
Light refreshments will be provided.
Please register through this link

Presented by the Faculty of Humanities and the Centre for Creative Arts, La Trobe University: http://www.centreforcreativearts.org.au

FURTHER INFORMATION
Contact Alix Austin a.austin@latrobe.edu.au

Global Tribe: Technology, Spirituality and Psytrance #books #travellers #trance #geekgirl

From the author: Graham St. John

This book has been a long time in the making, written in many locations, with respect and thanks due to many, and with the months counting down to publication this year I thought I would hook you up with the new Facebook page for Global Tribe: Technology, Spirituality and Psytrance (Equinox 2012).

global-tribe-book-cover

Book Synopsis.

Trance events have an uncanny ability to capture an era, and captivate an audience of travellers occupying the eternal theatre of the dance floor. As this book shows, the tendency within psytrance is to thwart the passage of time, to prolong the night, for those who adopt a liminal lifestyle. Amid the hustle and hubris of the psytrance carnival there is a peaceful repose that you sometimes catch when you’ve drifted into a sea of outstretched limbs, bodies swaying like a field of sunflowers in a light breeze. And you feel intense joy in this fleeting moment. You are the moment. You are inside the flow. You are all. Embodying the poetry of dance, you are living evidence that nothing lasts. And this is a deep revelation of the mystical function of trance. It is difficult to emerge from this little death, because one does not want the party to end. But it must end, even so that it can recommence-so that one can return to repeat the cycle.

The result of fifteen years of research in over a dozen countries, this book applies a sharp lens on a little understood global dance culture that has mushroomed all over the world since its beginnings in the diverse psychedelic music scenes flourishing in Goa, India, in the 1970s and 1980s. The paramount expression of this movement has been the festival, from small parties to major international events such as Portugal’s Boom Festival, which promotes itself as a world-summit of visionary arts and trance, a “united tribe of the world”. Via first-hand accounts of the scenes, events and music of psychedelic trance in Australia, Israel, Italy, the UK, the US, Turkey and other places, the book thoroughly documents this transnational movement with its diverse aesthetic roots, multiple national translations and internal controversies. As a multi-sited ethnography and an examination of the digital, chemical, cyber and media assemblage constituting psytrance, the book explores the integrated role that technology and spirituality have played in the formation of this visionary arts movement and shows how these event-cultures accommodate rites of risk and consciousness, a complex circumstance demanding revision of existing approaches to ritual, music and culture.

Contents

Ch 1. Transnational Psyculture
Ch 2. Experience, the Orient and Goatrance
Ch 3. The Vibe at the End of the World
Ch 4. Spiritual Technology: Transition and its Prosthetics
Ch 5. Psychedelic Festivals, Visionary Arts and Cosmic Events
Ch 6. Freak Out: The Trance Carnival
Ch 7. Psyculture in Israel and Australia
Ch 8. Performing Risk and the Arts of Consciousness
Ch 9. Riot of Passage: Liminal Culture and the Logics of Sacrifice
Ch 10. Nothing Lasts

Preorder book from Equinox.

Prologue on Facebook.

#Melbourne #Art: Stay Home Sakoku: The #Hikikomori Project Exhibition at West Space #geekgirl

STAY HOME SAKOKU EXHIBITION AT WEST SPACE

eugenia_lim_sakoku

Stay Home Sakoku: The Hikikomori Project is an introverted performance/installation exploring the Japanese phenomenon of hikikomori or ‘shut in’ syndrome. Over one week, Lim lived in a bedroom-style installation within West Space. Although physically ‘on view’ to gallery goers, communication between herself and the outside world occured via a web portal or ‘hiki-site’ through which people can chat with her via smartphones or home computers.

Background

Hikikomori confine themselves to their rooms for months and, in extreme cases, years on end. Without physical contact, hikikomori exist in isolation. Yet, many survive on a diet of pop culture and live a networked existence through an online community of forums, games and chatrooms. Increasingly, through our daily engagement with Web 2.0, we are all becoming networked beings. Stay Home is a project for anyone whose life intersects with technology and the Internet.

Project collaborators are Dan West, Yumi Umiumare and David Wolf. Stay Home Sakoku: The Hikikomori Project is part of the Today Your Love program. Eugenia Lim inhabited the room for one week, however the installation will be on display until 14 April. Eugenia and her collaborators are supported by the Australia Council and City of Melbourne.

http://www.stayhomesakoku.com/

Exhibition runs
Fri 30 Mar –Sat 14 April 2012

EUGENIA LIM (SAKOKU HAS LEFT THE BUILDING)
Live-in performance and online conversation
Thur 22 Mar – Thur 29 Mar 2012

Hack the City Open Call #hack #cities #ireland #mashup #geekgirl

Hack the City Open Call :: Science Gallery, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Call closed 20 January 2012 :: Exhibition 22 June – 7 September 2012 :: Festival 11 – 15 July 2012
Science Gallery is seeking proposals for its 2012 flagship exhibition HACK THE CITY launching in June 2012. Currently more than half of the world’s population lives in towns and cities. This trend is expected to continue. Between 2025-2030 of the approximate 8 billion people who will live in the world 5 billion will live in cities. Yet the majority of our city infrastructures are based on inherited historical layouts and systems. Science Gallery’s 2012 flagship exhibition and festival HACK THE CITY will rethink our cities from the ground up through the spirit and philosophy of the hacker ethos – to bend, mash-up, tweak and cannibalise our city systems, to create possibilities, illustrate visionary thinking and demonstrate real-world examples for sustainable urban futures. The exhibition and events will explore hacking for good – the repurposing of useful resources, the innovators who customise existing tools for new uses and who purposefully challenge existing hierarchies.
http://www.sciencegallery.com/hackthecity

Maturity: PROJECT – Laith McGregor #masculinity #bogan #geekgirl

maturing_still6

Maturing is a satirical social commentary about masculinity and the absurdity of what popular culture perceives as the definition of masculinity. McGregor uses facial hair as a ‘signifier of male authenticity’ and proceeds to metamorphose into an ϋber male. Through this process he transforms into various male role models; sportsmen, movie stars and the family father figure. By contorting his face into various expressions, he satirises stereotypes that personify society’s ideals of masculinity, including that of the quintessential Australian bogan.

In filming a close-up of his face, McGregor evokes a sense of voyeurism. The intimacy is immediately uncomfortable as the viewer is privy to a personal moment of self exploration and reflection.  The artist examines his face; pouting and contorting, trying on different personnas, contemplating as if deciding what character he will become next. Using his face as a blank canvas, he starts to draw facial hair using a pen and begins his transformation into a myriad of male personalities. It is a mesmerising journey of self discovery and an in-your-face mockery of the male – a mockery that resulted in a rash that persisted for three days after the work was completed.

Exhibition and further info on at the Art Gallery of Ballarat

Runs until Sunday, 25 September 2011

Night Projection Window
Admission: Free
Street Address
40 Lydiard Street North
Ballarat VIC 3350