98. Sound, media and art adventures in South Korea
Like previous ‘overseas trip recaps’, this is a long read, and there are lots of photos too - so click that ‘load images’ button. I’ve written parts of this...
97. It’s been an (even) long(er) time, I shouldn’t have left you (again)
False starts, false hopes. All those things have been in full effect down here as the first warm flickers of summer peeks through an unsatisfactory Melbourne...
96. Books and music, and music books
(continued from Episode 95 …) The last days of the (now fading) European trip were spent in London and Brighton over the UK Bank Holiday weekend. If I had...
95. Travels in the ultraworld
It’s now been more than five years of occasionally writing this newsletter. I missed the fifth anniversary which would have fallen in January sometime. Time...
94. Mediation and some art things
Last episode was long delayed, and also quite lengthy. This one probably is quite long too. It’s the long weekend, Easter and the autumnal equinox. Brew up a...
93. It’s been a long time, I shouldn’t have left you without a …
This was meant to be written in the first week of the new year but life has had a tendency to get in the way. Then I was on a plane heading to Singapore -...
92. Slow and slow it grows
Apologies if you got the last episode twice. There turned out to be a rare ‘plumbing problem’ at Buttondown that delayed and then sent Episode 91...
91. Wolves and lambs
It must have been about six months ago when I first started getting adverts for Malthouse Theatre's The Hour of the Wolf in my social media feeds. It felt...
90. Radical flourishing
Every time I send one of these newsletters I have to go on to my social media channels and tell people to check their spam filters for the episode. It’s...
89. Text to text
A huge box arrived at my post office box recently. In it was Aaron A Reed’s 50 years of Text Games, a massive hardcover volume expanded from his excellent...
88. Short sights and sounds
For the first time I had to skip a talk because of sickness, so big apologies to everyone who I had hoped to catch up with at Remix Summit in Sydney on...
87. Time passes
Another delayed newsletter, sorry! Recently both and K and I entered a new age demographic, one more list item to scroll down to when filling out government...
86. Blackbox complexity
i feel bad for neglecting this newsletter! The recent months have been a flurry of activity - I barely get to come up for air. A two day symposium, a board...
85. Delays expected
Happy new year. 2022 is over. Finally. Gung hei fat choi. Welcome to the Year of the Rabbit! 🐇 This one has been written in discontinuous chunks, aborted...
84. Requiem for a nightmare
This one has been a long time sitting in my drafts being tinkered with on a lot of commutes. Over the intervening weeks I have probably deleted 1000 words so...
83. Trace memories
The jet lag from the trip has finally worn off. It feels like a long time that I was away. I still get the occasional flashback to the phone snatch moment I...
82. Snatch & grab
A few milliseconds was all it took. I was standing on the street outside my hotel DM’ing with a friend - possibly even a reader of this - and a kid in a navy...
81. Definition and context
[There are quite a few images in this one so you might want to load them up!] Last episode I finished up by mentioning Gabrielle Zevin’s Tommorrow and...
80. Next Next
I think most of you can probably now guess why there has been such a gap between episodes. And I’m quickly writing this one to ‘productively procrastinate’...
79. Generative things and choosing the right words
It’s been many weeks since the last episode. And I know that for American readers, its been particularly awful and I hope that this episode provides some...
78. RPM
(D. Woodard and W. S. Burroughs with Dreamachine, 1997, John Aes-Nihil via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0) After nine years of hard pushback on social...
77. Art of tote bags, or, Venetian Stares
I was amused to find the measure of distance to the moneyed heart of the art world represented at the Venice Biennale was the tote bag. Pretty much every...
76. Art of fighting
R and I are almost finished an intensive beginners kendo course. Neither of us can quite remember how the idea first started but it also involved G...
75. Scrolling memories
Another short one. Again in the service of shorter attention spans and quicker responses. Charlie Wurzel’s recent rumination on abundant personal digital...
74. Things on screens
Hello again This week I managed to finish a book, not just pick up read halfway, and then get distracted, but actually finish it. Progress is being made....
73. Short diversions
This week its a short episode with some optimistic links for these increasingly dark times. The war in the Ukraine is unbearable, the new IPCC report is...
72. The delayed 2021 roundup
It turns out that 2021 was a pretty terrible year all round. I know you almost certainly had and awful one too. But I’ve been doing annual round ups each...
71. Iron curtains
It’s already the second month of the new year and I’ve still not finished writing my 2021 round up! Time marches on and I can’t have that weighing over all...
70. Queues, failures, tapes & razors
[A lookout in Katoomba is unexpectedly prescient about our uncertain future] I have rushed this one out the door so it gets through to you in the final...
69. Minimal tolerable product
Today was a good day - in that Ice Cube way. Things got done. Things that were hard to resolved got nudged out of inertia. And there was a beautiful sunset....
68. Discovery tools and partial-machine curation
I had hope to be sending this a little sooner than this but, y’know, its been quite a week in Melbourne. Not just a lockdown but also riots and, errr, a 5.9...
67. Immersion rewind - back to theatre
Immersion A little while back, between lockdowns, K and I went out to see a twice rescheduled immersive theatre production Because The Night to celebrate our...
66. Horizonlessness
Meow Cats will always find the highest point in a room. Maybe not while you are in it, but when you creep downstairs in the middle of the night, there they...
65. Video video video
A1 It turned out that the Rising Festival that so many of us were looking forward ended up being cancelled - the second year in row. A reader, Esther,...
64. Forwards to the edge
(Apologies for the enormous gap between episode 63 and this one - its nearly been a month! Here's a tune to listen to while you read on, for reasons that...
63. Winter came early this year
Upwards G's photo of K & I doing what people seem to do when they get to the top of a mountain these days Winter has descended quickly on Melbourne. Since...
62. Interfaces and maps
Actual dancing K & I went to an actual gig last weekend. It wasnt the first we had been at since things have slowly begun opening up, but it was the most...
61. Migrating the newsletter and the not-conference
Its worked! If you’re reading this message then the newsletter migration from Substack to Buttondown has worked! Hence the slightly different formatting this...
60. Opening new things, contestable curation, curated lists
It’s alive! I’m conscious that the last time I wrote to you was a month ago! But its been busy. I’ve spent the last few weeks with my colleagues launching...
59. Sounds, friction, time
Thanks to Dan Cohen’s tweet going viral after the last episode I need to welcome a lot of new readers! So “hi!” (and thanks Dan!) As some of you are new...
58. Hello 2021
Hello 2021. Feels just like 2020 with a tiny bit less dread, right? Or maybe just a different kind of dread. I started writing this one several times then...
57. Looking backwards to go forwards, words from talks
I’ve been doing a bunch of talks recently and several folks asked me to write them up rather than let them stay ephemeral moments. This shift to the...
56. On fictional virtual cities
Things are looking a little different today. Like everyone I know, we anxiously awaited the US election results, constantly refreshing web pages with the...
55. The work / longform / structure
Dan Andrews @DanielAndrewsMPSaid I'd go a little higher up the shelf. Here's to you, Victoria. October 26th 2020823 Retweets10,137 Likes 725 to zero. It’s...
54. On online communities, conferences, connections
Our cats pretending to imitate Annie Leibovitz’s John & Yoko. Photo by G.I’m procrastinating another task by completing this one. Yes, it’s gotten to that...
53. Buckets of data
The recently released new Google Arts & Culture experiment, Gael Hughes’ An Ocean of Books, is a cute but telling example of the challenges of large...
52. Lost memories
The Whitney’s recent exhibition cancellation controversy is yet another reminder that an art museum is not the same as a social history museum. Power and...
51. Epistolary transformations
(Air conditioners in Hong Kong, 2019)August is a cold month in Melbourne. Our rental is particularly poorly designed with only low efficiency airconditioning...
50. Fifty fifty
Fifty.I didn’t expect to get to fifty of these little missives when I started writing them. When I started this writing there was no real goal in mind, it...
49. Lockdown, labs, shadow libraries
I had hoped to get some of this out earlier but change is happening so fast at the moment. Things have escalated again in recent days and we are in a new...