48. On Planetary in 2020: curatorial activism and open sourcing in service of digital preservation
This was originally going to be posted on Medium but my frustration over whether it would be accidentally paywalled means I’m publishing it here instead as a...
47. More screens, sounds, fruit
Last episode I speculated about my experience of video tours, and I totally forgot to write anything about a really fantastic video tour that our friend...
46. Walking through video
“Somehow bullet holes in steel doors look like a collection of constellations trapped to catch the wrath of idiotsAnd we are the size of constellations in...
45. On generative music, digital exhibitions, and other distractions
[United States Office Of War Information, Gruber, E., photographer. (1942) Conversion. Jukebox plant. Solonoid selectors, devices which play the right record...
44. On interdependence
[Diners’ Club Western Section Credit Card, 1953, National Museum of American History, Gift of Bloomingdale, Alfred, 1953-04-30, Smithsonian Institution]It...
43. Back to the subject of museums
[Key for the Technological Industrial and Sanitary Museum, Garden Palace, maker unknown, Sydney, Australia, 1879-1882, Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences...
42. The paws - between fast and slow
[Paw and toe beans, claw in need of a trim]I’m spending a lot more time online now and I expect that if you still have a desk job then you probably are too....
41. The blurring
[A New York fortune cookie from when I lived there back in April 2013]Its a short one today, we’re all drowning in ‘content’.Back in the home office it was a...
40. Sounds, like stars in the darkness
[Hubble Sees a Horsehead of a Different Color, 2013, Jet Propulsion Lab, NASA, Public Domain]“No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are...
39. Closed/closed - the end of touch
[Sherman’s Influenza Bacterial Vaccine 38, ca 1937, Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.]If the last one was...
38. Closed/open
Head of a Cat, ca. 1877-1880, Paul Wayland Bartlett, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Armistead Peter III, CC0 license.I’m finishing off this...
37. Super connectors and low frequencies
This week’s news of the sudden death of DJ and producer Andy Weatherall - at just 56 - was rather shocking. He was one of the real musical ‘super connectors’...
36. A ship heads into a bank of clouds
A shorter one this time.This week I was flying back from Sydney and opted, a little unusually, for a window seat. The torrential rain had abated briefly, and...
35. Holiday triptych - books, music, art
#1/This one starts out during a week away at the beach, and as a consequence, the opportunity to finish off a couple of books and attempt to make some crude...
34. Context collapse
Changi Airport now has Jewel - a high end bubble shopping mall with an enormous water feature that feels like something out of the old videogame Doom - a...
33. Farewell 2019, hello 2020
I tried to get this finished before the end of the decade, but life intervened. And, you’ve probably already heard that Australia is on fire (and is likely...
32. Art, AI, auteurs, access, annual audio
Matthäus Greuter, Kort over Rom med de syv pilgrimskirker, 1634-1638, Statens Museum Kunst, Denmark. Public domain.This last weekend, R and I were playing...
31. Heart beats
Above is a chart of my heart rate on my 9 hour flight from Melbourne to Hong Kong to the Hong Kong Museum Summit earlier this week. I dozed off after take...
30. “Calculating the ever changing distance between rock and stardom”
Mirror with game board design, China, Han Dynasty 206BC- AD220, Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain.The title today comes from Saul Williams’ poem...
29. Multi-sensorial memories & seamful-ness
[A whale stranded on the coast at Winterton; five men in the foreground, ship in the background. Engraving, ca. 1880. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY]A...
28. C86, coziness, conceptronica
All new technologies will be used to ‘optimize’ - worker behavioural tracking via motion capture in 1915. From the Kheel Center for Labor-Management...
27. Experience malls & bonus beats
My hastily snapped, slightly wonky, pic of UNTITLED (HARING), 1997 as I walked past it.“In 1997, in a gesture of homage, KAWS painted on a poster of New York...
26. Story games and game stories
(A chance discovery of my old Dungeons & Dragons ephemera from a mid 1980s visit to the UK offices of TSR!)Last weekend I was in Mind Games, a very Melbourne...
25. Ghosts & the spectral
Hello new readers! (and old readers!)I’ve noticed another flood of new readers in the month between this episode and the last, so for those of you who are...
24. Listening & clubs & listening clubs
I’m finishing this off on the flight back from an Australia Council for the Arts workshop looking at ways of developing a new public narrative around the...
23. Closing loops
“Ice is a recording medium and a storage medium. It collects and keeps data for millennia. Unlike our hard disks and terabyte blocks, which are quickly...
22. On easter eggs, extended media, inclusivity through exclusivity
Hello from a wet and cold Melbourne. It’s been a busy few weeks and thinking space has been compromised. However … Continuing a thought from the last email...
21. On old software & media
This one is vaguely about preservation practices, especially software preservation. Given that almost “all the things” that didn’t run on software now do,...
20. On visiting again
I’m barely out of the hubbub of last week’s Creative State Summit in Melbourne so lets start with a bit of recap of that event. After making for too many...
19. On videogames, complexity, nostalgia
(I’m sending this out after the unexpected Australian election result. It is clear that making a coherent case for change at a national level is vastly...
18. On the blockbuster (in many forms)
I’m writing (most of) this on May Day and thinking back to May Day in 1993. It was a Saturday evening and I was lugging a box of acid techno to play at a...
17. On immersion and interactivity
Late onset jet lag and the Australian chocolate festival that coincides with school holidays (elsewhere known as Easter), has meant this one has taken a...
16. On doors
First up, welcome to all the new readers! There’s been a huge influx of new readers since #15 possibly because I posted a brief note about this newsletter on...
15. On text adventures
This one was mostly written somewhere between Melbourne and New York. I’m sitting in a big metal tube, the movies have been exhausted, the melatonin is yet...
14. On something approximating podcasts
The past week has been shrouded in the fog of the aftermath of horrendous terror attack in Christchurch, NZ. What and how much to tell the children; how to...
13. On 'digital' leadership
Writing on ‘leadership’ usually conjures up fears of an airport business book. The ones you pick up as you browse waiting for your flight, and then quickly...
12. On piles and stacks (of dead media)
My friend and former colleague, Katie Shelly has started to illustrate these emails, starting with today’s one. When I first arrived in New York, Katie was a...
11. On machine learning & museums
I was going to really try not to write about machine learning in this email series. So I will keep it short. Recently there’s been a series of amusing micro-...
10. On visitors
This morning I got up at 430am to catch a 6am flight for a dental appointment in another city. Onboard that flight was where most of this was written. I’m...
9. On pirate libraries
Back to a slightly longer piece this week. This one leads off in a number of directions and somehow avoids talking about copyright. If you own a Playstation...
8. On email
[This is the ‘permanent’ post - email subscribers get posts as they come out but not all posts will hang around online once they’ve been emailed. So far -...
7. On magic
Kung hei fat choi! Just over a decade ago I started getting interested in the idea of ‘magic’ again - as well as its connection to ‘curiosity’. This interest...
6. On music
I do like cats. But perhaps not a bathroom full of four kittens and a mother. That’s what the last few days have been thanks to the local cat rescue....
5. On paper (part 1)
This one is about paper, books, and interfaces - the first of a few on this topic. Lucie Paterson and I recently finished our academic paper for Museums and...
4. On motorways
This missive is full of asides. Think of them as optional exit ramps off the motorway. The journey is the purpose, right? So at the end of the last email I...
3. On convenience
One of the biggest changes moving from New York City to Melbourne at the end of 2015 wasn't the weather, nor the lack of subways, nor my kids current...
2. On selfies
Number 2 is out quicker than expected. Thanks to everyone who emailed me private comments on the last missive. I really liked that. Writing is feeling a bit...
1. On sampling
Well, hello everyone. I’m a little shocked at how quick the take-up to this email thing has been. Watching the subscriptions come in over the past 48 hours...
0. A new thing
If you’ve followed my writing over the past 15 years or so, you might have noticed that its become a little sparser and more irregular. Scattered across...