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...
