The future is well and truly here: Rod Bamford’s 3D Ceramic Printer now on show at Sydney’s Object Gallery.
Author Archive
Two new videos from COFA Art Design Media department, interviewing artists from this year’s Underbelly Arts festival.
In this clip, Brad Miller poses the question “how is technology changing the way we remember the world?”, pulling user-generated content from Flickr into an immersive installation.
And in this second clip, Complicit (aka Petra Gemeinboeck, Liz Williamson and Rob Saunders) model “computational curiosities” and research into boredom to teach their pet robot how to behave.
I’ve been running a great many social media workshops of late, it’s becoming a core part of the business over at The Nest (along with building apps, designing web sites, developing digital strategies and eating cakes made by extremely thoughtful members of the team). The workshops are always evolving, borrowing ideas from one another, and morphing as they go. No two workshops are the same – partly because that would start to get boring for me as a presenter, but primarily because I’m always finding new ways to talk about the subject.
For the workshop which took place at Underbelly Arts this weekend, I further teased out the idea of using social media as a storytelling platform. (It’s worth noting that these workshops are designed for people who want to (or have to) use social media as a promotional platform for their work or ideas. If you’re a belligerent non-user and hate the idea of revealing your story on the internet, then you can look away now – this post is not for you.)
Social media lends itself extremely well to the concept of storytelling – that is, instead of pumping out a long string of status updates noting what you’re doing or what you’re reading, think of all of the digital tools at your disposal as the empty pages of a book. That book is your story, your autobiography, the (excuse me) ‘Never Ending Story’ of your life and work. Every pixel you commit to the screen is being logged and saved and stored in any case, so why not turn that automatic and ongoing documentation to your advantage?
We need not suddenly all have to morph into talented writers or publishers, but it’s nonetheless helpful to think of your online activity as a story-telling exercise: consistently building actions into on ongoing collection of scenes and chapters. Whether we choose to contextualise it this way or not, the truth is that the ‘telling’ of our story is already in progress. Google and Facebook already have most of our published chapters on file, and anyone can read most of these chapters quite openly. Thus, it follows that we should harness this scenario for our own ends – take control of our own autobiography, rather leave it to happenstance or badly formed metadata.
I often do think about my life having chapters, with the parenthesis being locations (cities and houses), partners, jobs, states of mind. But more directly, as someone whose life seems littered with projects of one form or another (some realized, others not so fortunate), those projects readily lend themselves to being ‘chapters’ in and of themselves.
As I was putting the finishing touches to the workshop, I realised that this particular blog (launched a matter of weeks ago) only tells a very small part of a very long story. And so, if you’re at all interested in the back story, you can find most of it helpfully archived at stuartbuchanan.com/archive.
The archive (as it suggests) is very much a historical record of past projects, full of documentation in the form of audio, video, images and text. It’s confusingly non-chronological (clever, huh?), but nonetheless interlinked via tags and categories. New Weird Australia, Discontent, Disorient, Fat Planet, Slang Tang, Thee Data Base, Zero-G Audio, The Foundation For Art In Zero Gravity, Association of Autonomous Astronauts and many other anti-brand devices are all documented therein. Interviews with characters as diverse as Karin from The Knife, Jamie Hewlett from Gorillaz and Gillian ‘Agent Scully’ Anderson; hard-drives worth of mix tapes, podcasts and original music; a few reviews, photos, videos – plenty to catch up on. My pleasure in your leisure.
This blog is quite different – there is a different story to tell. Where it goes, nobody knows; and that is, of course, all part of the fun.
I’ve been reading ping pong arguments over the last couple of weeks on the ongoing debate of the value of music. To share or not to share? To illegally grab from the cloud or to toe the line with dollars and cents? My sympathies lie with Henry Cow founder Chris Cutler in this month’s Wire magazine who rightly notes that without adequate remuneration, artists will simply cease to either make music, or at the very least, will be unable to spend a sufficient amount of time on their craft in order to make amazing music.
“Making a recording is not cost-free or work-free; it’s expensive. And those costs can only be recovered through sales. No sales, or sales so low that costs are not recouped, mean artists are forced to cut the costs next time (with inevitable negative consequences for quality) or not to record so much – or not at all. Along with a lot of dross, good music is lost this way, especially at the margins, where the most innovative work is already nearly paying its way”
(read the full essay at thewire.co.uk)
This is a watertight argument, and I concur entirely. I for would one would be heartbroken if my favourite artists stop making music simply because they can’t afford to. Hence, my main credo in this debate is simple: to buy music from those that you love. It sounds simple, but it should be the rock-bottom position for any one interested in music – whether that’s at the scale of Lady Gaga or at the scale of Catcall, it’s all the same. If you want that artist to continue, to thrive and to grow, you must fund their work. And you do that by buying their records.
However, beyond that, the boundaries start to get a little less tangible, particularly with new, independent and eclectic music. How do we know we’re going to love a band on their first release? How do we know whether we should invest in their future if we haven’t heard their present? And that’s what often leads to illegal downloads – a desire to discover.
However, illegal downloading is actually just a symptom of laziness on the part of the fan. Chances are most artists, at least those who might consider themselves independent or otherwise at the fringe, have made some (but not all) of their music available for free – either through their own site or through blogs (the classic ‘loss leader’ position). It doesn’t take more than a quick Google search to find one or two tracks from artists that are actually legally free. Unfortunately, that same search will often bring up more music that is illegally free.
So it’s a two-handed solution: (1) we as listeners need not to be fooled by the glittering prize of illegal freebies, and instead seek out the free music that artists have legally made available; and (2) artists must make those tunes available.
Sadly, many artists still feel overly precious about their entire catalogue, and – as a result – are most likely doing themselves a disservice. I don’t advocate free music from everyone, for everyone, for ever, but I advocate the need to get inside people’s minds, incite and inspire them, and become part of the soundtrack of their lives. Making a certain amount of your music freely available for a certain amount of time is the most obvious way to achieve this.
And I should note, that streaming music on MySpace, Bandcamp or Soundcloud is not a realistic way to discover new music – the experience is so banal, so transient, and often (in the case of MurdochSpace) so unusable, that this momentary lo-fi blerg of a stream is unlikely to lead to a lifetime of fan loyalty. I need to have it in my iTunes, on my iPod, burned onto a CD, played in my car, on the stereo at work – I need it in my life, wherever and whenever I am, if I am at all likely to turn that discovery into a true conversion.
That’s the trick I’ve been trying to pull off through the New Weird Australia project- to distribute music in such a way as to introduce people to their new favourite artists. Some 150 or so artists have been featured on New Weird Australia’s free download releases over the last two years, and each one of them has understood the value of giving away a sample of their music for free. I hope that everyone that has downloaded those free releases has found a new favourite in there, has subsequently bought a release, been to a gig, or at the very least, shared their affection and encouraged others to do the same.
If you haven’t, you can start now:
- Live set (three mp3s) from Sun Araw on the Free Music Archive
- Prefuse 73 + Zola Jesus get together for a 40-minute mix, The Misanthrope Meditation (a promo for the new album ‘The Only She Chapters’)
- debut official release from Sydney’s Guerre ‘Darker My Love: Remixes‘ with reversions of the upcoming debut from Collarbones, Townhouses, Namine and more
- ‘Oh Why‘ – a track from forthcoming debut from Balam Acab
- and, of course, the latest 13-track compilation ‘Bleak Metal‘ and an exclusive live set from Severed Heads - added this week to the archive at newweirdaustralia.com
img: early morning sun on Marion Street, Leichhardt
So, TEDx happened in Sydney last weekend. The annual sharing of ideas amongst a large room of cherry-picked hipsters and smart folk, streamed live to the world on YouTube. It’s a good concept, but with a wide mixture of speakers and artists, there were inevitably both winners and losers.
That said, there were more than a few moments of inspiration in the day’s events, but perhaps the most illuminating came from Genevieve Bell, who devoted her 17 minutes on the TEDx stage to a clarion call for us all to, once again, be bored. Bell rightly noted that which we all feel from time to time – that our twitching hands are now perpetually filled with devices of some description, or that a screen is in such close proximity, that we rarely find the time to be bored anymore. There are always buttons to press, messages to txt, screens to watch, or tweets to tweet. Idle hands and wandering eyes are a thing of the past.
But it was one of Bell’s offhand comments that lodged itself in my mind – that there are fewer and fewer physical places in which we are actually allowed to be bored these days. Transport and transit spaces, waiting rooms, lobbies, queues, petrol pumps, toilets (even urinals!) – once places of enforced contemplation & meditation, all now cluttered with television screens, or worse still, talkback radio. Where once they provided us with brief moments of silence or calm, they too are now polluted with pixels and noise. And if, by chance, there are no screens stuck to the wall, there’s always one stuck in our pocket. The brain cannot simply switch into ‘bored mode’ when faced with such a cacophony. Everywhere we turn, there’s something waiting to be read, watched, heard, tapped, posted, updated, subscribed or otherwise consumed – demanding attention, negating ignorance.
And this is such a shame. As I’m sure you’ll agree, being bored is such a blissful state to be. The mind gleefully wanders, flitting between random nodes, dredging up memories, creating new futures. Great ideas often come when great ideas are not being sought (and we know that the converse is also often true). The calm mind, the Buddha mind, the meditative place – dispatched by the march of gadgetry and perpetual connectivity.
And as a willing slave to the shiny techno baubles, I now increasingly hanker for the space to bored, both figuratively and literally. Last year, I tried to have a ‘disconnected Saturday’ every now and again, and it nearly killed me. But thanks to Bell’s timely reminder, I shall now try to be bored more often.
The great irony, of course, is that it took the creative, powerful minds of the TEDx forum to remind me of the joy of being well and truly and blissfully bored.
img: overhead wires on Riley Street, Surry Hills.
Australia has a great deal to offer immigrants such as myself – and I say that as someone who doesn’t particular care for sand, sea or surf. But being on the barnacle end of the world does have its fair share of problems – chiefly our failure to maintain any kind of synchronicity with the rest of the world. In some cases, this can ideal (what global recession?), but in others, it’s a royal pain in the posterior.
Strangely, I’ve taken to buying CDs again after a drought of months / years, chiefly due to the fact that digital albums are just so terribly forgettable. That is, once bought and loaded into the iPod, they’re often forgotten – whereas CDs stick around; in the car, in the office, in the house. These indestructible, eco-unfriendly totems are present in the minds’ eye at all times – hence, my return to shiny disc retail. But I was stymied when I attempted, with wide-eyed innocence, to purchase the new CD from Prefuse 73 here in Australia on its release on April 26th. The date of launch was even given on the label web site as being both 25th and the 26th, which one would assume was to account for the various timezones across the world getting into line.
Alas, it wasn’t to be. For no particular reason, the Australian release (according to the fourth retailer I visited) is actually next weekend, 28th May, some four or five weeks after the rest of the Western world. Thus blocked from parting with my cash, I resisted the very powerful urge to download from a file share somewhere, and instead nabbed the item from a a U.S. reseller on eBay – who promptly posted the disc to me prior to the Australian release date, for around $10 less than the usual Aussie retail price. Current eBay prices for a new copy of the album are floating anywhere between $10 – $15 U.S.
And don’t get me started on the dumb and hilarious movie ‘Tucker & Dale vs Evil’, which was released in January 2010 (i.e. almost eighteen months ago), and yet is only receiving its (drum roll) “Australian premiere” at the Sydney Film Festival in June 2011. I know that there’s a whole world of anxiety involved in simultaneous worldwide movie distribution, but – please – 18 months? This gruesome little horror parody, with its 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, is being publicised here in Sydney as being the rightful winner of the Midnight Movie Audience Award at SWSX. What the blurb neglects to tell you is that this victory took place in March 2010, not March 2011. Which might as well be the last epoch. Watch the trailer below to work out why I give a damn, or better yet, buy the DVD today for $17.76 (Australian) from a Finnish webstore.
You might have twigged from all of this that I am an impatient sonofabitch. Hell, I’m still annoyed that the ABC choose to screen Doctor Who six days after it screens in the UK. Six frigging days? What’s wrong with the next day? Apparently, Saturday is its “rightful home” on the ABC, hence the delay. As the great man says, look out for wibbly-wobbly-torrenty-worrenty stuff in my vicinity soon.
My point: Is it any wonder that we’re (a) turning to illegal downloads in a heartbeat or (b) buying goods offshore, when Australian importers or distributors can’t either (a) argue the case for a worldwide simultaneous release or (b) get their act together to get it down here before the rest of the world revolves past us?
img: Shaun Gladwell’s ‘Apology to Roadkill’ projected on the front of the Art Gallery of New South Wales last Friday night, to mark the opening of the new Contemporary Gallery & The John Kaldor Family Collection.
A short video segment of Breitz’s installation that I shot at MONA, Hobart, Tasmania, February 2011. The installation features numerous Madonna fans singing the entirety of the Immaculate Collection album karaoke-style. This clip features the spoken word segment from ‘Justify My Love’.
I filmed & edited this promotional video for Kaldor Public Art Projects, documenting the launch of the 20th Kaldor Public Art Project – in which celebrated US sound artist Stephen Vitiello collaborated with Australian artist and musician Lawrence English on a special event for the Art Gallery of NSW’s art.afterhours program – reprising their soon to be released recording ‘Acute Inbetweens’.
Celebrating a shared passion for analog electronics and field recordings Vitiello and English, who first met in 2006, developed Acute Inbetweens through a long distance discussion, passing sound files back and forth. Each piece is the result of many iterations, each artist contributing to their shape and composition. The resulting compilation draws out intersections between analog sources and found sound, setting up situations where one aspect flows freely into the other.
For their performance at the Art Gallery of NSW, each artist presented a solo work and then, for the first time, these collaborating artists performed together, presenting variations on works from ‘Acute Inbetweens’.
The video also includes ‘vox pops’ reactions with the audience recorded directly after the performance.
This is an archive post from my previous blog, first published in March 2008:
As new music industry business models continue to fall from the sky like miniature drops of divine inspiration, writer Kevin Kelly this month posits a fascinating scenario entitled “1,000 True Fans“. His thesis is simple – using Chris Anderson’s ‘Long Tail‘ as a jumping off point, Kelly suggests that artists draft the financial support of their die-hard fan base, and – once bundled together – it’s feasible to earn a crust directly from their support alone.
“A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can’t wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.”
Identified, registered and with $100 worth of credit card details from 1,000 of your nearest and dearest, you could be looking at a ‘salary’ of $100,000 per annum – enough to keep the lights on, the laptop charged and the guitar finely tuned. Funding for recording, touring and suchlike presumably comes from elsewhere as the model is generally seen simply as a ‘living wage’, designed to flush the artist out from the behind the coffee store counter and locked into their cone of creative noise.
Kelly invokes the wisdom of web 2.0 as the way to keep those True Fans happy – throwing out “galleries of your past work, archives of biographical information, and catalogs of paraphernalia”. Remaining in regular, direct contact with the True Fans is absolutely crucial – they need to feel part of the inner circle, furnished with exclusive information and touched by your warm hand on a regular basis. Which is almost exactly what web 2.0 syndication was invented for.
The beauty of the system is that “you don’t need a hit to survive”. You can get by in perpetuity with nothing more than your 1,000 True Fans – as long as they keep loving you, you don’t actually need 1,001 to stay alive. You don’t need to be in the charts, you don’t need to sell out stadiums – regularly water the freak-fans once daily, and all will be well. Of course it’s not perfect (some of the inherent maths and logic are a little flawed), but it’s a fascinating concept that highlights the fact that mirco-patronage is shaping up to be a realistic model for making a living from your creative practice.
Jill Sobule has raised $67K (of a target $75K) to record her next album – $10 will get you the finished album, $10,000 will get you a guest vocalist gig on the record itself. World music Calabash just announced its own micro-financing project for artists all round the world; Throwing Muses’ Kristen Hersh launched the CASH project last year with the same goals in mind (grab some new Xiu Xiu ephemera via this site) and there’s also SellaBand, Slicethepie and many more springing up on a regular basis. And I doubt they’re limited to music either – it’s a model that’s applicable for many artists right across the creative spectrum, and presumably well beyond.
If you’re under the belief that it’s all-well-and-good, but you still need a multinational record deal to survive, say hello to Maria Schneider – 9,000 fans contributed $87,000 to make her album ‘Sky Blue’ (via ArtistShare), a project which later delivered Maria the 2008 Grammy for “Best Instrumental Composition”. And lest we forget that Trent Reznor just bagged $750,000 in two days by selling ‘limited edition box sets’ direct to fans, featuring music released under a Creative Commons licence.
Certainly these are early days for micro fan-funded projects, but we may well be poking our heads behind the curtain and sneaking a glimpse at a viable future for the creative industries.