The ancient parish of GARTON

On the trail of family references. How the name Garton got to Novisad, where our father was born to a Red Army gaurd, is a mystery!

The ancient parish of GARTON is located "...in the wapentake and liberty of Holderness; 9 miles NE. of Hedon...", England.

High rez from another planet

P2302.jpg First highest resolution image to come from another planet. Bound to be linked to from sites all over this Earth...

It's uncanny... one can see a hill or mountain over the horizon. Reminds me of the stark images from Frank Herbert's Dune series.

Source: ABC - NASA shows off Spirit's postcard from Mars.

Justina's "home" page

Essentially a trackback test... Justina's getting clever with CSS (style sheets) and having fun with web sites again.

Our Lady of the Iguanas

Our Lady of the Iguanas (Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas, Juchitán, Oaxaca) , a photo by Graciela Iturbide taken in 1979.

One of the most remarkable images I have seen in recent months. Published in the 2004 calendar, Unwritten Histories, from DRIK, the Bangladesh based photo journalist library.

2004: Where we were before, but more...

We finally came up the resolution, moto, creed, that which we will live by, that which will aid in making up our minds when in doubt, forging directions, associations and where applicable, sustainability.

2004 will see us seek guidance from "Where we were before, but with more..."

2003 was "Respect the core, Jah"

2002 was "If you can, you must..."

Throughout 2004 we will endevour to ensure that we not only respect, but we build and strengthen that from which we came from, that which inspired us recklessly with all that we have learnt, gathered up, produced and created in the intervening years.

How did we get here? I was explaining to Justina how it was that I'd lost so much of my musicianship. I'd been arranging "Border Song" (from Son of Science project) for the best part of the day. I'd been struggling to play simple melodies, bass and organ lines.

By using computers and losing the spontaneity of tape based recording I'd sacrificed my performance skills for IT know how... However, with much better software I'm finding the encouragement to play again! And this led me to say, "... like it was before, but now with more." Justina exclaimed, "that's it! That's what it is... our 2004...!!!"

So it goes...

Merry Crispness @ Gore Core

Crispness began with the making of our Crisp-Utopia cards, reflecting the light that shone on us in the many countries, many spaces we have inhabited this year or so past.

We posted these cards to family, friends and then some...

All the presents, still in their mailbags, were placed on the Crispness Piano.

Twas the night before Crispness and all the lovely presents had arrived. We celebrated Crispness Eve, as the Garton family does, and we opened all the presents marked "Andrew".

Some, like the records we kind of opened earlier in the day during the treasure hunt Justina took us on :)

First thing in the morning we opened all the presents marked "Justina".

Before we progress any further into the day, let's take stock of our gifts, some of which we chose to wear today. This is the chilli jam we got from Andrew's sister, Grace.

Some of the creams, lotions and gels we chose to wear today! The shaving gel from Justina's Mum gave Andrew a clean, pain-free shave.

Here's Andrew sporting a new pair of top-the-range headphones (Sennheiser HD 25-1). Thanks Justina :^) 15000Hz never sounded so good!

Justina displays poise and delight at the new Crumpler bag that will carry her laptop and spare her back!

And Crispness would not be the same without Crispness cards. Our cards are displayed for all to see.

However, passers by on Gore Street will see not only cards, if they care to stop and look...

...there will be elephants fashioned from stone!

We spent much of the day cooking... preparing for a late lunch. This is a recipe for Crispness Cake that Justina prepared.

The kitchen... is it ready for us? You can be assured it is... 24 hours access (is) required! Thermos coffee cups at the ready (thanks Patsy and Mark)...

Justina's cake mix in full swing.

The (wild) salmon we purchased in Tasmania several months ago. Clearly thawing after a long winter in deep freeze Melbourne.

Preparing the fish for baking.

Oil, salt, lime and some physical contact with the fish.

Whilst all this was going on, Supercat was practising nocternal vigilance by our sides... well, slightly upstairs, on the bed in his special fake fur blanket (formally Andrew's winter jacket).

With the cooking done, we leave the kitchen and find our selves in the sanctuary that is Gore Core.

With a bottle of our favourite wine... (and we ain't had lunch yet!)

Gosh, the cake came out well...

Merry Crisp-Utopia Everyone

It comes but once a year...

Merry Crisp-Utopia

Instead of buying something, why not make a present for someone? Christmas for me has always been about family, sharing and giving... It has had nothing to do with the rampant commercialisation that sees Christmas, as Craig put it earlier today, as conduit to commerce from cradle to grave. So it goes...

So this is christmas...

How quickly the meme spreads, despots become icons, icons smear across cultures, transparent, impotent, the future collage...

A collaborative story in jpgs from lvxiao.

Says it all...

Now the spin begins... Beth sent me an SMS late Sunday evening... we punched the tele on and watched the charade unfold, orchestrated right down to the military garb on the person checking Saddam's teeth and hair for lice...

Saddam ain't a nice guy, but neither are those spreading and sustaining the fear of "terror"...

I took a bunch of stills and video off screen... intruiging images... thousands of people must be doing the same. I wonder who will ask of the Weapons of Mass Destruction now? The perfect smoke screen has been made manifest. The Bushs, Blairs and Howards will milk it for every pixel it's worth. I'm actually relieved... once the noise dies down, perhaps the people of Iraq will find peace...

We are listening to Too Many DJs. (Thanks Warren...). It's just gone past 5am. The essay birds are awake. Time to rest. We have a meeting at 11 after which should see version 2 of the Rowville-Lysterfiled History Project get up and out... Life goes on...

Data Collection at WSIS

OBTAINING A WSIS BADGE IN PICTURES

Does this violate Swiss, EU and UN data protection guidelines?

Note, this story was eventually picked by Slashdot and the Washington Post.

Seouless Nights

[We were in Sth Korea mid-November 2001... Justina for a WENT workshop and I for the first Asia Internet Rights Conference and the 4th Labor Media Conference. The following is an extract from emails describing one evening in Seoul, one of those rare moments when pinkies like ourselves are subjected to discrimination.]

last night was a curious mix of flicker lights, rip-offs and a few unfriendly gestures. sometimes it's useful to know how others are discriminated against, but it can be hard to deal with it up front.

at one point in the evening we had a bight to eat at a street vendor behind that huge shopping centre with the outdoor stage. we were charged 30,000 WON! no matter how we argued, the language problem and our "visitor" looks let us down. the stall holder literally removed 10,000 from my hand as justina handed over 20,000. i was furious. we had 1 pancake, 1 piece of fish, 1 serve of spicey chicken pieces and 1 bottle of soju.

shortly afterwards, i was looking at some coats in a shop and these guys started pushing into me. none would look at me. they just elbowed me out of the way. justina had a similar experience at the same shop with a girl who was quite upset at her.

later that night we tried to catch a cab. the first one drove off yelling "no, no english" at us, even when we showed him the card from sookmyung university with directions in Korean. i couldn't help but slam the side of my fist into the car.

then i had someone come up to me while i was trying to video something, this tall guy in a long, black coat... tapped me on the shoulder. i looked round, he looked on me and shook his head and waved his finger at me and the camera. no video... very imposing.

oh well, it wasn't so bad. i'm just sensitive to that kind of thing and it's hard to shake off at the time. but now it all looks pretty hilarious. well, sort of. i don't like getting ripped off... who does!

WENT-India 2003

Justina recently completed perhaps the last Women's Electronic Network Training (WENT) in Mumbai, India.

Justina and her colleague, Pi (Womens Hub, Manila) trained 20 women from various NGOs, reflecting a significant demographic of the women's movement and organisations dealing with women's and children's issues.

When the training was completed she spent a few days in Goa, now back in Mumbai and staying with an old friend and colleague of mine, Suchit Nanda, she is preparing to return to Melbourne.

During the course of her stay in India she kept a detailed, moving and challenging account of her experiences in a photo journal, perhaps the most engaging document thus far on Toy Satellite.

WENT-India 2003 is well worth a read, providing an insight to the challenges faced by women, both local and foreign in an ancient culture, ruptured by colonialism and values that lean far too heavily against women.

SmartMobs

Smart Mobs - The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold

Howard Rheingold's weblog surveying mobile and wirless Internet developments. It's a support "document" to his recent book, "Smart Mobs". Do a search on "swarming"... Scary stuff... Interesting article about swarming in The Age and SMH.

Kids love galleries

Queensland University of Technology did a study of children's use of galleries and museums. The study was called, Child Exhibition Art Spaces.

They discovered that most, if not all kids point to the escelator and lift buttons as the most exciting feature!

The curator of Queensland Art Gallery, which now sports a "child friendly interior, described the research as "not [exactly] groundbreaking..." Thank you Radio National.

No more Listening Room?

Last week we learnt that the ABC's landmark, experimental sound program the Listening Room was to be axed. And this evening, as I was preparing to write a letter about this, I read that New Music Australia had got the chop too...

The ABC's ADLib project was where I'd published this letter:

I was both astonished and appalled at the news that both the Listening Room and New Music Australia are to be axed.

The Listening Room gave me space and support to exert crucial ideas at a time when no one in this country was neither interested nor listening.

It provided the first experimental audio streaming project, to our knowledge, to be streamed and broadcast simultaneously in Australia, whilst in Europe this medium was already fast becoming utalitarian.

New Music Australia appeared at a time when I was near despair that radio in Australia was becoming bereft of challanges, evocations and new knowledge. Apart from numerous community broadcast efforts, the 3 B's, as Julian Knowles describes, were too often to be heard soothing the ears of the marooned.

Look ahead, not back... There's more to this country than sport and Americana.

For listening rooms everywhere,
-ag.

On blogs

I'd been discussing the art of letter writing and sharing poetry with an old friend when I realised they had not really known what a blog was/is... I penned the following, or rather typed the following in an email, which in a way clarified what all this means to me:

A blog is a kind of web page that is setup for an individual to write a day by day account of just about anything. There are thousands and thousands of blogs on the internet and mine, Auto Scribe, is a personal attempt at understanding the context, the technology and what it means to journalise one's thoughts within a medium that becomes a kind of shared resource... People can comment on one's "journal" entry for instance and as such, this can influence the way one writes...

I still keep a daily journal of sorts, both personal and mundane, where as the blog is perhaps less so. Auto Scribe is a way for family and friends to know what I'm up to. As so much of my writing time has been consumed by email, my letter writing has decreased to zilch!

Auto Scribe is also a kind of notepage. I also use it to log ideas when I'm travelling or list references, etc. I've always wanted a way to append notes to URLs. As such a tool doesn't appear to be available within a browser, MovableType's bookmarklet feature fills that need.

My personal journal is more important to me than any blog could be, as it reflects more the world I inhabit and those I inhabit it with. Auto Scribe reflects more that which transpires during the long hours in front of my computer. Auto Scribe has a more utalitarian role, whereas the paper based journal serves all manner of outlets, if only to remind me what it is I must do today, what I am to do tomorrow and what I forgot to do yesterday.

Thanks to Justina for reviving my journal writing... She gave me with a decent sized Filofax for Christmas... I write nearly every day now with a pen no less!

Beatnik Sofware

Having worked with Beatnik I was suprised to find the company no longer supports this plugin, let alone developing it for use in the more recent browsers. I was also suprised to find no obvious links to these legacy plugins, but I've since found an archive courtesy of skop shop.

Beatnik Browser Plugins - PC and Mac.

wireless toys

In case we get some decent funding for TS Wireless, there's a few hardware resources here hard to over look.

Wired 11.05 UNWIRED: Power Tools

There's always Christmas :)

Spotted - my rig!

Whlist contributing to a thread about hardware versus software on the Aus-Noise list, someone asked whether the gear on this page looked familier:

Electronic Music and Audio - Analogik, Brisbane, Australia

In fact, it's mine! This photo looks like it was taken when we were performing Undercurrents at the Power House, Brisbane, for the Multimedia Arts Asia Pacific Festival.

write the web

Just a reminder to keep an eye on this site for ongoing research...

WriteTheWeb - News for web users who write back

Webcam Art

I chanced upon this site whilst doing some research on the history of arts and information communication technologies...

Synergistic Art Project /Gallery

The work on this site has something of the spirit of Paul White's new work... stills carved out of DV footage and trimmed back to the smallest file size with the most minimal of lines to suggest an image, often resulting in poignent, delicate references to events, moments, people and place.

Losing touch?

Are we losing touch with the intuative side of our species? Take a good look at the face of this person. Whether she is the child's mother or a carer matters not, she looks puzzled, fearful and clearly reliant on the device being held up to the child.

Baby is clearly troubled, but that people will resort to a translation device to understand the basic needs of a child suggests that we are losing touch with not only our maternal instincts, but each other. Are we really to believe that we need such devices?

Source: Baby Translator and Geisha asobi blog.

Sites to adore

This has got to be one of the most reliable sources of adorable sites and products. Geisha asobi blog never ceases to amaze, delight and... freak one out just a little!

Lies

"The problem is not propaganda but the relentless control of the kind of things we think about..." Mr Eno's second notable article, coming in at a time of disquite and uncertainty.

Post-D3

Apart from a couple of odd health days, I'm starting to regain my energy since D3 went public. It's been up for two weeks now and seems to have been received with overwhelming enthusiasm... 1000 people had been through the gallery on the first weekend it was open.

ACMI has all the important data about D3 on their site. We have some photos from the installation, courtesy of ACMI Public Programs.

It's now 3:02, second attempt at getting this published! It's the first all night session Grant and I have been able to get in since completing D3. We find one all nighter, every so ofter, gets us through some of the more complex items on our c2o/Toy Satellite/Secession to do lists. Well, it helps having someone to cheer you along, particularly if one is making progress!

Here's Supercat, watching over us from his new perch, constructed from crates I'd bought in Byron Bay, made from off-cuts, off-cuts from a planned UFO landing pad! Oh, and a pile of cushions.

Justina is in Manila having just completed a WENT trainers workshop. Very shortly she'll leave for her first visit to the Philippines country side, including one night in Baguio, where I had spent an inspiring week, at the Tamawan Artists Village, last November.

Bobby (same guy who loves our WOK CMS...) at the entrance to Tamawan Village.

A sculpture of an eagle on a distant rock someone managed to carve. Baguio does that kind of thing to people...

Baguio taxi... yeh, lots of mirrors and they charge far less than cabs in Manila... and pretty friendly too.

Back to the present... at least within the past hour. Grant just having solved the "how do we get multiple forms to work on the WOK" problem. He's coding up the "Punter of the Month" questionnaire for the Lambsgo Bar site we recently rolled out...

And a rare one of me... prefering life behind a camera... hairy too... a week indoors, chilling out with no serious deadlines, music to keep me curious, and emails from Craig Bellamy to keep my brain from stagnating.

CAN do...

two days ago i saw for the first time video recordings of CAN from 1972 and 1974... as a musician, as a composer, as a performer i was entirelly smitten... i have been a CAN fan since the early 80s when i was first introduced to their music by robert iolini, who played bass and guitar in Lingo Babel, the band we had at the time.

seeing these videos my respect for CAN has shot through the roof. what i thought we were doing at the time, keeping within the spirit of improvisation and deep listening and collaboration pales in the face of what i have just been exposed to... that said, i am inspired to continue on my own journey with sound and music and will do so knowing there is a legacy that continues to unfold from the CAN camp, that continues to enlighten me all those years on...

Family reunites

Two weeks ago my siblings and I, there are 5 of us, reuinted with our Mother, for the first time under the same roof for 23 years! This may be the start, time permitting, of a few thoughts on the gathering, which was amazing to say the least... We all got on!

Days like this...

Sometimes there's only one way...

Every day is a challenge... today was no less so. Some how, if one remembers to look at the sky, and if nothing falls, you get by. And then there's beer...

To finish off, Frank, our patient XML and database developer, finished off his last email to me stating that, "Things will always go wrong - that's inevitable. It is what we do with those experiences in the future that make the difference..."

In the meantime, I'll settle for beer and consider the options once we're back from Hobart... But in the meantime, there is the long night ahead, one of what appears to be a string of all-nighters as we wrestle c2o into shape.

Sessions brief time out at LGB

For the past 10 months we've had an early week residancy at Fitzroy's Lambsgo Bar... We played so much music, organised one off events, recorded an album, encouraged people who hadn't mixed before to DJ, bringing to the bar an extensive variety of sound and experience, mostly revolved around beer, and a jolly good time had by all.

Tired...

Tired after long session on text for d3 help screens... Had planned to redraft these days ago, along with completing sound design, but keep getting side-tracked on admin and project management issues.

Sauce ain't what it used to be...

Bought a pie with sauce recently? I just did. The sauce one gets in those plastic spurters just ain't what it used to be... It don't run!

Someone must've done a consumer survey and discovered that people don't like their sauce runny, dripping down their face, onto their shirts, pants or desk! This stuff don't even smear! Tastes the same though!

Sunday morning, Letter from NY

I read Nyck's most recent Letter from New York and this followed as I wrote to congratulate him for this most articulate summary of the events in Iraq and the empire that is thrusting itself into this country.

A sunny, warm Sunday morning out in the garden, the city murmuring, showers running from nearby houses, reverberating against concrete, bricks and blue-stone, peppered with bird-song in this sanctuary we call home, flanked by traffic 2-3 blocks away in every direction, the thoughts of a million dead minds live again in the word, keeping alive the flame of wisdom no matter how dark the grim night falls, the toil of those that keep the word in light, that gather the disparate voices into collective expression reaps reward in every moment the 'word' is catapulted into meaning...