MoMA Director Glenn D Lowry at Melbourne’s ACMI on ABC Arts Online
On Friday 25 June MoMA director Glenn D. Lowry visited the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Sydney to present the inaugural Ann Lewis AO Contemporary Visual Arts International Address. He used his time to speak on ‘The Museum of Modern Art and the Future: thoughts about art museums in the 21st century’.
iPhone as Musical Instrument from UMNewsService on Youtube.
For the last year Georg Essl from the University of Michigan has been working on an interactive programming environment for mobile devices. An alpha version of urMus, currently used by the Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra (MoPhO) and Michigan Mobile Phone Ensemble, has recently been released for download. I was lucky enough to be invited to the second urMus workshop ever, held by Essl on the 21 June 2010 at the University of Wollongong.
Basically urMus is a tool for the creation of sonic and visual instruments directly on mobile devices (currently the iPhone and iPad, with wider non-Apple compatibility coming in the future). It gives you multiple entrance points from which to build these instruments. You can use Essl’s default urMus interface to work in a high level Pd-like way linking boxes together to create and process sound and vision, or you can delve deeper, using urMus lua code to build your own processes and interfaces. Where it differs from apps like RjDj is that it lets you create your own instruments and interfaces directly on the mobile device itself.
Vivid Live is an interesting concept. Each year it gives an internationally acclaimed artist the opportunity to curate a large scale festival through the Sydney Opera House. Last year Brian Eno curated the inaugural festival. I was lucky enough to see Eno’s keynote address, his projections onto the Sydney Opera House and his 77 million Paintings installation as well as performances by electronic/rock acts Pivot (now PVT) and Ladytron.
This year the projections onto the Sydney Opera House are back, created by Laurie Anderson. Anderson and Lou Reed are the Vivid Live curators for 2010 and have scheduled a very interesting and diverse line-up including Tuvan throat singers Chirgilchin, stylistically differing Japanese rock bands Boris and Melt Banana and The Blind Boys of Alabama.
For those young and emerging artists in Melbourne there is an ArtStart information session at the old council chambers on the corner of Lygon and Victoria Streets, Carlton on Tuesday the 25th of May, 6 – 8pm.
Detours and Destinations bump-in image courtesy of Sasha Cohen
Anyone in Sydney this Wednesday, Thursday or Friday should come and check out Detours and Destinations at the Sydney Opera House.
Detours and Destinations is an integrated multi-media arts project framing the stories and experience of young people from the Blacktown and Campbelltown areas.
Following on from the recent CareerOne interview, national Australian newspaper MX published an article about me and the Australia Council’s ArtStart grant program. Check out Art Starter Feeds Creativity (PDF 520KB) by Rhiannon Elston.
There is an ArtStart information session tomorrow (20th January) at Fraser Studios, 10-14 Kensington Street, Chippendale NSW. If you’re interested in learning more about this new Australia Council grant for young and emerging artists drop by the studios at 1pm.
Kath Melbourne will be running the session, with short talks and Q&A by recent grant recipients Anna Lise De Lorenzo, Claude Jones and myself.
Anna was awarded an ArtStart grant for her ‘object design studio launch supported by a series of curated exhibitions investigating emerging local object design’, Claude was awarded a grant ‘to develop and implement a marketing strategy to raise [her] profile, increase gallery and media attention and sales’ and I am using the grant for ‘laying the foundations to make a living as a sound and multimedia artist’. You can read more about what other recipients are using their grants for in the ArtStart December 2009 Assessment Meeting Report.
CareerOne recently interviewed me about my work as a Sound and Multimedia Artist and ArtStart grant success. Check out the Big Breaks for Budding Artists article by Rhiannon Elston.
To kick off the new year in style YAK Events would like to invite you to the 2010 YAK Summer Residency Showings on the 16th of January.