arts

Some thoughts on 3D printing and the arts

Posted by hil

If you want to blow your mind, take a journey into the revolutionary realm of 3D printing. Rapid prototyping has been around for about 20 years, but 3D printing seems now to be quickly becoming a viable manufacturing process for a wide range of materials and objects. There are lots of examples, of which the following are only a small selection:

Like other disruptive technology, 3D printing looks as if it will follow the path of offering the ability to decentralize and customise, and to make unique things cost effectively.

It’s interesting to consider what impact this is already having and going to have on artists and how they make things, as it becomes mainstream. Imagine, we can digitally sculpt or scan something in 3D (or photograph it, send the photos to somewhere like Photofly to get them stitched into a 3D scan), then send the files to a fabricator or perhaps even our own 3D printer , and there it is. There is the obvious debate between new and old, manufactured and handmade, and whether quality will be enhanced or compromised.  Most likely 3D printing will become an additional useful tool for some processes, components and items, and competency in these technologies will become more expected in the arts industry.  And, entirely handmade is likely to become rarer but more valuable.

Save the VCA and its puppetry course

Posted by hil

Those of you interested in the arts in Australia will likely know that the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne was earlier in the year merged with Melbourne University. The college gave practical training in the arts, and included a post graduate puppetry course, the only school of its type in the Southern Hemisphere. The puppetry course has been suspended, many staff have lost their jobs, and the practical elements of courses are being cut back. You can read up on the back ground of the merger at Save the VCA.

Today organisers are hoping for a big turnout to protest these changes. Here are the details:

Friday 21st of August,10am

MEET
VCA Campus at 10am.
234 St Kilda Rd, Southbank
Featuring live performances and speeches from prominent industry figures, featuring Julia Zemiro (Rockwiz).

MARCH
Show your support and march down Swanston St, along Collins St to Parliament. Final speeches, featuring John Micheal Howson (Shout).

When I first started making puppets in about 1995, I had the great fortune to be taken on and coached by Company Skylark and their new artistic director, Peter J. Wilson. Peter is not only a brilliant puppeteer; he also had a vision for setting up professional puppetry training to support development of  a vibrant puppetry artform in Australia. He went on to achieve this in setting up the puppetry course at the VCA.  I admired that, and feel sadness over the loss of the course somewhat personally, too, for that reason.

Over the last seven or so years the puppetry course has produced innovative work and graduates, supporting that wider idea of puppetry as artform, where it belongs. And of course this has benefited both the arts and wider community. Ironically, while merger discussions revolve around budgets and money, and draw in the question of funding for the arts in general, the puppetry course itself had managed to bring in outside money consistently since its inception with the patronage of the Cattermole family.

UNIMA World Puppetry Festival is close!

Posted by hil

The UNIMA Congress and World Puppetry Festival in Perth is drawing close; tt runs from April 2 -12! Check UNIMA 2008 for information and the latest updates; the most recent is here. You can also keep an eye on Unima Australia’s news and events page for updates. The Puppet Caravan, comprising several parties of puppeteers travelling from the eastern states by road and performing as they go, is already on its way. Puppets are rolling in to the Million Puppets Project; be sure to post yours by March 21st ( PO Box 832 Fremantle, WA 6959). There are lots of exciting professional development events, talks, shows and workshops and exhibitions; and freebies available to those who feel inclined to volunteer to help with the festival. The third Australian National Puppetry Summit is running in conjunction with the festival and congress.

Why doesn’t Digg recognise the arts?

Posted by hil

Taking a closer at Digg, I noticed that they have no catagories for the visual or performing arts, books, literature, or craft. The catagories under entertainment are: celebrity, movies, music and television. Why are they so impoverished?

World Refugee Day 2004

Posted by hil

World Refugee Day 2004 was held last Sunday, June 20th. In Canberra the day was celebrated with the installation of a Field of Hearts on the lawns outside Parliament House. The hearts had been sent in from all over Australia, and with messages of support for refugees written on them, were symbolic of a wish for Australia to be a more open-hearted country for refugees.

I dusted off my my two John Howard effigies for the occasion. I managed to find a way of anchoring the John Howard scarecrow in one of the dreadful white plastic bollards which, at the cost of $80,000, were installed as a security barricade around Parliament House at the time of the anti-war demonstrations in March 2003, and have remained ever since. (The government has recently approved spending $11.2 million on building a “low wall” right round Parliament House to replace them). My other John Howard puppet was one made for the coincidence of World Puppetry Day and the anti-Iraq war demonstrations. This time I sewed his lips together.

The poster I would have liked to take to World Refugee Day is the one on the left, made recently by my daughter. Its made entirely out of plastic and tapes of various kinds. This picture of the poster was taken at Reconcilliation Walk, with Old Parliament House in the background, and the ‘garden sprinkler’ flag pole of new Parliament House behind that.

Artlook: Canberra’s arts monthly revamped

Posted by hil


Nice to see the first issue of Artlook, Canberra’s snazzy new free arts monthly, out in theatres and cafes. Artlook takes over from Muse, featuring interviews, reviews, and a calendar of gigs and exhibitions, all now in a glossy magazine format. It also has a full online version of the current issue. I wonder if the online will eventually take over from the print version?

Elmgreen & Dragset’s ‘Dying’ Sparrow

Posted by hil

An exhibition by two Scandanavian artists, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, is causing a bit of a stir at London’s Tate Modern gallery this month. In an otherwise empty new gallery space 25 metres by 7 metres, a sparrow is trapped between the panes of a double-glazed window, apparently dying. The sparrow is, however, animatronic. It cost &pound12,000 and was made by Crawley Creatures, the company best known for the creatures in the BBC’s/ABC’s Walking with Dinosaurs series. The artists make a connection with the general demise of sparrows and that of London’s working class, though other interpretations have been made.

A selection of reviews
30 second video of the animatronic sparrow
Pictures 1, 2

The picture here is a woodcut from an early (1820 or so) chapbook, An Elegy on the Death and Burial of Cock Robin (York: J. Kendrew), reproduced in The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, by Iona and Peter Opie, (ISBN: 0 19 869112 2).

Who killed Cock robin?
I, said the Sparrow,
With my bow and arrow,
I killed Cock Robin.

Maybe he can’t afford to be so jaunty any more.

touchy-feely

Posted by hil

Here’s an unusual concept: Kirsten Johnson’s touchy-feely galleries of oil paintings of sock puppets, each one expressing a different emotion. They remind me of emoticons.

Paulus Berensohn: Deep Ecologist and Crafts Artist

Posted by hil

I’ve been sculpting with clay the last few days, a favourite activity. I love the feel of it, and how malleable yet solid it is. These days it always makes me think about an interview with Paulus Berensohn that I heard a while ago on the ABC’s Earthbeat program. Berensohn is a Deep Ecologist and craft artist, and he is best known for his book Finding One’s Way With Clay. I was taken with some of the things he says in the interview. Here are a few examples:

“But I started in my late teens as a dancer, and was a dancer until I was 30 and then one night in the middle of a performance, at a climax in the dance where we then had to freeze, a voice in my head said, ‘This is dancing on a stage, what does it mean to dance in life?’ And very shortly after that, I was taken to a picnic, and there was a great American potter there, and I watched her throwing on the wheel, and I made that connection that the act of throwing clay on a potter’s wheel was a kind of dancing. And I was just enchanted, and wanted to learn that dance”…

“I mean I personally think that the craft arts isn’t about an alternative way of making a living and filling museums and galleries with gorgeous objects, I think it’s the clay and the fibre and the metals and the wood saying ‘Listen, listen to me. Put your hands on me, and you’ll make contact with a living world.’ “…

“The word ‘art’, if you go back into its etymological roots, it’s not a noun, it’s a verb, it’s a doing, an acting, and it comes from the root for ‘to join’. So one is behaving artistically, one is in a state of intimacy and communion with the activity at hand”…

“We have in our DNA the memory of having fur and a memory of having whiskers that connected us to nature”…

“The first time I ever encountered an Aboriginal Australian, was in New Mexico, and they had invited an Aboriginal elder to come to speak to the native Americans and he was, I wish I remembered his name, he was wonderful. And he came with slides of stones and sunsets and sunrises. He would show a sunrise, and he would say, ‘This is a sunrise in Australia; you must watch the sunrise every day, it is a blessing for Mother Earth’, and then he would show a sunset, and he would say, ‘You must watch the sun set.’ “…

“So one of the things in journals you can do is keep lists, and one of the lists I keep is Who else is here? Who else is participating in this life? So like in these months that I’ve been on Tasmania, yes, here’s one I wrote: 2 Huntsman spiders, one on the lid of the compost toilet. The other was inside a straw hat of Peter’s which he wore for five minutes before he felt something crawling on his head. Luckily he took of his hat before it bit him. It was at least four inches across. Four possums by the side of the road as we drove home late from Hobart last night. Red tide in Nubena threatening the salmon farming pens. Gustav says they are dinoflagellates and that what Peter and I saw my first night here as a phosphorescent tide is the same as the red tide. See, I never knew that”…

“It’s the artist’s work to sing up the earth, to praise and thank and to express gratitude. Well that’s what I think art is. That’s why I think art is a behaviour, to sing up the earth.”