1,500,000 butterflies

Posted by hil

birdwing butterfly

Prompted by seeing the movie Paradise Road again recently, I’ve been chatting to a long time friend about instances of art sustaining people in dire circumstances. In real life, and well before the movie, the women’s chorus that she used to sing with had recreated the music for the first time since it was sung in the prison camp. I mentioned the puppet play story Gary Friendman is making into a documentary, Looking for a Monster, and she pointed me to I never saw another butterfly, a book of art and poetry by children at the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Terezin CZ.

So this is how I found the The Butterfly Project, an activity being run by the Holocaust Museum Houston to try collecting 1.5 million handmade butterflies, the same number of children who died in the Holocaust. You are invited to create and send in handmade arts-and-crafts butterflies, which will eventually comprise an exhibition, currently scheduled for Spring 2012. At the moment they have about 400,000 butterflies.

Seems like an idea that the internet craft communities might like to latch onto – Whip Up!, Craft.

Fail whale widget

Posted by hil

Here’s a widget made from the video of my fail whale sculpture. My friend Amy rendered it for me – thanks so much, Amy.

Here is the code you can use to put it on your website. You can change the height and width to size it how you wish, but it is designed to be fairly narrow for sidebars:

<div><iframe src="http://spiritsdancing.com/failwhale/whaget.htm" width="185" height="225" frameborder="0" name="whaget"></iframe></div>

The hero that is Fail Whale

Posted by hil

3D Fail Whale

My little kinetic sculpture of the lovely Twitter Fail Whale, based on the image by Yiying Lu that is used when twitter.com is over-capacity. The image is called ‘Lifting up a Dreamer’. I’ve wanted to make this since I first saw the image some weeks ago.

This is a short video of it in action, complete with twittering birds!

More photos here. (Update: fail whale widget here)

I remain optimistic and supportive of Twitter in the long term, because I think the real-time courier service rationale that was the founding impetus of the service constitutes a new branch off Doc Searls’ live web, and makes our online interactions a quantum step closer to Allen Searl’s original vision of  ‘a Web where anybody could contact anybody else and ask or answer a question in real time’. Twitter’s track facility, presently down but still promised, provides the real-time search of people and and what they are talking about right now.

Maybe the progression of branching-off goes a little like this:

static web > live web > real time web
google > blogosphere > twittosphere
our property > our history in time > our real-time conversation
search by sending out bots> search by listening for pings > search by tracking people and words in real time

It may be that Twitter’s primacy will be usurped by some other real-time service that gets up ahead of them in the race; I hope not. But many great progressive ideas start off serendipitously or in fun without their full implications or potential being known, and in those circumstances it’s silly in hindsight to say the founders ought to have seen further, planned better and acted quicker than they did.

Cutflat photography exhibition

Posted by hil

Tim Raupach’s first photography exhibition is now at The God’s Cafe at ANU. It opened last Thursday and runs until mid July. Tim is my son. He takes both urban and country scenes and landscapes, with a finely observed sense of colour and composition. Walls, bicycles, mountains, grasses and pattern are some of the recurring themes; take a look at his photoblog, Cutflat.

That’s the dispassionate report…! The truth is that it’s wonderfully exciting to see my kids stepping out into the artistic world, expressing themselves in such different ways, and I am so wildly proud of what they are doing!

Kevin Rudd glasses

Posted by hil

Kevin Rudd glasses

Eight pairs of sparkly Elton-John-sized Kevin Rudd glasses made for Shortis and Simpson’s lastest political satire, Three Nights at the Bleeding Heart, currently at the Street Theatre.

Now playing – strange trajectories

Posted by hil

Now playing – strange trajectories, the 2007 ANU School of Art Emerging Artist Support Theme (EASS) award exhibition currently on at the Alliance Francaise in Canberra, is featuring the work of Michal Glickson (painting) and Anna Madeleine (photomedia). Anna is my daughter. She has two cool new video art pieces in this exhibition. She has also recently done the album art for Casual Projects new CD, No Rest, and is showing one of those images at PhotoAccess’s Open all areas 2008.

Previously:

Flesh and Blood

Posted by hil

Mary Black and Shane Howard’s lovely duet version of his song Flesh and Blood. It was replayed on Rockwiz (SBS) last night.

Modeling elections?

Posted by hil

Listening to the opinion going round and around entrenched positions about whether Hillary Clinton would make a good VP, and whether she and Obama individually would come at a joint ticket, has made me wonder again about the role personality type plays in politics and the way people vote.

I’ve never been officially Myers-Brugged, but when I’ve done the tests online I consistently come out as INFJ, with the J being borderline; an Idealist/Councilor-borderline-Healer in the Keirsey descriptions. I notice and admire that INFP’s (I am close to a number of them, though they are rare!) step up more quickly to look for a negotiated way of getting to a desired bigger picture position. For instance, my instinct is that Clinton has done too much that is the antithesis of what Obama is driving at for it to be right for Obama to accept her as a running mate. But Amy is trying to get past the discomfort by framing the ticket as a coalition of separate minority parties, if it will get Obama into office. It’s a little like those woven tube finger traps: pull from opposite positions and you are stuck, give a little and you can get out.

There have been studies that suggest that personality type plays a part in political affiliation. Taking that idea further, if you can break a population down into personality types by percentage, and forecast what attitudes are likely to be taken by each type and how they might vote on different candidates and the range of issues on the table, perhaps it would be possible to model an election outcome? It would save a lot of money and shenanigans. Would you be able to build in nimble-enough responses to unexpected events and happenstances such as the perfect storm of 9/11 and Tampa that Howard finessed to give him the 2001 Australian election; or alternatively would it provide a protection against such occurrences? What about rigging? And is it likely we would be happy to accept the underlying idea of determinism, and the missing drama and excitement of the election trail?

Looking for a monster

Posted by hil

Looking for a monster

(photo: Sidat de Silva)

Looking for a Monster is based on an original puppet play written by a thirteen year old boy, Hanus Hachenburg in the Terezin concentration camp in 1943, shortly before his transportation to the Auschwitz Death Camp. In 1999, puppeteer Gary Friedman discovered the play in a Jerusalem archive. It was performed for the first time in 2001 and has just been filmed in Sydney for inclusion in Gary’s documentary film about the life of Hanus Hachenburg. Gary has a slideshow of photos taken at the shoot in the sidebar of his blog, Puppetry News, and you can also see individual photos in this gallery.

Incidentally, Gary is running another Puppetry for TV course starting in June.