Ok, some pretty exciting news here! This one has been in the works for a while…

My friend James Wright has asked me to be involved in an amazing new community project, Renew Docklands Community Arts!

We’ve been given a brand-new, disused food-court to use as we see fit … and we’re turning it into a community media-arts space!

It’s an absolutely amazing space as you can see in the images below… and what an amazing opportunity.

The story of Docklands has been a difficult one to say the least, with countless shops and businesses having closed doors for years, and entire retail areas being impossible to lease. That’s where Renew Docklands comes in. Artists and small business owners are able to apply for the use of the space rent-free, on a month-by-month basis.

The hope is that new cultural activity will re-inject interest in the area, inpsiring more and more business into the area.

It’s been tried before and it works! – you can read all about Renew here: http://www.renewaustralia.org/

The next big step for us is to prepare the space for launch, so we’ve started a Pozible campaign to help with the process!

Check out James and Nico explaining the project in the video below, or jump to the Pozible page here: http://pozible.com/docklands

And please, if you can, donate to the project!

This has been a real goal of mine for years, I’m totally stoked to see something beginning to happen

Renew Docklands Community Arts from NON on Vimeo.

Just spent the last 5 days and 4 nights in Adelaide for Unsound, as part of Adelaide Festival.

Probably the best multi-day arts festival I’ve been too since Sonic Acts in Amsterdam in 2008.

From Atom, to Severed Heads, Tim Hecker, Daniel Lopatin, Raime, Demdike Stare, Lustmord, Robin Fox, Pole, Actress and heaps more… the line-up was huge and none of the acts disappointed.

My favourite sets of the party go to Atom for his awesomely geeky ASCII tech geek porn. Robin Fox’s laser show was realised at a new level here with more rhythmic and tonal material, with the vision at Unsound blowing the minds of everyone in the room. And for Pole’s set was simply a treat and it was great to have him in the country for the first time.

Incredibly high production values at all venues across the city, from the main venue at Queens Theatre, to shanti-town bars and theatres at Barrio, The Garden of Unearthly Delights and Gluttony. Also found some great record stores about town during the day, and checked out some exhibitions including the Laurie Anderson show at Gordon & Anne Samstag museum.

Adelaide came off as a really cool city with an arts inner-core, while all the crew involved in Unsound should be well-stoked for how well they pulled it off. A few cancellations here and there which can’t be avoided…

Had an amazing time – lots of photos here from the 5 days I was in town!

Scenes from last nights BYOB 2013 in Melbourne, at RMIT Design Hub.

Massive turn-out and loads of work on display.

My own piece a reactive display of the gallery sound using a ‘Synchronator‘ (sold to me by Emile Zile), turning audio into composite video.

An amazing gargantuan space, but intriguingly – like BYOB 2011 in Melbourne – a more intimate arrangement, and given the size of the gallery it’s surprising the curators didn’t opt for a more large-scale approach.

Shots here from the recent Austhetic night held at Federation Square, in Melbourne.

A really cool event to be part of – big thanks to Jody and Christie for inviting me to take part!

It was great also to see performances by Ethno Tekh and No Light No Lycra, as well as the short films and interactives!

Felt like a warm-up for ‘White Night’ the following night – with a good crowd and heaps of passers by in the plaza.

Stills here are from an hour-long audio-visual performance I gave with an ambient vibe, with nature-inspired visuals, drifting into night cities and earthscapes, with minimal technos by nightfall.

BYOB (Bring Your Own Beamer) is a single night event for artists who utilise the projected video format in some way, and benefits from a wide range of approaches. Artists are expected to bring their own projector as the exhibition title implies, and create a work that deals with the relationship between projected light and the physical gallery site with respect to their practice.

BYOB is a worldwide exhibition platform initiated by Dutch artist Rafael Rozendaal. The project has been staged in various locations including the 54th Venice Biennale, 319 Scholes Gallery, New York and Palais De Tokyo, Paris.

BYOB 2013 is organised by Ry David Bradley & Antuong Nguyen.

Participating Artists:

Adam Wood
Adelle Mills
Amiel Courtin-Wilson
& Peter Ivor Wilson
Andrew Barrie
Antuong Nguyen
& Pageant
Brad Haylock
Charlie Sofo
Chase Middleton
Christopher LG Hill
Dolci & Kabana
Greatest Hits
Hamishi Jama Farah
Joe Hamilton
Johann Rashid
Many Many
Marcus Latcham
Matt Leaf
Matthew Linde
Michael Ozone
Misha Hollenbach
Nik Dimopoulos
Rowan McNaught
Ry David Bradley
SIBLING
Simon Pericich
Spencer Lai
Tara Cook
Virginia Overell
Warran Wright

BYOB 2013 will be held at RMIT Design Hub as part of Public Offer, curated by Timothy Moore and Kate Rhodes.

Very happy to be part of this upcoming audio-visual event run by Austhetic.

Thought I’d try something a little different this show – I’ll be performing an audio-visual DJ set of sorts, with some of my fave ambient and dub-techno tracks mixed to live visuals.

Should be a very cool night, with a host of other acts and screenings to follow.

Australian. New + Emerging. New Media + Performing Artists.

Join us on Friday the 22nd of February to support local artists & claim public space as a cultural site at our open access, major event of the year ~ Featuring

Ethno Tekh
Alice Glenn
NLNL
Christie Widiarto
Programs/Matt Leaf
Jody Cleaver
Lucy Fahey
Julia Holden
Simon O’Carrigan

Hope to see you there ~

Over the last few days I’ve been helping my friend, Tim Bright, run a workshop on the RGBD Toolkit, at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, in Melbourne.

RGBD Toolkit was first debuted at Resonate in 2012, and it’s a really cool video software that uses an XBOX Kinect attached to a DSLR camera, to turn video footage into 3D models. And it’s surprisingly easy to use and setup once you have all the quirks figured out. The models can then be put into a visualiser program to create awesome 3d effects using a range of rendering techniques. It was pretty cool to see too, Tim had the clamp that holds the Kinect and the DSLR together printed from a 3d model

It’s a very similar effect to the kind of thing you see in Radiohead’s ‘House of Cards’ Video:

Also – the guys who made RGBD have been putting together a documentary on software art, you can check out the trailer here:

Clouds: beta from DEEPSPEED media on Vimeo.

Each of the participants got to create their own video ‘portrait’, taking live filmed footage and rendering it out using the RGBD Visualizer program. They also had a chance to check out ACMI’s Candice Breitz exhibition, which is definately worth checking out (free!) if you’re in town.

There’s a few different ways of getting similar effects and if you’re interested, you should also check out Vade’s Rutt Etra plugins for VDMX and Quartz Composer, and the Trapcode suite of plugins for Adobe After Effects.

And make sure you download the RGBD software – it’s free! If you have a KINECT and a DSLR then you have no excuse!

We had an awesome few days with the technology and I learn’t a lot myself. It would be amazing to see someone do a feature length film with this process

I spend a lot of time reading the Processing Programming Handbook by Casey Reas and Ben Fry.

Even though I bought the book in 2008, I still haven’t read it cover to cover. I keep going over the same things, reading from the start. Reading the same chapters.

Slowly it’s beginning to sink in. I get certain concepts now, and am learning more and more of the language.

I’ve never learnt a 2nd language as far as speaking and writing is concerned, so I imagine learning to program is just as hard as doing that. Stop doing it for too long, and you start to forget.

One of the bonuses of the Reas/Fry book is all the little historical facts they twist into the text for each chapter. Depending on the topic, there’s a wealth of info to discover about the history of software in the arts.

Today I discovered AARON, a program written by the artist Harold Cohen.

Developed in the 70′s, and up to the present day, AARON creates a new artwork everytime the program is run. Initially creating basic lines, AARON evolved to draw rocks and plants, and eventually people, before moving onto abstraction.

Both of the images in this post were created by AARON.

This image was designed by Buckminster Fuller, whom I discovered after reading the preface for Expanded Cinema (Gene Youngblood, 1970).

Fuller calls this the Dymaxian map, a version of the globe that attempts to illustrate it as a connected whole island, stretched out across a singular ocean.

Our usual conception of the planet tends to divide things into separate oceans and continents, with a polar cap and bottom.

The Dymaxian Map breaks this conception, giving the insight of a whole, connected world.

I find this whole period so interesting. Some great texts came out of this era such as Radical Software, the Whole Earth Catalogue, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, and of course Expanded Cinema. Buckminster Fuller’s text are also great and a great resource on his work is online here: http://www.bfi.org/

With so many blogs these days I guess there’s no real need to collect things in magazines or catalogues. But I can’t help feel theres something special in collecting some of the current age in a physical, printed edition.

Of course, artists release catalogues all the time, but it would be great to see a periodical or text that dealt with some modern themes and processes of art and the Internet, kind’ve like a modern day Radical Software… Perhaps also, it would consider consciousness and the ecosystem, in similar ways as these texts from the 70′s did with video, tv, and the mental environment.

One of the interesting things about the web is the way it’s not linear. Actually I like how it’s called the Web. Coz that’s actually kind’ve the way it is. You go one way then you go the next.

But it’s also this place where stuff changes always. Even if I upload a movie, tomorrow I could upload an edited version. Or, I can could change the start date of a blog post, add an image, change the entire text.

Nothings set in stone on the Internet. Tomorrow I could change my URL and say my band was called Followers, instead of Programs. And I’d just release under Followers from then on. I could just go change WordPress Theme’s, relocate to Tumblr. Or some other provider.

I think growing up with this reality in front of me, that nothing is stable, has had an effect on the way I think. I always change my name, Matt Leaf, m. Leaf, Leaf-tierney. All this ridiculous stuff. But I think it grows out of the username generation. We live in a world where we’re expected to use avatars and passwords and profiles. So it has this natural effect of displacing those things.

Maybe it spills over into other activities too. People often talk about how no one has an attention span anymore. Maybe it’s not just because I can have twenty tabs, it’s this kind’ve ‘stability’ thing too. Ephemerality.