Busy-ness
Lots of stuff happening at once, a lot of long-standing commitments all coming to a close at the same time.
On Tuesday a show called CATAPULT opened at Kudos Gallery in Paddingon, included in which was a piece of my photographic work. It’s an award-based show for emerging artists, designers, and curators, and I was one of the finalists. I was really happy with how my light box worked out for the show – I’ll put some pictures of it up at some stage. The standard of work at the show was really great. A friend of mine won the first prize ($1,500) for her very impressive video piece. (Congrats again Amy!)
I’m having my second light box constructed over the next week, and have some Duratran 8×10″ tests waiting to be collected from the printers. Exciting stuff.
I just finished doing the sound design for a flash game being put together by some friends of mine. It’s all old school, “8-bit” style music and sound effects. I’m told the game should be released any day now, so I’ll be sure to link it when you can. (It’s part of a Facebook app called Coin Cans (or is it Cash Cans?), so you’ll need to have a FB account to play it AFAIK.) It was a fun and challenging project, and the first professional sound design job I’ve done. It’s definitely something I’d like to do more of in the future.
I’ve also been putting the final touches on a Python/Django-based Content Management System for artists, as part of a freelance job for another friend. It’s my first foray into web programming in Python and Django, and what I’ve experienced so far has been quite painless, if not enjoyable. Deployment is a bit of a pain – I wasn’t able to find a Debian package for mod_python, and didn’t much fancy trying to grapple with some documented MySQL concurrency weirdness between mod_python and mod_php – I ended up using FastCGI, which is “okay, I guess.”
I spend a lot of time writing JavaScript these days, so I was a bit irked by Python’s rigidity at times, but it certainly beats the hell out of PHP (plus I definitely prefer the Python syntax over JS).
Incidentally, I felt I needed to put up some sort of ‘artist’ web site, so I have put up something modest at andrewgerrand.com for the time being. I may or may not give it a bit of an overhaul before the COFA Annual at the end of next month.
I’m reading Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller at the moment, and it is incredible. (Thanks Viv!)
November 17th, 2008 at 10:20 pm
To whom it may concern,
We are inquiring about using the CATAPULT exhibition run earlier this year as a community for a school assignment where we have to interview
people that took part in the exhibition and put it all into a podcast.
While doing research on the CATAPULT community, we stumbled across yourself and noticed you were a finalist at the exhibition. We think you
would be a great source and would really appreciate it if we could send you a series of questions to answer. (don’t worry, theres only about 10 questions)
We are two students in year 9 at Marist Sister’s College in Sydney. We are interested in the exhibition and would highly appreciate it if you could get back to us.
We also read that you had some photos and planned on putting them up on this website soon. If you could send them along to us for our podcast, that would also be greatly appreciated.
Thank you.
–
Anne-Maree Salvemini
Sarah Manno